Above the shattered mountain, Lorel's scream tore through the chaos. "GEN!"
Li Fen and Ting, battered and breathless, snapped their gazes to the distant plume of sand and smoke in the desert. The form within the crater did not move.
Far below, on a precarious ledge, Juxian watched the unfolding cataclysm. He did not look afraid. His expression was one of grim calculus. He glanced at the titans clashing in the sky, then at the distant crater where his friend lay. A silent understanding passed through him. He gave one last look towards the plateau where Lorel stood, her hands clenched into white-knuckled fists, and then he turned. His form blurred, not with speed, but with a practiced, mountain-goat agility that carried him down the broken cliffs and into the labyrinthine canyons below. He was not fleeing. He was moving with purpose. For their safety, for any chance of success in this desperate mission, he needed to reach his Grand Pa. And he needed to do it now.
***
In the crater, the world was a haze of pain and ringing silence.
Gen pushed himself up, sand cascading from his shoulders. His mind was a fuzzy static, his body a single, screaming ache. He blinked, trying to clear the white spots from his vision. Above, the sky was a canvas of violence: blinding flashes of white light, concussive booms that arrived late to his ears, and the shuddering, sickening impacts of two forces that should not exist in the same world.
*The real fight has started,* he thought, the words sluggish in his own head.
A shadow fell over him. Master Ting landed beside him in a crouch, his own face pale, one arm cradled protectively against his cracked ribs. The old man's eyes were sharp with urgency. "Are you still alive, Gen?"
"Of course I am," Gen croaked. A thick, coppery spray of blood followed the words, spattering the pale sand. A bitter, painful smile twisted his lips. The taste of his own blood was a cold clarity. He finally understood the difference. Nix's domain had been about control and power, a cage of nullification. Buqu's **Forged Destiny** was something else entirely. It was not a cage; it was an avalanche. It was an undeniable, unchangeable conclusion given physical form. It hadn't just hit his body; it had hit his future, declaring his defeat an immutable fact.
He wiped his mouth with the back of a trembling hand, his eyes scanning the distant, glowing battleground. Two figures moved like comets around a third, stationary core of light. "What… what is Kaito doing up there?" he managed to ask, pointing a shaky finger.
Ting followed his gaze, a complex mix of pride and profound worry on his weathered face. He hauled Gen to his feet, supporting him as they retreated to a safer vantage point on a rocky outcrop. "Back in the Jade Palace," Ting explained, his voice strained but clear, "Kaito was always an outstanding student. But after we met you, after he saw your progress… he worked. He worked until his bones ached and his spirit frayed." Ting's gaze was fixed on the distant, shimmering figure trading blows with the Divine General. "Now, his **Jingdao**… it has not only surpassed my own. I believe it has surpassed yours, Gen. Unless you use the Eternal Body's Third Door, you might not be able to handle him in a contest of pure reinforcement. That is why he can stand there. And we cannot."
Gen stared, a slow, dawning awe cutting through his pain. He remembered Kaito's **Walking Star Jingdao**—a reinforcement that mimicked the dense, shifting plates of a stellar surface, granting impossible hardness with a fluid, tectonic mobility. If Ting was right, if Kaito's body could now theoretically *withstand* a Divine General's direct assault, even if only faintly… it changed everything. It made him the perfect shield for the Lost Triangle, who was clearly a long-range bombardment specialist of a scale Gen had never imagined.
His eyes darted around their small group—Lorel, her face etched with fear; Li Fen, nursing spiritual burns; Ting, broken but unbowed. One was missing. "Juxian," Gen muttered. "Where did he go?"
"He left," Lorel said, her voice tight. She didn't look away from the fight. "He did not say why."
Gen knew his friend. Cowardice was a philosophy Juxian had never studied. If he left, it was for a reason. A plan. The thought was a tiny, cold ember of hope in his chest. He filed it away; there was no time to ponder.
"Gen, you are wounded," Lorel said, finally turning to him, her eyes melting with worry.
"In one piece," Gen muttered, half to himself. His attention was locked back on Buqu. He had felt **Forged Destiny**. He knew its weight. A cold fear, colder than the desert night, settled in his gut. *Even Kaito might not be able to take it.*
***
In the eye of the storm, the Lost Triangle floated, serene and terrible. Around Buqu, the three intense points of light that formed the vertices of her spell hovered, humming with contained annihilation. They did not attack. They waited, defining the space of the trap.
Kaito, sheathed in his **Walking Star Jingdao**, moved. His skin glittered with a hard, grey light, spiderwebbed with hairline cracks of contained power. He shot forward, not with Gen's blazing speed, but with the inevitable, grinding momentum of a continental plate.
His fist met Buqu's in a head-on collision.
***CRACK-BOOM!***
The sound was not of flesh, but of two mountains colliding. Kaito was flung backward, skidding dozens of meters through the air, his feet carving grooves in the solidified Qi of the battlefield. But he did not fall.
Buqu stepped forward through the dispersing shockwave, a note of genuine appreciation in his voice. "You hit hard. But not enough." His fist drew back, divine intent coiling around it.
He never threw the punch.
The Lost Triangle moved. She didn't travel; she *became* the first point of the triangle. One moment she was across the void. The next, she was the falling star, the first vertex of light slamming down onto Buqu from above.
He reacted instantly, crossing his arms above his head in a guard, his face tilting up into a fierce smirk.
The impact had no sound. It was a silent, violent compression of reality. A wave of pure force *splashed* outward from the point of contact, a visible ripple that turned the remaining mountain peaks below into gravel and sent the debris swirling in a suddenly weightless void.
As the light and dust subsided, Buqu stood revealed. A faint, smoking burn mark etched his forearm. But more importantly, for the first time, the gleaming, intricate plates of his full Divine General's armor had flickered to life across his torso, shoulders, and arms, reacting to the threat.
A little frown touched his lips. He glanced from the burn on his skin to the woman now re-materializing near the second point of light, and then to the two remaining orbs. Understanding dawned. "Your heart carries no form of doubt whatsoever," he declared, his voice resonating with something like respect. "Allowing you to summon this spell from a place of utter control. Absolute perfection. Given form… it is a trap that could slay even gods." He nodded slowly, his battle-lust tempered by cold assessment. *If those three orbs land on me in quick succession,* he thought, *the outcome of this fight might turn uncertain. I can never allow that.*
The Lost Triangle's form dissolved into luminescence once more, flowing like liquid light toward the second orb.
Buqu did not wait. He shot forward, a spear of divine will aimed to obliterate her before she could reach her next crescendo.
Kaito stepped into his path.
The **Walking Star Jingdao** shimmered, the cracks in the light on his skin deepening. He braced.
Buqu's fists, now sheathed fully in his gleaming divine armor, became blurs. He unleashed **Forged Destiny** not as a single, finishing blow, but as a rapid, pummeling declaration.
***CRUNCH. CRACK. THUD.***
The sounds were sickening, precise. Kaito's legendary defense held for the first impact, shuddered on the second, and on the third, a sharp, audible *snap* echoed. A fissure, dark and deep, appeared in the light covering his forearm. He grunted, the breath driven from him.
But he had bought the one second needed.
The Lost Triangle, now fused with the second orb, arrived not from the front, but from behind Buqu in the last possible moment. Her attack was not an explosion, but an implosion—a condensed point of the **Lost Principle** that sought not to destroy, but to unmake from within.
It landed squarely between Buqu's armored shoulder blades.
***Shhhriiiiike—***
A soft, piercing shriek, like tearing metal and dying light, echoed in the sudden, breathless quiet.
Buqu was driven forward. Not by much. Three steps. Three small, stumbling steps on the void.
But he *stumbled*.
As the cascading light faded, Gen, Lorel, Ting, and Li Fen all blinked, their minds refusing to process what their eyes showed them.
On Buqu's back, where the ornate, divine armor had taken the hit, a web of fine, black cracks radiated from a central point. And from a hairline fracture on his lower lip, a single, shimmering drop of golden blood welled, traced a path down his chin, and fell, evaporating into motes of light before it could hit the ground.
He was bleeding.
His armor was cracked.
The sight was so absurd, so world-breaking, that the small group on the outcrop held their collective breath, waiting for the sky to fall in response.
Buqu himself seemed slightly shocked. He lifted a hand, fingers brushing the cracked plate on his chest. The touch was gentle, almost curious. "Incredible," he murmured, the word carrying across the distance with perfect clarity. "Cutting away all emotion… it allows you to reach a level of power that can rival my own. The Lost Triangle is indeed worthy of legends."
Despite the generous comment, the Lost Triangle did not answer. Her expression, visible within the nimbus of light, did not change. No pride, no satisfaction. In her mind, the calculation was cold and clear. *The final orb could end this fight. But can I land it?* Now, Buqu would be on maximum alert. This spell was her life's work, a principle given form that condensed all her fighting ability into three, perfect strikes. Its power was absolute—if it connected. *Can I do it?* she asked herself. *Can I protect my nephew? Can I protect the son of that foolish… friend?*
She wasn't totally sure. The blinding clarity of her heart was powerful, but not impossible to reverse. For a fleeting nanosecond, she wavered.
Then she stilled it. She cast the doubt away, burning it in the furnace of her will. There was only the target. Only Buqu.
Across from her, Buqu's expression shifted. All traces of amusement, of testing, vanished. It was replaced by a focus so absolute it seemed to draw the light from the sky. "Enough," he said, the word a law.
He unleashed **Forged Destiny** fully.
The world cried out.
The earth far below groaned. The very Qi in the atmosphere shrieked as it was ripped from its natural flow. The void around them seemed to crack under a pressure it was never meant to hold. The sound was a physical thing, a deep, metallic ringing that vibrated in their teeth, their bones, their souls. Lorel and Li Fen cried out, hands clamping over their ears. Gen felt his recently-healed ribs ache in sympathy.
Buqu's eyes ignited with cold, blue-white light. He crouched slightly, and then he *forged*.
Between his outstretched hands, reality screamed and yielded. Not from a spell granted by the Council of Immortals, but from a principle that had always lived in his soul. **Forged Destiny** had always been a part of Buqu—the unshakeable belief that will alone could hammer chance into certainty.
The Qi condensed, swirled, and took form. Not an axe of light, but an axe of *consequence*. A massive, double-headed weapon of shimmering, metallic Qi materialized in his grip. Ancient, indecipherable markings—like the runes of a universe's base code—glowed along its haft and blades. It was not a weapon. It was *fate given a handle*.
Buqu grasped it. The moment his fingers closed around the haft, the veins in his arms and neck bulged, pulsing with a painful, angry light. A strained grunt escaped him. He was not holding a weapon of energy; he was holding the concentrated, unbearable weight of a forced outcome.
He raised the axe, the movement slow, deliberate, and world-breakingly heavy. His eyes, blazing with effort and absolute intent, found the Lost Triangle, now hovering before the third and final orb.
The final forge had begun.