MPCW Ch. 85
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8m
"Who's there?!"
The laughter from the five Treasurefall cultivators cut off at once. Their heads snapped toward the sky, and their weapons were already half-raised before they had even finished turning.
Above them, hanging in the air on a sword, stood a teenager and a little girl who looked no older than eight. The teenager had hair the color of fresh snow, while the girl's hair was bright red, almost like fire. At first glance, they looked like a pair from some wealthy clan who had wandered somewhere they shouldn't have, but the longer the Treasurefall cultivators stared, the more wrong the sight became.
They could see both of them clearly, yet their spirit-sense found nothing. If they hadn't been looking straight at the pair, every instinct they had would've insisted the sky was empty.
That left two explanations, and only one seemed reasonable. Either the pair carried a treasure capable of hiding them completely, or their cultivation was so far beyond everyone present that the Treasurefall cultivators couldn't detect them at all. The second possibility was too absurd to accept, especially because one of them was a child who couldn't have reached Foundation Establishment no matter how talented she was or how much spiritual energy she'd absorbed before birth.
So they settled on the first explanation. The sword beneath the pair's feet was probably just another treasure, either inherited from a clan elder or gifted by some doting senior. It might look impressive, but a borrowed treasure didn't change the balance of the fight, and the Treasurefall cultivators weren't about to panic because a teenager and a child had shown up with expensive toys.
Except there was no time left to keep weighing the odds.
The two Nascent Soul cultivators leading Treasurefall glanced at each other, and both of them understood the same problem at once. The strangers had walked into the middle of a Nascent Soul ambush without flinching, which meant they either didn't understand the danger or had someone behind them who made it irrelevant.
If they had come alone, Treasurefall could still handle it. It wouldn't be clean, but the situation had already gone past the point where clean was possible.
If they hadn't come alone, then the real danger was the person behind them. The fact that this guardian still hadn't acted only made Treasurefall more uneasy, because it meant they were either absent, waiting, or so confident that they felt no need to interfere.
That possibility gave the three Skyborne cultivators a sliver of hope, though none of them relaxed while their lives were still in Treasurefall's hands. Unless the strangers, or whoever stood behind them, chose to intervene, hope was all they had. Even so, the ambush had changed.
They couldn't let the Skyborne cultivators leave after everything that had happened here, and they couldn't let the two strangers walk away with what they'd seen either. Once the story spread that Treasurefall had attacked cultivators from another righteous sect, the damage wouldn't stop at reputation. Every sect with an old grudge, a hungry elder, or a need to show righteousness would have the excuse they needed, and Treasurefall would be the target everyone could agree on.
Whether Treasurefall survived the fallout was something the elders could worry about later, assuming there was anyone left to explain what had happened here. For the cultivators standing in the clearing, the problem was much simpler. If they let the Skyborne escorts leave with those children, the sect's secrets would be exposed, and whatever punishment came afterward would be far beyond anything they could talk their way out of.
That meant backing down wasn't an option anymore. They could only strike before the situation grew any worse, then hope those two children hadn't brought anyone stronger with them.
The middle-aged Skyborne escort saw the choice settle across their faces and knew they had reached the same answer he had
"You," the broad-shouldered cultivator said, jerking his chin toward a younger swordsman. "Deal with the brats."
The swordsman moved at once, while the leader turned back toward the three Skyborne cultivators.
"And we finish this now."
---
"Well." Alexei watched the five Treasurefall cultivators spread out below and didn't need to hear their plan to understand it. "Guess we're doing this the hard way."
He opened his inventory and began putting on his netherite armor. One piece after another appeared over him, locking into place while Mengyao held onto him from behind.
"Head back to the sect first. I've got this."
"You aren't coming with me?" Mengyao had already reached into her sleeve for the communication talisman, but she still looked at him like she wanted him to give a different answer.
"They've already decided to kill us. I'm not letting that go."
Mengyao opened her mouth, then closed it again. There wasn't much to argue about when he had already started preparing for a fight. Their masters were also nearby, and while that didn't make the situation safe, it did mean Alexei probably wasn't throwing himself into certain death.
She still didn't look happy about it, but she pushed spiritual energy into the talisman anyway.
Whoosh.
The paper in her hand caught fire, red flame spreading across the talisman as her body dissolved into violet light. By the time the last of the paper turned to ash, she had already vanished from his side.
Alexei watched the spot where she had vanished and counted the test as a success. After the manual lever, the automatic nighttime trigger, and the linked storage container model, this made the fourth working version of their ender pearl stasis chamber research. It relied on communication jade slips, which meant he could finally justify calling it the Jade Slip Express, even if nobody else seemed to appreciate the name.
Communication jade slips were common in the Eastern Territories, and most cultivators treated them like ordinary tools. A talisman had to be keyed to a specific slip before it could send anything. Once the link was made, the message appeared on the paired slip, and the slip gave off a faint glow and tremor to alert its owner.
The message itself was almost irrelevant, since every incoming message also made the slip glow and tremble. That gave him a clean signal to capture with a sensor and pass straight into a redstone circuit, after which the circuit didn't care whether the trigger came from a lever, a hopper, or a cultivator's glorified text message.
From there, the rest practically built itself. He set a detector to watch the communication slip, connected it to the trapdoor mechanism, and loaded an ender pearl into place so it would fire the instant the trapdoor opened. When someone activated the talisman, the signal would pass from one part to the next and send them back to the sect.
The whole thing was basically a one-button escape route made from parts nobody else had thought to connect, and the main weakness came from the communication slip itself. Under normal conditions, a slip could hold its charge for about a decade before the imprint faded, but without ambient spiritual energy feeding it, that lifespan dropped to roughly two weeks before the jade degraded into useless scrap.
That meant the design couldn't replace proper long-distance travel yet. For now, it was best used as a way home, with the sect acting as a fixed point. Anything that needed a precise jump across regions still had to rely on the ender chest network he'd built for that purpose.
For today, that was enough. Mengyao was already safely gone, which was the only thing he cared about.
---
"This is bad!"
The Treasurefall cultivators below reacted almost as soon as the red-haired girl disappeared. That made the white-haired boy still floating above them even more valuable. They couldn't kill him when they still didn't know whether his companion had escaped, hidden herself, or gone to call for help. Until they understood what had happened, the only remaining target had to stay alive.
The two Nascent Soul cultivators exchanged a glance, and both reached the same conclusion without needing to discuss it.
"Take him alive."
The Skyborne escort below heard the order and looked up just as the the other Treasurefall cultivators rushed the white-haired boy from either side. Alexei floated above the battlefield in black armor, holding a golden fruit in both hands, and as the two cultivators rushed him from either side, he only lowered his head and took a bite. The escort knew at once that he wouldn't reach him in time.
One of the Treasurefall cultivators reached Alexei first and placed a long saber against his throat, while the other stopped nearby to block any escape.
Alexei glanced at the blade resting against his throat. "Huh. So this is a hostage situation now."
He kept chewing.
Whether this situation called for a golden apple was debatable, but eating one before trouble started had become a habit. He had an absurd surplus of them sitting in storage, and the only thing slowing him down was how long it took to bite and chew through each one.
The cultivator holding the blade against Alexei's neck didn't appreciate being treated like an inconvenience. His patience had already been thin, and watching Alexei take another bite of the fruit only made it worse. By the time Alexei went for a third, the man snapped and slapped at the half-eaten fruit, trying to knock it out of the boy's hand.
But the fruit stayed where it was.
Alexei's expression soured for the first time since this whole farce had started. The sword at his neck hadn't bothered him much, and the threats were barely worth acknowledging, but touching his food crossed a line. It had the same energy as walking up to someone eating a sandwich on a park bench and squeezing it for no reason. He didn't know where that hand had been or what it had touched, and he wasn't going to keep eating after that.
He tossed the rest of the apple aside without looking where it landed, and the item in his hand rippled through several shapes before becoming a netherite sword.
"I would advise against pointless struggling," the cultivator said, as if reciting a warning he'd given too many times before.
"You're really going through with this?" Alexei asked. "Or is talking still an option?"
"Behave and wait quietly."
"So we're past reasoning, then."
Alexei adjusted his grip, turned the blade flat, and swung at the cultivator beside him.
The man watched the attack come toward him and nearly smiled. The flat of the blade told him all he needed to know. The boy was probably some pampered young master from a great clan, or the spoiled favorite of a minor sect, too sheltered to kill even with a sword at his own neck. The slow swing only made him look worse. Any Foundation Establishment disciple could've avoided it, much less a Core Formation cultivator like him, and treating it as a threat would've been almost insulting.
He didn't even bother stepping aside. A blind man could've seen the strike coming from a city away, and he wasn't going to give the boy the satisfaction of dodging, so he reached out and caught the flat of the blade in his open palm, as casually as if he were stopping a swinging door.
The problem was that the door, in this case, weighed thousands of kilos.
The instant his palm touched the blade, the weight behind the swing crushed through his arm. His forearm folded inward, bone and muscle giving way before he could even understand what had gone wrong, and the force kept driving forward until it slammed into his ribs and bent his entire torso sideways. Blood surged through him all at once, flooding places it wasn't supposed to go, and his skin flushed red in uneven patches as his eyes bulged and blood spilled from his nose and mouth.
By the time the sound of the impact reached him, his body had already been folded around the blow and launched backward through the air. The wind tore around him in an ugly shriek as he disappeared into the distance.
Alexei had already swapped to his trident and started running through the charge-up cycle for a critical strike. The Treasurefall cultivators below were still adjusting to the fact that one of their own had just been launched into the forest, so he used the pause to pick out the person who looked like he was in charge.
The man in charge wasn't hard to pick out. Broad-shouldered and steady on his feet, he stood calmer than the others around him. Alexei put him in the center of his vision, finished charging the critical strike, and threw the trident.
It didn't look especially fast, and from below, it probably seemed like Alexei had misjudged the distance or thrown it without much power. The broad-shouldered man seemed to agree, because he didn't dodge. He turned his shoulder, brought his fist around in a sharp horizontal swing, and struck the trident aside, shifting it off course just before the stored force drove into his arm.
Even after being deflected, the trident still drove tremendous force through the man's arm and shoulder, shoving him backward across the ground. His feet tore two long furrows through the earth before he dug in and stopped more than ten meters away.
Alexei watched him with interest. No one had blocked one of his trident throws that cleanly before. The man hadn't stopped it outright, only deflected it, but the critical strike charge had still been one stage deep, which meant the attack had carried roughly 15,000 kilograms of force. He'd knocked that aside and come away with both arms attached, leaving only a few skid marks behind him and what looked like nothing worse than a bruised ego.
That made him a body cultivator, or at least something close to one. Alexei didn't need the exact label right now. Body cultivators put more of their cultivation into their meridians and flesh, trading spell variety for physical reinforcement. It sounded crude until one of them knocked aside something that should've taken his arm off. That also made this encounter useful. He had been meaning to test his spell loadout against body cultivators, and this one had volunteered by surviving the opening throw.
The trident finished its arc and came back toward him. The broad-shouldered cultivator heard it coming and shifted aside, letting the weapon pass. It slapped back into Alexei's hand, and he sent it into his inventory at once. His hand had barely come free when the man bent his knees and drove both feet into the ground. The earth buckled beneath him, dirt blasted outward in a wide ring, and he shot upward.
"Wind Walking Technique."
The sword surged beneath Alexei's feet and carried him aside just before the cultivator reached him. The man had to pull himself back before he overshot, and Alexei used that opening to twist in midair and thrust his empty hand forward.
"Flame Fist."
A compressed mass of fire erupted from his fist and roared toward the cultivator while he was still recovering. The man judged the distance, saw that he couldn't dodge cleanly, and punched straight into it.
The attack detonated against his knuckles, scattering burning fragments through the canopy as he forced his way through the flames. By the time the last sparks broke apart behind him, he was already closing in again.
Alexei stared at him, because that hadn't been some casual warning shot. The spell had only cost twenty spiritual energy points, but with his base attack being over seven, his fire-element bonus adding another 209%, and the Spiritual Energy Circuit V enchantment doubling the final spell damage while cutting the cost in half, the output was absurd. A normal forty-point fireball shouldn't even be in the same category. His version hit around fourteen times harder than that, and the cultivator had just punched it apart without breaking stride.
"Let's try 120."
The netherite sword appeared in Alexei's hand, and he poured spiritual energy into it as soon as his fingers closed around the grip. Fire caught along the blade, raced across the metal, and stretched far past the edge in a growing arc of flame. It kept extending until it reached over a hundred meters.
He turned the flying sword and flew straight at the broad-shouldered man, keeping the full length of the burning blade angled ahead of him.
The man looked back, saw the flaming weapon coming his way, and turned around to fly in the opposite direction.
"Stop running and let me test its damage!" Alexei shouted, banking after him.
"Stop chasing me with that thing and I'll stop running!" the man shouted back.
"Stop running and I'll stop chasing!"
"Are you listening to yourself?!"
"You first!"
"Shut up!"
The man broke left before Alexei could reach him. Alexei swung the blade right, realized he'd overcorrected, and dragged it back across the air, only for the man to slip past by a distance that was starting to feel personal. He was still faster in a straight line, but the man kept cutting away in short, sharp bursts, changing direction whenever the gap closed and denying the burning blade a clean line.
Since maintaining the flaming extension didn't cost him anything, he left it burning and focused on the part that did. Wind Walking still drained his spiritual energy, so he eased back on the boost while keeping himself faster, then pushed the freed-up energy into the sword.
The blade stretched another twenty-odd meters, and the broad-shouldered man glanced back just in time to see the fire reach for him again.
"Oh, come on!"
Below, the fight between the Treasurefall cultivators and the three Skyborne survivors had stopped entirely, mostly because everyone still standing in the clearing was too busy looking up.
A white-haired teenager was chasing a grown man across the sky with what looked like a hundred-and-twenty-meter burning sword. Every few seconds, the flames swept over the clearing and sent another wave of heat rolling across the ground, curling the leaves on the nearest trees. Somewhere deeper in the forest, something small and frightened was already running away from the noise.
The two groups had been trying to kill each other roughly three minutes ago, but the fight had stalled so completely that even the people halfway through raising their weapons had forgotten to finish. Treasurefall and Skyborne alike stood where they were, staring up at the sky with the same blank disbelief on their faces. Their reasons for being in the clearing couldn't have been more different, but right now their thoughts had probably lined up almost perfectly: what's going on?
---
High above the edge of the fight, Yan sat with one elbow on her knee and her chin resting on her hand.
She'd been trying to figure out Alexei's combat style since the trident throw, but the more she saw, the less sense it made. The spells weren't the strange part. Fire was fire. Even the odd divine ability he used wasn't impossible to understand after watching it a few times.
The strange part was how much spiritual energy he was using.
Alexei was forcing out more than his meridians should've been able to take. That wasn't a complicated rule. Any cultivator past Body Tempering knew that a spell became stronger when spiritual energy moved faster through the meridians, and that wider meridians could carry more of it at once. Talent, realm, training, and experience could all raise that limit, but they couldn't get rid of it. Push too much through, and the body started taking damage. Keep pushing, and the damage piled up faster than it could heal.
He shouldn't have been anywhere near that level of output. His meridians weren't wide, and he was only at the second lowest recognized cultivation realm, so his capacity should've been terrible by normal standards. Even if his strange body changed the calculation somehow, it couldn't explain what she was seeing.
A cultivator at his realm should've been on the ground by now, assuming the pressure hadn't already torn their meridians apart.
Even she couldn't release a tenth of what he was pushing out in a single burst here in the Eastern Territories, where the surrounding qi was so thin it was almost absent. In any other region, with several times more ambient qi to draw on, she could've forced out far more than that. Here, however, Alexei's output was still far beyond what should've been possible at his realm.
Alexei nearly caught the body cultivator on a sharp left turn, overcorrected, and missed him again.
She watched him recover and continue the chase while quietly adding another item to the list of things she needed to investigate. If that strange property of his could be trained instead of merely used, it would be valuable. As it stood, however, raw output hadn't solved his control problem, because he was spending far more time chasing the man through the sky than hitting him.
Qingxue stood beside her. She hadn't reacted since the trident throw, but when Alexei shouted down at the fleeing body cultivator and the man shouted back, turning the chase into an embarrassing argument at high altitude, the corner of her mouth shifted by the smallest amount.
---
The broad-shouldered man's shout reached the other Treasurefall cultivators still standing in the clearing.
"Don't just stand there!" he yelled, cutting sideways as the burning blade swept past his shoulder, heat rolling across his skin. "Help me!"
The remaining Treasurefall cultivators looked at him, then looked up at the flaming sword being swung around by the same person who had just launched one of their own into the forest with a single tap. No one said anything, but the answer passed through the group.
They would prefer not to get involved.
Alexei caught the exchange from above and understood that reinforcements weren't coming. He let the flaming blade slow in midair while he reconsidered the situation. The broad-shouldered man was difficult to hit, but he hadn't been the only Nascent Soul cultivator leading the Treasurefall group when the fight started. He remembered seeing a second one.
His attention shifted toward the cultivators below, and several of them stiffened as they realized he was looking at them. When the burning sword began to tilt in their direction as well, the group started to lose its composure.
"What the... don't come over here!"
The Treasurefall cultivators looked up at the burning sword and felt as if the sky was coming down on them.
None of them had ever seen anything like it, and fear wasn't the only reason. They had all grown up around spell cultivators who counted every bit of spiritual energy they spent. Their teachers had drilled it into them, their seniors had warned them about it, and every fight they had survived had proven it true. A spell that wasted too much energy could lose a battle as easily as a spell that failed outright, so no serious cultivator threw power around without thinking.
Yet the white-haired teenager above them had kept a hundred-meter flaming sword hanging over their heads for more than three minutes, and he didn't look strained at all. If anything, he looked like the cost hadn't even crossed his mind.
Did he think a blade like that could maintain itself for free?
---
"This isn't working," Alexei muttered as he watched the Treasurefall cultivators dart through the air with unpredictable agility he normally associated with squirrels avoiding traffic. Every time he committed to a swing, one of them either burst forward in a sudden rush or slipped sideways at an angle that shouldn't have made sense from where they started, leaving his flaming blade cutting through empty air again and again.
He couldn't find a clean opening, and the longer the exchange dragged on, the clearer the problem became. Speed alone wouldn't fix this. They were reading the start of each movement and slipping away before the blade could follow through, leaving him to cut through the spaces they had already abandoned.
The only thing keeping the exchange from becoming a complete waste was that the flaming blade worked a lot like his charged trident throw. Unfortunately, the energy was already locked in as well, which meant he couldn't pull it back just because the targets refused to cooperate. Until he released the spell or found something worth hitting, he was stuck carrying around a very expensive attack.
---
"Huff... huff..."
The second Nascent Soul cultivator leading the Treasurefall ambush stopped in midair and bent forward with his hands on his knees, dragging air into his lungs.
As a spell cultivator, he wasn't suited for this kind of chase. Full-speed flight already drained him quickly, and the repeated bursts of acceleration and sudden changes in direction had pushed the strain much further than it should've gone. He had kept it up for several minutes while trying to stay ahead of that monstrous child, and the damage was no longer something he could ignore.
Several of his meridians ached from the repeated bursts, but the pain in his soul worried him more. It sat deep, carrying the familiar warning of an injury that wouldn't heal on its own. Without a proper closed-door retreat, he might never fully recover, and even if he secluded himself for several years, there was no guarantee the damage wouldn't remain.
The thought made his breathing turn rougher.
A few years might not mean much to the young, but at his cultivation level, every year carried weight. Closed-door cultivation wasn't a simple rest. It could take a chunk out of his remaining life and give him nothing back, especially if the retreat was spent healing damage instead of pursuing a breakthrough.
This entire operation had looked clean on paper.
The Ji family had paid 10,000 mid-grade spirit stones for the job, which was the kind of money that made elders overlook plenty of inconvenient questions. They also hadn't simply thrown the task at Treasurefall and expected results. They had supplied the target information, the ambush layout, and even the talismans and treasures needed to make the plan work. Treasurefall only had to provide the people. They would wear their own sect robes, bring along three Core Formation disciples as backup, and approach the Skyborne cultivators as fellow travelers until they found an opening to strike.
Without that information advantage, two mid-stage Nascent Soul cultivators couldn't have expected much against a late-stage Nascent Soul escort from Skyborne Sect, not in a fair fight. With the Ji family's preparations, though, the operation had looked solid from every angle Treasurefall's leadership had bothered to examine.
Which made the white-haired teenager's appearance impossible to understand.
He had gone over it again and again, but none of it fit. The boy hadn't carried any clan banner he recognized, his cultivation method hadn't matched anything in his memory, and the flaming sword he'd extended to more than a hundred meters in only a few breaths wasn't something an ordinary cultivator could do. It was as if the boy had looked at spiritual roots, and decided the rule couldn't apply to him.
The elder suspected he would need a long stretch of quiet meditation once he got home, assuming he still had a home to return to. Being chased around the sky by a boy who looked like he should still be lining up for a sect's junior exams had shaken him badly, and he wasn't sure how long it would take to put his worldview back together.
When he glanced toward the rest of his group, he found nothing reassuring. Without his support, the broad-shouldered body cultivator had been forced into a slow, grinding fight against the strange teenager and the injured Skyborne escort, while his two remaining disciples only held a slight edge over the younger Skyborne cultivators. That edge wasn't turning into a victory either. The Skyborne juniors weren't trying to win anymore, only to survive, and they covered each other so tightly that every attempt to separate them failed before it could go anywhere.
The elder's thoughts turned toward retreat. There was no path back into Treasurefall after this, but the Eastern Territories were vast, and a man who stopped caring about status could still vanish into them. Some forgettable mortal city in a remote corner could hide him for ten or twenty years, especially with mortal fortune pressing down over the area and making any search far more troublesome than it should have been. It wouldn't be a glorious life, but glory couldn't help him if he died here.
More importantly, the boy's attention was starting to drift. His body language no longer had the same sharp focus from earlier, and it looked like he was preparing to switch targets. He didn't waste the chance. While his mind raced through possible escape routes, his hands were already moving, pulling several mid-grade spirit stones from storage and drawing their energy into his body.
---
Alexei was already preparing to switch targets. At his current speed, his remaining spiritual energy would only last another two minutes at most, and the old man didn't look like he had much left either.
He gave the chase another minute. If that didn't produce results, he would change plans. He always found something else.
The elder cursed under his breath. So the brat had decided an exhausted old man was easier prey. He'd already accepted that retreat was his only realistic option, and there was no point circling the battlefield any longer. He broke away at his highest speed and flew for the horizon.
Alexei followed close behind, and the heat from his pursuit rolled over the elder's back. Sweat dried as soon as it formed. The elder kept weaving through the sky, forcing himself through sharper and sharper turns as the gap refused to widen, but every dodge felt tighter than the last and every glance back told him the brat was still there.
The heat behind him began to thin, but the elder didn't slow down. He kept flying at full speed, expecting the pressure to surge back the instant he relaxed, yet the burning weight on his back only continued to recede. By the time the air no longer scorched his lungs with every breath, his eyes were stinging with relief.
"...Huh?"
Somewhere during his escape, a woman had appeared in his path.
She wore a veil, and her composed posture made her look out of place. The worst part was that he couldn't sense anything from her. She might as well have been an ordinary mortal, but anyone who could appear here without him noticing couldn't possibly be ordinary.
His eyes dropped to her clothes, and even with his thoughts barely holding together, he understood what he was looking at.
She was the boy's guardian, and she was standing in the only path he had left.
From the way she faced him, she hadn't come to chase him. She had been waiting for him to run this way.
It is over, he thought.
---
Back on the main battlefield, the two original groups were still fighting while Alexei chased the elder around the horizon, but the fight hadn't stayed clean. Heat kept rising over the clearing, and the growing light above them drew people's eyes upward, breaking their focus whenever they could least afford it.
The broad-shouldered cultivator noticed Alexei first. The white-haired teenager was already coming back, faster than before, and the sight of him cutting through the air toward the battlefield made the man's instincts take over before he could think through what was happening. He turned and fled.
The two remaining Treasurefall disciples saw him run and understood why almost at once. From the angle of Alexei's approach, he was coming straight for their side.
That realization cleared the last of the haze from their minds. They broke away from their opponents and tried to rush toward the two Skyborne cultivators they had been fighting, hoping to use them as cover, hostages, or anything else that might slow Alexei down. The problem was that the Skyborne cultivators had already pulled 500 meters away, and both of them were retreating toward Alexei.
Chasing after them would mean flying straight toward the same white-haired teenager, and neither Treasurefall disciple could force himself to do that, so they fled in the opposite direction instead.
They pushed their flying swords as hard as they could, but the gap kept shrinking. Their sword-flight speed wasn't even a third of his, and within seconds, the distance had already dropped to 300 meters.
The roar of flame reached them from behind, and when one of the fleeing cultivators glanced back, he saw Alexei raise the burning sword high over his head.
Fire streamed from the blade in a long orange trail, painting a line across the sky as it moved. Then, as the sword started to come down, the ground beneath Alexei answered with a deep rumble. Clods of earth and shattered stone tore free and surged upward, covering the blade from hilt to tip. In the span of a breath, the burning weapon was wrapped in a jagged shell of rock shot through with molten cracks, as if the sword itself had turned into a slab of magma dragged straight out of a volcano.
"Ultra Flame Fist."
The sword came down.
The instant it fell, the rocky shell around the blade broke apart and a pillar of flame burst free from within it. Fire and blasted earth erupted forward together. A towering wall of flame rushed toward the two fleeing cultivators, and mixed into it were chunks of broken earth glowing red at the edges, thrown outward with such force that they tore through the air like meteor fragments. The whole attack was more than a hundred meters tall and moving far faster than the two of them could hope to escape.
Heat slammed into them before they could fully turn. The air twisted in front of their faces, their robes snapped wildly in the violent wind, and by the time they looked back, the fire had already swallowed everything behind them. Between the surging flames and the exploding spray of burning earth, all they could see was a blazing wave rolling over the clearing.
"What did either of us do to deserve this?" one of them asked.
BOOOOM.
The flames swallowed both cultivators whole. The wall of fire kept driving forward, and the eruption of shattered earth went with it, spraying outward and crashing across the clearing in every direction. The farther the attack traveled, the more it spread, until more than a kilometer past the point of impact it had swollen into a massive surge of fire nearly eight hundred meters tall and over three hundred meters wide.
Only then did it burst outward completely, filling the sky with searing light as fire and molten debris scattered across the horizon.
What remained afterward was a long scar burned into the clearing. The ground had turned black from end to end, with broken ridges of scorched earth jutting up where the blast had torn through. Smoke rose from the surface, and faint orange embers still clung to the places that hadn't been incinerated.
Alexei lowered the blade as the last traces of the spell faded from its edge.
"Now that felt good," he said, rolling his shoulders while checking what was left of his spiritual energy. "So this is what fighting with spells feels like."
What was left, unfortunately, was nothing.
"Bit pricey, though."