The final word had barely fallen when the pool erupted, hurling gouts of clotted red and shredded wraiths skyward.
Boom!
Fragments of anguished spirits shrieked as they rained down like a grotesque
storm.
A towering figure, wrapped in roiling ck miasma and the stench of ughtered souls, floated upward from the broken pool and settled in mid-air. It was Soul Devourer.
He stood now, his aura nothing like the broken husk Jared had faced on level nine.
There was still a threadbare weakness at the core of his soul, yet the tide of demonic essence rolling off him dwarfed Mordain—and every foe Jared had met before.
Thews swirling around his cloak brushed a realm beyond the Heavenly Immortal threshold, hinting at some secret tier above.
Slowly, he lifted his head. Beneath the cowl, two crimson embers burned like twin blood-moons, fixing on Jared without blinking.
"Atst, whelp... you havee."
Gone was the rasp; his words rang clear and icy, each syble a hammer striking the listeners'' spirits. "I have waited for this day a very, very long time."
Jared felt that crushing presence and, instead of fear, a wildfire of battle-lust red behind his eyes.
Chaotic celestial energy thundered through his veins, the lotus of primordial fire in his core turning, petals radiating scalding resolve. Even the Dragonyer Sword, sped in his palm, responded with a low, eager hum.
"You''ve recovered quite well. Pity. You''re still going to die," Jaredmented calmly.
Soul Devourer threw back his head and roared withughter, a thunder that shook the za tiles.
"Die? You. You''re a mere Level Nine Human Immortal who stumbled into a bit of fortune and now believes himself unbeatable. When I roamed the heavens, devouring stars and their children, your ancestors had not even been born yet. Today, I will teach you what true power is... what despair tastes like."
Before the echo faded, Soul Devourer snapped his arm upward, wing at empty air in Jared''s direction.
"Soul-Devouring w!"
A ck w, a hundred yards across, condensed from pure soulforce and demonic essence, materialized overhead.
Faces of the damned writhed across its surface, breathing decay that could strip life from stone.
The moment it appeared, the space around Jared locked tight. With the force to crush stars, the w descended.
The strike eclipsed any technique Mordain had ever unleashed. It brushed the doorway to an even higher realm.
Jared''s gaze sharpened. All chaos essence surged to the limit. The Dragonyer Sword red, spilling prismatic chaos light across the square.
"Heaven-Splitting Chaos!"
With a clear shout, he swung from hip to sky, cutting against the fall.
The resulting Sword energy, honed to absolute purity, seemed able to separate the pure from the foul, to cleave the primal chaos itself. It carried Chaotic True me and
sword intent fierce enough to
unmake creation, meeting the w head-on.
Boom!
Sword and talon hammered together, neither yielding.
Then the world tore open. A st beyond words blossomed, an expanding storm of
energy that consumed the entire Infinite Soul Hall.
The array Sheldon and his demonic
cohorts had hurriedly patched together burst apart like soggy papyrus beneath a cyclone Flooring forged from ghost-lit iron buckled upward. Half the blood from the pool shed into steam, and wide ck fissures tore through the very air, refusing to close.
Amid the roiling haze, Jared pinwheeled backward over one hundred meters before
he dug his boots in. His sword arm tingled with pins and needles, and turbulent blood hammered against his ribs.
Across the battlefield, Soul Devourer
merely swayed once and settled again in midair. The enormous w-split a moment earlier by Jared''s de quivered knitting itself together as though mending flesh, its murderous aura
vol
undiminished.