"Law – Definition: In this place, energy dissipation is halved."
Cerydra intervened at just the right moment, forcibly amending the local rules. She effectively suppressed the impact of the explosion, protecting her own side while also slightly limiting the full eruption of Kevin's power.
The battle fell into a stalemate.
Kevin's murderous sword aura could erode divine power, Hysilens's ocean authority was vast and inexhaustible, and Cerydra's laws were bizarre and impossible to guard against.
The three powers collided madly. The sky shifted violently between blood-red, azure, and deep blue; the earth continuously cracked and sank, as if the end of the world had come.
After attacking for so long without breaking through, a faint trace of impatience seemed to flash through the hollowness of Kevin's eyes.
After once again knocking aside a heavy strike from Hysilens's trident, he did something no one expected—he let go.
That Asura Demon Sword which made all tremble at its name gave an unwilling buzz, turned into a streak of blood-red light, and with a clang stabbed obliquely into a huge dark-red boulder in the distance, trembling slightly.
Immediately after, Kevin's right hand, which had been gripping empty air, reached out toward the void—toward the very spot where that strange greatsword that had once nailed down the Slaughter King Tang Chen had originally been.
"Wong——!"
Scorching light surged into existence out of nowhere, as if a miniature sun had been born in his hand.
A grotesque greatsword, wrapped in the aura of destruction, was slowly drawn out by him.
At the crossguard, a scarlet Herrscher core pulsed like a living thing, radiating the Key of Destruction that could make even gods tremble.
The moment the blade appeared, the temperature of the entire City of Slaughter shot up from chilly to scorching.
The air twisted from the heat, crackling explosively. The rock on the ground below even began to melt and vaporize.
"What is… that weapon?"
Sensing a destructive aura far beyond that of the Asura Demon Sword, Hysilens's expression grew more solemn than ever.
Kevin gripped the Might of An-Utu. His eyes became even more hollow, yet also more focused.
He cast aside all emotion and became an ultimate weapon that existed only for destruction.
He clasped the sword in both hands and, facing the two opponents braced in front of him, gave a simple horizontal sweep.
No technique—only annihilation.
A flood of flame, blinding white entwined with dark red destruction, roared forth like a world-ending beast breaking free of its cage.
Where the flames passed, space was not torn but directly obliterated, leaving shocking, long-unhealed black tracks of void.
"Careful."
Cerydra cried out sharply and thrust both hands forward.
"Law – Iron Wall, unassailable by all arts."
Layer upon layer of transparent barriers formed of pure law instantaneously took shape, blocking before the torrent of flame.
However, before the Catastrophe blaze, these solid walls of law were like thin paper thrown into a bonfire, collapsing and dissolving one after another.
Cerydra let out a muffled groan, her face turning pale. Though the authority of law was strong, facing this ultimate, pure power of Destruction, she actually found it hard to hold back completely.
"Boundless Sea Barrier!"
Hysilens planted the golden trident in front of her. The purest oceanic divine power transformed into a blue light-screen as deep as the starry sea and as weighty as the Nine Hells, sheltering her and Cerydra behind it.
The next instant, the world-ending torrent of Might of An-Utu slammed heavily into the Boundless Sea Barrier.
"BOOOOOOOOOOM!!!"
A terrifying boom shook heaven and earth as the white-hot Destruction fire and the deep blue light frantically corroded and annihilated one another.
The energy storm swept out, vaporizing everything around them.
A massive circular crater like the impact of a meteor formed at the collision point below. Its bottom was filled with roiling magma that had been instantaneously vitrified into glass.
Hysilens clenched her teeth. The radiance on her divine armor flickered violently, and her divine power drained at an unprecedented rate.
Yet her gaze remained firm. The ocean's source power was endless and unceasing; by sheer force she withstood this blow of apocalypse.
Seeing Might of An-Utu unsheathed and actually stopped, a minute ripple appeared for the first time in Kevin's hollow eyes.
He no longer held back, and began to release deeper layers of power.
An aura far more primordial and ferocious than Parvati's frost awoke inside his body.
His physique began to mutate. Dark keratin surfaced beneath his skin, and his bones twisted with a teeth-grinding creak, as if hundreds or thousands of Honkai beast factors were roaring within him at once.
Catastrophic Form.
He was no longer that cold human figure, but a being clad in pitch-black alien matter, like a demon emerging from the abyss.
In Catastrophic Form, Kevin's strength, speed, and reflexes spiked geometrically.
He brandished the Might of An-Utu, unleashing all manner of inconceivable battle techniques.
At times he slashed out sword aura of frost that froze space itself; at times he drew on the earthfire below to erupt; at times he flashed about with speeds beyond vision for surprise strikes.
Facing Kevin with his surging power, Hysilens and Cerydra also raised their cooperation to the utmost.
Hysilens drove the Sea God's divine arts to their limits: Ever-shifting Wind and Wave to restrict her opponent's movement, White Clouds for a Thousand Ages to dissolve lethal blows, and Sun of the Sea to launch overwhelming counterattacks.
Her figure fused with the billows, combining softness with steel.
Cerydra, meanwhile, was like the most precise command hub, constantly switching law directives.
When Kevin unleashed wide-range freezing, she instantly defined: "In this place, ice-element laws are nullified."
When Kevin tried to suppress them with absolute speed, she applied: "Global gravity increase."
She could even briefly construct reflection barriers to send part of his attacks back at him.
The battle escalated to the level of law itself.
At one point Kevin plunged the Might of An-Utu into the earth, drawing out the destructive force contained within. A blazing sword-scar thousands of kilometers long erupted, as if he truly meant to give the Douluo Star a center part right down the middle.
Where the sword-scar passed, all things were annihilated and even the structure of space became unstable.
Facing this world-ending attack, Hysilens and Cerydra joined forces. Sea God's divine power and law authority shone together, forming a blue-gold barrier spanning heaven and earth that forcibly blocked this middle-parting strike.
Though the barrier was covered in cracks and golden god-blood trickled from the corners of both their mouths, they ultimately held.
"We can't go on like this."
Standing side by side, the two peerlessly stunning goddesses now looked somewhat battered.
The light of their divine gear had dimmed a little, and their breathing carried a faint, hard-to-notice urgency.
Continuous high-intensity combat—especially against Kevin's terrifying might—had massively drained both their divine power and their spirits.
Even so, their eyes were firmer than ever, with not the slightest intent of retreat.
Kevin, in Catastrophic Form, hovered in the air. The destructive aura coiled around the Might of An-Utu pulsed like breath, repeatedly battering the already tottering spatial structure.
His hollow eyes locked onto his two opponents, as if calculating the power required to destroy them.
"You are truly admirable warriors. As a show of respect, I shall go all out."
Hysilens's hand glided along the shaft of the golden trident. Her vast oceanic divine power began compressing and condensing inward without restraint; the azure divine light around her grew deeper and deeper, even taking on a faint, sacrificial brilliance.
The dark-blue flame on Cerydra's coronet also flared violently. Now she could only put her full strength into supporting Hysilens; after all, she was never famed for combat even among demigods.
Facing an unsurpassable warrior like Kevin, only a likewise unstoppable warrior like Hysilens could truly stand against him.
Blackened Kevin sensed his opponent's fighting spirit climbing to its pinnacle. His Catastrophic Form body crouched slightly, while the Herrscher core on the Might of An-Utu blazed, and an aura of finality surged like a tsunami.
The final clash was about to erupt.
At this life-or-death instant—
Zheng——!
A sword aura that seemed capable of cleaving stars and freezing the Milky Way ripped open the distant sky without warning, flying in faster than sound.
Where the sword aura passed, space was neatly cut apart, leaving mirror-smooth severed planes of ice.
Several towering dark-red peaks, once soaked in blood, were silently split in two the moment the sword aura swept past. Their cross-sections were sheathed in eternal, never-melting deep-blue ice, radiating a chilling, deathly stillness amid the raging energy storm.
This sudden strike, aimed straight at Kevin, instantly shattered the balance.
The Catastrophic Form that Kevin had become whipped his head around. In his hollow eyes was reflected that strike of pure, ultimate force.
Even he could feel from this sword-aura a keenness and chill sharp enough to threaten his life.
He was forced to cut his charge short, swinging the Might of An-Utu backhand. A blazing sword aura burst forth.
"Chi——!"
The ice-blue sword aura collided hard with the fire-red sword aura. Extreme cold and extreme heat clashed violently.
Clouds of white vapor billowed into existence. In the end, it was a hasty swing; the fire-red sword aura was shattered, while the ice sword aura itself mostly dissipated, yet its lingering chill still pierced through, frosting a thin layer of ice over Kevin's Catastrophic Form exterior and abruptly slowing his movements.
This earth-shattering strike caused the battle-cranked fighting spirit of Hysilens and Cerydra to pause for a heartbeat. They immediately turned toward the source of the sword aura.
Far off at the horizon, two figures stood leisurely in the sky.
At their head was a woman in martial garb of overlapping sky-blue and smoke-blue. A black eyepatch covered her eyes but could not conceal the sword intent that seemed able to pierce the soul.
Her silver-white hair whipped in the energy storm, and in her hand, the Shard Sword glowed with a cold, dim light.
It was Jingliu.
By her side, Lu Jingming waved cheerfully at Hysilens and Cerydra, his face utterly free of any tension at being on the front lines of battle.
"Jingliu, and… him as well."
A strange light flickered through Hysilens's eyes.
Cerydra inclined her head slightly, coolly analyzing:
"They've come at just the right time. His tempo's been disrupted."
At the center of the battlefield, Kevin slowly turned around. The frost over his Catastrophic Form body evaporated in rising waves of heat.
For the first time, his hollow gaze locked fully onto the newly arrived enemy—Jingliu.
From this veiled woman he sensed a dangerous aura.
Facing this terrifying Catastrophic Form, Jingliu felt no fear. Instead, the corner of her lips hooked up in a faint, delighted arc.
Beneath the black gauze that hid her sight, what she saw was not a monster, but an unprecedented, near-godlike good opponent.
"I wonder if my sword can sever a demon from the abyss."
She whispered quietly, her figure already turning into a streak of light shooting forward.
Her new-moon sword light was like the cycle of the moon—cold and ruthless.
The battle between Jingliu and Kevin had already surpassed the scope of normal description.
Two streams of light—one a bone-chilling moon-white radiance, the other a blazing, ferocious dark-red karmic fire—crashed through the shattered sky and earth like two runaway meteors.
One second, they were thousands of meters up, Shard Sword and Might of An-Utu clashing head-on, shockwaves blasting the clouds to shreds as a rain of ice-crystals and sparks poured down.
The next, they were slamming into the ground like falling stars, the magma ravines carved by the flame sword and the frozen abysses hewn by the ice sword criss-crossing them, leaving the already-ruined land even more ravaged and unrecognizable.
Sword aura rampaged.
With each of their clashes, the twin, opposing powers of ice and fire violently annihilated and were reborn anew.
Blazing trails of light hung in the air, slow to disperse. Fire-red and ice-blue intertwined like the most brutal yet gorgeous strokes on an end-of-days canvas.
"Incredible speed and power…"
Hysilens watched those two figures whose movements the naked eye could no longer track and whose paths could only be sensed through divine power. Flames of battle burned in her deep-blue eyes.
Though as Sea God she was not known for speed, with divine power as her support she could likewise step into this realm of godlike velocity.
"Wong——!"
Without further hesitation, azure divine light exploded around Hysilens, turning her into a third stream of light that crashed into the fray.
In an instant, the sky became a killing dance floor for three streaks of light.
Jingliu's sword was strange, swift, cold, and carried the meaning of annihilation. Her sword light was like moonlight shining everywhere, leaving no gap.
Kevin's sword was violent, straightforward, and fierce, embodying pure destruction. Every sweep of the Might of An-Utu carried the power to burn all things, breaking finesse with brute force and forcibly smashing apart Jingliu's exquisitely refined swordplay.
Hysilens's entry brought the immeasurable weight and endlessness of the sea.
Her golden trident no longer chased extreme speed, but instead used its vast divine power to erect sturdy bulwarks, blocking Kevin's deadliest slashes, while Ever-shifting Wind and Wave's binding power disrupted his movements and created openings for Jingliu.
The three figures crossed, clashed, separated, and clashed again at speeds beyond conscious thought.
The sounds of their weapons colliding were so dense they merged into an unending roar.
On the paths of their combat, energy storms constantly formed and burst, driving sky and earth ever closer to complete collapse.
Down below, Lu Jingming strolled at an unhurried pace to Cerydra's side, stopping five meters away.
For a queen of such extreme vigilance, master of law itself, that distance already counted as very close.
However, Cerydra merely turned her head slightly. Those deep eyes glanced at Lu Jingming, then returned to the fierce battle in the sky. The scepter in her hand—symbol of authority—spun idly between her fingers.
"You knew long ago that with just me and the Sword Knight, we could not fully resolve this opponent."
Her voice was flat and calm, without joy or anger.
"Showing up to help at this moment—is it because you want me to owe you a favor?"