The Shield Breaks
The colossal bell-like peal faded, leaving a ringing silence in its wake. Bai Juyi stood behind his Fortress Holy Shield, arms trembling violently, breath coming in ragged, shuddering gasps. The earthy-yellow glow had died, leaving the shield looking dull and wounded, a web of fine cracks marring its surface, a deeper crimson fissure splitting its heart. The ground beneath his boots was pulverized.
That… that was just the leftover force? The thought clawed at Bai Juyi's mind, cold and sharp. His muscles screamed in protest, his joints felt loose and watery. Thirty percent of his soul power, gone in an instant, burned away just to hold ground. He looked down at the crack in his shield, a flaw in the one thing he'd always been able to rely on. A hollow, sick feeling settled in his stomach. It wasn't just a shield; it was his identity. And it had almost broken.
Across the clearing, Luo Guixing watched the shield hold, but no relief came. His mind, usually a humming engine of spatial calculations and probabilities, stuttered. His perfect encirclement, his layered control, had been swept aside like cobwebs by a single, monstrous spear arc. Two of his team were gone. The math was brutal and undeniable. One force can overcome all techniques. The old adage mocked him. He'd never truly understood it until now, watching a dragon in human form reduce complex strategy to simple, overwhelming power.
A soft chime echoed in Yao Xuan's consciousness, separate from the pounding of his own heart and the hum of his bloodline.
Yao Xuan's gaze, calm and assessing, shifted from the dissipating energy of his last strike to Bai Juyi. He saw the tremor in the big youth's arms, the way his eyes were locked on the crack in his shield. There was a story there, a pride about to be shattered.
"To stop my spear as a Soul Venerable," Yao Xuan's voice cut through the heavy air, not loud, but carrying. It held a note of acknowledgment, a warrior's respect for a stubborn defense. "You have talent."
The acknowledgment was a double-edged blade. It validated Bai Juyi's struggle for a fleeting second before Yao Xuan's eyes hardened, the gold in them turning cold and absolute. "But talent isn't enough. Your part in this is over."
Yao Xuan's body shifted. He didn't leap; he coiled. The Ancestral Dragon Saint-Slaying Spear, still gleaming with residual crimson light, was pulled back alongside his body, its tip pointing at Bai Juyi like a compass needle finding true north. Every muscle in Yao Xuan's transformed frame aligned along the axis of the coming thrust.
"Great Wilderness Annihilation Spear—Second Form: Shaking Heaven and Earth."
He launched. It wasn't a dash; it was a controlled, devastating release of kinetic energy. His foot drove into the earth, and he became a golden-and-crimson blur. The air around the spear's tip didn't part; it compressed, forming a visible shockwave that screamed ahead of him. Space itself wavered and rippled in the spear's wake, struggling to contain the force passing through it.
Bai Juyi stood directly in its path. The terrifying aura wasn't an abstract concept; it was a physical pressure that pushed the air from his lungs and made his heart hammer against his ribs like a trapped bird. Cold sweat instantly soaked his back. His mind screamed one clear, primal truth: This will kill me.
"FORTRESS SHIELD WALL!" The roar was ripped from his throat, raw with fear and a desperate, clinging pride. He poured every last drop of his remaining soul power into his first ring. The shield glowed again, that stubborn earthy-yellow, expanding once more into the semblance of an impregnable wall. He planted his feet, dropped his center of gravity, and braced. He was no longer a tactician or a classmate; he was a man behind the last thing that defined him, waiting for the avalanche.
'Too strong… he's just too strong!' Luo Guixing's mind raced, panic threatening to short-circuit his analysis. Then, a spark—a tactical flicker in the gloom. 'But such power… the soul power expenditure must be colossal! He's a Soul Master, not a Saint. If we can evade, make him waste his energy… attrition!'
"Bai Juyi!" Luo Guixing yelled, his voice sharp. "Don't tank it! Evade! We'll wear him down!" As he shouted, his second purple ring flared. Silver spatial energy gathered at his fingertips, then lanced out, aiming to encase Bai Juyi in a Short-Distance Spatial Teleportation field and whisk him to safety.
Yao Xuan, mid-charge, saw the spatial shimmer begin to form under Bai Juyi. A faint, almost imperceptible smirk touched his lips. 'Attrition? You think my energy is so easily spent?' The vortex in his heart spun with relentless, deep reserves. But more importantly, he wasn't alone.
He didn't need to look. He didn't need to signal.
Behind him, Gu Yue's silver eyes had been tracking Luo Guixing's every micro-movement, the flow of his spatial energy. As the teleportation field began to solidify, she acted.
Her left hand rose, fingers splaying. No grand incantation, just a subtle, commanding twist of her wrist. "Spatial Interference."
Her first purple ring glimmered. A ripple of silver, finer and more precise than Luo Guixing's, shot from her fingertips. It didn't attack the teleportation field head-on; it unwove it. The forming spatial coordinates around Bai Juyi shuddered, their harmonic resonance disrupted, and dissolved into harmless sparkles before the teleport could initiate.
Luo Guixing's eyes bulged. "What?!" The shock was a physical blow. Spatial control? But her elements are… His analysis shattered. This girl wasn't just a powerful elementalist; she possessed an innate, refined authority over the fabric of reality that rivaled his specialized soul skills. The depth of their team's power was a bottomless chasm.
With the escape route severed, Bai Juyi was alone before the spear.
Yao Xuan arrived.
The Ancestral Dragon Saint-Slaying Spear, a line of concentrated ruin, hit the exact center of the crimson crack on the Fortress Holy Shield.
KRA-BOOM!
The sound was different this time—not a peal, but the catastrophic failure of a monumental structure. The earthy-yellow light snuffed out instantly. The web of cracks exploded outward, and with a final, pitiful shriek of tearing metal and spirit, the Fortress Holy Shield split cleanly in two.
The force didn't stop. It carried through, a brutal shockwave that smashed into Bai Juyi's chest. His eyes, wide with the realization of his shield's death and his own defeat, met Yao Xuan's for a fraction of a second. Then, his body was flung backward like a ragdoll, crashing through two saplings before slamming into a thick oak trunk. He slid to the ground, not vanishing immediately, but lying there stunned, the simulation registering a critical, incapacitating injury.
The two halves of his sacred shield clattered to the forest floor before dissolving into golden dust.
Silence, once more, but now it was complete, utter. The last major defense of Luo Guixing's team lay broken. The shield had fallen. All that remained was the strategist without a strategy, a support soul master, and a harried agility fighter, staring at the dragon and his silver-scaled partner who had just rewritten the rules of their world.