Chapter 135: The Wolf's Throat (Part 3)
While the brutal and bloodthirsty extermination of the infantry consumed the lower levels, transforming the beautiful corridors of the Floating Citadel into rivers of acid, ash, and ground flesh, the true war for the supremacy of the skies was about to erupt.
On the surface, the high-ranking officers of the Cryon army—those commanders and minor generals consolidated in the Stage 2 and 3 Saint Realm who had remained safely in the rear lines of the boarding—watched with absolute tactical horror as their fifty-thousand-man Black Winter Legion was mercilessly devoured by the geological and biological traps of the south.
They realized, with a knot of ice in their stomachs, that the ground battle, the physical boarding by brute force, was hopelessly lost. They had sent their best men into a custom-designed slaughterhouse.
"It's useless to fight in their corridors! Retreat the ground troops!" shouted one of the Cryon generals, floating ten meters above the plaza. "To the sky! The only way to stop this massacre is to cut off the head of the snake! Kill the commanders guarding the royal balconies! Take the head of their Matriarch!"
Obeying the direct order of selective annihilation, a squad of absolute elite composed of five Stage 1 Saints—the personal guards and assassins of the main Cryon family, clad in High Earth Grade ice crystal armor—broke off from the formation.
Ignoring the chaos in the streets, the five celestial cultivators unleashed their auras in unison, creating a wake of supersonic frost, and flew in a straight, vertical line toward the towering dais and main balcony of the palace, seeking to ambush Seraphina and the tactical leaders while Samael descended to the plaza to face the Three Judges.
But the elite Cryon squad never reached its destination.
Halfway through their aerial ascent, the starry, frigid sky above the citadel suffered an impossible thermodynamic fluctuation. The air became painfully freezing, suffocatingly boiling, and toxically corrupt all at the exact same time.
Three figures leapt from the upper balcony, plummeting to intercept the assassins hundreds of meters in the air.
Kael, Violeta, and Eris crashed into the formation of the five Saints in mid-air.
The first to unleash hell was Eris (Sequence 3).
She spun her immense dark spear in the air, and instantly, a roaring tornado of thick, black fire erupted around her, literally devouring the oxygen within a fifty-meter radius.
The temperature rose to volcanic levels, but the light diminished, swallowed by the dark flames.
"Are you feeling hot, you damned ice pigeons?!" Eris laughed uproariously. Her eyes glowed with a sickly red, bloodshot with absolute madness and the emotional apathy demanded of her by the Law of Destruction.
One of the five Saints, bearing a heavy silver spear and a heraldic shield of solid ice, veered from the formation to intercept Eris.
"Die, southern whore!" shouted the Cryon Saint, channeling his winter Qi to create a twenty-meter-thick frost barrier while launching a lethal thrust of compressed energy.
Eris did not dodge. She executed the [Flame of Eternal Ruin].
She projected a dense, boiling stream of fire from the tip of her spear that clashed head-on against the immense Saint Grade ice shield. The impact did not generate an explosion of water vapor. The white core of Eris's flame "bit" into the atomic structure of the enemy shield.
The Cryon Saint widened his eyes in terror upon seeing that his indestructible magic barrier was not blocking the fire; it was rotting. Eris's viscous black flame spread rapidly across the surface of the shield, feeding directly on the enemy's Qi, consuming its vital energy and using it as fuel to rot the shield from the outside in.
"What the hell is this fire?! It won't go out!" The Saint panicked, trying to drop his shield and retreat using flight.
But Eris gave him no quarter. As he fled, Eris activated the [Decaying Core Explosion].
She compressed an immense amount of ruin fire into a small sphere the size of an eye, dark and pulsing, and hurled it at the fleeing Saint. The sphere detonated ten meters away from him.
There was no traditional fireball. The shockwave unleashed an area of accelerated entropy. The impact swept the Cryon Saint into the air. In that very instant, his impeccable ice crystal armor cracked and became brittle as old paper. His flight arrays failed miserably, corrupted by the energy of decay, and the silver spear in his hand disintegrated into rust and dust in mid-air.
Unable to fly, the Cryon Saint began to fall into the void, screaming and flailing his arms.
Eris dove after him and, with a fluid flick of her wrist, released the [Ash of Oblivion].
A silent, dying cloud of ashen gray dust enveloped the enemy's body in free fall. The gray particles sought out the Saint's traces of life and meridians. The man did not burn or explode. His flesh, his bones, and his cultivation simply flaked away, crumbling into flakes of harmless ash in the night wind.
Eris landed elegantly on an obsidian gargoyle, dusting off her gray-stained hands, completely apathetic to the fact that she had just erased an immortal cultivator from existence in three seconds.
About two hundred meters to her right, in the same firmament, Violeta Morningstar was demonstrating why she was the family's Executioner.
Two of the Stage 1 Saints, having witnessed their comrade's terrifying death at Eris's hands, decided to coordinate perfectly. They wouldn't attempt close combat. From opposite sides of the sky, the two Saints conjured dozens of heavy compressed ice javelins and hurled them at Violeta, who floated in the center, crossing their shots at the speed of sound in an inescapable pincer attack.
Violeta, with her mismatched eyes shining under the moon, didn't move a single millimeter from her axis. Her face was an inscrutable mask of frost.
A millisecond away from being impaled by thirty divine projectiles, she activated the [Step Between Worlds].
Her beautiful body instantaneously "desynchronized" from physical reality. Her image phased out, creating three or four vibrating visual "echoes" of herself.
The swift, deadly ice javelins, propelled by the Qi of two Saints, passed cleanly through her chest, head, and stomach, but met no biological resistance, crossing her figure as if passing through a holographic mirage of blue static.
"It's a hologram! Watch out!" shouted one of the Saints, preparing to search for the real Violeta.
But she had never moved from there.
Deactivating her intangibility the moment the attacks passed through, Violeta instantly used the [Bridge Between Worlds].
Her physical body compressed inward in a millisecond, absorbed by a minuscule wormhole, leaving only a thin, glowing black crack in the night sky.
She appeared with a deafening crack and a shockwave in the exact spatial blind spot, right behind the two Saints, who were floating back-to-back scanning the sky.
Her passive Zero Entropy Pulse activated as she approached. The two Saints suddenly felt the air turn to frozen molasses. Their neural and physical reactions were slowed by the conceptual cold, moving in tragic slow motion as they tried to turn toward her.
Violeta didn't use grand magic formations or war cries. She held her slender rapier, wrapped in a terrifying black aura. She executed a single, fluid flick of her wrist: the [Zero Coordinate Slash].
Violeta didn't cut the flesh of her enemies. She performed a clean slash in the empty air in front of her, almost five meters away from the two Saints.
Due to her mastery over spatial laws, the "edge line" didn't travel through the air. The cut appeared physically and instantaneously directly in the spatial coordinates occupied by her enemies' bodies, blithely ignoring the distance and the multiple passive ice barriers surrounding them.
A thin, astonishing crack of absolute darkness, surrounded by black fractal snowflakes, appeared traversing the neck of the Saint on the left and the heart of the Saint on the right, traced as if reality itself had been cut with a box cutter.
Neither of the two Saints bled. The Zero-Degree Cut caused simultaneous subatomic and cryogenic necrosis. The cold invaded their central nervous systems, killing them before they could register the pain. The two bodies froze into statues of black ice and began to crumble into diamond dust in the air, falling onto the city in the form of a macabre, glowing dark snowfall.
As Violeta silently sheathed her sword in the sky, the hell of brute force was unleashed a little further down.
Kael Morningstar had been left with the mathematical short end of the combat: he faced the two remaining Stage 1 Saints. But for the First Sequence, numerical inequality wasn't a challenge; it was simply an all-you-can-eat buffet.
Kael didn't wait for them to attack. Using the pure explosive force of his Dragon bloodline, he propelled himself into the air, breaking the sound barrier with a sonic boom, and charged directly at the first Saint.
The ice cultivator, terrified by the brutal onslaught, raised both arms and tried to conjure a prison of glacial ice around Kael to halt his trajectory.
Kael simply gritted his teeth, let his blood boil to a volcanic level, and activated his natural armor. He crashed through the ice prison using his own armored body as a human battering ram, shattering the magic crystal with his bare shoulder.
He appeared in front of the Saint amid a cloud of shattered ice and, with bestial speed, extended his gigantic, crimson-scaled hand.
Kael didn't use his immense Magma Fang for an elegant cut. He violently grabbed the Cryon Saint by the ankle.
The man screamed as the temperature of Kael's hand, burning red-hot, instantly melted the stellar steel plate of his boot, burning him to the leg bone and welding the grip shut.
"You are not gods!" Kael roared, his golden eyes glowing with animal fury as the veins in his neck popped like cables.
With a physical effort that defied biology, Kael used the immense weight and armored body of the agonizing Saint as if it were a vulgar, blunt meat club.
He spun violently in the air and swung the man's entire body, smashing him with all his might, at the speed of a meteor, directly into the face of the second Saint who was approaching to help.
The aerial impact was devastating. The skulls and armors of the two Saints crashed into each other with a sickening, lethal crunch.
The Saint Kael used as a mace died instantly, his neck snapping at an impossible angle from the inertia of the blow, his own armor bursting inward and destroying his chest. Kael let go of the useless corpse, which plummeted toward the lower plazas.
The last Stage 1 Saint, the second man struck, shot backward, tumbling dizzily in the air with the visor of his helmet shattered, bleeding profusely from his nose and mouth.
Upon stabilizing his flight and seeing his four elite comrades, the supreme vanguard of the Cryons, murdered, erased, chopped to pieces, and humiliated in a matter of twenty seconds, pure, atavistic, irrational fear seized his immortal soul. He realized they weren't fighting cultivators; they were trying to kill living storms.
The last Cryon Saint panicked absolutely. He spun around, injected the entirety of his core's Qi into his flight arrays, and fled dishonorably, flying at top speed toward the enormous, intimidating black belly of the Leviathan Battleship, seeking the desperate protection and shelter of his flagship.
To ensure his escape, the Saint used his entire cultivation to conjure behind him a spherical, mobile wall of eternal ice: an absolute High Earth Grade defense, so thick and dense it could have withstood a continuous bombardment from runic cannons.
Kael floated in the air, watching as the last of the empire's "heroes" escaped by turning his back on him.
"This is the fucking elite you boast so much about?!" Kael roared, spitting a glob of burning blood that hissed as it fell. "Fucking cowards!"
The humiliation of the flight deeply offended Kael's inner sovereign.
He would not let the prey escape.
Channeling magma to the soles of his boots and the tip of his heavy Odachi, Kael used the [Ignimbrite Glide].
He didn't fly. He created a wake of molten rock and super-heated air in the atmosphere itself, using it as a zero-friction track. Kael violently "skated" on the boiling air, accelerating at breakneck speed, leaving behind a dense trail of black smoke and glowing lava that burned the sky.
He reached the fleeing Saint in a matter of seconds, rapidly closing in on the immense ice shield protecting his rear.
The Cryon Saint, looking back terrified over his shoulder, saw Kael approaching, but blindly trusted his massive shield. No conventional weapon can break ten meters of eternal ice in a single blow, the man thought, believing the barrier would buy him the second needed to reach the Leviathan's deck.
Kael, his face disfigured by rage and the heat of his own power, raised his immense Magma Fang over his head.
He gripped the hilt with both hands and synchronized his mind in a sepulchral silence. He activated Sword Intent Level 1: The Awakening of the Edge, and abruptly merged it with his most lethal and humiliating technique: the [Sovereign's Slash].
The immense Odachi no longer vibrated with common physical fire; it was sheathed in a dense, brilliant, and imposing royal purple aura. The space around the blade seemed to buckle under the weight of a colossal conceptual suppression force.
Kael unleashed the enormous vertical slash.
The immense line of solid, heavy light did not crash against the High Earth Grade ice shield. There was no explosion of frost, nor the sound of ice breaking from the thermal force of the magma.
Demonstrating the terror of Sword Intent, Kael's blade and will acquired the "Indomitable" property. The cut from the Magma Fang simply ignored and passed right through the ten meters of impenetrable ice shield as if it were a ridiculous, faint optical illusion. The ice didn't break or melt; the weapon and the magma slipped their power through it without encountering any physical resistance.
The invisible vertical slash appeared directly on the physical body of the Saint fleeing behind the intact barrier.
The Cryon Saint stopped abruptly in mid-air. His eyes widened in shock as he felt an atomic heat suddenly erupt into his spine.
Kael's immense magma blade, having bypassed the absolute defense, entered through the crown of the enemy's helmet and sliced cleanly down to his groin.
Kael didn't just cut his body in two. The immense heat of the ignimbrite and magma instantly sealed and cauterized the wound. The Cryon Saint, along with his elite blue crystal armor, was split exactly into two perfect halves.
His exposed entrails and organs, sliced lengthwise, were instantly charred and turned into smoking black coal upon contact with the sword's core, ensuring that no miraculous regeneration technique or divine medicine could save his life.
The two charred halves of the last elite guard slowly drifted apart in the air, accompanied by the sparks of Sword Intent, and began to fall toward the desert below, while the gigantic ice shield he had uselessly conjured faded away from lack of his dead master's Qi control.
Kael flicked the Magma Fang with a sharp snap, extinguishing the purple edge and the scorching heat, and spun in the air, breathing heavily. His chest rose and fell, but his face was a mask of absolute, ruthless triumph.
Just meters from him, Eris floated leaning on her dark spear, surrounded by gray ash, and Violeta materialized in a dark flash, her rapier clean of blood but exuding a space-warping cold.
The supreme elite of the Northern Empire, the five Stage 1 Saints handpicked by the Judges themselves, had been massacred, eviscerated, humiliated, split in half, frozen from the inside, and conceptually erased from existence in less than a damned minute on the clock.
And the three Morningstar Sequences didn't have a single scratch on their armors.
"Clean work, team," Kael said, wiping the boiling blood from his knuckles, watching the rain of ash, diamond dust, and magma fall on the destroyed cannons of the Leviathan. "Let's head back to the box seats. The boss is about to start his own show."
With impeccable military synchronization, the three monstrous generals descended smoothly from the firmament, passing through the smoking remnants of the battle, and landed soundlessly back on the large obsidian balcony of the Inner Palace.
Seraphina, holding little Celeste who clapped happily at seeing the "red and gray stars" fall, welcomed them with a look of deep imperial approval.
The skies of the Floating Citadel had been swatted clear of flies.
And while the Black Winter Legion continued to be methodically ground up and dissolved in acid in the gloomy, suffocating basements of the architectural complex by the rest of the Assassins and Commanders of House Morningstar, the absolute focus of the war shifted back to the immense, silent, frigid central Parade Ground.
Down there, time seemed to stop completely.
Samael Morningstar, dressed in his long, heavy black and gold cloak that billowed at the whim of the freezing gusts, finally landed on the smooth, cracked obsidian of the plaza.
He held the gigantic, long, and deadly Kurohime in his right hand. The enormous golden reptilian eye embedded in the dark, black hilt of the Saint Grade Odachi blinked frantically, whispering into Samael's mind, moaning and writhing with pure pleasure and sadistic hunger as it sensed the immense, pure, succulent quality of the souls located just a hundred meters away.
Opposite Samael, cloaked in an aura of absolute tyranny, suffocating atmospheric pressure, and lethal cold, the colossal Three Supreme Ice Judges stood defiantly.
Judge Alpha, with his gloomy black glacier scythe; the immense Judge Beta, armored in his indestructible diamond cuirass and holding his monumental siege hammer; and the cadaverous, floating Judge Gamma, shrouded in her lethal storm of seven supersonic frost orbs.
Three of the deadliest, most ancient, and destructive human cultivators in the Great Saint Stage, gathered for the first time in centuries against a single man.
Judge Alpha observed Samael with his inscrutable, metallic gaze, processing the brutal humiliation of his personal guard's annihilation in the upper skies. His coldness gave way to a dark resolve for absolute extermination.
"You have proven to have sharp claws and well-trained dogs, Samael," whispered Judge Alpha, and his voice wasn't amplified, but it resonated clearly in Samael's ears across the vacuum of the plaza. "But the phase of cheap tricks and skirmishes has just concluded. The three of us are the very blades that execute the divine will of the north. This morning, you do not die in combat, Morningstar. You will be purged like a heretic from this existence, and your disgusting desert will burn in blue ice."
Samael slowly raised the tip of Kurohime's immense dark blade until it pointed exactly and directly at the slit of Judge Alpha's helmet.
Samael smiled, and his eyes ignited with the deep, galactic, apocalyptic violet fire of primordial tyranny, finally releasing the heavy seals that repressed his true murderous aura. The pressure Samael unleashed was so overwhelming and inhuman that it clashed head-on and collapsed the Great Saints' own cold, creating visible static thunder in the exact center of the plaza.
"Stop barking shit about divine wills in front of me, you old corpse of junk..." Samael decreed, his deep, hoarse voice vibrating with the inescapable promise of absolute extermination. "And all three of you get over here at once. My sword is extremely thirsty, and I don't like to keep it waiting when there are disgusting gods on the menu."
The true apocalyptic battle, the brutal and definitive confrontation that would decide the complete and absolute fate of the Citadel and the immense continent, was but a single heartbeat away from shattering the heavens.