Chapter 181: The Genesis Spear and the Sea of the End Times (Part 4)
The Demon King, slowly lowering the grotesque giant Scepter into an execution stance, formed a malignant sneer on his charred, crumbling face. His voice, wet and cruel, rumbled like heavy rocks splitting at the bottom of the abyss.
"Good," purred the dark deity, glaring at the young Morningstar dragons who were already standing back up, ignoring their pain, their sharp red pupils locked onto their impending deaths. "Now then, arrogant human scum... let's end this miserable and pathetic little game once and for all."
The ancient being raised the bloodied spear toward the forty-five monsters. A shiver ran through what was left of his millennial soul as he witnessed the unbreakable will in their eyes; if all these prodigies belonged to the same clan, he didn't even want to imagine the unfathomable and terrifying depths of the monsters who ruled them.
But the tension in the air was suffocating. The demon knew he was out of time, and the youths knew they only had to hold on long enough to see his fall.
The first move was not a battle cry; it was an absolute alteration of the spatial fabric.
Violeta hovered slightly, assuming the role of conductor in this orchestra of blood. Her face adopted the impassivity of a statue carved at the end of time. Upon entering maximum resonance, her eyes lost any trace of humanity. Her left eye ignited with an incandescent neon-violet glow, the pupil stretching into a reptilian slit that allowed her to literally see the seams and silver threads holding three-dimensional space together. Her right eye mutated into a diamond-blue crystal, devoid of a pupil, where a fractal snowflake slowly spun, reducing the battlefield to a thermal spectrum that showed her the exact heartbeat of her enemies' kinetic energy.
With a graceful movement of her freezing hands, Violeta activated the Bridge Between Worlds. The air around her comrades warped inward, sucking them in and making them disappear in the blink of an eye, leaving behind a trail of shattered black glass.
Dante burst back into reality directly behind the Demon King. As he reappeared, the small sonic shockwave stopped the wind, but the False God, connected to the omniscience of his sea of blood, was already expecting him. With a twist of absurd speed, the demon launched a thrust combined with the Blood Collapse Palm, an attack designed to make the Executioner's veins burst from the inside out upon the slightest contact.
But Dante's eyes were no longer human; they were dead, gray orbs processing the world like a mortality interface. He didn't see the miasma; he saw the red threads of the "seams of existence," the weak points in the god's technique. Beneath the skin of his neck and joints, his lethal Asura Obsidian Scales sprouted. When the King's palm and spear clashed against the youth's dagger, the black scales didn't just block the impact; they absorbed the seismic trauma, boiling Dante's blood to eliminate the pain and convert it into pure adrenaline. Capitalizing on the clash, the Executioner slid his blade through the seam in the air, executing the Void Slash: Zero Code Execution, threatening to erase the monarch's lifeline.
In that exact millisecond, space tore open to the King's right. Eris emerged from a portal.
Her face was the mask of an extinction deity. Her crimson eye spun erratically, searching for the quantum thread holding the demon's aura together, while her neon-violet eye detected the potential to set gravity itself on fire. Eris brandished the Sun Devourer, her imposing black halberd. The obsidian tip didn't cut the wind; it left a scar of non-existence, a slash of pure, static darkness in the air. Executing the True Destruction Slash, she aimed directly to erase the Sovereign's arm from reality.
And on the left, space collapsed again. Kael Morningstar appeared, his asymmetrical Dragon Eyes passing judgment. His magma eye detected the demon's stagnant Qi flow, marking him with a cross of fire, while the small runic sword glowing in his right pupil traced the mathematical route of death. Kael swung down Magma Fang. The broadsword vibrated at a destructive frequency, unleashing the Crimson Slash: Blood Lotus Extinction. An invisible, causal thread connected to the demon's chest, making the slash conceptually impossible to dodge.
Besieged simultaneously by the void, entropy, and atomic friction, the Demon King let out a demented laugh.
"Fools!" he roared, activating his Domain Skill: [Pantheon Projection: Spear of a Thousand Kings].
The boiling sea of blood beneath them erupted. From the waves and the very shadows of the Morningstars sprouted thousands of ghostly copies of the spear of exile. Two colossal blood avatars materialized instantly at the King's sides, interposing their dense mass to absorb Eris and Kael's inescapable attacks, while the true monarch blocked Dante. The clash of the three apocalyptic forces triggered a shockwave that forced the vanguard back, while the Demon King, wearing a sadistic smile, sent dozens of avatars to massacre the rest of the legion.
As the blood avatars lunged at the mid-line, the twins of annihilation stepped forward.
Aion, his black chrome scales absorbing the ambient light, raised The Void Anvil. When the heavy hammer struck the air, inertia crushed reality, creating a zone of static gravity. It squarely intercepted two avatars charging at supersonic speeds.
The blood clones, finding themselves halted, activated the lethal Sting of the Exiled Throne. Their spears didn't travel through the air; they folded space and impaled Aion's shoulder and abdomen almost instantly. The youth's black blood splattered the ground.
But Aion's face didn't even flinch. His Dark Matter lineage, amplified by the Black Hole Shield, swallowed the lethal damage. The spears didn't destroy his organs; the Grade 5 kinetic and magical energy was sucked in and compressed within his own body.
"Now, Aia!" bellowed the giant, spitting blood.
Aia, her liquid silver skin glowing with stellar heat, glided like a phantom and touched her brother's shoulder. Instantly, the Paradox Horizon activated. The flow of time around them seemed to thicken. Aia extracted the colossal, dense mass of energy that Aion had just absorbed, channeling it into her Vector Needle. With a flick of her wrist that defied friction, she unleashed the [Refracted Light Spear: Mirror Execution].
The attack wasn't linear. A concentrated beam of light, multiplied by three in destructive density, traveled through invisible dimensional mirrors and pierced the two avatars from ten directions simultaneously, disintegrating them into a rain of dead blood.
Meanwhile, on another flank of hell, Violeta danced with death.
An avatar attempted to decapitate her, but she condensed her energy and deployed the Absolute Zero Lotus. A flower of perfect ice bloomed in the air, emitting a pulse of conceptual cold that anchored space. The avatar froze in its tracks, its atoms halted by thermal stasis. With an elegant flick of her transparent needle, Violeta executed the Singularity Petals. The clone's blood body imploded, collapsing into billions of frost particles that shimmered like stardust before vanishing.
Violeta didn't stop to admire her work. Using her neon eyes, she tracked the tension of the battle and teleported directly beside Cedric.
The architect, his fractal mind processing thousands of variables per second, knew she was coming. He deliberately let the avatar chasing him get close, and in the final microsecond, he opened his heavy Array-Breaker Gauntlets, deploying a geometric net of platinum light that trapped the clone in a mathematical prison for a single second. It was all Violeta needed. She appeared out of thin air and drove her freezing needle straight through the abomination's head.
"We have to stop that old man somehow," Violeta said, her breathing heavy as she listened to the apocalyptic explosions of Kael, Eris, and Dante fighting the original body in the sky.
Cedric nodded, his eyes darting frantically as he calculated. He muttered axioms at the speed of light, his knowledge of past lives overlapping with the current crisis.
"I need Iris," Cedric dictated, blood dripping from his nose. "With her help and your spatial control, I can anchor an absolute sealing formation directly over the miasma of his own world. Go get her."
Violeta nodded and vanished into a fold of the void, reappearing in the most chaotic zone of the rearguard.
Iris was immersed in a dangerous game of attrition. Her amber eyes spun with precognition as she frantically moved the pieces on her Stellar Jade Chessboard. She lacked the raw offensive power to kill avatars, so she used geometric mirrors to deflect the clones' attacks against one another.
When Violeta arrived, she saw something that made her blood run cold. Iris, foreseeing a blind spot she couldn't defend against, smiled with a maniacal coldness. She deliberately allowed an avatar's spear to pierce her abdomen.
Iris spat a thick mouthful of blood. But the young prodigy's blood wasn't a normal liquid; it was Liquid Crystal Blood. Instead of spilling uselessly, the red fluid organized itself in mid-air into complex, perfectly super-dense runic patterns. She had used her own mutilated body and her lifeblood as the perfect, unbreakable catalyst to stabilize the sealing array the clan needed.
Violeta, materializing, decapitated the stunned avatar and looked at Iris, impressed and horrified by the undeniable, glorious madness of her clan's strategists. She relayed Cedric's plan in a hurried whisper and opened a portal directly to the architect. Iris, clutching her guts with eyes shining on pure adrenaline, threw herself into the vortex.
Violeta stood alone for a second, steadying her breath, preparing to jump back to the vanguard to support Eris and Kael.
But the Demon King, besieged and wounded in the skies by the relentless assaults of the Commander, the Berserker, and the Executioner, had kept his single yellow eye fixed on the master of space. She was the vessel he needed to stabilize his soul.
At the climax of Kael's assault, the Sovereign spun his spear, blocked the magma barrage, and invoked his dirtiest technique: the [River Styx Step].
The King's body dissolved into black mist. One of the hundreds of avatars fighting far away on the battlefield took his place to receive the warriors' punishment, while he rematerialized through the drops of avatar blood scattered on the bronze floor.
He appeared exactly in front of Violeta.
The young prodigy barely had time to open her dual eyes, shocked by the absolute violation of spatial laws she had just witnessed.
"You are quite annoying, little girl," whispered the demon, his putrid breath hitting her face.
There was no time for a spell. There was no margin for the Bridge Between Worlds. The Demon King activated the true [Sting of the Exiled Throne].
The colossal spear built from vertebrae and imperial souls didn't travel through the air; it tore through space and causality itself.
The battlefield fell into absolute, deafening, terrifying silence.
Everyone, from the distant Titans to the Assassins in the shadows, turned their heads, drawn by the echo of reality breaking. They only saw the scene frozen in time: the immense, foul Scepter of Exile had cleanly pierced Violeta's chest, its bloody, jagged tip protruding from her back, dripping her life onto the crimson sea.
Violeta coughed, and a thick stream of blood stained her pale lips. The freezing cold of her lineage couldn't numb the agonizing burn of her core being punctured.
The silence shattered.
Eris, suspended in the sky, let out a heart-wrenching scream that seemed to tear the dimension's black firmament, diving down with eyes injected with pure madness. Kael, his face contorted and his pupils dilated by unspeakable horror and fury, erupted in black flames, shredding the air in his wake. The rest of the legion tried to rush toward her, blinded by despair, but the blood avatars interposed their massive bodies, unleashing chaos.
The Demon King smiled, pleased. He had captured his vessel.
Violeta felt gravity vanish. Her perfect vision, the one that could see molecules and the threads of the universe, began to darken, covered by a veil of gray mist. She didn't hear the explosions, nor Kael's roars, nor Eris's wrathful cries.
She only felt the terrible, suffocating cold of death brushing against her soul.
«Ha... so this is it...» she thought weakly, her mind wandering on the threshold of the abyss as she felt the demon withdraw the spear, letting her fall. «This is how it ends. Brother... I'm sorry. Kael, forgive me for leaving you alone so soon in this war...»
Familiar faces, warm and bright, flashed in the darkness of her dying mind.
«I'm sorry for being so weak... I would have liked to tell them. To tell Eris how much I loved fighting at her back. To Samael... to tell him he was the father who forged me... To my Aunt Lilith... To Seraphina and her little girl, whom I won't get to see grow up...»
Her delicate, pale hands, once capable of holding the weight of the universe and freezing stars, fell limply to her sides. The last breath escaped her lungs in a white, ethereal sigh.
«Father... mother... it's time to reunite...»
The Demon King, with a look of absolute contempt and triumph, brutally pushed Violeta's small body with his free hand. The inert, bloodied figure of the Frost Executioner fell like a broken doll, slowly sinking into the depths of the boiling blood sea of the end times.
Far away from the labyrinth, at the unreachable pinnacle of the cosmos, the Realm of Eternal Dawn breathed in perfect calm.
Inside the Palace of Primordial Heritage, Samael Morningstar was in deep meditation. But then, he felt a rupture. Both his soul and his primordial lineage suffered a violent tug, an icy, suffocating premonition that something immensely precious had just been snatched from him.
He snapped his eyes open and, without hesitating for a millisecond, activated his absolute power over fate: the Law of Crimson Destiny.
The physical matter of the palace vanished from his sight, giving way to the intricate Fabric of Causality. Samael searched for the threads linked to his Primordial Dragon lineage. And there he saw it. A crimson thread, Violeta's, was dangerously splintered, almost completely broken, darkening under the threat of imminent death.
Upon seeing whose blood was being spilled, Samael's mind went completely blank. All reasoning vanished. Something deep, dark, and horrifyingly primitive took hold of him.
His power utterly erupted.
A black, abyssal aura enveloped him, distorting and shattering the very space of the mini-world. The majestic Stellar World Tree, sensing its host's uncontrolled emotions, reacted immediately. The ever-peaceful sky clouded over in fractions of a second. Red lightning and thunder crashed down, unleashing an apocalyptic storm. The elders and disciples of the clan fled their residences and workplaces in terror, looking up at the sky in sheer panic. The World Tree began to glow with a mournful black hue, and the spiritual energy in the air became so chaotic and uncontrollable that those in isolated cultivation were forced out, coughing up blood.
In the outer gardens, the guardian beast, Kala, felt her master's fury. Her elegant, slender body, covered by the hexagonal obsidian plates of the Event Horizon, tensed up. From her eyes—two wells of rhythmic violet light—thick, heavy smoke began to "drip" out of sheer rage. Kala began roaring at the stormy sky, trying to force her juvenile-phase body to become colossal and massacre whoever had provoked such wrath, but it didn't work.
Celeste, who was by her side, tried to calm her upon seeing her despair, but the dragoness wouldn't yield.
Suddenly, the air grew heavy. Abaddon, the Eternal Guardian Spirit, appeared near them. With a solemn, protective tone that brooked no disobedience, he released his colossal aura. "Kala, calm down. You are scaring your ward."
The dragoness, subdued by the guardian's immense power and seeing Celeste's frightened state, lowered her head with her black crystal horn crown in a clear sign of repentance. Celeste approached quietly and began to stroke her.
Vexia, the Goddess of War, had approached after hearing the chaos. Seeing the situation, she only sighed. She didn't want to hurt the creature, but seeing the chaotic state of the realm, she knew something terrible had happened and that her master was furious. Just one glance at Abaddon—who had his hand firmly resting on the hilt of his weapon, releasing an immense pressure that even made her wince—was enough to understand the gravity of the matter. That guardian could threaten the gods themselves.
Back in the palace, Seraphina had been startled upon feeling the catastrophic outburst of power. Seeing her husband's state, she knew it wasn't normal. Samael's eyes were lost, and from him emanated a murderous intent and something dark, grotesque, that made her feel at home, yet simultaneously repulsed her very existence. Disregarding the danger, she approached him.
"Samael! Samael, please!" she cried out, her voice growing louder.
Samael was trapped in a trance. He thought he might lose his younger sister, someone he swore to protect with his life after their parents died. Seeing that he was about to lose her on his own whim of letting them fight that Demon King, he viscerally regretted not ordering Sienna to go in and handle it herself. Someone he loved and adored was about to be taken from him.
«No... that will not happen again,» Samael told himself from the very depths of his madness. «Not again. No one, not even damn destiny will stand in the way again. No one will!»
He began searching for desperate solutions. Unbeknownst to him, the Crown of the Primordial Sovereign, which he always kept hidden, materialized on his head in the face of his imminent loss of control.
The seven stellar black diamond needles began to orbit. The Infinite Mental Calculation activated, operating at the speed of light and processing billions of variables. The air around him went absolutely still.
Seeing him slightly calm his mind, Seraphina activated the Imperial Sutra: "The Eternal Dance of Chaos and Order." Instead of using the divine technique for dual cultivation, she used her Frost-Void Resonance Field to envelop her husband's aggressive blood, acting as a celestial coolant to calm him completely.
Samael finally snapped out of the trance. Seeing his wife's face bathed in tears, his dark heart shattered into pieces, and a single tear slipped from his violet eyes.
Seraphina caressed his face and, with a low, breaking voice, whispered, "Shh, don't say anything. Solve your problem, that is more important right now. Focus, we'll talk later, okay?"
Samael nodded. He focused on his immense arsenal, knowing Violeta only had a few minutes before her soul faded away. With a cold mind, he activated the "Golden Blood Legacy". Using the Loyalty Bond anchored in his sister's blood, he projected his intent through the Nexus and began calling out to her.
In a plane devoid of sensation, Violeta floated in absolute silence. Suddenly, she started hearing herself being called from a distance, feeling a strong pull. Exhausted, she only wanted to remain immersed in that silence eternally.
But then, she heard a familiar laugh. A sound she could barely remember, but one that made her entire existence tremble.
"Little girl, it is not your time yet," whispered the warm, loving voice of her mother. "Return before your brother goes mad and unleashes the monster he carries. Remember, my daughter, you all are one of the keys that keep that sanity and madness tied and locked away. It is not time for you to disappear. And I love you, my daughter... you, your sister, and, of course, your brother."
The voice paused, filled with infinite tenderness. "It's time to return, little one."
In that exact instant, Violeta's soul was dragged back into her body. Though she couldn't move and kept her eyes closed, she felt the unmistakable voice of Samael in her mind.
«Brother...» Violeta called out.
«Vio...» Samael's voice rumbled through the connection, and she could sense a tremor completely unlike him, as if the King were about to break at any moment.
"Yes, brother... forgive me," she said sadly. "I'm sorry for being too weak, I'm sorry for failing you."
"Shh, quiet, Vio. I am not disappointed in you or any of the rest of you. You did a good job. The only one to blame is me."
"No, brother, that's not true. You have given us everything. It is time we helped you."
"Yes, Vio, it was my fault... but we will talk about that later. It is time to end this battle. Vio, are you ready? I will allow you to use my power, but keep something in mind: this will hurt both your soul and your body. Are you prepared?"
With steel resolve, Violeta answered, "Yes. I am ready, brother."
"Good. First, let's recover your state."
Samael, from the palace, shifted his resolve to a highly serious demeanor. «Since you decided, I will begin.»
He raised his hand and activated a heresy against the universe: the [Law of Reality - Genesis Fragment (Incomplete)]. He invoked the Echo of Dealt Damage, but instead of using it to rip open an enemy's wound, he forced reality to "undo" the physical damage inflicted upon Violeta.
Projecting this overwhelmingly powerful and demanding law across such a cosmic distance came at a monumental cost. The side effects of "Existence Fatigue" hit him hard: his vision blurred, and his own hands turned translucent. Seraphina, holding him tightly, supported him with worry, but without saying a single word, anchoring him to reality.
In the boiling Sea of Blood, a terrifying miracle took place.
Violeta's body, which lay inert and stained in the scarlet puddle, began to levitate. The forty-four geniuses went blank, paralyzed by the scene.
But the one who was trembling the most, invaded by a primordial fear, was the Demon King. Suddenly, he felt the suffocating gaze of a predator. Someone superior was watching him, but he didn't know from where. And then, he felt a divine pressure emanating from the dead girl. Her aura began to rise to impossible levels.
Violeta continued to float. The grotesque wound in her chest slammed shut, regenerating tissue, bone, and meridians as if the spear had never pierced her.
Slowly, she twitched her pale fingers. And with lethal grace, she threw her eyes wide open.
The Neon-Violet Eye and the Diamond-Blue Eye shone with blinding light, charged not only with her own power but with the omnipotent fury of the Morningstar Patriarch.