Long Shenyu looked at the demon first.
"So you're really working with beasts now? I thought your kind found them dirty."
The demon sneered.
"Working beside an inferior beast is still better than seeing a human breathe."
The beast scout reacted at once, twisting in Long Shenyu's grip hard enough to nearly dislocate its own neck.
"Say inferior again, carrion-eater."
The demon hissed, "Gladly."
That was enough.
Long Shenyu and Long Shenyin exchanged a single glance.
The answer was obvious.
Barely cooperating. Mutual contempt. Bound only by a larger directive.
Then the ground trembled.
This time the tremor was not subtle.
It came in a harsh, rising wave that rattled shattered stone and shook loosened gravel from the ridge lines. Two far stronger auras were rushing toward the battlefield at full speed, both moving through the air with the reckless directness of beings who did not fear what they would find at the end of their charge.
Seventh-layer Sky Lords.
Late-layer.
Mei Qingxue's expression changed at once.
So did Shen Lanyue's.
Neither woman panicked. Neither stepped back.
But both went serious in the same breath, because there was no mistaking the pressure descending on the field now.
Ning Huang straightened despite the wound in her side, already assuming what had happened.
Set up.
Observed.
Boxed in.
Long Shenyin only sneered, as if this were finally becoming worth her attention again.
Long Shenyu looked at the demon scout one last time.
"Tell me," he said mildly. "Were you planning to watch from the edges until the trap closed?"
The demon smiled.
Its little teeth were pink with old blood.
"Too late."
"Annoying," Long Shenyin said.
The two scouts reacted at once.
Too much said. Too much revealed.
They both tried to break free.
Neither moved.
Long Shenyu's fingers tightened around the beast scout's neck.
Long Shenyin's grip became iron.
From deeper in the woods, a huge voice roared, "Release them!"
A second voice followed from another angle, colder and far more controlled.
"Touch them and die."
The siblings ignored both.
Long Shenyu crushed the beast scout's neck in one motion.
A short crack. One twitch. Done.
Long Shenyin tore the demon scout in half.
No technique. No flourish. Just raw force.
Black blood hit the stones.
The smell was revolting.
The casualness of it—the sheer contempt in the act—was enough to enrage the approaching Sky Lords before they even arrived in full view.
Mei Qingxue's eyes narrowed toward the trees.
"Let me help too," she said softly.
The words were quiet.
The intent beneath them was not.
Shen Lanyue followed at once. "You're both strong, but that doesn't mean you should handle two mid-Sky Lords alone."
Ning Huang lifted her spear. The wound pulled at once. She ignored it.
"I will fight as well."
Long Shenyu glanced sideways at her.
She added coldly, "Not because of you. On principle."
He chuckled.
"You can tell yourself that."
Then he looked at Mei Qingxue and Shen Lanyue, and the warmth in his expression returned so naturally it was almost offensive.
"Rely on your man."
Mei Qingxue lowered her eyes at once. The edge of her mouth lifted despite the danger.
Shen Lanyue snorted and rolled her eyes with practiced coldness, yet the faint softening in her gaze betrayed her more than the gesture hid.
Then Long Shenyu turned to Ning Huang.
"You're under the same protection," he said. "I like you too much to let you get torn apart in front of me."
Ning Huang's reaction was immediate and impossible to hide completely.
Heat rose.
Anger followed it.
Embarrassment followed both.
And under all three, against her will, something warmer flickered once before she buried it so fast she almost convinced herself it had not happened.
"You are unbearable."
Long Shenyin made a strangled sound.
"I'd rather fight ten more Sky Lords than listen to you pursue women."
Long Shenyu answered lazily, "If you get knocked around long enough, maybe you won't have to hear it."
She bared her teeth.
"Stay out of my way."
He grinned.
"I'll probably have to save you."
That nearly made her attack him first.
Then the enemy arrived.
The first crashed into view from the western slope with enough force to break stone under his landing.
Massive.
That was the first impression.
His body carried a beast-man's shape only loosely. His head was that of an abyss-maned lion, dark and heavy, with a mane like layered iron-black flame. Heavy shoulders rolled beneath corded muscle dense enough to look plated. Black horn-plates ran down his spine in overlapping ridges, each one thick with the brutal inheritance scent of an ancient beast court. He was not pure mainline Heaven-Horn blood—not quite—but close enough that the pressure in him made the nearby forest go still.
Territorial.
That was the word for his Sky Qi.
Dense, brutal, possessive.
The Heaven-Horn Desolation Court was built on bloodline kingship and predatory order. This one was clearly from a powerful subordinate bloodline under that court—strong enough that lesser beasts would lower their heads on sight.
The second arrived without impact.
He simply appeared at the edge of the broken field like a length of night cut free from the trees.
Tall. Ash-pale. Too composed.
His fingers were elongated, elegant in the way thin blades were elegant. Blood-moon markings curled at his throat and wrists like old curses made decorative. He smiled when he came to a stop, and the smile was all wrong for a battlefield—too mild, too measured, too detached from the dead around him.
His aura was quieter than the beast's.
Also worse.
Cold, blood-fed, refined.
The presence of his demoninc bloodline, the Bloodmoon Rakshasa line, did not spread like brute pressure. It seeped. It suggested. It coiled around the senses like something that preferred to arrive inside a person before it attacked from outside.
Where the beast felt like a war-horn sounded across a mountain range, the demon felt like a knife hidden under silk.
Their eyes met for half a second.
Open hostility.
No alliance-born trust. No camaraderie. No shared contempt softened by habit.
The beast-man snarled first, voice thick with rage. "You killed my scout."
The Rakshasa's eyes settled on Long Shenyin.
"You destroyed mine."
Long Shenyin answered by insulting both of them without hesitation.
"You sent trash to watch me and somehow expected a different result. Are all beasts and demons this stupid, or did I get unlucky enough to meet the best you had?"
Both Sky Lords' killing intent flared at once, heavy enough that the cracked ground beneath them trembled in response.
Before either could move, Long Shenyu swept one arm outward.
A barrier rose around Mei Qingxue, Shen Lanyue, and Ning Huang.
Ning Huang's eyes sharpened again.
An outer shell of compressed Origin Qi formed first, dense and seamless, each layer folded into the next so tightly it looked almost translucent. Then an inner current of soul force settled into it—not enough to be obvious to the others, but enough to stabilize the entire structure from within. Thin spirals appeared between the layers, rotating so faintly they were almost invisible.
Ning Huang spoke immediately, "I said I would fight."
Long Shenyu did not even turn around.
"And I said you're protected."
Long Shenyin did not wait for another word.
She launched first.
Long Shenyu moved with her.
The real battle began.
To Mei Qingxue and Shen Lanyue, and even to Ning Huang despite all her own power, the difference between this and what had come before was immediate.
The earlier fight had been violent.
This would be something else.
Compared to early Sky Lords like Ning Huang and the six dead heirs, a seventh-layer Sky Lord stood at a different height of the same mountain. Not merely stronger. Different in nature.
At the late Sky Lord layers, Sky Qi was no longer just denser energy.
It resonated.
With heaven. With pressure. With a higher order that ordinary mortal cultivation only brushed against from below.
A Sky Lord's dantian and soul had already evolved enough to bear that resonance. That was why their presence alone felt heavier. Their attacks did not simply carry force. They carried command.
The beast Sky Lord stepped onto empty air.
And the air held him.
No stutter. No visible strain. He moved as if the world itself had accepted that he had the right to stand there.
His punch came down toward Long Shenyin and dragged a wave of crushing pressure through the space in front of it, as if he were hauling part of a mountain down with his fist. The air boomed before the strike even reached her. Loose stone below her feet burst apart from the pressure line alone.
The Rakshasa moved differently.
His body did not seem to cross distance so much as let bloodlight and shadow exchange places with him inside them. Each step was too smooth. Too slight. One instant he stood twenty paces away, the next he had already entered striking range of Long Shenyu.
Every clash at their level warped the field.
The air folded.
Light bent.
The ground broke before contact landed.
And within every movement there was clearer Dao presence than Origin Core cultivators should have been able to challenge at all.
That was the part that made the scene absurd.
Not because Long Shenyu and Long Shenyin were "almost Sky Lords."
They were not.
They were Origin Core cultivators breaking rules that many geniuses spent their lives assuming were absolute.
Long Shenyu could do it because his comprehension did not belong to his current realm.
He had once stood as a Dragon Emperor among monsters. He understood energy, law, timing, battle rhythm, and structural weakness on a level no one present could match. His Dragon Soul let him press on wills, read intent a fraction early, and fuse forces that should not have belonged together in a Lower Domain battlefield. His bloodline and physique refined, devoured, and recycled energy with terrifying efficiency. Very little of what he used was wasted.
Long Shenyin matched Sky Lords differently.
She did not care about efficiency.
She cared about escalation.
Her Primordial Asura Dragon Blood and Asura Wargod Body turned battle into nourishment. Pain sharpened her. Injury fed her. The longer a fight lasted, the more monstrous she became. In direct collision, she was not merely durable.
She was delighted.
That was why both siblings could stand here.
Not because they were close to the Sky Lord realm.
Because their bloodlines, physiques, soul force, and prior-life depth let them tear open the normal limits.
Long Shenyin met the beast first.
His claw came down with territorial Sky Qi packed into it, enough force to flatten an ordinary fifth-layer Sky Lord into pulp. She did not dodge.
Of course she did not dodge.
Both hands came up.
She caught the descending force head-on.
The impact shattered the ground beneath her feet. Cracks blasted outward in a black web. Her knees bent half a span under the crushing weight. The barrier behind them rang softly from the transmitted pressure alone.
Then she laughed.
A real laugh. Bright, savage, delighted.
Black-red destruction lightning erupted around her in a sudden surge, and with it came the aura.
Not a simple power flare.
An Asura field.
A murderous black-red halo unfurled from her body in jagged layers, the air around her shredding into crimson sparks and dark distortion. Killing intent, pain, old battle joy, and fresh violence folded together into one rising force. Her power jumped hard enough that even the beast Sky Lord's eyes narrowed.
She twisted.
Not away.
Through.
She tore the beast's force line sideways with both hands, ruined the balance of his descending blow, and drove a knee into his ribs with such vicious timing that the sound cracked across the field like split iron.
His body was too hard for bone to give easily.
But he still got driven back three steps in midair.
At the same moment, Long Shenyu met the Rakshasa.
The demon opened with blood-moon thread arts.
Thin crimson filaments spilled from shadow around his hands, each line so fine it was almost invisible until moon-red light caught it. They laced through the air in crossing patterns meant for eyes, throat, meridians, tendons, dantian points. Not wide attacks. Surgical ones.
A Rakshasa did not waste elegance on spectacle.
These threads were made to pass a guard and turn a body into meat before the victim understood they had already been opened.
Long Shenyu did not retreat.
A dark-gold aura rose around him—not loud, not explosive, but sovereign.
It spread close to the body first, sheathing him in a low dragon-like pressure that made the surrounding air sink. Thin strands of soul force moved under it like hidden current under deep water. His robe snapped once in the wake of it. His eyes became colder.
Then he walked forward through the web.
Some threads shattered outright against the pressure of his soul.
Others he redirected with two fingers.
Others he slipped through by margins so small they looked impossible, moving through the kill-lines as though he had seen them before the demon finished weaving them.
The Rakshasa's pupils contracted.
Long Shenyu appeared in front of him.
No wasted motion.
One palm.
It came in flat and clean, carrying force that did not shout but made space fold around it. The Rakshasa had to abort the next technique entirely and bring both arms across to block.
The collision rang through the air like metal struck under water.
'Bang!'
The sound went deep.
The kind of impact that made everyone watching feel it in the bones before the ears had finished hearing it.
Shockwaves burst outward. Bloodlight tore loose in strips. The demon was driven back half a step through the air, expression finally stripped of its false calm.
There was only a brief lull of calm.
Then Long Shenyin moved first, a black streak peeling away from the ridge with a savage grin still wet with someone else's blood. She did not go after the beast. She went for the demon.
The beast was huge, brutal, obvious. The demon was different. Thin cruelty. Old blood. A smell like moonlight rotting in a sealed tomb. Long Shenyin's eyes lit with the sort of interest other women reserved for jewels.
"I want this one," she said, and laughed as she crossed half the battlefield in a blink. "Let me see if rakshasa blood screams differently."
The demon's expression darkened instantly.
His calm mask split as Long Shenyin came straight at his throat with five clawed fingers wrapped in destruction force.
At the same instant, the beast dropped from above.
It had been circling wide after the earlier chaos, reading Long Shenyu, searching for the shape of his movement. Now it committed fully. Its enormous body folded downward in a killing dive, horn lowered, storm pressure gathered around its frame in violent spirals. Black-gold beast-source force rolled off it in waves, each wave heavy enough to shake shattered stone loose from the broken ridges.
Long Shenyu looked up once.
Then he stepped into it.
He did not jump. He did not gather himself in the exaggerated way most lower-realm fighters did when trying to imitate higher movement arts. He simply shifted his weight and met the descending charge with a shoulder-level strike, his arm driving forward with dragon force condensed into a dense, brutal line.
The collision boomed.
Air burst outward.
The beast's downward momentum stopped as though it had smashed into a mountain hidden inside a human frame. Its horn veered. Its claws scraped sparks out of the air itself. Long Shenyu's feet slid back two inches through empty space and no farther.