Author's Note:
Hello everyone! Your favorite author, Void_Scribe, speaking here... Well, at least I hope I'm your favorite, don't break my heart in the comments, okay? š
Look, I come to you with a confession. As you've probably already seen, today I uploaded a brutal combo of 4 chapters. But before you go thinking I've become a charitable saint or that I took a speed Qi potion, I have to admit the truth: yesterday my single functional brain cell failed miserably. š¤¦āāļø
Three chapters were supposed to come out yesterday, but while picking a fight with the "Schedule" button, I accidentally set the last one for today. So what you have today is yesterday's leftover chapter plus the 3 that were actually due today. Total tech clumsiness on my part! Consider it a conceptual law blockade applied to me by the scheduling system.
I must warn you that today's chapters are a bit short (just like my patience when wrestling with publishing platforms), but they are incredibly fun!
So there you have it, enjoy this impromptu 4-chapter marathon. Have a wonderful day, a great afternoon, or a very good night... depending on whether you're reading this on your commute, while eating, or completely ignoring your mandatory sleep schedule (hahahaha).
I love you guys tons! Now, less talking and more reading. I'll leave you to the chapters.
Your beloved (and sometimes clumsy) author, Void_Scribe
CHAPTER 188: The Weight of the Void and the Silence of Aethelgard
The interior of the Palace of Primordial Heritage was an abyss of condensed pressure. In the center of the immense meditation chamber, Samael Morningstar slowly opened his eyes. His irises, a chaotic mix of violet and crimson, shone with the lethal light of dying stars in the void. His skin emitted the faint, heavy metallic hum of the Indestructible Body of the War God, a vibration that seemed to threaten to fracture the space around him.
In front of him, kneeling on the obsidian with absolute devotion, was Sela. The leader of the Eyes of the Void made no sound; her heartbeat, the flow of her blood, and her breathing were perfectly nullified by the Shadowless Specter Sutra.
"My Lord," Sela began, her voice slipping out like a lethal whisper. "The preliminary training in the mini-world has concluded successfully. My assassins no longer walk upon the earth; they now walk upon fear."
Samael nodded slowly, a smile of a pure predator curving his lips. He raised a hand covered in dark scales, and the space beside him distorted immediately, revealing Lilith, who held the Portal Key glowing with an indigo hue.
"The Void Herald is in a fixed position in the outside world," Lilith reported, executing an impeccable bow of martial royalty.
Samael looked down at the kneeling assassin.
"Aethelgard. They call it the City of the Cosmic Balance," the Patriarch pronounced, the name tasting like ashes in his mouth. "It is the largest and most corrupt neutral territory in the North. A nest of mercenaries, exiled sectarians, and scum with too much money. We do not know who rules it from the shadows. We do not know what exact factions operate in its streets. And I do not care."
Samael leaned forward. His aura flooded the room, heavy as an ocean of blood.
"Go to that city, Sela. Infiltrate its foundations. Discover how they breathe. Find their underworld secret brokers and get the logistical coordinates of the Ancestors of the Iron Blood Alliance and the Violet Cloud Sect. Buy them. And if they refuse to sell them... tear them directly from their souls."
"Your will is my destiny, Patriarch." Sela bowed her head until the cold metal of her mask touched the floor.
Lilith turned the Portal Key. Space tore open. Sela stood up in a graceful movement, her body dissolving without resistance into the Soot Veil, and crossed the interdimensional threshold.
The intelligence hunt had begun.
Sela emerged in the arid outskirts of Aethelgard at dawn. When her eyes fell upon the metropolis, even her mind, trained in the coldest corners of death, had to take a second to process the insane scale of the place.
It was not a conventional walled city. It was built across the length, width, and depth of a colossal crater that seemed to have been carved by the fall of a divine meteorite eons ago. Runic skyscrapers, floating palaces suspended by chains of light, and labyrinthine districts stretched as far as the eye could see, disappearing into the morning mist.
Physically, Sela was alone. Her cultivation, masterfully suppressed thanks to the Morningstar Clan's techniques, barely radiated the harmless presence of a common Transcendence Realm cultivator. However, in the shadow projected by her slender body, an abyss pulsed. Malak, the Shinigami with the devastating battle power of a Holy King, rested in her darkness, accompanied by one hundred assassin specters. They were a walking cosmic bomb, but Sela had not come to detonate it; she had come to observe.
During the first three days, the echo of the crater was her master. Sela did not enter through the immense main cobalt gates. She used the Penumbra Mantle to glide vertically up the walls, merging imperceptibly with the guards' shadows. The first thing she noticed, however, was not the clinking of gold or the bustle of merchants, but the earth itself. Beneath the city, sleeping in the unfathomable core of the crater, Sela felt an immense and melancholic pressure. A normal cultivator would never have noticed it, but her senses, tuned by Samael's absolute void, detected an entity of the Holy King Realm. Whoever the official Lord of this city was, it was a monster that was deliberately contained.
Gliding through the rafters of high-end taverns and the rooftops of commercial districts, she dedicated herself to identifying the wolves. She learned that the city's surface was divided into territories ruled by five oligarchies that the citizens called, with reverence and dread, "The 5 Great Families." She saw gigantic men forging metal that radiated unbearable heat in the Vulcan Family's districts. She observed immense Ice Wyverns patrolling the skies under the emblem of a raven, property of the Corvus Family. She followed men dressed in golden silks of the Aurelia Family extorting merchants, and perceived the stench of medicines masking a toxic miasma in the Viridis Family's greenhouses.
But the center of the crater housed a monolithic skyscraper of black glass, operated by mercenaries who called it "The Wandering Star Alliance." From its pinnacle, Sela felt the immense pressure of another Holy King, nicknamed the Steel Judge.
Ā«The surface is too noisy, bureaucratic, and plagued with lookouts,Ā» Sela concluded on the third night, crouched on a stone gargoyle in the rain. Ā«If I ask about the military secrets of the Iron Blood Alliance up here, the Five Families or this Guild will try to sell me out, betray me, or use the information for their own turf wars. I need the black market. I need the rats.Ā»
Over the course of the fourth and fifth nights, Sela's shadows nested on the rooftops of the Illusion Weavers. She focused her attention on the fifth surface faction: the Morwen family, who operated brothels, luxury theaters, and gambling houses under the subtle symbol of a silver spider. They were the undisputed spies of the city.
She chose a pleasure palace frequented by deacons as her hunting ground. She did nothing more than observe the patterns from the darkness. She noticed that some courtesans, known in whispers as the "Silk Shadows," did not merely entertain the dignitaries, but, in the midst of ecstasy, collected vials of memories and notes encrypted with blood seals.
In the early hours of the sixth day, Sela executed the interception. She followed a Silk Shadow leaving through a back door to deliver her report. When the spy crossed an alley heavily guarded by detection arrays, Sela activated the absolute intangibility of her Evolved Shadow Step. For half a second, she became nothingness, passing through the alley's defensive formations without triggering a single magic seal.
She did not unsheathe her weapons. She did not want to alert the Morwen family's life array by killing their operative. Instead, Sela literally slipped inside the shadow cast by the spy. With an almost imperceptible thread of dark Qi, she brushed against the courtesan's mind. It was not a strike; it was an infusion of paralyzing terror that plunged her into a catatonic trance. In seconds, Sela extracted the key information from her surface mind: the name of the true intelligence network, "The Court of the Eclipse," and, most valuable of all, the location of the secret doors leading to the inverted city: The Underworld.
Sela spent the seventh day preparing her ammunition. She evaluated the local currency and checked the leather pouch Lilith had given her. It was full of Low-Grade Holy Crystals. Seeing how the high nobles of Aethelgard killed for a simple Supreme Stone, Sela understood the magnitude of what her clan handled. What she carried in that worn pouch was not money; it was the equivalent of buying an entire empire.
She was ready to descend.
By the eighth day, Sela found the entrance in the forgotten catacombs of the crater. Using the runic sequences stolen from the courtesan, she opened the heavy steel door. And then, the world changed.
Upon crossing the runic threshold into the cavern, gravity suffered a nauseating twist, inverting completely. The floor became the sky, and the ceiling of the immense underground cavern became the earth she walked upon. The majestic buildings of basalt and black stone did not rise; they hung defiantly toward the infinite void, illuminated not by earthly fire, but by colossal stalactites of blood crystals emitting a perpetual, gloomy red glow. That scarlet light bathed the scar-marked faces of the assassins, slave merchants, and mercenaries walking through the inverted streets, giving the entire Underworld the appearance of a world-devouring beast's stomach.
Sela walked through that architectural delirium, her feet levitating millimeters from the slabs using the Penumbra Mantle. She had not advanced even three hundred steps toward the core of the district when the space around her seemed to freeze.
The shadows cast by the pillars elongated unnaturally, slithering like snakes to block all escape routes in the dark alley.
"An impressive concealment technique," whispered an androgynous voice that seemed to bounce and come from all directions at once. "But in the realm of the blind, the darkness is the absolute king. And you, faceless girl, have entered my palace without having the decency to knock on the door."
From the stone itself emerged Noctis, nicknamed "The Nonexistent," the Third Needle of the Underworld. A Stage 7 Great Saint. Behind him, space warped and cracked, revealing two dozen elite assassins of the Court of the Eclipse, all with daggers and sabers smeared in lethal conceptual toxins.
Noctis smiled arrogantly beneath his bandages. His Law Domain, Umbral Assimilation, began to devour the scant light of the alley, extending its tendrils to swallow Sela's shadow, with the intention of paralyzing and dismembering her right there. It was his signature technique; with it, he boasted of having hidden even from the clear perception of the City Lord on the surface.
But Sela did not unsheathe her daggers. She did not even invoke her Dragon Transformation, which would have instantly elevated her to the rank of a Stage 2 Great Saint. Doing so would have alerted the energy arrays of the upper city.
Sela, simply, stood perfectly still.
"You believe you dominate the shadows, Third Needle," Sela said, her voice devoid of any hint of emotion, cold as the void between the stars. "But you only play like a child in the absence of light."
The entire alley froze.
The small and docile shadow Sela cast against the stone floor suddenly expanded violently. It was not an outburst of Qi; it was a physical rupture in the laws of reality.
In the center of that infinite shadow that devoured the assassin's domain, an immense and terrifying Red Eye opened.
Noctis stopped his attack dead in its tracks. His pupils contracted into tiny pinpricks. His breath caught painfully in his lungs. The air in the alley suddenly became so thick, toxic, and deadly that the twenty-four elite assassins accompanying him fell to their knees simultaneously, vomiting clots of blood from the monstrous pressure.
Malak did not physically emerge from the shadows. The ancient Shinigami simply let a microscopic fraction of his oppressive Holy King aura leak into the physical world. It was a killing intent so absolute, so archaic and cosmic, that the entire alley was instantly filled with the intense smell of burnt ozone and dried blood. Noctis's Law Domain shattered silently, like fine glass crushed by the weight of an invisible mountain.
Beside the Shinigami's scarlet eye, one hundred pairs of white, empty eyes opened in the abyssal darkness of Sela's skirt. The assassin specters of the Holy Realm emitted a cacophonous hiss that resonated directly in Noctis's spiritual eardrums, threatening to shatter his soul into a thousand pieces.
The Stage 7 Great Saint, the most feared infiltrating assassin of the underworld, began to tremble uncontrollably. His instincts, sharpened by centuries of innumerable slaughters, screamed at him a single absolute, irrefutable, and inescapable truth: If you take one more millimeter of a step, you will be erased from the cycle of reincarnation forever.
He was not facing a stealthy and talented cultivator; he was looking directly, and without veils, into the open jaws of Original Death.
Noctis withdrew his aura violently. He forced himself to swallow the blood rising in his throat due to the brutal backlash of his own shattered technique. Slowly, with a thick terror that froze his marrow and his millennial pride torn to shreds, he knelt down, lowering his forehead to the soaked stone floor.
"Forgive... forgive my atrocious blindness, Your Excellency," Noctis stammered, his androgynous voice broken by primal panic. "Our Regent... 'The Tailor'... will receive you immediately. Please... have mercy and follow me."
Sela did not say a single word. The Red Eye in her shadow closed with a blink, but the residual pressure left the alley submerged in a cold that pierced the mercenaries' bones.
Noctis, walking stiffly and not daring under any circumstances to look back, guided Sela through the blood-illuminated districts to the core of the Underworld: an immense black marble chamber that simulated the extravagant office of an aristocrat from the surface world.
Sitting behind an opulent desk of fossilized dragon wood was the Regent of the Underworld, known as "The Tailor." A mature man, dressed in an impeccably tailored suit, whose long fingers were adorned with runic thimbles of stellar metal. He was a Quasi-Holy King, the absolute master of the invisible spatial Qi threads of the black market.
The Tailor looked up from his scrolls, with a supremely courteous and lethal smile ready on his lips to receive the mysterious intruder. But in the microscopic instant his eyes fell upon Sela's figure crossing the door, his smile froze and died.
A Quasi-Holy King has an almost perfect perception of the Dao and imminent danger. The Tailor did not see a simple teenage assassin hovering around Stage 8. He felt the fissure in the universe walking beside her. He noticed the aberrant anomaly resting in her shadow, an immense gravitational mass of pure death that completely defied any logic established in Aethelgard.
The Tailor felt a thick drop of cold sweat slide down his spine. He understood, with terrifying clarity, that if he even thought about using his spatial threads to try to decapitate her, the ancient entity sleeping in that shadow would react faster than time itself and rip him from existence before his brain could send the command to his fingers.
"Welcome to The Court of the Eclipse, honorable and distinguished guest," said The Tailor, forcing every muscle in his jaw and throat so his voice wouldn't tremble, maintaining the facade. He dismissed Noctis with a tense wave of his hand; the terrified assassin fled the room, closing the door as if he had just escaped hell itself. "My most sincere apologies for the rude manners of my subordinates. What invaluable service do you seek in our humble market?"
Sela advanced with silent steps until she stood in front of the immense desk. She did not take a seat. Her metallic mask hid any expression, leaving only the icy gleam of her eyes in sight.
"I do not come seeking minor services; I come for information," Sela got straight to the point. "Exact coordinates, structural blueprints of the immense defense arrays, and the precise isolation routines of the Ancestors of two factions: The Iron Blood Alliance and the Violet Cloud Sect. I want to know exactly what dark cave their Holy Kings and Quasi-Holy Kings are meditating in at this very moment."
The Tailor raised an eyebrow, completely unable to hide his genuine astonishment. Those were not common espionage requests designed for political blackmail or territorial extortion. That was raw, direct logistical information for a large-scale extermination.
"Those... those are two of the largest and most revered orthodox forces in the outer regions of the North," The Tailor replied with extreme caution. "We possess that information, of course we do. Our 'Cleaner' and our 'Black Widow' have mapped their tactical layouts for centuries, infiltrating piece by piece. But, you must understand, the price of revealing the intimate secrets of Holy Kings is astronomical. Handing this over to you could trigger a full-scale continental war..."
The Tailor made a strategic pause, hoping to negotiate an immense political favor, or perhaps force a juicy long-term contract with this mysterious and terrifying faction that had appeared out of nowhere.
Sela had neither the time nor the patience for the petty politics of mortals. She reached into her dark robe and pulled out the small, worn leather pouch. She tossed it carelessly onto the polished desk.
The pouch fell with a dull, heavy, and lethal thud. The silk cord sealing it loosened, and the entire room was suddenly illuminated with a blinding light.
The air in the refined office became dense, almost liquid. The immense pressure of the contained pure Law flooded the space with such ambient violence that the expensive inkwells on the desk shattered into a thousand pieces. The Tailor, a legendary man who negotiated with the life and death of empires every day, stood up abruptly, his eyes practically bulging out of his orbits.
Spilling from inside the pouch were thumb-sized crystals, but each one shone with the intense ferocity of a small violet sun, containing complex chains of natural runes floating within.
"Two thousand Low-Grade Holy Crystals," Sela announced, with the same casualness and boredom with which a commoner would ask for a glass of dirty water in a tavern. "It is the absolute payment for the maps. No future favors. No hidden contracts. A direct and final commercial exchange."
The Tailor could not breathe. His cunning merchant mind collapsed completely under the terrifying mathematics of power. A single Low-Grade Holy Crystal was easily equivalent to a hundred Supreme Spiritual Stones. Two thousand of these invaluable crystals equated to Two Hundred Thousand Supreme Spiritual Stones in pure cash.
That amount exceeded the combined annual military budget of the Five Great Families of Aethelgard. It was an unfathomable fortune that would normally require massacring ten medium-sized sects and stealing their treasures, exploiting a virgin vein in the core of an active volcano for several centuries, or looting the central vault of a minor Empire to the ashes.
And this girl... this girl had tossed it onto his mahogany desk as if they were simple, worthless copper coins.
"The... the record jades are here," The Tailor stammered, his parlor eloquence destroyed and pulverized by the absolute weight of gold and death.
With trembling hands, he unlocked a secret runic compartment beneath the floorboards of his desk and pulled out two heavy blood-red jade scrolls, handing them to Sela with utmost and unconditional reverence.
"They contain the complete military topography, the underground escape routes, and the exact blind spots of the Holy King-level formation arrays."
Sela took the jades with elegance and stored them in her spatial ring without even checking them; she knew that if they lied to her about a single line on the map, Malak would return to rip his head off that very night.
The Tailor, desperately trying to swallow his saliva and recover a minimal fraction of his composure and pride as the leader of the Court of the Eclipse, dared to speak.
"I must warn you, honorable and fearsome guest. You have purchased precise maps to your own annihilation. If you attack those formidable sects head-on, even with the immense power you jealously hide in your shadow..."
"Silence," Sela cut him off sharply.
Sela did not raise her voice, but the temperature in the opulent office plummeted brutally, far below absolute zero. The overwhelming killing intent that seeped from her silhouette filled the room once more with the thick smell of ozone and old blood. The Tailor felt the air in his own lungs crystallize instantly, transforming into solid ice and tearing his chest from the inside.
"The grave is already dug for them," Sela's voice resonated like the final verdict of an ancient god. "I only came to this scum of a city to get the correct directions to go bury them."
Sela took a step back, melting slowly and gracefully into the shadows of the office. Her eyes gleamed one last time beneath the cold metal of her mask.
"Forget completely that we were here, Tailor," the threat echoed like a premonitory echo in the merchant's mind. "Enjoy your small, insignificant fortune. But if you try to play spy and follow us, or if you dare sell the record of this transaction to the sects... I assure you on my own blood that there will not be a single bone in your body that your Sixth Needle can reanimate. Your Inverted Underworld will be wiped off the map until not a single stone is left standing."
The assassin disappeared without leaving a trace of Qi, leaving behind a sepulchral silence, the smell of death's frost, and the blinding gleam of the Holy Crystals spilled over the wood.
As soon as Sela completely vanished into the void, the Tailor's knees gave way. He fell heavily and ungracefully into his fine leather chair, breathing heavily, his chest rising and falling as he clung to the edge of the desk. The cosmic death pressure that had suffocated and frozen him inside slowly disappeared, but the pure, animal terror persisted, rooted in every fiber of his being.
He frantically, almost desperately, struck a runic button hidden beneath his desk.
In less than a minute, space distorted and the Second Needle entered: "The Cleaner." The Stage 8 Great Saint, with his deceptive and pathetic appearance of a hunchbacked janitor, looked at the absurd mountain of purple crystals on the table and then directed his eyes toward his boss, who was trembling, pale, and covered in sweat.
"What happened, Regent?" The Cleaner asked, dropping his broom, genuinely alarmed. In his centuries of service, he had never seen the unflappable Tailor lose control like that.
"That girl... the shadow accompanying her..." The Tailor wiped the cold sweat from his forehead, his fingers still trembling. "Cleaner, listen to me well. Use every damn contact we have in our network. In the vast Northern Continent, in the dangerous borders, in the ruins of antiquity, and even in the untouchable periphery of the Central Court of the world. Find me, right now, the records of any emerging faction that handles a death entity in the Holy King Realm like a lapdog and that pays incalculable fortunes of Holy Crystals as if they were simple trash. Find them right now!"
The Cleaner nodded with professional urgency and disappeared in a gust of air to activate the largest, deepest, and most efficient espionage network on the continent.
The Tailor waited. The hours in his dark office passed like a slow and tortuous agony, his gaze fixed on the crystals that illuminated the room, weighing whether that wealth was worth the cosmic risk he had just assumed.
Seven long hours later, The Cleaner returned through space. His face, normally stoic, bored, and brimming with confidence, was as pale as old parchment.
"Regent..." The Cleaner murmured, audibly swallowing his saliva in the silence of the room. "I checked the deepest records of the Aurelia Family's clandestine auctions, forced open the sealed archives of the Adventurers' Alliance, scanned the exile lists of the Northern Empire, and read the anomaly reports from a thousand years ago. Nothing."
"What do you mean, nothing?" The Tailor demanded, leaping to his feet, his hands resting on the desk. "Absolutely no one pulls two thousand Holy Crystals out of the sleeve of the void! A Holy King-level monstrosity doesn't walk the surface of the world without leaving a damn Qi signature in history!"
"There are no Qi footprints, my lord," The Cleaner insisted, his voice trembling for the first time in centuries of assassinations and cover-ups. "There are no previous transactions in the black market. There are no sightings in recent wars. Their dark energy profiles do not match any of the Five Families, nor the beasts of the Corvus, nor the relics of the ancient sects of the south. Regent... they are specters. Absolute ghosts that have just appeared on the map of the world out of nowhere, as if they were literally born yesterday to bring about the end of times."
The Tailor turned his gaze back to the bag of crystals. The initial greed, the ambitious idea of using that money to expand his power over the surface of Aethelgard, was completely crushed by a pure, animal survival instinct. Whoever that masked girl was, she served a master capable of treating incalculable fortunes as scrap, and Holy King entities as simple, silent bodyguards.
"Listen to me well, Cleaner," The Tailor ordered, his voice unusually hoarse and firm, full of finality. "Decree an absolute rule throughout The Court of the Eclipse, from the tunnels to the surface of Aethelgard. No one, absolutely no one, from the lowest iron-rank mercenary to the First Needle, must dare to investigate that girl, her shadow, or the mysterious faction that destroys the Iron Blood Alliance in the coming days. If any idiot dares to follow them, I will decapitate him myself before he drags the curse and wrath of those people to our doors. Is that clear?"
"Perfectly and absolutely clear, Regent."
The Underworld of Aethelgard, a formidable espionage force feared throughout the continent, had just bowed its head and closed its eyes, terrified before the single, diminutive shadow of an envoy from the Morningstar Clan.
Exactly ten days had passed in the outside world since Samael gave the order from inside his palace in the void.
In the immense tactical room of the Void Herald, floating statically high above the continent's sea of clouds, the air was charged with static electricity and a thick bloodlust. Lilith, Sienna, and Grand Marshal Vexia surrounded the glowing central holographic table.
Behind them, Kael with his greatsword resting on his shoulder, Dante playing with his new dagger, and the remaining forty-three Sequences waited in an absolute martial silence, their formidable auras sharpened like freshly polished guillotine blades.
A vortex of pure shadows and unfathomable darkness opened in the center of the elegant room and Sela emerged, without a single speck of dust on her dark clothes. She walked firmly to the table and deposited the two dark red jade scrolls.
"Mission accomplished, Matriarchs," Sela reported, performing a brief but deep bow of respect. "Here are the celestial and earthly coordinates of the main bases. The structural weak points of their immense defensive formations, and the exact location of the underground isolation chambers of their Patriarchs and Ancestors."
Sienna, without dropping her perennial smile, took the jades between her pale fingers. Her immense mental capacity processed the complex topographical data, escape routes, and intricate Qi flows in a single microsecond. With a sharp snap of her fingers, the holographic table came to life, projecting two immense three-dimensional energy models with terrifying clarity.
On the left, an immense valley materialized, vast and prosperous, surrounded by seven steep mountains and perennially covered by a thick mist of purple energy: The impregnable base of the Violet Cloud Sect.
On the right, a gigantic and imposing fortress of black metal and ashen stone rose up, brutally embedded in the treacherous and unstable slopes of an immense volcanic canyon: The headquarters of the Iron Blood Alliance.
They were undeniably formidable forces, gigantic armies, well-established and with millennia of history within their walls. But, in the eyes of the Morningstar Clan, they were definitely not the pinnacle of the continent; they were merely the first steps on the ladder.
"The month of temporal training in the sand mini-world has concluded," Vexia announced. The Marshal adjusted her glasses with a gloved finger, her cold eyes shining with an uncontainable military sadism. "My twenty-five thousand armored soldiers and General Orion Alpha are calibrated and ready to grind human flesh and splinter the steel of their gates."
Lilith straightened to her full height, resting both hands on the metallic edge of the holographic table. Her commanding voice resonated in the assembly room, injecting burning fire into the blood of everyone present.
"The board is set and the pieces are in motion. The Patriarch has given the definitive order of annihilation, eradication, and harvest. We will divide our naval and ground forces and attack both locations simultaneously to prevent any runic distress messages or mutual reinforcements from being sent."
Lilith pointed with a finger, whose nail gleamed with a lethal flash, at the mountainous projection on the left.
"Front A: The Meat Grinder. Grand Marshal Vexia. You will take your colossus, General Orion Alpha, and all the cyborgs of the Dead Blood Guard's vanguard straight into the valleys of the Violet Cloud Sect. Your one and primary objective is to mercilessly massacre their immense multitude of disciples to feed our Lord's passive Harvest technique. Destroy their protective arrays to the foundations and capture the Patriarch and the Quasi-Holy King Ancestor alive. We need their cores intact."
"It will be a beautiful symphony," Vexia smiled, visualizing in advance the brutality of the Tyrant Dragon Codex devouring the rocky mountain.
Lilith moved her hand toward the incandescent volcanic projection on the right.
"Front B: The Decapitation Strike. Sienna and I will descend upon the Iron Blood Alliance. We will seal the dimensional space around the entire canyon with absolute barriers; not a single distress message, spirit pigeon, or teleportation array will leave there. Kael, Eris, Dante, Titans, and the rest of the squads..."
The forty-five Sequences struck their armored chests in unison, the metallic sound echoing in the immense ship like the heartbeat of a single, furious monster.
"You will lead the frontal tactical assault in the vanguard," Lilith continued, her green gaze burning and setting the operational and lethal limits of the impending war. "Your objective is to completely decimate their precious elite troops in the outer and middle courtyards. I want you to sweep away all their sect elders and stall the advance of any expert up to the Stage 3 Great Saint Realm. If by chance you cross paths with superior commanders in Stage 4 or 5, do not act like lone heroes; I want you to form squads, use your divine lineages, and unleash your most destructive combined attacks to wipe them off the map."
Lilith made a solemn pause, her eyes shining with an immense oppressive power that commanded absolute silence and obedience from the youths.
"As for the high command above Stage 5 and their decrepit Holy King Ancestor... Sienna and I will take care of those ancient colossi. He is an old monster who has lived for millennia and rules his lands with an iron fist; he is not prey for you to play with yet. Lady Sienna and I will break his legs to a pulp, shatter his motor meridians, and leave him barely breathing over the magma. The Mirror Maiden needs his ancient bones and his fractured soul for the assembly of our next war Golem."
"We will knead their elders until they turn to dust and clear a path of blood for you, Matriarchs!" Kael roared, unsheathing the Magma Fang in his hand, whose heavy edge vibrated with a seismic hunger.
Sienna raised her right arm and slightly flicked her wrist. The small golden bell chimed, singing its melody of impending death.
In response to the sound, the ship's colossal navigation arrays ignited. Two immense spatial portals, massive and devouring, began to open in front of the ship's immense front windows, violently tearing the fabric of the starry night sky.
"The information has been paid for with interest. The blades are sharpened. The hearts are cold," Lilith pronounced, her voice adopting the tone of a celestial judge dictating a sentence. "It is time to descend and show them, once and for all, why true dragons never, ever negotiate with sheep."
Vexia turned around and marched with a rigid and imposing military step toward the left abyssal portal, followed closely by the terrifying sound of twenty-five thousand heavy metal boots that made the interior of her immense massive spatial containment ring rumble.
Kael, Eris, Dante, Violeta, and the rest of the lethal Sequences marched with bloodlust toward the right volcanic portal, wrapped in cloaks of shadows, furious lightning, and boiling fire, with the divine figures of Lilith and Sienna walking serenely and majestically behind them.
The long eras of peace, arrogance, and stagnation for these ancient sects had come to an end.
True absolute terror, embodied in the black banner of the Morningstar Clan, had just opened its immense doors above their heads.