Author's Note
I want to take a moment to send a huge shoutout and a big hug to BreZzy19, The_Reaper20, and Sid_Death_King! Thank you so much for being here from the very beginning, donating power stones, and never missing a single chapter. Your unwavering support means the world to me!
To everyone else, if you'd like a shoutout in the next chapter, leave me a comment! Tell me what you thought of the battle, if you have any questions about the novel, or if you simply want to know something more about your beloved author. I read them all! Now, I'll let you get back to enjoying this great chapter.
CHAPTER 198: The Sentinels of the Eclipse (Part 3)
"Very well, immortal scum," Zane whispered, his voice sounding like a hollow echo carried by the freezing wind. "Let's see if you can heal from this."
The pressure of his Stage 1 Grand Saint core exploded with apocalyptic force.
"GRAND SAINT DOMAIN: THE VORTEX OF SILENT BLADES!"
The activation of his [Enhanced Law Domain] drastically changed the rules of existence. Zane brutally crossed his Eclipse Twins in front of his chest. There was silence. An absolute, sepulchral, and infinite silence that devoured even the sound of the magma.
A colossal invisible sphere of gravitational distortion expanded close to the ground. The air inside the sphere became strangely dense and translucent. The surroundings flickered with infinite suspended lines of silver light. The sound of the wind completely disappeared; Kael and the tanks immediately noticed that even the sound of their own heartbeats had been suppressed.
Any sudden movement caused extremely fine threads of blood to sprout from their cheeks or clothes. The air itself had become a network of suspended microscopic blades.
The Absolute Friction Void dominated the zone. Zane eliminated the universe's resistance for his physical body. He could change direction instantly without losing speed. He became a hundred percent faster, unreachable.
And with the disturbing Steel Reflection of his domain, Zane was no longer a single desperate man. He had become a lethal, omnipresent echo.
When Kael, braving the cutting atmosphere, tried to launch a swift frontal slash, Zane's silhouette simply vanished. The lava blade cut a harmless mirage. Zane had magically swapped his real physical position with the "translucent echo" that the trail of his sword had left floating in the air.
Appearing instantly and in perfect silence at Kael's unprotected back, Zane raised his twin blades, fusing all the inertia of his realm and his life into a single definitive movement. His arms descended in slow motion in the minds of his victims, attempting to decapitate the squad leader, Kael, and the three stunned tanks with a single, masterful backslash, executing his lethal and apocalyptic [Twin Horizon Cut].
The final battle for the summit of the volcanic plateau and the pride of the Sentinels of the Eclipse had just entered, spectacularly and irreversibly, its violent terminal phase.
With his [Twin Horizon Cut], Zane launched gigantic, grazing energy slashes across the obsidian floor, forcing the colossi to jump into the air to avoid being severed at the knees. Once Borg, Bren, and Tormund were suspended in the void, lacking any point of friction or terrestrial anchor to maneuver or dodge, Zane fully exploited his domain's Steel Reflection.
The mercenary disappeared from the ground and reappeared instantly in the deafened sky, materializing exactly at the same three-dimensional coordinate where the residual "echo" of his sword was already slicing the air.
It was a total, suffocating carnage. Thick, boiling dragon blood rained relentlessly on the obsidian plateau.
Borg lost thick pieces of his indomitable bronze armor, torn clean off by the storm of blades. Bren, the volcanic colossus, had his broad chest crossed by severe gashes that scraped down to the white bone beneath the magma. Tormund bled profusely and silently despite his impenetrable basalt dermis. And Kael, although his Heart of the Eternal Forge kept him plunged in a burning, tireless frenzy that sealed his wounds with molten metal, was taking too many hits and losing lava blood at an alarming rate for his physiognomy.
From the back lines, sheltered behind Orion's amalgam of dead flesh, Elowen and Cassius worked at a frantic pace, sweating cold at the absolute display of a cornered Grand Saint. Phosphorescent green healing spores and thick beams of eternal sap emerald light continuously fell upon the martyred vanguard, closing critical wounds over and over again, welding flesh before the boys hit the ground.
But the wear and tear on a macroscopic scale was undeniable.
Kael's warriors were taking increasingly concentrated damage, and the heals took agonizing extra seconds to take effect. Worst of all for the clan's strategists was that the biological "fuel" was running out. The bodies of the thousands of mercenaries killed on the lower level were rapidly turning into useless gray dust as they were completely drained of all their life essence and residual longevity. There weren't many living enemies or fresh corpses left at the bottom of the crater from which to drain energy to keep up the pace of infinite healing.
If this Dantean dance of death continued under the suffocating rules of Zane's silent domain, the entire vanguard would bleed to death and be torn to pieces, and the supports would collapse from massive Qi depletion and mental fatigue.
"We have to break his damn rhythm or he's going to fillet us all!" roared Kael through the secure Soul Nexus link, crossing his magma-bathed swords to barely block an invisible slash that almost slit his throat. "Elowen, Cassius, how much healing time do you have left at maximum power?"
"The corpses in the pit are drying up fast. Ten minutes maximum before the healing rate drops by half," Cassius immediately replied, his mental voice tense, pragmatic, and devoid of his usual arrogance, as he threw his jade spear into another body to extract every last drop of sap.
A few meters away from the main fray and Orion's corpse barrier, three figures who had deliberately stayed on the sidelines, floating like shadows analytically observing the topography of the massacre, decided it was the exact moment to intervene.
Jareth, the toxic necromancer, and the feared stellar twins, Aion and Aia.
Understanding the rhythmic pattern, the hyper-kinetic speed, and the lethality of the deadly Iron Blood mercenary, Jareth infiltrated the Nexus telepathic conversation.
"General tactic change," Jareth transmitted, his mental voice dripping a clinical, toxic coldness that froze the blood. "This absurd physical war of attrition will kill us if he keeps his domain. I am going to poison the very laws of his air. I'll use my decomposition toxins to rot the time of that slippery swordsman. Borg, Bren, Tormund: stop jumping around like idiots after his echoes. Group up immediately in a tight terrestrial tortoise formation. If he attacks with that frictionless speed, his own cutting air domain will hurt you much less if you don't move a centimeter. Take the damage head-on, assimilate it, and I will personally handle the chemical counterattack."
"I'll support the frontline defense," added Aion, stepping into the network, his voice resonating with an unfathomable gravity, heavy as a planet's core. "That guy is too fast for our eyes, but the kinetic mass of his spatial attacks is constant. I'm going to intercept and redirect the weight of the wind cuts. But listen closely: he's a Stage 1 Grand Saint. If I try to swallow his whole attack head-on with my shield, he'll split me in half. I can only safely absorb and redirect between 25% and 30% of his residual energy with each impact. Aia..."
"I will gladly take that damn stolen 30% and return it to the skittish dome architect," Aia finished, with a vibrant tone, sharp as stellar crystal. "I will immediately join Cedric and Iris's siege group. I'll use the massive inertia stolen by Aion to bombard Kaelen with heavy artillery. If we break the life support and the bunker of that old man, the fast swordsman will be left without any safety net to fall back on."
"Understood and approved. Execute now," Kael ordered with a commanding voice.
The disciplined heavy vanguard obeyed instantly. Borg, Bren, and Tormund abruptly stopped their suicidal charges and their blind jumps trying to reach the unreachable. They regrouped in the center of the domain, clashed their heavy armored backs together to form an impenetrable, immovable defensive triangle, lowered their centers of gravity, and raised their enormous armored arms to protect their necks and faces, ready to stoically withstand the invisible storm of cuts without moving a millimeter from their spot.
Zane, floating majestically in the air after executing his last decapitating slash, frowned with deep concern upon seeing the giants suddenly adopt a perfect static defensive posture. However, what really triggered his internal alarms and tensed him to the max was seeing three new opponents calmly approaching from the periphery of the mist.
It was already costing him horrific amounts of concentration and Qi to maintain the absolute expansion of his domain and extreme speed against the four immortal vanguard monsters. If these were fresh reinforcements, his window of survival was closing rapidly.
Zane frantically analyzed the newcomers through the silent network of his domain. His sharp eyes locked onto Jareth.
The poisoner boy seemed, by far, the weakest and most pathetic physical link of them all. He was thin, almost skeletal, with an unhealthy pallor that bordered directly on cadaverous. The dark circles under his eyes were so deep and dark they looked like bruises from a beating, and he wore baggy black robes with multiple hidden alchemy pockets. He wore no visible heavy armor nor wielded colossal weapons, and an explicitly foul, putrid, and lingering smell of bitter herbs and swamp dampness emanated from him. The tips of his slender fingers were a constant, necrosed purple.
"That sickly boy will fall in a single blow. I'll thin their numbers first before he launches some trick," thought Zane, making a quick, lethal tactical decision in fractions of a second.
Ignoring the solid tortoise formation of the tanks, Zane used his supreme movement technique: [Vectorial Eclipse Step (Yuseong-Bo)]. Zane executed a hyper-kinetic straight-line dash at a speed that comfortably broke the sound barrier within the borders of his domain. With no air friction, his body didn't generate a sonic boom. He simply left behind a straight line of "absolute void" that sucked everything toward the center of his trajectory.
Zane headed straight for Jareth's throat.
The immense killing intent and death pressure of a Stage 1 Grand Saint fell upon Jareth like a mountain of millennial ice. The hairs on the back of Jareth's neck stood up. He knew perfectly well that Zane was absurdly fast, much faster than his human eyes could track.
Without hesitating a microsecond or panicking, Jareth activated the entirety of his disgusting repulsive arsenal.
His lungs and throat, horribly mutated by poison to process lethal gases, throbbed forcefully. Jareth opened his jaw and released the [Swamp Exhalation], a deafening sigh that vomited an immense cloud of purple miasma so dense it completely blocked physical vision and anesthetized divine sense in the area. This was the Offensive: [Mist of the Fallen Era], a cloud that applied the [Rot Intent], designed to "age" and deteriorate the enemy's magical laws and speed.
At the same time, he crossed his thin arms over his chest and unleashed his Defensive: [Corrosive Chitin Shell], an extreme variant of his [Poison Sutra]. His toxic Qi condensed on the surface of his pale skin, hardening to form an invisible layer as tough as the armor of a prehistoric beetle.
But Zane's apocalyptic speed with the Vectorial Eclipse Step, boosted by the immense one-hundred-percent power increase within his zero-gravity domain, overwhelmingly surpassed the magic formation speed of Jareth's biological cocoon.
Before the heavy purple gas could fully solidify and expand to protect the boy, Zane was already materialized right in front of him.
"Too slow, you damn corpse!" roared Zane, his eyes bloodshot.
His twin blades flashed in the dead air. Zane unleashed the [Storm of Stigmatic Echoes (Hwan-Myeol-Cham)]. Zane ferociously attacked the air in multiple directions for two seconds, creating dozens of "Steel Echoes" around him. Immediately after, all the spectral echoes executed the same combo simultaneously from twenty different angles, aiming at Jareth. It was an omnidirectional prison of slashes.
The brute force and spatial persistence of the Grand Saint's echoes tore a huge, violent hole in the biological chitin defense that Jareth was barely managing to condense. Jareth defended himself desperately, but the blade storm was excessive for a non-tank fighter.
The left blade, fast as a moon flash, grazed Jareth before the skeletal youth could fully dodge the omnidirectional siege. A deep, cold, and surgical gash sliced cleanly across the necromancer boy's entire chest and ribs.
Zane smiled broadly, anticipating the sound of victory, expecting to see the fragile and sickly Jareth's body fall split into two clean halves on the obsidian floor.
But Jareth didn't let out a single cry of pain. Instead, his pale, chapped lips curved into a grim, sickly smile.
The blood that gushed massively from the deep open wound on Jareth's chest wasn't human red. It was a purple compound, extremely dense and horribly viscous. It was [Effect 1: Entropic Acid Blood]. When Zane's mystical Saint-Grade blade tore through the boy's mutated flesh, the high-pressure spout of blood, acting as a universal solvent, shot out violently at point-blank range straight toward the surprised Grand Saint's face and body.
The torrent of acid blood was millimeters away from dissolving the mercenary's flesh, and as it was about to touch Zane, he reacted with the speed that only centuries of experience grant. He used his emergency [Defensive Skill: Inverse Cross Parry: Void Deflection].
Zane executed a micro-twist of his wrists at an imperceptible speed. He infused his Law of the Infinite Slash into the blades to generate three instant spatial micro-cuts. He didn't block the acid, he deflected it. The torrent of dissolving blood that was going to melt his skull was smoothly slid sideways, passing millimeters from his shoulders and splashing onto the stone, which immediately began to smoke and melt under the power of the Saint-grade acid.
Having deflected the deadly blood and leaving Jareth in a vulnerable position from the counterattack, Zane didn't miss the opening. He pushed forward and seized the gap to launch his lethal [Dance of the Eternal Cross], a combo of twelve cross-thrusts, straight at Jareth's exposed chest to definitively dismember him.
The thirty-six lethal overlapping cuts flew at terminal velocity toward the necromancer's torso.
But the battlefield had already changed. The Mist of the Fallen Era, the purple miasma Jareth had initially exhaled, finally did its corrosive work. Upon coming into physical contact with the heavy cloud of poisonous gas, Jareth's Rot Intent conceptually attacked Zane's very magical laws of spatial persistence and wind.
The dazzling, lethal cuts of silver light literally began to "age" as they crossed the one-meter distance separating them. Their hypersonic speed dropped sharply due to entropic friction; the flawless gleam of their edge became blurry, erratic, and dull, instantly losing thirty percent of their original lethality as they were eaten away by the temporal poison.
Even so, an attack at seventy percent of a Stage 1 Grand Saint's brute and spatial force was more than enough to split the body of a boy like Jareth in two if it hit him head-on.
Jareth didn't even flinch or try to retreat. An immense shadow of lead—heavy, immovable, and lacking luster—abruptly interposed itself between him and the lethal death in the air.
Aion had appeared in front of them.
With a brutal movement of his brawny arm, Aion raised his supreme weapon: [The Void Anvil]. An immense one-handed hammer forged from the heavy core of a dead star, whose mass and density defied existential logic. His body was coated by his aberrant [Stellar Chrome Scales] of Dark Matter; opaque black scales that didn't reflect a single photon of light, but visually consumed the surroundings.
Aion wide opened his [Event Horizon Eyes], the color of a storm gray. Through them, the illusory material world vanished, revealing the cosmic Energy Vectors in their purest state. Aion saw the twelve multiple wind cuts weakened by the acid approaching. He saw the "mass" and quantum weight of Zane's destructive magic. He identified the perfect center of gravity of the enemy's spatial technique in fractions of a second.
With a bestial grunt, Aion rigidly planted the heavy flat head of his hammer onto the plateau's volcanic floor.
He activated his [Defensive: Black Hole Shield]. Aion expanded the limit of his Collapsed Mass Dragon bloodline. Instead of raising a crystal wall or a magical barrier that would be sawn through by the cuts, a focused and extreme gravitational suction distorted the very fabric of space one meter in front of him.
The twelve flawless silver wind cuts, instead of impacting his leaden body to pierce it, were violently, inevitably, and inexorably drawn toward the center of the void generated by the heavy hammer. The sound of sharp wind shrieked intensely as Zane's monstrous kinetic, magical, and cutting energy was literally "swallowed" by the small black hole.
The Grand Saint's massive attack didn't even scratch Aion. The crushing gravity of the void simply mashed and condensed the twelve dimensional slashes, compressing Zane's persistence into a dense sphere of pure, turbulent, glowing, and humming energy that remained suspended and harmless between the dark chrome-clad youth's two gloved hands.
He had absorbed exactly thirty percent of the original lethal power of the Grand Saint's daggers. Aion grunted from the effort, the thick veins in his neck bulging beneath his grayish skin as the black scales creaked, contracting to physically contain the immense and unstable pressure of the stolen energy sphere.
"The main course is served, little sister," Aion grunted, activating the central artery of his bloodline.
He activated [The Singularity Link].
The abyssal Dantians of the twins Aion and Aia were intrinsically connected on the astral plane by an unbreakable thread of void. In a cosmic instant, Aion transferred the absolute one hundred percent of the turbulent energy from Zane's attack absorbed in the gravity sphere directly through the link to his twin sister at the other end of the plateau.
He took the immense burden of the physical impact; she took the devastating speed and destructive power.
Aia, who had just strategically positioned herself in the rearguard next to the runic Cedric and Iris, felt the sudden and massive influx of stolen Qi. Her eyes shone with the intensity of a thousand suns. Using all that inertial energy transferred from Aion, Aia rose into the air and unleashed an immense destructive discharge of stellar heavy artillery, a concentrated bombardment that rained relentlessly upon the desperate Kaelen.
The deafening roar of Aia's explosions repeatedly impacting Kaelen's Nine-Layer Iron Shell shook the entire plateau, threatening to finally collapse the elderly Array Master's bunker.
From the short frontal distance, Zane, who was still struggling to purge the last traces of lethal acid from his chest with Qi, observed the entire sequence.
He saw his unparalleled and persistent mortal attacks simply swallowed by a quantum void shield, and then how his own life's energy vanished to another part of the battlefield to bombard and kill his best friend.
His breath caught sharply in his throat. The beating of his heart hammered in his ears. He looked at the sickly cadaverous boy (Jareth) smiling madly while bleeding streams of dissolving acid. He looked at the immovable colossus of lead (Aion) swallowing spatial hurricanes as if they were water. And then he averted his gaze to the center, where the tanks were laughing and the incandescent friction boy (Kael) waited, surrounded by healers who controlled life itself.
He understood his sad and inevitable reality.
These were not human people. These were not cultivators pursuing the noble Dao. They were a collection of living biological weapons, primordial predators genetically engineered to counter, mock, and annihilate any sacred law of nature or magic.
Zane felt a thick, cold sweat of pure terror soak his back and temples. He turned his head desperately toward the top of the plateau, seeking the gaze of his only friend. Kaelen had been cornered in his nine-layer dome, trying to survive Iris and Cedric's control and using his last magma chains to deflect the pain onto Orion's chimera. But now, with Aia's incessant bombardment feeding off Zane's own stolen strength, the old architect was buckling under the avalanche of destruction.
As these dark, defeatist thoughts clouded his mind, Zane's honed senses, connected to the neural network of his active domain, warned him that nothing escaped his realm. He felt a violent disturbance in the fabric of the air. A frontal attack was approaching.
Sensing that massive danger, Zane prepared to counterattack, erasing fear from his mind. The imminent attack came from the leader himself, Kael, who was using his colossal movement technique.
Kael moved using the [Crimson Dragon Dance: The Step of the Igneous Void]. His Heart of the Eternal Forge turned his entire body into a mass of pure kinetic energy. Kael flowed like lethal liquid metal. The friction with the dead air of Zane's domain was so absurdly high that the space around Kael bent, creating multiple silhouettes of a translucent lava dragon that flickered menacingly toward Zane without emitting a sound, only the hiss of space itself being vaporized in its wake and leaving a trail of white ash lotuses.
Kael was approaching at terminal velocity, but Zane, dominating time within his realm of silence, was ready. The mercenary quickly counterattacked using the [Lightning Cross Collapse (Chon-Gyok)].
Zane didn't move toward Kael. Instead, he crossed his daggers and launched an immense, destructive X-shaped slash from a distance. But, thanks to the disturbing laws of the frictionless domain, instead of physically traveling through the air and giving the enemy time to block, the devastating silver Qi slash materialized and was magically summoned directly and at point-blank range over Kael's moving body, using the pre-established coordinates of Zane's domain blood network. If the young leader tried to dodge it by jumping, the inertia slash corrected itself and auto-tracked due to kinetic acceleration, pursuing its target relentlessly until impacting flesh.
When Zane fired the relentless tracking cut, Kael, knowing the slash's execution was coming and had materialized directly over his chest, tried to evade the blow by shifting his torso. But as he slid, Kael's glowing Dual Eyes registered the spatial anomaly: he saw that the cut's vector line simply twisted reality to follow him wherever he moved. It was an inescapable blow.
In a fraction of a second, Kael made the decision of a true leader: to stop retreating and advance toward destruction.
Kael firmly gripped his Magma Fang and decided to attack head-on against the inescapable cut, using his supreme offensive of causal annihilation: the [Crimson Slash: The Extinction of the Blood Lotus].
With the entirety of his Nirvana Sword Intent imbuing the edge, Kael didn't seek to repel or block the heavy impact of Zane's Lightning Cross Collapse; Kael sought to "extinguish" its very causality. The immense lava sword clashed head-on against the magical blades of Zane's tracking silver Qi.
The world around the clash lost all its color, turning momentarily a ghastly ash-gray hue under the light of Nirvana. A black and crimson line of atomic friction tore the fabric of silenced reality. Kael's sword vibrated at a frequency so sharp and stellar that the clash disintegrated much of Zane's spatial magic into a harmless vapor. However, the overwhelming power of the concentrated force of a Stage 1 Grand Saint was too high to be completely extinguished in an instant.
This time, Kael managed to firmly withstand the mercenary's frontal assault without being brutally dragged or sent flying through the air like in their first encounter. He endured the impact keeping his feet firmly planted in the melted obsidian. Nevertheless, the residual tails of the X-slash managed to pierce his guard and violently tore the flesh of his waist, opening a deep gash from which lava blood immediately began to spout and smoke, which was already being healed on the spot by the burning temperature of his Forge Heart and the distant support of the healers.
Zane didn't waste the momentary advantage of having wounded the immovable leader, and his martial pride resurfaced in the form of an adrenaline-fueled taunt.
"Is that absolutely all, you filthy brat?" roared Zane, the fury of his sword echoing in his words. "I have to admit you are quite good to have managed to awaken the immense Sword Intent at such a young and immature age! I wish I myself had had your stupid, given natural talent! Because I assure you, if I had half your divine power, you pathetic arrogant pups wouldn't have lasted even a miserable minute on your feet against me."
And to demonstrate the indisputable superiority of his millennial experience over raw talent, Zane had already materialized face to face, half a meter from Kael.
Taking advantage of the fact that by launching his previous tracking spatial attack he had left subtle illusory echoes of himself sown in the air (thanks to his domain's Steel Reflection), when one of those swift echoes conveniently ended up a few millimeters from Kael's right shoulder, Zane used his connection to instantly swap his real position.
Taking the focused Kael completely by surprise in his own blind spot, and with a speed that erased light itself, Zane mercilessly launched his lethal [Storm of Stigmatic Echoes (Hwan-Myeol-Cham)].
An insane flurry of twenty omnidirectional cuts, swift and lethal, rained directly and mercilessly toward the face, neck, and exposed torso of the young Sequences leader.
Kael, seeing from the corner of his dual eyes the same devastating and overwhelming storm of spatial skill with which the mercenary had riddled and tried to dismember Jareth minutes ago, understood he couldn't evade or counterattack in time. Acting purely on survival instinct, Kael hurriedly defended himself using his [Defense: Polished Obsidian Shield].
Receiving the rain of lightning cuts, Kael massively flowed large quantities of boiling Magma through the heavy blade of his sword and swung it swiftly in front of him in a wide circular arc. The immense temperature of the environment and his Qi instantly cooled the glowing magma in the air, solidifying it in a millisecond to form an imposing and solid black barrier of thick, reflective, shiny volcanic glass.
The storm of twenty invisible cuts clashed like cursed hail against the mirror surface of the obsidian.
Sparks flew, illuminating the gray domain. The barrier acted as an Absorption Block. Since Zane's attacks were cuts of lethal spatial energy, the flawless, polished "mirror" finish of the thick obsidian managed to deflect and slide sideways much of the tremendous cutting and lethal force of the damage.
But the destructive power of a cornered Grand Saint fighting for his life in his own domain was relentless.
Not all twenty deadly cuts could be blocked or deflected by the rigid black crystal. Kael's shield shattered into a thousand sharp obsidian splinters after resisting the tenth blow, and the remaining slashes brutally penetrated his defense.
Kael received numerous, bloody, severe cuts along his hardened arms, deep lacerations in the thick muscles of his thighs, and a long scratch that crossed diagonally over his armored shoulder and neck. His clothes were torn to shreds, and burning rivers of thick liquid metal blood gushed at high pressure from the newly opened wounds.
But, to Zane's absolute and incomprehensible terror, the cold, arrogant smile never left Kael's bloody asymmetrical face. On the contrary, as the Morningstar leader was cut and bruised, his youthful smile widened into a grimace of genuine, chilling, and sick homicidal ecstasy, as if the agony of the cuts were the most exquisite and refined of delicacies.
Zane felt a sudden, violent, and deep shudder of pure existential terror run down and paralyze his entire spine. Despite his experience in countless wars, for the first time in his long life, the mercenary instinctively took a step back. He understood in the deepest part of his human soul that all these damn, beautiful people in black robes and icy stares were tactically brain-dead. These demons liked, were fascinated by raw pain and got turned on by the mortal danger of the wildest battle, exactly as if they were the most irrational barbarians of the primordial wastelands themselves! They were incurable. If Zane managed the miracle of surviving and fleeing this hell tonight, he swore by all heavens he would never want to cross his gaze or his sword with the Morningstar banner ever again in his miserable existence.
But Zane couldn't continue his daydream of escape or deliver the coup de grace, because out of the corner of his eye he detected a multiple threat approaching.
The immortal tanks—Borg, Tormund, and Bren—now enveloped in thick green healing clouds and laughing uproariously with bloodshot eyes, were rapidly approaching the melee position once again. Jareth was exhaling more corrosive mist to enclose his escape routes.
Completely outnumbered, surrounded by aberrations, with his stamina dwindling by the second inside his own demanding domain, and fearing being pinned down by the bulk of the titans, Zane was forced to give ground.
The Grand Saint sped away in a blur of spatial movement, leaping dozens of meters backward and abandoning his hunt, leaving behind a heavily wounded Kael, bathed in molten blood, but who was already being efficiently healed, protected by his siblings, and smiling into the void like a thirsty predator.
The mutiny of the traitors in the fortress had ended a long time ago.
Now, there was only desperate, brutal, and instinctive survival.
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