"…or do you plan to do something more interesting?"

"…."

"…."

Her words barely made a ripple.

The battlefield had seen worse.

Still, between the torn silk, the lazy posture, and the way her tits sat perfectly round and unapologetic, any halfway-functional man would've been thirsty enough to start hallucinating.

Wang Xiao wasn't halfway-functional... Today.

He stared at her like he was assessing a malfunctioning weapon. "Define interesting," he said flatly. Then added, without blinking, "You want me to rape you?"

The word landed like a brick.

Athlaea didn't recoil, didn't get angry.

She licked her seductive lips instead, deliberate, and shameless.

"…If you have the ability."

"…."

Wang Xiao turned his head slightly toward Yuriko, genuinely puzzled. "I just kicked her into low orbit. What exactly does she think happens if I force myself on her?" He frowned. "She screams? Files a complaint?"

"…."

Yuriko's ears turned red instantly. She hesitated, then sighed, "She… wouldn't be unwilling… So, it shouldn't count."

She forgot to mention the important part:

This woman worshipped strength like a religion. And right now, Athlaea was looking at Wang Xiao the way a miner looks at a diamond vein, eyes glittering, hands itching, brain completely offline.

"I should kill her," Wang Xiao said suddenly, tone casual, like deciding lunch.

Athlaea's smile finally dropped.

Not fear, confusion.

She was beautiful, famous, a continental guardian... Men begged just to kneel near her shadow.

Why the hell jump straight to murder?

She stepped closer instinctively, dropping her voice, turning soft. "That seems… excessive, don't you think?"

Then she crossed the line.

She slipped in, wrapped his arm around her thin curvy waist, pressed herself against him like he owned her palace.

Warmth, curves, confidence...?

The silk loose like it was personally invested in the moment.

A burst of orange blossom and sweat hit his nose.

Her hair brushed his face as she tilted her head, lips close, teasing.

"Still want to kill me?"

Her mouth was right there, juicy, smug, cherry-soft. The kind of lips that got men stabbed because they forgot to think.

She was a prickly pear... Sweet inside, pain outside.

Except...

Wang Xiao was already holding her waist.

Firm and casual, like he'd picked up a grocery bag.

No hesitation.

No hunger.

No excitement.

Perks of being powerful?

Wang Xueying's worldview quietly collapsed.

…Do women just do this now? Is this normal?

Just when Athlaea thought she'd won something, Wang Xiao shook his head. "Held too many waists like this," he said, unimpressed. "Nothing special."

"…."

That did it.

Athlaea felt it instantly, the shift.

This wasn't flirting anymore.

Yuriko was glaring at her like a loaded gun with opinions, silently telling her: choose your next words carefully, or you're about to become a cautionary tale.

Color drained from Athlaea's face.

For the first time, doubt crept in.

If she had known this man was this moody…

this unhinged… this utterly uninterested in being seduced…

Swoosh!

"Hm?"

Wang Xiao felt something soft in his hand, soft enough to drown fingers, warm enough to fog reason. Before he even processed it, Athlaea grabbed his other wrist and shoved it straight inside her loose chiton.

Directly onto her smooth mounds on her chest.

His palm sank into smooth, cool skin that warmed instantly against his touch, plump, heavy, indecently soft, like someone had stuffed a dessert inside hot sand.

She leaned in, lips close enough to brush breath against his cheek. "Do theirs taste like desert melon?" she asked, her breath smelled faintly of sweet citrus and heat.

Wang Xiao stared at her as if evaluating the structural integrity of her skull.

"…"

He didn't pull his hand out.

Instead he stepped forward, dragging her along effortlessly.

"If you lied," he said calmly, "you die."

Athlaea actually shivered.

Not in fear.

But before she could speak, he turned toward Yuriko, who stood a few paces away, frozen like someone watching a crime she didn't know how to report.

He seized Yuriko's slim waist with his free hand.

"Move," he ordered.

Yuriko stiffened, eyes narrowing, her voice steady despite the indecent situation, "Go inside the Pyramid. If you delay any longer… the four people inside won't make it."

"Four?" Wang Xiao raised a brow. "Helena, Aisha… and the other two clowns?"

He shrugged, already walking toward the coded entrance stones, still holding both women like trophies.

Athlaea, after the earlier humiliation, didn't dare act out again. Even when his fingers curled around her waist, pinching harshly against the sensitive skin under the fabric, she swallowed her voice and walked quietly, obedient for the first time in her extremely long life.

Yuriko on the other hand… Looked like she was committing a religious sin just by being held like that.

The battlefield noticed.

Two stunning women clearing the path for one man, one clinging, one glaring, both powerful enough to turn armies into sandstorms.

Wang Xiao's smile widened, he liked this!

Making women work for him had a rare, satisfying charm.

Behind them, Yue'er hesitated, looked at Wang Xueying and Isabella, then hurried after Wang Xiao like a nervous kitten trying not to be left behind.

The two remaining women were not amused.

Wang Xueying sighed, "…Uh, excuse me? Brother? I am not zombie-proof like you."

Wang Xiao's voice drifted back through the dust storm.

"Yanyan, stay with them."

The next second, he was gone, his figure swallowed by a rising sandstorm.

The remains of the battlefield trembled.

Whoever had placed that array inside the Pyramid… really chose the worst possible timing.

With Athlaea, Yuriko, and Ning Xue tearing through undead like bored immortats, the scene wasn't a battle anymore... It was a massacre performed out of mild irritation.

It was one of the rare moments Wang Xiao actually saw Yuriko use weapons.

Four golden constructs floated around her in a slow, holy orbit, each glowing with quiet authority as she stared down the massive serpent coiled around the Pyramid.

A golden sword.

A golden scale.

A golden rod, or maybe a scepter? Some spellcaster thing he didn't bother interpreting.

And hovering above her head, the strangest of them all... A colossal golden eye, the size of ten footballs, rotating gently like it was judging the world.

Despite this divine display, Yuriko and Ning Xue were barely keeping up.

The serpent's black scales shook with time-warp distortions, its body phasing in and out, existing across timelines like ripples on a broken mirror.

Ning Xue froze the desert into glittering silica.

The serpent ignored it.

Yuriko bent fate.

The serpent shrugged it off.

It was only interested in her.

Wang Xiao touched one of its scales, his fingers passed straight through.

"Hiding inside timelines, hm?" he muttered. "Does it really think that saves it?"

He watched it coil tighter around the pyramid, dark poisonous breath oozing toward Yuriko in waves, ignoring everyone else like they were irrelevant side characters.

For a brief moment, Wang Xiao genuinely considered breaking the entire temporal fabric of the universe just to drag this snake out by its tail.

But seeing the way it glared at Yuriko,

that strangely personal hatred, he leaned back and let it continue.

"It was called Apophis once," Athlaea said beside him, tone far more complicated now. "Its existence wasn't always like this."

Wang Xiao arched a brow. "Go on."

"Apep. That was his name, he was the Supreme Commander of the united Pangean Empire... Second only to Aegis. When the empire turned on us, he was the one who helped some of us escape."

Wang Xiao frowned.

"…Ah, that guy."

He remembered the man during his travels, strong, honorable, irritatingly righteous.

He'd ignored him because the man was too… textbook.

Athlaea continued, voice softening:

"He admired Yuriko. Deeply. But never crossed any lines because of his oath to the Emperor. He died helping kill Maliketh, mortally wounded. Chose Nirvana, turned himself into a living corpse to preserve what was left."

She exhaled.

"Years later… his corpse was swallowed by a python. Absorbed, corrupted... And this abomination was born. In her reincarnation as the Goddess Ma'at, Yuriko had killed it once, honoring the man he used to be..."

Her gaze tightened. "Didn't expect it to crawl back."

Wang Xiao finally pieced it together.

So the snake wasn't just powerful.

It was carrying the remnants of Apep's soul, his devotion, his obsession, and his hatred.

No wonder it despised Yuriko with every timeline it existed in.

And then... a thought tapped him from the side.

He glanced at Athlaea, lips curling annoyingly upward.

"Do you think that woman liked Commander Apep?"

Athlaea choked on pity for herself.

"You'll kill me if I answer wrong."

"Then answer right."

She pursed her lips. "Don't ask things you can't tolerate. She's had many reincarnations… one of them might've cared for him. Who knows what that version felt."

Wang Xiao snorted.

"What's there to tolerate? The guy probably spent his whole life orbiting her like a dog in heat, guarding her shadow, chasing behind her for millennium, and still died without even tasting the forbidden fruit. Is that a life worth living?"

Athlaea's mouth twitched... Whatever remaining admiration she had for Apep disintegrated, crushed beneath Wang Xiao's contempt like a relic turned to dust

She stared at the sand, kicked it once, and muttered under her breath, "…You're attacking my psychology."

Wang Xiao only shrugged, "Don't admire men, who can't even-"

Before his words could finish leaving his mouth, the world suddenly lurched and twisted.

The sky above the Pyramid shuddered, as if something massive had just slammed into the back of reality. A deep, subsonic roar rolled across the desert, not sound but pressure, squeezing the lungs, rattling bones.

"That's not supposed to happen," Wang Xiao said quietly.

The casualness vanished from his voice.

The heavens split!

Not clouds, space itself.

The sky tore open like rotten cloth, revealing a nauseating green beneath, etched with crawling geometric patterns that hurt to look at. Symbols twisted, overlapped, rewrote themselves mid-air, as if the universe was trying, and failing, to reject them.

A cosmic beam descended.

Green!

Dense and otherworldly.

It wasn't light, it was a verdict.

Far away, Wang Xueying and Isabelle froze mid-movement.

"…What," Xueying whispered.

Isabelle's pupils dilated, hands trembling as instruments short-circuited around her. "That's…"

The beam swallowed the Pyramid whole.

No explosion.

No resistance.

The black-scaled Serpent vanished mid-coil.

The ancient stone structures folded inward like sketches erased from a page.

Even the space screamed, then fell silent.

When the green light faded, the desert stood empty.

No Pyramid.

No Serpent.

No divine clash.

Only the remnants of the undead army, scattered and leaderless, shambling in confusion beneath a sky that had already stitched itself back together.