Kael stood.

His body screamed at him to stay down. Ribs grinding against each other with every breath. Leg throbbing where the kick had connected. Blood still dripping from his lips, coating his teeth, running down his chin to stain his black kimono.

He stood anyway.

"Support me."

Silas moved to his side without question. Her brown hair was matted with dust and blood. Her uniform was shredded. The loss of her direwolf showed in her eyes.

Behind them, Rue and Aria were struggling.

The Mana Heart Peak Rank 9 cultivator had dismissed their attacks like rain off a roof. Aria’s light blasts did nothing. Rue’s Word Magic had been broken with painful backlash—the fox girl was coughing blood from her nose, her golden eyes wide with something that looked horrifyingly like fear.

Despair was setting in.

Kael felt Grey’s enhancement fade as the golden halo that had been boosting their abilities for the entire mission simply vanished. The physical enhancement, the mana boost, the extra speed and strength—all gone.

Kael frowned.

He could feel the difference immediately. His body was still enhanced from the Dragon Pill—the Tier 4 breakthrough had given him significant physical improvements—but without Grey’s boost, he was operating at maybe sixty percent of what he’d had during the fight with Seraphine.

Against a Mana Heart Peak Rank 9, sixty percent wasn’t enough.

He sighed.

"Looks like I still have to use it in the end.", Kael murmurs.

Rue turned to look at him as Kael smiled.

"Take care of my body after this."

He turned away from her before she could respond.

His legs carried him forward. One step. Two. Each one sending pain screaming through his broken ribs, but the Void Body Refinement held his skeleton together, the Tier 4 breakthrough giving him just enough structural integrity to move.

The Mana Heart Peak Rank 9 cultivator had recovered from Rue’s Word Magic. He stood in the middle of the battlefield, earth swirling around his feet, watching Kael approach with an expression of bored amusement.

Kael stopped walking.

"Shadow God Technique." His voice was quiet and steady as he murmurs under his breath. "First Form."

Darkness erupted from his body.

It wasn’t like his normal shadow manipulation—this was something else. Something deeper. The darkness grew, thickened, solidified into actual armor that covered him from neck to toe. An incomplete armor formed with cracks that ran through it like fault lines.

His hands changed.

The fingers elongated, sharpened, curving into claws that gleamed with inner darkness and then a crown with two black horns erupted from his temples, curving backward like a demon’s, rising from his head like a challenge to the heavens. They weren’t large—maybe six inches each—but they pulsed with dark energy, radiating an aura that made the air itself feel heavier.

The fiend form’s aura exploded outward.

It pressed against everyone present like a physical weight—not just mana pressure, but something else. Something primal. Something that triggered fight-or-flight responses in the deepest, oldest parts of the brain. The kind of presence that made prey animals freeze and predators reconsider.

Aria’s breath caught. Rue’s tails went rigid. Even Silas—cold, composed Silas—felt her heart rate spike.

Kael was Foundation Establishment Rank 8.

The aura he was projecting was something else entirely.

The man’s amusement died.

His earth-swirling feet stopped moving. His frown deepened into something more serious. The casual confidence that had carried him through the fight so far cracked, just slightly, at the edges.

Kael reached to the ground and withdrew the Twin Fangs of Eclipse.

Then put them back in the system storage.

The fiend form’s claws were better for this.

[NOTIFICATION — SHADOW GOD TECHNIQUE: FIRST FORM — FIEND ACTIVATED]

*Host has activated a technique beyond current soul capacity.*

*Warning: Host lacks the necessary bloodline to sustain this form.*

*Consequence: Soul damage will occur proportional to maintenance duration.*

*Maximum safe duration: 5 minutes before complete soul collapse.*

*Note: Even maintaining for more than 1 minute will induce deep slumber for repair.*

*Host acknowledges risks.*

Kael acknowledged the risks.

The flashback hit him—the memory of purchasing the technique. The System’s warning had been clear at the time.

*Soul integrity and soul damage are different things. Integrity is the wholeness of your soul—how complete it is, how much of the original structure remains. Damage is actual harm—the soul being torn, burned, or corrupted. You can have high integrity and still take damage. You can have low integrity and be undamaged.*

*This technique was designed for someone with a shadow or darkness bloodline. Their soul naturally processes this kind of energy. Yours doesn’t. The technique will work, but the energy will scrape against your soul like sandpaper. The longer you maintain it, the worse the damage.*

*Five minutes maximum. After that, your soul collapses. Before that—every second costs you.*

*One minute is the practical limit. After that, you won’t be choosing to fall asleep. The sleep will choose you.*

The flashback ended.

He had to end this fast.

The man recovered from his surprise quickly. His frown shifted back toward amusement.

"Foundation Establishment realm in the end." He laughed. The sound echoed across the battlefield. "That was quite the show, wasn’—

Kael moved as with blinding speed, he was already in front of the man.

The punch landed.

Mana and micro-gravity reinforced the strike—every drop of power Kael could channel concentrated into a single point, amplified by the fiend form’s physical enhancement, accelerated by gravity manipulation that made the fist move faster than it should have been able to.

BOOM!

The Mana Heart Peak Rank 9 cultivator went flying.

His body carved a trench through the red stone of the battlefield, earth and rock exploding in his wake, his defense shattered by an attack that shouldn’t have been physically possible from someone one full realm below him.

He crashed through a ruined building.

Silence fell over the battlefield.

Aria and Rue stared in shock. Even Silas cold expression was full of shock.

Kael turned toward where the man had disappeared. His fiend form pulsed with dark energy.

He smirked.

"You shouldn’t talk so much in a fight."

The man pulled himself from the rubble.

Dust and debris cascaded off his body as he rose, earth element swirling around his fists like eager pets. His expression had shifted—amusement gone, replaced by something colder.

"I really underestimated you." His voice was flat. Controlled. The voice of someone reevaluating a threat. "I should have killed y—"

He stopped talking.

Because Kael was already there.

The fiend form moved differently than his normal body—faster, more fluid, the darkness acting like a second skin that reduced air resistance and amplified momentum. Kael appeared directly in front of the man, claws raised, ready to strike.

The man reacted.

Earth wall erupted from the ground in front of him—a barrier of compressed stone three feet thick, reinforced with earth element, solid enough to stop most physical attacks.

It was a good defense.

Against most opponents, it would have been excellent.

But the disadvantage of earth users was always their speed.

Construction took time. Even instant construction required a heartbeat of focus, a moment of stillness, an opening that faster elements could exploit.

Kael exploited it.

His fist didn’t break through the wall. It went around it—gravity manipulation bending his trajectory, pulling him sideways, letting him emerge from the wall’s blind spot while the man was still committed to the defense.

Claws met earth armor.

The man had reinforced his body with condensed stone while Kael was closing the distance. His skin had gone gray, his muscles had hardened, his entire physical form had become something closer to golem than human.

It was still slower than Kael.

The fiend form’s claws scraped against the earth armor, leaving grooves in the stone. Kael pressed the advantage—claw strikes, gravity-reinforced punches, every attack targeting joints and weak points that his Spirit Eyes identified through the stone exterior.

The man retreated as he adjusted and reinforced his defenses.

Kael followed.

He couldn’t copy earth manipulation—wrong element, wrong foundation—but he could adapt. Dark energy from the fiend form spread across his body, mixing with the earth dust from the man’s defenses, creating a crude version of the same armor. It wasn’t perfect. It cracked under the man’s counterattacks. But it absorbed enough impact to keep him in the fight.

Silas joined as she appeared at Kael’s side, hands already moving through summoning patterns, her silver-white hair whipping in the wind of combat.

Two lightning birds materialized overhead. The direwolf appeared at her feet, muscles coiled, ready to strike. And through all of them, a faint halo pulsed—the mark of a summoner actively drawing on their beasts’ power.

The boost was visible. Silas’s movements sharpened and her reactions quickened. The halo of her beasts surrounded her like a constellation, each one adding a fraction of their power to her own.

But it drained her.

Maintaining multiple summons while fighting was burning through her reserves at an unsustainable rate.

They pressed the attack together.