Chapter 181: The Silence of the Dragons and the Terror of a God (Part 2)
The sound of the infinite mass obsidian splitting in two was like the agonizing scream of a dying god.
The colossal crack, burning with the unstable black flames of purgatory and the sepulchral echo of a million souls immolated by the Asura's Executioner, illuminated the dark calcium corridor with an apocalyptic glare. It wasn't a simple light; it was a radiation of pure death that evaporated the dense, toxic crimson mist that had dominated the cavern for millennia. The crushed stone dust and dimensional static swirled violently, pushed back by a hurricane gust of wind loaded with a killing intent so dense it suffocated.
Through that smoking and apocalyptic opening, Kael Morningstar took the first step.
His armor was stained with the gray ash of his previous enemies, and his breathing was a volcanic hiss. In his right hand, the monstrous sword Magma Fang dripped a dark, liquid fire that melted the fossilized bone floor with just a graze, leaving a trail of smoking craters in its wake.
His eyes, shining with a fiery fury that seemed to defy and judge the abyss itself, scanned the scene. And what his gaze captured caused the temperature in the entire colossal corridor to skyrocket instantly, evaporating every last drop of moisture in the air in a millisecond.
The scene before him was the absolute definition of desolation. The vast hallway, framed by fossilized ribs the size of mountain ranges, was completely destroyed. Deep craters dotted the floor, the colossal bone pillars were splintered like rotten wood, and the air itself reeked of burnt blood, ozone, and a toxic miasma that irritated the lungs.
On the floor, surrounding the monster's feet, Ciro, Voltar, Jareth, and Lirael lay immobilized in puddles of their own blood. Their faces, normally stoic and proud, were distorted by a mute agony. Thick, sadistic threads of living blood, controlled by the deity's fingers, writhed deep inside their open wounds. The scarlet tendrils coiled around the exposed bones of Voltar's twisted arm, in Ciro's sunken ribs, and in Lirael's and Jareth's shattered abdomens, anchoring them to the floor like horribly tortured puppets.
Despite their absurd biological dragon regeneration and the mythical toughness of their scales, surviving a direct, hand-to-hand, and conceptual combat against an ancient Grand Saint had pushed them to the very brink of extinction.
But what snapped the last, fragile thread of sanity of the Morningstar Legion was not the wounded on the floor. It was the fragile girl suspended in the center of the corridor.
The Demonic Saint King, with his left arm still encased in the unbreakable block of Violeta's absolute zero ice, had his back to the explosion. The putrid fingers of his right hand, black and sharp as obsidian blades, brutally held Violeta by her pale neck. He was strangling her in mid-air, lifting her off the ground with a crushing force as thick, precious drops of her golden blood trickled down the grip of death.
The Demon King smiled. His primordial miasma enveloped the fragile body of the Frigid Executioner, sadistically savoring the imminent possession of his perfect vessel, oblivious—for a fraction of a second—to the monsters that had just thrown open the doors to his tomb.
Kael stopped dead in his tracks. Behind him, the other thirty-nine geniuses of the clan crossed the crack in perfect synchrony.
Seeing their beloved siblings kneeling, humiliated, and bleeding out, and Violeta suffocating in the disgusting clutches of the old man, a deathly silence fell over the legion. A silence much heavier, more suffocating, and more absolute than the very gravity of the primordial tomb.
Forty pairs of dragon eyes fixed exclusively on the monster.
There were no screams of panic. There were no exclamations of terror or hasty military orders. There was something infinitely worse. Something that froze the blood itself.
There was the unanimous grinding of forty jaws clenching at the same time. An aura of death so dense, so pure, and so terrifyingly collective rose from the young warriors that the Demon King's own primordial miasma seemed to hesitate and shrink for a fraction of a second. The temperature of the hallway fluctuated sickeningly, freezing from the pure killing intent of the assassins, and then boiling violently from the fury of the commanders.
Kael squeezed the hilt of his sword. The dragon wood and frost leather creaked under the insane pressure of his fingers. The blood running through his veins stopped flowing like a normal biological liquid; it turned into hyper-pressurized lava seeking to incinerate the world.
"No one..." Kael's voice wasn't a shout. It was a low, dark, tectonic hiss that vibrated directly into the soul and body of every living being in the hallway, ignoring the distance. "No one touches my family."
Beside him, Eris didn't say a single word. The Berserker of Ruin didn't need to speak. She simply closed her eyes and let her fury break the heavy chains of her humanity.
Eris and Kael detonated at the same time.
It wasn't a gradual channeling of Qi. There were no martial preparations. It was a pure biological and conceptual explosion. Both automatically entered their Dragon Semi-Transformation state, releasing the locks that repressed their true nature.
Eris's transformation was a walking cataclysm. The incarnation of the Beast of the End. Her pale, perfect skin tore from the inside with a horrifying crunch, revealing the burning "Veins of Catastrophe", fissures through which the boiling lava of Ruin flowed. Her dark scales sprouted violently across her neck, shoulders, flanks, and legs. They were of a matte black so absolute and deep that they literally swallowed the sparse light of the corridor, creating visual voids around her. The edges of these scales vibrated and shone in an incandescent red, ready not to repel, but to devour enemy magic.
The flesh of her forehead opened mercilessly to give way to her immense, rugged, and heavy igneous obsidian horns. These acted as exhaust coils for her unstable power, projecting a crown of pure white fire that exhaled plasma to prevent her own body from bursting. The crown instantly doubled the size of her already monstrous aura.
Her eyes snapped open, manifesting the true Eyes of Ruin. The right eye became an absolute, liquid crimson red, a gaze designed exclusively to crumble the structure of matter. The left eye erupted into a raging neon violet, marking and calculating the combustion potential of the void. Under the sinister synergy of her awakening, Eris's raw power level skyrocketed, shattering the logical barrier of her cultivation and rising to the fearsome Stage 5 of the Saint Realm.
The air around her literally began to die. Her fire erupted without needing oxygen, devouring the very Qi particles of the environment.
But if Eris was the Beast that would bring the end of the world, Kael was the boiling core of the planet refusing to be extinguished.
The legion's Commander erupted into his own divine metamorphosis. His imposing crimson scales coated his muscular body like a perfect thermal conduction armor, forged in the heart of a volcano. His majestic dragon horns emerged from his skull, glowing with a white, incandescent light, acting as mystical antennas that stabilized the overwhelming, infinite power of his soul.
His Dragon Eyes mutated, losing any trace of humanity. The left eye became a reptilian slit burning in golden and crimson flames, capable of seeing the ignition points in the enemy's meridians. The right eye transformed into a pure ruby crystal where the silhouette of a small platinum light sword floated, analyzing the mathematical causality of combat.
In the center of his chest, the Sword Heart and his Dragon Heart entered into resonance. Kael's biological heartbeat was replaced by a rhythmic, dry, and crystalline ringing. CHING! CHING! It sounded exactly like the strike of a divine hammer tempering fine steel. Each heartbeat emitted a transparent shockwave that silenced the battlefield.
Kael didn't stop at Stage 5. His Perfect Fusion with the Spiritual Edge bloodline pushed his power to absurd and incomprehensible heights, reaching the raw and undeniable power of Stage 6 of the Saint Realm. The liquid metal blood boiled in his veins, and his passive domain enveloped his sword, accelerating the molecular movement of the air until reality itself began to melt around him.
The Demon King, with Violeta still suspended by the neck in his putrefying hand, turned his face toward the explosion of light and heat. His yellow eyes widened in genuine, profound stupefaction.
"Another one skipping stages of the Saint realm as if the laws of heaven didn't exist?" the entity thought, his millennial mind short-circuiting. "How is such overwhelming purity of bloodline possible in simple, pathetic humans? Are all these little ones the offspring of a divine clan? No... that's impossible. Those beings detest impure bloodlines. They would rather die than mix with human blood. Then... what the hell are these things?"
The fallen king had no time to process his own confusion. Kael and Eris were no longer standing where the infinite wall had fallen. They had simultaneously broken the sound, light, and spatial barriers.
Kael was the first to clash. He didn't use an initial physical slash; that would be too slow. As he crossed space in a crimson blur, he deployed his Semi-Domain, level 3 of his martial mastery: "The Realm of the Crimson Ash Lotus".
The most absolute and disturbing silence fell over the battlefront. The immense coliseum lost all its color saturation, turning a pale ash gray. And from the tomb's artificial sky, the air around the Demon King was instantly filled with thousands of lotus petals made of glowing red ash, falling slowly.
The scene seemed taken from a beautiful and tragic poem, until the macabre Law of "Cessation of Cause" activated.
The Demon King, sensing the lethal threat approaching his neck, panicked. He desperately tried to squeeze his rotting fingers to snap Violeta's neck and use her corpse as a miasma shield. But before his dead nerves could apply the necessary force to crush the girl's bones, dozens of fragile red ash petals touched the skin of his arm.
Kael's Nirvana Intent detected the imminent aggression. And, without mercy, it simply extinguished the Qi fueling that movement.
There was no physical block; the attack was erased from causality. The miasma strengthening the Demon King's fingers vanished into a cloud of red dust. The Grand Saint's grip loosened pathetically, his dead muscles paralyzed by the Nirvana Friction, which acted like an unbearable spiritual sandpaper grinding away the deity's very "hostile intent."
With the monster stunned, unable to understand why his divine body wouldn't obey his commands under the rain of ash, Eris appeared on his blind flank.
The Berserker didn't seek a refined martial arts duel. She had channeled the ultimate technique of her codex: the [Scripture of the Solar Catastrophe Spear]. Using her Crimson Eye, the girl immediately found the exact breaking point and structural flaw in the Demon King's heavy biological miasma shield.
Her immense obsidian horns shone like two collapsing dwarf stars, channeling the immense, unstable chaos of her marrow directly into the obsidian tip of her halberd, the Sun Devourer.
Eris struck a blow toward the old man's chest. "Black Supernova."
The Demon King, feeling the heat of annihilation, reacted out of pure survival instinct. He slapped his palms together and hastily activated his Grade 4 absolute defense: the [Black Blood Lotus]. Thick blood poured from his pores, attempting to form a gigantic red and black crystal lotus to absorb the shockwave.
But it was useless. He had gravely underestimated the girl's speed and destructive purity.
The black and white Flame of Ruin collided against the half-formed barrier. There was no audible impact; there was a terrifying assimilation. Eris's fire literally devoured the molecular structure of the demonic defense over the course of a millisecond. It erased the shield from existence as if it had never been conjured.
The shockwave of pure annihilation, unstoppable and hungry, continued its trajectory and hit the corpse's torso head-on.
The impact was volcanic. The Grand Saint was lifted off the ground and sent flying violently backward, his chest smoking and skin charred, physically forced to completely release Violeta's neck.
Violeta fell into the void, coughing up golden blood and clutching her bruised throat. But before her fragile, exhausted body touched the hard bone floor, the shadows of the hallway came alive.
Dante and Ren, the kings of darkness, appeared at her side in an inaudible blink. Dante caught her in his arms while Ren covered their rear with poisoned daggers, pulling the Executioner out of the primary impact zone in a fraction of a second.
The very instant Violeta was safe, the rearguard of the Morningstar legion entered a perfect, sublime, rehearsed synchronization.
"Life Network, now! Don't let them fade!" shouted Cedric, his gray eyes coordinating the support matrix with military precision.
Elowen, Lys, and Cassius deployed in unison, forming a triangle of salvation behind the heavy vanguard.
Cassius fiercely plunged his spear into the bone floor. He activated his passive drain to the maximum, his eyes glowing emerald green, greedily absorbing any trace of residual vitality from the miasma destroyed by Eris, channeling it through his body like a purifying bridge.
Lys, the legion's Purifier, raised her delicate hands toward the ceiling. She released torrents of pure, warm, and blindingly bright starlight, which fell like a sacred cascade over the broken figures of Violeta, Voltar, Ciro, Lirael, and Jareth. The light penetrated their bodies, instantly dissolving any toxin, necrosis, and demonic corruption the King had injected into their meridians.
And finally, Elowen, the Head Healer and compassionate heart of the clan, cut her palms and spilled her invaluable universal elixir blood onto the stone. Golden roots, thick and pulsing with pure vital energy, explosively sprouted from the floor and spread like snakes of light, connecting directly to the chests of the five wounded. The infinite life network was established.
It was a real-time medical miracle. Ciro's shattered, sunken bones welded and straightened with a wet snap. Voltar's grotesquely twisted arm crunched as it returned to its perfect anatomical position, while the horrific plasma burns closed, forming pristine new skin. Lirael's beautiful pale scales, splintered by the impacts, were polished and rebuilt; Jareth's dissolved flesh healed, and Violeta's agonizing breathing completely stabilized, the color returning to her cheeks.
In less than five seconds on the clock, the vanguard that had been dying and tortured was aggressively returned to its peak combat state.
A hundred meters away, the Demon King came to a halt. His rotting boots tore deep furrows in the bone floor to brake his humiliating backward slide.
The monster looked down at his own chest. Old man Li's ancestral robes were disintegrated. The tough dead flesh, upgraded to Stage 5, displayed a huge, disgusting black crater surrounded by white edges that flatly refused to regenerate. It was being eternally consumed by the insatiable void fire of Eris.
The King raised his face. His yellow eyes twitched spasmodically. There was no longer surprise in his gaze. There was no more stupefaction or scientific curiosity regarding his opponents' abilities. There was only a pure, abysmal, unhinged fury.
He had been humiliated. He had been struck. He had been burned. They had snatched his prize, his perfect vessel, right out of his hands.
"These damn ignorant brats have humiliated me enough," the deity thought, his mind distilling pure conceptual venom. "It is time for them to die. It is time for them to learn the supreme lesson of the Primordial Era."
"Enough!" roared the Demon King, his voice painfully distorting three-dimensional space and making the ears of the weakest bleed.
The millennial entity crossed his arms in front of his shattered chest. His fingers, still stained with Violeta's golden blood, formed ancient, blasphemous runic seals at a blurry speed the human eye could not follow. He was going to stop playing with basic martial arts. He was going to show them the true, suffocating despair of a King.
"Know your place in the cosmos, mortal scum! [Domain of the Blood Purgatory]!"
The entire world turned a dark, sickly, coagulated red.
A colossal dome of thick, bloody miasma expanded violently from the Grand Saint's body, exploding like a bubble of Dantean proportions. It covered the entirety of the immense underground hallway in a fraction of a second, enveloping the forty-five geniuses inside without giving them a chance to escape.
Inside this dome, the universal laws of nature were hijacked and rewritten. The Law Domain of a Grade 4 Grand Saint wasn't a simple "area of effect magic" that caused damage over time; it was absolute tyranny. It was the imposition of his own sovereign will upon the physical world.
Inside the Blood Purgatory, normal atmospheric pressure completely disappeared, replaced by a macabre, inverse, gravitational suction force. The Domain was designed for one thing only: the absolute extraction of life.
Every previously opened wound, every pore on the skin, every tear in the eyes of the trapped warriors inside began to be physically pulled outward. The blood of the forty-five youths boiled in their veins, pumping with maddening force, trying to pierce the skin and escape their own bodies to feed the scarlet ocean floating menacingly above their heads.
Any orthodox Qi attack attempting to cross the space within the domain would instantly wither, devoured by the aura of primordial rot.
The terror of feeling one's own life abandon them from the inside out would have paralyzed, disorganized, and annihilated any orthodox army on the continent in seconds. They would have fallen to their knees, begging for mercy as they turned into dried mummies.
But the Morningstar Clan was not orthodox. The Morningstar Clan had been forged in the infernal lessons of a man who was much more terrifying than the old man before them.
And Kael Morningstar wasn't going to play defensively.
"The old bastard wants war!" bellowed Kael. His voice, amplified by the immense atomic friction of his dragon larynx, cut through the hum of the domain like a hot knife. "Then give him fucking hell! Direct Commander's order! Release ten percent! Everyone!"
That wasn't a simple tactical instruction. It was the verbal key that broke the heavy seals of reality.
During months of grueling exploration in the tomb, Kael had demanded with an iron fist that they actively suppress their partial transformations. He ordered them to operate at minimum capacity so as not to exhaust their precious blood reserves and to jealously hide their trump cards from any unwanted spectators.
But facing an infuriated Stage 5 Grand Saint, there were no more cards to hide. There was only one route to victory: total, overwhelming annihilation.
Forty-five dragon auras exploded simultaneously.
The roar was deafening. The monumental corridor, already in ruins, became an authentic apocalyptic war zone. The combined pressure of forty-five metamorphoses of pure, violent, savage bloodlines from the Primordial Era clashed head-on against the tyranny of the Blood Purgatory. The atmospheric pressure shattered. The horrific sound of shattering glass on a massive scale was heard as immense silver and golden cracks appeared in the very dome of the enemy domain, unable to contain so much cosmic heresy.
The war machine kicked into gear.
Magnus, Korg, Goran, Borg, Draven, Bren, and Tormund—the Physical Titans, the impregnable vanguard of the legion—let out roars that shook the mist. They positioned themselves at the front in a horizontal line, intertwining their auras to form an immense wall of flesh, bone, and magic. Their enormous bodies mutated drastically, covering themselves in overlapping layers of glowing golden Vajra, black organic iron, massive volcanic basalt, indestructible divine bronze, and frost.
The Demon King, boiling with fury upon seeing that his ultimate domain was not only being resisted but physically fractured by the mere presence of these children, did not wait. He disappeared from his spot using the impossible speed of Stage 5.
He activated the [Styx River Step]. He dissolved into a puddle of miasma and, breaking the spatial restriction, instantly rematerialized in front of the wall of Titans, emerging from a drop of spilled blood on the floor mere centimeters from them.
The monster threw a devastating punch. It was powered to the maximum by the scarlet assimilation of his domain, condensing the weight necessary to pulverize entire mountain ranges. Into that physical impact, he injected the conceptual curse of the [Blood Collapse Palm], seeking to make the Titans' blood flee their own hearts and make them explode like water balloons.
Magnus and Goran, the central anchors, didn't blink. They stepped forward to receive the impact head-on.
Goran roared and slammed his immense [Shield of the Northern Black Turtle] deep into the ground. Using his bloodline, he transmuted the kilometers of fossilized bone beneath them, anchoring himself to the structure of the tomb to become immovable. Magnus crossed his gold-plated arms, using the unfathomable tectonic weight of his Liquid Vajra skeleton as an absolute counterweight.
The Grand Saint's punch impacted against them.
The shockwave leveled the ground around them. Goran's mythical shield groaned and dented massively, sinking the center of the energy barrier. Magnus's ultra-dense bones cracked loudly with a sickening sound that chilled the blood. Both colossi were violently pushed ten meters backward, plowing deep trenches in the floor's calcium with their heavy boots.
Any normal cultivator would have exploded into a red mist. But the Blood Collapse curse didn't work. Behind the Titans, the sacred support trio (Elowen, Cassius, and Lys) had woven a shield of constant purification over their veins, nullifying the necrosis and stabilizing their bloodstream pressure before the Blood Law could act.
The Titans were injured, bleeding from their mouths, but they didn't fall.
And before the Demon King could seize the momentum and connect a second, definitive blow to break the defensive line, Morningstar's tactic shone with cruel efficiency. Korg and Borg had already swiftly occupied the empty space left by Magnus and Goran.
The two giants didn't defend themselves; they counterattacked. They launched brutal cast-iron hooks at the monster's temples and crushing kinetic battering ram charges directly at the old man's exposed ribs, forcing the deity to raise his arms to block.
It was a perfect military rotation cycle, a meat grinder impeccably rehearsed in the pits of the abyss. The Titans took turns. Those who took the absurd, lethal damage of the deity would step back for half a second, being instantly healed, almost resurrected, by Elowen's inexhaustible golden life network and Lys's light. Meanwhile, the next in line took the vanguard, absorbing the counterattacks and returning heavy physical punishment.
They were using their own bruised bodies as a shield of infinite grinding, wearing down the monster's unfathomable physical strength and endurance at an agonizing pace.
Finding himself bogged down in a useless and humiliating melee combat against walls of flesh that refused to die, the Demon King tried to change tactics. He flexed his legs to retreat, seeking to rise into the air and get out of melee range to bombard them with long-range, massive-area blood magic.
But the Legion wouldn't let him.
From the distant rearguard and hidden in the dark flanks of the corridor, the Morningstar Clan's Artillery unleashed a ballistic hell that defied every law of physics and martial logic.
Varian, floating majestuously near the ceiling with his storm wings spread, didn't need to waste time aiming. His [Authority of Fixed Destiny] dictated a simple cosmic rule: if the hawk's eye saw the target, the talon had already arrived.
Using his [Zenith Sentence: Execution by Synchronization], Varian drew the light string of his bow, aiming at the Demon King's shoulder. He didn't shoot an arrow through the air. In the exact millisecond his fingers released the God's Nerve string, space collapsed. The emerald plasma arrow bypassed distance, time, and the wind barrier. It materialized directly inside the thick, dead joint of the Grand Saint, piercing flesh and bone before detonating in a violent storm of internal plasma blades that shredded the old man's ligaments, making him lose his balance mid-leap.
At the same time, Selene, melded into the absolute shadows of the fallen pillars, fired her [Whisper of Death Arrows]. The pink zephyr arrows became intangible and ethereal upon contact with the monster's brutal defensive miasma. The Demon King, panting from the effort of combat, inhaled huge gulps of the corrupt air. At the precise instant of the deadly inhalation, Selene's arrow materialized out of nowhere directly inside his trachea, expanding into hundreds of tiny wind needles that shredded his vocal cords and lungs from the inside. It was a microscopic, dirty assassination, impossible to block with external shields or area magic.
And from the other flank, Lia, with her eyes shining with the pure electricity of a storm deity, rained down judgment. Firing ten arrows in the time it took a common archer to blink, she unleashed the [Bolt of Celestial Judgment]. Instead of seeking piercing damage, her blue light bolts directly ionized the heavy blood of the Domain, calling down immense columns of homing lightning that struck the Demon King's head and back. The discharges forced constant, painful massive short circuits in his nervous system, freezing his muscles for microseconds and forcing him to constantly divert his attention to avoid going blind.
Trapped on the ground, bombarded from all angles, the Demon King tried to create another defensive lotus. But then the wraiths arrived.
Maren and Ciro, the assassins of pure speed, were undetectable blurs of light and cutting wind. Their goal wasn't to kill the Grand Saint; they knew their daggers couldn't penetrate his core. Their only purpose was to torment him, bleed him, and open windows for the executioners.
Maren lost her physical form, transforming into a stream of pure electrons. She passed directly through the thick walls of red miasma, materializing centimeters from the old man to plunge lightning daggers into his blind spots, causing more temporary paralysis in the dead meridians of Li's corpse.
Ciro, newly healed and with his eyes bloodshot with fury, glided using his zero-inertia thrusts. His [Phantasmagoric Displacement] left solid copies in the air that drew the monster's attacks, while the real Ciro appeared behind his back, using the [Whisper of the Apex] to slice with surgical precision the large tendons of the old man's knees before disappearing back into the void, taking advantage of his infinite speed.
And in the midst of this deafening cyclone of chaos and destruction, Lirael didn't make the mistake of approaching the dangerous physical body. Her mercury clones danced in circles around the dead god. Every time the monster moved and cast a grotesque shadow on the walls, or when his murderous silhouette was fleetingly reflected in the blood puddles or the thick walls of broken ice, Lirael executed the slash. She slashed those reflections with her invisible scimitar. Every cut to a shadow opened deep, agonizing spiritual and physical wounds in the King's real flesh, making him roar in incomprehension and pain at being attacked through the mirror of reality.
Ignis, Violeta, and Jareth mercilessly joined the overwhelming punishment. Ignis rained down pure Yang fire, like small burning suns that evaporated the toxic mist. Violeta appeared and disappeared using her spatial rifts, launching swift Absolute Zero thrusts that froze and crystallized entire sections of the old man's blood armor, rendering it brittle. Jareth hurled torrents of entropic purple miasma that acted as a divine solvent, rapidly melting the frozen defenses.
But in the very center of this perfectly orchestrated hurricane of death, Kael and Eris were the absolute, deadly spearheads.
Eris's black and white Flame of Ruin devoured any massive magical technique or blood wall that the Demon King tried to conjure in desperation. Her Dark Scales feared no damage; they absorbed the enemy's residual magical impacts, feeding her sadistic frenzy and turning her fire increasingly, unbearably hotter, forcing the god to retreat step by step.
Kael, operating under Perfect Fusion and using his Liquid Metal Blood, ignored pain. He instantly regenerated from the severe acid burns that the Blood Purgatory managed to inflict upon him. His gigantic sword, boosted to radioactive levels by his bloodline's Incandescent Friction, clashed relentlessly, over and over, against the monster's crossed arms. He didn't cut; he melted. Every contact of the plasma blade fused large chunks of the Grand Saint's putrefying flesh, turning the dead tissue into dripping magma.
The Demonic Saint King, the deity who had ruled at the apex of Stage 9 in eras past, was being beaten like a stray dog.
His supreme domain, designed to bleed continents dry, was being methodically purified by Lys's inexhaustible light and slowly suffocated by the infinite red ash lotuses of Kael's Realm.
A devastating lateral blow from Bren's warhammer destabilized him, fracturing his jaw. A whip of heavy ice chains thrown by Draven tangled around his right leg, breaking his ankle and immobilizing him. A fleeting, precise spatial cut from Violeta completely sliced off part of his cheek, exposing his rotten teeth.
And finally, a majestic downward slash from Kael, fully charged with the lethal Nirvana Intent, cleanly amputated three fingers from the King's left hand. The cut left a black, charred, and smoking wound that the demon's immense blood was unable to heal or regenerate, since Nirvana had dictated to that flesh that its existence was over.
For the first time since his awakening in the tomb's cold sarcophagus, the Demonic Saint King felt something his ancient soul had not experienced in countless millennia.
He felt fear.
And fear, in the heart of a tyrant, quickly transmuted into an irrational, blind, hysterical fury. He no longer cared about his legacy. He no longer cared about elegance. He only wanted to destroy these damned, blasphemous brats with all the power his core harbored, at whatever cost.
His yellow eyes, now bloodshot with a thick blackish blood, frantically scanned the deafening and overwhelming battlefield.
His mathematical mind analyzed the unbreakable barrier of Titans at the front, which refused to break no matter how much force he applied. He analyzed the suffocating rain of arrows and spatial thrusts that, no matter how much he moved, he couldn't dodge because they ignored distance. He analyzed the perfect, infinite, sickening golden healing network that rendered all his accumulated lethal damage useless within five seconds. He analyzed the white fire and magma sword that literally devoured and burned his immortal conceptual laws.
And then, in the center of the beating, the cold, cruel truth hit him with the destructive force of a meteorite falling from the sky.
With true, genuine, and abject psychological terror crawling up his dead spine, the Demon King realized his fatal mistake. The mistake that would cost him his soul.
He was not fighting a talented group of human cultivators. He was not facing a coalition of the best geniuses from the arrogant sects of the mortal continent.
He was being hunted.
He was trapped and surrounded by a ruthless pack of divine monsters. Forty-five aberrations, apex predators of the Primordial Era, operating with a military synergy so absolute, so cold, and so monstrously coordinated, that they were erasing the unreachable gap between realms through pure, uninterrupted tactical violence. They were not individuals fighting for glory; they were a single, lethal, gigantic organism meticulously designed to kill gods and massacre immortals.
And he, trapped in the fragile, decrepit body of an old man, in the middle of his own throne room, was the defenseless prey.
"NOOOOOO!" roared the Demon King. It was a desperate shriek that mixed impotent fury with visceral panic, completely tearing his already injured vocal cords.
Cornered and about to be dismembered alive, the monster made a suicidal decision. He decided that the longed-for perfect human vessel no longer mattered. His ambition to devour Violeta had died. If he didn't kill them all at this exact instant, this meat machinery would tear him apart piece by piece, erase his soul with black fire, and leave not an atom of his existence to reincarnate in the future.
Without hesitation, he consumed all the immense vital energy, the meridians, and the very soul of Grand Saint Li in a single, massive heretical sacrifice. The old man's spiritual core cracked. The corpse's body swelled to grotesque and unstable proportions, the veins bursting beneath the skin. He was preparing an atomic self-destruction of condensed miasma that would blow up the entire colossal corridor, evaporate the bone of the tomb, and erase everyone inside within a radius of a hundred kilometers.
The swollen body of the old man suddenly shone with a radioactive, blinding, and lethal red light. The sound of space collapsing toward his chest announced the imminent end.
"He's going to detonate his main core!" Iris warned, screaming at the top of her lungs from the distant rearguard, her fractal eyes pouring blood as she mathematically read the imminent end of the world forming in the monster's chest.
Kael Morningstar, bathed in enemy blood and ashes, did not step back a single millimeter. His asymmetrical Dragon Eyes pierced through the blinding radioactive light and saw the minuscule point of massive failure in the monster's pulsating, expanding body.
"Eris! Dante! With me!" ordered Kael, his voice firm as steel cutting through the panic of the impending explosion.
Without hesitation, demonstrating the fanatical loyalty that united them, the Supreme Commander, the Berserker of the Apocalypse, and the silent Executioner of the Shadows launched themselves like three dark meteors straight toward the heart of the expanding core. They ignored certain death and rushed into the blinding light, prepared to deliver the lethal and definitive finishing blow before the fallen god could drag them all into the fires of hell with him.
And there, in the center of the impending cosmic explosion, upon seeing the three strongest leaders throw themselves directly into the jaws of the detonation to save the rest...
The Demon King, his skin melting from his own power overload, stopped his wailing. He looked directly into Kael's crimson eyes, and his burnt lips curved into a slow, subtle, and chilling smile.