Chapter 389: The Crimson Tide Turns

Chapter 389: Chapter 389: The Crimson Tide Turns

Eclipse Sovereign stepped off the air and onto the shattered floor of the arena.

He didn’t hurry.

His boots touched the cracked stone with a soft sound, and the sound carried across the whole colosseum.

"Enough," he said, and lifted one hand.

The wave did not look like much.

A ripple of black light rolled outward from his palm, thin as a sheet of silk, and every sword, spear, and shield it touched bent toward the ground as if the weapons had grown ten times heavier.

The Imperial Enforcers went down first. Gold armor folded inward with a screech, and the front rank dropped to their knees with their faces pressed against the stone.

"Hold the line!" a Royal Solaris captain screamed. His miniature sun flickered, shrank to the size of a fist, and went out.

Then the Glacial Palace’s frost shattered like dropped glass, and Lysara staggered back with blood running from her nose.

"What is this?" Lumina’s voice cracked beside Damon.

"Nobody should be able to move that much power with one hand."

"He’s Sovereign Spirit Realm," Damon said.

He kept his eyes on the black light and did not blink.

"This is what that looks like when he isn’t even trying."

Mei hit the ground beside him with her arms crossed over her chest, and a lattice of pink light flared and cracked in front of her.

She slid back three full meters, heels carving trenches into the floor.

"Don’t stand there looking at him!" she snapped, spitting a mouthful of blood.

"Move, all of you, or he’ll flatten the entire north side!"

Seraphina didn’t wait to be told twice.

She tore across the stage with the Tempest Azure Blade screaming and wind and silver lightning wrapped around her like a second skin.

She swung at the center of the black light, and the whole arena flashed white.

Eclipse Sovereign turned his head, looked at her for exactly one breath, and flicked two fingers.

The azure storm folded in half.

Seraphina flew backward through the air and slammed into the barrier wall, and the sound of her landing made Damon’s hand tighten around the Chaos Devourer.

"Seraphina!" Flare shouted. She was already running, and the Inferno Phoenix Blade lit up in her hands like a torch.

"Stay back!" Selene’s voice cut across the stage, flat and hard. She stepped in front of Flare with her sword raised and a glacier of frost rolling off her shoulders.

"I’ll hold him."

"You can’t hold him alone," Mei said through her teeth.

"Then hold with me."

The two of them moved together.

Mei’s light and Selene’s ice poured at Eclipse Sovereign in one long wave, and for a moment the black ripple actually shuddered.

Selene’s blade bit down, and Damon saw her Sword Aura flash, clean and bright. It cut a line across the Sovereign’s sleeve.

Only the sleeve.

Eclipse Sovereign looked down at the torn cloth, and the corner of his mouth lifted in a small, tired smile.

"Beautiful," he said. "Ten years ago that would have cost me an arm."

He closed his hand.

Selene’s ice blades cracked down their whole length, and she was thrown across the floor like a leaf.

She hit the stone on her shoulder and rolled twice before she stopped, her white hair fanned across the blood.

Mei went down on one knee a second later.

Her barrier burst, and the shockwave sent her skidding into the legs of the stands.

"No," Ariel whispered. The Trident shook in her hands, and water streamed uselessly off the prongs.

"No, no, no."

Across the arena, the cultists screamed.

It was not a scream of fear. It was a roar, hoarse and joyful, and the black-robed ranks surged forward as if someone had cut a rope that had been holding them back.

"The Sovereign walks!" one of them shrieked. "He walks, and the sects bow!"

The Royal Academy line buckled and then simply broke.

Sky Sword Manor’s lattice splintered, and Tora, half-transformed and bleeding from a dozen cuts, went down under four cultists with a howl.

Grand Marshal Vane moved at last.

He crossed the whole stage in one stride and met Eclipse Sovereign head-on, and the two Saint-grade auras collided with a crash that threw dust across the stands.

It lasted six breaths. Then Vane flew backward through a stone pillar, and the pillar came down on top of him.

Damon stood very still.

The noise of the colosseum seemed to roll off him, the screaming and the roaring and the clash of steel.

He looked at the wounded lying across the stage, at the gold armor turned crimson, at the cultists climbing over the dead.

King Spirit Realm Ninth Level had been enough for Kai.

Against a man who could flatten a Saint with a flick of his fingers, it was a candle held up to the sun.

’I can’t close that gap with a sword. Not like this.’

He reached into himself, past the Polymorph and the cultivation he had spent months stacking up and hiding.

The thing underneath answered at once, a heavy, ancient heat coiling around his spine.

He had not wanted to show it. Not here, not in front of every sect on the Eastern Continent and a king who was already watching him too closely.

But Seraphina was lying against the wall with her blade slipping out of her fingers.

Damon turned his head.

Lumina was staring at him, and her face was bone white. She did not speak, and she did not need to. Her golden eyes held his, and she gave him the smallest nod.

Ariel stood next to her with her lips pressed together and tears running freely down her cheeks.

Mio and Mia had stepped up on either side of them, bow and daggers raised, their eyes locked on him.

Flare gripped her blade with shaking hands and still managed a crooked grin, and Alena stood behind them all with her staff against her chest, nodding too.

’They trust me.’

"Stay behind me," he said quietly.

"Damon," Ariel started.

"I know." He sheathed nothing and lowered nothing, and he stepped forward past the line of his women.

"I’ll be quick."

The Chaos Devourer hummed in his hand, and the air around him began to bend.

Then he walked out alone, across the broken stone, toward the man who had turned the whole arena into a graveyard.