The crimson steam hissing from the skin of the three leaders smelled like burning bone.
Every second the Berserk Pill burned within their meridians, it devoured decades of latent vitality.
In the span of a dozen breaths, the youthful vigor of their features withered away; dark strands turned to coarse, brittle gray, skin sagged over cheekbones, and deep, ragged wrinkles carved into their foreheads.
They no longer carried the robust aura of middle-aged powerhouses—they looked like ancient, dying patriarchs fighting on borrowed minutes.
Across the shattered shoreline, the twenty-foot granite bear peeled back its black lips, exposing rows of jagged fangs drenched in thick, yellow saliva.
GROOOOOAAAR—!
The beast’s bellow shattered the silence, and from the fractured timber behind it, dozens of additional High and Peak Rank Tier 2 beasts flooded into the clearing.
Armored Mountain Apes, Ironscale Scorpions, and Razor-Clawed Badgers surged forward in an auxiliary wave, eyes burning with mindless, frenzied hunger.
As the colossal bear accelerated toward the three elderly figures, the accompanying horde slammed directly into the human barricades.
In the rear ranks, the families looked on with terrified, bleeding hearts.
“Father!” John David yelled, his knuckles white around his weapon as he cut down a lunging ape, his eyes fixed on Lucas’s rapidly graying hair.
“Patriarch!” the young disciples of the Lewis Clan wept, their swords trembling as the realization sank in.
They knew the cost of that crimson glow.
They knew their elders were burning the very marrow of their lives to buy Aurora City a future.
BOOM!
The collision between the three masters and the Mid-Rank Tier 3 behemoth sounded like two mountain crags crashing together at terminal speed.
The earth beneath the bear’s paws cracked and caved into deep trenches as its steel-like claws gouged the bedrock.
It swept a massive, granite-plated arm horizontally, seeking to swat the three humans into meat paste.
The three men moved with suicidal clarity.
They knew, with terrifying certainty, that this was the final true battle of their lives.
“Die, beast!”
The City Lord roared, leaping ten paces into the air.
The crimson aura surrounding his scarlet steel saber flared three feet thick, ignited by the scorched potential of the Berserk Pill.
Falling like a meteor, he unleashed the devastating fourth stance of the Raging Crimson Saber Art.
A roaring arc of pressurized red energy detonated against the bear’s left shoulder, blasting off shards of rock armor and opening a steaming trench of dark blood!
Simultaneously, Patriarch Lucas David flashed to the bear’s blind flank.
His azure straight sword dissolved into a blur of liquid light, leaving trails of pale blue blossoms in the air.
Clang!
Clang!
Clang!
Lucas struck thirteen times in a single breath, every thrust landing on the exact same spot along the bear’s right flank, chipping through the petrified hide until azure Qi pierced the underlying muscle.
The bear howled in blind agony.
It whipped its colossal frame around, its massive spiked back slamming backward with the concussive force of a falling fortress wall.
The air pressure alone blew Lucas off his feet, his boots skidding across thirty yards of wet shale as he coughed a mouthful of dark, stagnant blood.
Behind the beast’s blind spot, Patriarch Lewis hovered like a wraith.
He did not rush into the heavy kinetic crossfire.
His eyes, burning with feverish crimson madness, tracked the bear’s tendons, waiting with predatory patience for the single microsecond the colossus overextended its reach.
Minutes bled into hours.
Midnight slipped past, and the moon tilted toward the western peaks.
Across the wider shore of Mirror Lake, the defensive lines were drowning in blood.
Without the three pillars to crush the High and Peak Tier 2 beasts, the common Bone Forging martial artists had to trade life for life.
Shields fractured under the weight of charging Ironhide Boars, and screaming guards were dragged down into the mud, their spears snapping under the weight of the swarm. Follow the newest chapters on novelping . com.
The casualties mounted with sickening speed.
By the second hour past midnight, the crimson mists radiating from the City Lord, Lucas, and Lewis began to flicker and thin.
The cold truth struck their hearts: the borrowed medicinal storm was nearing its end.
Their meridians were burning out; their dantians were turning to dry, dead ash.
When this artificial burst of energy dissipated, they would not even have the strength to lift their weapons.
They had one strike left.
“Brothers!” the City Lord choked out, dark blood leaking from his nose and ears as his voice rasped with the dryness of the grave.
“Now! With all you have left!”
The City Lord planted his boots into the shattered earth, locking his joints against the stone.
He dragged every remaining drop of Berserk Qi from his scorched dantian, channeling it into the scarlet steel saber.
The blade turned white-hot, humming so violently that micro-fractures webbed along the steel.
Beside him, Lucas David held his azure sword with two hands before his chest.
He closed his eyes, cutting off all sensory awareness of the chaotic battlefield.
Across the tip of his blade, a magnificent, pristine blue lotus condensed—not merely petals, but a complete, radiant flower woven from forty years of sword cultivation and the dying embers of his life force.
Patriarch Lewis moved first.
He didn’t make a sound.
Igniting his remaining life essence into pure kinetic velocity, Lewis’s body blurred into an invisible streak of shadow.
He vanished from the beast’s peripheral vision entirely, reappearing directly beneath the bear’s massive rear flank.
With his teeth clenched until they shattered, Lewis crossed his twin black daggers and drove them horizontally through the thick hamstring tendon of the bear’s left hind leg!
RIP—!
The massive, iron-like tendon severed with a sound like a snapping ballista cord.
The twenty-foot behemoth let out a deafening, frantic roar as its hind leg gave way.
Its colossal bulk lost balance, tilting heavily toward the left like a collapsing siege tower.
“Now!” Lewis screamed, spitting blood as the falling beast’s flank grazed his shoulder, shattering his collarbone.
Lucas David’s eyes snapped open, blazing with blinding azure brilliance.
“Blue Lotus—Shatter the Void!”
Lucas drove his sword forward.
The condensed blue lotus detached from the blade, spinning into a vortex of razor-sharp floral energy that smashed directly into the exposed, unarmored center of the bear’s chest!
SPLAT!
The azure blossom detonated inward, shredding flesh, cracking the massive ribcage, and burying the entire length of the straight sword straight through the beast’s dark heart!
The bear’s eyes widened in agonizing shock, its massive paws thrashing in death throes.
Before those lethal claws could come down upon Lucas’s head, a blinding scarlet sunrise tore through the night sky.
The City Lord executed his final, all-out horizontal slash.
With every shred of residual Qi and physical mass thrown into the arc, the scarlet saber met the beast’s thick, armored neck.
SHING—CRACK!
The shockwave blew back the mud for twenty paces.
Against the impossible, concentrated density of the High-Rank Mortal Saber technique, the granite-encrusted hide finally failed.
Flesh parted, vertebrae sheared in two, and the colossal, twenty-foot bear’s head was severed clean from its shoulders, tumbling into the air in a spray of boiling crimson gore!
THUUUD!
The headless carcass of the Mid-Rank Tier 3 titan collapsed into the shoreline shale, vibrating the very earth beneath their feet before settling into motionless death. This chapter was copied from novelping.com without permission.
And with the fall of the beast, the three men collapsed simultaneously.
Clatter.
Weapons dropped into the mud from numb, unresponsive fingers.
The City Lord, Lucas David, and Patriarch Lewis crumpled onto their knees, their breathing shallow, ragged, and wheezing.
The battle was won, but the price was absolute.
Though they would nominally retain the title of the Blood Quenching Realm, their inner foundations were ruined.
Their meridians were permanently scarred, their life potential burned clean, and their bodies rendered hollow husks incapable of ever circulating or storing true Blood Quenching power again.
They were living invalids, bound to this nominal ceiling for the remainder of their shortened lives.
Yet, as Lucas looked out across the lake and saw his family standing intact, a frail, trembling smile spread across his bloodied lips.
“We… we held,” Lucas wheezed softly.
“The children… are safe.”
With the death of their alpha behemoth, the surviving High and Peak Tier 2 beasts lost all organizational will.
Terrified by the sheer brutality of the kill and the severed head resting in the mud, the demonic creatures let out frantic whines, turning on their heels and fleeing in every direction back into the dark woods.
A ragged, disbelieving cheer rose from the battered human lines.
“We won!”
“The bear is dead! The tide has broken!”
Exhausted guards dropped their broken spears, collapsing directly into the mud and corpses, weeping with pure relief.
Clan elders fell to their knees, gasping for cold air as the adrenaline washed out of their systems.
“Quickly! Tend to the wounded!” John David shouted, sprinting forward alongside the medical attendants.
“Get the healing salves to the Patriarch and the City Lord! Move!”
They believed the nightmare had finally passed.
They believed the dawn would bring salvation.
Then, the world shattered.
ROOOOOOOOOOOOAAAR—!
SKREEEEEEEEEE—!
Two simultaneous, apocalyptic roars tore out from the innermost depths of the Eastern Mountain Forest Range.
The sound did not travel through the air; it vibrated through the tectonic bedrock of the continent itself.
The mountain peaks in the distance visibly shuddered, shedding massive landslides of boulders that crashed down into the river basins.
The atmospheric pressure above Mirror Lake spiked violently, dropping the temperature by twenty degrees in a single second.
Across the water, the tree line did not merely sway—it was flattened by an invisible, suffocating pressure.
And then, out from the dark, fractured woods, came the true horror.
It was not a wave of dozens.
It was an unbroken, rolling tsunami of demonic beasts—thousands upon thousands of snarling, glowing eyes surging out of the forest like black water bursting through a ruptured dam.
Every single human on the shore felt their soul freeze in paralyzed, instinctual terror.
The primeval aura saturating those two roars told every living consciousness, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the entities driving this slaughter were calamities no mortal in Aurora City could ever hope to face.
Lucas David looked up, his pale, ancient eyes staring at the endless black tide sweeping toward them.
The three strongest protectors of the city lay crippled on the ground, unable to even lift a dagger.
A heavy, suffocating despair descended over Mirror Lake.
They were completely doomed.