Chapter 136: Divine Torture and the Surrender of the Leviathan
From the majestic and frigid bow of the Leviathan Battleship, suspended five kilometers above the scorching Dragon Bone Desert, the Three Supreme Ice Judges observed what their immortal minds cataloged as a mathematical and biological impossibility.
Their army, the glorious Black Winter Legion of fifty thousand men hardened by the conquest of three kingdoms, was not fighting a siege war. It was being systematically devoured. It was not a tactical battle with defined fronts and martial honor. It was an industrial-scale feeding.
In barely thirty humiliating minutes of deployment, they had lost over twenty thousand men. The other thirty thousand survivors were running like blind, terrified rats, hopelessly trapped in a network of suffocating corridors brimming with corrosive poison, gravitational traps, walls of entropic ash, and hybrid monsters that laughed at swords.
In the exact center of the immense Great Obsidian Plaza, the silence preceding the annihilation was absolute.
Samael Morningstar slowly raised, with a terrifying, predatory grace, the tip of Kurohime's immense, dark, thirsty blade until it pointed exactly and directly at the transverse slit of Judge Alpha's helmet.
Samael smiled, and his eyes ceased to be human. They ignited with the deep, galactic, apocalyptic violet fire of primordial tyranny, finally releasing, once and for all, the heavy spiritual and physical seals that repressed his true, massive murderous aura.
The atmospheric and cosmic pressure that Samael suddenly unleashed was so overwhelmingly dense, heavy, and inhuman that it clashed head-on against the combined pressure of the Three Great Saints, literally collapsing the executioners' own divine cold. The clash of auras created visible static thunder and black lightning 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, making the tectonic plates beneath the citadel tremble. "And all three of you get over here at once. My sword is extremely thirsty, and I absolutely hate making it wait when there are supposed, disgusting gods on the menu."
The true apocalyptic battle, the brutal and definitive confrontation that would decide the complete and absolute fate of the Floating Citadel and redraw the power maps of the immense continent, was a single heartbeat away from shattering the heavens.
Samael opened his eyes completely. His violet pupils contracted into perfect, vertical reptilian slits.
With a sound that tore the very fabric of space, Samael unfurled the massive Wings of the Primordial Void at his back.
They were not ordinary appendages of feathers or scales; they were an immense, majestic pair of giant dragon wings composed entirely of pure black void energy and veins of boiling blood. Flapping them just once, they launched violent gusts of void wind that erased and disintegrated the residual frost in the plaza, wiping away any trace of enemy Qi within a hundred-meter radius.
But Samael's transformation did not stop at the wings. His Eyes of the Crimson Abyss reached critical mass. The deep, serene violet was suddenly devoured by a crimson neon glow that seemed to contain entire galaxies being crushed and swallowed by supermassive black holes. With the Gaze of the Primordial Truth, the immense, complex Divine Ice armors of the Three Judges became transparent to Samael; he could see the rhythmic flow of their golden blood, their meridians pulsing with fear, and the minuscule, invisible weak points in their arrogant defenses.
Finally, the air above his head solidified. The Crown of the Void Sovereign physically manifested, indicating that his bloodline had reached twenty percent synchronization.
A pair of majestic, jagged, thick horns emerged from his head. They were a crystalline, lethal obsidian black, with thick neon red veins beating with an atomic pulse inside them. They looked like a crown forged not by blacksmiths, but by the hatred of the heavens.
Upon manifesting, the horns acted as absolute receptors of the Laws. The Space-Time Anchor activated passively. Within a fifty-kilometer radius, space became as solid as lead. No enemy, not even a Great Emperor, could use teleportation scrolls, spatial blink abilities, or open escape portals. In Samael's territory, absolutely no one fled unless he explicitly allowed it.
Although his body still maintained a mostly human silhouette, the gravitational and magical density of his aura eclipsed, crushed, and humiliated that of the Three Great Saints combined.
And then... Samael simply disappeared.
There was no burst of speed, no sonic boom. Space simply stopped registering his existence.
Samael went straight for them at a speed so obscenely explosive and inconceivable that the Judges failed to process it. He launched an apparently normal, casual horizontal slash with Kurohime's blade, aiming at the necks of all three.
The Judges, reacting purely on millennial animal survival instinct rather than sight, threw themselves backward, dodging death by a hair's breadth. The void wave of the slash whizzed by, cleanly cleaving the plaza's outer wall a hundred meters away.
"You took a long time to come down from your cloud," Samael's voice said, resonating from everywhere and nowhere. "You sent tens of thousands of your own men to suffocate and melt to death in my traps as cannon fodder. You fired your stupid cannons at the roofs of my home."
Samael blinked spatially, leaving behind a blood afterimage that confused the enemies' thermal vision, and reappeared instantly and silently right behind Judge Beta (The Wall of Agony), the largest, heaviest, and most defensive of the three titans.
Beta, the three-meter colossus who boasted of being physically immovable, reacted with the speed of a veteran. He spun on his diamond heels, raising his immense tower shield, and in a microsecond covered the entirety of his gigantic body with a dense, gleaming, and supposedly impenetrable Peak Earth Grade Divine Ice armor.
"You will not pierce my glacier, demon!" Beta roared from inside his spherical fortress.
Samael did not use his sword. He simply extended and opened his bare right hand.
His claws shone with a dark, viscous red light, activating the supreme physical domination ability: the [Hand of the Usurper].
Samael nonchalantly grabbed the armored giant's huge forearm.
The colossal ice armor, famous throughout the northern continent for having withstood direct cannon fire from warships without a scratch, did not break or crack; it pathetically melted away like wet sugar dropped in boiling water under Samael's heretical touch.
Beta's protective Qi, his pride as a Great Saint, was nullified and silenced at the exact point of contact, ignoring fifty percent of all his magical defense. Samael's fingers, hard as the core of a planet, pierced the ice and skin, clamping directly onto the giant's living flesh and exposed bone.
CRACK!
The sound was a cannon shot in the silence of the night. The thick, dense forearm bone of a Stage 2 Great Saint, bathed in centuries of pure energy, snapped, splintered, and collapsed in on itself like a miserable, rotten dry branch stepped on in winter.
"AAAAAAHHHHHH!" Judge Beta's scream tore through the air. It was not a martial cry of pain; it was a shriek of pure, absolute terror, biologically unable to understand why or how his absolute defense had failed so miserably against a casual grip.
"Shhh..." Samael whispered, leaning in gently until his scaly lips were right next to the giant's ice-covered ear. "Don't scream so loud, you damned sack of meat. You're scaring the children in my city."
Without giving him time to process the trauma, Samael pulled.
The Hand of the Usurper didn't just break; it claimed matter as its own by divine right. With a single, brutal, sharp, and indifferent mechanical yank, Samael ripped the colossus's entire arm from its shoulder.
A massive geyser of high-cultivation blood, thick, golden, and glowing blue, sprayed the plaza floor. The vital energy contained in that blood was so immensely dense that, upon touching the obsidian slabs, it crystallized the black stone, sprouting small, macabre, bloodied ice flowers.
As Beta staggered from the amputation and the massive blood loss, Samael raised his boot and delivered a swift, calculated sidekick directly into the right kneecap.
The giant's knee inverted completely with another horrifying crunch of burst ligaments and crushed bone, forcing the gigantic Great Saint to fall to his knees before the Demon King, groaning and drooling in shock.
Samael, with the giant's severed arm still bleeding in his left hand, raised his crimson gaze. He stared at the other two Judges (Alpha and Gamma). Both were completely paralyzed in place, frozen not by ice, but by the absolute terror of seeing their "invincible" comrade, the defensive pillar of the Fifth Family, dismantled in three seconds with less effort than it takes to pull the leg off a grasshopper.
Samael tossed Beta's arm aside, raised his golden blood-covered right hand, and slowly licked a drop that had splattered on his cheek.
"Let's play a fun, educational little game," Samael said, his voice dripping with ancient sadism. "The game is called: 'How long does it take a damned god to beg on his knees for his own death?'"
Without waiting for an answer, Samael placed his flat hand flat against Beta's chest and pushed.
It wasn't a magic strike. It was pure brute force channeled through his Primordial Dragon Body.
The impact caved the giant's sternum into his own ribcage. Beta shot backward like a cannonball, crossing the plaza and crashing into the main guardhouse.
Judge Beta's immense body crashed through the exterior facade. It pierced the first interior reinforced concrete wall. It pierced the second, third, fourth, and fifth floors of solid stellar steel, leaving perfect, blood-stained circular holes in the Citadel's architecture.
CRASH... crash... boom.
The echo of structural destruction bounced around the plaza. And then, a deadly silence. Judge Beta, the Wall of Agony, had been crushed to death against his own broken bones and the citadel's rubble.
In the air, floating less than a hundred meters high on unstable Qi wings, Judge Alpha (The Executioner) and Judge Gamma (The Witch of Cold) remained completely motionless, like birds caught mid-flight.
Their Stage 2 Great Saint brains, alchemical and genetic prodigies capable of processing tens of thousands of thoughts, tactical equations, and array variables every passing second, had stalled on a single, fatal, unsolvable logic error:
"Beta is the strongest of us in defense. His physical body is impenetrable even to Heaven Grade weapons. How... how the hell did he die from a simple grab and a push? This isn't cultivation. This is a glitch in reality."
Samael, floating calmly before them with his immense black and red dragon wings lazily unfurled, wiped his bare hand on the edges of his long dark tunic. Not a single drop of enemy blood remained on his pale obsidian skin; the subatomic Void of his pores had drunk it, enjoying the appetizer.
His eyes, two apocalyptic violet supernovae ringed in crimson neon, locked directly onto the floating, cadaverous figure of Judge Gamma.
Samael tilted his head slightly to the side, evaluating her with the clinical curiosity of a predator studying a lab mouse prior to dissection.
"Do you feel that, supposed immortals?" Samael asked. His deep, heavy voice didn't need to travel through the sound waves of the air; thanks to his soul resonance, the question echoed directly in the bone marrow and minds of his two enemies, making them shudder. "Your heart rate, which normally rests in a glacial calm, has just violently spiked from sixty to one hundred and eighty beats per minute. Your pupils have dilated forty percent looking for an escape route that doesn't exist. Your lungs are hyperventilating. Your sphincters have contracted involuntarily. Adrenaline floods your blood, turning it bitter."
Samael smiled broadly, parting his lips to show a set of white, immaculate, lethally perfect fangs.
"That entire clinical picture you are experiencing right now is called 'absolute fear of death.' It's been centuries, maybe millennia, since you felt it in your cold veins, hasn't it? Believing you were at the top of the food chain on this mud continent. Welcome back to the pit of mortality."
That cold, medical, mocking psychological analysis was the straw that broke the camel's back of sanity. Judge Gamma reacted first. Atavistic panic completely shattered centuries of her impeccable Taoist discipline.
"ABOMINABLE MONSTER!" Gamma shrieked, her voice losing its elegance and becoming a hysterical squawk.
Clenching her hands until her palms bled, she burned a decade of her lifespan and activated her most powerful Domain.
[Absolute Zero Zone: The Garden of a Thousand Stellar Needles].
The airspace around Samael froze instantly. It wasn't common physical ice; it was the freezing of molecular time. A thousand enormous, glowing pure ice orbs formed out of nowhere, floating in a perfect spherical formation around the Demon King, each aiming directly at his heart. The orbs began to fire an uninterrupted torrent of a thousand ultra-concentrated freezing beams, a blue light capable of stopping blood flow, crystallizing meridians, and fracturing the soul of an entire army.
"Die! Freeze to your soul! Disappear in eternal ice!" Gamma screamed frantically, pushing all her Qi into the formation.
The thousand blue beams struck Samael's body simultaneously and directly, hitting the exact same focal point.
CRACK! CRASH! BOOOOM!
A colossal, dense, and destructive cloud of ice, cosmic snow, and divine frost completely covered the position where the Demon King stood, forming a prison of solid glacier in the air.
Gamma let her arms drop, breathing heavily, erratically, cold white vapor pouring from her trembling mouth as sweat froze on her forehead. Her bloodshot eyes stared fixedly at the immense block of ice in the sky.
"Did... did I get him?" Gamma babbled, trying to cling to false hope.
"Your ice... is lukewarm. And it bores me."
The deep, heavy, whispering voice didn't come from the ice prison floating in front of her. It came from one millimeter behind her left ear.
Gamma's heart stopped. She tried to turn, tried to summon a repulsion shield, tried to scream, but she could do absolutely nothing. The Sovereign Lock of Samael's crimson eyes had anchored her coordinates, turning her into a fly trapped in invisible resin.
A black hand, covered in scales and with long, elegant claws, rested softly and almost affectionately on her right shoulder.
Samael whispered in her ear, his hot breath pregnant with the smell of ash brushing against the woman's neck, like a cruel lover in the darkness of a bedroom:
"You are a runic mage, aren't you, Gamma? You use your delicate, ancient hands to weave your family's spells. Your art is in your fingers. Let's see how you conjure without them."
Samael tightened his grip.
CRACK!
The dry, sickening sound was immediate. Gamma's thick collarbone and shoulder blade were internally pulverized, turned to bone gravel beneath the dragon's steel fingers.
"AAAAAAHHHHHHHH!" The woman's scream was so high-pitched, painful, and supersonic that the thick glass of the observation windows on the Leviathan Battleship, kilometers high, vibrated and cracked in sympathy.
"Shhh..." Samael soothed her agony, sliding his hand from the broken shoulder down to tightly grip her fragile right wrist. "Don't scream yet, sorceress. Save your oxygen. We've barely begun to draw the anatomy of a god."
Samael pulled.
But unlike Beta's quick and merciful death, Samael was not compassionate. He didn't rip her arm off with a single, explosive yank. He did it slowly. Frighteningly, disgustingly slowly. Millimeter by millimeter.
Gamma was forced to endure the hell of her own dismemberment in real time. First, the pale skin of her shoulder pulled taut until it tore with a sound like thick canvas ripping. Then, the dense cultivated muscle began to give way; Gamma could see and feel, with her fully enhanced Saint nerves and eyes, how her own muscle fibers frayed, separated, and snapped one by one with a wet noise. Finally, the thick white tendons and veins popped like over-tightened guitar strings.
Her face, once described in the annals of the empire as an epitome of cold, haughty, and unattainable beauty, was now a grotesque, bloated, and pathetic mask, covered in thick snot, hot tears, and swollen veins about to burst.
"Please! For mercy's sake, no more! I surrender! I am a deity, I am a Great Saint! I can serve you, I can be your slave in bed or in war!" Gamma begged, abandoning all dignity, kicking uselessly in the air as her shoulder was torn apart.
Samael paused the dismemberment for a second and smiled at her, wiping a tear from the woman's cheek with his thumb.
"I have a beautiful wife and loyal servants. What I urgently need for my garden... is fucking fertilizer."
With a final, sharp, disgusted yank, Samael permanently separated the right arm from the woman's body.
The jet of pressurized blood stained her completely. Before she could catch her breath to scream again, Samael grabbed her left arm and repeated the brutal process, ripping it out by the roots in five seconds of uncontrolled agony.
Gamma was left floating in the spatial stasis imposed by Samael, horribly mutilated. She was a torso without upper limbs, bleeding profusely in spurts of glowing blue and golden blood that rained down onto the plaza.
Samael, tossing the severed arms into the void, gripped her firmly by her bloody neck and lifted her into the air, turning her so the last living Judge, Alpha, could have a front-row view of the macabre work of art.
"Look closely at your beloved companion, Alpha," Samael ordered. "Look at her beautiful eyes. Do you see how she cries and pisses herself? Do you see how all their stupid aristocratic egos gush out of their open wounds? You are just meat."
Samael turned his face back to Gamma. He opened his mouth, and his jaw seemed to unhinge slightly. In the deep darkness of his throat, a small, lethal, spinning sphere of absolute black Void formed.
"[Devour]."
Samael lowered his head and bit deeply into Judge Gamma's delicate, bleeding neck.
He didn't tear off physical flesh. He wasn't a cannibal. When his fangs penetrated the Great Saint's skin, he activated the cosmic suction of the void.
Samael absorbed, in a massive, roaring torrent, the entirety of her immense Qi, her knowledge, her comprehension of the laws of ice, and her pure origin vital energy.
Gamma's biological body underwent an aging and desiccation accelerated a thousandfold. She shriveled up like a raisin left in the sun in a matter of four seconds. Her skin turned a dead ashen gray, her eyeballs withered and sank deep into her skull, and her beautiful hair turned thin and white.
All of her immense, millennial vital energy, centuries of meditation, and imperial resources were drained, stolen, and assimilated by the Void Dragon's infinite furnace, recharging Samael's reserves to one hundred percent.
The banquet finished, Samael released his grip. Judge Gamma's inert, wrinkled, dried husk of a corpse, weighing no more than a withered straw doll, fell into the void like recycled garbage, turning to dust upon striking the plaza's obsidian.
Samael wiped the back of his gloved hand across his mouth.
"Delicious," he said, closing his eyes and savoring the energy. "A bit bitter and sour at the end due to the excess fear and stress in her blood, but acceptable for a mid-morning snack."
Judge Alpha (The Executioner) was completely alone in the firmament.
He had witnessed Beta, the immovable bulwark, fall torn to pieces and crushed in a second. He had seen Gamma, the supreme sorceress, be dismembered, tortured, and devoured alive until she became a mummy in under a minute.
He was, by right and brute power, the leader. The strongest and deadliest of the Three Supreme Judges. An expert swordsman who had decapitated great saints in the past.
But his hands... his immortal hands trembled uncontrollably. The immense dark ice scythe he wielded, the legendary weapon christened [The Final Sentence], vibrated in his sweaty hands, not from bloodlust, but from the echo of its master's fear.
"You... you are not human..." Alpha whispered, his voice cracking, taking a clumsy step backward in the air. His eyes, once cold and calculating, now desperately searched for an escape route toward the clouds, but the space around them had been sealed and locked by the overwhelming aura of Samael's horns. He was locked in a glass cage with a cosmic predator.
"Never, in my entire damned life, did I say or claim to be," Samael replied, walking languidly and lazily upon the empty air toward him. Each of his steps, resting on invisible platforms of void, sounded like a heavy, prophetic war drum in Alpha's ears. "But you drew your pathetic weapon against my home. You aimed your cannons at the roofs where my daughter sleeps. And the price for that offense is not paid with an apology, Alpha."
Alpha, cornered and knowing that escape was physically impossible, roared. It was a heart-rending scream, a desperate attempt to convert his abyssal panic into battle wrath.
"THEN I WILL TAKE YOU TO HELL WITH ME, BASTARD!"
Judge Alpha made the final decision of the desperate. He burned his vital essence. He burned his soul, his longevity, and his spiritual core in a single instant, sacrificing his immortality for one last, apocalyptic suicide attack to wipe the demon and his city off the face of the earth.
[Forbidden and Sacrificial Art: Slash of the Northern Guillotine].
All the energy of a Stage 2 Great Saint erupted in blinding cyan light. His ice scythe magically grew monstrously, absorbing his soul until it measured a hundred meters long, becoming a blade of pure, condensed energy that eclipsed the sun.
It was a perfect suicide attack. If that blade connected, it would not only kill Samael, but it would cleave the Morningstar Citadel in half, piercing the Core and killing all the sheltered civilians.
"DIEEEEE, HERETIC!" Alpha howled, bringing down the hundred-meter scythe in a descending slash at the speed of light, aiming for Samael's head and, by extension, the city beneath him.
The world held its breath.
Samael didn't unsheathe the Kurohime sword hanging from his waist. He didn't even summon the defensive wall of his void wings.
Samael simply raised his unarmored right arm and extended the palm of his bare hand.
CLAAAAAAAANG!
The metallic, cosmic sound of the impact deafened the entire region.
The colossal, unstoppable, apocalyptic divine energy blade, a hundred meters long, stopped dead, blocked and frozen in mid-air against the tiny, open, bare palm of Samael's left hand.
The brutal friction of the impact created a massive atmospheric shockwave in the form of a white ring that expanded at the speed of sound, slicing through and clearing every single storm cloud within a fifty-kilometer radius, leaving the morning sky completely clear and blue.
But Samael hadn't retreated a single millimeter. His boots hadn't yielded in the air. His arm didn't tremble under the load. His gleaming, dark dragon scales covering his forearm hadn't even been scratched, heated, or chipped. He held the scythe at bay with the same astonishing ease with which a father stops the weak fist of a toddler.
Alpha, suspended at the end of the weapon, opened his eyes so wide that the small, delicate capillaries in his retinas abruptly burst, dyeing the whites of his eyes a bright blood red.
"Impossible..." the Executioner babbled, a trickle of blood dripping from his open mouth from the recoil. "It's a Peak Great Saint level sacrificial attack... you stopped a miracle with your bare fucking hand... What are you?"
Samael slowly closed his strong fingers, like obsidian claws, around the thick, glowing edge of the immense blade of pure energy.
"I am your king. And your will, Executioner... is infinitely weak and boring."
CRASH!
Samael clenched his fist sharply and, applying the pressure of the Void Law, literally shattered and broke the hundred-meter energy scythe into a million harmless pieces of cyan light that rained over the desert like glowing confetti.
The violent backlash and cosmic rebound of Qi from having his final technique and his soul physically shattered hit Alpha like a runaway train, shredding his internal organs and making him vomit a torrent of dark blood.
Before Alpha could fall, Samael materialized in front of him using a spatial blink.
He roughly grabbed Alpha by the thick breastplate plates of his armor, lifting him bodily into the air, and yanked him close to his face, until their foreheads almost touched.
Alpha's terrified, bloodied, and defeated eyes met the unfathomable violet and crimson abyss of the Dragon's eyes without any barriers. In those two supernovae, the Supreme Judge saw his own pathetic death multiplied and reflected a thousand times across the multiverse.
"Tell me something, illustrious and sacred 'Executioner,'" Samael whispered, his voice caressing madness. "You have tortured thousands of cultivators in your family's dungeons. Have you ever, in your centuries of life, been flayed alive and systematically dismantled by someone superior to you?"
Without giving him time to articulate a word, Samael drove the sharp, hard claw of his index finger into Alpha's armored shoulder, piercing crystal, metal, and flesh, and began to slowly drag his arm down, tracing a deep, burning, agonizing red line across the man's entire chest.
"AAAAAAHHHHHH! KILL ME! PLEASE, JUST KILL ME NOW! END IT!" the Great Saint begged, his pride shattered, the pain exceeding his mental capacity.
"No," Samael said with a disturbing, monotonous calm, shaking his head. "Screaming at the top of your lungs is very good for the lungs, Alpha. And besides, squealing like a stuck pig serves a brilliant tactical function: it informs your frightened officers and men on that fucking ship in the clouds that their immortal god is bleeding and crying for his mother."
Samael slipped his fingers into the bloody incisions on the Judge's chest and proceeded, with surgical precision, to break his thick ribs from the inside out.
One by one.
Crack. A muffled groan.
Crack. A death rattle of blood.
Crack.
He did it slowly, methodically. He let the exact seconds pass between each fracture so that the message of pure pain and extreme agony had time to travel through Alpha's nervous system and register in his brain with absolute clarity before moving on to break the next rib.
It was a tactical and psychological masterpiece of the purest, most refined cruelty; a message sent directly to the morale of the enemy army.
Finally, when Alpha was no longer a haughty Great Saint, but a mere, unrecognizable lump of weeping, bloody, broken flesh babbling incoherencies and drooling over Samael's gauntlets... he decided the show was over.
With a brutal, swift, and sharp motion of both hands, Samael grabbed the Judge's head and shoulders, twisted violently, and ripped his head from his torso.
The sound of tearing tissue was disgusting. Samael lifted the severed head in triumph; it wasn't a clean cut. Nearly a meter of shattered white spinal column, dripping with nerve fluid and red blood, hung swinging macabrely beneath the severed neck, gleaming in the sunlight like a grisly big game trophy.
Immensely higher up, in the wide, polished, technological command bridge of the colossal Leviathan Battleship, the reigning silence was sepulchral, thick, and unbreathable.
Dozens of communications officers, the north's best navigators, and squadron captains were paralyzed at their control consoles, mouths agape and breath held. Everyone stared, horror embedded in their bones, at the immense main runic screen broadcasting the ground combat through Judge Alpha's helmet.
They had seen everything, in glorious, graphic magical resolution.
They had seen the invincible, armored Judge Beta fall like a ragdoll after a single push. They had seen the beautiful and lethal Judge Gamma be dismembered weeping, and devoured until she became a mummified raisin. And finally, they had just witnessed firsthand, listening to the agonizing screams through the intercoms, how Judge Alpha, their undisputed leader, was dismantled alive and humiliated before losing his head.
The supreme Vice Admiral of the fleet, a proud, gray-haired man with medals on his chest, who had served, led, and won in ten continental border wars... pissed himself.
Literally, unable to control it, terror loosened his sphincters. A humiliating, warm puddle of yellow urine quickly formed beneath his impeccable, polished boots on the metallic floor of the command bridge. None of the crew dared judge him, because many of them were throwing up in the corners from the stress.
"They're dead..." whispered a young radar operator, his voice void of hope and his face paper-white. "The Three Judges... our great saints... they're all dead. He killed them like dogs."
"We are alone in this sky!" shouted another officer, jumping up, knocking over his chair, losing his tactical sanity. "The ship's outer shield won't stop him! That black-winged monster is coming here!"
On the huge main projection screen, Samael Morningstar, floating majestically in the air and holding up Alpha's decapitated head in triumph with its bloody spinal cord dangling, very slowly and deliberately turned his gaze toward the exact position of the ship high above.
Despite the five kilometers separating them, Samael's apocalyptic violet and crimson eyes seemed to physically traverse the distance, piercing the armored glass of the chamber, the thick holographic screen, and penetrating straight into the depths of the soul of every frightened crew member present on the bridge.
Samael, his face splattered with blood, smiled directly at the camera.
And raised a gloved finger.
He pointed directly at the gigantic siege ship floating in the sky. And then, with a theatrical, deliberate motion, he drew his thumb horizontally across his own throat, making the universal, silent, unmistakable gesture of "I'm going to slit all your fucking throats."
Panic detonated.
"Get us out of this damned hell!" the Vice Admiral screamed at the top of his lungs, his voice tearing, stepping in his own puddle of urine as he ran toward the chief helmsman. "Tight one-hundred-and-eighty-degree turn! Put the engine arrays at five hundred percent of maximum capacity! Overheat the cores if necessary! FLEE NORTH!"
"Admiral, sir!" the communications officer interrupted him desperately, grabbing his arm. "The Legion is still down there! The beacons indicate there are almost thirty thousand of our men still alive fighting in the Citadel's basements! We can't abandon them to their fate!"
The Vice Admiral turned and delivered a brutal, cowardly punch to the officer's face, knocking him to the floor.
"FUCK THE SOLDIERS! FUCK THE INFANTRY AND FUCK PRIDE!" roared the Vice Admiral, spit flying from his mouth, completely mad with terror, pointing at the screen where Samael floated. "If we stay one more minute in this orbit, that damned Dragon will fly up here, rip open the hull, and eat us all alive! JUMP TO HYPERSPACE AND FLEE RIGHT NOW!"
Obeying the cowardly, terrified orders of their leader, the immense metallic beast reacted. The colossal Leviathan Battleship began to clumsily rotate on its axis. Its gigantic, heavy blue gravitational engines roared with desperation, burning mountains of spirit stones, preparing to flee like beaten dogs.
They had cowardly abandoned their army, the elite of their own empire on hostile ground. The visceral terror instilled by the Dragon was immensely greater, purer, and stronger than a thousand years of loyalty to House Cryon.
Samael, from his observation point in the air, tilted his head and saw the colossal rear thrusters of the five-kilometer ship light up with hyper-speed illumination, trying to gain altitude to escape the spatial lockdown zone and flee.
Samael sketched a graceless smile.
"Oh, no. You're not going anywhere. The party down here isn't over, and you're the fucking dessert."
Samael opened his Imperial System inventory and tossed Alpha's bloody head and spinal column into the cold, dark storage holds to feed to his magical beasts later.
Freed of his burden, he reached to his waist and firmly grasped Kurohime's hilt.
Samael unsheathed the Odachi of the Eclipse (Awakened Spirit) with a slow, fluid, ominous motion. The immense curved blade, long and black as a starless night, left the scabbard whistling. The gigantic, creepy, organic reptilian golden eye embedded just above the sword's guard darted frantically in all directions until it fixed its dilated, sadistic pupil on the immense ship accelerating toward the clouds.
"Kurohime," Samael spoke softly, in an intimate whisper to the steel. "You're very hungry, aren't you, little one? I've kept you waiting."
The immense living Odachi vibrated in his hands, emitting a dark, metallic, high-pitched hum that made the teeth ache and gums bleed of anyone within a one-kilometer radius. Through their spiritual connection, a pulse of pure, ravenous emotion struck Samael's mind: HUNGER. EAT. DESTROY.
Samael gripped the thick, heavy hilt of the Saint Grade Odachi with both hands. He elevated his massive Void Qi, combining it with the Law of Space on the sword's curved edge.
Behind Samael's solitary human figure, the sky seemed to darken. The immense, terrifying energy projection, the astral image of a majestic thousand-meter-long Void Dragon, formed in the clouds behind him, opening its jaws and roaring in total and absolute cosmic silence.
Samael adopted a perfect Kendo stance in mid-air and aimed Kurohime's black tip at the rear of the escaping ship.
[Hybrid Supreme Technique: Event Horizon Lunge].
Samael launched a violent slash and forward thrust toward the horizon.
But a brilliant laser energy beam didn't shoot from the sword's tip, nor did a massive arc of ice or fire.
What shot out from Kurohime was a thin, opaque, absolute, straight black line.
It was a literal fracture in the fabric of reality. A zero-dimension void crack, a wound in space that devoured the light around it.
The black line of destruction crossed the sky in absolute silence, exceeding the speed of light, tenaciously and unerringly chasing the immense Leviathan Battleship that was accelerating north with all its engines.
The event horizon reached the ship's immense armored stern first. And, simply ignoring the biological concept of material density... it kept going.
The spatial fracture sliced through the multiple overlapping Heaven Grade shields as if they were soft butter left in the sun. It sliced and erased the colossal, thick rear hull of pure stellar adamantite. It sliced and geometrically severed the gigantic, burning crystal core of the main hyper-jump engine. It advanced relentlessly through the spine of the ship, slicing crew cabins, cargo holds, steel corridors, and artillery arsenals. And, finally, it emerged through the front of the ship, cleanly and transversely slicing the command bridge and the captains' chairs, cutting the Vice Admiral in half without him even noticing.
The Leviathan Battleship, the flagship, the immovable pride, the most expensive and lethal weaponized jewel of the millennial Cryon Family, over five kilometers long and weighing a hundred thousand tons... was split into two perfect halves longitudinally.
CRAAAAAAAAACK!
The tearing sound of dying, yielding indestructible metal was deafening; a high-pitched shriek of groaning engineering that swept across the desert.
The two colossal, symmetrical halves of the immense ship slowly drifted apart in the blue air, completely losing propulsion and buoyancy. The destroyed core triggered hundreds of massive internal energy explosions that blew out the ship's windows, spewing fire and bodies into the air.
Engulfed in flames that eclipsed the sunrise, the marvel of the north lost the grace of flight and began to plummet from the sky like two gigantic, burning steel meteorites, dragged down by the inescapable, relentless gravity of the earth.
"Everyone get down! Take cover in the Core!" Samael ordered over the general communicator channel to all members of his clan. "Imminent seismic impact! Brace yourselves!"
Barely five seconds after the order, the two smoking, flaming mountains of stellar steel that made up the ship's ruins plummeted and slammed brutally into the sand dunes, barely five kilometers outside the sturdy walls of the Morningstar Citadel.
The cataclysm was of continental proportions. The immense detonation of the physical impact of the massive weight generated a magnitude-nine earthquake. It kicked up a gigantic, infernal atomic mushroom cloud composed of millions of tons of melted sand, pulverized steel, and thick magic fire, which blotted out the morning sun and majestically reached the stratosphere of the world.
A brutal shockwave of super-heated air swept across the desert, kicking up sandstorms and crashing against the Floating Citadel's newly rebuilt and strengthened golden barriers, making them tremble and vibrate violently before dissipating harmlessly into the wind.
In the subterranean bowels and in the labyrinthine, bloodied, terrifying enclosed streets inside the Floating Citadel, all close-quarters combat ground to a halt, frozen by the enormity of the event outside.
The thirty thousand desperate, terrified, sweating soldiers of the Black Winter Legion still alive in the obsidian corridors, fighting uselessly against the massacre and poisons, felt the earthquake of the fall and instinctively, frantically looked toward the glass ceilings and the high open arches leading outside.
They saw with their own eyes the immense, colossal column of black smoke and fire rising in the distant desert, marking the grave of their ship. They saw the supposed invincibility of their empire fall in flaming pieces. They had felt, deep in their souls, the painful, humiliating, and quick death of their three invincible gods. They saw how their last and only hope for aerial evacuation was turned into a mountain of useless burning scrap, buried beneath the sand of the south they had come to conquer.
Kael Morningstar, breathing heavily and covered head to toe in the viscous, bluish blood of dozens of elite enemy officers he himself had torn apart with his bare hands, climbed heavily to the top of an immense, grotesque, smoking pile of armored corpses of Cryon soldiers heaped in the plaza of a central atrium.
He stood tall over the fallen, his huge, brutal Magma Fang dripping hot blood and chunks of molten viscera, and raised his hoarse, powerful voice, imbued with Qi and the unquestionable tyranny of the Fire Dragon.
"SCUM OF THE NORTH!" Kael roared, and the echo of his First General command voice bounced violently down every corridor, every ventilation tunnel, and every basement of the immense, deadly citadel. "YOUR SUPPOSED, INDESTRUCTIBLE SIEGE SHIP HAS FALLEN! YOUR GLORIOUS AND COWARDLY SUPREME JUDGES ARE ALL DEAD! YOU ARE RATS TRAPPED IN OUR LABYRINTH!"
Kael pointed the stained tip of his heavy Odachi toward the clear, clean, sunny morning sky visible through the atrium's immense open arch.
Up there, dominating the horizon, the imposing figure of Samael Morningstar was descending very slowly and majestically toward the citadel plaza. His gigantic, oppressive, dark black void dragon wings completely blotted out the glare of the rising sun, casting an immense, cold, elongated shadow in the shape of a winged cross over the entire blood-stained citadel. The god of death was coming down to claim his kingdom.
"ALL OF YOU KNEEL RIGHT NOW OR DIE THIS FUCKING INSTANT!" Kael decreed, and his final roar was so loud it shook the masonry.
The silence that followed throughout the walled citadel was heavy, thick, and lasted barely an agonizing second. A second in which the millennial pride of the northern infantry tried in vain to fight against the basic instinct of self-preservation.
And then... the metallic sound of a weapon surrendering was heard.
Clang. A silver spear fell harmlessly to the hard obsidian floor.
Then, at the end of the corridor, another identical sound. Clang. And then another. And a hundred more. And a thousand more. Clang, clang, clang.
Like giant dominoes falling pushed by the weight of defeat and the crushing truth of their mortality and inferiority, one by one, the thirty thousand proud, lethal, decorated soldiers of the Black Winter Legion—the vanguard and the cream of the crop of the North's military martial elite—bent their trembling knees. They fell heavily to their knees into the immense puddles of blood of their own fallen comrades.
They slowly removed the polished ice crystal helmets from their heads with trembling hands and placed them gently on the ground as a sign of complete and unconditional submission.
They wept.
Many of them sobbed openly, trembling with raw terror, hugging themselves. Others stared blankly at the black stone, their minds fractured. They weren't surrendering because the laws of martial honor dictated it upon seeing their generals die in a fair fight. They were surrendering, absolutely and pitifully, because primitive, pure, dark, and cosmic terror had broken them inside.
They had marched with arrogance to gaze defiantly into the dark abyss of the south, and the abyss, simply, hadn't blinked; it had eaten their immortal leaders as an appetizer.
Outside, in the triumphant silence of the sun-drenched Great Obsidian Plaza, Samael Morningstar landed gracefully. As his boots touched the stone, his monstrous, lethal draconic transformation faded harmoniously. The colossal void wings, the crown, and the neon glow of his eyes retracted, returning his pale, elegant humanity, although the deadly sword Kurohime was still gripped in his hand, completely satiated.
Samael walked with a calm, firm, silent pace among the long, disorganized, humiliated rows of armored enemies kneeling in the plaza. Not a single one of the thirty thousand empire soldiers even dared to lift their chin. No one dared look him directly in the eyes as his long, dark black cloak brushed mere millimeters past their foreheads bowed in submission. They feared that mere eye contact would mean the immediate evaporation of their souls.
Samael walked to the foot of the grand command dais, climbed the stone steps, and reached where Kael and Seraphina stood, accompanied by the rest of the Commanders and Elders, who observed the miracle of the extermination with deep, indescribable awe and fanatical adoration.
Seraphina looked at him, her dress woven of pure ice shining flawlessly without a single speck of dust. Her beautiful moon eyes, framed by the bright, deep ancestral silver rings of her evolution, evaluated him from head to toe with an intense mixture of deep conjugal pride and military satisfaction.
"You showed off, I assume," she said, with a mocking, arrogant half-smile playing at the corner of her pale lips, fully adopting her role as Empress consort and co-ruler of the desert.
Samael stopped his steps in front of her. He let out a sigh, relaxed his shoulders, and shrugged with apparent divine indifference, brushing a speck of invisible dust and ash from the lapel of his expensive dark tunic embroidered with gold threads.
"I had to make the message crystal clear, Sera," Samael replied, lowering the lethal tone of his voice when addressing his wife. "If we don't break the enemy's pride outrageously in the second battle, those noble pests would keep sending annoying flies to try and bite us for the next three centuries. Now they know perfectly well that if they cross our sky, they don't go back."
Samael slowly pivoted on his heels and rested both gloved hands on the dais's obsidian railing, sweeping his cold, suspicious gaze over the thirty thousand prisoners kneeling in his plaza and in the streets of his home.
"Thirty thousand damned elite veteran soldiers, armored and in the prime of their cultivation age..." Samael calculated aloud, rubbing his chin with a finger, the calculating, pragmatic mind of the patriarch quickly displacing the fury of the warlord. "They are simply excellent, free slave labor, wonderfully disciplined by terror to expand our adamantite crystal mines in the desert mountain ranges. And..." Samael smiled grimly, a smile that promised hells in underground laboratories, "...maybe we can separate a few thousand of the healthiest and strongest so Cedric can test the mutation limits of our bloodlines and runic implants on living subjects. Nothing goes to waste in House Morningstar."
Samael looked up and into the distance, turning his face slightly toward the freezing, distant northern horizon. There, far in the distance, the gigantic, wide column of thick, dark, toxic black and crimson-red smoke from the wreckage of the majestic Leviathan rose gloomily into the atmosphere, announcing and painting the sky in mourning.
It was the herald of chaos. The blood signature of the Demon. A letter of annihilation and an ultimatum of death, written in fire and shattered stellar metal, sent directly, without a return address and without mercy, to the frigid, impenetrable doors of Patriarch Cryon's throne room in the capital of the northern empire.
The defensive war of the south had finally concluded. The true, massive Morningstar empire had just been born upon the puddles of their enemies' blood. The world would have to learn to live under the shadow of the Dragon's wings.
Author's Note
"Hey everyone! I hope you survived the intensity of these last few chapters (because I almost depleted all my Qi writing them 😂).
I wanted to take a second to thank every single one of you who has this novel in your library and is joining me on this crazy ride. If you're enjoying Samael's path and the brutality of the Morningstar Clan, I would be endlessly grateful if you could leave a REVIEW on the main page and drop some comments on the chapters! > I read absolutely everything. Your comments are like high-grade spirit stones for my Dantian; they motivate me to keep writing these massive chapters and help the algorithm recommend the novel to more people. Drop your theories and thoughts below! See you in the next update!"