Chapter 139: The Anvil of Dead Gods (Part 2)
"One..."
The countdown wasn't shouted. It was a choked whisper, uttered through Violeta's shattered, bloody lips. A freezing hiss that floated in the center of the inferno.
The immense, heavy, geometric translucent black diamond monolith, which enclosed the colossal Light Golem and its apocalyptic gravity wave in its time stasis prison, emitted an agonizing crack. A network of fine, brilliant, blinding white fractures began to spread like veins of lightning across the dimensional crystal. The Stage 5 Saint was using the brute weight of its cosmic laws to burst time itself from within.
Violeta's cold blood dripped onto the obsidian floor, and in that exact, infinitesimal, perfect microsecond... the chaos of the Morningstar Empire's heirs was extinguished.
The disastrous adaptation phase, the childish complaints, and the miscalculations had been crushed to death by the gravity of the Palace. The murderous intents of twenty Peak Half-Saint level monsters did not clash with each other; they intertwined, fusing into a single, dark, predatory biomechanical organism, designed with the sole purpose of assassinating a god.
Tamsin (Sequence 13) was the first to caress death.
She didn't run. She didn't wield vulgar weapons. She walked with a hypnotic, sadistic slowness, her apple-green eyes shining with a cruelty that would freeze a demon's blood. She exhaled softly through her dark-painted lips, activating the [Art of the Black Flower].
A dense, thick, oily purple mist, almost invisible if not for the flashes of violet poisonous static dancing within it, erupted from her pores. It wasn't ordinary gas. It was the Pollen of Oblivion, a conceptual neurotoxin so evolved that it no longer attacked mortal biology, but sickened the very laws of magic.
The toxic mist enveloped the base of the gigantic frozen-time monolith.
"If there's a crack in your armor, big guy, there's a door for the widow," Tamsin whispered, with a sweet, lethal smile.
The purple gas didn't crash uselessly against the crystal; it slithered maliciously, seeping like ethereal parasites through the nascent, minuscule fissures that the Golem itself was opening in its desperation to break free from Violeta. As soon as the toxin came into contact with the frozen giant's titanic aura, the Law Corrosion effect erupted.
The majestic, divine, blinding golden light that formed the Golem's core began to flicker, turning a disgusting, opaque, sickly acid-green color. The toxin wasn't melting its skin of light; it was corrupting its Qi flow. The Golem, still trapped in slow time, experienced lethargy for the first time. Its immense quantum regeneration was suffocated from the inside out by deadly illusory thorns that blocked its artificial meridians. It was being assassinated from its own center.
But the jade widow wasn't dancing alone in this requiem.
Immediately, the deafening, Dantesque noise of the dimensional crystal cracking, the roar of Kael's residual fire, and the echoes of battle... vanished completely.
The entire world was punished and plunged into a tyranny of absolute muteness. Heartbeats could no longer be heard. The clash of boots against the floor was erased from existence. Joren (Sequence 17) had just unleashed the [Silent Wind: Acoustic Deprivation Zone].
Joren was a shadow among the gales. With clinical, professional coldness, he nullified each and every sound vibration within a three-hundred-meter radius. The Light Golem, already intoxicated and blinded by Tamsin's poison, was instantly rendered deaf, plunged into massive sensory panic, deprived of its magical echolocation.
Joren applied the Shadow of a Hundred Steps.
His athletic body became translucent, a heat mirage amidst the sepulchral cold. He stepped on the air, leaning on platforms of compressed solid wind, and propelled himself at supersonic speeds without emitting the slightest sonic boom.
While the giant struggled against the toxin and the crystal, Joren danced around it in a blink. His short twin daggers didn't seek to amputate an arm or decapitate; they aimed at the fine light connectors in the titan's rear joints. He executed dozens of Absolute Void Edges.
Fine blades of zero-pressure air, totally invisible and odorless, sliced through reality. Finding no atmospheric resistance, the cuts penetrated deeply into the Golem's luminous hocks. The colossus tried to move a leg within its temporal prison and, due to the suction of the void edges in its joints, lost the massive balance of its stance, stumbling clumsily in slow motion.
"Two..."
Violeta's bloody whisper trembled. The black diamond monolith partially exploded from the waist up. The Golem had managed to break the temporal seal on its torso. A silent bellow, muffled by Joren's acoustic void, warped the air. The giant raised its remaining fist, condensing the planet's gravity to crush them all.
But the Assassination Group wasn't going to grant it a single millimeter of mercy. It was the turn of the anvil and the needle.
From the darkest shadows cast by the flashes of battle, Nylas (Sequence 16) stepped forward. His eyes, the color of a dark miasma, looked at the false god with an ancient, calculating, apathetic hatred.
Nylas extended his right arm, and his own black shadow, dense and alive, peeled off the obsidian floor, crawling at an unnatural speed until it connected with the Golem's gigantic shadow.
Nylas clenched his fist with a violence that made the bones in his own arm crack.
"[Chronicle of the Event Horizon: Gravity Well]."
The base gravity beneath the giant's immense luminous feet didn't double, nor triple. It was instantly and tyrannically multiplied by fifty.
A geometrically perfect crater sank beneath the titan's legs. The Palace floor, forged to withstand the end of the world, shattered into millions of crystal shards. The immense Stage 5 Saint Golem, which was about to unleash an apocalyptic punch, felt its own weight become its worst enemy. The massive force dragged it downward, forcing its luminous knees to buckle, sinking into the shattered obsidian. Nylas's chains of oppressive gravity anchored the giant to the dimension's core.
The Golem tried to channel its Qi to break the gravity well. But in that precise instant of structural weakness and focus on its legs, a particle of silver frost floated harmlessly to the nape of the light colossus's neck.
Elara (Sequence 6).
No one, not even her own siblings, had seen her move. Utilizing the State of Non-Existence, she had frayed into the form of a freezing mist, ignoring spatial destruction, and had traveled through Joren's acoustic void and Tamsin's poisonous fog without altering a single molecule of air.
The frost particle solidified, condensing into the pale, silent, terrifying figure of the First Disciple, materializing directly on the giant's broad, glowing nape, like a ghost clinging to the back of a golden idol.
Elara's silver eyes showed no emotion, only the emptiness of an arctic predator. Her pale blue ice twin daggers descended.
"[Legacy of the Eternal Mist Dragon: Systemic Invasion]."
Elara didn't stab the hard outer shell to try to cause physical damage. She drove the daggers in, and instantly transformed the solid blades into highly pressurized, freezing gas that infiltrated through the micro-fissures of the light. The absolute zero mist invaded the equivalent of the giant's nervous system, traveling straight up toward its spiritual brain.
Inside the Golem's head, the gas violently recrystallized. Solid ice needles burst inside the beast's magical processing core, causing multiple frost micro-embolisms.
The Golem shuddered from head to toe. The immense fist that was about to annihilate them stopped in mid-air. Its golden halos flickered, spinning chaotically and losing their divine hum. It was nailed to the ground by Nylas, deafened by Joren, rotting from Tamsin, and now, suffering a cerebral short-circuit from Elara.
It was the Morningstar hell's ecosystem working to perfection.
And yet, the beast was a Stage 5 Saint.
Out of pure survival instinct, an instinct engraved by the gods, the Golem purged its own system. It detonated an internal light pulse that vaporized Elara's ice, violently expelling the assassin through the air, while partially breaking Nylas's gravity chains. The beast was shattered, but its core remained intact, charging enough energy to wipe out the entire room in a blinding flash.
There was one second left before Violeta's time vanished completely.
The sentence was pending.
From the rear, Altair (Sequence 10) did not run. He did not jump.
He walked.
His steps were slow, dragging, heavy, and deeply melancholic, like those of a man condemned to the scaffold who knows that every effort in the universe is fundamentally meaningless. His gray, dead eyes gazed at the gigantic god of light writhing in pain.
The air around Altair immediately lost all its color. The Golem's vibrant gold, the red of the residual flames, the purple of the poison... everything within a ten-meter radius around the Ash Monarch turned an antique, opaque, and dying sepia tone.
Altair opened the [Book of Mute Entropy].
He didn't launch a visual attack. There were no explosions or bursts of energy. It was a sentence of inescapable environmental decay. The Domain of Withering.
The immense Light Golem, which had withstood the legion's siege, felt the weight of time. The glorious, sacred golden crystal armor covering its massive chest began to lose its divine luster. The sacred gold became opaque, darkening. Cracks of rust and metaphysical oxidation appeared along its breastplate. The light of its core became "old," trembling like a candle flame in a millennial tomb.
Altair arrived in front of the Golem's immense knee, still pinned to the ground. He raised a pale hand, black veins throbbing beneath his leaden-gray skin, and placed his bare palm directly onto the beast's withered armor.
"Dust you are, and in my presence, dust you shall become before your time," Altair whispered.
[Touch of Withering].
A massive, disgusting, pure injection of absolute entropy penetrated the Golem's structure. The magical flesh Altair touched lost its "moisture" and atomic cohesion in a fraction of a millisecond. A thousand years of natural erosion, rain, wind, and death were condensed into a single heartbeat and forced upon the giant's center of gravity.
The beast's immense, broad, invulnerable golden light breastplate, capable of withstanding meteorite impacts, dried up. It became fragile, scaly, and brittle like charred parchment paper, peeling off in pieces of dead ash that rained down onto the black crystal.
Altair had exposed the Stage 5 Saint's raw core. He had stripped away the god's invulnerability.
"THREE!"
Violeta's agonizing howl shattered Joren's mute silence. Her eyes burst with tears of blood, and the gigantic black diamond monolith shattered into billions of fragments of dead time that evaporated into the air. Violeta collapsed against the obsidian floor, losing consciousness, but with a smile drawn on her red-painted lips.
Time flowed naturally once more.
The Light Golem, finally free of the spatial stasis, unleashed a bellow that tore the dimension's false sky. Deaf, poisoned, anchored to gravity, and with its millennial armor turned to ash by Altair, the beast channeled all its remaining power into a final, suicidal attack. An annihilation wave of divine light and pure gravity erupted from its exposed chest, seeking to wipe them all from the face of history.
But high in the sky, laughing with the absolute dementia of one who finds her true home in the apocalypse, was Eris Morningstar (Sequence 3).
She wasn't taking cover. She hadn't raised shields. Her veins glowed with a boiling crimson red through her pale skin, looking like cracks in a volcano about to erupt. The Frenzy of Ruin ran through her blood, feeding on all the destruction the Golem had caused, turning the small teenager into a Living Supernova.
Eris wielded her heavy spear, aiming directly at the abyss Altair had opened in the giant's chest.
The tip of her spear stopped burning with vulgar flames. It became a filament of infinite gravity, absorbing all the light, heat, and color in the dimension, creating a minuscule, vibrating, terrifying Black Sun at the tip of the metal.
"YOUR TIME IS UP, YOU SHITTY FALSE GOD!" Eris roared, her mismatched eyes bloodshot, diving like a meteor of annihilation straight toward the beast's wave of divine light.
[Scripture of the Solar Catastrophe Spear: Ultimate Move...]
Eris didn't dodge the Stage 5 Saint's attack. Her spear clashed head-on against the tide of golden light. But Eris's Flame of Ruin didn't fight energy; it devoured it. The viscous black flame "bit" into the atomic structure of the divine attack, using it as fuel, disintegrating the light and carving a perfect vacuum tunnel right to the giant's exposed chest.
Eris smashed into the center of the Golem with incalculable telluric force.
[...BLACK SUPERNOVA].
The impact didn't generate an immediate sound. It generated a collapse of quantum physics.
A white, absolute, mute, blinding flash erased the contours of the world for a millisecond. Everything ceased to exist in the vision of the twenty assassins. It was immediately followed by the expansion of a perfect, massive, relentless sphere of absolute darkness. A shockwave of pure dark matter that devoured the Golem's light, disintegrated its atoms, and triggered a chain reaction that annihilated every trace of solid matter within a fifty-meter radius.
The Stage 5 Saint's chest, unable to withstand the inverted nuclear reaction devouring its existence through Altair's wound, exploded from the inside out. The pieces of its body didn't fly away; they turned into static ash that vanished into space itself, reduced to nothingness.
And then, the terrifying spectacle of the "Wound of Reality" began.
At the epicenter of Eris's impact, there was no crater, no residual fire. There was a hole in the matrix of the universe. An immense five-meter sphere of absolute void floated in the middle of the Palace, devouring the surrounding light with a ravenous suction.
For two eternal seconds, an immense horizontal gravitational force dragged the crystal debris, the toxic dust, and Joren's broken winds toward the center of the black hole. The space around the wound curved and stretched visually as if it were melting glass in front of a divine blowtorch. The Morningstar assassins themselves had to drive their weapons into the ground to avoid being swallowed by Eris's apocalyptic creation.
At the third and fourth second, the dimension of the dead gods reacted. The misty sky and the obsidian earth began to vibrate violently, emitting an agonizing hum. The world had detected the entropic infection. From the temple's high clouds, immense, thick chains of golden laws descended like furious serpents, while titanic roots of blinding white light sprouted from the shattered underground. The natural laws of reality were attacking the void.
At the fifth cosmic second, the Universal Suture was executed.
An indescribable roar—the sound of the universe breaking and healing at the same time—shook the bones of everyone present. The golden chains and white roots embraced, closing and crushing Eris's black hole as if they were two titanic, invisible hands squashing a fly in mid-air. A final flash of pure light swept the room, pushing back the darkness, leaving behind only an immense, deep scar of smoking, black, vitrified crystal at the center of ground zero.
Silence, this time natural, fell heavily over the battlefield.
The gray dust, the cosmic ash, and the sparks of dying reality slowly began to settle.
Eris Morningstar lay at the edge of the gigantic smoking crater. Her spear was half-buried in the earth, dripping a black liquid that melted the stone. She was on her knees, covered in dark ash, her clothes scorched, her hands trembling spasmodically. Blood dripped from her nose and ears, but on her soot-covered face shone the most deranged, savage, and beautiful smile the cultivation world had ever seen.
The vanguard and assault center of the squad were on their last legs. Violeta unconscious, Eris drained of energy, Cedric with his runic armors collapsed, Kael breathing exhausted fire, Nylas and Altair with shivering Qi after using their absolute domains against a superior being.
They had torn, poisoned, aged, and blasted a god with a supernova. They had destroyed it.
But in the midst of the thick, dense smoke at the crater's epicenter... a bloody golden light flickered.
Kael's breath caught in his dragon throat.
An immense, mutilated arm of light, eaten away by Eris's black ruin and wrapped in Tamsin's poisonous rust, rested heavily on the edge of the crater.
The Stage 5 Saint Light and Gravity Golem emerged from the dust of the abyss.
It was no longer a symmetrical, divine figure. It was completely missing the left half of its immense torso, evaporated by the supernova. Its head had no golden rings; they were melted, dripping liquid light like boiling wax. Its right arm was a rusted stump. The black flowers of poison grew grotesquely in the open wounds of its flickering aura, and the gray miasma of aging made it move in a slow, agonizing manner.
But its eyes, two sockets burning with the deranged, primitive fury of an offended deity, fixed upon the fragile ants who had dared to destroy it.
The Golem let out a roar that wasn't magical, but pure animal pain and homicidal fury. A roar that shattered the few remaining ice stalagmites in the room to pieces. The mutilated giant raised what was left of its functional arm, condensing every last, agonizing drop of its immense sea of divine Qi to execute one final massive attack before dying. It was going to take the Morningstar assassins to hell with it.
The beast was shattered, bleeding, dying, and mad with fury.
It was the exact moment.
The millimeter-perfect, disgusting, flawless tactical window of opportunity.
In the opposite, darkest corner of the Palace of Heritage, oblivious to fatigue, cold as a judge's sentence, lethal as the shadow of the scythe, having waited patiently with their Qi at one hundred percent capacity for the anvil and hammer to break the god's metal...
The murderous eyes of the last elite group of the Morningstar Legion opened in the darkness, ready to hand down the final sentence.