Author's Note:
Hi everyone! Your beloved (and slightly MIA) author, Void_Scribe, speaking here.
Let's take a brief pause before entering the climax of Leng Bi's domain. I am perfectly aware that it's been about two days since I promised that brutal combo of 5 or 6 chapters, and I'm coming to you with my heart in my hand. Honestly, real life has kept me quite busy. My only moment of absolute peace with myself, where I can be alone and let my imagination flow, is at night. That's when I sit down to write this story which, I swear to you, has all my sweat, tears, and a couple of cups of coffee poured into it.
Mind you, don't think this is to make excuses or justify myself, not at all! If I promised those chapters, I intend to deliver them. Let's see how long my body holds out in this battle against exhaustion. Sometimes, sleep hits me with a sneak attack and overcomes me halfway through, meaning I don't manage to finish the chapters. And the times I do finish them in the early hours of the morning, I don't publish them immediately because the time difference is crazy; it's like an 8-hour difference or more depending on where you're reading from. That's why I prefer to upload them at a time that is nighttime in most of your countries.
Now, let's talk about the behind-the-scenes gossip regarding the last chapter. I already had part 2 and the finale of the fight against Leng Bi ready... and you have no idea the frustration I felt when I realized that, in the final draft, I forgot to add two of the boys' characters who were supposed to be fighting! 🤦♂️ I accidentally applied the forbidden technique of "existential erasure" on them.
So I had to rewrite the entire ending and expand it to give them their scenes and the spotlight they deserve. Remember that in these last few chapters I'm making an effort to include everyone; I don't like them having little screen time. The problem is... there are 45 Sequences! Yes, I admit I went overboard with the number of characters, but what can I do, I love them all hahaha. (GOD, why do I always get sidetracked? Focus, Void, focus!)
Anyway, getting back to the point: I had to rewrite the entire ending. Furthermore, I confess that this second part of the chapter wasn't even originally planned (just like Rurik's). I only wanted to expand the fights, but in the end with Leng Bi I got so excited that I had to remake her entire arsenal, skills, and her domain from scratch. Nothing of what you just read was in the original plan. And I'll throw you a little spoiler: I might have to do exactly the same thing in the next fight... because there are like 11 more Sequences coming into the ring!
So, truly, forgive this author for so much delay. I try to get the chapters done on time, but my body always falls defeated before the god of sleep.
I sincerely hope you enjoy Chapter 197 Part 2 and the others I'll be uploading. Thank you so much for being there and for your incredible patience!
(And remember, if you want to support this sleep-deprived author to recover his Qi points and buy more coffee, you can drop by my Ko-fi☕. And don't forget to add the book to your library and leave your votes if you're enjoying the massacre!)
CHAPTER 197: The Theater of the Bloody Twilight (Part 2)
Ten... a hundred... thousands of identical replicas of Leng Bi appeared surrounding the youths in a circular formation that seemed to stretch into infinity. In a perfect, spine-chilling synchrony, thousands of copies tilted their heads slightly to the side. On their pale faces, they wore the same sadistic, deranged smile drenched in promises of carnage. In their hands, they wielded the dark daggers dripping a milky poison; a toxin that hissed and smoked with a toxic vapor upon touching the surface of the black water beneath their feet.
The deafening, high-pitched, metallic sound of thousands of blades scraping and scratching the dead wind in unison filled the spectral coliseum. It was the prelude to a mass execution.
In this cursed theater, objective truth no longer existed. The seven Morningstar Sequences were trapped in the heart of a mental and physical labyrinth of tangible illusions, where every projected shadow was a potential assassin, and where every blink, every wrong breath, or millimeter of hesitation would be punished with an agonizing and suffocating death.
"Well... are you ready to die?" the Head of Intelligence's voice resonated throughout the domain. It didn't come from a single direction; it emanated from the water, from the starry sky, and from the throats of thousands of copies simultaneously, creating a polyphonic echo that dizzied the senses.
In the center of the nightmare, the seven young invaders put their backs together. There was no terror on their faces, but the arrogance had vanished. Their expressions became stoic, hard as diamond. They knew this was the breaking point. It was all or nothing. It was the final battle for survival in the Igneous Fault.
Eliam, whose mercury eyes feverishly scanned the density variations in the blackness surrounding them, took up the mantle of leader. His mind connected to the Soul Nexus, projecting his will with an icy urgency.
"Listen closely, holding back is over. We're going all out," ordered Eliam telepathically. "Korg, Goran, you are the wall. You're in charge of absolute defense. Not a single needle gets past your perimeter."
Korg slammed his immense red-hot gauntlets together, letting out a guttural laugh that made the air around him boil. Goran planted his immense shield with a tectonic crash.
"That's our damn job, Eliam. Hahahaha. Let these fake bitches come."
"Good," continued Eliam. "Ignis, Joren, and Aylin, I want you to use massive area-of-effect attacks. We need to saturate the field and eliminate all these illusions. Even if she's a Grand Saint, it is physically and spiritually impossible for her to maintain thousands of clones with real mass at the same time. But be careful, one of them will have to be the original. Rowan, you stay with me. We will cover the group's blind spots and back in case she tries another intangibility surprise attack again. NOW!"
The center of the encirclement erupted in light and power.
Korg was the first to react. He brought his hands to his chest, and the valves on his gauntlets creaked. He activated his [Iron Steam Shield]. The giant exhaled a cyclonic cloud of ultra-high-temperature metallic steam. This metallic gray mist not only acted as a blinding veil for the approaching clones, but it possessed an overwhelming physical density, capable of deflecting projectiles and burning the lungs of anyone who tried to pass through it.
Beside him, Goran unleashed his bloodline's maximum capacity. He buried the base of his enormous blazon into the invisible slabs of the domain. [The Wall of the Black Tortoise]. A colossal dome of bronze energy, adorned with ancestral ice runes, rose up to cover the seven. It was an immovable defense, anchored to the very laws of gravity, designed to drain the kinetic energy of attacks into the veins of the earth.
To seal the perfect bunker, Eliam raised his Heart of Mercury and superimposed his own barrier. [Event Horizon: The Mantle of the Dead Sea]. The purplish-black orb dissolved into billions of floating drops that formed a rotating orbital shield around Goran's dome. Inside this zone, kinetic energy simply died. Any attack, arrow, spell, or steel blade that touched the liquid surface would lose its motion vector, remaining tragically "stuck" to the mercury.
Leng Bi, floating invisibly high in her own nightmare sky, observed the impregnable fortress the children had raised. A smile of pure disdain curved her bloodstained lips. She slowly opened and closed her fist, feeling the immense flow of dark Qi feeding her veins.
"Stupid, arrogant pups..." she muttered to the inert wind. "Now, with my domain completely open, my speed, my stealth, and my lethality have increased by three hundred percent. You have no idea what hell you just stepped into."
The most terrifying effect of the Theater of the Bloody Twilight was not the cloning; it was the inversion of reality. The reflection of the black water distorted the laws of physics. Any real attack that Leng Bi received would become an illusion, granting her perfect evasion. Conversely, any illusion of an attack she projected would transform into a physical, real, and inevitable impact if the enemy decided to ignore it. It was a paradox designed to make the victim completely paranoid: defending yourself against the fake exhausted and killed you; failing to defend against the fake pierced your heart.
Leng Bi raised her hand toward the crimson moon.
"Attack and cut the flesh from their bones!"
Just as the Sequences braced for the impending clash, a macabre detail left them stunned. The true Leng Bi, hidden in the shadows, whispered a runic chant. Suddenly, the thousands of copies surrounding them raised their hands, and in each of them materialized an exact replica of her deadly daggers.
It was the Domain Synergy: [Stigmatic Multiplication]. In this state of absolute resonance, even if the clones were illusory, the poison of the White Calamity imprinted on the steel became lethally real. If a Morningstar kid ignored a clone's attack assuming it was a simple visual trick, the conceptual poison would penetrate their body anyway, mercilessly calcifying their insides.
Thousands of shadows shot forward.
The siege was apocalyptic. Clones attacked from the ground, from the sky, emerging from the black water and materializing centimeters from the shields. They crashed against the dome with the fury of a meteor shower.
Clang! Ssssss! Boom!
Eliam's outer mercury barrier caught hundreds of daggers and illusory bodies, absorbing them into the liquid mass. Korg's Steam Shield melted dozens of clones trying to filter through, and Goran's Wall of the Black Tortoise stoically resisted the impacts that managed to pierce the liquid defense. But the defenses began to yield. The density of the impacts was unreal. The worst part was that when the fake daggers struck the bronze and the mercury, they injected the calcifying toxin into the very structure of the magic, turning the shields as brittle as old stone.
"ATTACK NOW! CLEAR THE FIELD!" roared Eliam, feeling his link with the mercury grow heavy and toxic.
Ignis, with his hair burning in real solar flames, did not wait.
"HAHAHAHAHA! Fine, take this, scum! Stop hiding, you old hag!"
The Volcanic Yang Dragon channeled his maximum caloric compression. [White Sun Singularity]. Instead of chaotic bursts, dozens of compressed fire spheres the size of simple marbles emerged from his hands. The spheres traveled in absolute silence through the shield, impacting against the clone squads. The detonation was not expansive; it was implosive. Drawing the air, the black water, and the fake bodies toward the center in a vortex of gravitational suction, before disintegrating the matter into pure atomic ashes. Entire rows of the illusory horde were wiped off the map.
Aylin, positioned on the other side of the formation, was not left behind. Knowing fire would not be enough, she channeled the Qi of the earth. She sank the base of her immense Thorn of the World into the black water mirror and unleashed her authority. Dozens of tectonic spears of amber rock and massive emerald roots erupted from the ground, impaling and shattering the approaching clones. The earth thrusts exploded into storms of geological fragments, sweeping away the illusions like a hurricane destroying a house of cards.
Joren, moving with the lethal grace of a phantom in the center of the formation, delivered the coup de grâce. He deployed his [Domain of the Silent Void], creating a zone of "Acoustic Death" in a three-hundred-meter radius that suppressed the unbearable echo of the thousands of daggers. At the same time, he launched incessant barrages of his [Azure Dawn Slash]. Lines of sky-blue light, as thin as hair but capable of separating air at zero pressure, crossed the battlefield, slicing the clones in half and sucking their illusory energy into the void.
The infernal encirclement held for several minutes. It was a spectacular meat and Qi grinder. The three attackers swept the waves of enemies while the three defenders bore the pressure of a collapsing sky.
But the kids, sweating and panting, knew they were playing the enemy's game. Their Dantians were emptying at an alarming rate, while Leng Bi's energy seemed to feed off the domain itself.
"Eliam, we have to do something different," shouted Rowan, his cyclone wings spinning furiously around him, finding no real target. "We won't be able to hold out if we keep wearing ourselves down like this for much longer! How do we stop the source of this damned illusion?!"
"I know... I'm tracking the core..." replied Eliam through the Nexus, his liquid eyes bloodshot.
But before he could formulate an offensive strategy, the true Leng Bi decided she had been patient enough.
Activating the depth of her Law of Assassination: "The Edge of Absolute Silence," Leng Bi eliminated the causality of her own existence. She erased sound, scent, temperature, and, most terrifyingly of all, she erased the "intent to kill." The universe itself stopped registering her as a danger.
Amidst the chaos of solar explosions, rock spears, and void slashes, no one noticed her infiltration. No one knew when she crossed the Mercury Wall. When the Sequences finally reacted to the microscopic change in air pressure, she was already inside the dome, breaking the most secure guard of all.
Knowing perfectly well that Eliam was the defensive pillar and the strategist of this phase, Leng Bi chose him as the sacrificial lamb.
She magically appeared centimeters from his face. Her crimson eyes shining with a promise of eternal torment.
"Look at me," Leng Bi whispered, her voice vibrating directly in the young man's mind.
Eliam made the most basic and lethal human mistake: he instinctively turned his gaze toward the voice. Upon making direct eye contact, Leng Bi unleashed her ultimate torture skill: [Sentence of the Fragmented Mind].
In a millionth of a second, the outside world disappeared for Eliam. He was thrown into the abyss of a hyper-realistic illusion. In his mind, he didn't see shadows or monsters; he saw the Domain shatter and the Iron Blood Vanguard invade his clan's ship. He saw his brothers-in-arms, Ignis, Goran, Rowan, being dismembered and flayed alive before his eyes. He saw Lilith and Sienna fall under a rain of poisonous daggers. And at the climax of the mental torture, he saw Patriarch Samael, the deity they all revered, chained, tortured, and decapitated thousands of times in a cycle of perpetual agony.
Terror, helplessness, and despair collapsed the young man's psyche. He suffered a Qi Deviation in milliseconds. His energy flow violently blocked itself. In the real world, Eliam's body petrified, his eyes rolling back, devoid of all defense, with his arms dropping to his sides.
The Mantle of Mercury protecting the group lost its support and dissolved into useless puddles on the ground.
Taking advantage of the absolute vulnerability, Leng Bi chuckled quietly and attacked. She executed the [Scorching Void Strike].
Her Twin Fangs sank into Eliam's torso. One. Two. Six times. The daggers not only pierced the pale flesh, but injected liters of the Ash Toxin directly into his main arteries. The boy's body convulsed, spitting a torrent of lumpy, black blood. The calcification of his lungs began instantly, but his mind, trapped in the illusion, couldn't even register the physical pain to defend himself.
Rowan, who was assigned as his protective shadow, witnessed the scene and his heart seemed to stop.
"ELIAAAAM!" roared Rowan, his voice breaking with panic.
The youth of wind crystal violently interposed himself. He activated his supreme emergency defense: [Dance of the Absolute Void: Shield of Dead Calm]. His satellite chakrams, synchronized with his Cyclone blood, spun at quantum speed, creating a globe of zero-friction compressed air.
Leng Bi tried to deliver the coup de grâce to decapitate the strategist, but when her daggers touched Rowan's emerald sphere, the kinetic energy simply "slipped." Her blades were sucked into the orbit of the chakrams and violently redirected toward the ground in a perfect curve, leaving a deep furrow in the black water. Rowan remained in the "eye of the hurricane," untouchable, while the outside world was deflected.
Despite the perfect shield, the assassin only let out a mocking laugh. Using the properties of her reality-inversion domain, she let the illusory body that Rowan blocked fade away, dodging any retaliation. Her job was already done; the formation's leader was dying.
Lilith and Sienna, watching the horrifying development from their untouchable position in the black firmament of the canyon, exchanged glances of icy evaluation.
"We knew this fight would be hell for them," Lilith murmured, twirling a strand of her hair. "Not only does she outclass them by a full cultivation realm, but the illusion and assassination element is the natural weakness of a frontal assault group. If they had Darius, the lord of nightmares, or Lyra with her mind control here, this ridiculous illusion would have collapsed hours ago. But everyone down there is a pure attacker or a physical defender."
Sienna nodded, her sharp smile widening.
"It's a test of adaptability. Unless they manage to bypass the traps of that bitch's mind and strike her core, they'll never win. Let them bleed a little more; the lessons that hurt are the only ones you don't forget."
Back in the massacre, Rowan didn't waste a millisecond. He grabbed Eliam by the collar of his armor, taking advantage of the boy's paralysis, and dragged him desperately backward, tossing him behind the enormous back and shield of Goran and Korg, who closed ranks with a roar to cover the breach.
Rowan knelt beside his fallen brother, shaking him violently. He delivered two slaps charged with wind Qi to his face.
"Wake up! Damn it, Eliam, snap out of it!"
The physical shock finally pierced the mental prison. Eliam woke from the nightmare with a heart-wrenching shriek that chilled his companions' blood.
"NOOOOOOOOO!"
He panted like a dying animal, bathed in cold sweat, his bulging eyes desperately searching the void. Upon snapping back to reality, the accumulated physical pain hit him full force. He doubled over, coughing up clots of solid blood and clumps of hardened ash from the six piercing wounds in his torso.
"Guys... are you okay?" Eliam babbled, his mind still trying to reconcile the images of his dismembered friends with the sweaty figures protecting him.
"What the hell are you talking about?" growled Rowan, never taking his eyes off the perimeter. "It's only been a few miserable minutes since you went into that trance."
Eliam blinked, processing reality. He struggled to sit up, leaning against the rock. His heavy water dragon body agonized as it fought to slow down and expel the calcification of the toxin. He didn't have Ignis's fire to burn it away immediately, so the process was a slow torture. Every breath felt like inhaling crushed glass.
He fixed his gaze in the distance, where one of the thousands of Leng Bis offered him a mocking, aristocratic salute with two fingers.
The fury that invaded Eliam was colder and deeper than mercury itself. To play with his mind like that... to force him to see his Morningstar family massacred and his Patriarch humiliated... was the unforgivable cardinal sin.
"I won't forgive her for this," Eliam hissed, his eyes shining with an abyssal bloodlust. "I'm going to flay her alive. I'll make her pay."
Despite his catastrophic injuries, his iron will refused to yield. But the tactical reality was undeniable.
"We have to do something different or we'll drown in this illusory swamp!" bellowed Joren, launching another blind slash into the darkness.
Just as despair threatened to crack their defensive formation, a new voice, calm, cold, mechanically arrogant, resonated with absolute clarity within the collective mind of the Soul Nexus.
"Breathe. Panic is for the weak. We're here now."
Ren, the inscrutable sensory strategist and supreme assassin of the Sequences, observed the battle from the very edge of the illusory crater, outside the black dome. His eyes, perpetually open and devoid of human emotion, underwent a divine mutation. A translucent nictitating membrane slid over his pupils, vibrating in perfect synchrony with the currents of the volcano.
Ren activated his [Sensory Pupils].
His vision of the world changed drastically. He stopped seeing lights, shadows, illusions, or physical bodies of flesh and bone. Ren saw atmospheric pressure. The world became an intricate map of blue and red micro-vectors. He could notice the microscopic disturbance in the air caused by the mere fluttering of a fly, or the blinking of an enemy five hundred meters away. This absolute vision annihilated any Saint-Grade stealth or illusion technique. Because it didn't matter if Leng Bi turned into phantom ash, light, shadow, or mist; it was physically impossible for real mass to move through space without displacing the atmosphere. And Ren saw that displacement.
Simultaneously, Ren's [Qi Scanning Tongue] emerged fleetingly from his lips. It was a primordial viper trait that tasted the energy particles in the stale combat environment. He tasted the air. On his mental palate, he immediately identified the specific signature, the putrid, venomous, and ashen "flavor" of the true Leng Bi's Qi, hidden among the thousands of clones of residual energy.
The chemical trail told Ren, with millimeter exactness, where the real poison was concentrated and to which precise coordinate the next physical attack would flow, a full second and a half before the assassin decided to initiate the movement.
Ren closed his physical eyes to avoid sensory overload, letting himself be guided by his soul's radar, and took over the squad's communication.
"Ignis, suppressing fire, magma sweep at your two o'clock, now. Goran, raise the shield at a forty-two-degree angle to your left, massive impact coming in 0.3 seconds. Rowan, breathe shallowly, take a step back, and launch a void slash at throat level."
Ren's telepathic voice was clinical, absolute, and devoid of hesitation. His passive skill, the [Sensory Wind Body], had turned the air within a square kilometer into a literal extension of his own nervous network. If a dust molecule collided with another eighty meters away, Ren felt it as a brush against his own cheek.
The seven Sequences in the center of hell didn't hesitate for a millisecond. They blindly obeyed the strategist's numerical coordinates.
And the effect on the battlefield was instantaneous, humiliating, and demoralizing for the Alliance's Head of Intelligence.
Suddenly, Leng Bi's theater of nightmares stopped working. Her perfect attacks, calculated from blind spots, crashed resoundingly against Goran's enormous bronze shield, which was mysteriously already positioned there, waiting for her before she even stepped out of the shadows. Her intangible daggers uselessly cut the cold air because Rowan had slid half a step back a moment prior. And worse yet, Ignis's implosive explosions detonated exactly at the empty coordinates where she planned to materialize after her ash technique, forcing her to abort attacks, swallow blood, and waste obscene amounts of Qi to avoid being incinerated.
Ren, from the outer shadows, was manipulating them. He guided his siblings like a sadistic orchestra conductor controlling puppets of mass destruction. He reduced the damage taken to zero and turned the supreme master of unpredictability into an open book.
But Ren didn't just give orders. He was the embodiment of assassination.
He activated his [Camouflage Scales]. Along his slender body, fine flat scales altered their texture and pigmentation to mimic the molecular density and refraction of the stale air. Ren achieved [Dissipation Invisibility]. It wasn't a simple optical trick; his physical presence, his heartbeat, his thermal signature, and his Qi trail were "erased" from the mortal world. When moving, his aerodynamic body didn't push the atmosphere; it flowed in perfect symbiosis with it.
Leng Bi began to feel a frigid, instinctive terror creeping up her spine. She was the pinnacle of continental espionage. She was the nightmare that lurked in the shadows. But suddenly, she felt like a fat fish trapped in a narrow pond, surrounded by the invisible nets of fishermen she couldn't see.
She launched frantic crossed slashes of her Twin Fangs at empty air, praying that the toxin would graze some hidden enemy, gripped by despair upon realizing that her absolute divine sense was failing to register her stalker.
And her despair did her no good. Ren was already standing exactly thirty centimeters behind her back.
With his predictive perception and the omniscience of the wind, Ren had already calculated what Leng Bi would do in the next three seconds. He raised his dagger, the Ethereal Gale Fang, a weapon made of nearly translucent Feather Steel that nullified air resistance and emitted not a single decibel of sound when moving.
Ren did not attack the woman in her current position. He attacked the assassin's near future.
He executed the [Blind Wind Fang: Slash of Instinct].
He launched a lethal thrust, aiming at a seemingly empty space to Leng Bi's right. It was at the exact microsecond when Leng Bi, startled by a fake fireball suggested by Ren to Ignis, felt the imminent "intent" to abruptly turn to that side to dodge.
Ren interrupted universal causality.
The Feather Steel dagger, enveloped in a Constant Void Edge, found the quickest path into the woman's flesh just as she herself lowered her rear guard to begin her evasion. It was as if Leng Bi had willingly thrown herself against the guillotine. The enemy dies without understanding why the assassin already had the weapon positioned at their jugular before the attack was even conceived.
The mystical metal cleanly tore through Leng Bi's thick protective leather tunic, the internal armor, and her pale flesh. A deep, long, and potentially lethal cut opened along her right ribs and her left arm. Boiling blood splattered like rain on the surface of the black water. If Leng Bi hadn't been living in a state of maximum paranoia, and her Grand Saint animal instinct hadn't forced her to rotate her spine a fraction of a degree in the last millisecond, Ren's silent dagger would have amputated her jugular with a clean swipe.
Leng Bi stumbled brutally forward, clutching her bleeding side, her face contorted in a mask of excruciating pain and pure disbelief. Her crimson eyes, previously cold, analytical, and brimming with superiority, were now bloodshot, blinking with the unbridled madness of a cornered animal.
The sharp pain of her pierced entrails was the final spark that detonated her fractured ego and homicidal fury.
Her! A Stage 2 Grand Saint of the Iron Blood Alliance elite! Trapped, herded, humiliated, and severely wounded in her own domain by some brats barely past puberty!
"DAMN YOU ALL! DAMN YOUR BLOODLINE!" Leng Bi howled.
The immense pressure of her aura erupted like a thermobaric bomb, shattering her own biological limits and meridians out of pure desperation. She was burning her life force. Her cultivation was temporarily forced upward, ascending toward the Mid-Stage 2. Her multiple wounds stopped bleeding instantly, cauterized by the dark energy of her madness.
"The cat and mouse game is over, you damned insects..." hissed the assassin, preparing her ultimate execution technique. "Let's see how well you dance with the weight of your own arrogance."
She activated her Active Skill: "The Echo of the Phantom Edge." This martial aberration synchronized directly with her Law of Illusion. By wielding both daggers at inhuman speeds, the steel blades distorted visual spacetime in her immediate vicinity. The enemy would never see the true trajectory of the lethal cut.
If Leng Bi launched a direct downward vertical attack toward the skull, the opponent (and their divine sense) would absolutely and unequivocally register that the attack was coming from a horizontal slash from the left. When the victim instinctively raised their shield to block the fake slash from the left, the real cut would have already amputated their arm from the true angle.
The assault fell upon the eight Sequences like a tempest of invisible threads, a guillotine that played on the edge of life and death, where perception was a death trap.
Goran, Ignis, Rowan, Joren, Korg, Eliam, Aylin, and the newly revealed Ren instinctively felt the primal danger. They tried to react, surrounding themselves with dense protective elemental Qi auras and raising their shields, but without knowing which flash was true and which was dead light.
Horror materialized in their bodies. There was no physical or magical way to defend against a lie that became truth in the last millisecond. When their brains processed that a cut was fake and decided to ignore it, the poisoned steel turned out to be real and tore their flesh. And when their sense of preservation forced them to block an attack that looked real, they blocked empty air, leaving their backs exposed to the true slash.
In a span of five seconds, each and every one of the Morningstar youths received multiple deep, bleeding cuts on their arms, shoulders, legs, and cheeks. The flawless formation was stained red. Their black tactical uniforms were torn, dripping blood onto the water. If they remained subjected to this paradoxical bombardment for another minute, they would bleed out and be calcified by the toxin from the thousands of superficial slashes.
Giving them no quarter, Leng Bi escalated the atrocity and combined her technique with a pure version of the [Spectral Echo Execution]. She summoned dozens of her densest physical clones, which began to rain down upon the youths from all zenith angles. The Sequences were forced to launch their most destructive skills against empty shadows or echoes that burst into smoke, rapidly wasting their valuable and dwindling Qi.
In the midst of this deafening and blinding chaos, the true Head of Intelligence fixed her purest, blackest, and most venomous hatred on one particular target: Ren. The invisible boy, the tactical leech who had ambushed her, wounded her, and exposed her in front of her prey.
Leng Bi concentrated all the remaining energy of her core. She combined her [Veil of Nonexistent Death] to erase any cosmic trace of her charge, along with the [Scorching Void Strike].
She dematerialized and reappeared in the absolute darkest blind spot at the back of Ren's neck, a centimeter from his cervical spine. She raised both poisoned daggers with the intent of sinking them deep into the boy's throat, injecting enough boiling ash to suffocate him, petrify his vocal cords, and liquefy his brain in three agonizing heartbeats.
But Ren didn't need to see her, smell her, or hear her. His very dragon bloodline felt the weight of a Grand Saint's immense killing intent centimeters from his neck.
Before Ren's human, conscious mind remotely processed the mechanics of the ambush, his superior biology reacted autonomously. His supreme passive skill activated: [Shadow Defense: Reflexive Reaction].
It was a movement of instinctive contortion so extreme it would tear the ligaments of a normal human. Ren utilized unconscious manipulation of the wind currents to shift his skeleton's center of mass and gravity. The tempestuous air dominating the interior of the theater of illusions was not an obstacle; it was the perfect shield and the ultimate lifeline.
The wind itself violently "pushed" Ren's body out of the lethal trajectory of Leng Bi's twin daggers. The maneuver was executed at relativistic speed that Ren's own cerebral cortex couldn't process. Pure, primal fear had become the fastest autonomous defense mechanism in the clan's arsenal.
Leng Bi's daggers crossed the void, her hands uselessly squeezing the inert air where Ren's head had been positioned a microsecond prior.
Ren rolled chaotically across the watery floor, coughing blood and feeling the multiple illusory cuts opening anew and burning on his skin from the friction of the fall.
"We can't keep fighting under her damn rules!" Ren transmitted frantically through the Soul Nexus, his mental voice sounding raspy, urgent, and exhausted from the sulfur asphyxiation. "This illusion, its paradoxical laws, and this damn domain are tearing us to pieces! Attacking the clones is tactical suicide. We have to force her to condense her physical form into a single point, neutralize her stealth, and crush the domain's core, or we'll drown in this lake of mirages!"
Just as despair and physical exhaustion began to cloud the defenders' vision, a new voice, calm, cold, and mechanically arrogant, resonated in the mental link.
"Hold on, trash. I'm here to clean up your mess."
From the absolute exterior of the impregnable dome of the Theater of the Bloody Twilight, a figure burst in with the precision of a scalpel cutting out a tumor. It was Sylas. The Sequences' lethal sniper had finished effortlessly massacring the dozens of guards in the fortress's outer perimeter ring, and was coming to the rescue of his brothers trapped in the slaughterhouse.
The definitive counterattack plan was formulated in milliseconds within the Nexus's hive mind. Those trapped inside would act as the ultimate bait; they would absorb the cuts, endure the poison, and dodge with millimeter precision to keep Leng Bi's arrogance and concentration focused on them. Meanwhile, the rescuers would shatter the structural pillars and the conceptual rules of the illusory domain from the outside in.
Sylas landed softly and silently on the shattered stone arch, on the outer edge of the dark dome. He brought his hand to his face and activated his biological-mechanical mutation. His [Wind Eagle Eyes] flashed with a cold, intense sapphire-blue glare.
"I see your puppet strings, cheap bitch," Sylas whispered to himself, a sharp smile forming.
The continuous Pre-Impact calculation of his divine eyes processed millions of variables: the densities of the fake Qi, the micro-air currents generated by each movement, and the electromagnetic fluctuations within the illusory storm. Sylas didn't aim his weapon at the elusive assassin's physical body; he aimed at the network of invisible energy nodes she used to sustain the coordinates of her infinite mirages.
His slender, lethal fingers, covered by the transparent, ultra-thin [Wind Scales], gripped the white light string of his bow. Environmental friction simply vanished from his hands, granting him Void Stability. He could hold the monstrous tension required by a High-Stage Heaven Grade bow for hours, without his tendons suffering fatigue or his heart rate altering the math of the shot.
At the same time, his bloodline dictated its authority over space with the [Void Corridor]. A microscopic, absolute tunnel of zero friction opened in a straight line from the tip of his nocked arrow to the very heart of the nightmare domain.
He raised his monumental asymmetrical bow, the Vortex of the Ethereal Horizon. The Lightning Tree wood and Winged Platinum hummed eagerly. Sylas loaded the string with a hyper-compression of emerald zephyr Qi, preparing his ultimate offensive technique: [Arrow of Inevitable Destiny: The Thread of the End].
Sylas released the string.
There was no sonic boom, no snap of the string. There was absolute silence. The emerald light arrow traveled thousands of times faster than its own sound, passing through the dark membrane of the domain unfazed. Upon penetrating the illusory barrier, the concentrated Qi arrow experienced Multidimensional Impact. Visually and mathematically, it seemed to "split" reality, fracturing into hundreds of brilliant light lines traveling simultaneously along all possible trajectories in the fabric of spacetime.
The coordinated impact was devastating and poetic. The emerald flashes systematically and simultaneously destroyed all the structural energy nodes that Leng Bi had hidden in the sky and ground to maintain her stigmatic multiplications.
The thousands of clones menacingly surrounding the Sequences began to burst one after another. They sounded like gigantic blood balloons being popped, reducing to ash dust and drastically dissipating the suffocating pressure crushing the seven wounded combatants.
In the precise instant the massive distraction vanished, Eliam saw his opportunity.
Despite his piercing wounds, the calcifying toxin fighting to petrify his veins, and the blood soaking his armor, the young man took a deep breath. His biological mutation, the [Abyssal Lungs], had been forged to extract vitality and Qi directly from the densest fluids on the planet, not pure air. For Eliam, breathing the assassin's environment of toxins and heavy miasma wasn't much different from breathing under the pressure of the Marianas Trench.
His body, already bathed in his liquid Mercury Scales, healed superficially. With a quick movement, the dark silver sealed the hemorrhages of his wounds, preventing him from bleeding out, although the internal poison remained dormant.
His [Mercury Eyes], immense spheres of liquid silver lacking pupils, feverishly scanned the waning storm. Eliam didn't waste time looking for the assassin's elusive outline; he looked for the "voids in density," the exact space where the atmospheric armor was less dense and where a physical entity inevitably had to be hiding.
He found it. Up, to his left.
"Come down to my damn level!" ordered Eliam, his distorted voice resonating and bubbling like boiling metal from the bottom of a cauldron.
The water strategist unleashed the entirety of his gravity bloodline: [Heavy Water].
The manifestation of this passive skill turned into terrain altered the world. A massive aura of Liquid Gravity expanded radially a hundred meters around him.
The air inside the illusory theater, already dense, became monumentally heavy. It was as if, suddenly, the entire fortress courtyard had been teleported and sunk under ten thousand meters of pressurized ocean water. The toxic ashes, the smoke particles, and the freely floating dust fell like anvils to the ground, crushed by the sudden cosmic weight.
Leng Bi, who was in the air, moving with the agility and stealth of an undetectable cold draft in her illusory form, suddenly felt the sky fall on her. Her limbs and her very skeleton felt loaded with tons of liquid lead. Her absurd Grand Saint speed was drastically reduced to pathetic levels. Worse yet, her Phantom Ash state, which relied on weightlessness and intangibility, began to destabilize horribly and collapse upon itself due to the massive, inescapable increase in environmental atmospheric pressure.
Feeling the annihilating weight of cosmic mass fracturing her technique, and watching in absolute horror as her invincible clones vanished beneath a rain of soundless arrows from a hidden sniper, Leng Bi began to break into a truly cold sweat.
She looked within. Her Qi reserves were in the alarmingly red. Maintaining the size of the Domain Expansion, forcing the intangibility of the ashes, and sustaining the lethal cloning of physical illusions had drained her at a suicidal rate. She knew her veins would collapse and her power would shut down in less than thirty minutes.
Gripped by genuine panic, the Head of Intelligence cast a desperate glance through the cracks in her own domain, seeking visual support from the grand central courtyard, hoping to see the imposing Captains or her invincible leader coming to her rescue.
What she saw destroyed her emotionally and psychologically, more than any physical blow.
At the bottom of the burning abyss of the Igneous Fault, Rurik, the feared Beast Tamer, permanently fused into his monstrous magma deity, was being cruelly riddled, tortured, and dismembered by nine Dragon Queens of a beauty as absolute as it was lethal. Around him, the charred corpses of the four majestic Semi-Saint grade beasts lay scattered. The entire invincible Iron Blood elite, the terror of the continent, had ceased to exist in a puddle of blood.
She was alone. She was cornered. She was going to die here, at the hands of monstrous children.
That raw thought eliminated the final barrier of her self-preservation. If she was going to fall and her legend erased, she would take at least two of these demons to the abyss with her. She ignored the suffocating, crushing gravity of Eliam through the irreversible burning of her own blood essence and longevity. She forced her muscles to the breaking point and readied her poisoned daggers to dive into a final suicidal attack, aiming for Joren and Eliam's necks.
But before she could channel and condense the power necessary for her final deadly strike, the earth beneath her feet vibrated with a furious, deep, and ancient melody.
Aylin, the docile girl of nature, unleashed her pent-up wrath.
Aylin didn't run, she didn't jump, and she didn't walk; she sprouted and blossomed from the ground itself. Her slender limbs and fragile spine were now fully and heavily armored by Iron Wood Scales, thick veins of vibrant, ancient wood boasting the incomprehensible hardness of a stellar meteorite. Her Amber Eyes, now with no trace of white sclera, shone like two jade beacons. She had felt Leng Bi's subtle, desperate kinetic vibrations accumulating Qi since the first microsecond.
Aylin didn't hesitate. With both hands and a heart-wrenching scream, she drove the heavy amber tip of her immense spear, the Thorn of the World, straight into the hard volcanic stone beneath the mirror of the domain's fake ocean.
"[ARBOREAL PULSE DOMAIN! WANDERING YGGDRASIL!]" Aylin bellowed, unleashing her entire spiritual reserve, fusing her being with the planet.
It wasn't a simple offensive technique or a floral spell. In that instant, Aylin ceased to be an individual human entity and became the gigantic neural center of a primordial ecosystem, alive, wrathful, and deeply predatory.
In an expansive radius of five hundred square meters, the dense, suffocating air of the enemy domain became violently saturated with a storm of hyper-luminescent emerald pollen emitting a high-pitched hum. This beautiful pollen didn't bring life, spores, or healing; it brought microscopic laceration. It was the manifestation of the Devouring Wind. Each tiny luminous particle was, in reality, a rotating emerald micro-wind blade that, upon being breathed in or grazed by the enemy, would begin to eviscerate and lacerate their internal organs and meridians from the inside out.
Millions of these micro-wind blades crashed like a typhoon against the oppressive boundaries of Leng Bi's Theater of the Bloody Twilight. The assassin's domain—already critically destabilized by the chronic exhaustion of its creator and collapsed by the anomalous gravitational pressure of Eliam's Heavy Water—simply could not resist the expansion force of the invading nature. The vault of black sky and crimson moon cracked like a rotten egg.
Aylin, with her arms outstretched and her eyes glowing with a green fire, controlled the massive updrafts generated by her imposing, monstrous Wind Root Filaments emerging from underground. With a twist of her wrists, she conjured an apocalyptic-category hyper-tornado, a monstrous whirlpool of slicing air and leaves spinning like serrated saws, and closed it exactly on the spatial coordinates where Eliam had detected the density void where the assassin hid.
The emerald tornado engulfed Leng Bi and acted as an atmospheric meat grinder.
Trapped in the epicenter of the storm, the extreme friction of the hurricane winds and the deadly slicing pollen violently, sadistically, and inevitably stripped her of her Phantom Ash intangibility. Her supreme evasion technique was torn to shreds. She was forced to condense back into flesh and bone, compelled to take her vulnerable physical form by pure instincts of biological survival, only to try and block the blades attempting to flay her alive with her flimsy Qi aura.
The all-powerful Head of Intelligence, the Stage 2 Grand Saint of Iron Blood, reappeared in the material world, falling to her knees. She was bleeding profusely from thousands of microscopic cuts, panting hoarsely, completely exposed to her enemies, and with her face crushed against the ground by Eliam's unforgiving gravitational force.
She had lost all her grace and mystery. She was just prey awaiting the coup de grâce. It was the exact and perfect moment the lethal synergy of the Sequences had been waiting for.
"NOW! TEAR HER APART!" roared Ren, his order resonating like a thunderclap of a death sentence in the Soul Nexus.
Aylin clenched her small wood-gloved fist with ferocity. The Devouring Wind inside the tornado cage contracted brutally upon Leng Bi's fallen figure. However, the goal was not to decapitate her; Lilith's order was to leave them alive for interrogation. Aylin's intent was to dismantle her like an old doll. The unstoppable emerald micro-wind blades spun and sliced with surgical precision through the thick tendons of her wrists, shattered the ligaments of her ankles in a hellish succession of milliseconds, and caused hundreds of fine but permanently paralyzing lacerations to her minor organs and meridians, ensuring she could never channel her destructive Qi again.
Simultaneously, from the impregnable distance of the outer ring, the sniper's scythe descended. Three brilliant, soundless arrows of Sylas's Inevitable Destiny materialized into reality. They crossed the vibrating air without emitting sound or friction. They didn't aim for her chest or heart. The light projectiles impacted exactly on the vulnerable joints of Leng Bi's two knees and intact right elbow.
The explosively injected concentrated wind Qi from the arrows acted like an implosion charge. Leng Bi's bones snapped and bent grotesquely backward with a horrific, hollow, wet crunch. The brutal impact sucked out and evaporated the final trace of spiritual energy remaining in her devastated Dantian.
Leng Bi let out a hoarse, bubbling, and pathetic shriek that didn't sound human. She collapsed inert onto the charred ground of the volcanic canyon. Her limbs were shattered at impossible angles; she bled profusely from a thousand wounds, but her chest still rose and fell. She was alive and broken, exactly as dictated by the cold orders of the Morningstar.
The grand, oppressive illusory Domain, The Theater of the Bloody Twilight, flickered weakly for a few seconds like a broken television and finally dissipated, disintegrating into particles of black smoke and returning reality to the gloomy orange light of the magma, the suffocating geological heat, and the piercing, repulsive smell of copper and roasted viscera.
With the humiliating fall of the Head of Intelligence, the asymmetrical combat was formally over.
But victory always exacts its toll. The physical, mental, and spiritual cost of resisting the suffocating pressure of a Stage 2 Grand Saint's Domain had been monstrous.
Goran, Ignis, Rowan, Joren, Korg, Aylin, and the stoic Eliam—who had been trapped inside the deadly encirclement from the first damn second, pushing their bodies and primordial bloodlines beyond the limits of sanity, receiving deep poisoned cuts on all flanks, with a pale, punctured Eliam fighting internal necrosis—didn't even have the strength or the time to let out a cry of victory.
Upon confirming through their clouded divine senses that Leng Bi was completely neutralized and bleeding out on the ground, the chemical remnant of pure adrenaline and fury keeping them upright vanished like water in the desert. Their eyes lost focus, rolled back, and in perfect succession, like dominoes losing their support, the seven young titans collapsed. They fell on their backs or faces, unconscious, onto the cold, dirty, and rough volcanic stone, suffocated by exhaustion and with their colossal Dantians drained to the last drop.
Sylas, swiftly stowing his massive bow of light, and Ren, deactivating his optical camouflage with a tired sigh, ran frantically from the edges of the crater toward the center of the courtyard where their seven fallen siblings lay.
They knelt hastily and checked the pulses on the sweaty, bloodied necks, confirming with a relief that threatened to crack their cold military facade that everyone was alive. They were only in a comatose state from being critically exhausted and suffering the atrocious side effects of the exertion and the assimilated volcanic toxin. Quickly and with medical dexterity, they began placing the larger boys on their sides, opening their bloody jaws so they wouldn't choke and could expel the residual ash coagulating in their throats.
Amidst the silence broken only by the agonizing gasps of the boys, a soft, clear, and macabre metallic tinkle made the two young rescuers suddenly look up at the smoking sky.
Ring, ring...
Sienna, the sadistic maiden of mirrors and the smiling architect of the clan's terror, floated down with immaculate slowness and aristocratic grace. Her dark skirts billowed unblemished. Her pale, unsettling silver eyes swept the depressing scene with complete emotional detachment: she observed the seven fainted, bleeding elite warriors; the two tense rescuers panting protectively beside them; and finally, she looked down at Leng Bi's pathetic, shattered, and barely breathing body.
A broad, sincere, and disturbing smile, unusually devoid of her usual venomous and cruel sarcasm, curved her pale lips.
"You have done an absolutely excellent job, my little children," Sienna said. Her voice, surprisingly soft, melodic, and sing-song, acted like a sedative that immediately soothed the tense electrical hostility in the air. "You have hunted, cornered, and torn apart a Stage 2 Grand Saint in her own illusory terrain. You have shed your blood for the family's name. You have more than earned the divine right to rest."
With an elegant, fluid, and imperious movement of her pale, obsidian-ringed fingers, Sienna conjured thick, intertwined threads of silvery spatial light and altered gravity. She wrapped them with extreme care, almost maternally, around the inert, broken bodies of the seven fainted young warriors, gently lifting them into the air a few centimeters above the smoking magma.
"Take them immediately to the infirmary of the Void Herald. Inform the healers of the situation. The pools of primordial recovery liquid in the Patriarch's gardens will have them as good as new and ready for the next massacre in a matter of a few hours," Sienna ordered Sylas and Ren, in a tone that brokered no argument. "Go. I will personally take care of disposing of the trash."
Sylas and Ren nodded with deep military respect, guiding their comrades' floating bodies toward the return portal Sienna had opened behind them, disappearing into the dimensional abyss and leaving the maiden alone with the remains of the massacre.
Sienna walked at a slow pace toward where the once-fearsome Head of Intelligence lay dying. With a cold blink, she wrapped Leng Bi in heavy, suffocating chains forged of pure dark Qi and mirrored crystal. The Iron Blood assassin groaned in agony as the chains tightened around her multiple fractures and burns, but Sienna didn't even pay her any mind or glance her way.
She dragged her brutally and dismissively through the air, pulling the chains as if walking a rabid dog, toward a clean corner of the obsidian courtyard. There, in a macabre still life of suffering, the paralyzed bodies of Vorg the Unbreakable, the massive Rurik, the bleeding remains of the twelve invincible Captains, and the frozen body of the colossal Magma Hound were already humiliatingly piled up.
The exclusive, twisted collection of broken toys for Matriarch Sela's torture chamber and experimental laboratory was almost gloriously complete.
Sienna unceremoniously dropped Leng Bi onto the pile of flesh and steel, and slowly turned forward. Her gaze went toward the immense destroyed drawbridge and the internal walls leading to the main pavilion. In the very heart of the impregnable fortress, the dense chaos of the Vanguard's annihilation still reigned, but above the agonizing screams and seismic tremors, the Morningstar maiden could feel the suffocating, terrifying residual pressure of two solitary titans.
"Well, well, well..." Sienna whispered to herself, softly making the small bell on her collar jingle. "The opening act has been dazzling. But all we have left is to dispatch the pompous ringmaster... and rip the head off the pathetic old man at the top of the volcano."
The final hunt for the crown of the continent was just beginning.
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