Chapter 132: The Fall of the Sky and the Massacre of the Valois (Part 2)
From the abyssal belly of the obsidian beast floating above the Emerald Valley, twenty-one dots fell into the void.
They did not descend wrapped in ostentatious formations of light. They did not utter heroic war cries or speeches of justice. Only the suffocating whistle of gravitational acceleration reigned, along with the raw, heavy, and inescapable manifestation of a murderous intent so dense that the Valois soldiers on the ground felt the air turn into breathable lead.
In the immense central courtyard of the Main Mansion, Valerius Valois, the self-proclaimed "Holy Son" and heir to the region, was petrified.
His golden ceremonial armor, meticulously forged by artisans of the Purple Light Sect, was designed to dazzle in military parades and banquets, not for the carnage of a real war. Under the unnatural shadow of the floating citadel, the gold of his pauldrons shone ridiculously, like a bullseye marking the fattest pig in the slaughterhouse.
Valerius raised his face, his knees trembling until the plates of his greaves clattered together. He saw a dark red dot in the sky growing larger and larger with every millisecond. And hotter. The temperature in the courtyard rose from thirty degrees to hundreds in a blink. The sweat evaporated from his skin before it could even form.
"No…" Valerius whispered, his lower lip trembling uncontrollably, his eyes wide as denial fought against reality. "It's not possible. You're supposed to be dead. You are ghosts of the sand..."
BOOOOOOOOM!!!
The impact of the crimson meteor was not a simple landing; it was the detonation of a thermobaric bomb. The majestic marble fountain in the center of the courtyard, which had flowed with pure water for three hundred years, was instantly vaporized. A colossal shockwave swept the courtyard, kicking up a dome of dust, boiling steam, and crushed debris. The heat was so unbearable that the Valois flags spontaneously burst into flames. The unbreakable limestone floor began to melt at the epicenter, bubbling and turning into a puddle of viscous, orange lava.
From amidst the dense, suffocating smoke, two lights ignited. They were two golden eyes, shining with the predatory cruelty of vertically slit pupils, identical to those of an ancestral reptile.
A heavy step. Thud. The melted stone hissed.
Another step. Thud. The smoke began to swirl and clear.
Kael Morningstar emerged from the volcanic cloud. The visual contrast with the Valois heir was an insult to the aristocracy. Kael wore no gala armor or fine silks. His heavily muscled torso was completely bare, covered in black soot and beaded sweat. Along his neck, collarbones, and shoulders, thick patches of crimson scales—hard as diamond and hot as the earth's core—throbbed with their own magmatic light. In his right hand, he dragged the Magma Fang, leaving a deep, bubbling groove of molten rock in his wake as he advanced.
Kael stopped a mere five meters from Valerius. He slowly tilted his head to the side, and the solid vertebrae in his neck cracked with a sound that froze the blood of the surviving soldiers in the courtyard.
"Hello, 'Saint'," Kael said. His voice was no longer that of a young swordsman; it was a low, raspy, terrifying growl, like two immense millstones grinding against each other. "You look pale. Don't you like the redecoration of my new house?"
Valerius took a clumsy step back, tripping over his own cape. His biological instinct screamed at him to turn around, to crawl through the mud if necessary to flee from the thing looking at him. But his pride, artificially inflated by years of sickening adulation in the Purple Light Sect, kept him anchored to his own grave.
"Desert trash!" Valerius screamed, his voice cracking into a high, pathetic squeak that betrayed his terror. "I am a Saint! Heaven itself has chosen me to rule!"
He drew his sword, a thin blade of radiant purple light, a priceless treasure gifted by the Elders of his Sect. His Qi, artificially inflated by pills and elixirs until it grazed the power of a Stage 1 Saint, erupted in a violet aura.
"Divine Judgment Slash!" he roared, launching a cross-slash of concentrated energy toward Kael.
The attack was undeniably fast. It was dazzling. It had the destructive power of a cultivator in the Saint Realm. It cut through the air with a sharp whistle, seeking to decapitate the desert savage.
Kael didn't even blink. He didn't dodge. He didn't raise his colossal sword to block.
He simply raised his bare left hand.
CLANG!
A deafening metallic crash echoed through the courtyard. The sublime blade of purple light slammed brutally against Kael's open palm. There was a massive burst of violet and red sparks, but when the light of the impact cleared, reality crushed Valerius's ego. Kael held the blade of pure light between his scaly fingers. He hadn't been pushed back a single millimeter. On his palm, there was not a single cut, not a single drop of blood. The incandescent friction of his scales was literally melting the structure of the enemy's technique.
Valerius's eyes bulged so far out that the bloodshot whites around his irises could be seen. He trembled with pure panic, his jaw unhinged.
"Impossible…" the "Holy Son" babbled, tears of terror welling in his eyes. "My technique… the Sect's treasure…"
Kael smiled. It was a horrifying smile, a gash across his face full of conical teeth, far too white and sharp to belong to the human race.
"Your Qi smells like cheap medicine," Kael whispered, squeezing his fingers until the blade of purple light shattered as if it were cheap glass. "You are a damn chicken farm disguised as a phoenix."
In a burst of speed the human eye couldn't register, Kael disappeared from his position. The sonic boom arrived a millisecond after Kael reappeared right in front of Valerius's face. Without using his hands, Kael thrust his neck forward and delivered a brutal headbutt directly to his face.
CRACK!
The sound of facial bone pulverizing was nauseating. Valerius's perfect aristocratic nose exploded in a shower of blood, cartilage, and broken teeth that stained his own golden armor. The "Holy Son" was sent flying backward, landing heavily on the stone.
Valerius began to bawl, the pitiful wailing of a spoiled child, crawling backward on his elbows to get away from the monster.
Kael walked slowly toward him and, with an effortless stomp, sank his fire-wreathed boot directly onto the chest piece of the golden armor, denting it and crushing Valerius's ribs. The boy howled. Kael didn't finish the job quickly. He raised his heavy Magma Fang and, with surgical precision, drove the incandescent blade right through Valerius's right knee, pinning him to the stone floor.
The atomic heat of the sword melted armor, bone, and flesh, instantly cauterizing the immense wound to ensure Valerius wouldn't bleed to death too quickly from shock. The smell of roasted human flesh filled the air.
"Scream," Kael ordered, slowly twisting the sword's hilt inside the melted joint. "Scream louder. I want the damn ghosts of your ancestors to hear you beg while I watch the rest of your dogs die."
While Kael systematically tortured the future of the family, the rest of hell had simultaneously broken loose across the Emerald Valley.
The fifteen thousand Valois soldiers, frantically trying to regain their sanity in the face of the meteor shower, formed ranks of pikes and shields.
"Hold formation! There are only twenty-one of them!" the commanders shouted, sweating cold. "We outnumber them a thousand to one! Kill them!"
It was the worst miscalculation in the military history of the continent. The Sequences of the Second and Third Wave (Specialists 11 through 21) fell upon the regular battalions not as a rival army, but as a biblical plague.
On the eastern flank, a desperate group of three Stage 1 Saints—minor Elders of the Valois family, dressed in green robes embroidered with gold—led a suicide charge.
"For the Patriarch! Protect the family's honor!" they roared, summoning avatars of wind and earth Qi.
In front of them, the dust cleared to reveal three shadows standing in their way: Nylas (The Event Horizon), Bren (The Seismic Behemoth), and Tamsin (The Jade Widow).
"You're our quota," Bren said, slamming his gigantic gauntlets together, smiling fiercely.
Nylas didn't even draw a weapon. He crossed his arms and activated the heavy Shackles of the Horizon wrapped around his torso. The Authority of the Gravity Well struck space. Instantly, the gravity within a hundred-meter radius multiplied by ten.
The three enemy Saints, who were running at supersonic speeds, smashed face-first into the ground. Their bones crunched horribly under the sudden pressure, their organs feeling like iron anvils inside their bodies.
Before they could gather Qi to counteract the gravity, Tamsin took a step forward with aristocratic elegance and unfurled her fan of black feathers. She blew softly. A colorless, lethal mist entered the panting lungs of the three fallen Elders without resistance. A smile of stupid euphoria crossed the Saints' faces as their alveoli began to dissolve into green acid from the inside.
Bren took advantage of the lethargy. He took a mountain-shaking leap, resisting Nylas's gravity through pure Behemoth strength, and landed directly on the chest of the first Elder. He raised his magma-coated fist and struck the Saint's skull.
SPLAT.
Like a ripe watermelon hit by a siege mallet. The Stage 1 Saint's Qi barriers were ignored by the seismic vibration. The teamwork was a machine of monstrous precision. Three Sequences against three Saints. The result was not an epic battle; it was a summary execution in under three seconds.
At the same time, in the west wing of the mansion, the terror was absolute, silent, and invisible.
Two hundred elite soldiers of the Valois archer guard frantically fired Qi-imbued arrows into the hallways, the trees, the shadows... into nothingness. Their hands trembled so much they could barely draw their bows.
Elara (The Frost Shadow) had unleashed her Atmospheric Infiltration. She was literally the mist clinging to the ground. She had no solid body they could aim at. She materialized only for milliseconds behind her victims.
A translucent flash of her Void bone dagger. A clean cut to a captain's Achilles tendon, who fell to his knees. An imperceptible slice to the jugular of the soldier beside him. The Valois guards wept like children, spinning in circles, watching their own comrades slump over, bleeding out in silence, their throats slit without anyone having seen a single blade, nor heard a single footstep.
"It's here! The damn thing is in the air!" a terrified archer screamed, raising his bow blindly.
Those were his last words before he inhaled sharply. Breathing in the frigid mist, Elara's black ice crystals expanded in his own lungs. The soldier coughed up a cloud of frozen blood and fell flat on his back, dead from internal freezing in broad daylight.
The sight of his millennial empire being slaughtered like cattle was too much.
Above, on the remains of the shattered marble balcony, Alaric Valois could take no more. Arrogance was replaced by homicidal rage. Seeing his "Holy Son" crushed and screaming under the boot of a savage, and his invincible legions turned into fertilizer, fractured his mind.
"ENOUGH!!!"
The Patriarch's roar shook the Emerald Valley. Alaric Valois (Stage 5 Saint) erupted. His immense emerald green aura exploded outward, creating a mid-level energy storm that sent marble columns and nearby corpses flying through the air.
The difference between a Stage 1 and a Stage 5 in the Saint Realm was abyssal, a conceptual chasm that separated initiates from true warlords.
Alaric dove from the upper terrace, ignoring the Specialists, heading straight for the center of the courtyard, where Kael was trampling his bloody son.
"DIE ALREADY, YOU MUD MONSTERS!" Alaric bellowed.
As he plummeted, he channeled all the hatred and power of his bloodline into his right hand, launching a colossal Giant Jade Palm. A handprint of solid energy, the size of a house, descended from the sky. The sheer air pressure pushing the technique downward was suffocating. It was the undeniable power of a Patriarch who ruled an entire region, a force capable of flattening a hill.
Kael was at the epicenter. His dragon instincts warned him, but he was completely focused on ripping out Valerius's collarbone.
"Kael, up!" cried Violeta's crystalline voice.
Violeta and Eris, who had been massacring Alaric's soldier guards on the steps, threw themselves into the trajectory of the colossal Jade Palm, placing themselves between the sky and Kael. They knew perfectly well that the level difference was mathematical suicide. They were Semi-Saints bordering on Stage 1. Alaric was a consolidated Stage 5. But blood loyalty superseded logic.
"Vio, raise the mirror!" Eris roared, her mismatched eyes burning with the fury of Ruin.
Violeta didn't hesitate. She gripped her thin Rapier of Eternal Cold with both hands and drove it violently into the stone floor. Her entire body paled, the Winter Void blood flowing to the max.
"Dimensional Fracture Mirror!"
The air in front of the two sisters cracked as if the fabric of reality were freezing over. An immense sheet of pale blue ice, with no defined physical thickness, manifested floating in the air. The edges of the mirror emitted violent sparks of violet static electricity, indicating that the ice wasn't frozen water, but compressed space.
Alaric's gigantic Jade Palm smashed into the Fracture Mirror.
The impact was deafening. Violeta's defensive technique tried to do its job: the energies of Alaric's attack began to slip into the spatial micro-fissures contained within the crystal, attempting to swallow the green Qi and redirect it to another dimension.
But the abyss in power was absolute. Stage 5 was simply too much raw energy mass for a Stage 1 crystal vessel.
The Fracture Mirror vibrated with a high-pitched shriek and, a fraction of a second later, shattered into a million shards of harmless void. The inertia and residual force of the Jade Palm continued its descent, striking Violeta's aura barrier directly.
"Ahhh!" Violeta let out a choked gasp. The shockwave hit her square in the chest. She spat a mouthful of red blood mixed with frost, thrown three meters backward. The soles of her boots left two deep grooves in the stone as she tried to stay on her feet, finally dropping to one knee, trembling. The level barrier was a concrete wall they had just crashed into.
"Sister!" Eris bellowed. Seeing Violeta bleed eliminated any trace of sanity in the young woman's mind.
Eris used the broken wall as a springboard and leapt toward Alaric, who had just landed in the courtyard, cracking the stone. Her heterochromatic eyes radiated a blind, lethal euphoria. Her massive, heavy Cataclysm Spear ignited with a furious tornado of black and white flames, fueled by her Veins of Catastrophe.
"Get away from her, you old bastard!"
Eris brought the weight of the spear down directly toward the Patriarch's head with a force capable of demolishing a city wall.
Alaric Valois didn't even bother to draw his sword to stop a Stage 1 girl. With absolute contempt, he raised his bare hand, thickly coated in a gauntlet of glowing emerald green Qi, and stopped the heavy blade of the halberd with his open palm.
BOOOM!
The collision generated a massive explosion of black Ruin fire that engulfed Alaric. The flames quickly consumed the golden silk sleeve of his robe and scorched the skin of his forearm, but the kinetic force of the blow failed to move the Patriarch a single millimeter from his position. Alaric looked through the smoke and black fire straight into Eris's enraged eyes with a sneer of superiority.
"A Stage 1 Semi-Saint brat thinks she can even push me back?" Alaric spat, his voice laced with venom. "Your fire technique is strange and fast, trash, but your cultivation base is pathetic. Know your place."
Alaric didn't use a complex technique. He simply twisted his wrist, grabbing the shaft of Eris's black spear, and infused his entire arm with Stage 5 Qi. He delivered a brutal, sharp backhand with the back of his free hand directly against the girl's side.
The impact connected like a siege ram against Eris's chest.
CRACK.
The sickening, crisp sound of multiple ribs breaking echoed above the roar of the flames. Eris let go of the weapon and was sent flying through the air like a ragdoll with its strings cut. She flew fifteen meters across the courtyard until she crashed brutally against the base of an immense marble statue of the Valois ancestors. The statue broke into two enormous pieces that fell beside her.
"Ghhh...!" Eris rolled on the dust-covered floor. She gritted her teeth, trying to use her spear as a crutch to stand, but her legs gave out and she fell flat on her face, vomiting a thick amount of dark blood onto the marble ruins. The pain was immense, but her Veins of Catastrophe were already burning, converting that very agony into stored fury to heal herself. Still, the brute force had momentarily immobilized her.
Violeta, paler than usual, her chin stained with her own frozen blood, stood up with a superhuman effort. Limping, she positioned herself directly in front of her fallen sister. She gripped her fragile crystal Rapier with both hands, pointing the trembling blade at the approaching green colossus.
They were two Semi-Saints at the door of Stage 1. He was a hardened monster at Stage 5. Mathematically, they had no chance.
Alaric walked slowly toward them, the emerald Qi rippling around him like a vengeful storm, his eyes filled with a hatred that sought to erase the existence of the two girls.
Alaric raised his hand, his palm glowing with enough energy to vaporize them.
"Disappear from the world, you little shits."
But Violeta did not back down. She didn't shed a single tear. There was no terror in her bright blue eye or her dark violet eye. Eris, leaning against the base of the shattered statue behind her, wiped the blood from her lips and looked up at the Valois Patriarch.
The attitude of the Morningstar sisters was something Alaric's mortal logic could not process. The two assassins stared at him fixedly with absolutely cold eyes, devoid of the fear of death that Alaric expected to savor. There was no crying, no pleas for mercy, not even the heroic resignation of warriors accepting an honorable death.
What lay in Violeta and Eris's eyes was a blind, arrogant, and monstrous faith. An absolute biological certainty.
They knew, with every atom of their existence, that they were not going to die. Not while He breathed. Not while the shadow of the citadel floated above them. The Dragon King was watching, and the Dragon King did not allow trash to touch what was his.
Alaric, confused and infuriated by the lack of fear in his prey, lowered his hand to execute the final blow.
But the Jade Palm never descended.
Because the very core of the back mountain of the Emerald Valley, the family's forbidden cemetery, tore open from the bowels of the earth.
Three gigantic ancestral tombs, built into the bedrock and sealed with chains of celestial iron, exploded simultaneously. The shockwave didn't just kick up dust; it kicked up a thick, putrid smell of magical formaldehyde, of flesh embalmed for centuries, and the millennial rot of those who had refused to enter the cycle of reincarnation.
The pressure leaking from the shattered mausoleums wasn't Alaric's vital green, nor the gold or crimson of the Morningstars. It was a dark, diseased, and rotting purple aura. A spiritual gravitational pressure so monstrous that Alaric Valois himself halted his attack and dropped to his knees in the courtyard, sweating cold, feeling the air become unbreathable.
"INSOLENT FOOLS!" An ancient roar, echoing as if from the bottom of a lead coffin, shook the foundations of the valley.
From the thick mortuary dust, three skeletal silhouettes, wrapped in frayed burial robes, slowly rose into the darkened sky.
The Morningstar System flashed with crimson warning letters in everyone's minds.
[SYSTEM ANALYSIS: CALAMITY LEVEL THREAT DETECTED.]
[Great Valois Ancestor:] Stage 9 Saint (Apex / Tissue Decay).
[Second Valois Ancestor:] Stage 8 Saint.
[Third Valois Ancestor:] Stage 8 Saint.
The Great Ancestor, a living mummy, a husk of bones covered by skin dry as ancient parchment, floated at the vanguard. He was surrounded by a swarm of flies created from condensed purple energy. His eyes, two pools of cadaverous green light, looked down to evaluate his own valley.
He saw his great-great-grandson, Valerius, crushed and humiliated with melted knees. He saw the marble mansions he himself had ordered built turned to rubble. He saw his invincible army massacred by a handful of youths in an orgy of blood.
"Disgusting half-breeds," the Great Ancestor hissed. His voice was dry, devoid of moisture, sounding exactly like coarse sandpaper rubbing against pumice stone. "You have come to sully my lands and spilled my own blood."
The old monster raised a single bony, fleshless finger, pointing directly to where Kael, Violeta, and Eris stood in the shattered courtyard.
The sky beneath the citadel darkened even more. The storm clouds and ambient Qi of the valley swirled violently, obeying the will of a Stage 9. In a second, the dead energy solidified to form a gigantic skeletal claw of purple energy, nearly a kilometer wide, which overshadowed the entire courtyard.
"I will strip your skin in millimeter strips and squeeze the marrow from your bones to rebuild my home," the rotten deity decreed.
The immense purple claw began to descend like a mortuary asteroid.
Kael, who was still standing on Valerius's chest, found he couldn't move. The sheer passive pressure of an Apex Stage 9 Saint pinned the Semi-Saints' feet to the ground as if gravity had multiplied by a hundred. Violeta, still standing protectively over Eris, kept her chin high, gripping the handle of her crystal rapier. They weren't going to run. They weren't going to beg.
The immense claw of death was a mere fifty meters from crushing them, ready to wipe the central courtyard and everyone in it off the map.
The putrid, purple shadow covered the girls' faces.
And then... the end of the world stopped.
No. It didn't stop. It was annulled from reality.
A single black line. A thin dark thread, thin as a human hair but unfathomable as the abyss between stars, crossed the sky of the courtyard from east to west.
Ziiiiiing. The sound was a cutting whisper, a high-pitched hum that canceled out all other noises in the universe.
The immense, majestic, and unstoppable kilometer-wide claw of purple energy stopped dead. An instant later, the energy structure slid cleanly, separating into two perfect halves. The bottom half dissolved instantly, turning into a shower of harmless light that fell like ash onto the faces of the combatants. The Great Valois Ancestor choked back a scream, recoiling in the air as the backlash from his own shattered technique burned his rotten meridians.
Silence once again dominated the valley. It was a thick silence, laden with a new and absolute terror. Everyone, from Patriarch Alaric to the surviving soldiers to the Morningstar Sequences themselves, looked up at the sky.
From the bow of the monumental Obsidian Citadel, a solitary figure descended.
He did not fall at terminal velocity like a meteor. He did not fly propelled by wings of Qi or wind tricks. He simply... walked.
Every step his boot took on nothingness created an expansive black ripple in the atmosphere, as if he were descending a majestic, solid staircase forged entirely from the fabric of the Void. Samael had decided to step onto the board.
Samael Morningstar was not wearing the heavy battle armor that everyone feared, nor the resplendent Crown of the Eternal Dawn. He didn't need defensive gadgets to deal with exhumed garbage. He wore only his immense black robe, whose threads of dark gold seemed alive, devouring the sunlight around him.
In his right hand, casually dragging the tip through nothingness, he held the colossal Odachi of the Voracious Eclipse, its black blade vibrating with a passive lethality.
His face was a mask of the coldest, most perfect indifference. Two black horns, curved and dominant, had sprouted from his temples. And his eyes... his eyes were two violet supernovae in constant collapse, with rings of deep crimson slowly spinning around pupils that processed the end of space and the destiny of everyone who looked at him.
Samael landed softly, without kicking up a single speck of dust, stepping between his wounded heirs and the three monsters floating in the sky.
He did not look at the Valois. First, he turned his face to the left. He looked at Eris, who was lying in the ruins of the statue, spitting blood, but grinning like a lunatic at the sight of him. He looked at Violeta, who remained standing, trembling from cellular exhaustion and with lips stained with red frost.
Samael's violet eyes darkened a thousand times over.
"Rest," he told them softly, his voice wrapped in such extreme control that it was more terrifying than a scream of rage. "The training is over."
Samael turned slowly toward the three skeletal Elders floating above him. His posture was relaxed, the Odachi hanging at the side of his leg.
The instant his eyes locked onto the Great Ancestor, Samael Morningstar's aura exploded.
It wasn't a bright, noisy explosion. It was a pillar of absolute primordial darkness that shot up from the ground, pierced the sky of the Emerald Valley, and punctured the highest clouds of the continent. He was no longer a simple Stage 6 Saint. With his biological transformation and the Law of the Void and Blood simultaneously ignited, Samael's oppressive pressure rivaled, and possibly surpassed, that of a Great Saint at their apex. All of gravity seemed to kneel.
Samael slowly raised the long, dark blade of his Odachi, pointing the tip directly at the mummified throat of the Great Ancestor. A cruel, lethal smile spread across his face, revealing the fangs of a pure predator.
"You have made the final mistake of your damned, prolonged existences, you decrepit old fools," Samael hissed. His voice wasn't loud, but it made the foundations of the Valois back mountain vibrate, causing rockslides. "You crawled out of your shitty graves just to make what is mine bleed."
The Great Valois Ancestor frowned. The energy flies around him fluttered erratically, affected by the spatial anomaly. An atavistic fear, a prehistoric instinct he had forgotten a thousand years ago, resurfaced deep within his desiccated chest.
"Who are you, blasphemer?" the old man asked, trying to maintain superiority, but his voice trembled. "Your blood... you smell of ancient death. Of an empire that should not exist."
"I am the gardener," Samael replied, his smile widening. "I have come to pull the weeds."
And in a millisecond, Samael Morningstar disappeared from physical perception.
The System processed the execution order in fractions of a second.
[Spatial Technique Activated: Bridge Between Dimensions (Coordinate Collapse).]
[Grade: Law of Absolute Space (Critical Offensive).]
Samael didn't leap forward. He didn't fly at supersonic speeds to close the hundred-meter distance separating him from the three monsters in the air. That was for beings bound by physics.
Samael folded the dimension. He spliced the coordinates of his current position directly with the internal coordinates occupied by the Third Ancestor (Stage 8 Saint) floating to the right of the mummified patriarch.
Space itself cracked.
A tear in the air of galactic violet and platinum light erupted directly inside the torso of the Third Ancestor. By forcing the entry of his own mass through a space already occupied by solid matter, the old Valois' anatomy was shredded at the atomic level to make room for the Dragon King.
Samael materialized inside the Elder's physical space. His voice echoed right next to the Third Ancestor's parched ear, as intimate as a lover's kiss.
"I am your fucking funeral."
SLASH!
There was no time to conjure defensive barriers. There was no time to scream. The immense Odachi of the Voracious Eclipse, wrapped in pure Spatial Slash energy and Flame of Purgatory, moved in a perfect, undetectable horizontal arc.
The dark blade passed through the thick passive barrier of Stage 8 Qi, cut through the millennial defensive artifacts hanging from the elder's neck, and cleanly sliced his mummified torso.
The Third Ancestor was cleaved into two perfect halves.
The instant the two body parts separated, the Primordial Void coating the blade activated. A dense darkness enveloped the scattered remains, devouring the Ancestor's immortal soul before it could attempt to escape or initiate an emergency reincarnation rite. The body, history, and essence of the Third Valois Ancestor were eradicated from the universe's records in the blink of an eye, leaving only a trail of black ash floating on the breeze.
Samael, floating calmly in the air where a Stage 8 human god had existed a second ago, gently shook the Odachi with a flick of his wrist, cleaning the nonexistent blood and ash from the blade.
He slowly turned his head and looked at the two remaining immense and historic Ancestors, whose eyes were wide with the shock of seeing their brother conceptually decapitated in under a second.
Samael tilted his head, his smile intact.
"Two left. Come and get me... before I decide to get bored and sink this entire valley into the earth's core."