The battlefield tightened into a focused instrunt.
Lin Mu and the Transcendents readied themselves. Xiao Yin slid into the shadow beneath the Titan's roots, tongue of a snake testing the scent of the arrays. Her presence was invisible to all but those tuned to minor Dao traces, yet she moved with the confidence of one who could find a weakness.
From the rear, the Emperor gathered thunder like a smith gathers hamrs. He began to pound the sky with a drum of lightning in his palms, a drumbeat that threaded through the marsh of Baleful Qi.
The Titan responded. Vines surged, redirected energy like blood attempting to close a wound. Branches flared with a baleful light and lashes sliced at the Transcendents who dared stand too close.
Lin Mu t those lashes.
Each clash was a contest of will and Dao. His magma-wreathed armor flared, sword intent and fire braided into strikes that sang against the ancient wood. Sparks and steam erupted where magma kissed bark.
Every strike Lin Mu landed demanded a compensation in energy and focus. The Grand Elder chopped, the Patriarch slashed, the Abbot drove Wisdom Flas into the Titan's joints, and the Ice Drake breathed frost to harden and slow the regenerative sap.
Sweat and blood scented the air. Dao runes flared and died. The ritual trembled, and the Ancestor roared as the coordinated pressure tugged on the barrier like hands trying to tear a net.
All the while, in the shadowed seam at the back, the lightning grew denser.
The Emperor tid his strikes with Lin Mu's assaults, and the pattern unfolded perfectly. The barrier shuddered. Its weave, maintained by corrupted arrays and the Ancestor's will, began to peel at a point where the trees of the Titan did not expect a blade.
Lin Mu felt that opening. It was tiny, like a hairline crack in a cliff face. He tasted victory and danger both on the sa breath. The Ancestor's Titan form pivoted and reallocated focus, sensing the threat, and Lin Mu saw the mont where the ritual could either be broken or erupt in fury.
He tightened his grip on his sword. Around him, his companions readied themselves for the next strike. The dance of blade and root, light and rot, had reached a single breath where fate might be decided.
BOOM. BOOM. BOOM.
CLANG. CLANG. CLANG.
WHOOSH. WHOOSH. WHOOSH.
The clash between the Transcendents and the Ephera Ancestor, now reshaped into the Darkblood Treant Titan, was thunderous and chaotic.
Every impact sent waves of pressure across the crypt. Sword slashes, concentrated sword intent, roaring flas, flashing lightning, and the Abbot's burning wisdom fire all collided against living wood that refused to break.
Blows left cracks and rents in the titan's bark, but these wounds knitted closed in seconds. Regrowth ran like sap through the creature, healing the Titan as quickly as the Transcendents could damage it.
All the while the ritual deep in the crypt continued.
Around half of the Ephera Sect disciples had already been drained of vitality, their bodies reduced to dust and bones. The air tasted faintly of ash and old blood, the sound of chanting undercut by the grinding noise of the Titan's movent.
"YOU WILL ALL DIE!" the Ancestor thundered in a voice that was no longer wholly human.
He brought his two branchlike arms together and fused them into a single, titanic hamr.
BOOOOOM.
SHATTER.
The hamr struck.
The ground shuddered and then exploded outward in a crater that spanned roughly five hundred ters. Soil and stone leapt into the air like gutted earth. The Patriarch, Grand Elder Huo, and the Elder Ice Drake were caught beneath the aftershock.
They heaved and t the blow with every ounce of their Transcendent might, but the weight of it threatened to bury them.
"His raw power just keeps swelling," the Elder Ice Drake rumbled, sending a freezing breath against the hamr in an attempt to slow the moving mass of wood and rot.
The Xian Sword Sect Patriarch ford spectral blades to brace the hamr as if balancing a mountain on swords. The Grand Elder chipped at fibers with burning sword intent. The Abbot poured Wisdom Flas into the space between arm and handle, trying to cauterize and unmake the corruption that allowed the tree to heal.
But as they held the line, sothing shifted. The Darkhan Emperor, who had been trading bolts of thunder with the Titan for minutes, suddenly slinked out of the main fight.
RUMBLE.
A peal of thunder announced his movent.
In a flash of violet light he vanished from the battlefield as if the storm itself had swallowed him. Observant eyes would have noticed he was not alone. A huge beast with crackling red and orange fur, threaded with lightning and licking with fire, took him away.
WHOOSH.
Little Shrubby moved with a speed that made the Titan's slow vigilance seem like an antiquated defense. The Ancestor was too focused on the front to notice the flash at his flanks.
With the Emperor astride the beast and his thunder drumming still active, the air around Little Shrubby shimred with constant lightning strikes, masking the true movent. To a casual observer, it looked only like the Emperor dancing in place amid a rain of bolts.
Lin Mu had kept Little Shrubby ready in the Sleepscape for exactly situations
like this.
The beast's speed and endurance could change the flow of battle. With the Emperor concealed by a ring of lightning, and with Xiao Yin crawling through the darkness to find the barrier's weakness, the setup felt perfect.
While the Patriarch, Grand Elder Huo, the Abbot, the Elder Ice Drake, and Lin Mu pinned the Titan's attention, Little Shrubby and the Emperor raced to the
rear of the crypt.
They halted before the giant back wall of the ritualed structure. Beyond that wall the Ephera sect massed in ritual ranks, unaware that a second strike team now crouched inches from them.
The Darkhan Emperor dismounted. He looked at Little Shrubby and asked simply, "Ready?"
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