The purple vortex of the Ashen Abyss Rift rippled violently before tearing wide open.
Ethan stepped out onto the marble plaza of the Horizon Grand Arena, his hands resting casually inside the pockets of his black trench coat.
Cassandra followed half a step behind him, her snow-white hair catching the heavy wind, her silver eyes radiating a lethal, absolute-zero chill.
Behind them, the dungeon portal flickered and collapsed into nothingness. The Ashen Abyss had been entirely cleared, its records permanently conquered.
The moment Ethan’s boots touched the arena floor, the atmosphere turned heavy as lead.
The hundred thousand spectators inside the stadium did not cheer. A suffocating, dead silence hung over the colossal structure.
The live broadcast screens high above still flickered with the final, static-filled images of the blood-soaked volcanic crater, showing the severed legs of the Vice-Principal and the frozen statues of the family elders.
Outside the arena gates, a massive, militarized blockade had completely locked down the sector.
"Step forward another inch, and you will be blasted into atomic dust!"
A booming voice amplified by high-grade mana megaphones echoed across the plaza. Standing at the front of a literal army was Reginald Vance, the absolute head of the Vance Corporation and a Level 95 SSS-Rank Apex Vanguard.
He wore a heavy, crimson-tinted dragon-scale armor set that pulsed with world-ending magical power.
Behind Reginald stood three thousand elite armored soldiers, fifty heavy mana-cannon hover-tanks, and a dozen high-level guild masters recruited from the surrounding provinces.
The entire military might of the Vance family had been mobilized in less than twenty minutes to surround the arena.
Reginald’s eyes were bloodshot, his face contorted in an expression of pure, unadulterated murderous fury. "Ethan Reed! You slaughtered my family’s elders, crippled the Vice-Principal, and destroyed my son’s cultivation on a live global broadcast! Today, not even the gods of the cosmic rifts can save your soul from being torn to pieces!"
"Fire the cannons!" Reginald roared, slamming his heavy claymore into the ground. "Vaporize them!"
BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!
Fifty heavy mana hover-tanks fired simultaneously. Crimson beams of highly compressed, structural destruction magic tore through the air, converging directly on the small spot where Ethan and Cassandra stood. Visit g.com for the full chapter.
The collective kinetic force of the volley was enough to flatten an entire city district.
The spectators in the stadium closed their eyes, expecting the teenagers to be reduced to ash.
Ethan didn’t move. He didn’t even take his hands out of his pockets.
"Cassandra," Ethan murmured, his voice calm and smooth amidst the thundering roar of the incoming artillery. "Protect the rear."
"By your command, My Lord," she replied instantly.
With a swift, elegant wave of her hand, Cassandra unleashed the full, unfettered domain of her SSS-Rank Primordial Glacial Divinity.
BOOM!!!
An apocalyptic wall of crystalline, absolute-zero blue ice shot up from the marble floor, rising hundreds of feet into the air like a massive glacier shield. The fifty supersonic mana beams slammed directly into the ice structure.
The expected explosion never happened. The moment the pure energy beams touched the primordial ice, the absolute-zero temperature violently froze the magical kinetic energy itself.
The laser beams froze solid into jagged, glowing crimson pillars of light suspended inside the blue ice, before shattering harmlessly into a million glittering fragments.
"What?!" Reginald’s lead tank commander shrieked through the radio. "She froze energy?! That’s impossible! What tier of magic is that?!"
Before the army could recover from their shock, Ethan finally took his hands out of his pockets.
With a low, echoing hum, the two obsidian daggers—Shadow Sovereign’s Twin Blades (SS-Rank)—materialized in his hands, their dark, sentient mist expanding rapidly until it covered the entire arena floor in a sea of pure shadow.
But he wasn’t done. Ethan opened his system space and equipped the ultimate reward he had extracted from the Underground Guild’s cursed vault: the Aegis of the Starless Night (SS-Rank Growth Shield) and draped himself in the Primordial Void Executioner’s Aura.
[DING! Host has fully equipped SS-Rank and SSS-Rank Mythic Armaments!] The source of this chapter is g.com.
[Void Sovereign Talent synchronization: 150%!]
[Active Passive: Eternal Domain expanded to a 1,000-yard radius!]
[All incoming damage from targets below Level 90 reduced by 99%!]
CRACK!!!
The sky above the stadium literally cracked. The clouds parted as a massive, localized gravity well of pure void energy descended upon the three thousand elite soldiers.
SPLAT! SPLAT! SPLAT!
The heavy mana hover-tanks were instantly crushed flat against the ground like aluminum cans under a hydraulic press, their engines exploding into sparks.
The three thousand armored soldiers let out a collective, choked scream as they were violently pinned to the earth by their own armor, their bones fracturing under a weight equivalent to ten times the earth’s gravity.
The dozen high-level guild masters Reginald had hired dropped to their knees, vomiting blood, their mana cores violently shaking as Ethan’s Level 60 Void Sovereign stats completely suppressed their lifeforces.
Reginald Vance stood alone in the center of the crushed army, his Level 95 SSS-Rank vanguard attributes the only thing keeping him standing, though his dragon-scale armor was creaking loudly under the strain.
He stared at Ethan, his arrogant fury completely replaced by a cold, sweating, primeval terror.
Ethan walked forward through the sea of shadows, his twin blades humming hungrily as the dark mist swirled around his boots. He looked at the head of the city’s greatest corporation as if he were looking at an ant.
"Reginald," Ethan whispered, his voice echoing across the broken plaza with the absolute weight of a god. "You brought an army to block my path. But I think you forgot one simple rule of the global awakening..."
Ethan stopped ten feet away, his pupils completely dissolving into an endless, terrifying void.
"...in front of a true Sovereign, numbers mean absolutely nothing."