The golden rain of swords continued to pour down.
This was no longer a battle.
It was a one-sided slaughter.
The center of God Valley had long since lost its original form, transformed into a molten golden purgatory. Every time a giant sword fell, it triggered a miniature sun upon the earth; the light and heat evaporated rock and tore bottomless chasms into the land.
Saint Saturn, possessed by Imu, was reduced to a broken heap.
Though he had done his best to dodge within the storm, the rain of swords was too dense!
The shell sustained by dark energy—his fragmented left arm and half of his shoulder—simply vanished into thin air amidst the golden rain, without so much as a wisp of black mist escaping.
His right leg was pinned to the ground by a giant sword.
The golden divine energy ruthlessly suppressed the dark origin, preventing any form of regeneration.
The remaining half of his body was riddled with holes.
Dark red blood mixed with viscous dark energy writhed in vain, but the wounds only grew wider under the golden light.
He could barely hold on.
The will of the King of the World dwelling within him flickered, weakening to a critical breaking point.
Defeat, or being erased from this world, was only a matter of time.
The Holy Land, Mary Geoise.
Deep within Pangaea Castle.
Upon the Empty Throne, an indescribable dark figure let out a silent roar of rage.
Though soundless, the roar was a shockwave saturated with fury and indignation that swept across the deathly silent hall.
The light within the hall distorted, and ripples formed in space.
Cracks appeared in the ancient reliefs carved into the sturdy walls, depicting eight hundred years of history.
Imu's true body—those crimson eyes that had looked down upon the world for eight centuries—gazed coldly across the infinite void at everything happening in God Valley.
He could not accept it.
He could not accept that he would lose like this.
Even more, he could not accept that the pawns he had managed for eight hundred years—those loyal tools granted eternal life—were being cleared away so easily by a monster of unknown origin.
The Five Elders, Saint Garling, the Holy Knights.
They were tools, lapdogs, replaceable parts.
But they could only be replaced by him.
He would never allow them to be destroyed so effortlessly by an external force.
This was an insult to his status as the King of the World.
The man in the white mask had to die.
But not today.
Not today, at the cost of sacrificing all his elite forces.
The dark figure made a decision.
If his true body forced a descent, the price would be unimaginable; it might even shake the very foundation of the power he maintained. However, there were no other choices left.
God Valley.
The golden rain of swords had entered its final phase. The number of light swords in the sky had dwindled, but each one contained a terrifying power of destruction.
The final few dozen giant swords locked onto the only target still gasping for breath on the ground—the ruined Saint Saturn.
This was the finishing blow.
In the split second before the golden torrent could completely execute the possessed Saint Saturn!
*Buzz.*
The space above God Valley distorted without warning!
It wasn't a tear or a fold, but a rupture from a higher dimension.
Reality was violently crumpled like a sheet of paper by an invisible hand.
All sound vanished.
A will thousands of times more powerful than the previous possession descended.
A supreme, pure will of void.
It was cold, indifferent, and devoid of any emotion. Its very existence was the negation of life and light.
It crossed the entire world, projecting itself with precision from the distant Holy Land onto this battlefield on the brink of annihilation.
High in the sky, Lucian paused his motion as he prepared to give the final command.
The golden eyes behind his mask pierced through layers of light and flame, gazing toward that distorted space.
A blurred, indescribable, giant black shadow flashed behind the warping space.
It was composed of pure darkness and void, possessing no fixed form.
A single glimpse was enough to make the heavens and earth pale.
The radiance of the sun was swallowed, and the boiling golden lava on the ground instantly dimmed. The color was drained from the entire world, turning it into a grayscale old photograph.
The shadow appeared for only an instant.
It was so fast that even Lucian's Divine Perception only captured a lingering afterimage.
Yet, the power extending from that shadow was incomparably precise.
It ignored Lucian and did not attempt to block the world-destroying rain of swords. Instead, it cast an invisible net, enveloping all surviving core forces of Imu's faction on the ground.
The Five Elders, critically wounded and wailing in the golden light.
Including Saint Garling, who was still struggling with poisonous hatred.
And the remaining core members of the Holy Knights, who were futilely resisting the aftershocks of the sword rain.
In the next second, space returned to normal.
The crumpled paper was smoothed out, time flowed again, and sound returned to the ears.
In an instant, everything had changed.
The shell of Saint Saturn, pinned to the ground, remained.
But aside from him, the Five Elders, Saint Garling, and every member of the Holy Knights had vanished.
They disappeared without a trace.
It was as if they had never appeared on this battlefield.
There were no energy residues of teleportation, no traces of torn space; they had simply been plucked from this world, clean and efficient.
At the cost of enduring massive side effects, Imu's true body had activated a forced spatial transfer across the world, sending them directly back to the Holy Land, Mary Geoise.
The sky full of golden swords lost most of its targets.
They roared, carrying the power to destroy everything, and crashed entirely into the earth of God Valley.
*Boom.*
The center of the entire island was violently gouged into a bottomless giant crater.
The violent shockwave transformed into a circular white blast wave, expanding in all directions and grinding every remaining mountain, forest, and building on the island into powder.
Seawater surged in frantically, only to be evaporated into a sky full of steam by the intense heat in the next second.
The silhouette of the island shifted under the violent tectonic movement, and the edges of the land continuously collapsed, sinking into the boiling ocean.
God Valley, the island that had witnessed countless legends and atrocities, was now heading toward destruction at a speed visible to the naked eye.
High in the air, Lucian lowered his arm.
The curtain of death shrouding the sky vanished into billions of golden light particles at a single thought.
The blinding light faded, revealing the hellish scene below.
His gaze was calm, eyes narrowing slightly as he scanned the giant pit where only lava now flowed.
The enemy's presence had completely vanished from this area.
Imu had run.
Taking all his core subordinates with him, he had escaped in the final second before being erased.
Lucian let out a low, cold chuckle.
The sound wasn't loud, but it carried a mockery that saw through everything!
To risk the backlash of side effects just to have his true body descend and initiate a spatial transfer to take away all his dogs!
How desperate!
"But, do you think you can actually escape?"