CHAPTER 199: The Ashen Calamity and the True Awakening (Part 1)
When the gravitational collapse of the Shroud of the Iron Maiden finally settled and the thick volcanic dust stopped swirling, the impregnable fortress of the Igneous Fault Bastion was plunged into a sepulchral silence, broken only by the crackling of the red-hot stone.
The Morningstar Clan's Blood Vanguard had fulfilled its directive. The annihilation was total.
On the intricate walkways, the vast lower courtyards, and the surrounding plateaus, the bodies of thousands of Bounty Hunters, elite assassins, and rebel slaves lay scattered, forming a macabre tapestry. The twelve Alliance Captains and the four arrogant Supreme Commanders were captured, their meridians sealed and their limbs mutilated, packaged like mere cattle ready to be delivered to Matriarch Sienna's laboratories.
The Sequences who had finished the ruthless cleansing of the outer ring—Elara, Dante, Varian, Vorian, Nylas, Magnus, Lyra, Voltar, Darius, Tamsin, Draven, and Ciro—gathered in the center of the immense crater of the main courtyard. They were covered in dried blood and smoking viscera from head to toe, breathing heavily. Their bodies were at their limit, but their collective auras radiated a raw lethality that would have terrified an army of conventional Saints.
Dante, in particular, sported a smile that split his face from ear to ear. His Dagger of the Fallen Asura vibrated in his hand with a dark, insatiable thirst, and his mysterious Slaughter System kept flashing with golden notifications on his retina. The points were accumulating by the hundreds of thousands, rapidly approaching the mythical one-million mark. He euphorically felt that his latent Slaughter Intent was about to break a fundamental bottleneck; his own Law Domain was stretching and awakening with every life his blade had harvested in the darkness.
Around him, the gigantic Magnus and the others heavily dragged the captive Saints. They had witnessed the apocalyptic battles of their vanguard comrades from a distance and felt a fierce pride burning in their chests. They knew perfectly well that, while massacring the cannon fodder had been their task, the true monsters—like Kael, Cedric, Aia, or Violet—had walked straight into the hell of the Iron Blood elite and survived to tell the tale.
Suddenly, a majestic figure descended from the starry night sky filtering through the mouth of the volcano.
Lilith landed in the center of the courtyard with the lethal grace of a destructive deity. Her intense red hair swayed lazily in the wind. She swept her gold and gray gaze over the twelve Sequences who were still standing.
"You have done a flawless job, my children," Lilith said, her warm and seductive voice contrasting sharply with the hell of blood that surrounded her. "Do not feel bad for not having the opportunity to flay the Commanders yourselves tonight. Our Clan is just beginning its grand hunt in this world; there will be inexhaustible oceans of blood and a thousand more wars in the future for you to enjoy. For now, return to the Void Herald with the trash you have captured. The air down here... is going to get very turbulent in a moment."
As soon as Lilith uttered those enigmatic words, the ambient temperature in the entire canyon seemed to stop dead, as if the volcano itself came to life and held its breath.
From the core of the main fortress, in the unexplored depths of the black mountain, a colossal spiritual pressure erupted.
It wasn't a vulgar explosion of sound, but an invisible tsunami of oppressive force. The physical space around the immense black iron doors rippled violently. The air became so dense and heavy that breathing was like trying to swallow liquid lead. A dark blood-red aura, densely laden with a millennial killing intent, shot toward the sky like a pillar, tinting the ash clouds a sickly scarlet.
The twelve Sequences in the courtyard felt the monstrous pressure slam into their bodies like a physical wall. Their knees trembled from the instinctive weight, and the gravity around them seemed to multiply drastically. It was the raw and absolute power of a Grand Saint at the very peak of his existence.
But not one of the Morningstar Clan youths knelt. Not a single one stepped back. There was no panic in their eyes, only a clinical and silent evaluation. They had survived the infernal training of Samael and Vexia. They had seen their own Patriarch unleash the true absolute void. What this old mercenary was doing with his aura was impressive by the continent's standards... but, compared to the unfathomable and cosmic darkness of their leader, this man's pressure was just a pathetic match struck in the middle of an eternal hurricane.
Seeing that her young ones did not bow before the terror, Lilith smiled with a fierce pride. However, she was not going to let them endure that heavy suppression needlessly. She took a single step forward and released a delicate thread of her own aura. The clash was invisible but definitive; it was enough to shatter the dense enemy suppression over the Sequences as if breaking thin glass.
"Go. You have won. Rest," Lilith ordered softly.
The youths gave a quick martial bow, activated their heavy containment rings to store the prisoners, and leapt one by one through the spatial portal to the safety of the Void Herald, whose immense defense formations were already glowing in orbit.
Lilith was left completely alone, floating indifferently ten meters above the floor of the bloody crater.
The colossal black iron doors of the fortress were blown to a thousand pieces from the inside.
From the dense darkness and smoke of the shattered threshold emerged the immense figure of Vargas "The Butcher" (Stage 8 Grand Saint).
The absolute Master of the Iron Blood Alliance was a terrifying tactical brute. He stood over two meters tall, his body covered by heavy black plate armor literally embedded into his own flesh, fusing the runic metal with his hypertrophied muscles and nerves. In his right hand, he dragged a double-edged battleaxe the size of a castle door.
Vargas had been in closed-door seclusion, trying to force his breakthrough to the Saint King Realm following the death of his five border Saints. But the massive collapse of the fortress arrays and the death of his people had violently awakened him from his meditation.
Upon stepping into the courtyard, what he saw made the blood boil and burn in his veins. His invincible fortress was smoking rubble. His thousands of mercenaries were bled-dry corpses. And his Commanders, his blood brothers, had vanished without a trace. His fury reached its absolute limit.
Vargas looked up, searching for the culprit of this apocalypse, and his eyes locked onto the figure floating majestically in the sky.
The Butcher stopped dead in his tracks. Despite the murderous rage consuming him, the sight of Lilith struck him with an overwhelmingly different force.
Her intense red hair alternated with a dazzling ash white, with streaks of liquid darkness moving like living smoke around her exquisite face. Her red eyes. Her skin possessed the immaculate, lethal glow of stellar ash. Her chest filled out in perfect proportion, reaching a flawless and striking C-cup, maintaining a deadly harmony with the rest of her body. Her war robes, woven in smoky tones and deep scarlet, clung to her majestic silhouette, highlighting an elegant neckline and dominant hips that perfectly combined a primal maternal instinct with the absolute fire of destruction. She was the very embodiment of a goddess of war.
Vargas, like a good mercenary who loved money, power, and beauty above any morals, couldn't help himself. A dark, drooling, heavy trace of pure lust seeped into his bloodshot eyes.
If this is the bitch who destroyed my home, I'm going to exact my toll with her body before I cut her head off, Vargas thought, licking his burnt lips as his grip on the axe loosened a fraction of a millimeter.
Lilith saw that disgusting look. She had seen that exact same pathetic expression on thousands of scumbags throughout the centuries, and they always ended up exactly the same way: as forgotten dust beneath her heels.
The disgust she felt was so pure and concentrated that the temperature of the entire canyon rose ten degrees in a single second.
"Filthy mercenary," Lilith's voice cut through the dead air, resonating with a divine authority that vibrated the subterranean magma. "You'd better wipe that look off your face unless you want me to gouge your eyes out with my own nails. And stop looking at me like that unless you want to die forever, without the slightest chance of reincarnating. I might just forget the Patriarch's order to keep you alive, you disgusting leech."
Lilith's words, spoken with the icy contempt of an empress toward an insect crawling in the mud, instantly broke Vargas's spell of lust. His ego shattered, and the fury returned, multiplied a thousandfold. They had come out of nowhere, destroyed his life, his empire, and now this woman had the unprecedented gall to threaten to erase him from the cycle of reincarnation!
"YOU ARROGANT FUCKING BITCH!" Vargas bellowed, his voice trembling with murderous rage as he raised his colossal axe. "I am the Butcher of Iron Blood! I'm going to show you who rules in this hell! I'll beat that goddess attitude out of you and make you beg me every damn night in my bed! Hahahaha!"
Lilith did not say another word. Patience had never been a virtue of the Phoenixes.
With a dull burst that seemed to suck the sound out of the world, Lilith unleashed her soul's supreme bloodline.
Behind her back, the colossal [Wings of the Ashen Calamity Phoenix] manifested.
They were not wings formed of dazzling, traditional fiery feathers. They boasted a thirty-meter wingspan and were made of dense, cold, motionless gray fire that exuded threads of jet-black smoke, distorting space. Lilith's Phoenix did not represent luminous rebirth; it represented the inevitability of death, the end of things, and cosmic entropy.
The sky above the canyon darkened. The wings opened with a mystical crackle. They emitted no heat, only a sepulchral cold. With the first majestic beat of her wings, a gust of sterile air swept the plateau, actively suppressing the Dao of the surroundings. The fallen weapons of the dead mercenaries rusted and lost their Sword Spirits in seconds. The iron formations of the fortress rotted, crumbling like old chalk. Her mere presence dismantled the physical reality of the battlefield.
Lilith dove toward Vargas at a speed that broke the sound barrier without producing a boom, leaving behind only the terrifying hiss of matter disintegrating.
Vargas, feeling his survival instincts screaming that the gray fire of those wings was the touch of death itself, abandoned all thoughts of lust. He gripped the handle of his immense axe with both hands, his runic-metal-embedded muscles tensing until they almost burst.
Halfway through her celestial dive, Lilith channeled her supreme power: the [Embrace of Entropy].
She didn't draw steel. She concentrated her ash fire in the palm of her right hand, condensing it to form an unstable gray fire javelin with a dark aura. That spear of accelerated entropy promised to wither everything it touched, rusting mystical iron and aging flesh a hundred years per second. Lilith hurled the javelin of death straight at the Butcher's armored chest.
Vargas saw the gray projectile tear through space toward him. He knew with absolute certainty that if that spear touched him, his fused armor would rot into his skin and kill him of old age before the fire even touched his heart.
"DON'T UNDERESTIMATE ME!" roared Vargas, his veins bursting with power.
The Stage 8 Grand Saint activated his supreme offensive skill: [Collapse of the Iron Horizon].
Instead of launching a traditional slashing attack, Vargas struck the air in front of him with the flat side of his immense double-edged blade. The brute force and the overwhelming x100 Gravity Law of his domain concentrated into a single infinitesimal point. He created a gravitational singularity; a sphere of infinite darkness the size of a fist that shot toward Lilith's ash spear. It wasn't designed to explode, but to suck, compress, and crush time and space.
The Spear of Accelerated Entropy and the Sphere of Infinite Gravity collided head-on in the exact center of the courtyard.
The silence of the impact lasted an agonizing microsecond. And then, hell broke loose.
Lilith's entropy tried to "age" and disintegrate Vargas's gravity, while the Butcher's singularity tried to compress the primordial fire until it extinguished. The flagrant contradiction of two supreme laws generated an explosion.
A shockwave of pure force, gravitational darkness, and incandescent ash swept the courtyard. The impenetrable volcanic rock beneath the impact was atomically annihilated, creating a perfect crater fifty meters wide and twenty deep.
The brutal repulsive force caused Vargas to stagger backward, dragging his heavy armored boots for ten agonizing meters, leaving smoking furrows in the stone before managing to stabilize his immense mass. In the air, Lilith was pushed several meters upward by the ascending column of force, but she stabilized her flight immediately with a simple, graceful beat of her immense smoke wings, without losing an ounce of her elegance.
Vargas spat a clot of blood onto the ground, panting slightly. The handle of his axe trembled from the torque of the impact, but he had managed to stop certain death. He looked up at the sky, expecting to see the red woman doubting her strength.
But Lilith did not doubt. She was an impassive divine siege machine.
Without wasting a single second to let him breathe, Lilith soared even higher into the canyon's firmament. Her eyes flashed an unforgiving neon crimson.
She unleashed her Area Offensive Technique: [Starfall Dusk Feather Rain].
Lilith beat her colossal gray fire wings violently, shedding thousands of spectral "feathers" of glowing ash and black smoke. But these did not fall according to the laws of physics or gravity; they floated in the air like a heavy, dense, unnatural snowstorm, descending toward the courtyard with lethal precision.
Vargas felt a chill freeze his thick blood. Those feathers had a strange magnetic attraction; they tracked Qi fluctuations and Blood Essence.
Each feather was a Karmic Extinction Seal. They wouldn't explode outward like cheap magic. If a single one grazed his armor, the seal would savagely suck the vitality, heat, and internal energy from the point of impact, withering flesh and transmuting metal into inert ash in seconds. It was an absolute bombardment technique, specifically designed to eradicate entire armies and leave behind a wasteland of dust statues.
Seeing the overwhelming rain of gray death covering the entire sky, mathematically impossible to dodge, Vargas made a drastic tactical decision.
He drove his immense axe deep into the crater floor. His black plate armor embedded in his flesh began to emit a dense, suffocating dark reddish glow.
He activated his ultimate Defensive Skill: [Immovable Mountain].
Vargas voluntarily renounced all mobility. He became the physical anchor of his own domain, increasing his extreme density to match the pressure of a planet's core. He became absolutely immobile, but in exchange, he became virtually invulnerable. His aura solidified into a dark, burning shell of gravity.
The storm of starlight dusk feathers fell mercilessly upon him.
The gray feathers touched Vargas's dense aura, attempting to anchor their karmic seals to suck the energy and rot the armor. But the planetary density of the Immovable Mountain was so absurd that the feathers scattered and slid down the gravitational dome, dissolving into ordinary ash before they could exert their entropic effect. In that state, the swords of the gods would have bounced off him as if striking divine diamond.
Moreover, the technique harbored a deadly trap: any damage, magic, or pressure the shell absorbed passively accumulated as pure kinetic energy in Vargas's body. He was devouring the damage from Lilith's bombardment to return it in a colossal counterattack.
Lilith, floating high in the ash sky, watched as her feathers disintegrated harmlessly against the Butcher's dark red shield. Instead of getting frustrated by the failure of her massive attack, a macabre and beautifully cruel smile curved her red lips. Her gray eyes shone with the absolute mockery of a predator at the top of the food chain.
"Do you plan to stay cowering in that sphere like a pathetic turtle your whole life, barbarian?" Lilith's voice descended from the heavens like venomous thunder. "You are a coward. A vulgar, frightened leech hiding in its shell. Let's see how long your fake planet holds out before my ash rusts it into oblivion."
Vargas, locked inside his immovable shell, gritted his teeth until his gums bled. Lilith was right, and he knew it as a war veteran. His defense had no flaw against frontal force, but it was not invincible against the wear and tear of time.
As the agonizing seconds ticked by under the relentless, silent bombardment of entropy feathers, Vargas noticed with growing panic that his own shield and dense reddish aura were beginning to dim unnaturally. Lilith's attack wasn't penetrating his defense with force; it was slowly "decomposing" and "aging" it from the surface. The feathers were withering the outer layer of his aura much faster than he could regenerate it. If he stayed anchored there for another minute, the entropy would devour his gravitational shell and then consume him alive inside it.
He couldn't wait any longer. His absorption limit was on the verge of collapse. He had to release the immense built-up pressure.
Vargas let out a desperate roar that shook the tectonic faults, deactivating the Immovable Mountain and brutally tearing his axe from the volcanic floor.
All the kinetic energy, mass, and heat he had absorbed from the massive Phoenix bombardment were channeled at once into the broad blade of his axe. With a brutal twist of his waist, which made his own fused armor creak, Vargas launched a colossal upward slash that split material reality.
An immense arc of black and red energy, the size of a mountain and loaded with all the accumulated damage of a hundred bombardments, shot toward the sky, tearing the air with a sonic shriek and aiming directly to cleave the arrogant goddess of fire in half.
Lilith, floating immovably in the path of total destruction, did not blink. She did not retreat or attempt to dodge the wave of death. She simply opened her thin red lips and exhaled softly.
She deployed her Absolute Defensive Technique: [Veil of the Funerary Crucible].
An immense breath of concentrated miasma, composed of dense smoke and pure primordial ash, burst from her lungs instantaneously. The miasma expanded, enveloping her in a runic dome of boiling ash that spun at breakneck speeds, distorting local space. It was not a vulgar physical Qi barrier; it was a fearsome Dao Dissolution Formation.
Vargas's powerful upward slash, an attack that undeniably would have split the entire fortress and the plateau in half, struck directly against the center of Lilith's smoke dome.
But the Veil of the Funerary Crucible was a cosmic disintegration filter. When the immense and overwhelming arc of black and red energy penetrated Lilith's pale smoke, it suffered the curse of withering. His attack entered an accelerated entropy of a thousand years for every second of contact.
Vargas, still holding the posture of his slash in the lower crater, watched with his heart frozen in pure and absolute despair as his supreme, lethal counterattack simply "cooled down." The massive and violent attack lost speed and mass as if crashing into thick mud. Its fierce red light faded to a dull, sickly gray tone. And, before it could even graze Lilith's robes, the colossal kinetic energy dismantled into its most basic particles, becoming simple, harmless dust that fell upon Vargas's face like a drizzle of dead chalk.
In less than three heartbeats, the Butcher's masterstroke, his life-or-death gamble, had vanished into the smoke as if it had never existed.
The veil of smoke dissipated lazily, revealing Lilith completely intact. She was floating majestically with her arms crossed beneath her breasts, looking down at him with that same sadistic, beautiful, and unbearably arrogant smile.
"Is that absolutely all you have?" Lilith asked, tilting her head with a feigned, icy disappointment. "If that was your best, most pathetic attempt to touch me, then it's a real pity for you, little leech. Your torture has only just begun."
Several kilometers away, suspended safely in low orbit and hidden behind the immense, complex runic shields of the Void Herald, the twelve Sequences who had returned to the ship watched the battle unfold through the immense magical projection panels.
The imposing command bridge of the ship was plunged into an absolute, tense, and stupefied silence.
The young monsters, who minutes ago had been bathing the volcanic canyon in blood, laughing amidst viscera, and severing heads as if it were a game, now had thick drops of cold sweat rolling down their pale foreheads and ash-stained cheeks. Their asymmetrical eyes were bulging with awe and horror. Some, like Lyra and Tamsin, were even unconsciously hugging themselves, feeling deep shivers run down their spines.
They were thoroughly impressed by the absurd and overwhelming power of a Stage 8 Grand Saint like Vargas, of course. His gravitational density was monstrous. But what truly made their hair stand on end and chilled their blood was Lilith's ruthless divine display.
Mentally, like the tactical warriors they were, each of them had simulated trying to stop, block, or dodge just a single one of the attacks from that battle. And the result of the personal simulation, facing the rain of stardust feathers or the funerary smoke veil, invariably ended with all of them turning into rust statues or corpses withered to the bone in less than a second of combat.
And far beyond the level of raw power was her destructive attitude. They had discovered a facet of the Blood Guard's Supreme Commander that they were completely unaware of. Who would have thought that "Auntie Lilith"? That beautiful Grand Elder who was always strict about her duties, but strangely affectionate, kind, and comfortingly maternal in the golden halls of the Morningstar Palace, turned into a deity so infinitely sadistic, arrogant, and terrifying in the middle of a battlefield?
The contrast in her personality was so brutal and incongruous that it sent another collective shiver down their spines. They would never be late for one of her formations again.
Sitting regally on the spaceship's command throne, with a posture of absolute indolence, Sienna, the Maiden of Mirrors, observed the terrified, pale changes of expression on the faces of "her beloved children."
Sienna let out a small, elegant, and crystalline laugh, bringing a fine black-lace-gloved hand to her pale lips, and slowly shook her head. These young pups still had a lot to learn about the true shadows and the primordial terror that came with bearing the Morningstar surname in a real war.
Sienna returned her bored and indifferent gaze to the immense main projection panel showing Lilith's battle on the plateau. The ash-fire redhead had the military situation under absolute control; Vargas was not a rival, he was a toy being taken apart. She was sadistically playing with her food.
However, Sienna's piercing, omniscient silver eyes suddenly deviated from the light hologram. They were not looking at the cornered Butcher. Her gaze pierced the physical plane, looking beyond the destroyed courtyard, penetrating through the dense volcanic rock, and descending into the deepest, most secret part of the igneous fault's burning core.
Her soul threads and her unparalleled divine senses had just picked up a latent anomaly. Another aura, one that had been carefully disguised, was beginning to awaken abruptly beneath the subterranean magma bed. An immensely ancient, vast aura, covered in heavy thermal crystallization, and whose spiritual Qi density dangerously bordered the imposing barrier of the Saint King Realm.
Predatory interest suddenly ignited in Sienna's cold, calculating eyes. Her pale lips curved into a dark, gloomy, and exquisitely macabre smile, as she moved her hand and cheerfully jingled the small silver bell tied to her wrist. Ring, ring.
Finally, Sienna thought, slowly standing up from the throne and smoothing the folds of her black dress. I was getting too bored just sitting and watching the others have fun. It's time to stretch a bit.
**************
Note from Void_Scribe: 🐉
(Are you enjoying the story? Then don't forget to add it to your library and leave your votes to support the book! Every show of support counts immensely and motivates me to keep writing. See you in the next chapter! And if you want to directly support this humble author, swing by my ko-fi.com/void_scribe for a little coffee... wink, wink hehehe ☕. Thanks for reading!)