Another great sound of impact stole all noise from the backdrop for a few fleeting seconds, this one closer than the previous by a dangerous degree. Sersa put her pursuit on pause for a moment and jumped hundreds of paces into the sky, heart sinking as she beheld several strips of ruptured earth where large lanes had been carved into the land, some wide as city streets and nearly as long. Each swath of upturned earth had claimed the lives of hundreds from her war party that were currently battling the many local armies that had congregated in the region. Hundreds of Haussians were now suspended high above the ground, safe from the attacks that had just claimed those that they had been fighting up until moments ago.

She quickly summoned another hand and kicked off of it, her mind ablaze as she rocketed toward the girl that she had chased up until a few moments ago. Not only had the unknown cultivator killed hundreds of their number within several seconds, they had done so while simultaneously lifting hundreds of allied fighters into the sky with just as many globes of projected inner essence. Whoever they were, the moment they arrived before the city it would no longer matter how large their war parties were, or how many members of the Core that they had assembled. They would likely die without exception, and as one of the most powerful disciples present she was sure to be targeted earlier than the others.

I’ve got a couple of minutes, at best. She would flee the fighting before the unknown powerhouse arrived on scene, though she would collect the heads of as many enemy leaders as possible in order to present them to the great elder, a bid for leniency in supplication for her inevitable failure.

She quickly located the weakest of the enemy commanders, an older boy at the first level of Integration that died quickly beneath her bloodthirsty hand. After decapitating his pretty-faced head, she harvested as much of his abundant supply of inner essence as she could before hurling his emaciated body toward the girl that she had chased so eagerly a short while ago.

Quite the stoic, are we?

She followed after the girl, who didn’t lose her rational after avoiding the corpse of her dead sibling and instead continued to flit across the battlefield like a fairy of fantasy, an elusive butcher of the scarlet-on-black-robed invaders.

As consecutive sounds of explosion spilled throughout the region every few dozen seconds or so, the fighting before the city remained desperate and fearsome.

Sersa couldn’t help but notice as the aged earl severed a martial skill with so much substance that it couldn’t have come from anyone but a core disciple with a seated position. The severed hand maintained its inner essence composition as both halves crashed to the ground to injure dozens of people on either side of the angry-eyed lord, who had immediately leapt through the gap between the falling masses of energy in order to chase after his fleeing assailant. He made short work of the blond-haired young man with several deadly disks that he directed with chilling skill.

Sersa felt a further rise of unease as she witnessed a seated member of the Core die so quickly to a single foe. He must be in the late stages of Integration, she thought as she hurled another pair of black knives toward the pale-faced girl that was no doubt drawing upon the last vestiges of her dantian’s supply of inner essence. Let alone the oncoming expert, they would be hard pressed just to defeat the earl.

She judged that all of the remaining core disciples would have to join hands in order to take down the lord of Westerbrook, though this would be impossible with several of the man’s powerful sons and daughters still present. The youths in question left piles of bodies at their backs whenever they passed an area that was thick with disciples, their presence a hampering boost to the Haussian’s morale.

This battle was lost before it began.

She noted the contingents of ordered ranks that held ground amidst the disorderly militiamen that did the majority of the fighting, for only a fraction of the enemy forces were of military background. Assuming that their war parties weren’t decimated by the oncoming expert, it was necessary that these pockets of trained and heavily armoured warriors be snuffed out as quickly as possible before the bulk of their forces from the outer court were slaughtered. As of now the sect had already suffered several thousand casualties on the main battlefield alone, less than the enemy but more impacting.

She ducked a sudden disc of violet energy that nearly stole her head from her body, her eyes alighting upon her sandy-haired foe as anger flared up within her. Before anything else she had to kill the young woman. You might be talented, but you will tire out sooner or later.

Sersa sprinted after the girl at a rapid pace, activating her core cultivation method while in motion and plunging her right arm into the heart of a young warrior in the middle levels of Profound Entry. She lifted him above the ground with the arm that impaled him and maintained her pace without disruption, her hand clamped around his heart as she siphoned his inner essence into her dantian to replenish her depleted stocks. Once the man had died on her arm she tossed his corpse off into the backdrop of bloody violence and went on to stab her hand into a middle-aged woman dressed in miscellaneous leathers, a volunteer perhaps, who she quickly drained of all vitality.

Her target’s pace dropped dramatically after another minute of chasing her through clusters of confused fighting, though this changed as Sersa refined another woman of beautiful features from among the abundant defenders in the area.

“You villain!” The noblewoman suddenly turned on the spot and dashed toward her with a dramatic increase in speed that could only indicate the reactivation of her family’s unknown movement skill. Her legs were encased in a more vibrant layer of energy than previously, a more translucent, pale purple.

“Oh?” Sersa glanced at the girl that she currently held aloft in the air, a frightened teen that struck at her arm in a fit of desperation, her arms flailing with failing strength. “A friend of yours?” Reading her opponent’s movements, she dashed to the side and hurled the dying girl directly into the path of an oncoming disk of energy that violently severed her head with a diagonal cut that exposed both brain and bone.

The sandy-haired noblewoman screamed her throat raw as she charged toward Sersa with the intent to paint a portrait of murder, a loss of rationality that she had been hoping for throughout the chase. The two met in a flurry of motion, sidestepping each other’s strikes as they dashed about with contesting martial skills, Sersa’s arms covered in red energy while her opponent unleashed a ferocious barrage of deadly violet rings.

Sersa gained the upper hand after a few more moments of vicious exchanges, and it wasn’t long before she moved in to deliver the final blow. Just as her hand was about to stab into the angry-eyed girl’s neck, a chill ran down her back and she ducked to the side as four large disks of energy sailed past her in heart-stilling proximity.

Blood spilled from her left shoulder where a thin strip of flesh had been sliced away, not fatal and yet terribly painful. She sensed them just as she made to retreat, a pair of powerful auras at the same level of the Integration stage as herself, the fifth. They appeared at her side just seconds after she detected their presence, two brown-haired men in their late twenties whose legs were shrouded in purple energy, their arms held high as they prepared to cut into Sersa with their bloodstained battleaxes.

A giant hand appeared around Sersa and quickly tightened into a dense fist of scarlet energy, both of the oncoming attacks penetrating half a pace into the translucent appendage before remaining stuck in place, momentarily trapped by her inner essence. The two men abandoned their weapons and dashed backward as a giant disk of violet energy wheeled toward the hand, its trajectory forecasting a vertical bisection.

Heart pumping in her chest as sweat dripped down her face and neck, Sersa suddenly realized that she was about to die. If I move then the others will target me with that blasted martial skill! She could leap skyward, but then she would become a perfect target. Still, she had no other option. She quickly jumped free of the protection of her martial skill, mind working rapidly as she decided how to make use of the extra seconds of life.

She screamed as she threw her arms out to the side and forcibly summoned two large hands of red energy, aligning them before her in a double layer of protection that she kicked off of just moments before it was torn to shreds by over a dozen martial skills. Half of the young nobles had been killed by now, whereas only she, Havel, and Ariana remained of those from the Core.

I need to flee, she thought as the region was shaken by another roar of breaking earth. That expert is almost upon—

“Your luck ends here!”

Dressed in blood and worn from battle, a pair of piercing eyes penetrated deep into Sersa’s soul as she sailed through the air at a rapid pace. The Earl of Westerbook had chosen this moment of weakness to abruptly dash through the turmoil in order to take her life with a single decisive stroke. Even if she managed to make a landing, the two powerful young men that had assisted the young noblewoman had already arrived at her projected site of impact.

The lord of the region caught up to her in an instant, matching her pace with perfect efficiency as he appeared an arm’s length above her.

“Don’t think it will be so easy!” she snapped, knowing that her end had come. She poured all of her remaining energy into summoning a series of bloody hands, which she relied on to jump free of the lord’s range of attack.

Frighteningly enough, he moved so quickly that he was able to follow her before she was able to dismiss her martial skill manifestations, and so arrived before her with an upward arm poised to deal a fatal blow with the bloody great sword that he had wielded so viciously throughout the evening. Oddly enough, in what she feared were the final moments of her life, a slight and mundane motion drew her eye to the location where she would land in the event that she was spared from experiencing the oncoming attack.

It was interesting how long a few seconds could last when that was all the time one had left to them in this world. Even as the earl had appeared before her, she was able to witness somewhat of a surprise, able to entertain a dozen indistinct thoughts.

The two young lords were lying where they had stood intently just moments before, their life signals betraying that they had been rendered unconscious, not killed. Standing between them was a familiar face that she hadn’t seen since the day that she first entered the dungeons of Castle Blackrock, the day that she had chosen to refine her younger brothers rather than die alongside them in a bid for a chance to avenge the cruel fate that had destroyed their family. Standing tall in his quality black robes was none other than Maxus, the only other survivor of the sect’s incursion upon their village. His auburn hair had grown down to his waist and his body now boasted a muscular tone that she found oddly difficult to overlook, though his face was still arranged in the stony expression that she remembered from the days of innocence that she had spent in the southern mountains before the advent of her corruption.