There was no time to mourn the dead, and there was no time to rest.It had begun with Valerius Thorne in a floating heaven ruling the world. It was to be a dust to the asphalt and eleven primordial gods to march on Ravenwood City.“Maya,” I said, my voice cutting through the damp hush of the broken Golden Lotus bunker. Do the backups on the Triad's servers still work?Maya rubbed the dirt off her face, and moved over to another console that was still intact after the flood. Her fingers were flying across the keyboard. "They're primitive, but they have a direct uplink to the Apex Syndicate’s global dark-web network. The whole system is in absolute anarchy right now. Sects are fighting each other for Valerius’s empty throne. Why?"Aria stepped forward, "Because that throne isn't empty... A silver crest on her forehead glowed with cold, absolute authority. We're going to stop a global civil war before it begins. Put us on every screen on the planet, Maya. Override their local frequencies

The sky didn't just burn; it screamed.The Third and Fourth Ancients didn't monologue. They didn't boast. They had something terrifyingly primal that communicated without the need for words.A thousand heads of a thousand snakes, a mass of a thousand heads that writhed like a mountain, lunged forward. Unleashed its jaws and released an ocean of toxic green venom. It was not a liquid, it was a highly compressed and acid gas that immediately liquefied the bedrock and turned it into bubbling slag.In an instant, the Crystal Seraph lifted its six pointed, black-crystal wings. It didn't cast a spell. It just had the presence.A gigantic pillar of thunderbolts crashed through the battered sky, hitting the middle of the Hydra's poison sea.The elements didn't cancel each other out. They fused.The lightning supercharged the venom, forming a mile wide tsunami of electrified, toxic plasma. It came at me at the speed of sound, crushing the essence of matter in its wake.I didn't run. I pushed m

I didn't let Aria fall. I kept my arm firmly wrapped around her waist, continuously feeding a slow, stabilized trickle of origin energy into her depleted meridians.Her silver eyes had already sharpened as she looked at the holographic map that was projected onto her wrist console from Maya.Eight markers, Aria breathed, her voice raspy but resolute. They are not only overlapping, they're compounding. The energy density is..."It's breaking the scale, Matriarch," Maya finished, her fingers flying over the holographic keys. There are localized gravity anomalies going on in the Sahara Desert. The sand is melting into glass, just from the ambient spiritual pressure. When they finish combining, whatever steps out of that desert will not be a god, it will be a planetary reset button.The auras of the half-million farmers of the Eclipse Dynasty blazed below us, the absolute triumph of having broken a primordial beast. They believed they were victorious. They believed the end of the world ha

The pressure was absolute.The Amalgamation, in a cage of eight crystalline hands, was pushing the fabric of space inwards in an infinite manner. I was filled with blood and my blood turned to vapor in my veins. My muscles ripped from my bones, only to be painfully, painfully sewn back in place by the overwhelming sheer of silver Warden energy that Aria was spilling through our soul-bond.“Kael!” Aria's voice was frantic, the spiritual burden of sustaining my life had broken her soul open. I can't hold you up in your boat! “It's just too compact an expansion!”“No, I don't, Matriarch,” I replied, a grin of blood spreading across my face. “He only had to close the door.”The eight overlapping voices of the Amalgamation, “RETURN TO NOTHING, ASURA,” tightened the cage, giving the final subatomic killing blow.You're a perfect being," I whispered, blood pouring from my eyes. But you're a poor physicist," said the girl.The Amalgamation had made a most serious mistake. It had not only form

Marching into Heaven didn't feel like an ascension. It felt like walking into a cosmic meat press.The dimensional pressure of the Upper Realm started to seep through the rift as the first members of the Eclipse Dynasty descended the golden stairs. The air of the Heavens was deadly to a mortal cultivator. The air was as dense as liquid glass and the gravity was as strong as a Tier 7 Sovereign's backbone."Keep moving!" Aria's voice cracked as Ghost and Maya pushed the Vanguard forward, while she stood at the bottom of the stairs, her voice echoing through the comms. "Do not stop! When you lose your balance, your core will be crushed!"I didn't allow that to happen.I floated at the very front and led the way up the hardened light, and expanded my starlight aura. The white light of my inner world lit up, blinding me, and spread out into a two mile long cylinder that wrapped around the whole staircase. My Absolute gravity violently resisted the pressure of the celestial, and created a s