Damian gazed up at the Hallowed Voice floating between the Citadel and the crimson-gold eye that had broken the sky, and his mind moved through possibilities.

The Primordial Tongue continued to be supreme in all scenarios. He could use it on himself and others, endlessly, without limitation beyond the understanding he carried and the Mana he could cycle. If need be, he could utilize Persevere and Exelissomai even on the Hallowed Voice, pushing the old man’s existence toward heights his already terrifying cultivation might not have reached on its own. And right now, standing in the crater the Eye’s first attack had driven him into, he could feel the letters carved on his heart burning with the familiar heat that told him they were ready to be spoken.

"Exelissomai."

HUUM!

Verdant-gold flames rose around his body, sinking into his tattoos and his bones and the Primordial Mana Core churning at his center, pushing him toward endless evolution while the conflict above played out across the broken sky. He felt his existence shift by a degree, Mvelo refinement deepening within him, his power climbing another increment toward whatever ceiling waited beyond the clouds.

Beside him, Serala had a worried look on her face, her white-gold and verdant wings flared wide, her body coiled to launch upward at a moment’s notice. Golden lightning crackled across her frame, and her wing-shaped pupils were fixed on the Hallowed Voice’s distant figure with the desperate focus of a daughter watching a father walk into something that might kill him.

"Wait," Damian said, his voice cutting through her tension. "Let’s see how things go first."

...!

Serala’s jaw tightened, but she held her position beside him.

Damian watched the sky with burning eyes. One side held a Sacred Ancestral Bone of a Ninth Circle existence, a Relic whose dormant power had silenced every authority in the sky the moment it appeared. The other side was a genuine Ninth Circle existence projecting itself across the River of the World, a being so far beyond the measurable scale of human cultivation that the information his Mana provided was not much.

How exactly did these two forces compare with what he currently had?

Damian wanted to see.

---

The Eye of the Demon Emperor shone with brilliance that turned the broken sky into a canvas of crimson and gold.

Its vast serpentine pupil contracted once, and the five freed Dukes were pulled upward into the light surrounding it, their burned and battered forms dissolving into the radiance as Barbatos’s mad laughter trailed away into nothing. They were gone in an instant, reclaimed by the power that had sent them, retrieved the way a hand retrieved fingers it had extended too far.

Then the eye looked down.

Not at the Hallowed Voice. Not at the Paladins or the Holy Women or the hundreds of thousands of faithful pressed against the white stone of the Citadel in prayer and terror. The eye looked past all of them with the casual dismissal of something that had already categorized them and found them unworthy of direct attention.

It looked at Damian!

The crimson-gold pupil found him standing in his crater beside Serala, and the weight of its gaze settled across his existence with a specificity that told him this was not incidental!

The Demon Emperor, or whatever fraction of the Demon Emperor lived behind that projected eye, had looked across the entire Citadel and chosen him as the thing worth studying.

Then it attacked!

Crimson-gold brilliance erupted from the eye in a concentrated pillar of demonic light so dense that the air beneath it didn’t merely heat or distort but ceased to function as air entirely. Within the pillar, chains formed, shackles of compressed demonic Mana materializing link by link as the attack descended, and the intent behind them was not destruction but capture. The Eye of the Demon Emperor was reaching down to seize him!

The Hallowed Voice roared.

The old man in plain white robes, who had spent decades cultivating an image of gentleness and compassion, threw himself between the descending pillar and the crater below with a speed that should have been impossible for a body his age and a fury that had nothing gentle or compassionate about it. The Sacred Ancestral Bone in his hand blazed to life!

WU!

What erupted from the Relic was not light and was not Mana and was not any force that the standard vocabulary of power could adequately name. It was the last echo of a Ninth Circle existence given permission to speak one more time, and when it spoke, it spoke in a language that the Lands of Stone themselves remembered.

A phantom formed around the Hallowed Voice.

It was vast, translucent, burning with white radiance so pure it made the sacred rivers around the cathedral look like muddy streams by comparison. The phantom took the shape of something ancient and terrible, a figure whose features couldn’t be held in the mind for more than a heartbeat before they shifted into something else, and it raised arms that spanned the width of the Citadel and caught the descending pillar of demonic light in its palms.

The collision shook the world.

White radiance met crimson-gold corruption in an impact that sent shockwaves rippling outward across the sky, and the phantom pushed back against the Demon Emperor’s attack with the borrowed authority of a being that had once stood at the same level as the thing projecting itself through the broken heavens. The chains and shackles within the pillar shattered against the phantom’s grip, links of demonic Mana dissolving into nothing as they met a purity that refused to permit their existence.

The Hallowed Voice screamed with effort, his old body straining beneath the weight of channeling a Relic whose power exceeded what his frame was designed to contain, and the phantom surged upward from his position, climbing toward the eye itself with fists raised and radiance blazing.

The eye stared down at the approaching phantom with cold indifference, and from it, a booming voice echoed out across the Citadel and the Covenant and the Lands of Stone beyond its walls with a resonance that reached into the chest of every living being who heard it.

"Hold your loved ones close. Hold them close."

BOOM!

The words carried no threat in their construction and all the threat in the world in their delivery, because they were not a warning. They were advice given by something that had already decided what was going to happen next and was offering its victims the courtesy of a final comfort before it arrived!

The eye brightened.

Terrifying crimson-gold brilliance erupted from the pupil in a burst that dwarfed everything it had produced before, and the phantom channeled through the Sacred Ancestral Bone met it head-on and held for one heartbeat, two heartbeats, three, before the sheer magnitude of what it was opposing began to overwhelm the borrowed authority of a Relic wielded by a living vessel that was not itself a Legend.

The Hallowed Voice cried out with valor that echoed across the broken sky, his voice carrying the defiance of a man who had protected his people for longer than most beings had existed and was not going to stop now simply because the thing opposing him was stronger!

The phantom blazed brighter. The Sacred Bone in his hand cracked along its length, ancient inscriptions fracturing as the Relic spent itself against a force it had not been designed to oppose indefinitely!

BOOM!

An instant later, the Hallowed Voice’s figure smashed downward!

The demonic light faded from the sky above as the eye’s brilliance dimmed, and the broken heavens began to seal themselves shut the way a wound sealed itself when the blade was withdrawn. The eye was leaving as it gazed coldly at Damian while it dispersed!

The scene it left behind was branded into the eyes of every soul within the Citadel.

An old man falling from the sky with crimson blood spattering across the heavens behind him, his white robes torn, his body broken, the cracked Sacred Bone still clutched in hands that refused to release it even as the rest of him failed. He fell with the terrible slowness of something too significant to fall quickly, and the blood he left in the air caught the returning sunlight and burned red against the blue!