"Good work, team. You've proven yourselves before the upper echelons of every sect in the god realm — after my battle, there's a gift waiting for each of you." The voice note ended, and Solanky strolled toward Tanko. Across the distance, Tanko caught sight of him — a grey-skinned, white-haired youth closing in at an unhurried pace. Tanko called out to his colleagues, and in an instant, six massive figures rushed out from every direction, landing behind him. All six bore Tanko's likeness, with only slight variations between them.
One of the devils spoke up. "We can't fight on this planet — our movements alone would tear it apart." Tanko nodded, then shot toward Solanky at terrifying speed and punched him clean off the planet. The rest of the devils followed within seconds, flying out into open space. Suspended among the stars, Solanky only smiled — this was exactly where he'd wanted the battle to happen. Free of the planet's constraints, the devils let their bodies swell to their true scale, growing from five kilometers to a hundred thousand. Tanko grinned. "Now you'll witness the power of my colossal body." His tentacles lashed out toward Solanky.
Back in the sect hall, the battle played out on-screen. Solanky merely stretched out a hand, and it seemed to slip straight through the layers of space around it. The Sky Hybrid Sect Master started, sensing something breaching the restrictions she'd placed on the sect's treasury. She cast her spiritual sense wide, careful to avoid the many powerful sect masters and elders in attendance, and swept it across the treasury. The restriction barrier itself was untouched — but scanning further, she found one weapon missing: the dagger she'd confiscated from Solanky, deeming his strength unworthy of it.
Stunned, she withdrew her sense at once. How could he wield spatial and dimensional control at that level? Has he been suppressing his true power this whole time? Could he actually rival a god of gods? How is that even possible? She let the thought go and turned back to the screen, where the rest of the Blue Star team watched the coming clash unfold.
Tanko's expression darkened. "You're not even taking us seriously, holding yourself down to a mere god-emperor's strength. Show us your true power, if you mean to stand against us." Solanky only smiled. "That won't be necessary." He surged toward the incoming tentacle, his frame dwarfed by it like an ant beneath falling timber.
Solanky raised his own strength to half a step into the god of gods' level, dagger in hand. As he drew it, he wove in engravings and techniques of the ancient devil-god race, elevating the blade from a high-tier divine artifact to a low-tier divine secret artifact. The instant it manifested, time and space themselves seemed to falter — and for the first time, the devils felt true danger stir within the inner worlds housed inside their own bodies.
Solanky swung the dagger into the oncoming tentacle, and a sharp RIP rang out as it was sheared clean through. The remaining devils teleported behind him instantly and slammed into his body, sending him hurtling into the distance. Tanko froze — he hadn't even sensed the moment the blade cut through his tentacle. Rage boiled over, and he detonated a third of his inner world's power. Beings above the god emperor level no longer carried spiritual life cores to house their souls; instead, each held a miniature universe that drew in the energy of the world to evolve. With that surge, Tanko's power leapt from 730,000 times a Devil of Devils' baseline to two million. He blinked out of existence and reappeared directly above Solanky, a trident forming in his grip, and began raining blows down on him while teleporting from angle to angle.
"Burn a third of your inner world's power," Tanko snarled, "or you'll fall right here — that dagger is a divine secret artifact. It could erase us without effort." The other devils, hearing this, understood at once why Tanko had let himself lose a tentacle — a warning. They began burning their own reserves in turn, then converged on Solanky from every side, pinning him into pure defense with no room to counter.
Watching from the sect hall, both the onlookers and his own teammates felt a pang of dread — Solanky looked outmatched against the devils' relentless assault. Okafor and Tee both moved to intervene, but the sect master held Okafor back, and the team held Tee, each trusting that Solanky wouldn't have put himself in this position without a plan. The devils laughed, sensing their advantage growing. Solanky had raised only a single barrier, and cracks were already spreading across its surface.
The barrier shattered, and Solanky was hurled into the distance, slamming hard enough to crater into a meteor. Tanko hurled his trident after him — a deafening CLANG rang out as the weapon was knocked aside into the void. When the debris cleared, Solanky's body stood revealed, clad in silver armor and helm. It wasn't his supreme divine rare artifact — merely a set Seth had lent him to use until the ten-thousand-year period lapsed.
Tanko called his trident back to hand, noting the faint bend now marring its tip. "Who is this monster," he muttered. The other devils teleported to his side, asking for the next move. Tanko didn't hesitate. "We merge. It's the only way we beat him. Look at him — his power's still climbing." The devils agreed and began the fusion. All the while, Solanky stood quietly in his new silver armor, watching them with the calm of someone who'd wanted this all along.
Once the merger completed, their combined height soared to several million kilometers, the resulting form carrying traits from every devil that had joined it. Solanky shot toward them at a staggering eight hundred eighty times the speed of light, space-time warping in his wake. Both the onlookers in the sect hall and his teammates on Dorvan stared in disbelief — that speed defied everything they understood. The fastest a god of gods or devil of devils could achieve was five hundred times light speed, and only by burning their inner world's power to do it.
Solanky had reached it simply by running. It upended every assumption they held, since flying or teleporting was supposed to be the superior means of travel through space — yet here he was, sprinting, his body and armor swelling in size until he plateaued at a hundred kilometers tall. Every sect master and elder in the hall spoke as one: "Who... who is this monster?" Solanky extended a hand, and the dagger grew, reshaping itself into a broadsword etched with countless engravings.
The merged devils raised their own hands, summoning a long rod, and swung it toward Solanky with brutal force. He met it with his broadsword. The instant the two weapons collided, ten light-years of surrounding space were annihilated, collapsing into chaotic streams of energy. The merged devil staggered back four steps; Solanky gave three. Before charging forward again, he slipped a secret voice note to Tee, asking her to raise her world-defying magic and seal off a ten-light-year radius around planet Dorvan — a separate dimensional pocket to safely house every life-bearing planet within that barrier.
Both combatants steadied themselves and clashed again, trading blow after blow, the space between them collapsing and reforming with every strike. They broke apart, flying to opposite ends of the battlefield, sizing one another up. Within the merged devil's shared consciousness, disbelief rippled through them: Impossible. How can he stand against our combined power and mass without yielding ground? Solanky, for his part, thought grimly, Even with the armor, this fused form is brutal to deal with — I'd need more than raw strength alone.
The merged devil laughed. "Impressive, going blow for blow with us, boy! But if our strength is truly matched, then it's our techniques and the accumulated weight of our mastery that will tip the scale — and that, I promise you, is where this ends. Each of us has lived more than fifty billion years. Together, our grasp of law and technique makes anything you've learned look like a child's scrawl." The voice was unmistakably Tanko's.
Solanky ambled toward them without urgency. "Oh, really?" He smiled. "Then let's see whose techniques hold up."