Chapter 394: The Demonic Blade Appears, A Fierce Deathmatch
The "star sword" in Stelle's grip pulsed, spitting out a fierce, golden-red radiance. She raised the blade with agonizing slowness, shifting her weight into an ancient, deeply heavy starting posture. This was the ultimate stance of her technique: Golden Light Demon Subduing.
The tip of her sword trembled, emitting a faint hum as it locked onto the violently struggling evil aura trapped beneath the massive barren star.
Catching the brilliant, unwavering resolve burning in Stelle's golden eyes, Lumine knew the climax of the battle had arrived. She didn't hesitate.
"Retreat!"
Lumine barked a low, sharp command. She instantly severed the flow of Geo elemental energy that anchored the crushing meteorite. Her slender figure blurred, transforming into a streak of azure light as she vaulted backward to clear the blast zone.
The very second Lumine withdrew her suppression, the earth ruptured.
"Let! Me! Break! FREE!!"
Bringer's hysterical, throat-shredding roar echoed from the depths of the crater. The massive barren star that had pinned him down detonated from the inside out. Countless jagged boulders and shattered stones erupted like shrapnel, tearing through the air and kicking up a blinding veil of choking dust.
From the heart of the billowing smoke, a towering silhouette vaulted into the sky. Bringer had mutated. He was taller, broader, and encased in a thick, jagged layer of Geo Crystalize armor. He looked like a grotesque giant clawing his way out of the abyss.
Yet, instead of lunging at his tormentors, he froze in mid-air, executing an eerie, deeply ominous ritual.
He slammed his palms together in front of his chest. The grotesque single eye embedded behind his shoulder, along with three other levitating eyeballs, snapped open. They flared with a blinding, blood-red luminescence as a stream of obscure, guttural syllables spilled from his monstrous maw.
Crack! Riiiip!
The unstable space behind him—still fractured from Lumine's Geo Element Array—violently tore apart, opening two massive, jagged fissures. Two gigantic hands clawed their way into reality from the void. They were far larger and more deathly pale than his previous constructs, each palm embedded with a single, unblinking eye that radiated a sickly, ominous purple glow.
But the true horror lay in what those colossal hands held. Each gripped a massive, grotesquely forged long blade.
The weapons were impossibly long and narrow, gleaming with a sinister dark purple sheen that seemed to drip with foul, corrupted blood. Thick, twisted veins pulsed rhythmically along the hilts like living hearts. To anyone familiar with Section 6, the design was unmistakably a twisted, bastardized reflection of Hoshimi Miyabi's Demonic Blade, "Tailless".
Except these projections were dozens of meters long, radiating an overwhelming, suffocating malice and a sheer, unadulterated will to sever all of creation.
"You insignificant bugs!!!" Bringer's face contorted into a hideous sneer, his single eye swimming with absolute madness and the intoxicating euphoria of stolen power.
"Despair! I will use the might of these Demonic Blades to carve you—and this pathetic cage—into bloody ribbons!!"
He swung his arms outward. Behind him, the two pale giant hands mirrored his movements with flawless synchronization. The colossal Demonic Blades rose high into the air. Even before the strike descended, the sheer, crushing pressure of their blade energy was already gouging deep, jagged trenches into the concrete below.
His grand declaration, however, was destined to be cut short.
"You talk too much."
Stelle's cool, utterly unimpressed voice sliced through his manic frenzy. Her star sword, now vibrating with the absolute peak of its charged energy, finally moved.
There was no devastating explosion, no theatrical shockwave. There was only a single, blinding beam of golden light. It was condensed to the absolute limit, pure beyond measure, and impossibly fast.
It erupted from the tip of her blade as a hair-thin line, then violently expanded, transforming into a brilliant, roaring pillar of celestial radiance that tore the very fabric of space apart. Wherever the beam passed, it erased everything. Dust, shadows, and even the pervasive, corrupting Aether of the Hollow were instantly annihilated and purified, leaving behind nothing but a perfectly straight vacuum of absolute nothingness.
Golden Light Demon Subduing: Sword Strike.
The blinding pillar of judgment was aimed dead center at Bringer's chest as he stood with his hands clasped, controlling the gigantic Demonic Blade constructs.
"What?!" Bringer's pupils shrank to pinpricks. A primal, suffocating terror gripped his throat as the shadow of death loomed over him.
It was far too late to command the giant hands to swing and intercept the attack. Driven entirely by the beastly survival instincts of his Ghoul Transformation, he poured every ounce of his corrupted focus into a desperate defense.
"BLOCK IT!!!"
The two towering Demonic Blade projections slammed together, crossing into a massive 'X' just in the nick of time, forming a desperate barricade in the path of the golden judgment. The dark purple aura coating the blades flared wildly, churning in a frantic attempt to neutralize and resist the overwhelming, purifying might of the sword light.
BOOOOM!
It wasn't the sharp clang of steel, but the deafening, world-shaking roar of two diametrically opposed, high-tier energies colliding. The dazzling golden radiance and the foul, purple-black corruption smashed into one another, violently grinding and annihilating each other in a blinding halo of sparks.
But the stalemate was a pathetic illusion. The Demonic Blade projections held for exactly one microsecond.
In the very next instant, as Bringer watched in utter, soul-crushing despair, the colossal crossed blades were violently blown apart, shattered into dissipating purple mist. The golden pillar of light surged forward, its terrifying momentum completely undiminished.
"NOOO!!!" Bringer unleashed a mournful, agonizing howl.
Pushed to the absolute brink, his survival instincts hijacked his body, burning the last dregs of his burst power to violently wrench his torso sideways at the final millisecond.
The golden beam grazed the left side of his waist.
There was no spray of blood. No rain of shredded flesh. Anything that the edge of the golden light touched—the ultra-hard Crystalize armor, his mutated, reinforced muscles, and the dense, concentrated Aether—was instantaneously vaporized by the apocalyptic heat and absolute purifying power.
It left behind a horrifying, massive crescent-shaped void in his torso. The edges of the wound were perfectly smooth and cauterized black. Nearly half of his left waist, along with a terrifying portion of his internal organs, had simply ceased to exist.
The devastating golden light didn't stop there. Continuing its rampage, it effortlessly punched straight through the glowing energy barrier of Lumine's Mountain Suppressing Spirit Locking Array. It tore through the shipyard, melting shipping containers and thick freighter steel plates as if they were wet tissue paper.
Finally, with a muffled thwump, the beam pierced a massive, temporary hole straight through the "sky" of the Epis Port Hollow, rupturing the chaotic spatial barrier itself. A brilliant shaft of natural sunlight from the real world spilled into the gloomy dimension, illuminating the destruction, before the Hollow's bizarre self-healing properties rapidly began to stitch the spatial wound shut.
A heavy, stunned silence descended upon the ruined port.
Stelle lowered her sword, her golden eyes locking onto Bringer. The monster was swaying on his feet, a massive chunk of his torso completely missing, yet he stubbornly refused to fall. She arched a brow, her tone laced with genuine, dry surprise.
"You actually survived that? Taking a direct hit from my Golden Light Demon Subduing and staying on your feet... I have to admit, you truly have some skill."
"Cough... hack, cough..." Bringer stumbled forward, his trembling hand clutching the horrific void in his side. Viscous, dark purple Aether energy slithered around the wound like writhing leeches, desperately trying to bridge the gap and repair the missing flesh.
He stared blankly at the mending sky of the Hollow behind him, then slowly lowered his gaze to his own near-fatal injury.
His mind reeled. He had successfully stolen the power of the Demonic Blade "Tailless". He had gorged himself on massive, unfathomable amounts of Aether. So why? Why was he still nothing but fragile glass before that golden light? He hadn't even faced Hoshimi Miyabi yet. Was he truly going to die here, slaughtered like a dog by a group of nameless anomalies who had just dropped out of thin air?
The shock quickly curdled into something else. A magma-like fury, fueled by absolute, crushing humiliation, violently incinerated the last shreds of his reason.
Powerlessness. He was so utterly sick of this suffocating powerlessness! From watching his leader be discarded in the wilderness, to suffering through failure after humiliating failure, and now this. Even after sacrificing his humanity for ultimate power, he was still being effortlessly crushed beneath their boots.
"AAAAAAHHH!!!!" Bringer threw his head back and unleashed a deafening, inhuman roar.
The whites of his eyes vanished, completely swallowed by a glowing, blood-red tide. The final fragile thread of his sanity snapped, leaving behind nothing but primal, unadulterated madness and a thirst for destruction.
"I'll kill you! I must kill you all!!"
He abandoned all attempts at precise control. Unclasping his hands, he let the two colossal purple giant hands thrash and swing wildly around him like the flailing limbs of a dying insect. Dragging his mutilated, smoking body, he launched himself forward, charging like a rabid beast at the closest target: Dan Heng.
His entire fighting style had devolved. There was no technique, no defense, no strategy. It was pure, chaotic butchery—a desperate, beastly frenzy aimed solely at trading life for life.
"Be careful!" Dan Heng's teal eyes narrowed into dangerous slits.
He could clearly see the monster was running on fumes, but a cornered, dying beast was always the most lethal. Fluidly shifting his stance, Dan Heng thrust his spear forward like a striking viper, the tip of Cloud Piercer aimed flawlessly at the center of Bringer's face.
But Bringer didn't even attempt to dodge. He merely tilted his head a fraction of an inch, allowing the lethal lead to shatter the Crystalize armor on his cheek and bite deep into his flesh, spraying a foul arc of corrupted blood. Ignoring the spear embedded in his face, Bringer swung his arm, manifesting a vicious, barbed whip of dark red energy that lashed out like a guillotine toward Dan Heng's neck.
He was fully committed to trading blood for blood, injury for injury.
Dan Heng frowned, his expression tightening. Yanking Cloud Piercer back to parry would be a fraction of a second too slow. Instead, he channeled the ancient, surging Power of the Dragon Lord into his footwork, kicking off the ground to retreat at blinding speed while relying entirely on the glowing Jadeite Shield enveloping him.
The dark red whip slammed into the barrier. The golden-green shield rippled and fluctuated violently under the immense kinetic force, groaning under the strain, but thankfully, it held firm.
Bringer, however, refused to let up. Seizing the momentary advantage, the berserker showed zero mercy. He completely ignored the razor-sharp Geo Blade Lumine was driving into his flank from the side, raising his other heavily armored hand to viciously claw straight for Dan Heng's chest.
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