The sky above The Eternal Crucible was no longer a sky. It was a churning ceiling of localized disasters.
The armies of Fire, Tide, Ironwood, Crow and humans were still colliding in a catastrophic free for all. They were waiting for their leaders to return but in the anti they would take as much blood as they could. The sheer volu of combatants engaging simultaneously turned the airspace into a rainstorm of blood that was washing over the city below.
The dark ironstone buildings of the capital groaned under the constant barrage of stray techniques, the city’s defensive arrays flickering like dying stars as they absorbed the kinetic shockwaves of a thousand simultaneous duels.
There was no honor in this tier of the war. There were no formal declarations and no respectful bows before crossing blades. At least not here. It was a visceral and desperate at grinder where survival was asured in inches and fractions of a second.
Above the northern plaza, Captain Torv of the Ash Guards found himself locked in a brutal contest of raw strength. His opponent was a hulking brute from the Ironwood vanguard. A demon whose flesh was entirely covered in interlocking plates of petrified bark.
Torv swung his weapon. A heavy, two handed halberd forged from tempered dark tal and edged with localized heat runes. The blade slamd into the brute’s shoulder and sent a shower of orange sparks and splintered ironwood into the air but it failed to bite deep enough to sever the limb.
The Ironwood demon bellowed and completely ignored the searing heat of the halberd. He stepped directly into Torv’s guard while raising a fist that had been molded into a spiked maul of solid earth.
Before the brute could bring the maul down, the chaotic reality of the battlefield intervened. A stray crescent of highly compressed wind, a residual blade from a clash between two human disciples high above, shrieked downward. It bypassed both combatants' awareness entirely. It sliced cleanly through the chaotic airspace and caught Captain Torv directly across the left side of his face.
Torv scread as his left eye and half his ear were instantly sheared away, leaving a smooth, cauterized trench of missing flesh.
The Ironwood brute barked a cruel laugh and seized the montary distraction to drive his petrified maul into Torv’s ribs. The sickening crunch of shattering bone echoed loudly and Torv was sent hurtling backward. He crashed violently through the tiled roof of a rchant pavilion.
The brute descended and was intending to finish the job but Torv was an elite of The Eternal Crucible. As the brute crashed through the ceiling after him, Torv didn't try to stand. Bleeding profusely from his ruined face and clutching his caved in chest, Torv channeled every remaining ounce of his fire Qi into the core of his halberd. As the Ironwood demon landed, Torv thrust the halberd upward and directly into the roaring mouth of his enemy.
The blade pierced the roof of the demon’s mouth and lodged in its brain. Torv twisted the shaft and detonated the heat runes at point blank range. The brute’s head swelled for a fraction of a second before exploding in a geyser of superheated ash and boiling sap.
The headless corpse collapsed onto Torv and was pinning the severely wounded captain beneath a mountain of petrified wood. Torv didn't celebrate; he simply lay there in the dark. He was gasping for air and praying he wouldn't bleed to death before the healers could find him.
Near the eastern spires, the war between the human disciples was playing out with equal, if not greater, bitterness.
Linnea, a young but fiercely talented disciple of Thorne, stood atop a floating chunk of pumice stone that had been ripped from the city’s architecture. She was bleeding from a dozen shallow cuts and her breathing ragged. Beside her floated her Martial Spirit: The Shadow Weaver Fox, a sleek, ethereal beast with three tails made of liquid darkness.
Her opponent was a disciple of Lord Jareth, a young man nad Umanu. Above him hovered his own Martial Spirit: The Gale Falcon with its wings constantly shedding razor sharp feathers of condensed wind.
"You betrayed the dawn, Umanu!" Linnea scread over the roaring winds as her hands weaved complex seals. "You sold humanity to the beasts!"
"We sold humanity to the victors!" Umanu shouted back. "Thorne is a relic! He would have us starve in the dirt for the sake of pride!"
Umanu commanded the Gale Falcon to dive. The massive bird folded its wings and beca a living missile of tearing wind laws. It was aiming directly for Linnea’s chest.
Linnea did not retreat. She commanded her Shadow Weaver Fox to leap forward. The ethereal beast dissolved into a pool of darkness exactly where the falcon was about to strike. As the bird of prey passed over the shadow, Linnea clenched her fist.
The pool of darkness violently erupted upward and solidified into a jagged net of dark tal. The net caught the Gale Falcon mid dive and the tal chains instantly pulled taut and shredded the ethereal bird’s wings.
Umanu let out a sharp cry of spiritual backlash as his Martial Spirit was crippled. He lost control montarily and was spiraling downward toward the ironstone rooftops of the capital. Linnea raised her hand and was intending to manifest a shadow spear to finish him off but the battlefield offered no quarter for triumphant monologues. Before she could form the spear, a stray blast of corrosive acid, deflected from a general's duel higher up, rained down like a sudden downpour.
The highly concentrated acid washed over Linnea. She roared as the toxic water instantly ate through her defensive Qi and was lting the flesh from her arms. It was severely burning her legs as well. She collapsed onto the stone that she was standing on.
Below her, Umanu crashed into a rooftop and his legs snapped upon impact. He lay paralyzed, watching the acidic rain lt the surrounding tiles. Neither disciple had won. They were simply two more broken bodies added to the toll of a war that cared nothing for their ideological differences.
Down at the southern gate, the battle had devolved into a desperate siege.
The invading army had deployed massive war beasts. Colossal, six-legged siege turtles whose shells were embedded with naturally occurring magma cannons. Three of these monsters were currently pounding against the secondary defensive arrays of the city. Their continuous bombardnt caused the localized shields to crack and splinter.
Defending the gate was a massive phalanx of Violet Deep tide callers. They stood shoulder to shoulder and their faces were pale with exhaustion. They were channeling their Qi collectively to maintain a towering wall of water that caught and slowed the magma blasts.
"Hold the line!" Roared the commanding officer, a massive demon with gills flaring wildly on his neck. "If the array breaks, the lower districts burn! Hold! For Morven!"
The tide callers scread in unison and were pushing their water arts to the absolute limit. But the siege turtles were relentless. One of the massive beasts unleashed a continuous beam of superheated earth and fire directly into the center of the water wall.
The thermal shock was catastrophic. The water wall didn't just break; it flash boiled.
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The resulting explosion of highly pressurized and scalding heat blasted back into the Violet Deep lines. Dozens of tide callers were instantly cooked alive in their own armor and their lungs blistering as they inhaled the superheated vapor. The commanding officer was thrown backward as his chest was caved in by a chunk of hardened magma that had bypassed the shattered shield.
As the siege turtles prepared to march through the breached gate to slaughter the panicked civilians fleeing the lower districts, a shadow fell over the vanguard. High above the chaos and weaving through the battlefield was Li Yu.
He had watched the Violet Deep line collapse. Li Yu hovered near the upper spires and was utilizing his understanding of the Laws of Life to perfectly mask his presence. He was then using his understanding of the Laws of the Void to hide from sight. To the chaotic senses of the invading army, he registered as nothing more than ambient background noise.
He looked down at the three colossal siege turtles lumbering toward the breached southern gate. Just as he was about to take action another general appeared. It was Tankard, a general of Ignis. With him rained what looked like teors of fire and death.
The teor shower rained down like a localized apocalypse. They bypassed the chaotic crossfire entirely and were striking the three siege turtles with clinical precision. The thick armored shells of the beasts crumpled like wet paper under the destructive force of the teors from Tankard.
The impacts sounded like a rapid succession of thunderclaps. The massive turtles were instantly pulverized and their internal magma cannons detonated, turning the entire invading vanguard into a crater of shattered bone and fine red mist.
The surviving Violet Deep soldiers stared at the sudden destruction of the siege beasts and roared with cheer. Before Tankard could even enjoy the cheer there was already trouble.
An invading general, a four-ard demon, had tracked the source of the devastating fire. The general roared and quickly launched himself through the sky toward Tankard with all four hands wielding poisoned scimitars.
Li Yu looked at the approaching powerhouse. He assessed the general's speed, the density of his aura and the lethality of the weapons. He quickly realized that he wouldn’t be able to help Tankard much so he Void Stepped away. To move to another area of the battlefield where he could make so impact.
He reappeared two miles away and was hovering above the western rchant district. Below him, an invading squad of assassins had managed to sneak past the arrays and were silently advancing toward a makeshift Ash Guard triage center filled with wounded soldiers.
Down in the alleyway, the air in front of the assassins suddenly shimred. Li Yu’s Sentry clone stepped out of the shadows. The assassins froze slightly while raising their blades but the clone did not engage in close combat.
The Sentry opened its featureless arms. A wave of freezing mist erupted outward. The mist flooded the narrow alleyway, bypassing the assassins' physical armor and instantly freezing them. The elite squad was paralyzed and turned into statues of frost in a matter of seconds.
A squad of defending Ash Guards rounded the corner and found the frozen assassins. Without a word, they shattered the invaders into pieces with their heavy maces.
The chaotic, overlapping auras of the thousands of combatants suddenly felt incredibly small. The air pressure plumted and a suffocating, heavy dread settled over the entire city. It was an instinctual terror that forced the lower level cultivators on both sides to pause their desperate struggles.
The Sovereigns were returning and everyone was waiting to see what the result was.
The sky above the grand plaza, near the crater where Li Yu had supposedly perished, violently tore open. Malos stepped out after having concluded his battle.
The Lord of Foresight looked entirely immaculate. His crimson cloak was unblemished and free of ash or blood. In his right hand, he held Tuwark’s sword and the blade was gleaming with pristine perfection. He casually tossed the erald green Sovereign core of Terris into the air and was catching it effortlessly before slipping it into his spatial ring.
He had executed a peer without suffering a single scratch. It was tough work and he had pushed himself to the very limits of his abilities in order to do so but nonetheless he was unhard.
Malos exhaled slowly and his cheerful rchant persona was entirely absent. His dark eyes imdiately scanned the ruined plaza and were looking toward the crater. He expected to see the lifeless body of the friend who had sacrificed everything. He had already prepared his mind for it, fully intending to unleash his remaining fury upon the invading army to honor Li Yu's mory.
But as his Sovereign senses swept the capital, Malos froze. He didn't sense a corpse in the crater. He sensed a ridiculously dense, completely healthy, second level Divine Transformation aura hovering above the western district.
Malos blinked and slowly turned his head.
Hovering perfectly unhard in the sky was Li Yu. The human was currently in the process of dropping a barrage of Abyssal Javelins onto a retreating enemy warship. Malos’s jaw dropped slightly. He rubbed his eyes and was genuinely wondering if the temporal strain of pushing his foresight to the absolute limit in the Void had finally caused him to hallucinate.
"What in the Daos...?" Malos whispered as he was completely stunned. He saw that Li Yu had taken that soul attack. Because he had done so, he had turned things around for them completely but that attack was not one he could have survived from.
Before Malos could fully process the impossibility of Li Yu’s survival, the shadows in the center of the plaza stretched and solidified. Thorne stepped out of the darkness. The old farr looked haggard. He stepped forward and was dragging the heavily bound, paralyzed forms of Saintess Elara and Lord Jareth behind him using thick chains of dark iron. The two betraying Human Pillars were broken. Jareth and Elara’s souls were entirely suppressed by Thorne’s tal laws.
Thorne dropped the chains onto the ironstone pavent. He looked and spotted Malos hovering nearby.
"The Ironwood?" Thorne asked with a warily voice.
"Dead," Malos replied automatically though his eyes were still entirely fixed on the distant figure of Li Yu.
Thorne frowned and followed Malos's gaze. The old farr’s hollow eyes widened. He had just heard Sovereign Morven vow to grind Jareth's soul to dust to avenge the martyred Li Yu. He too had briefly mourned the boy's tragic, heroic sacrifice.
Yet there the boy was, actively appearing and disappearing away from frustrated enemy generals and raining localized destruction down. He was like an annoying rat that no one could catch
"Is that..." Thorne began. "Is he not dead? I was told he took the full brunt of Elara's soul strike."
"He did… I was there to see it." Malos muttered while shaking his head in absolute disbelief. "It should have vaporized his existence."
Suddenly, the space above them erupted. The air didn't tear; it boiled, signaling the collapse of the localized Fire Realm.
Sovereign Ignis and Sovereign Morven materialized in the sky and were crashing heavily toward the plaza before stabilizing their descent. They looked horrific. Ignis was missing both legs at the mid thigh, her robes soaked in her own blood but at least the bleeding had stopped. Morven was missing his left arm and a massive chunk of his ribcage. His scales cracked and weeping acidic fluid.
But they were victorious. Morven held the severed and glowing third eye of Beast King Corva in his remaining hand as a grueso trophy.
"The Crow is dead!" Morven roared as his voice bood across the entire capital. This voice shattered whatever remaining morale the invading army possessed.
Ignis looked down and upon seeing the bound forms of Elara and Jareth, she let out a vicious shout. "The vanguard is broken. The war is ours!" The declaration and return of the Sovereigns was a huge boost of morale to the defending troops and an even more massive blow to the enemy. They were now in full retreat as all was lost. So decided to chase while others tended to their own wounds.
Morven looked toward the crater and his face twisted in grief. He raised his massive trident and was preparing to dedicate the grueling victory to the man who had saved his family and helped them win the war.
"We have won but the cost was heavy," Morven bellowed to the surrounding generals who were beginning to gather. "Today, we mourn the loss of those who fell defending this city and also to the hero—"
"Morven," Malos interrupted gently while pointing a finger toward the western sky. "Look there."
Morven paused briefly as his eyes were tracking Malos's finger. Ignis frowned at the interruption but turned her gaze as well.
Li Yu had just finished freezing an entire squad of demons with his Sentry clone. He looked down and was making direct eye contact with four of the most powerful beings on the continent. Li Yu offered a polite and casual wave, before turning and dropping more Abyssal Javelin on a fleeing enemy ship.
Morven’s trident slipped from his grip and clattered loudly against the ironstone pavent. The Lord of the Violet Deep stared at the sky with his mouth hanging slightly open. He was flabbergasted and confused. Ignis blinked her fiery eyes rapidly while Thorne and Malos stood in shared silence.
The human wanderer wasn't just alive. He was still sneaking in attacks when it was safe.
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