Chapter 628: Domain [Bonus - ]

Chapter 628: Domain [Bonus Chapter]

Talira let out an ear-splitting vibrating roar of complete agreement with her serpentine neck arching proudly toward the sky.

"HEAR THE TRUTH OF MY LORD!" Talira bellowed mentally. "WITH MY FLAMES AND MY LORD’S WILL, WE SHALL CLEAVE THIS SKELETAL VERMIN INTO ASH AND TREAD UPON ITS BONES!"

Number 5 slowly raised her head, staring at the two of them with an expression of exhausted disbelief.

"Are you two genuinely insane?" Number 5 deadpanned. "I am an elder of the World Council... My personal Core Advancement is significantly higher than yours, Kara White. I have stood upon the battlefields of the Sovereign Realm and I am telling you, with full certainty, that even I could not defeat that monstrosity in direct combat right now."

Kara gave her a sharp side-eyed smirk.

"You mean..." Kara corrected smoothly, "...you’re higher than me in Core Advancement, but still fundamentally weaker in a real fistfight?"

Number 5 choked.

Behind the porcelain mask, she violently coughed into her silk sleeve with her head snapping to the side as her ears flushed a furious indignant pink.

"That is... that is beside the point!" Number 5 spluttered, waving her hands defensively. "I am a specialist! My affinities are dedicated to macro-scale spatial teleportation and defense! I do not engage in crude, vulgar tavern-brawls like a mercenary!"

"Uh-huh," Kara teased. "So you’re weaker... Got it."

"I AM NOT WEAKER!" Number 5 hissed, her fingers twitching with the sudden urge to open a spatial tear beneath Kara’s boots and drop her into a septic tank. "It is not a matter of raw output! It is a matter of the fundamental laws that govern creatures that have reached the peak of Tier 5 and crossed into Tier 6!"

Kara raised an eyebrow, sensing the genuine technical weight behind the woman’s words.

"And what laws would those be?"

Before Number 5 could speak—

CRACK!

The sound wasn’t an explosion or a spell... Instead, it was the dry terrifying sound of a match being struck in an empty pitch-black room.

Suddenly... the world vanished.

The clouds, the desert sun, the distant burning spires of Iunu... all of it was instantly severed from their vision as the sky turned into an infinite suffocating expanse of cold lightless black.

And then... the fire ignited.

FWOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!

From the empty void, thousands of ethereal pale-green flames burst to life, floating weightlessly across miles of space like lanterns in an ancient graveyard.

The flames didn’t emit heat, instead tthey radiated a bone-chilling arctic frost that instantly coated Talira’s ruby scales in thick white ice.

High above them, floating at the center of the green fires, the colossal skeletal hand was fully revealed.

Yet, bizarrely... it didn’t seem to be eighty yards away anymore.

Through some terrifying warped perspective of compressed space, the titanic bone arm seemed to hover simultaneously miles away on the horizon and mere inches above their heads, its hollow eye sockets watching them with uncaring malice.

From the dark beneath the floating lanterns, an endless chittering ocean of skeletal horrors... winged bone-drakes, floating ribs crowned with snapping jaws, and serpentine centipedes forged from human spines began to drag themselves out of the shadows, encircling the dragon from every angle.

Number 5’s posture went completely rigid as her voice dropped into a hollow trembling whisper.

"A Domain..." she breathed, the porcelain mask casting long pale shadows across her collar. "A proper... completed Domain."

Kara stood firm on Talira’s back with her single hand dropping to the hilt of the invisible blade resting within her core and her senses flaring at maximum alert.

"Explain. Fast."

"Monsters are different from humans," Number 5 spoke rapidly, her eyes darting across the green lanterns. "In mortal cultivation, lords only begin to touch the concept of a domain at the peak of the Fourth Stage... It is rare, agonizing to manifest, and notoriously unstable. True, fluid mastery of a domain is reserved for the Fifth Stage."

She pointed a trembling finger toward the massive skeletal arm.

"But horrors of the Sovereign Realm do not cultivate like humans! They do not weave spells or balance their meridians... For a monster, their domain is an innate biological organ! At the peak of Tier 5, the seed of the domain awakens within their marrow and the moment they cross the threshold of Tier 6... their domain becomes a reality!"

Kara looked at Number 5, her brow furrowing with sharp impatience.

"And you? You’re a Council elder! Don’t you have a domain of your own?! Can’t you just deploy yours and cancel this out?!"

Number 5 grimaced behind her mask, her hands knotting into her silk sleeves.

"It’s... it is complicated! My domain requires three synchronized anchoring pylons to stabilize its boundary! I cannot deploy it from the back of a flying lizard in the middle of a free-fall..."

SCREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEECH!

The chittering horde of skeletal monstrosities lunged.

Dozens of winged bone-drakes dove from the green flames with their jaws snapping like bear traps.

"BEGONE, FILTH!" Talira roared.

CRACKLE-BOOM!

The Ancient Crimson Dragon’s body violently discharged a massive spherical web of blinding high-powered White Draconic Lightning...

WHOOSH!

The brilliant white arcs tore through the void, vaporizing twenty bone-drakes into fine powdery ash.

"Hmmmmghh!"

Talira reared her head, channeling the remaining voltage into a massive concentrated lance of white lightning aimed directly at the center of the colossal skeletal hand. 𝘧𝓇ℯℯ𝑤ℯ𝘣𝓃ℴ

SHRRRRK!

The white bolt struck the petrified bone and yet... The lightning didn’t detonate.

The moment the brilliant white plasma touched the surface of the bone with the green lanterns floating in the air flared with violent, unnatural luminescence.

The very laws of reality within the domain violently bent...

HISSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS!

The pure cleansing white lightning began to vanish as its elemental composition was violently inverted, within seconds, the brilliant white turned into a thick nauseating torrent of pale-green necrotic fire.

WHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOSH!

The reflected necrotic flames violently rebounded along their original trajectory, rocketing straight back toward Talira’s chest at twice their initial speed.

"WHAT?!" Talira gasped mentally.

SWOOSH!

The dragon rolled her massive bulk in mid-air, banking sharply to the right.

The green flames grazed her underbelly, searing through her thick ruby scales, turning three plates of armor into crumbling brittle green glass with a sickening sizzling hiss.

"RAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!"

Talira shrieked in genuine pain, her flight faltering for a terrifying half-second as more green fireballs began condensing around the floating skulls, preparing to unleash a continuous inescapable carpet-bombing.

Kara gritted her teeth with her Gold Core roaring as she caught her balance on the tilting spine.

’Domains...’ Silas thought, his mind racing through the variables like an overcharged supercomputer. ’Inside another entity’s completed domain, the host dictates the physical constants... An attack directed at the master doesn’t just miss, it gets rewritten into the master’s elemental authority!’

More green fireballs erupted from the dark as Talira banked, dove, and spun through the void with her massive wings working frantically as she dodged barrages of inverted plasma, but the safe airspace was shrinking by the millisecond.

Kara snapped her head around, glaring down at the masked woman crouching on the dragon’s back.

"Can we break out?!" Kara barked over the roaring flames. "Can you get us through the wall?!"

Number 5 looked up, her porcelain mask gleaming in the green fire.

"I can," Number 5 replied, her voice remarkably calm. "I am the Fifth Seat of the World Council... A domain can rewrite physics, but it cannot sever the fundamental spatial coordinate network so I can translocate us outside the boundary whenever you wish."

Kara froze.

Her dark eyes narrowed into a lethal murderous glare as she stared at the masked woman for two full seconds while Talira executed a near-vertical barrel roll to avoid being cleaved in half by a flying rib-blade.

"You..." Kara snarled, her voice dropping into a dangerous, terrifying growl. "...you’ve been sitting there watching us get turned into barbecue, knowing full well you could have popped us out of this deathtrap at any second?!"

"You didn’t ask," Number 5 replied with infuriating, bureaucratic precision. "You were busy lecturing me about your superior fist-fighting capabilities..."

"DO IT NOW, YOU DAMN WITCH!" Kara roared!

Above them, forty massive green fireballs converged into a single, colossal sun of necrotic plasma, hurtling straight down toward Talira’s skull!

Number 5 sighed.

She casually raised her right index finger, tapping the air with the tip of her manicured nail.

CHIME! VUM!

The green sun slammed down.

KABOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!

The massive explosion detonated across empty air with the concussive shockwave rippling through the void without touching a single scale.

POP!

The freezing natural air of the stratosphere rushed back into their lungs as the sky was blue-gray again.

The soot, the wind, and the distant roar of Iunu returned in a sudden, overwhelming crash as Talira, Kara, and Number 5 materialized three hundred yards above the primary rift fissure.

Looking down from their new vantage point, Kara’s jaw tightened.

Suspended in the sky directly below them, anchored to the dimensional tear, was a colossal and perfectly spherical orb... easily two miles in diameter, forged from impenetrable black-and-green spatial glass.

Inside that translucent orb, the green lanterns and the trapped skeletal hordes were visible, swirling like fish in a poisoned bowl and protruding from the bottom of that massive sphere, still gripping the mortal air, was the petrified bone hand of the Tier 6 abomination.

Kara didn’t wait.

"Talira!" Kara yelled, stepping to the very edge of the dragon’s snout. "The moment I jump, you hit that sphere from the outside! Pour every single scrap of white lightning you possess directly into the seam and crack the shell!"

Talira roared, her ruby crest flaring with blinding electricity.

"UNDERSTOOD, MY LORD!"

Kara bent her knees.

’I have an idea,’ Silas thought, his blood singing with the cold clarity of an all-or-nothing gamble.

’That thing is too massive to cross the threshold in one go... That’s why only its arm is through! It’s climbing through the dimensional throat like a fat rat stuck in a drainpipe! If I sever the anchor... if I break the limb that’s holding the gate open...’

BOOM!

Kara launched herself off the dragon’s snout but she didn’t fall.

With an explosive roar of wind mana beneath her boots, she accelerated downward like an artillery shell, rocketing toward the colossal two-mile domain orb at four hundred miles per hour.

Above her...

KRA-KRA-KRA-BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!

Talira unleashed the full unbridled fury of her draconic lineage as a colossal pillar of pure white lightning... forty paces thick crashed down from the heavens, slamming directly into the upper apex of the green domain orb.

CRACK-SHATTER!

The domain was absolute against attacks from within but against a high-tier assault from an Ancient Dragon from the outside...? The glass simply cracked.

TC! TC! TC!

A massive jagged fissure tore across the black-and-green surface, throwing showers of unstable spatial sparks into the slipstream AS Kara plummeted toward that exact fissure.

Her single right hand reached across her chest with her fingers clawing inward toward the center of her sternum.

’Come forth.’

VUUUUUM!

From the spiritual depths of Silas’s soul... a golden radiance erupted.

SHING!

She drew it.

The Dawn Blade... The sacred blade of the Second King...

The moment the three-foot blade cleared Kara’s chest, the gray, bruised sky above Iunu was brilliantly banished as a column of pure dawn sunlight punched through the clouds, bathing the falling woman in a halo of blinding gold.

’What a weird blade...’

The blade hummed with a terrifying vibration that made the air itself bow in reverence.

’You are the blade of the Second King, right?’ Silas thought, pouring every single drop of his Gold Core mana into the blade’s runes.

’The blade that cut through the rift during the First Cleansing, according to Number 5... If you could sever the dark then... you can sever this bone today!’

FWOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOSH!

Kara channeled the wind as she wrapped the golden blade in three vortexes of hyper-compressed wind-shears, driving her terminal velocity past Mach 3.

’Thank God I have 30,000 points of mana...’

She could spam this shit for as long as she wanted... The air in front of her compressed into a visible cone-shaped shockwave that glowed cherry-red from atmospheric friction.

"NOW..."

Kara locked her eyes onto the jagged crack in the domain orb, aligning her trajectory directly with the eighty-foot bone wrist of the titanic skeletal hand.

"...CUT!"

BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!

Kara struck.

The Dawn Blade, blazing with power of her compressed golden mana, cleaved clean through the outer glass of the two-mile domain orb like an incandescent scalpel slicing through a soap bubble.

SHRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRK!

She tore through the interior void!