Defiance of the Fall

Evo Ponson inwardly cursed at his bastard of commander as another crack appeared on his soul. He'd been forced to toil like a dog for weeks because these haughty tyrants wouldn't heed his warnings. They thought themselves above the dangers of the graveyard because of the creature they'd brought and the grandeur of their background. Foolish. He was the one who'd spent over eight centuries in this treacherous environment.

No one was above it, not even the Pope.

Had they just listened when he said something was wrong with currents, they wouldn't have been reduced to such a sad state. Now, the Lucent Voyage was destroyed, and the Void Leash controlling their guide had snapped. And yet, Pantiro was still playing around. What could he do except hear and obey, ignoring that the crew he'd painstakingly raised was growing even thinner?

They might both be Remoulded, but Evo knew his home-field advantage would do him little good in case they came to blows. Pantiro wouldn’t need to bother ripping him apart personally. The scene of Lord Evori detonating their old Captain's companion with a single look remained fresh in Evo's mind. Being a member of the Chapter of Tripartite Truth meant nothing when the Black Heart Curses held absolute dominion over all Kan'Tanu curses.

The poor man had been sacrificed the second he went against their orders, and Evo had no intention of following after having endured so long. So he erected the domain against his better judgment. The pain from the dimensional pressure added to his misery and made his companion writhe with fury. Evo's overtaxed mind lacked its usual ability to fight back, and his thoughts grew chaotic as he was forced to fight an inner war of control. He held onto his sanity by focusing on their target: the undead bastard who'd been caught in his net.

Evo was in a bad state, but not bad enough to miss the greed and elation in Pantiro's eyes when their target entered [Hidden Domain]. Evo was too far removed from the war, and he had no idea who these people were. Pantiro clearly did, and this black-eyed creature had to be a sealbearer. Three seals had already slipped through Pantiro's fingers in the months Evo had guided the outsiders from the breach, and he would rather sacrifice half their crew than let another one go.

Their target had managed to leave a domain skill in his wake. It had to be a Late D-grade skill, further empowered by an Earthly Dao. The spatial instability would deal with the skill even if his subordinates couldn't. Only, dozens would be dead at that point—something they could ill afford in their current situation.

They were already running precipitously low on the personnel necessary to make it out in one piece. Accomplishing the task sent out to all vessels in the region was even more out of the question. Thankfully, they should meet the minimum quota of sacrifices today. Since there was one sealbearer, there were most likely more. Such as that skeletal monstrosity duking it out with Lord Evori.

The faster they dealt with this mess, the sooner Evo could return to his original plan; sifting for benefits on the bodies of the Early and Middle Hegemons. Being too old to accept a seal didn't matter. Just the merit from unearthing one would let him trade for enough tonics to deal with decades of accumulated sequela and claw back centuries of longevity lost to his companion.

The black-eyed humanoid's resistance wasn't enough to escape the pull of [Spatial Flow]. He was quickly moved into position, where Pantiro was waiting. Evo activated [Forced Stasis] the moment he appeared, turning space around their captive into something harder than steel.

Paviro's hands wriggled as they rushed forward in a brutal double-palm. He'd activated his curse to create a second layer of muscle and skin, adding its power to his skill. Nightmarish powers bloomed, and Evo was no longer looking at a palm strike. It had become a dreadful maw of a creature too evil to exist in reality, its serrated teeth closing around its target.

The axeman wasn't accepting his fate lying down. Enough killing intent to make Evo's hair stand on end poured out of his body. Evo had never even seen such an aura of slaughter before, not even on the Warborn Reincarnator he encountered a few millennia ago.

Evo couldn't silence the misgivings appearing in his heart. The problem was no longer that they'd held up two of their strongest warriors on a single enemy. They'd jumped into a cage with a monster. His fears were immediately realized when space around the undead warrior fractured, unable to stop his advance.

[Forced Statis] shattered, seemingly through the exertion of raw physical power. Evo could barely believe his eyes. The suppressive effect might be weakened in the Imperial Graveyard, but it was still a Late D-grade skill. You'd need a shocking amount of Strength to overpower it in such a crude manner, far more than a Late D-grade Cultivator should have.

Evo repurposed the spatial turmoil from the broken skill into cutting blades. The attack that could have dismembered a Middle Hegemon only amounted to a new set of flesh wounds that triggered the warrior's murderous aura further. A mist of Miasma rose in the pocket space. It didn't work on Evo, who was lord of this domain.

Everything in his space was within Evo's purview, which allowed him to see something odd. The warrior's anthracite axe dripped with darkness, and it tore into the beast with unmatched ferocity. There was an odd, ancient aura Evo couldn't place, which interfered with how Evo perceived the swing. He'd never seen anything like it, which made his premonition worse.

The six chains emerging from the man's back lashed out like deadly whips. Two of them were coming straight for Evo, moving with blinding speed. Evo cast distracting thoughts aside, teleporting out of reach. His instincts told him to leave the pocket entirely, except that meant certain death. Their enemy was stronger than he'd expected, but Paviro was no pushover himself. Evo would have to make sure the scales were tipped in their favor. Anything less meant punishment.

Attacks clashed, and it looked like a purple and black sun had been born, each color fighting for hegemony over the pocket space. Evo pushed his mind to its limits, manipulating the shockwave to turn around and attack the enemy. A foreign spatial ripple made Evo teleport again, narrowly a calamity. Half the explosion had been transported to his previous location. Thankfully, centuries of exploration in the graveyard had made him extremely tuned in to sudden dangers.

A bedraggled streak of black shot out of the explosion. It was the bloodied undead, with Paviro hot on his heels. Evo finally relaxed upon seeing the victor from the initial exchange. Furthermore, Paviro had already activated his [Nightmare Asura] form, having grown four extra arms with his Heart Curse and two heads with his Daos. It was a far superior method of utilizing their companions than the crude methods their frontier off-shoot possessed.

Evo suppressed the pang of jealousy. Instead, he added to their enemy's worries by activating [Vacuum Grinder]. Space twisted and broke, turning into thousands of spatial tears that were compressed into a deadly vortex. If [Forced Stasis] was weakened by the weak spatial fabric, then [Vacuum Grinder] was the opposite.

The sphere could have expanded to consume the whole battlefield if Evo wanted it to. Instead, he compressed it further, exponentially adding to its deadliness. The axeman was pincered, and Paviro tightened the net. The two illusory heads released a soundless wail, and two enormous avatars emerged from the Nightmare Realm. One was a rune candle burning with an ivory flame, the other a twisted doll looking awfully similar to their target.

Each blocked off one side, and the unmoving flame unleashed an area curse even deadlier than being directly infected by a bloody tendril. Meanwhile, the puppet twisted further, causing creaks to come from the undead warrior's body. Paviro advanced, his body a bonfire of barely contained power.

Their target was weakened, completely boxed in, and ready to be slaughtered. Or so Evo thought. Evo's worry about the backlash from enduring Paviro's strike was soon forgotten. He gawked upon seeing the undead turn into a streak of darkness without so much as a ripple of warning.

How was that man activating his movement skill so fast? It broke Evo's understanding of energy and cultivation. Were the rules different when practicing death, or was it a racial trait? No, something so amazing would have reached him even in the depths of the graveyard.

The sudden transformation allowed their target to slip right past the puppet that was supposed to hold him in place. It shrieked with fury as boils and bloating appeared across its body. It looked like whatever connection kept its form had been destroyed, which pushed the summoned creature toward an early grave.

The voodoo doll exploded, and the eruption was enough to interrupt their enemy's movement skill. Unfortunately, the target had crossed half the distance toward him in that short window. Evo swore as he wove a dimensional labyrinth between them. So his goal was to take out the helper first?

Evo knew enough about Paviro by now to know he'd let it happen. That instant skill activation was too eerie, and a callous bastard like Paviro would rather stay back a few seconds to observe than risk his life. It would be up to Evo himself to survive in that interim. Luckily, surviving was what he did best.

Evo could tell his attributes were far inferior to his opponent's. It was also evident by his opponent's paradoxically vibrant aura he was a youngster, further cementing the theory he was a participant in the upcoming trial. Evo needed to leverage his experience and drag things out. If Paviro waited too long, he could make a small tear in the cage appear naturally, and he could have his squad 'stumble' through it to provide backup. At that point, Paviro would have to make a move, if only to protect his seal.

A cold weight around his ankle threw his plans out the window. A chain had somehow managed to elude his perception, and it tacked on the weight of a mountain. The connection also provided a clear path through the invisible dimensional maze between them, allowing the man to approach with blazing speed.

The chain was flooded with Dao, making teleportation borderline suicidal. Playing it safe, Evo lashed out with a spatial blade powered by panic and his Earthly Dao of Space Fracture. It actually failed to cut all the way through, only digging halfway into the sturdy link. Evo urgently conjured another blade to finish the job. A powerful tug made him miss. Worse, it pulled him into range of the chain's owner.

Evo's mind almost stalled when faced with the unspeakable darkness of his enemy's eyes. The target was too close and too fast to mount a proper response. Evo's survival instincts told him in no uncertain terms there was no time to hesitate. He opened the floodgates, ignoring the added damage to his soul while swinging his arm with ruthless determination.

[Empty Expanse] activated first. The incoming axe slowed down to a crawl when the last stretch was expanded to miles of empty space, as did the other chains that moved to bind him down. However, deathly flames poured into his defensive skill, setting the expanse ablaze with corrosion. The spatial barrier was rapidly crumbling, but it had bought enough time.

The relentless pressure abated when the pitch-black fetters suddenly held onto a severed foot. Evo timed everything perfectly. A lance of supremely condensed space pierced toward his opponent's midsection while he used the hard-fought freedom to teleport away. Meanwhile, six gates opened within the cage, granting access to his direct subordinates.

Evo had to take his chances with angering Paviro, or he would be dead long before this superior could find the answers he sought. He needed the boost of his War Array, or he'd be cut down in less than a minute. He hadn't expected to find himself so utterly helpless before the methods of a lower-graded outsider. He was a seasoned Peak D-grade Remoulded! Even if victory was off the table, he should have been able to hold his own for a short while.

Then, everything went from bad to worse. Evo heard the groan of a wooden wheel and was beset by an acute impression of the seasons turning, where his future was turning with them. Summer gave way to winter's chill, and Evo was blinded by pain when his teleportation failed. Something was very, very wrong. The Dao suddenly felt foreign, distant. Even his ever-present companion had become an unmoving stranger.

There was only a hollow emptiness. And Death in the form of a black-robed man.

Darkness flashed, the world split in two, and everything started to spin. A comforting cold flooded his Soul Aperture, acting like a healing balm on the thousands of wounds accumulated over his lifetime. A single discordant thought ruined the perfect harmony as Evo entered eternity's embrace.

[Empty Expanse] was still running, so why didn't the axe slow down?

----------

An unprecedented surge of cosmic energy poured into Zac's body, allowing him to exhale in relief. The Spatial Cultivator was clearly wounded from the ship's explosion, but he retained more than enough power to pose a significant threat with the Black Heart Pugilist breathing down his neck.

A familiar scream of danger followed the cultist's demise, and Zac grunted in pained surprise over a sudden stab of pain to his side. He was shocked to see the Kan'Tanu's Heart Curse emerge from a spatial rift instead of the corpse. Heart Curses' ability to borrow the Daos of their owners was incredibly rare, and Zac could only imagine it was doubly true for a Spatial Cultivator.

Then again, this was the first Peak D-grade elite he'd killed during the war. He'd dealt with a few more, but they were neither Remoulded nor members of an elite chapter. It only made sense that the opponent was outfitted with a superior curse to match. Virulent tendrils rushed toward his Cosmic Core, showcasing tremendous resilience against Zac's inherent defenses.

Dozens of spatial mirrors joined the first, and Zac found himself assailed from every angle by the dying Heart Curse. Its tendrils were already withered from hiding in the void between dimensions, and it desperately sought a new host. Zac formed an impenetrable wall with chain and axe, destroying the bloody thorns with such prejudice they formed a sanguine haze.

Years of experiments and attempted possessions let Zac confirm it wouldn't accomplish anything too dangerous before being whittled down. Some internal injuries would be the extent of it. Ideally, he'd have manually worked on it to lessen the dangers even further. Except, would his opponents give him the opportunity?

Zac had opted to use multiple hidden cards from the start, and it wasn't without reason. He almost had to activate [Void Zone] immediately upon arriving. His Eoz nodes had thankfully roared into action, providing an unstoppable burst of power in exchange for a couple of broken bones. Still, he'd felt just how much strength his true opponent wielded. He couldn't have another enemy harassing him from a distance.

Everything went even better than expected. Zac hadn't had the chance to test his recent ideas on using the Void in real combat until now, and the result was staggering. Activating [Abyssal Drive] purely with Void Energy had given the cultists pause, and his hesitation created the opportunity Zac needed.

Controlling one of Alea's chains with a Void-imbued Inexorable Stance allowed it to briefly move through a mental blind spot to reach the spatial cultivator unnoticed. That was enough to seal his fate, but he'd even used [Empyrean Aegis] from within the Shrine of Kanba to interrupt the teleportation and ensure there weren't any complications. It was a risky move, and Zac hoped the spatial cage and [Fields of Despair] had hidden and obscured any hints of life.

It was too early to celebrate. The Peak Hegemon had died an ignoble death, but not before exacting a price. A large dent had appeared on his heart protector, but Alea couldn't fully absorb the rampant spatial energies from the final desperate strike. He'd also summoned six more Hegemons, though none of them looked like they could put up much of a fight.

The real threat hadn't been scared off by his dominant display. The Black Heart Pugilist was quickly approaching, his face a mask of greed and bloodlust. Zac cracked his neck and got ready. He'd already spent quite a bit on his shock-and-awe tactic, but he had a few more cards up his sleeve.