Silas sent her lightning birds diving toward the man’s flanks—concentrated beams of electrical energy that crackled with enough power to blind. The her white direwolf charged from the opposite direction, massive jaws aiming for legs that earth armor didn’t fully protect.

Kael went straight up the middle.

His right fist was coated in lightning—dense, compressed, crackling with the particular energy that made it the best element for breaking any defense. Gravity wrapped around the fist, adding kinetic force to the electrical damage.

The man’s eyes widened.

Earth spikes erupted from the ground.

They came from everywhere—hundreds of them, shooting upward at angles designed to catch attackers from every direction.

Silas switched to her snake.

The massive black serpent materialized from her shadow, coiling around her body, its scales intercepting spikes that would have pierced her. The scales held—mostly—but the impact sent both summoner and beast sliding backward.

Kael created a gravity field.

It wasn’t enough to stop all the spikes. There were too many, coming too fast, from too many angles. But it slowed them—just enough for him to dodge the lethal ones, deflect the dangerous ones, and take the rest on his fiend form’s armor.

Most of the spikes shattered against the darkness.

Some didn’t.

Three pierced his legs and sides. Pain flared—sharp, immediate, the kind of pain that tried to shut down rational thought. The fiend form’s claws dug into the ground, keeping him upright, but blood was spreading beneath the incomplete armor.

Silas was in similar shape—her snake had taken damage from the spikes it intercepted, the creature’s movements becoming sluggish, its summoning time running out.

The man didn’t give them time to recover.

"METEOR!"

His hands came together.

Above the battlefield, the earth responded. Stone, rubble, debris from the ruined buildings—all of it rose, compressing, condensing into a single massive sphere. Hundreds of tons of material compressed into a single devastating projectile.

He threw it down.

Rue moved quickly to intercept the meteor.

Her nine tails erupted into full manifestation. Golden light blazed around her. The fox spirit’s power surged outward as she raised her hands toward the descending meteor.

"HOLD!"

The meteor slowed.

The fox spirit’s power created a field of resistance around the mass of stone, fighting against gravity itself, buying precious seconds.

Aria added her power.

Continuous light blast to slow it further, each impact shaving mass from its surface, reducing its momentum, chipping away at its destructive potential.

The meteor continued crashing down towards them.

The combined efforts of Rue’s fox spirit and Aria’s light attacks had reduced its velocity by maybe thirty percent. It was still devastating—the shockwave sent both girls flying, cracked the earth in a spiderweb pattern, created a crater twenty meters wide.

But Kael and Silas were alive.

They lay in the crater’s edge, broken and bleeding but breathing. The fiend form had absorbed most of the impact, the dark armor cracked in a dozen places but still holding together. Silas’s snake had wrapped around both of them, taking the brunt of the shockwave.

Kael pushed himself up.

His body screamed. The fiend form was draining him—not just mana, but something deeper. The soul damage the System had warned him about was accumulating with every second. He could feel it like sandpaper against his essence, scraping away pieces of who he was.

How long had it been?

Two minutes. Maybe three.

He didn’t have much time left.

The man was walking toward them slowly. His earth armor had regenerated from the spike damage. His expression had shifted again—from cold assessment to something darker.

Kael’s hands moved to his storage ring as he launched himself into the air.

The Twin Fangs of Eclipse materialized in his grip. Darkness and lightning swirled around the blades, reinforced with gravity, compressed into something denser than either element should have been able to achieve alone towards the mass of earth.

"Sky Rending Technique, Fourth Form: Void Split."

The attack launched.

It tore through the air toward the man—a horizontal line of destruction that seemed to split reality itself.

The man raised his hands as he controlled the meteor to crash on Kael and his group.

Void Split cut through it slicing it into particles.

And Kael was still in the air when the man’s fist met his stomach.

CRACK!

The fiend armor over his torso, where the concentrated impact of a Mana Heart Peak Rank 9 cultivator’s punch met the incomplete darkness that couldn’t fully protect him.

Pain exploded through Kael’s body.

He was sent flying backward, crashing through rubble, tumbling across the red stone. The fiend form flickered—the soul damage making it unstable, the cracks in the armor spreading.

He hit the ground and didn’t get up immediately.

"Kael!" Rue’s ran toward him with a panicked voice.

The man smiled.

Like he’d already won.

Kael raised a hand toward her.

She reached him, dropping to her knees beside him. Her golden eyes were wet with tears. Her hands hovered over his chest, wanting to help, not knowing how.

He grabbed her wrist and leaned closer to her and whispered something in her ear

Then he looked at Silas.

"Let’s end this. Buy me time. I will take care of the rest."

He pushed himself upright.

The pain was extraordinary. Every nerve screamed. His vision blurred at the edges. The fiend form flickered constantly now, the darkness eating itself, soul damage accumulating with every passing second.

He picked a fighting stance anyway.

"Aria. Rue. Silas." His voice was hoarse. Barely audible. "Attack together."

Aria moved first. Light gathered in her palms—concentrated, compressed, shaped into a blade of pure illumination that burned through the air.

Silas summoned her lightning birds back. They took to the sky, circling, waiting for an opening.

Rue’s eyes flashed gold.

"BLAST AWAY!"

The Word Magic hit the man like a physical force pushing him backward, sending him sliding across the battlefield, his feet carving furrows in the stone.

Meanwhile, Kael closed his eyes as his breathing slowed, his heartbeat steadied. The chaos of the battlefield became white noise, then silence, then something else entirely. He felt as if he entered into a mysterious zone where he could see the man’s movements before they happened. Could see the earth element gathering for the next attack, the mana pathways that would channel it, the exact spot where the defense would be weakest.

Void Split was too slow. It required setup, alignment, perfect conditions. He couldn’t use it against someone this fast.

He needed something new.

Something instant.

Something that could pierce any defense in a single strike.

Lightning gathered in his palm as a mass of lightning gathered on his palm built from pure comprehension of what lightning could be when pushed to its absolute limit.

High-density concentration.

A spherical mass of electricity formed around his right hand. Blinding bolts of lightning arced outward from the center, striking the ground, the walls, the rubble, the air itself. The sphere pulsed and writhed like a living thing, barely controlled, barely directed.

[NOTIFICATION — TECHNIQUE CREATED]

Host has created a Heaven Grade technique through comprehension and flow state.

Classification: Lightning Manipulation (Offensive)

Warning: Technique is unstable. Unrefined. Risk of self-injury if overused.

Suggestion: Name and stabilize before future use.

"What will host like to call it?"

Kael opened his eyes.

The sphere pulsed in his hand.

"Lightning Blade."

Kael stood wreathed in crackling electricity.

The Lightning Blade pulsed on his hand—a chaotic sphere of lightning spitting wild arcs into the ground, scorching the red stone, turning the air itself into a crackling haze of ozone and static.

He moved as shadow Step activated. His figure blurred, reappearing closer to the man in the space between heartbeats. At the same time, his eyes shifted. Spirit Eyes of the Dark Emperor flared to life, dissecting the man’s body in real-time, hunting for the weak point.

The earth armor was thinnest at the solar plexus—the network of nerves and vessels that connected his earth reinforcement to his core. A gap in the defense where the stone couldn’t form properly because of the body’s natural energy pathways.

"Rue, now!"

"DON’T MOVE!"

Rue’s voice cracked like a command from the heavens. Word Magic slammed into the man with the weight of a mountain. His body froze mid-motion, veins bulging in his neck as he struggled against the order. Blood dripped from Rue’s nose—the backlash of forcing her power against someone so far above her weight class.

Kael didn’t stop.

He appeared in front of the man in a heartbeat. The man’s eyes widened. He forced his right arm free—the Word Magic struggling as he brought it down to crush Kael.

A concentrated beam of lightning pierced through the air.

Silas.

Her lightning bird’s halo flickered behind her—the beast she’d resummoned, pushing past its injuries to fire one last attack. The beam tore through the man’s raised hand, searing through flesh and bone, cauterizing the wound instantly.

"That’s for my black wolf," she murmured.

That split second was all Kael needed.

His hand—reinforced by lightning and gravity, wreathed in the chaotic power of the Lightning Blade—drove forward.

It pierced the man’s stomach like paper.

His fingers went straight through as blood sprayed. The man’s earth armor crumbled around the wound, the shock of the penetration disrupting his focus, his reinforcement failing where the injury disrupted the energy pathways.

The man coughed. Blood sprayed from his lips.

"How can I be killed by a bunch of kids—"

With a roar, he shattered Rue’s Word Magic.