Chapter 134: The Winter's Judgment and the Wolf's Throat
The immense War Room of the Morningstar Floating Citadel was plunged into a heavy and suffocating tactical gloom. The only source of illumination in the vast circular chamber was the intense, pulsing, cold blue glow of a colossal three-dimensional holographic map floating majestically a meter above the massive black obsidian table.
In the center of that solid light projection, a massive, blinking red dot the size of a coin stained the map of the vast desert. It was the Leviathan Battleship. It was less than twelve hours away, moving relentlessly south like a thick, dark ink stain spilled over immaculate parchment.
The air inside the room was dense. It smelled strongly of burnt ozone, the static tension of hundreds of arrays operating at the limit of their capacity, and the unmistakable cold sweat of generals who knew the end of the world was knocking at their door.
Kael Morningstar, dressed only in his combat pants and with his scaly torso exposed, sat slouching. His heavy armored boots were crossed and resting shamelessly upon the immaculate surface of the imperial obsidian table—an absolute disrespect for martial protocol that, within those walls, only he permitted himself.
He broke the grave silence of the room by taking a loud, crisp bite of a red apple. He chewed slowly, swallowed, and pointed the rest of the fruit toward the head of the table.
"Boss, I'm going to play devil's advocate for a minute," Kael said, pointing his chin at the hologram of the gigantic enemy ship. "Ever since you came out of that Cultivation Pavilion after devouring those old men, your aura... makes no fucking sense anymore. I don't know exactly what realm or power level you're at right now, nor do I give a shit about the official nomenclature, but it feels different. Before, you were a lethal warrior. Now... now it feels like you're looking at the whole world from the unreachable peak of a mountain, moving pieces on the board like an absolute Grandmaster while the rest of us try to understand the rules of the game."
Kael lowered his feet from the table. The thud of his boots against the stone floor echoed loudly, and his face lost any trace of relaxation, adopting the ferocity of a predator.
"You could just fly up there right now. You could transform into that primordial monstrosity of yours, unsheathe that soul-devouring sword, and split that fucking toy boat into two smoking halves before its engineers even have time to load their cannons. You are capable of doing it. So... why the hell are you making us dig trenches, establish bottlenecks, and reinforce walls as if we were a bunch of frightened mortals preparing for a classic siege?"
Samael Morningstar, sitting at the head of the table in his imposing high-backed chair, looked at him. His unfathomable eyes, where galactic violet merged with rings of deep crimson, showed no offense at the tactical questioning.
No one in that immense room—not Kael, not Violeta, not the Founding Elders, not even Seraphina—knew with exact and mathematical certainty that Samael's true, effective combat power now brushed against, or possibly exceeded, that of a Stage 1 Great Saint. Not even Samael himself knew exactly what apocalyptic level of devastation he would reach if he unleashed the entirety of his latent power, his Supreme Laws, and his primordial blood all at once. To them, he had become a mysterious god, a bottomless well.
"Uncontrolled brute force is not synonymous with absolute victory, Kael," Samael replied with a terrifying calm, his deep voice resonating off the obsidian walls. "It is the resort of brainless beasts."
Samael stood up slowly. As he did, the illumination from the hologram interacted with his immense presence, and his shadow seemed to elongate supernaturally on the curved wall behind him, fleetingly but undeniably projecting the colossal, jagged, and horned silhouette of a Primordial Dragon spreading its wings.
"That five-kilometer ship, no matter how many runic annihilation cannons are mounted on its hull, is not the real problem. Indeed, I could destroy it with a single finger and a thought of the Void Law." Samael raised his gloved hand and pointed to three tiny, blindingly blue lights orbiting just above the hologram of the Battleship. "The problem, the true and only threat to our existence today, are the Three Supreme Ice Judges."
Samael rested both hands on the edges of the strategy table. The immense passive pressure of his physical strength caused the unbreakable obsidian to creak and crack slightly beneath his palms.
"They are Great Saints. The exact stage of their cultivation is a fucking, zealously guarded mystery of the Cryon family, but we know they have parasitically linked their spiritual cores and their meridian networks to the central energy array of the Leviathan Battleship. If I do something as stupid as attacking the ship directly from the sky with a massive annihilation technique, they, with their millennial experience, will use the colossal kinetic and magical energy of my own impact to redirect it downward, like a concave mirror."
Samael looked each of his commanders in the eyes.
"If I destroy the ship in the stratosphere, the immense thermonuclear shockwave and the resulting Qi explosion will fall like a meteor shower and erase our Citadel, the Valley, and every single one of the three thousand members of this family inside. I simply cannot project an omnipotent shield to protect three thousand people from the fury of a supernova while simultaneously fighting and killing three immortal monsters hand-to-hand. I need to isolate them."
Samael's violet eyes shone with a bloodthirsty cunning.
"I need you, my commanders, to be the immovable anvil. Make those arrogant aristocrats come down from their clouds. Make the infantry and the Judges set foot in our city and get muddy. Physically separate them from their ship's array. Take away their Heaven Grade toy... and then, only then, will I be the fucking hammer that crushes them against the steel."
Xylia (Sequence 5, The Empress of Thunder) took a decisive step forward, understanding the asymmetry of the battlefield instantly. Her luminous electric eyes shone with thousands of cold, lethal tactical calculations.
"Then, the general defense plan is 'The Wolf's Throat,'" Xylia declared, rapidly manipulating the three-dimensional map with her agile fingers, zooming in on the internal architecture of the Morningstar Citadel. "Cedric will overload the barrier of the Aegis of the Twelve Golden Dragons using the mountains of Saint Grade crystals we just stole from the Valois as fuel. The barrier will withstand the first shot from the Leviathan's main cannon. Seeing that they cannot evaporate us in a single shot from orbit will make them erroneously believe that we are a frightened turtle permanently hiding in its shell, and it will force them out of pride to descend and send their troops for a physical, bloody boarding."
Xylia pointed to the immense, intricate, and dark labyrinthine obsidian corridors, the wide interior courtyards, and the plazas of the Citadel.
"And when those fifty thousand ice bastards enter and cross our outer walls... we will turn the streets of our own city into a colossal meat grinder. We will process their bodies as if we were preparing fifty tons of raw meat for a feast."
She pointed to specific spots on the map that blinked in toxic green.
"Tamsin, with his black feather fan, and Altair, with his entropy, will saturate the immense ventilation shafts and the alleys of the lower levels. We will strangle them in close quarters. If the northern foot soldiers make the mistake of breathing our air, their lungs will wither and die."
Then, Xylia moved her hand toward the great entrance arches.
"Draven, with his immovable shield, and Cedric's mobile arrays will block and collapse the main corridors, establishing geographical bottlenecks, forcing their immense battalions to divide into small, manageable groups, cutting off their communication."
Xylia looked at the group's assassins.
"And while they are disoriented and separated... Kael, Violeta, and Eris, like specters, will slip through the shadows and hunt down their captains and field commanders one by one, cutting off the snake's head. If they try to fight on our terms, in the labyrinth we ourselves have built, their fifty-thousand-man advantage won't matter at all. The wolf's throat will close on them."
Cedric (Sequence 4) nodded stiffly. His hands encased in the thick gauntlets trembled slightly—a byproduct of the brutal spiritual and physical exhaustion after going three days and three uninterrupted nights without sleeping or eating, simply drinking elixirs to stay awake while reinforcing thousands of defense arrays. But despite the extreme fatigue, the smile that split his face was manic, unhinged, and deeply proud.
"I have modified every single one of the heavy Runic Cannons on the siege walls, Boss," Cedric reported, his gray eyes shining with engineering madness. "I changed the ignition conduits. They no longer fire those stupid, slow, and predictable fireballs or wind gusts. They fire pure, concentrated Reverse Gravity Spears. I have altered the friction and the mass of the impact. If we score a direct hit against their beautiful escort frigates, we won't burn them; we'll crush them against their own structural weight. We'll twist them in the air as if they were fucking empty copper cans."
Samael listened to the symphony of destruction his heirs had orchestrated. He smiled—a predatory, dark, and deeply pleased grimace that slightly exposed the edge of his white fangs.
"Excellent. A plan worthy of generals," Samael concluded. "Corner them mentally. Make them firmly believe we are terrified, praying behind our walls. And when they stick their heads into the wolf's mouth believing they're going to devour us... snap the fucking jaws shut and rip out their jugulars."
With the war machine in motion and the continent's fate sealed, Samael left the somber War Room and walked alone toward the upper levels, entering the Hanging Gardens of the Inner Palace.
He needed to see her. He needed to anchor his soul to something real and beautiful before the sky broke into pieces and blood covered everything.
The private garden was protected by an immense, delicate spherical thermal barrier, meticulously designed by Cedric, which kept the agonizing night cold of the desert (and the immense altitude of the citadel) completely out. Inside the dome, the atmosphere was spring-like and warm, creating an enclosed paradise of blooming cherry trees, small bubbling streams of crystalline water, and silky-soft emerald grass.
There, sitting peacefully on the grass beneath a shower of pink petals, was Seraphina.
Her appearance had changed drastically and forever after consuming the mythical Tear of the Winter Goddess. Her hair, formerly a dark, silky jet-black, was now a beautiful, long, and resplendent cascade of silver with subtle bluish sparkles that shone with their own light under the pale moonlight filtering through the dome.
Physically, she radiated the immense, overwhelming, oppressive power of a Consummated Stage 5 Saint, but her presence, her posture, and the way the air seemed to bow around her felt much denser, older, and deeply regal. She was the living reincarnation of an extinct stellar empire.
But the majesty of the Eternal Lotus Empress took a backseat to the scene unfolding in her lap.
Cradled tenderly amid the silks of her ancient dress, a chubby baby girl of barely two months was laughing and playing with something that, under all the laws of physics and mortal cultivation, simply shouldn't exist or be possible.
Celeste Morningstar.
The girl looked up upon hearing Samael's heavy approaching footsteps. Physically, she was a living miracle. She possessed a crown of soft, fine hair of an unusual silver-blue color. But the most hypnotic and disturbing feature of her small face was her mismatched eyes.
Her left eye was a deep, absolute, frigid blue—cold and inscrutable as the indomitable core of a millennial glacier, inherited directly from her mother's Supreme Yin Lotus. Her right eye, in a terrifying contrast, was a bright, unfathomable, predatory galactic violet—the exact and perfect mirror of her father's primordial Void Law.
In her tiny, soft, chubby hands, baby Celeste held a perfect, condensed sphere of pure black Void Qi—an unstable dimensional aberration. Any normal master cultivator on the continent would have lost their hand, arm, and possibly their life trying to even touch that condensation of pure destructive nothingness; Celeste, however, laughed with crystalline giggles and molded it, squished it, and stretched it between her little fingers as if it were simply malleable black play clay.
"Da-da!" Celeste exclaimed upon seeing him, raising her little arms.
Her childish voice was clear, immensely sweet and melodic, but it possessed a strange residual resonance; a dull echo that caused the molecules of three-dimensional space around her to vibrate slightly every time she articulated a word, as if reality itself had to adjust to make room for her voice.
Samael smiled with a tenderness that the whole world believed was foreign to him. He knelt heavily on the grass in front of his wife and daughter, feeling all the crushing tactical tension of the impending war, the stress of the arrays, and the weight of his army's lives dissolve instantly from his shoulders.
"Hello, my beautiful little catastrophe," Samael murmured, caressing the baby's soft cheek with the back of his gloved finger.
Celeste reached her little hand toward her father's armored chest. As she did, the sphere of pure black void she held did not explode; it simply dissolved harmoniously, melting and being reabsorbed through the girl's skin without leaving a trace or causing harm.
The little one furrowed her tiny brow, turned her silver-haired little head, and pointed her index finger directly at the dark sky beyond the garden's protective dome.
"Ugly... boat," Celeste decreed. Her adorable, chubby features were marked by a pout of disgust, but her bicolor eyes suddenly shone with an intelligence and spatial comprehension terrifyingly improper for an infant of mere months. "Celeste... break?"
Samael felt a true, genuine shiver of pure astonishment run down his spine, from the nape of his neck to the base of his back.
The girl, at her scant two months of chronological age, could telepathically and spatially sense the colossal, immense threat of death approaching from hundreds of kilometers away. Samael remembered that, in this brutal world of cultivation, she was not a normal infant; she had been born from the union of two genetic monsters, gestated with the foundation of an already formed and pulsing Qi Sea Realm inside her, even though Samael had protectively sealed it to prevent her tiny body from collapsing.
Intrigued by the anomaly and the girl's comment, Samael made an impulsive decision. He decided to activate a secret, omniscient function of the Imperial System that he had not touched a single time since he unlocked the crown upon formally founding the empire—an analytical function almost forgotten due to the frenzy of war and constant survival.
"System," Samael ordered mentally. "Immediately activate the Destiny Aura Vision on this target."
[IMPERIAL SYSTEM: COMMAND RECOGNIZED. ACTIVATING THE EYE OF ABSOLUTE DESTINY...]
Reality faded from Samael's retina once again, replaced by the causal tapestry of souls.
Samael looked down at his smiling daughter playing in Seraphina's lap. Honestly, he expected to see a dazzling, immense aura of pure gold around her, denoting a "Transcendent Hero" destiny, or perhaps an aura burning in violent, vivid red of a "Continent Conqueror," or, at best, given her mother's heritage, a brilliant, infinite blue aura of "Divine/Celestial" bloodline.
What his dragon eyes actually saw left him completely paralyzed, freezing the air in his own lungs.
Around Celeste's small physical body, there was absolutely no recognizable color in the palette of universal destiny. There were no golden, red, or blue threads.
What was slowly spinning around the baby was an immense, dense, silent Black Hole.
It was an aura of absolute darkness, opaque and hungry, relentlessly devouring the starlight, probabilities, and pre-written destiny of all other beings around her. Before Samael's horrified and awestruck eyes, the infinite, unbreakable luminous lines of the future—the thread of causality that dictated the laws of physics and luck—were literally snapping, violently breaking and twisting in agony as they tried to touch her. Where she stepped, where she existed, the pre-established, sacred "script" of the universe was simply erased, leaving a terrifying blank page.
The System panel exploded with opaque black letters bordered by silver frost.
[KARMIC TARGET ANALYSIS: CELESTE MORNINGSTAR.]
[Classified Destiny Type:] BLACK (THE RULE BREAKER / CONCEPTUAL ANOMALY).
[Absolute Description:] An impossible being who is not, and never will be, registered in the immortal pages of the Book of Life and Death. Her future is not written by the Fates nor dictated by the Heavens. She is the categorical end of all known prophecies. Her very biological existence is a mathematical and conceptual paradox that the engine of this System simply cannot process or calculate with precision.
[Estimated Evolution Potential:] Infinite / World-Destroying Calamity Level.
"She is... she is absolutely terrifying," Samael whispered in a raspy voice, blinking and hurriedly deactivating the cosmic vision before his own eyeballs bled and his head exploded from the massive overload of quantum information.
Seraphina smiled upon hearing him. It was a warm, purely maternal, and loving smile—a soft expression that achieved the titanic task of completely melting and disguising her new, overwhelming imperial coldness.
"She has exactly your destructive and insolent temperament, Samael," Seraphina commented, stroking the girl's silver hair. "Yesterday afternoon she sneezed with a bit of force and accidentally disintegrated an immense basalt stone table on the east terrace. Violeta and I quickly had to tell her it was all a 'fun visual magic trick' so she wouldn't get scared by the noise and start crying."
Samael swallowed hard, processing the mental image of his daughter accidentally erasing furniture, and sat heavily on the soft grass next to his wife. He placed his immense, warm hand over hers, intertwining their fingers, feeling the comforting, piercing divine cold emanating from Seraphina's skin.
The imminence of the massacre that would take place at dawn returned to his mind.
"Sera..." Samael began, his voice adopting a vulnerability that no one else in the nine continents would ever hear. "If for some reason fate twists, if Cedric's calculations fail, or if something goes irremediably wrong tomorrow against those three immortal ice monsters..."
"Nothing will go wrong, my love," Seraphina cut him off immediately, her voice firm and sharp as the edge of a frost guillotine. Her beautiful moon eyes and silver rings shone with the unyielding hardness of cold steel. "We will annihilate them. Because now, Samael... now I have not one, but three immense and powerful biological reasons to keep breathing and massacre whoever crosses our path."
Samael blinked, his tactical brain coming to a dead stop, confused by the emotional math.
"Three reasons?" he asked slowly. "Celeste... and what else?"
Seraphina did not answer with words. She firmly grasped Samael's gloved hand and, with a slowness that felt like an eternity, guided it gently from her own hand until it rested flat and open on her lower abdomen, just above the silks of her dress.
Samael tensed instinctively, as if he had touched fire. At his woman's invitation, he closed his eyes and subtly pushed a microscopic thread of his immense spiritual perception and life Qi into his wife's body, carefully piercing through the Matriarch's unfathomable, lethal layers of energy.
There, in the deepest and most protected recesses of Seraphina's spiritual womb—surrounded, enveloped, and zealously guarded by massive layers of impenetrable divine ice and roaring rings of primordial dragon fire spinning in perfect symbiosis—Samael's perception collided with something wondrous.
He felt two presences. Two tiny, brilliant, and wild sparks of pure life energy.
Thump-Thump. Thump-Thump.
Two little heartbeats. Completely out of sync, but rhythmic. Fast. Incredibly strong, vibrant, and brimming with the genetic fury of Morningstar blood.
"Twins," Seraphina whispered, her voice breaking into a thread as thick, hot, and happy human tears flooded her divine moon eyes and rolled freely down her cheeks. "Ancient cultivators of our current power level almost never manage to conceive new life... their bloodlines are too dense, too destructive, and opposing to create something fragile. It is an absolute cosmic miracle, Samael. A gift of life."
Samael felt a brutal, uncontrollable tightness in the center of his chest. His dragon heart galloped.
But it wasn't the tightness of fear of battle, nor the stress of war. It was the weight of a responsibility so immensely great, crushing, and sacred that it could have pulverized entire mountains. The revelation did not soften him; on the contrary, it ignited the furnace of absolute protection within his soul. The slightest possibility of losing what he had just touched transmuted his combat instinct into an apocalyptic fury.
"Daughters..." Samael murmured, his violet eyes clouding over as he looked at Seraphina's belly with religious reverence.
The Dragon King leaned in slowly and kissed Seraphina's cold lips with deep passion, transmitting all his love and protective wrath to her. Then, he lowered his face and tenderly kissed Celeste's soft silver forehead, who laughed, oblivious to the war.
Samael stood up slowly. His aura was no longer that of a human king; it was the incarnate tyranny of the abyss.
"I swear by every drop of my blood, and by the very darkness of the Void," Samael decreed, his voice resonating in the garden like a blood oath the entire universe was forced to register, "that that damned scrap ship will not touch a single grain of sand on the soil of this city."
At dawn the next day, the world woke up sick.
The sky over the usually burning and sunny Dragon Bone Desert suddenly turned a macabre, unnatural lead-gray color. A polar, piercing, and hostile cold swept the sand dunes, freezing the cacti and the sparse moisture in the air.
In the distance, breaking the line of the northern horizon, the Cryon Family's colossal Annihilation Fleet had officially entered visual range.
In the immense, polished central obsidian Great Plaza of the Morningstar Citadel, the 3,000 members of the clan—from the rank-and-file disciples to the elite guard—were formed in militarily perfect rows.
Despite the overwhelming fifty-to-one numerical inferiority, not a single molecule of fear was breathed among the southern troops. What floated in the air was a heavy, tense silence; the deadly silence of starving, cornered wolves just a second before lunging at their prey's throat.
Samael Morningstar climbed the stone steps of the grand command dais with a firm stride. The furious artificial wind of the approaching storm violently whipped his immense, heavy black and gold cloak behind him.
Flanking him to his left and right, standing at attention with their lethal High Earth Grade weapons unsheathed and thirsty, were his generals: Kael, Violeta, Eris, Cedric, and Altair. On his right side, projecting an inscrutable power, stood Lilith, the gray fire phoenix, and the newly crowned Empress Seraphina, her ice dress shimmering in the pale light.
Samael rested his gloved hands on the railing of the dais and swept his predatory gaze over the three thousand souls that made up his empire. In the front row of the infantry, he saw the wrinkled, weathered faces of the six Founding Elders. The old wolves had tears of pure pride and ferocity running down their cheeks as they silently beheld the formidable, invincible, and lethal war machine that this pathetic group of ragged exiles had metamorphosed into.
"Exactly two years ago!" Samael began to speak. He didn't shout, but he didn't need to; his voice, imbued with Dragon Qi and magically amplified by the plaza's acoustic arrays, boomed like thunder in the chest of every man and woman present.
"Barely two years ago, we, the Morningstars, were eating fucking poisonous roots and rotting meat in a damned, cold, dark, and damp cave. We crawled in the mud. We hid in terror from the sunlight. We were expendable trash. Geographical mistakes."
Samael raised his right arm, covered in obsidian, and pointed dramatically toward the dark, turbulent northern sky.
There, slowly piercing the thick bank of storm clouds like the tip of a divine spear, the massive, black, oppressive silhouette of the Leviathan Battleship began to reveal itself in all its apocalyptic glory. It was so immensely huge, forged of dark metal and eternal ice, that its mere physical presence in the atmosphere completely blocked the rays of the morning sun, plunging the entire Citadel and surrounding desert into an artificial, terrifying eclipse.
"And today, a continental enemy with the largest army we have ever faced comes marching toward us again!" Samael continued, his voice rising in a crescendo of controlled fury. "But listen to me well... They do not come all this way, mobilizing their mountains of iron and crossing thousands of kilometers, because we are weak or insignificant!"
Samael paused dramatically, letting the roar of the enemy fleet's engines serve as background music for his words.
"They come to our doors, armed to the teeth, solely and exclusively because they are terrified of us! They come because deep down in their cowardly aristocratic hearts they know, with absolute mathematical certainty, that if they make the mistake of letting us live, breathe, and grow in this sand for one more year... it will be us going to their palaces to slit their throats and burn their thrones!"
Samael violently unsheathed Kurohime. The metallic howl of the Saint Grade sword split the air. The enormous golden eye on the hilt swiveled frantically, dilating as it sensed the immense amount of fresh souls approaching from the sky.
"TODAY WE DO NOT DEFEND!" Samael roared, aiming the bloodied black blade directly at the Leviathan's belly. "TODAY WE DO NOT HIDE BEHIND THE STONES! TODAY WE TEACH THE ENTIRE FUCKING WORLD A LESSON!"
The entire plaza held its breath, fanaticism injected into their veins.
"Let every bastard who looks south know, today and forever, that the Morningstar name is written with the fresh blood of Saints!"
"BLOOD AND VOID!" shouted the twenty-one lethal Sequences stationed on the dais in unison. The furor of battle consumed them, and without warning, they partially and monstrously transformed their bodies; scales, horns, black fire, lightning, and mists of entropy erupted on the main tribune, demonstrating their Semi-Dragon bloodline.
"BLOOD AND VOID!" roared the entire clan, three thousand human and savage voices fusing into a single, colossal, unbreakable war cry that shook the plaza's obsidian and defied the heavens themselves.
The proud war roar of the Morningstar Clan was answered almost immediately by an immensely deeper, artificial, and deafening acoustic sound.
BRUUUUUUUUUUUUUM.
The entire sky over the arid desert literally split in two, the gray clouds violently pushed and swept aside.
The Leviathan Battleship fully emerged from atmospheric cover, revealing its true, horrifying form. It wasn't a simple flying ship made of magic wood; it was a colossal, intimidating flying siege city over five kilometers long, armored in stellar steel and glaciers of imperishable blue ice. Along its immense black underbelly, hundreds of thick, lethal runic heavy artillery cannons slowly protruded, aiming downward, locking their coordinates of extermination directly upon the Citadel.
Around it, buzzing like armored, lethal wasps, five massive fast escort frigates orbited in a perfect defensive pattern.
On the exposed bow of the battleship's immense main deck, oblivious to the deadly cold and hurricane-force winds of the altitude, three humanoid figures stood, radiating a passive power so colossal, crushing, and unstable that it caused the fabric of reality around them to tremble and distort.
They were the legendary executioners of the empire. The Three Supreme Ice Judges.
Judge Alpha (The Executioner): In the center, an unnaturally tall man, thin as a skeleton, dressed in a robe of black ice plates. He held an immense scythe in both hands, its blade made of a dark glacier that devoured sunlight.
Judge Beta (The Wall of Agony): To his left, a gigantic colossus almost three meters tall. No skin or face could be seen; he was encased in full, impenetrable armor of diamond and magic ice, carrying a siege hammer the size of a carriage.
Judge Gamma (The Witch of Cold): To the right, a cadaverous woman who did not touch the deck, floating half a meter above the ground. She was surrounded by a perpetual storm of seven condensed frost orbs spinning at supersonic speeds, protecting her and hissing lethally.
The three monsters radiated, without the slightest effort, the devastating and unmistakable power of a Stage 2 Great Saint (Perfection). The pure, crushing, combined passive pressure of their breathing and their joint Qi, emanating from five kilometers high, was so absurdly dense that it caused an unreal geological phenomenon: the soft desert sand, far below the Floating Citadel, instantly began to melt and crystallize into sheets of brittle glass due to the invisible pressure.
Judge Alpha's voice was amplified through a sonic array in the ship's hull. It resonated in the sky, coming down like the final judgment: cold, absolutely mechanical, devoid of any hint of human emotion or pity.
"Samael Morningstar," the Judge's divine voice decreed, filling the horizon. "For the unpardonable crimes of heresy, murder, pillaging, and armed rebellion against the sovereignty of the Fifth Family, the illustrious House of Cryon, High Command sentences you and all your descendants to immediate and absolute extinction. Surrender control of the Citadel right now, kneel, deactivate your defenses, and we will guarantee you the mercy of a quick and painless death. If you choose to resist... we will purge your rotten bloodline from the annals of existence through slow fire and ice."
Below, in the plaza, the answer was not silence, nor panic, nor murmurs of doubt.
Samael Morningstar, with a casual push of his boots, floated majestically upward, alone, passing through and exiting the protection of the Citadel's immense barrier.
Samael ascended hundreds of meters until he stopped, floating before the colossal, apocalyptic, immense fleet. Compared to the tectonic mass of the five-kilometer ship and the power of three Great Saints, Samael was just a tiny black dot silhouetted against a mountain of blue ice.
But the black dot smiled. A lopsided, mocking smile laden with cruelty.
"Extinction?" Samael asked, his voice projecting with crystalline clarity toward the deck of the enemy ship. "What a quaint word for walking corpses."
Samael, without taking his eyes off the Judges and still smiling, lazily raised his left hand toward the sky and issued a short command through his Blood Link to the citadel beneath his feet.
"Cedric. Fire at will."
At the precise instant the word left his lips, the morning silence shattered.
From the tall, massive perimeter defensive towers of the Floating Citadel, the immense siege Runic Cannons—which had been exhaustively reprogrammed, mechanically modified, and altered by Cedric over sleepless days—roared to life. The gigantic muzzles of the cannons shone intensely... but not with the predictable orange of fire or white of ice. The runes ignited with a terrifying, deep, dark Gravitational Purple.
"FIRE!" Cedric's euphoric shriek could be heard from the artillery control room.
ZWONG! ZWONG! ZWONG!
The sound of the shots wasn't a gunpowder explosion; it was the crunch of space being compressed. Ten gigantic, flawless beams of solid purple light shot into the sky at the speed of light.
Demonstrating brilliant tactical cunning, the purple beams completely ignored the thick, heavily shielded, impregnable hull of the immense Leviathan Battleship. Instead, the shots traced impossible parabolic curves in the air and struck with millimetric precision the flanks of the five fast escort frigates orbiting the flagship.
There was no gigantic initial fireball upon impact. The attack wasn't thermal; it was pure, ruthless physics applied in mid-air.
The five frigates, composed of thousands of tons of steel, magic wood, cannons, and hundreds of crew members, were suddenly caught, boxed in, and submerged in the exact center of immense, invisible wells of concentrated gravity, artificially multiplied by a hundred.
The effect was immediate, devastating, and horrifyingly graphic. The ships' super-resistant metal shrieked and groaned like tortured animals. The sturdy hulls of the frigates didn't explode; they dented and folded in on themselves, collapsing inward under astronomical pressure. The watchtowers were crushed against the decks. The immense Qi propulsion engines, unable to withstand the massive compression of the space containing them, suffered critical meltdowns and blew out from the inside.
CRASH! CRASH! CRAAAASH!
It was a spectacle of perfect industrial annihilation. In exactly ten agonizing, noisy seconds, the glorious Northern Empire's complete and proud aerial attack escort ceased to be a majestic flight formation and literally became five spherical, crumpled, smoking cans of compacted, crushed metal. The balls of burning scrap lost lift and plummeted, raining down like meteorites of cosmic garbage toward the desert sand dunes far below. Hundreds of elite crew soldiers who weren't initially crushed to death perished, pulverized upon hitting the ground.
The silence that followed on the immense main deck of the intact Leviathan Battleship was absolute, heavy, and pregnant with disbelief.
Samael, floating calmly in the air and surrounded by the rising smoke from the fallen frigates, let out a deep, dark, and terrifying laugh that rang in the ears of the enemy infantry like a funeral bell.
"It seems you've run out of flies buzzing around you, you damned scum," Samael mocked, spreading his arms in a gesture of welcome toward the main ship. "Come here and get me, illustrious and almighty Judges. I'm waiting for you."
The initial stupor and disbelief on the Leviathan's bow suddenly transformed into the homicidal, blind fury of a wounded god. Judge Alpha's cadaverous face deformed into a grimace of rage, gripping the handle of his scythe until his own gauntlets cracked.
"Artillery! To hell with capture and dissection!" Judge Alpha roared through the communicator, completely losing the clinical composure Viktor demanded of him. "Align the Main Cannon! Fire at will! Evaporate the city! Erase these rats from existence right now!"
In the gigantic dark belly of the flying battleship, the massive stellar steel armor plates screeched open. From the internal chamber emerged the weapon of mass destruction that had subjugated entire kingdoms and leveled mountain ranges for centuries. The legendary central cannon, grimly christened "Shiva's Breath," aimed its immense, dark, five-meter-diameter muzzle directly and mercilessly at the exact center of the Morningstar Citadel.
The apocalyptic weapon began to absorb the energy and moisture from the environment in a deafening vortex, igniting and charging its core with a dazzling, intense, concentrated blue and white light; a beam of negative thermal energy capable of mortally wounding and freezing the meridians of a Great Saint.
Samael, suspended in the air halfway between the cannon and his citadel, did not retreat, did not flinch, and, more importantly, made no effort whatsoever to try to block the attack or summon a Void wall. He kept his arms crossed behind his back, floating impassively, blindly trusting his life and his empire to the strategy drawn up in the War Room. He knew mathematically that his home's immense protective array would withstand that impact. It would withstand one. Only and exactly one, before the crystals overheated.
With a dull roar that caused the air to lose pressure and eardrums to burst, a colossal, suffocating cylindrical beam of pure ice, kinetic energy, and divine light fired from the Leviathan's belly, crossing the distance to the Citadel in a fraction of a second, coming down like the frozen fist of an angry god.
Below, in the central plaza of the besieged city, Seraphina decisively raised both hands toward the sky falling upon them.
Her immense, beautiful, deep blue eyes, with the distinctive silver ring of the ancestral deity shining intensely, focused on total control. Her new Stage 5 Saint cultivation and the infinity of her Eternal Lotus Empress body channeled the immense power from the batteries of stolen crystals directly into the city's defense core.
[Critical Defensive Formation Activated: The Aegis of the Twelve Golden Dragons.]
In response to the Empress's massive injection of pure power, the gigantic, previously translucent golden protective dome that hermetically sealed the entire Citadel reacted. It flared violently, ceasing to be a simple energy shield and becoming an unbreakable metallic silver color of solid light.
Across the immense surface of the dome, twelve colossal, detailed, and fierce projections of Golden Dragons, formed of pure Sovereign Law, materialized, swimming, intertwining, and roaring in defense of the empire.
The immense beam of "Shiva's Breath" struck directly, without obstacles, against the geometric center of the golden dome.
BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!!!
The clash of the two colossal energies shook the biological foundations of the world. The brutal shockwave from the impact swept the clouds away in a hundred-kilometer radius, creating a crater in the sky. The explosion of blue and golden light was so overwhelmingly intense and pure that it temporarily blinded the fifty thousand soldiers aboard the Battleship and the disciples on the ground, bleaching the universe for two long seconds.
When the deafening roar of the collision died down and the suffocating smoke of magical condensation and the burning glare slowly dissipated with the wind... the desert fortress was revealed.
Silence fell like a stone.
The massive, impenetrable spherical golden barrier of the Morningstar Citadel had terrifying, deep stress fissures like a spiderweb at the exact point of impact, but the structure had not yielded a single millimeter. It still stood proudly, protecting the dark obsidian towers.
The miraculous desert city had taken and survived intact the first direct, premeditated, and destructive strike from the most lethal and powerful weapon of a God of the northern empire.
But the defensive tactic did not end at surviving. Seraphina smiled coldly, her hands still raised to the sky. The Imperial System recognized the energy injected and stored in the dome by the enemy attack and executed the passive vengeance clause of the supreme defense array.
[Impact and Damage Absorption Condition Met: Executing [Roar of the Imperial Reflection].]
The twelve colossal, majestic golden dragons of solid light swimming and orbiting along the cracks in the protective dome halted their majestic flight. In perfect unison, the twelve magical beasts raised their immense horned heads toward the bow of the Leviathan Battleship and opened their abyssal maws of energy.
They had acted as sponges, swallowing and accumulating the crushing thermal, magical, and kinetic energy of the immense "Shiva's Breath" impact. And now, it was time for the karmic vomit.
With a deafening, synchronized sonic roar that tore the atmosphere and overpowered the noise of the fleet's gravitational engines, the twelve dragons simultaneously unleashed twelve massive, concentrated, hyper-dense beams of starlight, boiling Dragon Qi, and kinetic force.
The powerful automatic counterattack flew skyward at the speed of a blink. The twelve beams, collectively possessing the devastating, accumulated destructive power of twelve concentrated Saint-Level attacks launched at the same time, struck dead on, from the bottom up, against the enemy flagship's immense armored belly.
The Leviathan Battleship shuddered violently, like an immense mammal wounded by an explosive harpoon. A massive blast of golden glory, fire, and twisted metal lit up the morning sky.
The dense, magical stellar steel plates on the lower hull area could not withstand the concentrated wrath of the Aegis; they buckled, melted, and burst inward, ripping out the Main Cannon's outer chamber by the roots, causing a massive structural fire that filled the atmosphere with thick, toxic black smoke, completely and permanently disabling the immense ship's ability to fire sustained artillery barrages from the sky. The citadel had ensured there would be no second shot.
On the upper deck of the shaken, smoking Battleship, surrounded by fire and officers shouting damage containment orders, Judge Alpha clung to the glass railing of the bow. His cold pride had been replaced by the livid desperation of a commander who has just lost his main strategic advantage to a shield.
He knew the massive, slow main cannon was destroyed; engineers were screaming over the communicators that they would need hours of repairs to restabilize the annihilation artillery network.
And down there, the cracked but still-standing shield defied them, while the citadel and the insolent, annoying Morningstars continued to breathe beneath it, seemingly locked up and terrified within their own high-walled castle like rats in a golden trap.
Judge Alpha, taking the bait of "The Wolf's Throat" and yielding to his wounded pride, made the tactical decision dictated by Samael.
"Boarding!" Judge Alpha roared, his mechanical voice tearing into a strident scream of homicidal fury that echoed on every level of the five-kilometer-long ship. "The cannon is damaged! Don't let that damned golden barrier regenerate or cool down! Abandon the sky! Saturate their fucking defenses with infantry, breach their broken dome, descend, and tear them to bloody pieces hand-to-hand in their own shitty streets!"
The side hatches, launch bays, and lower deployment ramps of the entire monumental Leviathan Battleship opened simultaneously with the screech of heavy siege mechanisms unlatching.
Under the strict, furious direct order of their divine commanders, a staggering fifty thousand elite veteran shock troops belonging to the central empire's famous and feared Black Winter Legion loaded their swords, ice spears, and Qi rifles, and leapt into the blind void.
They dove from the dark sky toward the citadel. Fifty thousand armed silhouettes descending in an inexhaustible swarm, blocking out the rising sun, falling upon the roofs of the Morningstar Citadel like an apocalyptic, immense rain of murderous locusts clad in brilliant blue and silver.
The crash of the fall, the synchronized war cries of the imperial army descending upon the obsidian roofs, and the hum of unsheathed weapons marked the brutal beginning of the physical clash.
The true hand-to-hand carnage of the battle... had just begun.
(End of Chapter)