Chapter 139: The Anvil of Dead Gods (Part 1)
The greatest and most lethal problem of locking twenty-one apex predators in the same cage is not the lack of space. It is that, at first, their instincts clash so violently that they end up hunting each other by pure accident.
In the vast, suffocating, unbreakable space of the Palace of Primordial Heritage, the dense golden mist churned like an ocean in the midst of a storm. The polished, ethereal translucent floor, forged by dead deities, was horribly marred by immense smoking craters, residual cyan lightning, and lethal static zones of absolute zero that defied physics.
Thirty agonizing days had passed in the chamber's accelerated, distorted time. The 100G gravity no longer crushed them against the floor; their bodies had adapted, rewritten, and forged themselves under the incessant punishment. Their cultivation bases were dangerously stable at the Stage 4 Half-Saint Realm (Peak). Their anatomies, although externally maintaining the fragile appearance of human youths, concealed beneath the skin a lethal mesh of invisible scales, adamantite bones, and muscles with the atomic density of dragons.
But their teamwork was an absolute, damned martial disaster.
BOOOM!
A dull detonation ruptured the air. Kael Morningstar was sent flying backward like a flaming meteor. His dark boots scraped violently against the unbreakable crystal floor, kicking up golden sparks, until he was forced to plunge the immense, heavy blade of the Magma Fang into the ground to brake his catastrophic inertia.
"Damn your hide, Rowan!" Kael roared, coughing up thick smoke, his lethal, vertical reptilian pupils blazing with incendiary fury. "Your damned wind dispersed my transverse slash! You're supposed to compress it, not blow it out like a birthday candle!"
Thirty meters away, floating gracefully and intangibly in the air a hand's breadth from the floor, Rowan wiped a nonexistent smudge of soot from his impeccable tunic. His cold silver eyes looked at the Infernal King with aristocratic boredom.
"My [Dance of the Sharp Wind] creates absolute vacuums and eliminates environmental friction, Kael. If you stupidly launch your raw fire into the middle of my space vacuum zone, there is no fucking oxygen for your flame to expand. Use your head to calculate vectors, not just your sword to swing like a barbarian."
Beyond Kael's crater, Cedric was down on one knee. His impenetrable metallic skin glowed a red-hot bronze hue, emitting a high-pitched screech of jammed gears.
"Violeta!" shouted the human tank, his pure steel voice echoing hollowly and full of frustration. "Your temporal freeze caught me in the blast wave too! I was going to activate the runic reflection array and you left me static for two fucking seconds! I almost swallowed my own kinetic shock!"
A few meters from the metal colossus, Violeta sheathed her incredibly thin transparent rapier with a chilling, dry click. There were no physical ice stalagmites around her, only nauseating optical distortions in the thick air, as if space itself had been fractured.
"You moved slow, Fortress," she decreed, in her usual freezing tone, her neon violet eye and diamond blue eye fixed on her brother's heavy figure. "My [Song of the Void Winter Sword] is not cheap elemental magic; it stops the time frame of spatial coordinates. It does not distinguish between slow friends and fast enemies. Learn to stay out of my stasis range or you will remain a damned bronze statue for eternity."
A dense, poisonous wisp of gray mist descended from the turbulent ceiling of the palace. From it solidified Elara, the First Disciple, without emitting the slightest biological sound of breathing. She looked at the disorganized group with clinical, professional disdain.
"Pathetic," she hissed, her emotionless voice cutting through the arguments like a scalpel. "We are twenty-one monsters trying to rule the exact same square meter of sky. If we fight with this disgusting individualistic arrogance outside, against the true Purple Light Sect, a single Elder with a tactical brain will massacre us one by one while we argue about who is right."
Suddenly, before Kael could reply to the shadow assassin, the Palace of Primordial Heritage rumbled. It wasn't a physical tremor; it was a telluric heartbeat at the very core of the pocket dimension.
The ancient Training System of the dead gods, calculating the heirs' mortal inefficiency and lack of cohesion, made a ruthless decision.
A bloody golden light flashed in the retinas of the twenty-one youths.
[TACTICAL THREAT SIMULATION: ACTIVATED]
[Incursion Level: Stage 5 Saint (True Power Unlocked)]
The golden mist in the exact center of the immense room did not dissipate; it was violently sucked into a single point. The air repression was so abrupt that the heirs' eardrums burst in blood simultaneously.
A gigantic figure materialized. A Golem of Light and Gravity.
It was not a simple animated statue or a wild beast. It was a divine construct fifteen meters tall, with a central core that beat with the fury of a contained white star. It had no face, only a halo of concentric golden rings spinning around a head of pure, searing energy.
The atmospheric pressure emanating from its mere existence was Dantesque. It was the immeasurable power gap between a Stage 4 Half-Saint and a true, consolidated Stage 5 Saint. An absolute abyss of cosmic laws.
The gravity in the room went from a brutal hundred Gs to an incomprehensible conceptual weight. The liquid air solidified on their shoulders. Half the squad, including the lethal ranged attackers like Varian and Lyra, were instantly crushed against the crystal floor, unable to even lift a finger, spitting blood from the compression of their own organs.
Kael was forced to drop to both knees, his scales creaking sickeningly. He gritted his teeth until they splintered and drove the Magma Fang into the floor, using it as leverage to force his own genetically altered body to stand.
"Fine," Kael spat, a thick thread of black blood dripping from his chin, as his king's aura ignited in a demented fury to counteract the weight of a god. "Either we learn to dance this damned song together, or this thing turns us to mush for the foundations."
The Light Golem struck no threatening martial poses. It simply took a step forward and launched a straight punch toward Kael.
The blow was so absurdly fast that it broke three sound barriers consecutively. The giant's fist didn't push the air; it compressed the space in front of it, creating a ballistic missile of pure, invisible kinetic force that threatened to erase Kael from atomic existence.
Kael didn't try to retreat or uselessly raise his sword to block the mass of a mountain. His Crimson Dragon bloodline boiled, and his tactical brain operated in a millisecond of adrenaline.
"Aylin! The fucking floor!" he bellowed, his lungs burning.
Aylin, who barely measured one meter sixty and looked like a fragile, delicate blonde porcelain doll amidst the hellscape, did not hesitate, did not prepare stances, nor jump to dodge. She simply let the dead weight of her body fall backward.
The unbreakable obsidian forged by gods beneath her feet magically rippled as if it were a pond of calm waters, and swallowed her completely without leaving a single crack or trace. [Tectonic Navigation].
The Golem's gigantic fist was millimeters from crushing Kael's skull when the crystal beneath the titan's feet erupted toward the ceiling.
An immense column of debris, fire from the pure friction of stone, and hurricane winds ruptured the foundations. Aylin emerged from the bowels of the dimension turned into a terrifying supersonic missile. Using her [Ascension of the Pyroclastic Drill], she was an immense, spinning blur of brown and emerald green. The piercing drill impacted with the force of an ascending meteorite directly on the light-shining chin of the giant Golem.
The crunch was deafening. The impact achieved the biologically impossible: deflecting the brutal inertia of the Golem's punch mere millimeters from Kael's face, and lifting the thousands of tons of weight of the beast of light barely a few centimeters off the ground, breaking its gravity balance.
But it was a Stage 5 Saint.
The Golem did not fall. Its face of light simply reconfigured in an instant. It ignored Aylin in the air and, using the rotation of the girl's strike, twisted its gigantic torso to land a lethal, descending backhand against her.
"Rowan!" Kael yelled, propelling himself forward while Aylin was exposed in the air.
Rowan moved. He didn't run or jump. He applied the [Zero Friction Glide]. His physical body stopped registering friction with the atmosphere and gravity. He became a silver blur that crossed the battlefield at relativistic speeds without producing a single decibel of sound. In a fraction of a heartbeat, Rowan brushed past Kael and began to spin in circles around the Golem and the Infernal King.
Rowan didn't attack the giant. Utilizing the flawless synergy of the Sharp Wind, he created an immense tunnel of absolute vacuum in Kael's attack path. He removed all oxygen, wind resistance, and Qi particles from the corridor.
Kael understood instantly. The Infernal King temporarily sheathed his external flames, and his mind entered a sepulchral, alienating, absolute silence. He no longer heard the creaking of stone or the hum of approaching death. Only his breathing and the cold metal existed. [Sword Intent: Awakening of the Edge (Level 1)].
The world was wiped clean of visual distractions. The aura of his Magma Fang stopped radiating volcanic heat and condensed into a fine, microscopic, infinitely sharp line of white light on the weapon's edge. A line that cut causality itself.
Kael shot through Rowan's vacuum tunnel. With no atmospheric friction or wind resistance against him, and dragged by the suction force of the perfect vacuum, the speed of his charge multiplied by three, breaking his own biological limits.
He pierced the giant's defense just as it lowered its arm to crush Aylin.
Kael's cut wasn't loud or explosive. It was a clinical hiss. The fine white line of his Level 1 Sword Intent completely ignored the Golem's immense, hard, dazzling external armor of light, empirically seeking and finding the atomic weak point in the structure of its artificial meridians.
The immense sword crossed the construct's gigantic right arm.
Silence.
A second later, the titan of light's immense arm, heavy as a thirty-story building, slid from its joint and fell amputated, crashing against the crystal floor and vanishing into a rain of golden particles. Kael landed on the other side, skidding on the crystal, the blade of his sword emitting cold white smoke.
"Not bad, little light breeze," Kael panted, his chest rising and falling erratically, smiling with sadistic arrogance at his brother.
"Acceptable timing, brainless torch," Rowan replied, solidifying ten meters away, his twin daggers shining without having touched blood.
But Kael's smile lasted exactly as long as a blink.
The Golem of Light and Gravity didn't even emit a cry of agony. Its status as a Stage 5 Saint implied the control of greater laws. Golden light boiled at the stump of its amputated shoulder, seething and reconnecting concepts. In less than two miserable seconds, a new, identical, perfect arm of solid light sprouted and completely crystallized. Instantaneous quantum cellular regeneration.
The divine construct turned its faceless head toward the twenty-one assassins. It was done playing. If brute force and physical damage didn't work against these pesky Half-Saint ants, it would use the authority of space.
The Golem raised its immense regenerated arms toward the palace's false mist sky. The heavy golden rings orbiting its head began to spin at maddening revolutions, emitting a cosmic hum that pierced the mind.
All the light in the immense temple literally began to be sucked toward the center of the beast's chest. A black, purely empty, deep, infinitely heavy sphere began to grow. It wasn't an elemental magic attack. It was a gravitational singularity. A compression of pure gravity designed to create an omnidirectional spherical shockwave that would sweep away every organic molecule within a thousand-meter radius.
"It's going to erase us! Absolute defense in the center, NOW!" Elara shrieked from the shadows, losing her emotionless assassin tone for the first time in her life.
None of the legion's attacks—not Eris's dark fire, not Lys's healing laser, not Varian's tracking arrows—could reach the Golem in time or pierce the gravitational repulsion shield that had formed around it to protect the attack's charge.
Cedric took an immense, telluric step in front of his siblings.
THUD.
His body didn't just darken; his metal dragon blood and his regressor mind processed ten thousand vectors of death in a second.
"Turtle formation, everyone behind my shoulders, quickly!" Cedric ordered, and his hands became an incomprehensible blur of absolute technical mastery.
Cedric's fingers danced, weaving the very laws of reality. [Manual of the Emperor of Seals]. Instead of useless flags, he stitched the void itself. In front of him materialized immense, intricate, imposing three-dimensional runic disks of platinum light. Spinning disks the size of siege shields that overlapped each other, forming the indomitable [Array of the Inverted Mountain].
"Transmutation of the Golden Structure!" Cedric roared, injecting his own Qi and the essence of his blood directly into the energy array. The shields of pure light physically solidified in the air, becoming immense walls of gleaming runic steel, anchored with thick chains to the obsidian of the floor.
The Golem dropped its arms.
The singularity in its chest detonated.
There was no loud explosion sound. It was a collapse of the world. A shockwave of black gravity and radioactive light expanded like a cosmic tsunami, ripping up and disintegrating the indestructible floor of the gods itself in its path.
The gravitational apocalypse clashed head-on against Cedric's runic walls.
CRAAAAACK!
The screech of celestial metal twisting under cosmic force filled the temple. The first layer of the Array of the Inverted Mountain, which could have withstood the siege of an imperial army of a hundred thousand men without a scratch, exploded into a thousand pieces of glowing dust in a second.
The second immense runic layer resisted the onslaught, but began to buckle inward, heating up until it glowed white from the unbearable friction.
Cedric bled copiously from both ears, from his nose, and from beneath his eyeballs. His knees creaked, slowly sinking into the unbreakable crystal. His Fractal Consciousness Network operated at three hundred percent, absorbing energy from the air and desperately repairing the array, but the mathematics were cruel, objective, and irrefutable.
"I can't hold it!" Cedric roared, his metallic skin beginning to crack, expelling thick, toxic smoke. "The third layer will collapse in four fucking seconds! And when it does, this gravitational pressure will crush our bones into a red stain on the floor! Do something, you useless fools!"
The team was cornered behind the shield, immobilized by the beast's passive repulsion. Kael couldn't advance; Aylin couldn't sink into the ground because gravity had made it denser than a planet's core; Rowan couldn't evade a full-area wave no matter how intangible he was.
It was the inescapable checkmate of a being superior to them. The Light Golem, impassive, channeled more cosmic energy into the annihilation wave to ensure their total eradication, raising the lethality of the gravity to levels that would shatter their Cores of power.
Three seconds to the total annihilation of the heirs of the Morningstar Empire.
Then, amidst the deafening pandemonium of creaking steel, agonizing screams, and blinding light, a different sound—clean, sharp, and terrifyingly pure—echoed throughout the chamber.
The soft, icy glide of an unreal blade leaving an invisible scabbard.
Violeta took an elegant, silent, languid step in front of the desperate formation, leaving behind the secure, failing protection of Cedric's back. Her silvery-white hair billowed not from the air pressure, but from the deep, unbearable, unnatural absolute stillness that began to emanate from her own pores.
Her mismatched eyes—one neon violet glowing with the cruelty of empty space and the other diamond blue distilling the cold of a dying star—fixed without pity, without fear, without passion on the apocalyptic gravity tsunami that was mere centimeters from shattering the last layer of her brother's arrays.
Violeta did not aim at the imposing figure of the Golem of Light and Gravity. She didn't try to launch a vulgar ice beam at the center of its power. The fragile, lethal assassin understood one of the supreme laws of the universe that the other barbarians still hadn't processed: to kill the disaster, you must first assassinate the very reality that allows the disaster to exist.
"[Absolute Zero Lotus]."
Violeta released the thin hilt of her rapier with her left hand and extended it with an open palm toward the inferno. She condensed more than half the total Qi of her fragile Half-Saint meridians into a single, minuscule, painful millimeter point in the intermediate space between Cedric's shield and the destructive gravity wave.
From absolute conceptual nothingness, an immense, geometrically perfect Transparent Crystal Lotus bloomed brutally and majestically in the suffocating air.
Upon opening its immense, invisible petals, the divine flower emitted a deafening pulse of conceptual cold. But it wasn't thermal cold that vulgarly lowered the atmospheric temperature seeking to freeze water. It was a massive anchor driven directly into the bowels of physical laws. It was an order of absolute "Non-Vibration" imposed on the very fabric of the spatial matrix.
The thick white mist of zero vibrations that sprouted from the flower seemed to drain the color from the world around it. The adjacent space "solidified." The air itself became so thick, rigid, and immovable that the immense, relentless, destructive frontal gravity wave launched by the Golem crashed against this section of the universe and... got stuck.
The immense explosion wasn't stopped by a physical wall; it was forcefully compelled to travel at the speed of a dying snail through the anchored space. The lethal tsunami of destruction became trapped in a Dantesque, incredible slow-motion optical effect.
Cedric fell to his knees, panting wildly, as his shield smoked, freed from the colossal, lethal frontal load.
But the attack wasn't nullified, only slowed down. The immense Light Golem roared and forced its own divine aura to break the imposition of the Crystal Lotus. Space began to crack again. Violeta hadn't finished executing her symphony of execution.
With a graceful, fluid, imperceptible movement, her right hand grasped the ethereal, almost invisible guard of her rapier.
The cracks in the world turned black and white. The snow, defying the room's physics, slowly began to fall upward. The deafening cosmic sound of gravity destroying stone was wiped out at a stroke, brutally silenced and abruptly replaced by a sharp, solitary, chilling crystal song that seemed to pierce the spinal cord of everyone present.
Violeta executed her thrust into harmless empty air, eighty meters from the central target.
"[Song of the Void Winter Sword: Ultimate Move...]"
The immaterial edge of her rapier didn't travel across the physical distance separating them. It disappeared from the assassin's hands and simply tore reality. It reappeared, violating all causal and trajectory laws of the world with impunity, directly embedded, in all its ghostly, frigid extent, right into the beating core of divine energy of the Golem and the gravity attack that threatened to devour them.
"[... Crystal Coffin]," Violeta sentenced. Her voice no longer sounded human. It sounded like the inevitable thermal finality of the universe.
Cold Horizon Collapse.
In the millisecond the technique was consummated, all the chaotic, vibrating spatial coordinates around the immense, powerful Stage 5 Saint Golem, and the expansion of its lethal explosion, violently contracted toward a single microscopic point.
The destructive wave that was about to shatter the Lotus and annihilate them wasn't frozen by cellular frost. The tireless, unstoppable, invincible flow of biological and physical Time stopped absolutely in that specific coordinate. The technique completely nullified causality. The Golem's energy forgot how to expand, and the construct forgot how to move.
A colossal, Dantesque three-dimensional monolith of inscrutable translucent black diamond surged massively from the unreal void. It enclosed, crushed, and sealed within its frozen, eternal interior both the immense golden explosion in full atomic expansion and the titanic divine beast within it, petrified forever in a horrifying paradox of absolute stasis where the next second of life would never arrive.
Absolute, white silence reigned in the immense Palace of Heritage.
But the violent, blasphemous transgression of violating space, bending time, and binding a target immensely more powerful than her fragile Half-Saint soul exacted its predictable, Dantesque biological toll.
The fine, aesthetic, beautiful blue and violet veins on Violeta's pale face, neck, and arms swelled and burst grotesquely. Crimson blood stained her immaculate pale skin, and a thick, unnatural black smoke, indicative of internal spatial burns, began to emanate profusely from her beautiful mismatched eyes.
Violeta let out a wet, choking groan, and spat a thick, dark stream of instantly frozen blood onto the black obsidian. She fell to her knees, trembling spasmodically, leaning one injured hand on the floor, her breathing catching agonizingly.
She had contained the wrath of a god and put the brakes on the apocalypse itself. But the universe's laws of compensation were fierce.
"The... stasis dome... of my Lotus and my Coffin..." Violeta panted, her voice barely a cold, broken hiss, slowly raising her bloody head. Her eyes trembled as she watched the interior of the gigantic black diamond monolith begin to glow, shake, and crack from the inside, showing that the indomitable Golem was using the brute weight of a Stage 5 Saint's law to burst through the forcefully stopped time. "The weight of the damned bug is... it's too great..."
Kael, Rowan, Cedric, and the rest of the assassins stared at her with wide eyes, taking in the titanic opening she had just torn in the sky with her life.
"I can only hold its disgusting dead time for three precise cosmic seconds before it breaks the coffin and my spatial core bursts with it," Violeta spat, gritting her bloody teeth, her mismatched eyes distilling a freezing, ruthless murderous intent. "I already stopped the universe's time, you bunch of useless... The rest of you damned well better have something lethal prepared for when I drop the anchor."
One...
The crack in the black diamond grew larger.
Two...
The murderous intents of twenty Peak Half-Saint monsters erupted into the air, their primordial bloodlines roaring in perfect, absolute lethal synchrony. The disastrous adaptation phase was over. The Morningstar Empire's elite squad had finally learned to bare their fangs together.
Three.