Radeon could have rested. But the main battlefield was only now turning white hot.
Jekyll emerged from the smoke and churn, bloodied head to heel. He did not stagger, not yet, but he moved like every step took something out of him.
Another man stood squarely in front of him, planted as if the ground had been nailed to his boots.
One limb was gone, hacked or blasted away, and the ruin of it gushed and steamed in the heat.
"Jekyll... ah, Jekyll," the branch leader murmured, smiling as if at a private jest. "Tell me true, did you take us for men with nothing but cultivation to our name?"
Jekyll only smiled. His eyes narrowed to slits as he shifted his feet, testing purchase on glassed grit, and took up a stance.
Blood moved around him in small, deliberate streams. Not spray, not spill. It curled and circled as if it knew his will.
Each drop of that cultivated blood hung in the air with a real, brutal weight.
Tons, enough to make the air shudder around it. Wherever it drifted, the world thinned.
Paint dried to dust. Grass went gray. Even the warmth in living flesh seemed to dim. It stole vitality from stone and bone alike.
And he was still the underdog. He faced the branch leader of the cult, a man already in the Spirit Transfiguration Realm.
Jekyll was only half a step toward it, close enough to taste, far enough to be killed for trying.
Above them the sky gathered its judgment. This was the tribulation's second descent.
Lightning fell. The sword grandmaster swatted at it like an annoyance, palm and sleeve cutting through the descending bolt.
It split and scattered, snarling across the air in broken teeth, as if even heaven did not dare insist.
Jekyll met the next strike with less arrogance and more hunger. His blood-streams snapped up like whips, each drop dragging on the world with ton-heavy spite as they lashed the lightning apart.
The branch leader answered too. He hauled his bloodied axe up into the falling bolt and cut the lightning in half.
"Ullir. You are not leaving here alive today."
Jekyll surged forward as he said it, voice steady, promise plain.
Beads of cultivated blood snapped off his orbiting streams and shot toward the branch leader like sling stones, each drop dragging at the air with ton-heavy spite.
Ullir did not even shift his stance. Thick reserves of qi and abyssal energy rolled out from him in a blunt, effortless swell.
The blood-beads hit that unseen wall and died, splattering into heavy, dead flecks that thudded into the scorched ground.
Ullir's mouth curved, a smirk like a thin cut. Jekyll's smile did not move, but something in his gaze sharpened. He reached inward and pulled.
His bloodline talent answered. Crimson scales crawled over his hands, plate by plate, as if the skin itself hardened into armor.
Above his brow, a crown of red grew into being, not metal, not bone, but a living thing made of blood and will, forming with a slow, inevitable certainty as he closed the distance.
"You! You're a heretic." Ullir let the word ring, all righteous disgust on his tongue. "I knew it. No soul stays so... unsullied for a hundred years unless some foul grace is washing him clean."
Jekyll did not respond. He clenched the blood orb, and it hardened into a crimson spear.
Ullir sprouted tentacles from his back and reached for the eldritch power he'd been about to about to unleash, but his answer was too slow.
Jekyll tightened his fist. The spear, already buried in Ullir's heart, detonated.
When Jekyll looked up again, the huge blood core was already turning toward Ullir's corpse, greedy and intent.
Multitude of mouths split along its surface, and from that slick red darkness came tentacles, but not like any beast should have.
They were made of men. The very lives Ullir had taken. Torsos and arms fused into ropes of flesh, faces half formed and screaming without sound.
They sprang outward in hungry jerks, reaching for Ullir's soul. The man tried to run but hundreds of arms snared him in an instant.
"Jekyll! Arturo!" Ullir spat, the dead hands dragging him down. "You'll pay for this. I lay my curse on you! On your sons, and theirs after them... for all the ages..." The last turned to a choking sound as the cold fingers closed and the water took him.
Then, in less than a blink, Ullir was pinned by the very ten thousand souls he had sacrificed.
They swarmed him in a knot of pale hands and torn faces, dragging at his spirit, binding him in place with the weight of his own sins.
Ullir tried to wrench free and found nothing to push against.
The calm lasted a breath. Then the tribulation came down, one strike after another.
Lightning. Each strike louder, thicker, the air growing harder to breathe between flashes.
Jekyll endured, the sword grandmaster endured, the blood core endured.
The eighth bolt fell like a verdict.
The ground melted where it struck, rock running like black water, sand turning to glass in jagged sheets.
The blood core, once all appetite and arrogance, twitched in the air. Its mouth tightened.
The smug curl it had worn sagged into something like half a smirk, as if it had only now become truly aware of what it was standing in.
Awareness flickered through it, ugly and sudden, a thing realizing too late that the butcher's block had a name and it might be its own.
Jekyll passed the tribulation through gritted teeth. The sword grandmaster looked the same as ever.
The tribulation had not even fully wrapped itself around them when the sword grandmaster moved.
No warning. No posture. Just action.
His huge blade launched upward with a crack of sonic booms, splitting the air so hard the smoke tore apart around it.
Then, in midflight, it divided. One sword became a hundred, each a bright shard of intent.
They fell in a clean, ruthless pattern, embedding one by one, punching into the blood core.
Faces that had been etched into its surface in crimson, fatigued and furious, contorted as the points bit home.
Its mouth split wider, and a chorus of stolen throats roared in agony as it thrashed in the air, dragged and pinned by the planted steel.
In desperation it tried to feed. Several of its mouths puckered and strained, sucking at the sword grandmaster as if it could drink him down whole.
The air around him tugged. Dust crawled toward the core in little skittering lines. The grandmaster did not move.
He stood rooted too tight, as if the world itself had decided he belonged there.
Whatever pull the core managed found no purchase on him, and the blood core's hunger only made its struggle uglier.
"Reform!" Arturo roared.
The swords buried in the blood core began to move. They dragged themselves inward, inch by inch, pulled through dense, resisting flesh.
Faces warped and stretched along their path, mouths open in screams, crimson lines tearing and sealing in the same breath.
Every blade that had been planted found the same destination, gathering toward the very middle of the huge body, as if the grandmaster had marked a single point and the steel could not disobey.
The blood core beat harder, faster, trying to throw them out, trying to spit them free.
It could not. The cluster of swords sank deeper, tightening into a knot at the center.
"No, no, no." The blood core quavered. "Don't grind me to dross. I can serve. I can be of use."
As if deaf to the thunder and the screaming creature in the air, the sword grandmaster opened his eyes.
He raised his hands and began to slash through the air with the tips of his fingers.
Not a blade. Not even a hilt. Just skin and will. His arms moved so fast they left afterimages, a fan of ghost-limbs carving the space before him.
Cuts appeared on the blood orb. Not gashes. Not wounds a butcher would make.
Lines. Fine, merciless lines, slipping into the gaps between the finest silks, so precise they seemed to be drawn rather than struck.
The orb shuddered and then came apart in places it could not understand, seams opening where no seam should exist.
Blood rained down in heavy sheets, thudding and sizzling as it hit the ruined ground.
Then it gathered, as if called, drawing itself into beads and edges and a shape that answered only to Jekyll's hand.
The grandmaster's eyes went to him. Jekyll met the look. Neither showed excitement. Neither showed triumph.
Their faces held the same flat calm of men doing a task they had done before, a chore that happened to involve screaming souls and lightning.
"For the Severance of the Silencers," Arturo said.
"For the Severance of the Silencers," Jekyll echoed, simple and exact.
Then they turned away and left, each taking a different path through the smoking ruin, as if the battlefield behind them were already finished business.