CHAPTER 197: The Theater of the Bloody Twilight (Part 1)
While the Blood Vanguard systematically dismantled the Captains in the slaughterhouse below, and the nine Dragon Queens reduced the invincible Rurik and his colossal Magma Hound to a pathetic, smoking ruin in the center of the crater, another personal hell, much quieter but equally lethal, was about to brew on the upper walkways of the iron fortress.
Leng Bi, the feared Head of Intelligence of the Iron Blood Alliance and an expert assassin at the pinnacle of the Stage 2 Grand Saint Realm, watched the monumental massacre hidden amidst the densest shadows of the vaulted ceiling. Her mind, a cold, calculating machine forged in a thousand tortures and silent decapitations, processed the absolute terror engulfing her impregnable home at breakneck speed. Below, she had seen those nine harmless-looking girls transform into primordial monstrosities that trampled the very laws of physics and cultivation. The stench of sulfur, boiled blood, and ozone filled her lungs, but what truly suffocated her was the raw, terrifying logic: if nine of them could do that... what prevented the rest of these black-clad young invaders from also hiding the same aberrant power?
"I can't sit here waiting for them to finish their carnage and come for me," thought Leng Bi, narrowing her crimson eyes under her heavy dark leather hood. "I must take the initiative. Cut off heads, destroy their throats, and sow chaos before these demon pups awaken their damned blood."
With a fluid, elegant, and spectral movement that didn't displace a single speck of dust or alter the thermal currents of the air, Leng Bi threw herself from the upper walkway. Her target was not the group that had annihilated Rurik, but the left perimeter of the immense courtyard, where seven Sequences of the Morningstar Clan secured the area with a passivity she found insulting: Aylin, Rowan, Joren, Eliam, Ignis, Goran, and Korg.
The tactical plan in Leng Bi's mind was flawless: first decapitate the most colossal members of the group through an instantaneous surprise attack, use their heavy corpses as physical barriers, and sow panic among the smaller ones.
But she made a monumental miscalculation that would cost her dearly. The Morningstar Clan Sequences didn't need to "awaken" anything. Their lethality wasn't a switch that turned on; it was a perpetual state of contained violence.
Leng Bi appeared out of nowhere, like an ashen gray blur behind Korg. In her hands, she wielded her signature weapon: The Twin Fangs of the Ashen Twilight. These curved daggers, forged from the legendary Volcanic Shadow Steel, possessed a dark, matte gray color that literally devoured the photons around them, making them visually nonexistent in the gloom. Along the lethal edge, a translucent neon purple line flickered to the rhythm of a sick heart. Gripping the handles wrapped in spectral spider silk, Leng Bi aimed the edge straight at the base of the giant Korg's thick, exposed neck, injecting all her Grand Saint Qi into the thrust.
CLANG!
The sound wasn't of flesh being sliced, but of an immense siege hammer brutally colliding against the door of a divine steel vault. Sparks flew, illuminating the gloom. Leng Bi's Saint-Grade dagger was stopped dead, without even managing to leave a superficial scratch.
Under the flickering light of the surrounding lava, Korg's [Iron Scales] were revealed. His skin was covered in intricate metallic gray scales. Korg turned his massive neck with a slowness that denoted boredom, looking at the experienced assassin out of the corner of his eye.
"Is that all you've got, slippery fly?" Korg growled, with a deep voice that vibrated the dust on the obsidian slabs beneath his feet.
Without giving her a second to retreat, the giant raised his immense hand. His forearms were covered by the Crucible of the Tyrant King, heavy Mid-Grade Heaven gauntlets forged from Black Star Iron and tempered in magma drake blood. The instant his bloodline became excited, the artifact's mechanism reacted. With a roar of heavy machinery and tectonic gears, the segmented finger plates slid forward. From his knuckles emerged fearsome tungsten carbide claws that, in a fraction of a millisecond, reached 2,000 degrees Celsius, glowing with a golden-orange light from within.
Korg launched a backhand swipe designed to melt Leng Bi's ribcage.
The assassin, eyes wide open, instinctively leaned backward, feeling the scorching heat burn her eyelashes. But Korg wasn't finished. The pyroclastic exhaust valves, located on the wrists of his gauntlets, hissed with deafening violence. Korg exhaled, activating his [Iron Steam Shield]. A colossal, expansive, boiling cloud of ultra-high-temperature metallic gas erupted from his jaws and arms.
The dense gray steam, laden with incandescent iron particles, enveloped Leng Bi. It blinded her instantly. The extreme heat calcined the oxygen within a ten-meter radius, forcing the Grand Saint to tightly close her mouth and hold her breath, knowing that if she inhaled, her lungs would turn into boiled liquid.
Knowing that a blind, hand-to-hand combat against this walking boiler was a suicidal act, Leng Bi flexed her knees and used her extreme agility to bounce in the air, escaping the steam cloud and changing targets mid-flight. She landed as lightly as a feather and launched herself like a missile straight toward Goran, the other giant of the group, aiming her curved daggers at his knee ligaments.
Goran didn't even bother raising an offensive weapon. Beneath his tactical clothing, his microscopic [Bronze Scales] densified. His physical weight instantly skyrocketed to five hundred kilograms, anchoring him to the earth with an unstoppable natural inertia. With his [Bronze Dragon Eyes], whose pupils reflected the metallic glare of the surroundings, Goran perceived the world in a different way: he saw the fine lines of gravitational force and the trajectory of Leng Bi's attack long before she closed the distance.
Goran planted his heavy boots and raised his Shield of the Northern Black Tortoise. This immense rectangular pavise, forged with the mineralized keratin of a mystical beast, covered his entire body.
The Stage 1 Grand Saint assassin struck with all the explosive force of her cultivation, hoping the impact would at least unbalance the young man and break his guard.
CRACK!
The sound of a glacier colliding against a mountain flooded the courtyard. But the jet-black shield didn't yield a single millimeter. The artifact's passive property, "hardness memory," caused the shell's molecules to become infinitely more rigid upon receiving pressure. And simultaneously, Goran activated his absolute absorption.
His muscles, which until that moment moved with the smoothness of water, petrified. He absorbed one hundred percent of Leng Bi's monstrous kinetic force, storing it in his scales. His entire body shone with a blinding bronze light, and he redirected the shockwave downwards into the ground, shattering the solid rock beneath him without moving a single muscle.
The rebound of physical force was catastrophic. Leng Bi felt the pressure she herself had generated return through the blades of her daggers, traveling up her arms. A repulsive crunch resonated in her own bones. Her wrists splintered under the tension, and the rebounded impact scrambled her internal organs, making her spit a spurt of dark blood as she bounced backward into the air.
She was barely trying to regain her composure mid-flight when the air to her left shrieked as if it were being torn apart.
Rowan had entered the fray.
The young man unleashed his [Wind and Speed Intent] to the limit. His bones, which were not heavy marrow but hollow tubes of [Wind Crystal], reduced his mass to less than half, allowing him to reach instantaneous supersonic speeds without suffering the ravages of G-force. He moved so incredibly fast that friction with reality itself seemed to have been eliminated.
To Rowan, the world moved in slow motion. Through his [Liquid Silver Eyes], which lacked pupils and looked like two perfect mirrors, he processed reality in frames per millisecond. He saw Leng Bi falling backward. He saw the warm air currents rising from the nearby magma and used them as invisible rails. He activated his [Wind Gills]—located on his calves and forearms—sucking in and expelling pressurized air to execute a ninety-degree turn in mid-air that defied any law of physics.
He magically appeared in Leng Bi's upper blind spot. Orbiting his arms were his Cyclone Wings, two immense Star Silver chakrams covered in emerald runes. By spinning at extreme speeds, the weapons generated such absolute pressure on their edges that they created a "void edge," capable of cutting heavy metal with pure air. The disks descended emitting a high-pitched hum, like a turbine about to explode, aiming directly at the woman's jugular.
Leng Bi, guided by pure instincts forged in a hundred years of slaughter, barely managed to cross her twin daggers over her head. The impact was monstrous. The sawtooth effect of the chakrams tried to drill through her defense, sending sparks and steel splinters everywhere. The vacuum pressure sliced off part of her hood, leaving a superficial but bloody cut on her cheek, forcing her to use the inertia of the blow to propel herself toward the ground and flee.
But the torment was just beginning. At the spot where she planned to land, Joren was waiting for her.
The sonic assassin of the Sequences had detected her from the exact moment the woman flexed her knees on the walkway. His [Divine Sonar of the Zephyr Dragon] granted him a terrifying acoustic omniscience; Joren could hear the blood flow accelerating in Leng Bi's veins. And as she fell, he moved under the cloak of his [Absolute Silence].
The thin translucent scales covering the back of his neck and spine absorbed one hundred percent of the vibrations from his own movement. Joren broke the sound barrier crossing the courtyard, but he didn't generate a single acoustic wave. He was a deaf phantom.
When Leng Bi landed unsteadily, Joren materialized in front of her wielding his Absorbent Void Daggers. These blades didn't look like metallic weapons; they looked like black cutouts, flat ink stains that didn't reflect light, absorbing the air around them with a constant hiss.
But Joren didn't attack first with steel. He opened his mouth and, using his larynx covered in black dragon cartilage, emitted a [Critical Frequency Scream] inaudible to the human ear. Simultaneously, he lightly clashed his daggers together. The Banshee's Scream Stone, an electric purple crystal embedded in the pommels, emitted a transparent shockwave that directly attacked the fluid in Leng Bi's inner ear.
The vestibular collapse was brutal and instantaneous. Leng Bi suddenly lost all sense of "up and down." The Grand Saint's brain went into total panic at receiving no spatial information. She felt like she was falling down a bottomless pit, despite standing up. Extreme, nauseating vertigo hit her with the force of an anvil. She fell to her knees, dropping her daggers, and vomited blood and bile onto the obsidian slabs, unable to distinguish the sky from the ground.
In that second of misery, Joren executed the [Azure Dawn Slash]. Concentrating wind Qi into the edge of his void weapon, he traced a horizontal slash. A fine line of sky-blue light crossed the air. The cut didn't push matter; it separated it at zero pressure. The blade passed through Leng Bi's left shoulder. The wound sucked the tissues outward, separating muscle, tendon, and armor without emitting a single scrape, until blood gushed violently in the sepulchral silence.
Leng Bi rolled on the ground, screaming in agony. She was being destroyed, toyed with, and massacred by a group of youths who, in theory, were an entire cultivation stage below her. The boiling frustration and rage of a professional assassin took over her mind.
In the midst of her desperation, Leng Bi activated her hidden card. Her bloody body suddenly crumbled, dissolving into an inert ash cloud that dispersed with the wind. It was her [Phantom Ash Dance].
As the kids scanned the area, a cold, sadistic, and gloomy laugh echoed out of nowhere behind Ignis.
Time seemed to stop when everyone quickly turned their heads. Leng Bi had already materialized from the residual ash in the red-haired boy's blind spot. Her Twin Fangs of the Ashen Twilight sank deep into the lower part of Ignis's stomach, piercing his kidney and coming out the front.
Ignis, who had failed to perceive the killing intent until the exact instant he heard the laugh and felt the lacerating cold of the metal tearing his entrails, opened his eyes wide.
"Pity I can't make another cut a little higher," Leng Bi whispered in Ignis's ear, sadistically twisting the dagger inside the boy's stomach. "But let me give you a little warning, boy. These daggers are not ordinary steel. Their edge is innately imbued with the White Calamity Toxin."
Leng Bi let out a hoarse laugh and pulled the weapons, brutally yanking them from the boy's body. Ignis fell onto one knee, clutching his stomach as dark blood began to gush out.
"A single scratch introduces the volcanic ash directly into the Qi bloodstream," continued Leng Bi, taking a step back and pointing a blood-soaked dagger toward Lilith, who floated impassively high in the canyon. "The poison doesn't attack the flesh. It calcifies the lungs and spiritual meridians from the inside. With every passing second, his energy will become stiff as stone until he's completely paralyzed. The more he struggles, the faster he'll turn into a statue."
The assassin smirked smugly, feeling she had finally regained control of the situation.
"So tell me, will you continue with your stupid hunt? Or will you beg that lady to help you? If you let me go, I'll give you the antidote. If not... what a pity that your clan loses such a promising genius."
Lilith, from the sky, watched her with a cold, inscrutable gaze, her lips barely curving into a smile of disdain. She didn't say a single word. She didn't even move to intervene.
The Sequence kids gathered around Ignis, but on their faces there was no panic, desperation, or sadness. There was a pure, concentrated homicidal fury. They felt insulted; they had fallen for such a crude illusion.
Ignis, kneeling and with blood staining his clothes, suddenly began to tremble. But it wasn't from spasms of pain; he was chuckling quietly.
Ignis's nature was not that of a normal human. His body of pure Yang fire had evolved into the Volcanic Yang Dragon. His biology was the equivalent of a planetary core. The thick drops of dark blood falling to the ground began to sizzle and emit dense black smoke. The immense internal temperature of his circulatory system skyrocketed. Instead of the ash poison seeping into his meridians and petrifying them, Ignis's boiling blood literally burned and evaporated the toxin from inside his cells.
A deafening hiss came from Ignis's pores, expelling the evaporated toxin in the form of a blackish, rancid smoke. The process hurt; it would take a couple of minutes to purge the remains completely, but the lethality of the White Calamity had been neutralized by pure biological superiority.
Leng Bi, observing that her absolute poison, the pride of her assassination arsenal, was being expelled as if it were water evaporating in a hot pan, felt like a bucket of ice had been dumped on her back. Her breathing quickened. "Next time I'll aim straight for their hearts or heads. Let's see if those monsters can survive decapitation."
Ignis, rapidly regaining the ruddy color in his face, stood up, spat a clot of black blood to the side, and cursed under his breath.
"Hey, you disgusting old hag, I'll blow you to fucking pieces for this. You just ruined my reputation in front of the group!" bellowed Ignis, and then muttered under his breath, rubbing the wound. "(Good thing the drama queens of the clan are busy on the other side, otherwise they'd mock me for letting myself get stabbed for a long time)."
Upon hearing the boy's words, Leng Bi's expression twisted. A thick vein throbbed dangerously on her forehead. Her body trembled, this time not from impact, but from pure, blind indignation.
"You insolent little bastard!" shrieked Leng Bi in a voice so shrill it seemed to tear the air. "Has no one ever taught you that you should never, ever, mention a lady's age?!"
All the boys simultaneously turned their gazes toward the only girl in their squad, Aylin. The young woman's face was completely red with embarrassment, and she pretended to look at the volcanic ceiling, turning her head and exaggeratingly whistling an out-of-tune melody to avoid eye contact. The Sequences swallowed unanimously. Everyone here understood the golden rule: it's better to insult the enemy with your entire vocabulary, because if you do it to any of the girls in the clan, you'd probably get beaten beyond recognition in training.
"Fine!" hissed Leng Bi, squeezing the hilts of her daggers until her knuckles turned white. "Since you crave death so much, let me be your guide to hell!"
The assassin disappeared again, employing her [Phantom Ash Dance]. Becoming intangible and immune to physical and spiritual attacks, she moved through the air currents. In her mind, she identified the target that seemed most passive: Eliam.
She suddenly reappeared right behind Eliam, who kept his eyes closed, in an apparent state of peaceful concentration. Leng Bi launched both daggers toward the boy's neck. But the instant a single speck of her ash grazed Eliam's nose, his dragon instinct activated automatically.
When the poisoned steel made contact, Eliam's flesh flowed. His [Mercury Scales] were not solid plates; they were a layer of intelligent liquid metal that instantly shifted toward the point of impact. Leng Bi's daggers pierced what appeared to be his neck, but met zero resistance and zero blood. Instead, the impact was distributed throughout the young man's liquid body. The attack simply "sank" into him.
But the trap snapped shut. The dense liquid scales trapped Leng Bi's arms and weapons with such extreme viscosity that it was physically impossible to withdraw them.
Eliam opened his eyes, which now shone with an unfathomable glare. Without moving, he activated his passive aura: [Heavy Water].
Based on the premise that his bloodline dictated that everything touching him must share his [Cosmic Mass], a crushing Liquid Gravity expanded in a hundred-meter radius. The air around Leng Bi became thick, oppressive, as if she had suddenly been teleported ten thousand meters into the deepest ocean trench.
Gravity multiplied fiftyfold. Leng Bi felt that her arms, trapped in Eliam's neck, now weighed thousands of tons. Her knees creaked, threatening to splinter under her own body weight. The environmental pressure crushed her lungs, forcing the capillaries in her eyes to burst, spilling thick tears of blood.
She knew she would die suffocated and crushed in seconds. Consuming an atrocious amount of Qi and forcing her last survival instincts, Leng Bi activated her [Shadow Mirror Displacement].
Just as Rowan descended again like green lightning, seeking to decapitate the trapped woman, Leng Bi's body shattered like a tempered glass panel. Rowan cut only a solid illusion, while the true assassin had already desperately merged with her own shadow, managing to free her daggers from the mercury grip and escaping the lethal pressure.
"Thanks for the opening, kiddo, hehehe!" joked Leng Bi, her voice breathless from the pain of her bruised ribs.
She emerged on the other side of the courtyard, directly into the shadow cast by Ignis himself, her blades aimed at the back of the boy's knees to mutilate him.
But Ignis was no longer going to let them play with him. Sensing the slightest variation and the minuscule killing intent at his back, the young man unleashed his rage.
He activated his [Sun Flare Skin]. In a blink, his skin ceased to look like human flesh and hardened, adopting the texture of polished obsidian, while emitting a blinding glare. The heat around him skyrocketed spontaneously. His [Igneous Filament Hair] ignited, turning his red locks into real solar flames that danced violently. The extreme heat absorbed the surrounding oxygen and Qi, creating a shockwave.
Sensing the heat wave and the temperature rise, the assassin disappeared again in a [Phantom Ash Dance]. But before she could use it, Joren appeared.
Joren, the master of silence, already had his Codex of the Silent Wind open. By activating the [Acoustic Deprivation Zone], he absorbed absolutely all sound vibrations within a hundred-meter radius. Leng Bi tried to scream from the burns, but no sound came out. The sudden loss of hearing disoriented her again. Joren manipulated the dead air currents, creating the [Absolute Void Edges]. Zero-pressure blades, completely invisible and odorless, crossed the field. One of them sliced Leng Bi's calf. Flesh and bone separated in a sepulchral silence, and blood gushed out, knocking her down to the volcanic floor.
This time, her target was the smallest of the group, Aylin. She instantly reappeared behind her, executing her [Scorching Void Strike], an attack that stabbed the daggers in the air, but whose illusion forced the enemy's meridians to ignite with the toxin.
But Aylin wasn't defenseless. Feeling a very slight disturbance in the atmosphere at her back—which she initially confused with the volcanic wind—her Amber Eyes burst into a pure green glow. Her [Tectonic Pulse Vision] allowed her to feel the vibrations of the assassin materializing.
In a microsecond, Aylin activated her [Wood Scales]. Along her limbs and spine erupted thick veins of ancient wood, imbued with the hardness of star iron. This natural armor possessed a Qi Porosity that absorbed the friction of earth and wind.
When the intent of the dagger struck, Aylin's wood scales hardened instantly to splinter the attack. She managed to prevent the illusion from piercing her heart, but the edge of the murderous concept still grazed her, injecting her with the ash toxin.
Aylin spat blood, falling onto one knee, but spun around.
"She's here!" shouted Aylin, marking Leng Bi's position.
Leng Bi only smiled coldly, licking a trail of blood from her own lip. "Your senses really are sharp, little girl, and you reacted too well. But, for how long will you hold out?"
Joren, Rowan, and Ignis reacted immediately, lunging at her to protect their companion. Leng Bi, seeing herself outnumbered, executed her [Spectral Echo Execution].
Leng Bi generated three identical illusion clones that charged the boys from different angles with their curved daggers. Joren and Rowan, confident they were mere optical illusions, attacked to destroy them and reach the original body.
But that was their second mistake. The other branch of Leng Bi's law was the Law of Illusion: Tragic Perception. Her illusions interacted directly with the soul and the five senses of the opponent. The three illusory attacks had real physical mass in the minds of their victims. Joren and Rowan blocked two of the slashes, but the third, which they considered harmless, activated the [Scorching Void Strike], hitting them with the force of ash and forcing them to step back coughing.
Seeing that defending was useless against tangible illusions, Aylin decided to go on the absolute offensive.
She jumped backward, moving away from the poison area, and summoned her weapon: the Thorn of the World. This Low-Grade Saint spear was no ordinary weapon. Its shaft was not wood, but a heavy Earth Bronze alloy with engravings resembling geological strata. Its immense diamond-shaped tip was forged in opaque amber crystal, glowing from within with an intermittent orange light, like trapped magma.
Brandishing it, the spear left a trail of golden sand particles. Aylin activated the [Devouring Ecosystem Thrust]. The spear's Gravity Core reacted, changing the weapon's weight from a few kilos to massive tons of tectonic inertia.
Aylin lunged forward, tracing a straight, devastating thrust.
Clank! Clank! Clank!
Metal clashed against metal. Leng Bi crossed her daggers to block the spear, but the difference in inertia was overwhelming. The spear tip vibrated at an ultrasonic frequency, destabilizing the assassin's guard. Upon impact, the Thorn of the World released thousands of emerald-colored Qi micro-roots that sprouted toward Leng Bi, seeking to suck her vitality to feed Aylin's aura.
Leng Bi, feeling her bones crack under the weight of a mountain and that the emerald roots threatened to devour her, slipped under the spear's shaft, dodging the heavy attack and closing the lethal distance toward Aylin.
But before she could sink her daggers into the girl's throat, the group had already closed the trap. Eliam stood in Leng Bi's path.
Eliam had raised his hands, holding the Heart of Mercury. This purplish-black orb, which acted as the vessel of the abyssal singularity, beat to the rhythm of the boy's heart. Eliam released his [Abyssal Sentence: Stellar Column Collapse]. Concentrating the monstrous inertia of his bloodline, he blocked the space behind the assassin.
The mercury orb suddenly stretched, transforming into an immense, opaque black infinite spear containing the crushing mass of a liquid neutron star. Eliam threw it at supersonic speed.
Knowing she couldn't dodge in her state, Leng Bi frantically crossed her arms over her chest, using her Saint-Grade daggers as a last, desperate, and pathetic crossed shield.
The physical impact was apocalyptic. There was no scattered explosion. The incalculable weight of the liquid neutron star collided against her arms. Her limbs cracked and bent inward, smashing against her own ribs. The shockwave lifted her off the ground and sent her flying through the air like a rag doll in the middle of a hurricane. The trail of inertia pulverized the obsidian floor in a perfect straight line.
Leng Bi flew through the air at breakneck speed, her arms throbbing with dull pain, her entire body a massive bruise. In her delirium of pain, an absurd thought crossed her mind: "That boy and his power are too dangerous... he must be the first to fall."
But her uncontrolled flight toward the shadows of the perimeter had not been an accident. The Sequences' trajectories were calculated with perfect synergy.
At the exact spot where the spear's inertia would lead her to crash, Goran was waiting for her. The colossus brutally buried the base of his heavy shield into the molten rock. He activated the [Wall of the Black Tortoise]. An immense, semi-transparent bronze energy dome, immovable and absolute, rose in front of her, connected directly to the earth's dragon veins.
Instead of using the shield to defend himself, Goran used it as an immense pediment wall to catch the assassin's flying body.
Leng Bi smashed brutally against the bronze barrier, breaking her nose and falling heavily to the ground. And before she could even process the impact and look up, darkness covered her.
Korg had launched himself into the air. Despite his mountainous body and hypertrophied muscles, his jumping speed was terrifying. He descended like a meteor, with his right fist raised. Accumulating all the volcanic fury and temperature of his gauntlets, he unleashed his [Stellar Anvil Impact].
"Die, scum!" roared Korg.
His colossal, white-hot fist smashed directly into the fallen assassin's chest.
BOOOOM!
The collision generated an explosion of dry heat that calcined the air inside the dome. The sheer brute force of the impact crushed Leng Bi's ribcage against the obsidian floor, caving in her ribs with a repulsive crunch that echoed in the courtyard. But the damage didn't end there. The red-hot seal of the gauntlet was branded onto her; the forge mark burned away the remains of her leather armor and melted pieces of metal directly into her live flesh, leaving a smoking, black sore.
The residual shockwave was so massive that Leng Bi's body bounced off the floor, breaking through Goran's barrier, rolling and bouncing pathetically across the rough volcanic rock until stopping in the center of the courtyard, leaving a thick trail of red and black blood.
Silence descended again, broken only by the crackle of fire and the heavy breathing of the seven Sequences, who closed into a deadly circle around the fallen woman.
Leng Bi coughed violently, spitting up chunks of coagulated blood. Her body was broken. Her arms hung useless, her leg bled from the void cut, her sternum was caved in, and a volcanic burn consumed her torso. She, the pinnacle of intelligence and assassination of an entire military alliance, had been cornered, toyed with, and torn apart by arrogant children.
The humiliation burned more than the wounds. Rage, dark, black, and insane, flooded her mind, finally breaking the dam of her calculating coldness. Leng Bi's sanity fractured.
She leaned shakily on her daggers, using them as crutches to stand up. Smoke rose from her shoulders. As she raised her blood- and ash-stained face, her crimson eyes shone with the unbridled madness of a cornered animal.
"AAAAAAH! DAMNED BASTARDS! DIE!" she screamed in a raspy voice that tore her vocal cords, spitting bloody saliva.
She brought the hilts of the Twin Fangs of the Ashen Twilight together in front of her face. The temperature of the courtyard dropped suddenly. The air became thick and repulsive.
High above, Lilith and Sienna, who had watched every second of the confrontation from the sky with the passivity of bored deities, finally paid genuine attention. With the nine Dragon Queens recovering in the Void Herald, the field was clear for the Vanguard's final act to unfold.
Lilith leaned languidly in the air, stroking her chin.
"Ummm... her power is quite ingenious. I really think she would be a brilliant acquisition to join Sela's ranks. Her talent would be very well utilized. I don't even want to imagine the terror we would cause if we could replicate that power for a whole squad of assassins." A sadistic smile, laden with dark intentions, curved her lips as her thoughts flew toward the future of the clan.
Sienna, floating beside her, smiled with the same perversity, showing the edge of her teeth.
"It would be a pretty good show to watch. And if our dear Patriarch purges her of that useless loyalty and grants her a primordial stealth technique from our library... she would be an unstoppable assassin. But let's see first how these little ones deal with a master in the art of death trapped in her ultimate illusion, hehehe."
Below, Leng Bi's voice, now cold, resonant, and infused with the oppressive authority of her Grand Saint core, recited the forbidden chant of her life. The words resonated directly in the minds of the seven Sequences, drilling into their consciousness.
"Beneath the withered sky, truth warps and blood reclaims its stage... Domain: The Theater of the Bloody Twilight!"
Physical space contracted violently, as if the universe itself held its breath. A colossal pulse of jet-black Qi erupted from Leng Bi's feet and expanded in a radius of hundreds of meters at the speed of light.
The outside world simply ceased to exist.
The unbreakable spherical barrier of absolute dark Qi closed over Aylin, Rowan, Joren, Eliam, Ignis, Goran, and Korg, isolating this fragment of the battlefield from the rest of the mortal plane.
Looking down, the obsidian slabs and the magma had disappeared. Now, the ground beneath their boots was an infinite mirror of dense, stagnant black water. Upon stepping on it, the youths did not sink, but every slight movement and step generated slow purple ripples that macabrely distorted their own reflections.
Looking up, the vaulted sky of the igneous fault had been replaced by a dark violet starry abyss. Dominating the zenith of that nightmare sky floated a crimson moon, colossal and bloody, so low it seemed about to crush them. The pulsating red light of the celestial body reflected perfectly in the infinite black water, dyeing the entire environment with a suffocating atmosphere of carnage.
The air became a dense, heavy poison. The smell of old iron and sulfur filled their lungs as a constant layer of white and gray volcanic ash began to fall from the sky like pale, cursed snow, threatening to calcify their will.
And then, the lethal silence of the domain was broken.
From the distorted ripples of the black water beneath their feet, and from the elongated shadows cast by the suffocating crimson light of the moon, silhouettes began to emerge. At first they were shapeless lumps of darkness, but in a heartbeat, they took form, color, and terrifying detail.
Ten... a hundred... thousands of identical replicas of Leng Bi appeared surrounding the youths in an infinite circular formation. In perfect, spine-chilling synchrony, thousands of copies tilted their heads slightly to the side. On their faces, they wore the same sadistic, deranged, and bloody smile. In their hands, they wielded the dark daggers dripping a poison that hissed and smoked upon touching the surface of the black water.
The deafening, high-pitched, metallic sound of thousands of daggers scraping and scratching the wind in unison filled the spectral coliseum.
In this cursed theater, objective truth no longer existed. The seven Sequences were trapped in the heart of a mental and physical labyrinth of tangible illusions, where every shadow was an assassin, and where every blink, every wrong breath, would be punished with death.
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