Chapter 354: Trial of Meteors - II
Chapter 354: Trial of Meteors - II
Two massive, flaming meteors, trailing thick black smoke, plummeted from the blood-red clouds.
They tore through the sky, hurtling directly toward the group.
Rhain stood firmly in place. His dark grey eyes instantly ignited with a golden light.
’Early-stage Core Formation Realm,’ Rhain calculated instantly.
With a flash of spatial light, the massiv heavy broadsword materialized in his grasp.
He didn’t even bother to channel his dark essence into the blade.
He simply bent his knees slightly and swung the heavy steel upward using the raw, tyrannical physical force of his Abyssal Sovereign Physique.
BANG—!!!
The heavy broadsword collided with the first meteor.
The colossal rock, carrying the force of a collapsing mountain, was instantly pulverized into a cloud of harmless dust and gravel.
On his flank, Lyra did not fall behind.
"Crimson Tempest Rend!" Lyra shouted.
Swoosh—!
An explosive burst of orange-crimson True Heavenly Flame erupted along the edge of her star-forged rapier.
With breathtaking elegance, she slashed upward.
The blistering heat of her flame effortlessly sheared the second meteor perfectly in half, the two halves crashed harmlessly into the barren earth behind her.
Karsten and his five remaining mercenaries, who had been cowering in terror, slowly opened their eyes.
Seeing how effortlessly the two youths had dispatched the threats, a collective, shuddering exhale of relief washed over them.
"We... we can survive this!" Karsten shouted, his scarred face flushing with hope. "It’s just early-stage Core Formation attacks! That Senior was just trying to scare us! We are late-stage Core Formation experts! We can survive this for an hour with our eyes closed! Draw your weapons, brothers!"
The mercenaries scrambled to their feet, drawing their words and sabers.
Lyra flicked her rapier, her crimson eyes flashing with disdain as she looked at the sky. "What a joke of a trial. To think that a supreme expert would leave behind something so pathetic."
But Rhain did not lower his broadsword. His dark grey eyes remained completely fixed on the dissipating ash of the destroyed meteors.
’A supreme expert whose mere remnant soul could suppress us with a glance wouldn’t leave behind a trial this simple,’ Rhain reasoned, a chilling premonition brushing past his mind. ’There is a catch.’
He didn’t have to wait long to be proven right.
RUMBLE—!!!
The blood-red clouds above began to churn with ferocity.
Swoosh! Swoosh! Swoosh! Swoosh!
Four new meteors instantly plummeted back down toward them.
"They... they multiplied?!" Karsten gasped, his arrogant grin shattering into pieces.
Rhain swung his broadsword, crushing two of them into dust, while Lyra’s True Heavenly Flame incinerated the other two.
But the exact same phenomenon occurred again.
Four became eight, and came crashing down.
"Don’t just stand there!" Lyra shrieked at the mercenaries. "Attack them!"
"Don’t let them hit the ground!" Karsten roared, his voice cracking as he swung his blade, his arms trembling with using excessive force.
But it wasn’t just the number that was rising.
Their destructive power began to scale at a frightening pace.
"Mid-stage Core Formation Realm," Rhain analysed, effortlessly dodging a flaming boulder and smashing it with the hilt of his sword.
Lyra’s beautiful face turned incredibly ugly. "If we destroy them, they double in number and grow stronger! What kind of sadistic trick is this?"
"It is a paradox," Rhain replied coldly, deflecting two more meteors that crashed into the earth beside him. "If we destroy them, they multiply and escalate in power. But if we do not destroy them, we will be crushed into meat paste. It is a perfect loop of destruction."
They simply had no option against it.
If they wanted to survive, they had to keep fighting.
By the thirty-minute mark, the situation had deteriorated into a desperate struggle.
The mercenaries were gasping for air, their faces ghastly white.
They were rapidly draining their essence reserves just to keep the flaming sky from crushing them.
"I can’t... I can’t keep this up!" a mercenary gasped wildly, barely managing to deflect a flaming rock.
Karsten’s face was bleeding from a grazing hit, his eyes wide with rising despair. "Lord Rhain! Lady Lyra! Do something! We are running out of essence!"
Lyra gritted her teeth, her True Heavenly Flame blazing to its limit as she sliced through three meteors in rapid succession. "Shut up and fight! If you stop, you die!"
Karsten gritted his teeth, cursing the time when he met these two unlucky stars.
Soon, the forty-minute mark struck.
BOOM—!!!
BOOM—!!!
The oppressive weight bearing down from the heavens underwent a shift.
The gravitational pressure skyrocketed.
A single, colossal meteor, easily the size of a small pavilion, descended from the sky.
The pressure rolling off this single rock was so overwhelmingly dense that it was far greater than all the meteors they had destroyed.
"First Level Domain Master Realm," Rhain murmured.
The trial had breached the major realm boundary!
"No!"
One of the younger mercenaries had his mental fortitude had completely shattered under the ceaseless dread.
"I can’t do this! We’re all going to die! I’m getting out of here!" the mercenary shrieked hysterically.
Unable to handle the overwhelming fear, he dropped his sword, broke the defensive formation, and turned to flee madly across the barren wasteland.
"NO! IDIOT, COME BACK!" Karsten screamed, reaching out a hand.
But it was too late.
A massive meteor, burning with an intense, white-hot flame, plummeted with impossible speed.
The mercenary looked up over his shoulder, his pupils contracting to the size of pinpoints as the flaming mass of destruction blotted out his entire vision.
"Wait, please—!"
BOOM—!!!
The impact was earth-shattering.
The mercenary didn’t even have the chance to finish his scream.
He was pulverized instantly.
Where a living, breathing man had been running a fraction of a second ago, there was now nothing but a smoking crater.
Horrified out of their wits, Karsten and the remaining four men dropped to their knees.
"We are dead... we are all going to die!" Karsten wept, pressing his forehead into the scorched earth. "Save us! Lord Rhain, Lady Lyra, please save us!"
Rhain’s dark grey eyes swept over the broken men.
As for now, it wasn’t yet a problem for Lyra and him to handle these meteors.
But there was still twenty minutes left for the trial, and it was only a matter of time before Lyra would fall and then him.
They were wrong from the beginning to even imagine that this trial could be easy.
Rhain knew that offense was now completely suicidal.
If they kept destroying the Domain Master-level meteors, the sky would simply multiply them until the entire wasteland was glassed.
"Get up!" Rhain commanded, "Form a tight circle around Lyra! Pour every last drop of your remaining essence into a single defensive dome! Do it now, or die on your knees!"
Terrified of the flaming sky, the mercenaries scrambled around Lyra, forcefully extracting the very dregs of their Core Formation essence to project a unified barrier.
The clock ticked relentlessly toward the fifty-minute mark.
Only ten minutes remained.
The trial entered its final ten minutes.
BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!
The red clouds above began to boil.
A heaven-shattering rumbling shook the dimension.
Suddenly, the clouds tore wide open.
Rhain’s golden pupils contracted sharply.
More than a hundred colossal meteors, each radiating the devastating, full-powered strike of an Early-Stage Domain Master Realm expert, descended simultaneously!
The sheer gravitational pressure preceding the impact was so overwhelming that the ground beneath their feet cracked and sank by several inches.
Lyra gritted her teeth, her slender arms trembling uncontrollably.
The sheer gravity forced her to her knees, the tip of her star-forged rapier digging into the stone just to keep her from collapsing entirely.
The beautiful, orange-crimson True Heavenly Flame surrounding her body flickered and dimmed, suppressed by the sheer, overwhelming density of the descending threat.
Blood began to steadily trickle from the corner of her pristine lips.
She turned to look at the dark robed youth. He was still standing, but even he had an extremely solemn face now.
" I... I can’t lift my sword!" Lyra hissed through gritted teeth. Her breathtaking face was pale.
She, the prodigy who possessed a Domain and a Heavenly Flame, was actually being immobilized by mere pressure!
The mercenaries inside the dome were even worse, they flattened onto their stomachs, bleeding from their noses and ears under the crushing weight.
They were completely suppressed.
Seeing this, Rhain took a step forward, placing himself directly in front of Lyra and the trembling mercenaries.
He knew that if he didn’t do anything now, all of them would die.
His dark grey eyes blazed with a chilling light.
"I will handle this."
BOOM—!!!
The pitch-black void within his dantian spun with an unprecedented ferocity.
His three supermassive, crystallized cores ignited, releasing an ocean of unimaginably dense dark essence.
"Origin Domain of Darkness."
WHOOSH—!!!
A pitch-black void erupted from the mark on his forehead.
Rhain stretched his domain of darkness upward, forming a colossal, light-devouring shield over the group.