Alex spent long moments studying the Divine tier gate before him, paying no mind to the frustrated roars and screams behind him from tacticians, wujen, and spies now being crushed to a pulp in their final moments, for failing to report to their master just what Alex was truly capable of.

He ignored the desperate back and forth he could hear a quarter mile away as a general far smarter than his brutish features implied immediately ordered his dozen Gold disciples to strike at the avatar of Chaos in their midst before it was too late.

All his attention was now on the choking miasma of malice radiating from the massive humming portal before him.

Alex could sense Shalu’s hate with such exquisite clarity he was just a halfstep from being in that celestial gaming hall once more. Simultaneously the size of a Baroque ballroom, and massive enough to host the solar system he had once called home.

“Hah! That fool dares to think I will let him close the gate that will assure the doom of his kind once and for all? Never! He will die, swarmed by a dozen Jade and Gold, and we will allow our own enemies to expend their resources eliminating your piece once and for all!”

The Winter Queen’s hiss turned to abrupt surprised laughter.

“You actually managed to position one of your pieces to breach my realm, only to sacrifice him to me? Truly, our foolish associate was right. You’re on our team in all but name, Shalu. But by all means, keep your present seat. There’s only so much Winter’s purifying winds can do to cleanse the stench of your rotting flesh.”

“Know your place, woman!” Shalu hissed, hate-filled eyes flashing with transcendent malice. “The only reason why your forces remain for a few more turns, the only reason why you exist at all, is because you have utility, limited as it is. Cleansing this impure infestation buys you time, wench. But rest assured, we’ll be adding your realm to our own, soon enough!”

The Winter Queen’s frigid laughter froze the bitter brew in Shalu’s cup, earning a furious snarl.

“How you bluster and prevaricate, fool. For it is we who invade your lands, and it is we who shall claim the entirety of your empire before this game is through!” She frowned down at the battlefield, eyes widening with horror. “My men melt before him. What foul artifact is this?”

“One he designed himself, mistress of all things crisp and cool,” WiFu conceded with a wink and a smile Shalu’s way. “My dear brother has proven quite the inspiration.” His smile turned hard and cold. “And if my doomed sibling wishes to last at least a few more turns, I’d strongly recommend he close the gate and concede his hand.”

Shalu’s eyes bulged in disbelief. “Are you mad, you deformed little wretch? Surrender when I am this close to victory?” He slammed the table, multiple calderas across the lands below now erupting in fresh fiery plumes as he roared with laughter. “Surrender when I finally have the upper hand? When I have that filthy little mongrel right where I want him? Trapped between a barrier I will never let him cross, a dozen Deep Golds, and the Winter Queen’s own Jade, now sworn to my service, ready to eviscerate him as he so richly deserves?”

Shalu’s eyes flashed with sudden hate. “I care not for his axe nor his supposed communion with that damned river! A dozen Gold tier spells will obliterate him just as assuredly as it will anyone below Jade, and that fool is still a mere Silver! Best of all, Long Wang’s hand assures that when he finally falls, he will never again escape her coils, forbidden from ever returning to the Golden Realms by reincarnation again!”

He chortled with laughter as Wifu gazed sadly down at the sight of his disciple frantically dodging and countering an absolute onslaught of devastating spells. Alex sensing so many rituals firing from a distance, knowing exactly how and when to cleave through their matrices, thanks to the fox god even now gifting his disciple a few final precious seconds to do what he must.

“I’m afraid your forgetting a certain card still in play, dear brother,” WiFu said, waiting for the exhausted Golds to cease their onslaught, Alex bleeding from a dozen near fatal wounds before his eyes met his sneering brother’s once more. “And I suspect that his interest isn’t in crossing the gate.”

Shalu paled, glaring at WiFu’s bemused countenance.

Before he barked in laughter. “Ha! You think that fool can actually strike at me from a divine tier gate? it’s a full mile wide! There’s no way he could—“

His eyes bulged in surprise more than pain as he sputtered and wheezed, spraying the game table with arterial droplets of his blood.

Find Weakness Skillcheck modified by Divine Tier Nemesis Card: Critical Success!

After fruitlessly testing dozens of false nexi and suffering catastrophic damage, you have finally found the soul link between portal and host!

Alex’s heart was roaring in his ears as he wheezed for desperate breath, torso perforated by multiple soul-piercing fletchets of blackest ice. Deep Gold attacks launched at supersonic speeds beyond even his ability to parry, even after Alex had done all he could to pressure test and retreat from dozens of promising looking spots in the inconceivably complex portal construction before him.

He ignored the exultant roars of hundreds upon thousands of desperate soldiers, delighting in the sight of seeing their enemy spurting his life blood upon the frozen ground before their portal.

Even as the River of Souls eagerly tried to draw its would-be master in.

Saving Throw Versus Oblivion made!

Yet a gritting Alex proved his mastery over waters colder than death itself, just as he had from the moment he had first been frozen alive to the sound his mother’s despairing sobs, right before his eighteenth birthday.

He would have howled with fiercest vindication, had his lungs not been pierced, and desperate choking wheezes combined with Dark Qi metabolism all that allowed him to channel the fearsome double-edge blade that was the weapon of death only he would dare to hold while being so close to Oblivion himself.

And there was nothing more perilous in that moment than fear. No matter that he rode the razors edge between life and death as an entire army closed in than panic. Had he allowed the tiniest flicker of fear in his breast, that would have frozen him to panicked despair more rapidly than a dozen Gold tier spells of ice and snow.

Yet unlike a dozen times before, he didn’t immediately Bullrush away after once more futilely striking the massive mile-wide gate that rang like a gong after each blow.

Because this time, the pristine timber resonance of the portal, mocking Alex with its inviolate perfection, had cracked.

This time, Alex knew exactly where to strike.

“The fox’s champion weakens! Now! Finish him off before he can teleport again! Finish him off now, now, now!” Roared General Oudom as an entire army prepared to crash into Alex, eager to end him for once and for all, as Alex spent infinitely precious seconds he could never get back, focusing past the pain of yet another black ice javelin spearing through his chest before ricocheting off his unbreakable bones as he embraced that which he had deliberately avoided using since first tearing Godslayer free of its prison once more.

For every life-ending blow screaming through the air with such force that space itself seemed to bleed had been powered by nothing more than Black Swan and Alex’s own furious resolve and killing intent, thanks to the artifact in his hands.

And even that had been enough to obliterate the those Golds that had dared approach in melee range.

Yet not once did he dare unleash his ultimate attack.

Not until now.

A strike fueled by a Dragon’s strength, more than enough to send Shalu lurching back with a dismayed cry upon the gaming table of the gods as Alex’s furious determination and Nemesis Card of Fate allowed him to find a weakness arguably more wave function than real.

Before collapsing with the discordant ring of Alex’s Fangtian Ji.

A fangtian ji that knew well the taste of Shalu’s Blood.

Alex allowed himself one last smile, gazing into the shocked, disbelieving countenance of his sworn foe one final time as his inevitable doom hurtled through air, locking Alex down with a gravity well from which there would be no escape, his demise all but assured as General Oudom chortled in victory.

Time enough for one final attack, as the deadly mercury river undulating through Seanchen forces that none dared approach began to froth and boil as the flood waters of oblivion overran its banks, sending countless thousands of soldiers screaming to their next lives as Alex’s final blow tore through space faster than the Jade tier meteor even now crashing to earth.

And how pitiful Shalu looked, when he finally saw the end.

“No, no! I’m closing the gate! I’m closing the—“

SOUL CLEAVE!

Countless flashes of beloved wives and children from countless lives lived flashed across Alex’s eyes in the final moments of his life. Eyes filled with love, years filled with sweetest bliss, forever broken by the desperate screams and howls of everyone Alex had ever adored being tortured, burned at the stake, run through with steel, or chained to slave collars till death claimed them at last.

And in the final moments of every single life flashing across his eyes in that awful, endless chasm between death and renewal was the bloated smirking countenance of the monster Alex hated above all others, his endless laughter mixing with their eternal screams.

Fanatic hatred that knew no limits.

“It does not matter how you try to defy me, wretch, I will always find you, and I will always break you, Alex Hammer! As I have a thousand times before!”

Alex howled with a berserker’s fury, channeling the desperate howls of countless butchered women and children as his soul-bound artifact did that which none had ever dared before.

Slicing open Shalu’s throat in a spray of arterial blood, as the gaming hall and world both turned crimson with a storm of biblical proportions, flooding both realms in the frothy lifeblood of Alex’s eternal foe.

In that instant, the Divine Tier portal exploded in a flash of light so blinding that there was no escape, as the handful of Royal Phoenix observers too foolish to flee for their lives or jump through one of Alex’s now eternally closed gates were instantly obliterated by a heat flash beyond all comprehension. As was Royal Phoenix Academy in its entirety, not even Gold Tier enchantments able to survive the divine tier rupture as the former sight of Baidushi and all the lands within a ten mile radius were utterly obliterated in a firestorm of unfathomable proportions. Ironically, it was only the howling storm of outraged gods flooding an entire nation kept the Eternal Forest from being consumed in hellfire, along with with the destruction of a Divine Tier artifact.

***

The Winter Queen lurched back from the table, her face bone white, horrified eyes gazing at the Card of Calamity placed so calmly over the gate between worlds as the gaming hall erupted in screams and panic, countless pale Seanchen faces now covered in droplets of a dying Shalu’s pink frothy blood.

“Shalu! Channel your essence! Heal yourself while you still can!” Lord Zheng Yi choked back a sob, looking far less like a tyrannical lord of the realm than a father terrified for his dying son, mirroring countless millions of mortals in the world they had made their plaything for endless millennia.

Because an impossibly far off time ago, they had been just that.

Fragile mortals escaping their own doomed world, desperate to ascend.

WiFu’s eyes were filled with naked regret he didn’t bother hiding with artifice as the bloated deity that had taunted him for twenty thousand years collapsed to the ground, desperately trying to stem the bitter flow of life-blood shooting from between his trembling hands.

How it shook him to see even Long Wang in a horrified panic. “We have to get him to the pods, Father. It’s his only chance!”

Zheng Yi didn’t bother arguing, the matter so urgent that he wasted no time with threats, demands, or even looking back once at the gaming table as the pair of them gripped a terrified Shalu spurting blood and gurgling for breath as he faced the specter of his own demise before the three of them stepped at right angles to any direction that their opponents could see.

WiFu squeezed his trembling Qing Bai tightly to him, both of them more shaken than they would ever admit by the specter of that which they had never dared to unleash before.

Their greatest creation.

That which would doom them all.

Grandmother Yi Wang’s glare was colder than the Winter Queen herself, who was still gazing at the Calamity Card with disbelieving horror.

“We concede the match.”

A desperate whisper, echoing endlessly in the gaming hall still splattered with Shalu’s blood.

“Mistress...”

“Silence, Ponnleu!” The Winter Queen glared at her suddenly deathly still advisor, who, like all the other members of her pantheon, froze to absolute stillness under her glare.

“That damned monstrosity is no mere ‘boy,’ no simple ‘disciple,’ eternal or otherwise!”

Her eyes glittered with furious hate, pinning WiFu with her glare. “Did you know what would happen, WiFu? After all the arrangements we made, the accord I thought we had reached… did you know this would happen?”

WiFu forced a bitter smile that didn’t touch his ice cold eyes, taking a long thoughtful sip of his sanguine drink. “I quite clearly recall advising you not to risk more than you could afford to lose.”

“It was a divine tier gate!” his opposite shrieked, fists clenched in helpless fury. “Shalu and Long Wang, so desperate to destroy their strongest piece that they’d destroy your entire realm if they could, underestimating my forces so utterly that they thought a single tainted tactician, a corrupted ‘Red Prince’ would be the match of my expeditionary force!”

Her discordant laughter rang through the endless gaming hall between the stars.

“So I took a page from your own book. Did you know that, fox? Risking it all on a gamble no one would think me so foolish as to take. Investing so much in infrastructure as to reshape my entire realm!”

“Sophal...”

“One hundred million active soldiers! Fifty three million additional basic cultivators dedicated to supplies, logistics, and infrastructure. A tooth and tail formation like no other, all within fifty miles of the insertion point!” She shook her head, her expression one of horrified dismay. “Two hundred and sixteen Gold and three Jade. All serving as the tip of the spear of what would have been the most exquisitely orchestrated campaign in the history of both our realms!”

She gazed at the cards in her hand with tear-filled eyes spilling diamonds down her cheeks.

“Your family had been so certain that I would be able to slip through a mere two million troops at most, before Shalu forced it closed. Enough to rile your emperor’s wrath, but no real threat beyond that, your foolish kin attempting to use my conquest for their own political purposes and senseless purges. Yet my cards, my hand, would have slaved Shalu’s portal to me for all time!”

Her bitter, discordant laughter made even WiFu wince.

“Instead, my cards assured me well over 90% of the exothermic reaction your disciple unleashed like a quark bomb! Exothermics not seen since our homeworld was destroyed and we all forged our own realms. Death so utter that my entire expeditionary force… the cream of an entire realm… has been obliterated in a single strike!”

She slammed down her hand, showcasing cards that left both Wifu and Qing Bai wide-eyed. Cards that would now remain forever unplayed. “He’s an avatar of Death, you damned fool of a fox. You forged a God of Death!” Haunted eyes gazed beseechingly into WiFu’s own. “Why? Why would you doom us all?”