The Inferno Sovereign’s hand shot out and seized the nearest volcanic elemental.

One throw.

The elemental had no say in the matter — it was hurled directly into the path of Qianqian’s descending sword. The creature understood the situation immediately. If it couldn’t stop the attack, it was finished. There was water everywhere below — no fire sea to fall into, no Rekindling Domain to pull it back from death. For a high-temperature fire elemental, falling into an ordinary lake was a death sentence as final as any.

The volcanic elemental poured everything it had into a desperate rush — a burning meteor of pure fire-energy, accelerating toward Qianqian, going for mutual destruction at minimum.

It had underestimated what a divine artifact actually meant.

The Prison Emperor’s Divine Sword gathered every thread of lightning from the storm above into a single point at its tip. One downward stroke — as clean as a knife through soft stone — and the Sky-rank elemental was split in two. Qianqian was already through the falling halves before they hit the water, the sword without a moment’s hesitation, driving harder and faster toward the Inferno Sovereign two thousand meters below.

“A trivial trick.”

The Sovereign had learned something from watching. The swordswoman wasn’t drawing out the full power of the divine artifact — not a hundred percent of what it could do. Against a true full-power strike from that weapon, nothing in existence could directly oppose it. But this was less than that. Considerably less.

The Sovereign extended its right hand with complete confidence and caught the blow bare-handed.

The sword’s force cut a thousand-meter groove into the lake’s surface through the gaps between the Sovereign’s burning fingers. But the Sovereign itself was unmarked.

Even without a physical body, it retained Perfect Innate Sovereign tier eight power. If the Divine Sword couldn’t reach its true potential in this swordswoman’s hands, the Sovereign could simply ignore her attacks.

“Little flea. Watch how I crush you.”

The burning fingers closed toward Qianqian’s comparatively tiny form.

The fist never connected.

Something hit the back of the Sovereign’s skull.

The Storm Valkyrie had been waiting — completely still, completely silent — accumulating destructive ice energy through the entire exchange while Qianqian absorbed the Sovereign’s attention. The punch she threw didn’t look like much from a distance. What it felt like was a different matter. The molten rock packed inside the Sovereign’s thousand-meter skull erupted outward in every direction, spraying across the sky like a volcanic eruption in miniature.

The Sovereign’s body swayed.

It tried to stay upright.

The thousand-meter frame crashed onto the magma causeway with a sound that shook the entire flooded zone.

Molten matter fountained from the Sovereign’s mouth and nose and every opening in its face, scattering across the lake surface like blood from a wounded giant. The Volcanic Whale and the face-anglerfish were too far away to intervene in time — and truth be told, with their level of intelligence, neither had anticipated that a divine general-tier attacker could be lurking in complete concealment, waiting for exactly this moment.

That was precisely the point.

One clean ambush, attribute advantage fully applied, against an enemy deep in self-satisfaction — the Inferno Sovereign went down. The only thing that would have kept it standing was having already reached the Fire God realm, and it hadn’t.

The moment the Storm Valkyrie’s attack connected, the reserves broke cover.

Xiao Wenli called her four life-guardian war beasts: the Petrification Serpent Dusa, the Storm Mermaid, the Thunder Naga, and the Frost Snake Demon. All four moved immediately. The Storm Mermaid blew the storm horn first — gale-force winds tore across the lake, and the Thunder Naga’s lightning reached up into the black clouds and drew down a torrent of driving rain that swept horizontally across the entire sky. The effect on the fire-attribute war beasts was immediate and comprehensive. In a water-saturated environment, with the fire energy that sustained the Rekindling Domain actively being suppressed, the Volcanic Whale, the face-anglerfish, and the Fire Dragon Eel were cut down to a fraction of their normal combat power.

The Blazing Divine Eagle, the Oil-Flame Bats, and the Ghost-Fire Crows pressed low, tucking themselves against the Volcanic Whale’s enormous flanks, unwilling to fight the gale and even more unwilling to become priority targets.

Gray Wolf unleashed its Divine Beast force.

A mountain-crushing body drop onto the magma causeway sent several Sky-rank volcanic elementals flying. The causeway surface fractured in web patterns across its width. Gray Wolf saw it holding and added a swipe of one claw — the pillars cracked, sections of the surface fell through, but the overall structure stubbornly refused to collapse. Gray Wolf registered genuine irritation, elongated its skull into something like a drill, and simply plowed through several hundred meters of causeway lengthwise, reducing a substantial section to rubble.

The Chaos Phantom worked more precisely. She fixed on one target — a volcanic elemental — drained most of its fire energy with Calamity god-force, and then dropped the depleted, cooling creature into the lake.

The Gold Blood Python King and the Gold Tiger Shark were cruising the lake bottom. They saw the stiffening, heat-extinguished body hit the water and converged on it immediately, dragging it down into the coldest and darkest depths.

The Volcanic Whale answered by launching a magma blast that dwarfed anything a real volcano could produce. The Storm Mermaid met it with a thousand-meter wave. Magma cooled to rock and fell.

When the face-anglerfish opened its enormous jaws to swallow Xiao Wenli while she was concentrating on summoning, Gray Wolf appeared behind it. What Gray Wolf opened its mouth to reveal was larger than the anglerfish’s own maw — and somewhere in the depths of that throat, the faint outline of an all-consuming void made itself visible.

With Yueyang’s law-force flowing through it, Gray Wolf had become a true Doom Wolf.

It swallowed the anglerfish.

The anglerfish was far too large to go down in one motion — its body was nowhere near as large as the Volcanic Whale’s, but it was still enormous. Gray Wolf’s cheeks distended grotesquely. The lower half of the anglerfish hung out, tail thrashing desperately, while Gray Wolf swallowed with equal determination. Both of them were stuck.

The Blazing Divine Eagle — abandoning its useless fire-breath the moment it confirmed the attack had no effect on Gray Wolf — dove from the sky and went for the eyes with its talons.

Gray Wolf was currently occupied. It made a fast decision: it fell sideways into the lake.

Water didn’t bother Gray Wolf. At worst it was undignified. The anglerfish, on the other hand, was a fire-sea creature — not a water creature. Ordinary lake water to it was what a fire sea would be to a normal fish. The threat of death caused it to thrash a hundred times harder than before, throwing up water columns hundreds of meters tall, making things distinctly uncomfortable for Gray Wolf even while it refused to let go.

Letting go was not on the table. With Yueyang here, Gray Wolf had the confidence to outlast the anglerfish, the Volcanic Whale, and anything else the Sovereign cared to throw at it. It clamped down and did not open its mouth regardless of what happened to the rest of it.

A massive burning hand plunged into the lake.

Steam hissed in cascades as the water hit the superheated surface.

The Inferno Sovereign — impossibly, infuriatingly — had already recovered. The hand closed around both Gray Wolf and the half-swallowed anglerfish and hauled them out, then began slamming them against the causeway surface — using Gray Wolf as a club, swinging the wolf and the fish still clamped in its jaws against the stonework repeatedly, shattering hundreds of meters of causeway with each impact in the space of seconds.

Gray Wolf’s grip on suffering had limits. It eventually gave up and retched the anglerfish out, both of them arriving in approximately the same broken condition.

The Storm Valkyrie struck again — a blow to the Sovereign’s spine.

This time the Sovereign was ready. One arm blocked while it drove its body into the Valkyrie and simply crashed through her, hurling her into the lake by brute force.

Where the Valkyrie’s fists had connected, the Sovereign’s fire was encased in ice. The ice, impossibly, held flame within it — the fire somehow persisting inside the frozen shell.

Xiao Wenli moved.

The Twin Slash Blades drew a thousand meters of silver light through the air and drove into the iced section of the Sovereign’s back.

Ice fragments exploded outward in a shower.

The Sovereign’s protective force erupted and blew Xiao Wenli clear.

But the Divine Beast’s will behind the strike had gone deeper. The Sovereign felt cold in its core — a cold that had no business being inside something composed entirely of fire — and the discomfort was genuine and severe.

Wuxia had been waiting.

She raised both hands. Her spirit-sense domain expanded outward to its full ten-kilometer radius. Within that space, water answered her — countless water-dragons erupted from the lake’s surface and rose into the sky, saturating the Volcanic Whale, the Blazing Divine Eagle, and the Fire Dragon Eel completely.

Qianqian’s sword was already moving — a volcanic elemental cut in half mid-motion, the blade continuing its arc toward the Blazing Divine Eagle. The Eagle was too clever and too attached to its continued existence to take a direct hit from a divine artifact. It drove through several water-dragons low against the surface, dodging the fatal strike.

The unfortunate one was the anglerfish.

Still disoriented from being used as a blunt instrument and then retched up, it took Qianqian’s next heavy strike directly to the top of its head. The glowing lure-sphere was severed. The blade force cut ten meters into the skull.

Gray Wolf saw this and was immediately delighted.

It opened wide and swallowed the critically wounded anglerfish a second time. Then it executed a deliberate sideways roll into the water and swam as hard and as fast as it could in the opposite direction, ensuring there would be no repeat retrieval.

“Everyone. Die.”

The Inferno Sovereign’s rage had reached the point where words felt inadequate. It launched its full remaining power at Wuxia, both burning hands slamming together in a crushing strike. It had worked through the battle in its mind and arrived at the correct conclusion: the real threat was not the Chaos Phantom, not the Doom Wolf, not even the divine-sword swordswoman. It was the quiet scholar-woman who had said almost nothing, moved almost not at all, and spent the entire fight weaving a domain that suppressed the entire battlefield — and whose single summoned Divine General had nearly broken the Sovereign’s skull.

While the Sovereign’s hands were in motion, she couldn’t be allowed to survive.

Wuxia’s hands spread open.

The most extreme cold energy Yueyang had ever seen from her detonated outward from her body.

The descending hands froze solid in an instant.

The Inferno Sovereign stared at the ice encasing its own fists with eyes wide with shock. That cold — the kind that could freeze anything in existence — there was only one force the Sovereign knew of that could match it.

Is she a student of that woman?

In the moment the Sovereign’s hands were immobilized, the person who had been the least visible presence in the entire battle stepped in.

Yueyang, who had been moving in and out of the engagement with all the apparent urgency of a man running a minor errand, had drifted to within arm’s reach of the Sovereign’s face. The Sovereign could have swallowed him without effort — opened its mouth and taken him in with one breath.

Instead, for the first time in tens of thousands of years, the Inferno Sovereign made a sound of genuine terror.

It could see the Nirvana Flames.

If its hands hadn’t been frozen, it would have fled using every iota of power it possessed. Nirvana Flames were not something it could resist or redirect. They were not something that obeyed any of the rules that governed ordinary fire. They stood above every flame in existence—

No. They stood above what a fire god’s divine flame was supposed to be. They were something beyond even that.

“You’ve been howling for several tens of thousands of years,” Yueyang said. “Time to lie down quietly.”

The Nirvana Flames detonated in the Sovereign’s face — a column of fire that passed through the open mouth, through the body, and emerged from the back of the neck still burning, driving straight up into the sky above. The Sovereign watched it happen and could do nothing about it.

And then Yueyang’s hand turned, and the Sovereign saw the Eternal Wheel spinning where Yueyang’s palm had been a moment ago.

The Wheel of Apocalypse followed.

When the Wheel of Apocalypse cut through the Sovereign’s skull, the scream that followed was something between a war cry and a death rattle.

It’s over.

In its last fractured moments of awareness, it saw the young man it had so thoroughly miscalculated — the one who had seemed the least dangerous, the one who had spent most of the battle doing apparently nothing — produce a single bright sword-qi and drive it inward, directly toward the Inferno True Core buried in the center of its head.

If only we hadn’t been in the water world. If only the scholar-woman hadn’t been there to summon her Divine General. If only the swordswoman hadn’t drawn my attention at exactly the right moment. If only I hadn’t let my confidence run so far ahead of my caution. If only we’d still been in the fire sea—

Too late.

All of it, understood too late.