Chapter 128: The Twilight of the Crystal and the Shattered Star (Part 1)
The grayish sun of the southern desert was devoured.
It was not hidden by simple storm clouds, nor obscured by a natural eclipse. It was devoured by a presence. The immense and unnatural black snowstorm advancing from Skull Valley was not simply a meteorological phenomenon; it was the very breath of the calamity that General Krow had unleashed upon the basalt sands.
When the silhouette emerged from the blizzard, primal, raw, and atavistic terror seized every living being in the Morningstar Imperial Capital. The Siege Beast was not an animal. It was an animated geographical catastrophe.
It was a Black Ice Titan, a bipedal monstrosity a hundred and fifty meters tall. Its colossal body was not composed of flesh, but of crystallized glaciers compressed under abyssal pressures for millennia. Its joints creaked with the sound of colliding tectonic plates, and instead of a face, its head was a crown of sharp ice peaks surrounding an abyss of absolute darkness.
In Samael's mind, the system activated with a blood-red warning.
[Threat Analysis: Corrupt Winter Titan.]
[Classification: Monarch Siege Beast.]
[Rank: SAINT REALM Stage 1 (Consummate).]
[Constant Passive Skill: Absolute Zero Aura. Thermal distortion alters environmental laws. Any being with a cultivation below the Origin Realm will freeze cellularly and spiritually upon entering a 500-meter radius.]
The desert floor trembled violently, causing micro-quakes that reached the foundations of the Citadel as the immense beast took its first step out of the fog. A shockwave of bluish frost split the high dunes, turning thousands of tons of loose sand into inert crystal in a millisecond.
The absolute cold struck the city's outer barrier. The Outer Cape disciples watching from the lower walls fell to their knees, vomiting blood that froze before touching the jade floor.
Samael Morningstar floated serenely fifty meters above the city's immense main obsidian gate. His arms were crossed over his armored chest, and his long dark cape billowed frantically from the Titan's hurricane winds. He did not draw his Odachi. He did not emit Void pressure.
"Patriarch..." Kael's voice echoed just below him.
The First Sequence stood on the wall's main battlement. His heavy red scale armor vibrated and emitted dense steam due to the brutal thermal struggle between his dragon Qi and the Absolute Zero environmental pressure trying to snuff out his core.
"It is yours," Samael said, his tone frigid, distant, and imperial. He didn't even look down to see his disciples. His piercing violet eyes, with the three golden rings spinning slowly, were fixed on the distant sky, high above the Titan, where the Stellar Steel-clad figure of General Krow observed the scene from the prow of his Destroyer. "If I intervene prematurely and cut down that beast, Krow and his lieutenants will attack with their entire orbital arsenal. You must hold that thing back. I'm not asking you to kill it quickly; the power gap is mathematically suicidal. I am asking you to survive, to bleed it, and to prevent my city from falling. Show me why you bear my name."
Kael clenched his massive jaw until his teeth ground. He understood the Sovereign's tactic. This wasn't just a defense; it was the ultimate baptism of fire for the Golden Generation. A Stage 9 Origin Realm versus a Stage 1 Saint. There was an ocean of distance. Nine Semi-Saint stages separated them from that beast's understanding of True Laws.
Kael spun sharply toward the other 20 Sequences waiting behind him on the broad walkway of the wall. They were pale, their breaths forming dense clouds, feeling the cold try to slow the Qi in their veins, but they stood absolutely firm, weapons drawn and eyes burning with suicidal determination.
"Listen to me, you damn bastards!" Kael roared, his dragon voice competing with the howl of the snowstorm. "If that mountain of ice touches the gates, the entire city becomes a crystal graveyard! Shattered Star Formation! Now!"
The military discipline imposed by blood and fire for months bore fruit in an instant. The 21 youths did not hesitate.
"Cedric, shields to the front, I want the air to be made of steel!" Kael continued ordering, unsheathing Magma Fang. The blade of his immense sword erupted in an orange heat. "Lys, Elowen, don't let anyone die of cellular cold or impact damage! The rest, prepare the heavy artillery!"
Five hundred meters away, the Black Ice Titan raised its right arm. It was not a fast movement, but the immense mass of the arm displaced so much air that it generated a localized hurricane. The fist, the literal size of a craggy hill of solid ice, rose toward the darkened sky and began to descend directly toward the main barrier of the east wall, threatening to crush the gates, the wall, and the Sequences in a single kinetic impact.
"NOW!" Kael bellowed.
Cedric (Sequence 4 - Heart of Steel) stepped forward, the coldness of his face unchanging. He drove his heavy runic standard deep into the stone of the wall. His gray eyes shone with intense mathematical and geometric formulas. Moving his hands at blinding speed, he traced seals in the freezing air.
"[Master Array: Dome of the Divine Blacksmith]."
Cedric's Qi, pushed to the absolute limit of his Stage 8 Origin Realm, erupted. A hundred overlapping layers of golden light shields and highly condensed spiritual metal materialized in the air, forming a colossal hemispherical barrier of glowing geometric energy that covered the entire eastern section of the wall.
But a passive shield, no matter how strong in the Origin Realm, would be pulverized by the raw inertia of a Saint. They needed mass. They needed a living anvil.
Draven (Sequence 11), the barbarian giant, let out a hoarse, brutal laugh. He vaulted over the edge of the wall, plummeting toward the desert. In mid-air, his frost Qi went wild.
"[Giant Bear Ice Armor]."
Draven's body was instantly enveloped by an exoskeleton of immensely dense, opaque white ice, growing to four meters in height. He took on the form of a terrifying bipedal cave bear, his eyes glowing arctic blue beneath the bestial helm. He landed heavily outside Cedric's barrier, cracking the crystal floor.
Beside him, Kael did not jump. He used the [Ignimbrite Glide]. Kael channeled all his magma into the soles of his boots and the tip of his sword. He slid down the vertical face of the wall, leaving a glowing trail of molten lava that hissed upon contact with the freezing air. He landed next to Draven's gigantic ice bear, right at the epicenter where the Titan's colossal fist would fall.
Altair (Sequence 10), without saying a single word, dropped like a lead anvil from the wall, landing to Kael's right. His [Ash Monarch Body] activated, his skin turning a leaden gray and the veins in his neck glowing like dark magma. He increased his own gravity with the [Weight of the Ash Crown], sinking up to his knees into the petrified ground to become immovable, raising the immense Penance above his head like a support pillar.
And finally, Bren (Sequence 19), laughing like a maniac, landed on the left. His [Core Anchor] fused him with the earth itself, his arms covered in incandescent obsidian bark thanks to the [Magmatic Collapse Fist], crossing them in an X-guard over his head.
The wall of flesh, bone, and fire was ready.
The Titan's immense glacial ice fist crashed against Cedric's golden layers.
BOOOOOOM!
The sonic impact was as if the sky itself had been torn apart. The sound was not a strike; it was an explosion that immediately made the ears of the lighter Sequences, like Lyra and Tamsin, bleed, forcing them to take cover. The shockwave crushed the air, creating a temporary vacuum that sucked the snow upward.
Cedric's shields, forged through the effort of his supreme intellect, shattered as if they were thin sheets of glass under a demolition hammer.
The hundredth layer exploded.
The ninetieth layer pulverized.
The fiftieth layer gave way with a runic screech.
The tenth layer disintegrated.
Cedric spat a large clot of dark blood, his hands trembling violently as the seals broke in his Sea of Consciousness, but he had achieved his goal: he had absorbed fifty percent of the Saint Beast's murderous inertia.
The immense fist, now slowed but still lethal, broke through the barrier and smashed squarely into the four vanguard pillars on the ground.
"Aaaarrrgghhh!" Draven's roar from inside the Giant Bear was bloodcurdling. The Titan's fist collided with his immense crossed frost arms. The armor's ice blubber held for a second before deep cracks propagated through his exoskeleton.
"It weighs... like an entire damn mountain!" Kael grunted. The pressure was so absurdly immense that blood gushed from the Dragon's nose and gums due to the rupture of his own capillaries from the internal pressure. His knees, despite his Stage 9 Origin Qi, buckled dangerously, sinking into the petrified sand that vaporized beneath the intense heat of his boots.
Beside him, Altair did not scream. His ash body crunched sickeningly. His collarbones fractured into micro-fissures under the weight of the impact transmitted through his sword, but the Monarch's Sutra absorbed the immense kinetic force, using the pain to further densify his Eternal-Ferrum bones in real-time.
Bren spat volcanic blood, his obsidian knuckles miraculously resisting being crushed.
"We can't hold it! It's going to crush our organs!" Draven yelled, his voice distorted by the ice, as his bear armor began to shatter into pieces.
The vanguard had halted the arm's advance, but they were trapped beneath a continental-level trash compactor. If the Titan exerted a single gram more of force, all four would be reduced to bloody pulp.
From atop the wall, Violeta (Sequence 2) did not hesitate. Her violet eye and diamond blue eye shone with absolute mystical brilliance.
"Get it off them! Eris, now!" Violeta activated the [Bridge Between Worlds].
She didn't use it on herself. She calculated the immense dimensional pressure and coordinates to perfection. The space around Eris (Sequence 3) folded in concentric circles, and she was sucked into a dark violet tunnel. In a millisecond, Eris reappeared in mid-air, floating just meters from the Black Ice Titan's immense dark eyes. The shockwave of her appearance dispelled the snow.
Eris, with a wild, maniacal smile on her face and her red eye burning, didn't use her spear. She thrust both hands forward, releasing the entirety of her unstable Qi.
"Swallow this, you mountain of shit! [Flame of Eternal Ruin]."
An immense, thick, and dense torrent of viscous fire of absolute black color, with a blinding white core, erupted from Eris's palms. The jet of flames didn't strike the Titan's face seeking to heat it; it sought to decompose it. The Ruin crashed squarely against the millennial ice of the Saint beast's head.
The Titan emitted its first sound: a deep, hoarse roar, akin to a collapsing glacier.
The Flame of Ruin was a universal acid. It began to rapidly rot and melt the black ice of the beast's face. However, the power gap of a full Major Realm was insulting. The Saint ice "skin" of the Titan barely melted a couple of meters deep, unable to reach the beast's true vital core, while the Absolute Zero Aura slowly extinguished Eris's black fire, forcing her to retreat in the air.
Even so, the pain and annoyance were enough. The Titan growled and violently shook its immense arm to free itself.
The brute force of the retreating movement launched Kael, Draven, Altair, and Bren flying backward as if they were simple discarded ragdolls. The four smashed brutally into the crystal dunes over a hundred meters away, kicking up clouds of debris.
"It's too fucking tough!" shouted Rowan (Sequence 12), the arrogant speedster, who had already moved across the battlefield using his [Wandering Cyclone Step].
Exploiting the distraction caused by Eris, Rowan had sprinted straight for the creature's massive ankles. Moving as a translucent green and white blur, he unleashed the [Flurry of a Thousand Cuts] combined with his chakrams and the Translucent Void Slash. Dozens of silver lines of ultra-compressed air, capable of slicing tank steel, struck the Titan's gigantic black ice tendons.
The slashes bounced off pathetically, producing harmless white sparks. The wind scattered against the immense passive hardness of a Saint's body.
The Titan, ignoring the useless cuts on its feet, turned toward Eris in the air, raising its other arm to crush her like a pesky insect.
"We need absolute penetration, not fucking superficial cuts!" The voice of Xylia (Sequence 5) echoed across the battlefield, laden with her moral domain of an Empress that instilled courage in the wounded.
Xylia had landed nimbly on a tall nearby obsidian rock. Her slender body was wreathed in a furious, crackling aura of white and golden lightning, her silver hair floating from the extreme static.
"Maren, with me! Center line, on my mark!" Xylia ordered, pointing at the Titan's immense chest, right where its frozen heart beat.
Maren (Sequence 15), unable to stay still, appeared beside her in a cyan flash using the [Path of Thunder], laughing nervously as her pupils dilated from the [Synaptic Overload] she was already injecting into her spine.
"I'm always ready, your majesty! Let's fry this giant ice cube's circuits!" Maren yelled.
Both lightning users fused their Qi frequencies.
Xylia pointed her index and middle fingers at the Titan, activating her [Spear of Divine Decree]. She condensed the electricity in the air into a point so incredibly dense that physical space warped around it from the magnetism.
At the same time, Maren placed both hands on Xylia's shoulders, channeling all the raw, brutal, erratic power of her [Chain of Chained Lightning] directly into the core of the Empress's attack.
The result was not a lightning bolt striking from the sky. It was a combined linear beam, thick as the trunk of a millennial oak, of blinding pure white and cobalt blue, that shot out horizontally.
The electromagnetic beam crossed the distance at the speed of light and smashed directly into the center of the Titan's black ice chest.
The impact was devastating. The immense temperature of the compressed lightning and the piercing force of the Heavenly Mandate achieved the impossible: they violently pierced the immense, impenetrable outer plate of glacial ice, digging a red-hot crater three meters deep into the beast's chest, evaporating the ice with a thunderous hiss.
But then, the horror of facing a Saint Realm expert manifested in its purest form.
The Titan didn't flinch. It didn't bellow in pain from the piercing attack.
It simply lowered its immense head slightly. The internal walls of the crater that Xylia and Maren's beam had opened began to instantly crystallize again, utilizing the pure, infinite density of a Saint's Qi. The beast, through its primitive Law of Ice, didn't just close the wound; it absorbed the residual electrical energy, snuffing out the combined lightning as if drowning a candle in the ocean.
The Black Ice Titan ignored the pesky electric flies.
It opened its immense, abyssal mouth, revealing rows of jagged, sharp frost teeth that looked like cursed stalactites.
It began to suck in air.
It wasn't a simple inhalation. The Siege Titan activated its power center. The ambient Qi of the desert, the oxygen, the snow, and even loose stones were violently sucked into its maw. An immense, terrifying vortex of pale blue light began to condense deep within its throat. Space itself warped around the beast's mouth due to the intense temperature vacuum.
In the shadows cast by the wall, Sela appeared in a blink, cold sweat bathing her stoic face. Her eyes, accustomed to analyzing threats, went wide.
"It's charging a pure Absolute Zero Breath!" Sela yelled at the top of her lungs, her voice losing its composure for the first time. "If it fires that mass of condensed energy at the city, Cedric won't be able to stop it! The wall and half the inner districts will solidify at the atomic level instantly! Everyone will freeze to death!"
"Deflect it, fuck, deflect it!" Kael's hoarse, pained voice echoed from the bottom of a crater in the sand. The First Sequence was struggling to his feet. His left arm hung uselessly at a grotesque angle, cleanly fractured by the initial impact, and his red armor was dented. His dragon eyes bled. Despite the pain, he raised Magma Fang with his right arm, but he knew he was too far away to interrupt the breath.
No ranged attack would penetrate the sucking vortex of the Titan's throat without freezing before arriving.
From amidst the dust kicked up by the vanguard's fall, an immense grayish figure strode forward, dragging a black sword.
Altair (Sequence 10). His thick body was covered in micro-fractures, bleeding toxic smoke from every pore, but his ash aura shone intensely, having assimilated part of the Titan's inertia.
"We don't need to deflect it," Altair's voice was a guttural, deep, and metallic whisper that resonated eerily above the wind. "I just need to feed it. I'll be the damn bait."
Before Kael could yell an order against it, Altair used the immense muscular strength of his densified legs. He delivered a massive stomp that cracked the crystal and leaped.
He didn't jump to attack an arm or the chest. Altair flew in a direct, suicidal trajectory, propelled by pure brute force, straight toward the Titan's immense, dark open mouth, letting himself be dragged by the monster's gigantic suction force.
"You're fucking crazy, you piece of ash!" screamed Aylin (Sequence 9), who had just summoned her [Telluric Thorn Whirlwinds] in a futile attempt to tangle the beast's feet.
Altair didn't hear her. He was swallowed by the immense blue abyss of the Titan's maw.
As he flew toward the glowing core of the Absolute Zero Breath, facing a temperature so low that his leaden skin began to crack painfully and cover with deadly frost, Altair felt no fear. He felt the fucking furnace of his bloodline roar for fuel.
Scarcely five meters from the core of frozen energy deep in the immense throat, Altair twisted his heavy body in mid-air. He drove the immense, blunt blade of Penance deep into the beast's ice palate, using it as an anchor so as not to be sucked further in and disintegrated.
Suspended inside the Titan's mouth, surrounded by a cold that would kill any mortal, Altair closed his eyes and activated his core to the maximum, overloading his divine body's transmutation.
"[Monarch's Sutra: Throat Eruption]."
Altair opened the pores of his body, his mouth, and the spiritual valves of his collapsed meridians simultaneously. He released, in a single, massive millisecond exhalation, the absolute one hundred percent of the entire reserve of dead heat, superheated toxic gas, and volcanic ash he had stored up in his previous battles.
A concentrated, pure [Pyroclastic Cloud Breath] detonated from within him at thousands of degrees Celsius, expanding violently inside the enclosed cavity of the monster's immense mouth.
The physical result wasn't magical; it was pure, apocalyptic thermodynamics.
The Titan, which was accumulating massive Absolute Zero energy (extreme cold), was suddenly struck internally by a deflagration of lava and ash at over 2000 degrees (extreme heat). The massive thermal shock in such a confined space was catastrophic for the siege beast.
The Titan choked.
An immense, brutal, and dull thermobaric explosion detonated inside its neck. The Absolute Zero Breath that was about to annihilate the city destabilized, reacted violently with the ash, and erupted prematurely inside the monster's own throat.
A colossal flare of gray fire, white frost, and black smoke shot outward through the beast's maw, accompanied by the sickening sound of the Titan's millennial glacier neck cracking and fracturing from the inside.
However, the price of the miracle was absolute.
The primary shockwave of the thermal detonation hit Altair at point-blank range. Without any barrier between him and the explosion he himself had triggered in combination with the Titan, the Tenth Sequence's body was ripped from his anchored sword.
Altair was shot out of the Titan's mouth as if expelled by an orbital cannon. His immense, heavy body flew through the skies, completely engulfed in flames, smoking, black, and with his armor almost totally disintegrated. He traced an arc of gray smoke in the stormy sky before violently crashing like a meteorite into the obsidian dunes, over two kilometers away from the citadel, kicking up a massive crater of dust upon impact, and lying completely motionless, plunged into silence.
The Black Ice Titan took a staggering step back, its immense glacial hands instinctively trying to grab its throat, which smoked and dripped black slush due to the internal damage.
But a Saint Realm monster does not die from a simple thermal choking, no matter how massive. And the fury of a wounded beast is the purest form of calamity.
The Titan stopped trying to cast complex magic. It switched to tactical massacre.
It straightened up, letting out a hoarse, bubbling bellow from its shattered neck. From its immense glacial back, thousands of massive stalactites of compact ice sprouted in a millisecond. With a violent shake of its massive torso, the Titan simultaneously fired thousands of those black ice spikes in all directions, covering a three-kilometer radius.
It was an orbital rain of death. Each spike was as thick as a tree trunk and traveled at supersonic speeds, enveloped in the suffocating Absolute Zero Aura.
"Everyone get down! Protect the damn healers!" roared Bren (Sequence 19), the beast of the Earth, running frantically toward the rear of the formation.
Lys (Sequence 14), who was in the middle of the wall's plaza desperately using her [Photonic Healing] to mend Draven's shoulders, looked up. An immense black ice spike the size of a siege lance was falling straight toward her head. Her holy light wouldn't be able to melt so much mass in time. She closed her eyes, accepting the end.
A muscular, dark mass threw itself between her and death.
Bren dove over Lys, covering the Guardian Angel's fragile body with his broad back. He activated his [Core Anchor] to the maximum, densifying his bones to the limit.
SQUELCH!
The sound of dense flesh and bone being pierced was sickening. The colossal black ice spike of the Saint beast could not be stopped even by Bren's magma-hardened skin. The ice lance cleanly pierced his right shoulder from the back, shattering his collarbone and exiting through his chest, literally pinning the human beast to the stone floor of the wall with a dull thud.
"BREN!" Lys's scream was heart-wrenching, losing all her solemn composure. Her angelic face was splattered by the colossus's boiling blood, which quickly froze.
Her trembling hands frantically began to glow with blinding golden light, trying to apply healing directly onto Bren's immense, open impalement wound, but the dark energy of the Holy Ice spike fought against the Photonic Light, necrotizing and freezing Bren's tissues from the inside as fast as she tried to heal them. Bren coughed blood but forced a grim, pained, bloody smile.
"Keep... healing, girl... I'm... I'm fine..." Bren grunted, refusing to yield, his thick hands gripping the floor to keep from passing out from the thermal shock to his heart.
The rain of ice continued to tear the formation apart.
Elowen (Sequence 7) went into a tactical panic. She channeled all the emerald vitality of her botanical core.
"[Regenerative Chlorophyll Cocoon]!" she shouted, striking the jade of the wall.
Immense, thick dark green vines surged from the sterile ground, quickly intertwining to form an enormous roof, a botanical dome of broad leaves over Lys, Bren, Cedric, and the most severely wounded of the vanguard. The wooden shield withstood the first ten impacts of the spikes, but the Titan's holy ice was unnatural. Upon contact with the black ice, Elowen's resilient vines lost their green luster, turned black, brittle, and froze down to the root, shattering under the weight of the icy shrapnel in a matter of seconds.
From the periphery, Tamsin (Sequence 13) desperately tried to slow the monster. Moving nimbly, she threw concentrated vials and seeds from her [Corrosive Lotus Rain] directly at the Titan's enormous knee joints.
The seeds bloomed and burst, spilling super-concentrated emerald green acid and toxic gas that melted the glacial ice, emitting foul, bubbling smoke. Her toxins managed to eat away at the frozen ligaments, but the passive regeneration speed of the Saint Grade monster negated the effort. The ice reformed faster than the Widow's acid could consume it.
The unbreakable Shattered Star Formation was collapsing under the weight of absolute superiority.
Kael was down to one useless arm, bleeding out and exhausted. Altair had been launched kilometers away and was likely on the verge of death. Bren was impaled and freezing from the inside. Cedric's mind was fractured by the fall of his hundred arrays. Elowen and Lys couldn't handle the massive volume of incoming damage.
The Titan, weary, took a colossal step forward, crossing the outer wall effortlessly. It raised its immense right foot, a mass of sharp ice twenty meters long, to definitively crush Xylia and Maren, who lay kneeling and exhausted on the ground after using all their Qi to fire the initial piercing beam.
Xylia watched the gigantic shadow of the foot descending upon them, death in the form of a glacier. She clenched her fists, unable to muster enough static to move.
But in that exact, silent, and agonizing moment of absolute despair, when the freezing shadow of death covered the Empress of Thunder, the dense, hurricane-like gray air of the battle changed.
It didn't turn black. It turned white.
It wasn't snow. It was mist.
An incredibly dense, cold, unnatural, and ghostly mist surged from absolute nowhere, enveloping the upper half of the Ice Titan's immense body.
Lyra (Sequence 8) was hidden in the rear guard, kneeling behind the rubble of a tower. Bright red blood flowed incessantly from her beautiful blind eyes and nose due to the colossal, suicidal spiritual effort. She was maintaining the immense [Shadow Mirage Requiem] at a scale her Origin Realm was not prepared for, projecting a barrier of fog and ghostly echoes directly over the Titan's face and senses. She was deceiving, blinding, and auditorily disorienting the spiritual perception of an ice god.
"Now, Elara!" Lyra screamed, her voice cracking and becoming a bubbling sound of blood in her throat as her Sea of Consciousness threatened to collapse from the pressure. "Cut it!"
Elara (Sequence 6) was not on the ground with the rest. She never was.
The lethal assassin and the Patriarch's first disciple had not attacked head-on or thrown useless projectiles. She had been in the air, moving like a truly undetectable spirit of frost thanks to her [White Shroud Camouflage]. She had been sliding nimbly and undetectably through the storm, acrobatically jumping from one falling ice spike to another, literally scaling the deadly rain to gain altitude amidst the chaos.
She wouldn't attack the impregnable hard skin of ice. She wouldn't attack the beast's enormous, useless eyes that were already blinded by Lyra. Her master, Samael, had taught her to see the invisible "cracks" that hold the world together and to use power not as a sledgehammer, but as a needle.
She landed silently as a feather on the Titan's immense nape.
It was a minuscule, barely visible point, the small physiological joint where the colossal plates of ice and frost of the head joined the beast's spinal cord of energy, protected by Lyra's illusory mist.
In her delicate, pale hands, Elara held no steel daggers. She wielded two short, lethal white daggers meticulously carved from void dragon bone, a personal gift from the Patriarch.
Elara knelt on the monster's nape. She drove the bone daggers deep into the crevices of the ice. But she didn't use muscular force to try to cut the massive neck; that would be physically impossible.
She used vibration.
[Execution: Internal Freeze - Touch of Absolute Zero]
She injected the entirety of her Mist and Frost Qi, ultra-condensed and focused, directly through the bone of the daggers into the "spinal cord" of pure energy of the Saint beast.
The Black Ice Titan, lord of the cold, froze.
It didn't freeze on the outside with more ice. It froze internally, within its own Qi transmission system. Elara caused a massive, painful, and lethal short circuit in the thick spiritual "nerves" connecting the beast's core to its body.
The gigantic ice leg that was mere centimeters from crushing and grinding the exhausted bodies of Xylia and Maren stopped dead in the air, suspended against all physical laws, trembling uncontrollably from the spasms of paralysis coursing through the monster's colossal structure.
"KAAAAEL!" Elara screamed from above, her high-pitched voice breaking from the incomprehensible, suicidal effort of using her entire tiny weight and her scarce Qi to keep a monster a thousand times larger, stronger, and heavier than her medically paralyzed. "CUT ITS FUCKING NECK RIGHT NOW!"
Kael Morningstar, from the bottom of the crater, with his broken arm, his face bathed in his own dried blood, and his lungs burning from the pressure, looked up and saw the perfect opening the shadows had created for the Dragon.
He felt the thick dragon blood in his mutated veins boil with an ancestral fury, devouring his pain and transmuting it into pure adrenaline. Ignoring his fractures, he channeled one hundred percent of his core's fire into his legs and his right arm.
"[EVERYONE WITH ME!]" Kael roared, a cry that wasn't a simple order, but an invocation of war that shook the clan's morale.
The Dragon would not ascend alone. The Shattered Star attacked as a single lethal organism.
Violeta (Sequence 2), with her blue eye shedding tears of exertion due to the immense distance, activated the largest [Bridge Between Worlds] her meridians allowed, aiming directly above the Titan's paralyzed head.
Space tore open. A massive violet portal opened right above the beast's exposed neck.
Kael didn't jump alone.
Kael with his enormous Magma Fang blazing in white sword intent.
Eris with her Spear of Ruin dripping condensed black fire.
Rowan, wreathed in a Tornado of sharp air, holding his vibrating chakrams.
Joren, channeling the Celestial Dawn Slash of pure void into his daggers.
Lirael, projecting the dark, deceptive Lunar Shadow Slash.
Elian, brandishing a heavy, colossal mallet formed from his dense Mercury Whip.
Even Nylas, projecting his massive, crushing Devouring Abyss Claw infused with x5 gravity.
All the heavy physical attackers of the Empire, propelled by the magic of the Elements, jumped, flew, or were teleported through Violeta's portal in the torn sky.
They fell from the darkened skies not as individuals, but as an apocalyptic, multicolored meteor shower of pure energy and focused destruction. They converged from different angles directly onto the fragile, paralyzed neck frozen by Elara.
Ten elite-grade weapons, loaded with all the hatred, despair, fear of annihilation, and unbreakable hope of a clan that refused to die, struck with maximum and absolute force at exactly the same minuscule geometric point in unison.
CRAAAAAAACK!
The sound of a god's decapitation was as if the axis of the world split in half.
The glacial crystal neck of the Black Ice Titan, paralyzed from the inside, melted by magma, sliced by the void, rotted by ruin, and crushed by heavy mercury, could not withstand the clash of wills.
The Titan's immense, spiked, dark, massive head, the size of a minor fortress, slowly and grotesquely separated from its immense body. It fell lazily through the storm, crashing at the foot of the dunes with a dull, final tremor.
Deprived of its control center, the immense, headless body of the hundred-and-fifty-meter Saint Grade monster slumped heavily to its knees, shaking the city walls, and then, slowly and inexorably, fell face-first, kicking up a titanic, blinding cloud of dust, crystal sand, and black snow that covered the citadel walls.
The dust and snow took long, agonizing minutes to settle.
When visibility dimly returned, the scene revealed the high, cruel, brutal cost of hunting a siege deity. The 20 Sequences present were scattered miserably across the colossal, melting ice corpse of the Titan and the surrounding craters.
Kael was on his knees in the dirty snow, using Magma Fang as a pathetic cane to keep from collapsing completely. His broad back rose and fell, breathing with alarming difficulty, emitting wet wheezes. His robust Stage 9 Origin body bled freely from dozens of deep ice cuts, his left arm hung broken, and every micro-movement wrung a grimace of raw agony from his normally haughty face.
Elara lay completely unconscious and pale as a ghost on the beast's frozen, decapitated nape. She was being held by Violeta's weak arms, who was trembling uncontrollably—but not from cold. She trembled from massive dimensional exhaustion and a brutal, childlike emotion. The cold Tsundere's lips murmured a shaky, nonsensical prayer, in disbelief that she was alive after leading the spatial assault against a millennial monster.
Lys and Elowen ran frantically from one wounded person to another on the wall. Their pale hands glowed intensely with warm light and emerald life, welding broken arteries, melting necrotic frost, and closing burns, but thick tears mixed copiously with the blood and grime on their delicate faces upon seeing the magnitude of the damage their brothers and sisters had suffered.
For a long, heavy moment, absolutely no one shouted in victory. There were no cheers. The dense air reeked rigidly of electric ozone, coagulated dragon blood, burned toxins, and elemental death. Most of the brave combatants were covered in grotesque wounds; some with useless limbs hanging, others bleeding profusely from their eyes or ears due to sonic trauma, barely breathing. The reigning silence was one of awe and absolute exhaustion.
Kael slowly raised his heavy golden eyes, looked at the immense decapitated remains of the Titan melting into dirty water, and could barely raise his hoarse, raspy voice:
"We... we did it, you damn idiots..." he said, trying to force an arrogant smile.
But deep within his alpha warrior chest, a pang of cold, renewed fear mixed with the relief.
If that... that titanic, nearly invincible aberration that had wrecked them... was just a measly lone pawn sent by Krow to test the waters... what kind of hellish, crushing abyss awaited behind the storm in the final assault?
From the internal safety of the city, the thousands of civilians, blacksmiths, and nervous Outer Cape apprentices who had watched paralyzed with horror from the inner walls, knelt on the cold slabs. They trembled violently amidst uncontrollable tears of abyssal terror and a renewed, burning, fanatical hope.
For many of them, that minutes-long battle had shattered the parameters of their reality. The fine line separating protecting "heroes" from divine "monsters" was now barely visible after seeing the youths of the clan tear a god to pieces. Some parents hugged their children tightly, while others prayed in absolute silence to the bloodied skies, mentally unable to believe that the city miraculously remained standing and the walls had not given way.
Far away, from the highest point of the dark stormy sky, on the prow of his orbital Destroyer.
General Krow stopped stroking his braided ice beard. He stopped smiling with tactical disdain. His face, lined by decades of slaughter and cold discipline, abruptly twisted into a grotesque grimace of disbelief, disgust, and incandescent fury.
His divine pet. A Saint Realm Siege Beast that cost a fortune to feed and awaken. It had been halted, gutted, and loudly killed by a motley, pathetic, uncoordinated group of... mortal children in the Origin Realm. It was an insult that stained the honor of the Cryons' military branch.
Below, floating serenely in the exact same spot where the conflict had begun.
Samael Morningstar, who had not moved a single muscle during the entire horrifying massacre of his disciples, began to clap slowly and deliberately.
The dry sound of the Stellar Steel gauntlets clashing resonated magically and inescapably in the tense silence of the blood-bathed battlefield, reaching the exhausted ears of every Sequence and every elder.
"Absolutely well done," Samael said.
His deep voice was filled with an immense, heavy, genuine fraternal pride that subtly healed a fraction of his children's moral pain. But his cold violet eyes, permanently fixed on the small, armored figure of Krow floating in the northern skies, were two dark, bottomless pits overflowing with lethality and concentrated death.
"Rest and heal your wounds, my wolves. You have proven that your fangs can tear the sky."
But internally, beneath the imperturbable mask of the Void Sovereign, Samael felt a dark, heavy worry cloud his tactical mind.
That was barely the first test. They had killed the scout. If Krow had unleashed a Stage 1 Saint Beast simply as a cold "greeting" to test the defenses... what unspeakable, crushing atrocity was he truly keeping in the bowels of those destroyers for the main, final assault?
Samael uncrossed his arms. He took a slow, majestic step forward, stepping firmly on the empty air.
His suppressed, immense, titanic Aura of the Stage 6 Saint Realm Sovereign unfurled for the first time since his breakthrough without any restriction, suppression, or filter.
The pressure was instantaneous, apocalyptic, and absolute. The colossal, dense, dark power of Samael Morningstar expanded upward, pushing away and darkening the dying sun, making the gigantic, cold, terrifying magic winter storm generated by Krow suddenly seem like a fragile, pathetic summer breeze crashing against an insurmountable steel wall.
"Your boring ice toy has broken, General," Samael's voice projected toward the clouds, resonating with the fearsome polyphonic power of his ascended True Laws, as he slowly raised his immense hand and unsheathed the long, black, curved Odachi of the Eclipse from his back, the edge of the void whistling hungrily. "Now descend from your floating palace... and let's go down to the mud to see if you are a little more resistant to the temperature of death."