The standoff shattered. Dou Yi moved first. She raised her hands, not towards the sky, but towards the churning basin of the diverted river. **Shidow**—the Wheel of Manipulation—flowed from her in a palpable wave. She wasn't creating water; she was commanding it. Torrents of muddy water lifted from the basin, defying their own weight. They coiled around her will, merging, thickening, until twenty serpentine columns of swirling liquid, each as thick as an ancient tree, stood suspended around her like the tentacles of a leviathan. With a sharp, downward sweep of her arms, she sent them lancing forward. They moved with the speed of striking pythons, hammering into the forest of stone limbs on the titan's left side, not to break them, but to entangle, to blind, to slow.
The other elites watched, their expressions shifting from calculation to sharp interest. This was no simple blast of force. This was control.
Gen felt a hot spike of admiration, followed immediately by the cold chill of the gap between them. Her grasp of **Shidow** was like a master sculptor's touch on clay. His own use of it for movement and pushing wind felt clumsy in comparison. The feeling didn't discourage him. It lit a fire in his core. *I need to be better. I will be better.*
His energy bloomed, a familiar warmth spreading from his Root point. He reached over his shoulder and drew his weapon—not a sword, not a staff, but a single, resilient length of vibrant green bamboo, unadorned and straight. It was a tool, not a blade. He shot forward, a pulse of **Shidow** at his feet kicking up a spray of gravel. He wove through the opening Dou Yi's water-tentacles created, a darting figure against the monumental chaos. Stone limbs, slowed by the clinging, pounding water, swept down around him. He ducked under one, used a second as a springboard with a reinforced kick, his bamboo rod deflecting a glancing blow from a third that sent a numbing shock up his arms.
He landed at the base of the titan, the rough, clay-like skin of its ankle rising before him like a cliff wall. He glanced up the massive leg and a fierce grin split his face. *Time to climb.*
He jumped, planting a foot on the deity's ankle. He pushed off, finding purchase on a seam in the stone, ascending the colossus like a determined insect.
On the bank, Ning's hand finally closed around the hilt of the plain sword on his back. He drew it without a sound. Then he sheathed it just as quickly. He didn't need the steel. He stepped onto the churning water of the basin. **Shidow** flared around his feet, not with Dou Yi's grand manipulation, but with exquisite, localized precision. He manipulated the surface tension, the flow, creating momentary platforms of solidity with each step. He ran across the water as if it were polished marble, a silent sprint toward the titan.
He closed on a thick limb swinging low to crush him. His right hand came up, index and middle fingers extended together. **Shidow** condensed around them, pulling ambient energy into a needle-point of vibrating, invisible force—a blade of pure manipulation. He performed the **Silent Departure**.
There was no movement to see. One moment he was before the limb, fingers poised. The next, he was fifteen paces to the left, skidding back on the water, his fingers smoking slightly. A resonant *PING!*, like a giant bell being struck, echoed from the stone arm above the deity's torso where he had aimed. A hairline crack, no longer than a handspan, appeared on the obsidian surface. Ning landed, his breath coming a little faster, his expression behind the blindfold unreadable. The recoil from striking something so dense had been immense.
High above, Baili Feng scoffed. "Amateur probing." He rose higher on his **Cloud Juggernaut**, the dense, grey-and-silver mass rolling with ominous intent. "Watch how it is done."
He sent the Juggernaut forward. It lumbered through the air, a moving piece of sky, and slammed into the same cluster of limbs Dou Yi had targeted. A giant stone hand, each finger a pillar, swung to meet it. The cloud's leading edge formed claws of condensed vapour and pride.
They met.
***CRUNCH.***
The sound was not of shattering stone, but of compacting mist. The Cloud Juggernaut's claw disintegrated. The entire mass of the cloud shuddered, compressed, and was batted aside like a child's ball, its form rippling and tearing. Baili's icy composure cracked for a single instant. His eyes widened not with panic, but with pure, unadulterated surprise. His cloud—his pride given form—had been *crushed*.
Two more massive palms, each the size of a small house, clapped together from above and below with him in the middle. Baili didn't retreat. He fell into a controlled drop, his body twisting mid-air. A thin, desperate shell of **Shidow** flared around him, manipulating the air, turning his fall into a sleek, sideways slide. The palms slammed together with a concussion that blew the remaining water from the basin into a momentary dome. He shot from the narrow gap between them, his robes whipping, landing cleanly on a rock spire. A collective gasp rose from the distant observers. Only someone with his insane confidence would dare test the limits so precisely; a single grazing blow from those hands meant instant death. Murmurs followed. "He used Manipulation to slide… but it's weak. It's not an Acupoint he's fully opened. He's a creator, not a manipulator."
Lorel, seeing an opening on the right flank, focused her will. A beam of solid pink light lanced from her hand, weaving itself instantly into the long, slender, humming form of the Supremacy Sword. She lunged, the blade of condensed light piercing towards a joint in the stone. The limb it targeted was slow, but its power was absolute. It didn't bother to block. It simply swept sideways, a casual, monumental motion.
The Supremacy Sword shattered on contact. The force of the passing limb didn't even strike Lorel directly; the displaced air itself hit her like a rolling mountain. She was lifted off her feet and hurled backward, tumbling through the air like a leaf in a gale.
"My lady!" Chubbs bellowed from his safe perch, his fists clenched. "Hold on! I'll join the fray the moment I feel ready!" He puffed out his chest, but no one so much as glanced his way.
Juxian, like Gen, had used the chaos to close in. He moved not with Gen's darting aggression, but with a flowing, gravity-defying grace, leaping from shuddering limb to limb, using Dou Yi's continuing water assault as cover. The cheerful youth was gone. His face was a mask of stern focus.
"By staying close to its body," Gen shouted over the din, leaping to a perch beside Juxian on the deity's thigh, "it can't bring its full strength to bear! It'll hit itself!"
Juxian nodded, his eyes hard. He placed a hand against the deity's stony skin. Jingdao energy left him, but it was the Jingdao of the Agile Mountain—fluid, penetrating, heavy. His body seemed to soften and gain impossible weight simultaneously. He took a step upward. The clay-like surface beneath his foot bent inward with a deep groan, forming a perfect footprint crater, though it did not crack.
Gen deflected a swatting palm from a smaller, secondary limb. The sheer force behind it was monstrous. The impact travelled down the bamboo and launched him from the deity's side. He spun, weightless, another crushing arm already descending to pulp him against the titan's own leg.
Dou Yi, floating serenely on a dome of water, saw it. A flick of her wrist. One of her twenty water tentacles diverted, splashing upward to form a thick, temporary platform right under Gen's falling body.
Gen's grin returned. He hit the water-platform feet first, and it held just long enough for him to kick off again, slipping through the air as the stone arm smashed through the space he'd just occupied.
Juxian saw his moment. As that same arm recoiled, he moved. His body became a blur of liquid motion. He jumped, not away, but onto the arm itself. He landed in a perfect, anchored stance, one foot high, one low, his body aligned along the limb's length. He did not strike. He simply pushed his Jingdao into the stone, a wave of devastating, internalizing force.
The result froze the breath in every onlooker's throat.
The massive, thirty-foot stone arm did not break. It died. All tension, all animating force left it. It fell limp, crashing down by its own colossal weight against the deity's side with a world-shaking THUD, cracking badly but not severing.
Gen saw the opening—the deity's face, the pulsing violet slit, was momentarily unguarded. He gathered every shred of Shidow he could muster. The air around his bamboo began to whirl, forming a roaring, vertical column of compressed wind and energy.
"Liang! Now!" he roared.
From the ground, Liang's face was tight with concentration. The Kalash of Elements glowed. A stream of pure, silver binding energy shot from the Kalash's mouth. It snaked through the air, coiling around the tip of Gen's spinning bamboo, merging with the vortex, layering a devastating force onto the already violent manipulation.
Gen leapt from the deity's chest, a meteor trailing a screaming vortex. He aimed his rod like a lance, straight for the violet slit.
An arm—the one Ning had cracked—shot up in a blur to block. It moved faster than any before.
WHUMP-CRACK-BOOOOOM.
The impact was a cataclysm. Light, sound, and force exploded outward in a ring. The remaining water in the basin was lifted bodily into the air, hanging for a surreal, silent second in a suspended ceiling of droplets before collapsing in a single, crushing deluge.
Everyone was thrown back. They landed in sodden, battered heaps, gasping for air. As their vision cleared, they saw it.
The blocking arm of the False Deity was unharmed. Where the combined strike had landed, the obsidian surface now gleamed with a steady, radiant golden light. The hairline crack was sealed. The arm hummed with a palpable, familiar density.
Gen pushed himself up on his elbows, water streaming from his hair. He stared. "Jingdao," he breathed. "It reinforced itself."
On the ground, Liang let out a shaky, almost laugh. "At that scale… the energy required…"
Dou Yi wiped mud from her glasses, a real, fierce smile breaking through her calm. "It worked. Our combined attack… it forced it to defend seriously. We can do this."
A fragile, exhausted smile passed between them.
Then, they looked up.
The False Deity slowly turned its smooth, oval face towards them. The single violet slit pulsed once, slowly. And then, impossible though it seemed, the hard line of its featureless mouth… curved. It was the barest suggestion, a slight upward turn at the edges, etched in stone and shadow.
It was not a smile of warmth. It was the smirk of a patient hunter whose prey had just shown it a mildly interesting trick.