Back within the Inner Continent, the place was entirely devoid of any sounds of clashing that one would expect. To an ordinary observer standing on the distant glittering streets below, it would appear as though the two figures hovering high above the cityscape were doing nothing at all. They simply floated in the artificial twilight, staring at each other in silence.
But to anyone who had awakened their consciousness, the space between Xeolze and Tenyz was a raging battlefield.
They were exchanging willforce attacks.
Thousands of invisible, microscopic needles forged from pure, condensed intent hovered around Tenyz. With a mere flicker of his mind, he sent them launching forward, aiming to pierce, shred, and completely paralyze the consciousness of the black-armored warrior standing opposite him.
Yet, before those needles could even cross the midpoint of the space between them, they collided with an equal number of identical willforce constructs. Xeolze's own intent manifested as a storm of invisible daggers, intercepting every single one of Tenyz's attacks. The resulting clashes did not produce sparks or shockwaves of mana, but they sent high-frequency tremors rippling through the fabric of reality itself, generating a pressure that would have caused any ordinary Rule Stage cultivator to collapse into a coma simply from being near it.
Tenyz's eyes widened, a flicker of genuine shock breaking through his usual mask of arrogant superiority.
"How?" Tenyz thought, his mind racing as he diverted more and more of his mental pressure into the clash. "This Elyrian slave… he isn't just someone who barely scraped his way into the first stage of consciousness mastery."
As the invisible storm of intent ground into a bitter, unyielding stalemate, Tenyz came to a realization. This pitch-black armored guard was not only in the Chime of Consciousness stage, but he was exceptionally strong within it. He was someone who possessed a mental foundation deep and refined enough to fight equally against Tenyz himself, the extensively tutored son of a Lesser Major Sect leader.
Realizing that attempting to crush this opponent through mere willforce was a futile endeavor that would only drain his own mental reserves, Tenyz abruptly shifted his tactics.
"You hide your fangs well for a caged bird," Tenyz spat, his voice echoing coldly across the sky. "But a strong mind cannot save a weak body!"
He reached into the void beside him, his hand blurring as he summoned a remarkably slim, elegant sword from his spatial ring. The moment his fingers wrapped around the hilt, the ambient mana in the air ignited. A blinding, golden divine domain erupted around him, radiating with the suffocating weight of the Fate concept. The ninety percent authority of an Astral Stage sovereign pressed down upon the cityscape, distorting the very light of the artificial sky.
Xeolze's expression remained entirely hidden beneath his featureless black helmet, but his response was instantaneous. He flicked his wrists, and a pair of curved daggers materialized in his grasp.
Simultaneously, a turbulent domain of deep violet and vibrant emerald essence exploded outward from his body. His domain crashed headlong into Tenyz's golden light. The two Astral Stage domains ground against each other in a deafening contest of authority, the resulting friction tearing thin, jagged fissures in the surrounding space.
Far in the distance, Mariska raced back toward the battlefield. Her majestic, luminescent wings beat frantically against the wind, her heart hammering in her chest.
As she drew closer to the epicenter of the clash, she felt a sudden, massive wall of pushing energy wrap around her. The pressure generated by the overlapping domains of two battling Astral Stage sovereigns was immense.
Xeolze sensed her arrival immediately. He parried a fast strike from Tenyz's slim sword, the impact sending a shockwave up his arms, and risked a fraction of a second to glance over his shoulder.
"What are you doing here, Princess?!" Xeolze screamed, his usually composed and whisper-quiet voice cracking with desperate urgency. "Just run! Get out of here!"
Tenyz let out a sharp, mocking laugh that cut through the thunderous grinding of their domains. "Looking away from your opponent? How touching. And how very fatal."
Tenyz did not give Xeolze a single moment to recover his stance. His eyes flared as he activated his most potent offensive authority technique. With it, Tenyz peered into the immediate, cascading threads of fate.
The technique showed him the near future. It projected the exact trajectories, the desperate parries, and the evasive maneuvers that Xeolze was about to make before the Elyrian guard even consciously initiated them.
Armed with this precognition, Tenyz struck.
Xeolze twisted his body, attempting to slip beneath a horizontal slash, but Tenyz's slim sword was already waiting for him at the exact coordinate of his evasion. The blade sliced cleanly through the heavy plating of Xeolze's pitch-black armor, biting deep into his shoulder.
Blood sprayed into the void.
Xeolze gritted his teeth, refusing to cry out, and retaliated with a cross-handed strike of his daggers. But Tenyz simply leaned his head a fraction of an inch to the side, allowing the deadly blades to pass harmlessly through empty air, exactly as his technique had predicted. In the same fluid motion, Tenyz brought the pommel of his sword crashing down against Xeolze's chest plate, fracturing the armor and sending the shadow guard plummeting downward.
Xeolze arrested his fall violently, his violet and emerald domain flaring as he forced himself back up, but the damage was already accumulating. Every dodge he attempted was pre-empted; every counter-attack he launched met empty air or a perfectly positioned parry.
Tenyz hovered above, his sword dripping with Elyrian blood. He turned his gaze toward Mariska, who had breached the outer edge of their clashing auras. His eyes swept over her with a mixture of arrogance and greed.
"Ah, the little princess returns," Tenyz sneered, his voice dripping with condescension. "And here I thought you actually possessed some survival instincts. But look at you, rushing back to the slaughterhouse."
Tenyz flicked his sword, sending a spray of Xeolze's blood scattering into the wind. "Do yourself a favor and stay exactly where you are, little bird. I would hate to accidentally sever an artery in the crossfire. Do not waste that good blood! Your kind's essence is far too precious to be spilled meaninglessly over the streets. It belongs in my sect's refinement cauldrons."
Mariska hovered in the air, her entire body trembling as the words washed over her.
She looked at Tenyz, at the arrogant smirk plastered across his face. Then she looked down at Xeolze. The loyal shadow guard was battered, his armor cracked in a dozen places, bleeding profusely as he gasped for breath. He was fighting a battle he could not win, against an opponent who could read his every move.
A heavy guilt settled upon her chest; it was only because of her reckless actions that her father had sent this loyal warrior to save her, and now, because of that very choice, he was going to be slaughtered.
The guilt rapidly twisted into a blinding rage. "He is going to die because of me," Mariska thought, "My father hid him. He is a true asset to our civilization... an Astral Stage warrior who reached the first stage of consciousness mastery. He is far more valuable to the future of the Elyrians than a newly ascended, helpless princess like me."
The calculation in her mind was swift.
She could not let Xeolze die here. She valued his life, his strength, and his potential to protect their people far more than she valued her own.
She resolved herself that if anyone had to die today for her actions, it should be herself, not the one who came to save her! If she had to burn her own existence to ash just to buy him the handful of seconds he needed to escape, then she would do it without a shred of hesitation.
"I will not let you take him!" Mariska screamed, her voice tearing through the heavy atmosphere.
Her Ultimate-tier divine concept erupted from her core. She dashed toward Tenyz like a falling star, her ninety percent authority flaring wildly as she prepared for the ultimate sacrifice. If her sword could not reach him, she was fully prepared to self-destruct her Astral Core, turning her own life force into an apocalyptic bomb right in front of the Ethereal Providence Sect's heir.
Tenyz watched her reckless charge, and his smirk only widened into a look of utter pity.
"Still as foolish as ever," Tenyz murmured.
He didn't even bother raising his sword to defend against her physical charge. Instead, he simply narrowed his eyes and executed the same willforce attack he had used before. An invisible needle of pure, concentrated intent manifested in the void and shot directly toward Mariska's forehead at a speed that bypassed the laws of physics entirely.
He expected the exact same result as their previous encounter. He expected the overwhelming weight of his mind to crash into her unprotected consciousness, severing her connection to her mana and dropping her to her knees as a helpless, paralyzed prisoner.
The invisible needle struck Mariska directly in the center of her mind.
Mariska braced for the agonizing, mind-shattering weight she had felt only some moments ago.
But as the needle impacted her mind... something was different.
The pressure was there, heavy and violent, yet it was not the same insurmountable wall it had been before. It did not shatter her mind. Instead, her mind pushed back. The fire of her rage, the clarity of her sacrificial resolve, formed an invisible, unyielding shield around her consciousness. The paralyzing shockwave rippled through her, causing her to grit her teeth in pain, but her body did not stop. Her flight did not falter.
"I am not stopping!" Mariska roared within her own mind, her vision tunneling entirely onto Tenyz's arrogant face.
She tore through the residual mental pressure like a comet breaking through a dying atmosphere. She closed the distance in a fraction of a heartbeat, raising her blade high.
Tenyz's smug expression evaporated. His precognition technique had been entirely focused on Xeolze; he hadn't even bothered to read Mariska's fate, certain that his willforce attack would incapacitate her.
By the time he realized she was still moving, it was too late to mount a proper defense.
Mariska's sword swung downward in a blinding arc.
SLASH!
The blade connected. It carved through the outer layer of Tenyz's golden domain and sliced deeply across his forearm.
"AARGH!" Tenyz screamed, stumbling backward through the air. He clutched his bleeding arm, his eyes wide with a mixture of pain and shock.
"Impossible!" Tenyz muttered, his voice cracking as he stared at the blood coating his own fingers. "You... you haven't reached the first stage! You don't have the Chime! How did you stand against my willforce?!"
Hovering a short distance away, Xeolze witnessed the entire exchange. Despite the pain radiating from his own fractured armor, a wide, genuine smile bloomed beneath his dark helmet.
"The Princess..." Xeolze thought, his heart swelling with pride. "She has taken a step forward!"
What Tenyz failed to understand in his arrogance was the fundamental nature of the energy he was wielding. Willforce was not a simple, quantifiable energy like mana.
Willforce was the energy of the mind, of intent, of resolve, and of consciousness itself. This distinct classification was given to willforce for a very specific reason. It did not behave passively; it scaled directly with the emotional and psychological state of the user.
When a cultivator's intent and resolve were forged in the fires of unwavering conviction, when they were willing to abandon their own life, driven by a purpose far greater than their own survival, their willforce amplified. It became boosted multiple times over, transforming a fragile, newly awakened consciousness into a fortress of steel.
Understanding this truth, feeling the raw, undeniable connection between one's resolve and the strength of their mind, was one of the primary, most vital steps required to finally reach the Chime of Consciousness. And in her desperate, self-sacrificing charge to protect her people, Mariska had just placed her foot firmly upon that path.