Chapter 90: Clash of Martial Lords [2]
"I will die huh?" the human knight-priest chuckled.
"You are quite funny, dirty beast" the Martial Lord stepped forward, he tightened his grip on his runic blade.
The subterranean ritual site became a crucible of absolute destruction.
"You may be a Martial Lord, but the difference between a human and a savage beast is as vast as the heavens and the earth"
The human knight-priest declared.
He vanished from the scene, spawning right behind the High Priest Croak,
"Not so fast" Croak’s lips curled faintly as he evaded the human Martial Lord’s blade.
The moment High Priest Croak’s aura fully clashed with the human knight-priest, the air between them fractured, sending visible ripples of distorted space tearing through the stone pillars.
There were no introductory words.
In the realm of Martial Lords, a single thought was an entire tactical strategy.
The knight-priest violently tore his blade free from the stasis array, his white-gold armor erupting with a blinding, holy kinetic light as he lunged.
Croak didn’t flinch.
Abandoning his typical meditative stance, the elderly beastman moved with terrifying, physics-defying speed, raising his heavy ceremonial staff to meet the strike.
BOOM—!!
The initial collision was pure, unadulterated physical violence.
They began throwing hands and exchanging blows at a speed that rendered them invisible to the naked eye.
The knight-priest’s armored gaunlets slammed into Croak’s defensive exoskeleton, creating acoustic shockwaves that shattered the surrounding stone walls into fine dust.
Croak countered, swinging his staff with the weight of a collapsing mountain, striking the knight-priest square in the chest.
The human was sent flying backward, crashing through three solid obsidian pillars before stabilizing his footing.
Snarling with rage, the knight-priest blurred back into the fray, tackling Croak straight through the ancient, runic altar.
The entire ritual site began to break down, the ancient architecture collapsing in a thundering avalanche of boulders as the two powerhouses traded brutal, bone-shattering strikes, treating the structural foundations of Norona City like fragile glass.
"You are strong, I give you that" High Priest Croak smirked.
Wiping a smear of dust from his pristine visor, the knight-priest’s aristocratic composure completely shattered.
"How dare you!! Mere beast!" the knight-priest growled.
He was being pushed back by a creature he considered a feral mutation.
Angered beyond sanity by High Priest Croak’s chilling serenity, the human vaulted into the air, his rapier gleaming with a conceptual, golden-white light that felt deeply ominous.
"Perish, you dull beast!" the knight-priest screamed, unleashing his active skill concept:
Lord of Cleave.
It’s an unwritten rule that once a Martial General evolves into a Martial Lord, their active skill evolves as well.
Gaining the title of Lord.
The skill’s latent strength quadruples after evolution.
The space within the entire subterranean depths instantly warped.
Lord of Cleave was a terrifying, absolute conceptual skill—An unavoidable strike.
No matter how many spatial barriers Croak erected, no matter how much he tried to dodge or block.
No matter how densed his exoskeletons were.
The laws of the skill dictated that the blade will surely land, bypassing all evasive maneuvers as long as the target was within his cultivation realm or below.
However, because High Priest Croak was an established, Middle-enlightened stage Martial Lord at the exact same cultivation realm, the conceptual absolute-damage of the skill was dynamically reduced.
SLASH—!
A colossal, invisible blade of pure spatial cleavage manifested directly against Croak’s chest.
The mighty beastman was thrown backward, his ceremonial robes ripping apart as a deep, bloody gash opened across his torso.
"It’s strong" Croak mumbled, he felt tingling sensation from the attack.
He crashed heavily into the debris, his breath catching as the conceptual mana tried to split his mana cores.
But Croak did not fall.
He slowly rose from the rubble, his webbed fingers pressing against his bleeding chest.
His elderly yet youthful eyes darkened, flashing with the terrifying, ancient wrath of the deep ocean.
He planted his ceremonial staff heavily into the shattered ground, his voice echoing like a roaring tsunami.
"You speak of purity, human... yet you know nothing of the primordial forces that birthed this world."
"Humans and beastmen alike....we are all born in the image of the gods!"
"No one stands above the other, that is the absolute law" High Priest Croak took a step forward.
High Priest Croak unleashed his own tyrannical concept: Lord of the Sea.
PRAJAA—!!!
The manifestation of Lord of the Sea was not a mere elemental manipulation; it was a violent distortion of environmental laws.
As High Priest Croak’s intense mana surged to its absolute peak, the subterranean cavern underwent a terrifying metamorphosis.
The absolute nothingness of the underground air began to weep.
Microscopic particles of densed mana moisture coalesced instantly at a cellular level, multiplying exponentially within milliseconds.
Suddenly, the fabric of space itself seemed to rupture.
Massive, pressurized torrents of deep-blue, high-density oceanic water erupted directly from the void, roaring out of invisible dimensional tears in the stone ceiling and floors.
Millions of gallons of primordial currents crashed into the plaza, filling the subterranean depths with an inescapable, drowning abyss that crushed the remaining architecture under thousands of tons of hydrostatic pressure.
The supernatural localized catastrophe was so immense that its atmospheric feedback bypassed the deep layers of rock and earth, violently tethering itself to the world above.
Outside, directly over the coordinates of the ritual site, the clear desert night sky abruptly fractured.
Colossal, pitch-black storm clouds coalesced in seconds, and the sky thundered heavily, unleashing deafening, world-shaking cracks of lightning that shook the very foundations of Norona City.
Down in the submerged depths, High Priest Croak stood at the absolute center of the raging maelstrom, completely unaffected by the drowning currents.
His ceremonial robes billowed beneath the waves as he raised his wooden staff.
With a sharp, fluid twist of his webbed fingers, he took control of the chaotic vortex.
The overflowing, pressurized sea violently responded to his will, churning rapidly as the high-density currents were forcibly compressed and molded.
Within seconds, hundreds of jagged, three-meter-long water spears manifested out of the overflowing sea, floating in a lethal, rotating formation around the human knight-priest.
Each spear hummed with enough kinetic rotation and compressed physical weight to punch clean through a mountain face, their tips locking onto the armored human like an inescapable execution squad.
The True Battle between Martial Lords was just getting started.