Chapter 143: The Eclipse Cage and the Blood Baptism (Part 3)
The air in the central mountain range of the Purple Light Sect stopped flowing. It froze, not from a drop in temperature, but from the absolute weight of primordial terror.
While the massacre of the disciples and lesser elders dyed the foothills red, four colossal pillars of light erupted simultaneously from the cardinal peaks surrounding the main sanctuary. The combined pressure of four Saints (Stages 4, 5, and 6) descended upon the battlefield like an invisible gravity hammer. Rocks instantly turned to dust. Dozens of Vexia's stellar metal puppets standing at the epicenter sank up to their knees into the solid earth, their mechanical joints screeching and bursting under the atmospheric suppression.
"INSOLENT!"
The scream echoed with the force of a natural disaster. From the four points, the Guardians descended. They did not fly; they walked on the air as if the sky were a solid glass staircase, each step creating shockwaves of different colors that warped the light.
They landed in the immense Plaza of the Four Winds, forming a wall of ancestral power that halted the invasion's advance in that sector.
"Who dares to stain our sacred land with this heresy?" roared the Guardian of the Magma, a red-skinned giant whose armor dripped living lava, evaporating the blood on the ground. "Where are the cowards you call elders? You send mere children to die on our doorstep?"
Before the immortals, the golden mist and the smoke of the explosions slowly dissipated. The figures of the Morningstar Legion walked through the dust. They didn't run with the fury of novices. They didn't shout insults. They walked with the freezing, predatory calm of a wolf pack that had just surrounded a herd of obese deer.
But before Violeta could even raise her rapier to answer the magma giant's insult, the very fabric of reality vibrated.
From on high, seated on his obsidian throne in the suspended Citadel, Samael Morningstar rested his chin on his fist. His violet eyes, now pools of total darkness thanks to the [Infinite Mental Calculation], observed the board.
The Patriarch spoke, and his voice did not travel through the air; it materialized directly inside the skulls of everyone present, amplified by the terror of the [Crown of the Primordial Sovereign].
"Four old beasts against my girls? What a lack of manners," Samael's voice distilled a glacial contempt, the tone of an emperor correcting rebellious servants. "Allow me to organize the matches. The scum must be recycled in order."
Samael didn't even stand up. He simply snapped the fingers of his left hand.
The [Absolute Authority of Micro-Space] spread like a silver spiderweb from the Citadel and crashed into the Plaza of the Four Winds. The world lost its color for a microsecond, turning gray and white. The immense, square-kilometer marble plaza literally shattered into four temporal pocket dimensions. Enormous, absolute walls of spatial void, dark and sparking with stellar lightning, rose from the underground, isolating each Guardian in their own "combat box."
The Guardian of the Magma blinked, suddenly discovering that his companions had disappeared behind unbreakable walls of solid space. In front of him stood only Kael, his sword dripping black fire, and Cedric, assembling his runic shield with a predatory smile. In another distant box, Lyra and Joren emerged from the mist facing the Guardian of Illusion. The distribution had been perfect, assimilating the elemental weaknesses of each enemy.
As the space finished sealing, Samael's Eye of Destiny slowly drifted toward a dark corner of the purple clouds, high above the plaza, but below the Citadel. There, hidden in a dimensional fissure created with millennial artifacts, the fifth guardian—the Stage 8 Hidden Elder—was holding his breath, preparing a massive assassination attack aimed at the King's throne.
Samael didn't even turn his face completely. He smirked.
"Do you think you can hide in the shadows from me? Vexia, don't bother."
With a simple, disdainful gesture of his right hand, Samael used his mastery over the crown to seize the space where the Stage 8 Saint was hiding. The dimensional fissure broke like a fragile egg. The powerful millennial assassin was forcefully ripped from his hiding place, humiliated and exposed, before being brutally hurled across the sky like a rag doll straight toward the [Veil of the Eclipse] in the southern sector.
The Stage 8 rolled into the liquid, absolute darkness. He stood up furiously, invoking his light. But in the inert blackness, two orbs of freezing blue will-o'-the-wisp ignited.
"Welcome to nothingness," whispered Malak's immaterial voice, wielding his immense scythe. The king had delivered his offering to the Shinigami.
The Storm Box: 6 vs 1
Back on the main board, inside one of the monumental spatial void boxes created by Samael, combat was about to unleash hell.
In this isolated five-hundred-square-meter space, the Guardian of the Gale (Stage 5 Saint) found himself alone. The old man, thin and with a face as sharp as a hawk's beak, floated in the air, surrounded by a furious green aura that cut the wind and created high-pitched whistles that would burst a mortal's eardrums in milliseconds.
In front of him, thirty meters away, six girls watched him in silence.
Violeta (Sequence 2) led the formation, the tip of her rapier brushing the marble and leaving a trail of black frost. Beside her, Eris (Sequence 3) twirled her black spear, its flames consuming the ambient light. Xylia (Sequence 5) levitated slightly, cyan static crackling in her jade diadem. Aylin (Sequence 9) kept her spear planted in the stone, connected to the tectonic pulse of the ground. Elowen (Sequence 7) held a throbbing seed in her left palm and her Codex in her right. And Elara (Sequence 6)... had simply vanished, melting into the long shadow cast by Violeta.
The Guardian of the Gale gritted his teeth, feeling the humiliation burn his throat.
"Do you little brats think six girls at the Peak of the Half-Saint Realm can stand up to me?" The elder let out a laugh that sounded like clashing blades. "I am a Stage 5 Saint! The difference between you and me is the same as between the mud and the stars! I will flay you alive and send your skin to your Patriarch!"
With his fury alone, the Guardian unleashed his full spiritual pressure.
The effect was devastating. The gravity in the void box seemed to multiply tenfold. The marble floor beneath the Sequences' feet cracked and sank an entire meter, forming a massive crater.
Aylin let out a muffled groan, her knees trembling under the crushing weight of a being that surpassed the fundamental laws of energy by several cultivation levels. Xylia was forced to land. The air itself became so dense that breathing felt like inhaling sand. If they had been normal cultivators, their meridians would have burst right then and there.
But they were not normal. They were dragons.
"Aylin, Elowen, Xylia..." Violeta whispered, her voice devoid of any inflection of fear. "Resonance. Now."
In an instant, the five visible girls forced the biological evolution of their primordial blood to counteract the realm suppression.
Violeta's body began to emit a blinding white vapor as Pearlescent Ice Scales sprouted on her neck and arms, stabilizing the space around her. Eris's veins lit up through her skin with a volcanic glow, her Marrow of the Unstable Singularity using the pain of the pressure as fuel, forming crimson scales on her cheeks. Massive voltaic arcs enveloped Xylia as her purple eyes turned white, her nerves replaced by Lightning Light. Aylin and Elowen mutated slightly; small ironwood thorns and obsidian scales covered their arms and legs, anchoring them to the living earth.
The Stage 5 Saint's pressure was repelled. The synergy of the draconic bloodline formed a dome of perfect resistance around them.
The Guardian of the Gale was surprised, but his arrogance did not wane.
"Interesting blood tricks! Let's see if your shields stop the fury of the sky!" He thrust both palms forward. [Saint Domain Art: Hurricane of a Thousand Blades].
It wasn't a simple tornado. All the air inside the void box convulsed. Millions of hyper-compressed wind blades, each capable of slicing a mountain in half, converged into a horizontal, rotating tsunami that shot toward the girls. The speed of the attack was supersonic, tearing through the sound barrier with a roar that shattered stone. A Half-Saint would be dismembered in nanoseconds upon contact.
Violeta did not retreat. Her Heterochromia—the neon violet eye and the diamond blue one—shone with a spectral coldness. She was the Freezing Executioner, the team's anchor.
"[Zero Entropy Pulse]."
Violeta's bloodline did not generate vulgar ice; it emitted an invisible frequency of "Non-Vibration." In cultivation physics, the elder's furious wind was extreme movement. Violeta imposed the law of stillness at a subatomic level.
When the apocalyptic hurricane of blades entered a fifty-meter radius in front of the group, it crashed into an invisible wall of conceptual cold. The visual effect was unreal. The fierce tornadoes seemed to lose their inertia abruptly. The supersonic wind blades became heavy, slow, their rotation decreasing to the point where the girls could see the individual shape of each sheet of air. The Stage 5's attack hadn't been destroyed, but it was moving through a dark molasses of thermal stasis. Violeta had neutralized the enemy's absolute advantage: his divine speed.
"Now, Aylin!" Eris yelled, bracing herself.
The little porcelain doll with amber eyes, Aylin, drove the Spine of the World into the sunken marble.
"[Spear of the Earth Storm: Stratum Wall]."
The earth obeyed the authority of its ecosystem. A simple defensive wall didn't rise; a colossal wave of rock, super-dense minerals, and layers of cold magma rose like a solid tsunami directly in front of them, absorbing the residual impact of the slowed hurricane.
BOOM! CRAAACK!
Aylin's stratum wall disintegrated under the immense cutting power of a Stage 5, but it fulfilled its function: 90% of the damage was mitigated. The recoil, however, struck the girl. Aylin spat a mouthful of golden blood, her hands trembling as she felt three ribs crack from the reflexive impact.
"Hah! Useless!" the Guardian scoffed, preparing to launch a second barrage now that the wall had fallen.
But he didn't have time. The pack's counterattack had barely begun.
"You haven't understood anything, old fertilizer," Elowen said with a maternal smile that didn't reach her cold green eyes.
Taking advantage of the wall's distraction and the shattered earth from Aylin, Elowen had activated her Codex. [Genesis of the Vital Root: Forest of the Gallows].
Beneath the feet of the Guardian of the Gale, who floated a mere two meters above the ground believing himself unreachable, the earth exploded. Gigantic roots of Spiritual Ironwood, black as tar, covered in red thorns and pulsing like enormous fleshy veins, shot toward the sky. They weren't slow; the Qi infused by Elowen made them move like muscular whips.
The roots quickly intertwined above the Guardian, forming an immense, hermetic dome of runic wood, enclosing him within a thirty-meter diameter. They had created a sub-battlefield.
The Guardian laughed, unsheathing a glowing sword of wind.
"Wood! You intend to cage the wind with simple branches? I'll shred it in seconds!"
"It's not a wooden cage, idiot," Xylia's voice, the Empress of Thunder, cut the air with mathematical coldness.
Xylia floated above the roots and raised both hands toward the dome. Elowen's black wood was a specialized botanical conductor.
"[Mandate of the Celestial Thunder: High Voltage Zone]."
Xylia discharged millions of volts of pure cyan lightning directly into the roots. The entire dome lit up. The black roots became charged with divine electricity, turning into a closed magnetic and voltaic net.
The Guardian, who had just tried to lunge at the wooden wall to cut it, crashed head-on into the array.
BZZZZAAAAAAP!
A blinding flash illuminated the spatial box. The Stage 5 Saint screamed in pain and surprise. His natural wind barrier was pierced by the perfect conductivity of the electrified wood. Millions of volts coursed through his body, burning his sacred robes, blackening his skin, and, most importantly, causing violent micro-spasms in his nervous system. For a critical second, the powerful Guardian was suspended in the air, paralyzed by the electrocution.
"ERIS!" Violeta and Xylia shouted in unison.
The Flame of Ruin was already in the air.
Eris didn't bother launching her attack from afar. The berserker with white hair and red tips propelled herself with explosive force, entering the electrified cage directly, uncaring of the residual lightning burning her shoulders. She was a whirlwind of absolute anarchy.
"LET'S DANCE, OLD MAN!" Eris bellowed, her heterochromatic eyes injected with pure homicidal euphoria.
As the Guardian managed to recover from the spasm, releasing a howl of furious Qi that dispelled the electricity from his body, he saw the girl falling upon him. The elder, humiliated and bleeding slightly, aimed his palms at Eris.
"DISAPPEAR!" A concentrated wind cannon, enough to erase an entire forest, was fired at point-blank range toward Eris's chest.
Eris didn't dodge. Instead, she activated [Entropy Combustion].
The flames on her spear turned a blinding white at the core and a viscous, tar-like black on the outside. Eris plunged her spear straight into the Stage 5's air cannon.
The fire didn't clash. The fire of Ruin devoured.
The elder watched with pure existential horror as his invincible Stage 5 wind magic was disintegrated at a structural level. Eris's flames spread through the torrent of air, using it as fuel to grow even larger. The black and white fire advanced swiftly through the wind tunnel, swallowing the opponent's energy.
The wind cannon crumbled, and Eris's spear, wreathed in the most absolute Ruin, sank deep into the Guardian's right shoulder.
"AARRGHHH!" The Saint's scream wasn't from the cut; it was from the incomprehensible pain of the Law of Ruin infecting his meridians, rotting his Qi from the contact of the obsidian.
But a Stage 5 Saint didn't fall so easily. In a burst of pure survival instinct and pain, the Guardian unleashed an omnidirectional shockwave from his spiritual core. The wind explosion repelled Eris. An inaudible vacuum blade grazed her left flank.
Eris was sent flying and crashed brutally against the electrified roots of her own cage, spitting blood. The vacuum slash had laid her side open; the white of her ribs was visible, and blood began to pour out in torrents.
"Eris!" Violeta yelled, her eyes widening.
Eris fell heavily to the stone floor. But instead of complaining, she let out a demented cackle. Her blood, spilled on the marble, began to bubble and emit black smoke. The [Marrow of the Unstable Singularity] activated. The massive damage she had just taken didn't weaken her; it turned her into a ticking time bomb. Her wounds boiled, and her aura skyrocketed to Half-Saint levels that bordered on the forbidden.
The Guardian of the Gale, his right shoulder useless, burned, and his robes in tatters, floated upwards, breathing heavily. His eyes were bloodshot.
"I acknowledge you, demon girls. You have earned the right to die by my supreme technique."
The elder brought his palms together, ignoring the rot of Ruin. The air throughout the cage began to spiral toward him, forming a black sphere of incalculable pressure between his hands. He was preparing a massive area-of-effect attack, a tactical suicide meant to collapse the entire pocket dimension and erase them all together.
"Elowen," Aylin spat, clutching her broken ribs, trying to stand up using her spear.
Elowen, sweating cold from the strain of her botanical control, bit her own lower lip until it bled. The luminescent green [Universal Elixir Blood] began to glow. Small drops of her blood vaporized into the air of the cage, entering Aylin's wounds and Eris's open side, forcing a green cauterization that stopped the lethal hemorrhaging immediately. Although the pain persisted, it kept them in the fight.
The Guardian roared, about to unleash the black sphere of sonic annihilation.
"DIE, SOUTHERN SCUM!"
"Silence," Xylia decreed.
The Empress of Thunder channeled all the power of her Codex and her [Frequency of the Sovereign Mandate]. Her eyes turned into spotlights of white light. She pointed her index finger at the elder's head, ignoring the profuse bleeding that began to fall from her own eyeballs due to the tremendous overexertion of trying to bend the mind of a superior being.
"KNEEL!" The [Voice of Thunder] was a direct lightning bolt to the Guardian's cerebral synapses.
The Stage 5, in the midst of concentrating his ultimate attack, was hit by an absolute biological short circuit. His nerves failed. His brain received the imperious command to paralyze. Given the immense difference in realms, Xylia's mind control only managed to stop him for a minuscule, fragile, insignificant millisecond of real time.
But in combat at this level, a millisecond is an entire lifetime.
In that fraction of time where the Guardian's attack halted, the world lost its color for Violeta. Black and white swallowed her vision.
Violeta exhaled a vapor so dense it froze instantly in the air. Her rapier disappeared completely, leaving only a hilt held by her ice-gloved hand. She was the pack's Executioner. The anchor. The hunter.
"[Execution: End of the Spatial Trajectory]."
Violeta did not launch a thrust through the air. She erased the distance.
The line of fractal frost linked Violeta's hilt directly to the Guardian of the Gale's chest in zero seconds, ignoring the fifty meters of distance, the black sphere of defensive wind, and the Saint's armor.
The impact made no noise. The Guardian's body tensed horribly.
In the exact center of his ribcage, an "absence" appeared. There was no bleeding wound; his flesh and bone simply disappeared, replaced by a block of stellar diamond dust. The cold of Absolute Zero invaded his central nervous system, stopping the biological time of his lungs, his core, and his heart. The collapse of space upon itself generated a silent implosion, freezing his apocalyptic technique in a coffin of perfect thermal stasis.
Violeta fell to her knees, her right hand completely useless, black from a severe "spatial burn," trembling uncontrollably from the recoil of her ultimate attack.
The Guardian of the Gale, with a fractal hole in his chest, his eyes bulging, and his technique interrupted, was still alive. His massive Stage 5 vitality fought desperately against the ice's stasis, his mouth opening to let out a final death rattle or a last suicidal attack with the Qi of his soul.
"I won't fall... to some... fucking... little... girls!" the Saint babbled, blood freezing on his lips.
But the Guardian, in his arrogance, his panic from Eris's fire, his paralysis from Xylia's thunder, and his freezing from Violeta... had made the most basic mistake of prey. He had forgotten to count.
He had entered the cage with six girls. He had only fought five.
In the very shadow cast by the elder's burned robes, the darkness thickened. Elara Morningstar (Sequence 6) emerged from absolute nothingness behind him, levitating in silence. She had not emitted a single trace of Qi during the five minutes of battle. She had been a ghost, waiting with freezing patience for the perfect blind spot, the ultimate distraction created by her sisters.
Elara didn't say a word. She didn't even breathe.
With a fluid, elegant, and deadly silent motion, she slid twin daggers wreathed in pure, lethal shadow Qi around the frozen neck of the Stage 5 Saint.
The blades passed through flesh, cartilage, and spine without meeting resistance.
The decapitated head of the Guardian of the Gale fell to the floor of the electrified cage with a dull thud. His body crumbling into diamond dust and ash followed seconds later.
Silence fell heavily over the dimensional box.
Elowen's dome of roots withered and crumbled, unable to maintain itself any longer.
The six goddesses of war of the Morningstar Legion stood in the center of the shattered arena. Eris was leaning on her black spear, panting heavily, her side cauterized but her armor stained with blood. Aylin lay on her knees, coughing and clutching her chest. Xylia wiped the blood from her purple eyes with the back of her trembling hand, almost blind from the mental strain. Elowen breathed raggedly, her vital energy dangerously low after healing the group's mortal wounds. Violeta held her frozen black arm, her face as pale as the moon. Only Elara stood without a drop of sweat, clinically wiping the blood from the twin daggers.
They had achieved the impossible. A group of Peak Half-Saints had torn apart a Stage 5 Saint in head-on combat without fleeing.
Violeta, forcing a slow, freezing breath, looked at the diamond dust of the corpse. Her voice sounded tired, but the pride of a Morningstar dragon distilled in every word.
"Age, old man... didn't save you from being eaten."