Chapter 128: The Twilight of the Crystal and the Shattered Star (Part 4)
The center of the crystal plain, the space separating the southern ruins where Lilith stood and the northern snows where Seraphina reigned, had remained deceptively silent during the first minutes of the siege.
But General Krow hadn't just sent an ice brute and a speed insect. He had reserved his densest nightmare for the center of the formation, aiming straight to destroy the main spire of the Dragon Tower.
The third drop pod from the orbital Destroyer didn't fall from the sky; it was fired into the earth. The impact against the petrified basalt generated a crater three hundred meters in diameter, sending shards of molten rock kilometers away.
From the deep, burning darkness of the crater emerged the Stage 6 Saint Realm abomination.
It was the Gravitational Rift Golem.
It wasn't a biological being like the Chimera or the Leviathan. It was a divine construct, a colossal, amorphous mass of meteoric rocks, dead dwarf star cores, and Stellar Steel debris compressed by an incomprehensible artificial gravity force. It had no animal or human shape; it looked like an immense, grotesque agglomeration of black and purple asteroids floating and colliding with each other, held together by lightning bolts of red gravitational energy. Its "center" was a miniature black hole that throbbed violently.
This beast didn't need to attack physically. Its mere existence was an existential threat.
The moment it emerged, the weight of the world multiplied. The Golem's Collapse Field activated. Gravity within a two-kilometer radius increased exponentially. The beautiful peripheral jade towers of the Morningstar Citadel began to creak and sink on their own foundations, unable to support their own weight. The corpses of the assassins fallen in previous battles were crushed into two-dimensional pools of blood against the crystal.
The Golem prepared to advance. With each "step" (a translational movement of its floating mass), the ground sank ten meters. If that thing reached the citadel gates, the gravitational pressure would crush the hundreds of thousands of mortals and low-level cultivators like insects beneath a steel boot. Not even bones would remain.
But before the Golem could take a second step toward the capital, the space in front of it seemed to "rot."
It wasn't an explosion. There was no war cry. It was a silent invasion.
The scarce sunlight that managed to filter through Krow's snowstorm was suddenly swallowed. The crystallized ground stopped reflecting. The air became heavy, immensely cold, and devoid of all emotion.
Malak, the Reaper, emerged from the very shadow cast by the gigantic Golem.
Malak didn't walk onto the battlefield; he glided centimeters above the gravity-crushed ground. His presence was a painful and absolute absence of light and heat. Unlike Draven or Kael, he didn't impose terror through immense musculature or a dragon's roar. His terror was born from the incomprehensible existential pressure emanating from his non-corporeal form.
He had no flesh or bones. His "body" beneath the robe was a conglomeration of thick jet-black smoke, dense and semi-liquid, constantly writhing like boiling pitch. Beneath his deep hood, there was no face expressing fury or concentration; it was a perfect abyss of absolute darkness. The only visible thing in that nothingness were two tiny, floating will-o'-the-wisp orbs, of a pale, frigid blue, that did not blink, only watching the mountain of asteroids with the eternal coldness of a gravedigger.
Holding his Scythe—a monstrosity larger than himself, with a handle of petrified black wood from the underworld and a blade of obsidian crystal from which an almost visible cold emanated—Malak raised his head.
His cultivation, solidly anchored in the Stage 6 Saint Realm, clashed directly against the beast's pressure. They were equal in raw power, but diametrically opposed in nature. The Golem was weight, mass, and crushing force. Malak was void, death, and intangibility.
Malak did not speak. He never spoke. The Reaper only acted.
With a fluid movement of his smoky arm, he drove the end of his colossal Scythe into the crystal floor.
"[Domain of Shadow: Veil of the Eclipse]."
The darkness didn't expand like a shockwave; it simply was.
In a three-kilometer radius, completely enveloping the gigantic Rift Golem and the crater, Malak's tattered robe seemed to expand until it covered the sky. Liquid darkness devoured the light. It created an absolute zone where space itself solidified into impenetrable blackness. Inside the Veil, the colors, sounds, and natural energy of the outside world disappeared.
Only Malak's suffocating, freezing darkness existed.
The immense Stage 6 Golem roared, a distorted sound of grinding rocks. It felt the disconnection. Its central black hole throbbed violently, trying to suck in Malak's darkness using its gravitational Collapse Field. Gravity increased a hundredfold in the beast's center, trying to swallow the Reaper.
Any normal Stage 6 expert would have been compressed into a fist-sized sphere of flesh by that attraction.
But Malak had no flesh to crush.
The Reaper's semi-liquid smoke body simply deformed and flowed through the lethal gravitational currents as if they were a breeze. His [Awakened Skill: Holy Assassination Domain] was active. Despite being mere meters from a beast of his exact same level, Malak's killing intent was absolute zero. The Golem couldn't "lock on" to a target because, to its primitive cosmic senses, Malak literally did not exist on the material plane of threats.
The Golem, frustrated at being unable to crush what it couldn't touch, began to launch immense red rock meteorites from its body in all directions within the Veil, trying to clear the area through sheer brute force.
It was time for the hunt. And the Reaper never hunted alone in his own Domain.
Malak raised his left hand, composed of black mist, and snapped his bandage-wrapped fingers. The sound was mute, but the order crossed the shadow dimension.
From the floor of absolute darkness of the Veil of the Eclipse, bubbles of thick ink surfaced.
A hundred black puddles formed around the colossal Golem.
From those puddles rose The 100 Silent Shadows.
Their appearance was pulled from the deepest of nightmares. They were two-dimensional humanoid silhouettes; they looked like grotesque black paper cutouts pasted onto physical reality. They lacked volume or depth. Around them, the air vibrated with a visual distortion of intense cold, rendering the beast's rudimentary gravitational and magical sensors unable to lock onto them.
Wearing tight, matte skin suits that absorbed even the slightest particle of light, and with their faces covered by eerie, flat white porcelain masks—lacking eyes or mouths, adorned only with a violet rune on the forehead that dictated the concept of "Silence"—the 100 Semi-Saint level Shinigami Assassins deployed.
The Golem sensed the hundred minuscule presences and directed its gravitational fury at them. A rain of meteorites and red lightning fell upon the assassins' formation.
But the shadows possessed the [Cloak of Non-Existence].
When a colossal Stage 6 meteorite was about to crush a group of ten assassins, they didn't try to block or dodge by running. They used the [Blink of Darkness].
The assassins simply melted into the ground like ink or dissipated into black smoke carried by a nonexistent wind. The meteorites crashed harmlessly against the shadow floor. In the exact millisecond of their disappearance, the assassins reappeared directly atop the immense floating debris that made up the beast's body.
It was impossible to hit them; the Golem was fighting tactile mirages.
Once positioned atop the monstrosity, the 100 Shadows unsheathed simultaneously in unison.
Two hundred [Daggers of the Eternal Night] shone with a poisonous green tint in the darkness of the Veil. The dark, jagged blades, devoid of any reflection, sank deep into the cracks between the monster's meteoric rocks, seeking the filaments of gravitational energy holding the debris together.
The damage was not physical. The Golem's meteoric rocks were impenetrable to Semi-Saint level daggers.
But the function of the Daggers of the Eternal Night wasn't to cut stone; it was to drink consciousness.
Two hundred precise cuts tore the beast's spiritual bonds. Every time a dagger severed a red lightning bolt, the blade glowed intensely green. The Shadows drained a fraction of the opponent's immense cosmic power and, through their hive connection, transferred all that raw energy directly into Malak's core.
This massive flow of stolen energy allowed the Reaper to maintain the immense Veil of the Eclipse without exhausting his own Stage 6 reserves. It was a perfect parasitic feedback loop.
The Golem, feeling its internal energy being sucked dry by hundreds of incorporeal ticks, tried to release an expansive gravitational shockwave to purge its own body. Its central black hole throbbed and prepared to burst.
Malak was not going to allow it.
He raised his scythe, and the blue orbs beneath his hood shone with cruelty.
The 100 Silent Shadows ceased their dagger attack. In a fluid, choreographed movement that defied death itself, they launched themselves into the air around the colossal Golem.
"[Formation: Web of Chained Souls]."
The 100 assassins moved in a rhythmic, geometric, and three-dimensional pattern of absolute perfection. As they flickered in the darkness, they crossed their trajectories thousands of times in a single second. From their bodies and daggers, they began to release thick, sticky threads of pure liquid shadow.
In a matter of three heartbeats, the immense, amorphous, floating body of the Rift Golem was completely enveloped in a colossal spiderweb of darkness. The threads intertwined, forming a restrictive cocoon of negative energy.
The Golem tried to expand its gravitational shockwave.
The wave crashed against the Web of Chained Souls... and was devoured.
The mechanics of the Web wasn't to restrict physical movement; it was to restrict the soul. The beast's gravitational bonds felt an incomprehensible spiritual weight. The beast discovered, with cosmic horror, that it could not use its spatial manipulations or its gravitational pressure. It was immobilized from the inside. It was no longer a Stage 6 calamity.
It was simple, tied-up "livestock," passively waiting to be harvested.
And the Reaper advanced to claim the harvest.
Malak, the Sovereign of the Scythe, glided toward his prey. There was no rush in his movements. Death never runs; it simply arrives at its exact time.
The Rift Golem, trapped and feeling the Web of Chained Souls crushing its spirit, resorted to the most primitive force it had left: brute physical strength. Its colossal meteoric rock arms, each the size of a fortress, rose heavily and tried to smash the floating, approaching Reaper.
Malak didn't even raise his scythe to block.
When the immense fist of debris and stellar steel fell upon him with the force of a meteorite, Malak's smoke figure simply let the physical mass pass right through him. The rock struck the ground, creating a crater within the Veil, but the Reaper's body instantly reformed atop the very fist that had just tried to crush him.
Using the shadow cast by the beast's own arm, Malak suddenly materialized in the center of the monster's colossal chest of rocks, right next to the throbbing miniature black hole that served as its core and heart.
Malak extended his left hand, a claw of dense smoke and pitch, and touched the burning surface of the core.
"[Touch of the Beyond's Cold]."
It wasn't a kinetic strike. It was an injection of pure, absolute death energy.
The moment Malak's smoky fingers brushed the core, the intense red heat and gravitational lightning circulating through the Golem's immense body stopped dead. Death invaded its inorganic meridians. The veins of red energy turned a sickly pale blue before crystallizing into a disgusting black ice.
The monster felt its plasma "blood" freeze. Its massive gears of rock and steel ground agonizingly. The immense Stage 6 Golem slowed down drastically; a strike that previously took a second now took five. The chill of the grave had numbed its immense body, leaving it at the executioner's mercy.
The Golem tried to let out one last, desperate roar, gathering the little energy that hadn't been frozen in its throat of debris.
Malak gripped his immense Scythe with both hands. The obsidian crystal blade, filled with a thousand silently screaming faces, shone with a ghostly radiance.
"[Severing the Silver Thread]."
The Reaper executed a wide, seemingly effortless horizontal slash.
The scythe's blade crossed the beast's immense, armored torso. But Malak's attack didn't clash against meteoric rock or Stellar Steel. The obsidian crystal completely ignored physical armor, passing through solid matter as if it were water.
The cut traveled straight through the beast's physical body to strike that which kept it anchored to the world of the living: the silver thread connecting its rudimentary Stage 6 soul to its stone vessel.
SNICK!
The sound was imperceptible to normal ears, but on the spiritual plane, it resonated like a harp string snapping.
The Silver Thread was cleanly severed.
The beast suffered total soul paralysis. Its immense Stage 6 cultivation became violently unstable, like a reactor about to melt down. Its central black hole began to flicker erratically, completely losing control over the immense mass of rocks that made up its body.
Its vitality plummeted, collapsing far below the critical thirty percent.
Malak halted his movement. He rose a few meters into the air, floating in front of the dying monster.
Beneath the dark hood of shadows, the two orbs of frigid blue will-o'-the-wisp that served as the Reaper's eyes abruptly changed color. They ignited into a furious, bloody crimson red.
The time for the final harvest had arrived.
The space behind the immense Golem began to warp violently. A gigantic, horrifying Gate of the Underworld, forged from rusted black iron, the bones of dead gods, and rusted chains, materialized from nothingness, opening slowly with a blood-curdling screech of metal. On the other side of the gate, an abyss of green will-o'-the-wisp fire and eternal screams waited impatiently.
Malak raised his Scythe above his head. The obsidian blade erupted in green and purple flames.
"[Harvest of Purgatory]."
The Reaper brought the blade down with a definitive, inescapable movement.
The scythe did not cut the body; it cut the very Destiny of the Rift Golem. The immense slash traced a line of underworld fire through the monster's core.
It was an absolute death. There would be no regeneration, no crystallization of energy, and no spiritual escape. Malak's technique dictated an unbreakable rule of the universe: what his scythe reaps cannot reincarnate nor use life-substitution treasures.
The black hole serving as the beast's heart collapsed in on itself with a dull groan. The gravitational energy dissipated instantly. Deprived of its soul, its destiny, and its binding force, the immense Stage 6 body—which seconds before was a calamity capable of flattening continents—immediately turned into a simple, useless pile of dead stones and lusterless steel debris.
The thousands of tons of rock rained heavily upon the crater, crashing against the crystal floor without causing magical harm, forming an immense, silent pyramid of gray ruins.
Malak landed softly atop the peak of the dead debris. His scythe stopped glowing, and the souls inside it seemed to calm.
Around the crater, the 100 Silent Shadows stopped. They ceased spinning their Web of Souls. The hundred two-dimensional, eerie silhouettes simultaneously turned toward Malak's figure atop the rubble. In unison, and with a perfect, disturbing synchronization, the hundred faceless assassins bowed in absolute reverence to their Sovereign.
Then, they simply melted like ink into the ground, dissolving and returning inside the Reaper's robe of shadows from which they were born.
With the beast's death, Malak dispelled his technique. The immense [Veil of the Eclipse], the dome of darkness that had swallowed the center of the battlefield for minutes, began to retract rapidly, being sucked back into the Reaper's chest.
The pale light of the grayish sun and the black snowstorm illuminated the sector once again.
Malak looked up from under his hood toward the sky. He saw Samael floating, and the Dragon King returned a very slight, almost imperceptible nod of approval.
The earthly task was accomplished.
The three Saint Grade Titans—the bestial fury of the Stage 3 Chimera, the lethal speed of the Stage 3 Leviathan, and the crushing mass of the Stage 6 Golem—had been methodically, brutally, and absolutely annihilated by the Grand Elder, the Empress, and the Reaper.
Along the cracked obsidian walls, the Golden Generation, despite being wrecked and covered in blood, looked upon the three colossal remains of the beasts with silent awe. They had survived the apocalypse. They had defended the gates. And above all, they had witnessed the true, terrifying, and unfathomable power of the Supreme Echelon of their own Empire.
But the silence of the victory on the ground was only the prelude.
The immense battlefield sank into an unnatural stillness, because every single soul present, from the terrified civilians to the exhausted assassins, felt the atmospheric pressure of the entire world suddenly turn suffocating and collapse upward.
Samael Morningstar, the Dragon King, raised his immense, black Odachi of the Eclipse. The long void blade whistled, slicing the very fabric of reality, as his Stage 6 Saint aura ignited in a violet and black fire that eclipsed the horizon.
General Krow, wrapped in his heavy, sacred White Stellar Steel armor, his eyes bloodshot from the humiliating massacre of his divine beasts, wielded his immense Spear of the Dark Winter, radiating the absolute zenith of mortal power: the indomitable pinnacle of the Peak Stage 9 of the Saint Realm.
The Storm against the Void.
The pinnacle of stellar discipline against the King of the end of times.
The earth had been purged with blood and ash. Now, it was time for the sky itself to break.