Dense, multicolored dark magic, rimmed with crackling azure light, erupted in a massive beam from Zagar's cavernous jaws. Rotating his head in a continuous arc, the transformed Gatekeeper swept the catastrophic laser across the field, severing the magical root tendrils binding his legs as secondary detonations shattered the landscape in every direction.

The destruction was absolute.

Zagar spewed the beam continuously, driven by unbridled rage as he sought to obliterate everything in sight. Frustrated by the encirclement that had restricted his movements, his fury leveled the woodland.

The giant beam continued its destructive arc until...

SNAP!

The torrent of dark magic cut off abruptly. Zagar's massive frame froze as a figure flashed past his neck. It was Warrior Jiro, who had executed a full-yield, aura-infused slash that severed Zagar's massive head cleanly from his shoulders.

Refusing to grant the Gatekeeper a single second to recover, Jiro pushed his combat parameters to their absolute ceiling to halt the abomination's rampage once and for all.

"Ghost Speed!"

Moving at terrifying velocity, Jiro unleashed a storm of high-yield sword projections that blanketed Zagar's falling head. Without pausing, he redirected the barrage toward the monster's fifteen-meter body, raining down thousands of aura slashes that shredded the giant frame from its feet to its neck.

Zagar's mutated vessel shattered into microscopic fragments.

Unable to trigger dark cellular regeneration, the abomination failed to produce the writhing tendrils required to knit its body back together. Instead, Zagar's massive form dissolved into black vapor, drifting upward before vanishing into nonexistence.

The Gatekeeper was gone.

Elsewhere on the battlefield...

Aji and Commander Yarko stood side-by-side, confronting Gatekeeper Denta.

Glancing across the field, Denta saw that his three elite lieutenants had been completely eliminated by the Sky Squad. Now, he faced two formidable opponents: Commander Yarko, renowned as one of the realm's strongest grandmasters and the head of military defense command, and Aji, the enigmatic youth who claimed to be the heir to the Three Legends.

Denta—one of the Five Gates and a top-tier general of the dark army—refused to be looked down upon by mere mortals.

His rage boiled over. Discarding all restraint, Denta activated the fragment of the Blood Supreme embedded within his vessel by Lord Demon Shura. His dark parameters spiked exponentially as he deployed his full Demon Transformation. A terrifying aura flared outward, whipping up gale-force winds that rattled the surrounding air.

"Stay sharp, Commander Yarko!" Aji warned. He could feel Denta's dark core continuously absorbing environmental dark energy—a hallmark of dark cultivators who bypassed gradual conditioning to claim sudden, volatile power.

With his output fully compiled, Denta vanished into a dense plume of black mist, his dark aura expanding to blanket the entire sector.

Commander Yarko immediately recognized the spellwork. "This is..." Before he could finish his sentence, a pitch-black shroud enveloped the battlefield, clouding their vision. It mirrored Yarko's own fog techniques, yet radiated a far more sinister pressure.

The dark mist felt suffocating, actively choking every living entity caught within its radius.

Unlike his fellow Gatekeepers, Denta possessed a rare aptitude for spatial manipulation. He could shift locations and bend spatial pathways using dimensional portals. By dispersing his dark core into an energy fog, he was systematically purging and consuming the trapped oxygen within the affected zone.

Siphoning atmospheric oxygen through spatial fissures, Denta depleted the air particle by particle. Watching from a hidden spatial pocket, Denta sneered with cruel satisfaction. While his fellow Gatekeepers often dismissed his spatial techniques as useless in direct combat, Denta understood their absolute lethality in open war.

He required no brute force to eliminate powerful grandmasters. By starving them of oxygen while encapsulating their position within a looping spatial barrier, he created a flawless death trap. Anyone attempting to break out through the fog would be redirected back inside by his spatial boundary.

It was a masterclass in tactical warfare—a quiet, inescapable execution.

He chuckled softly. Defeating elite grandmasters did not require exchanging blow for blow; taking away their breath was more than enough. Such was the fatal weakness of human flesh—without oxygen, even the strongest cultivators would perish.

From within the dark fog, Denta monitored the surviving Sky Squad members and military units as their internal cores faltered from asphyxiation. When panicked cultivators attempted to sprint out of the sector, Denta's looping spatial wall redirected them straight back to their starting positions.

To Denta, it was an exquisite, entertaining spectacle.

"Bwahahaha!" Denta's sinister laughter echoed through the dark fog as he savored the slow demise of his enemies. After a prolonged silence, however, Denta paused. Had the trapped martial artists finally succumbed to the oxygen deprivation?

Their life signatures had vanished completely. The area had fallen entirely silent. It seemed the process had taken less time than anticipated. Had he deployed this technique from the beginning, he realized, he would not have lost his three lieutenants. Still, securing absolute dominion over the continent would make replacing his lieutenants an effortless task.

Power, status, armies, and wealth—everything would bow beneath his boots. Denta's thunderous laughter rang out once more.

His spatial fog had covered an immense radius, trapping Commander Yarko, Aji, the Sky Squad, and hundreds of rank 7 military veterans.

Denta was eager to harvest their fallen aura. By feeding their high-tier life force into his Blood Supreme fragment, his combat parameters would reach unprecedented heights—positioning him as the second most powerful entity under the heavens, behind Lord Demon Shura alone!

The prospect made his dark core throb with excitement. He would finally prove his superiority over his fellow Gatekeepers, who had looked down on his spatial abilities for years.

It was time to feast!

Raising both hands toward the sky, Denta channeled dark magic to recall his spatial fog, pulling the dark clouds back into his vessel. It was an exhausting process; binding spatial portals to high-density dark magic consumed enormous volumes of his internal reserves, draining his core significantly.

Still, the sacrifice felt entirely justified. He had eliminated an entire vanguard of high-tier martial masters in a single move.

Yet as the dark shroud dissipated, Denta's smile froze.

The ground before him was completely empty. Expecting to find hundreds of fallen grandmasters sprawled across the scorched earth, he saw nothing save for the old corpses from previous skirmishes.

Where were they? Denta scanned the clearing frantically, but his sensory domain picked up no life signatures whatsoever. Impossible! Did my spatial array malfunction, casting them to an alternate coordinate?!

Nonsense! He had mastered spatial mechanics to perfection; any entity attempting to cross his fog boundary should have been looped directly back into the center.

This defied all logic!

Denta stood frozen in disbelief, having expended the vast majority of his dark reserves to maintain the spatial fog. Recovering that lost stamina would require significant time.

"Where are you?!" Denta bellowed, his blood-red eyes flaring as black steam hissed from his scale-covered skin. Enraged and bewildered, his mutated form thrashed wildly, searching every quadrant of the clearing. Yet he remained entirely alone.

Just as despair began to take root, a massive spatial portal materialized mid-air. A radiant arc carved through the space before expanding into a three-meter-wide dimensional gateway. Denta gasped—another cultivator on the field possessed spatial creation magic!

Stepping out from the glowing gateway came the very warriors Denta believed he had suffocated within his fog.

Leading the exit was Alicia, her spellsword drawn in her left hand, having constructed the high-tier spatial portal that shielded their vanguard. Stepping out right behind her were Commander Yarko and Aji, followed by the Sky Squad members and the surviving military defense units.

Alicia closed the spatial gateway behind the last soldier with a flick of her wrist, leaving the entire joint task force completely unharmed.

"Curse you all!" Denta roared, his core trembling with rage and fatigue.

His dark reserves were heavily depleted, yet he knew he had to fight—or create a split-second opening to escape this worst-case scenario. If he could throw their ranks into disarray, he could withdraw to fight another day.

Gazing at the intact vanguard arrayed before him, Denta gritted his teeth, realizing that if escape proved impossible, he would be forced to unleash his final, taboo trump card.