God-Defying Slash went off, and a shaft of colorless light shot up to the sky and then came down all at once. Inside a roar that swallowed hearing completely, the ground heaved up again, and space shuddered violently under that frightening destructive power. Not far off, the Undead Guardian God of Archery, just then lining up a sneak arrow at Ye Tianxie, was instantly killed by the backwash.

Holy Annihilation power is called Holy Annihilation because it destroys. One careless stroke of it can easily set off a terrible disaster. Had the attack just now come down in any other area, the world would already have turned upside down; had it come down in an ordinary underground space, the ground would already have caved in completely.

But something powerful was quietly protecting the earth of the Phantom Beast Ruins; that much was plain. Shock after shock of Holy Annihilation power still had not truly brought this underground space down.

Under the holy sword’s unbroken attacks the Dark Nether Ghost King had almost no way to strike back. His body had been smashed down to a frightening depth of nearly a thousand meters, and before that violent impact had fully spent itself, another force of the same strength came from somewhere unknown and slammed hard into him from below. His body flew back the exact way it had come down, broke up through the earth, and landed in a wretched heap.

The Dark Nether Ghost King climbed up off the ground, still shuddering under the pressure of the holy sword. The black demon robe on him was already in tatters, and through the rents showed a body as dry as thousand-year-old tree bark. The holy sword’s attacks carry a destruction property that almost never appears: they can ruin scenery, and they can wreck an enemy’s equipment. The Dark Nether Ghost King’s demon robe was a true Heaven-Severing item, and even so the sword had torn through it that easily.

The Dark Nether Ghost King’s green eyes swayed and wandered violently, throwing out a terrible glow of hatred. Locked down by the holy sword, then struck hard four times running, driven from the surface into the ground, back up into the air, and down into the ground again… and through all of it he had not had one chance to hit back. From his birth until now, when had he ever been trampled and beaten like this?

Demons are a race quick to anger, and once one of them is angry he will stop at nothing to put his opponent to death by the cruelest method he can find. He raised the skull staff in his hand, terrible cold light in his eyes, and finally stopped running. As a great spread of black orbs of light flew off him carrying the voices of the resentful dead, a low shout came out of him, deep with resentment of its own. “Ten Thousand Demons’ Curse Wave!!”

Hundreds upon hundreds of pitch-black lights and shadows carrying the power of hatred came rushing at Ye Tianxie head-on, packed so thickly that dodging all of them was simply not possible. He did not try. He charged straight into that skyful of black dots, and the holy sword came down on the Dark Nether Ghost King without mercy.

-50000. -50000. -50000. -50000. -50000. -50000…

Damage figures rose thickly above Ye Tianxie’s head, and he might as well not have seen them. A Breakthrough Sword landed square on the Dark Nether Ghost King’s chest and brought up -1670000, flicking that pitch-black body straight up into the air. Calonandis’s attacks all come out of his overwhelming strength, so every stroke of the sword carries enormous impact and shock behind it. Along with the damage, it drives an enemy back hard, or knocks him flying…

Flicked into the air, the Dark Nether Ghost King fought his body back under his own control and roared wildly. “How could This King possibly lose to a human… impossible! This King says die… die!!”

Black lightning gathered in the Dark Nether Ghost King’s hand, and in that crackling flicker it drew together into a pitch-black spear with the lightning coiling around it. He hurled it at Ye Tianxie with a vicious howl — a high-grade forbidden spell of the dark element, with tremendous single-target attack power: the Spear of the Dark Demon God.

In the instant the Spear of the Dark Demon God shot out, air that had been in total disorder stopped moving entirely, as if some terrible force had clamped down on it. Ye Tianxie’s steps paused. He looked up at the black shape closing on him out of the air, and did not dodge, did not give ground. He gripped the holy sword in both hands and swung it level, up to meet it.

BANG!!

The Spear of the Dark Demon God and the holy sword swinging up to meet it collided hard, and the crash of that great dark power against that overwhelming sacred power tore cracks in space itself… space was ground to pieces where the two met.

Ye Tianxie was driven back a few steps, and a thin, scornful smile came to the corner of his mouth. And that single-target high-grade forbidden spell of the dark element, powerful as anything could be, had been broken apart into its most primitive dark force right in front of him, and had not done him the least damage.

The holy sword is the great bane of every dark power there is.

“Impossible… this is impossible!” The Dark Nether Ghost King knew exactly how strong the Spear of the Dark Demon God was, and what he was watching overturned everything he knew. He could not believe his own eyes. It had not been dodged. It had not been taken head-on. It had been broken apart completely by one stroke from the other side… He had never seen, had never so much as heard of, any power that could simply meet a high-grade forbidden spell able to destroy an entire city and cancel it out…

In that moment he suddenly understood why the shape of the holy sword was stamped on the Demon race’s emblem. It was there so that every demon of the race would know this sword, and then, on meeting it… would choose without hesitating to run. Because the holy sword was their race’s most terrible enemy, the one they must never face and never touch. It was the sword of holy judgment that heaven had sent down for the express purpose of judging demons.

If the Dark Nether Ghost King had still meant, before this, to grind Ye Tianxie into powder, the sight of the holy sword Elsidion breaking the Spear of the Dark Demon God apart shattered that last thread of any wish to fight back. Now he smelled death clearly.

A demon’s strength makes his kind hard to wipe out, but when one truly faces death, an enormous fear grows in him. In front of that fear and the pressure the holy sword put on his mind, he took one step back, gave a strange howl at last, and used dark Blink after dark Blink to flee wildly backward.

“Heh. Want to leave… did you get my permission?”

Watching the Dark Nether Ghost King, already a hundred meters off in the space of a breath, Ye Tianxie smiled his contempt and raised the holy sword in his hand, and a shaft of white light shot out all at once… Demon-Severing Kill Barrier, its cooldown just now at zero — the skill that locks a demon down completely and leaves him nowhere to hide!

CLANG!!

The beam froze the Dark Nether Ghost King on the spot, fixing him to the ground in the act of running, unable to move so much as a finger… and yet Ye Tianxie did not throw the killing blow that should have come after it. He shut Demon-Severing Kill Barrier down by force, then raised the holy sword high with a calm face, and a light blazed up so sacred that it cleared the mind and scattered every trace of darkness around it in an instant…

“Sword of Heaven!!”

(End of Chapter 244)