"Amar!!!!" Lina screamed, her heart seizing with violent terror as the roaring, ten-meter pillar of elemental fire engulfed my body.
She lunged forward, her sky-iron rapier humming with frantic, desperate energy, ready to tear that disciple into pieces—
"Stop, little girl!" the Sovereign Dragon Empress shouted inside her sea of consciousness, her voice laced with raw, petrified horror. "Look at the flames! Look at his eyes!"
Inside the blazing inferno, the flesh didn't burn.
The fire-elemental qi that was supposed to incinerate organs and turn human bone to charcoal didn't even singe a single thread of my obsidian coat. Beneath the fabric, my Chitinous Bio-Mesh hummed with dense, diamond-hard resonance, absorbing the kinetic shock, while millions of bacteriophage clones flared with the Stage 3 Toxic and Thermal Immunity stolen from the rift beasts.
The blazing fire wasn't an execution. To me, it was merely warm air.
Slowly, deliberately, a pale hand reached out from the center of the roaring column of flames.
The fourth disciple, who had poured his entire dantian into that desperate strike, froze in mid-air. His eyes bulged out of his skull, his breath hitching in a strangled squeak. His fist was still buried in the fire—and my bare fingers had just wrapped around his wrist.
CRACK.
With a sickening, wet snap, I twisted his wrist 360 degrees, shattering the radius and ulna into splintered bone fragments that tore through his skin.
"ARGHHHH!" the man shrieked, falling to his knees as the giant pillar of fire was instantly sucked into my open pores, snuffed out like a candle in a hurricane.
The flames vanished, revealing my face.
My eyes were pitch-black—dead, devoid of emotion, like two hollow abysses staring down at a maggot. There was no anger on my face. There was only a terrifying, vacant calm that made the remaining disciples' bladders lose control.
"You tried to touch her," I whispered softly, leaning down toward the screaming man. My voice sounded hollow, like a corpse speaking from the bottom of a well. "You wanted to let your boys have a turn with her. Did you really think you would get to keep your hands?"
Before the disciple could beg, my right hand shot forward like an iron piston.
RIP!
I grabbed his collarbone and tore his entire left arm straight off his shoulder socket with raw, unassisted muscular force. Blood geysered into the sulfurous air, showering my face in warm, dark crimson.
"AHHH! DEVIL! HE'S A DEVIL!"
The remaining disciple completely lost their minds. They threw their broadswords to the gravel, scrambling on hands and knees to claw their way up the sheer obsidian cliff walls, wailing like terrified children.
He didn't make it three steps.
Thump-thump.
Two loud thumps echoed as his head is separated from his body, now lying in Amar's hand which tossed aside.
The Ashen Gorge fell dead silent.
The stench of copper, charred meat, and ruptured intestines hung thick in the cold air.
I turned around slowly, my boots splashing through the pool of blood pooling around the mutilated corpses.
Ten feet away, Arthur Vance was still on his hands and knees, clutching his throat, vomiting violent clumps of dark-red blood and shredded lung tissue onto the rocks. The Sun-Devouring Core on his chest was flashing erratically, but the hundreds of thousands of dormant phages nested in his bronchial tree were already eating the qi before it could ever reach his heart.
Every breath Arthur pulled in was agonizing. His face was blue, veins bulging across his forehead like crawling worms as he looked up and saw me walking toward him.
He saw the blood dripping from my pale chin. He saw the lifeless, abyss-black void in my eyes.
"P-P-Please..." Arthur wheezed through a mouthful of bloody foam, trembling so violently his teeth clattered against each other. "A-Amar... my grandfather... he's a Grandmaster... spare... spare me..."
I stopped right in front of him.
I looked down at him, tilting my head slightly, like a curious child inspecting a bug he was about to tear the legs off of.
"Lina," I whispered, not looking back at her. "She is mine. She has always been mine. In that life, in this life, in every life."
I raised my boot and brought it down hard on Arthur's right knee.
CRUNCH!
"AGHHH!" Arthur's scream was muffled by another surge of blood from his throat as his kneecap was crushed into powder.
"You looked at her with lust," I whispered, bringing my boot down onto his left elbow, shattering the joint in reverse.
SNAP!
"You dared to speak her name with that filthy mouth."
I crouched down, grabbing Arthur by his golden hair, forcing his tear-streaked, bloodied face upward until his eyes met mine.
"I won't let you die quickly, Arthur," I murmured, my voice dropping into a tender, psychotic purr that made the hairs on Arthur's neck stand on end. "My little clones are going to live inside your lungs. They will eat you cell by cell, day by day, breath by breath... while you watch me take everything your family ever owned."
Behind me, Lina stood frozen, clutching her sky-iron rapier with white knuckles.
Her breath was caught in her throat. She looked at the butchered limbs, the crushed skulls, and the boy she loved standing drenched in gore, smiling like a demon crawling out of hell.
A profound, suffocating chill swept through her spine—not because she was disgusted, but because she finally understood the depth of the bottomless, terrifying madness that bound Amar to her soul.
And deep inside her pendant, the Sovereign Dragon Empress curled her soul-projection as tightly as she could, shivering in pure, unadulterated terror.
"He is not human..." the immortal whimpered in absolute dread. "I have seen people worse than him, people who drink human blood, wipe out millions just for amusement, but you know what is more interesting, his eyes those eyes are same eyes, those dark cultivators. Those are eyes of someone who could anything to reach his goals."
"Unfortunately, little girl you are his goal."