General Kaelen didn't wait for the dust of the explosion to settle. He stepped through the haze, his hand raised as a massive spear of solidified river-water—cold enough to crack stone—coalesced in the air.
"Enough parlor tricks," Kaelen spat, his voice trembling with the effort of suppressed rage. "You die now, boy."
Vincy tried to lift the Void-Cutter, but his arms felt like leaden weights. His vision blurred, and the internal roar of the Primeval Fire was fading into a cold, hollow ache. He looked at Seraphina, who was struggling to stand, and felt a crushing sense of finality.
"Pathetic," a voice boomed—not in Vincy's mind, but seemingly through his very bones. "I did not survive the collapse of the Great Archive to be extinguished by a common provincial officer."
Suddenly, Vincy's slumped posture vanished. His spine snapped straight with a sickening series of cracks. His eyes, once a desperate violet, bled into a deep, abyssal black that seemed to swallow the flickering light of the signal flare.
"Vincy?" Seraphina whispered, recoiling. The aura radiating from him was no longer the heat of a furnace; it was the chilling, ancient authority of a tomb.
Piet had taken control.
He didn't use the sword as a crutch anymore. He flipped the heavy black blade with a single hand, spinning it with a grace that defied its massive weight. He looked at Kaelen not with fear, but with the bored irritation of a king being pestered by a mosquito.
"You speak of sins, little water-walker?" Piet spoke through Vincy's lips, his voice overlapping into a harrowing, dual-toned resonance. "I have seen empires drown in the blood of better men than you."
Kaelen didn't hesitate. He launched the water-spear.
Piet didn't parry. He stepped into the strike, tilting his head by a fraction of an inch as the projectile whistled past his ear. In a blur of motion, he closed the distance, the Void-Cutter humming a low, mournful note.
The battle that followed was harrowing to witness. Piet fought with a brutal, mathematical efficiency. He didn't waste energy on wide swings; he used the gravity of the blade to pull Kaelen's guard down, then followed with strikes that targeted the General's meridians with surgical precision.
Kaelen roared, unleashing a Tidal Wave Slash that leveled the remaining trees, but Piet moved like a ghost through the water, his footsteps silent and his eyes fixed. Every time Kaelen thought he had the "boy" cornered, Piet would use a burst of the Primeval Fire not to attack, but to propel himself into a blind spot.
The elite disciples watched in stunned silence. This wasn't a fight; it was a slaughter being held back only by the General's sheer cultivation level.
Kaelen backed away, blood leaking from a cut on his cheek. His pride was shattered. He realized that whatever was inhabiting the boy was a monster far older than himself.
"I don't care what demon you've made a deal with!" Kaelen screamed, his azure aura expanding until it formed a towering, ghostly image of a serpent behind him. "The Great River will wash you away!"
He began to form the Great River's Final Judgment, a technique that sacrificed his own life essence to create a localized flood of pressurized Qi.
Piet, sensing the shift, let out a dark, hollow chuckle. He planted his feet, the ground beneath him cracking under the sudden surge of the Star-Core's full power. He raised the Void-Cutter high, the black metal beginning to glow with a terrifying, white-hot intensity as he prepared the Heaven-Sunderer's Collapse.
"You want to see a trump card, little officer?" Piet sneered. "I'll show you how a star dies."
High above in the firmament, the two observers leaned forward, their masks of indifference finally slipping. The air between the two combatants began to distort and tear, the very fabric of the forest unable to hold the sheer magnitude of the energy being gathered.