Draudo had locked his focus entirely onto Aaman, fully intent on executing the dual-dagger warrior in a single stroke. He completely failed to factor in Aji's presence—whether blinded by overconfidence or outpaced by the youth's absolute velocity, Draudo's reflexes failed to catch the incoming vector.

Aji's celestial fist detonated against the mutated dragon head protruding from the tip of Dragon Ego. The living weapon shattered into fine steel fragments as the crushing kinetic feedback hurled Draudo backward through the air. He slammed violently into the earth, carving a deep crater into the plain while a thick plume of dust rolled over his collapsed frame.

Draudo felt as though his spine had been pulverized by the impact. Yet the youth's strike hadn't even targeted his body—it had struck his sword directly. His sword? How could Dragon Ego be pulverized in a single blow? This is impossible!

Lying in the dirt, Draudo struggled to process the lightning-fast sequence of events. He couldn't wrap his mind around how a supreme warlord of the 10 Annihilation Demons could be so casually humiliated, tossed aside like a novice due to a momentary lapse in concentration. Worse still, the dark army's sole sentient blade had been permanently destroyed.

The truth was undeniable: the youth who had shattered Dragon Ego was no ordinary cultivator. He was a high-tier grandmaster operating in disguise, masking his true parameters among the alliance ranks.

Before Draudo could recover, Aaman plunged from the sky, his twin long daggers pointed straight at the warlord's chest. The air pressure radiating from Aaman's descending vector carried immense kinetic force. Aaman was determined to eliminate the supreme warlord immediately—a strategic necessity, given the alliance's severe numerical inferiority.

Executing one of the 10 Annihilation Demons would strike a fatal blow to the dark army's morale, dampening their offensive momentum.

Raising his twin daggers high, Aaman plunged toward Draudo's collapsed frame. This was his golden opportunity to strike down a supreme commander of the abyss.

"HAAAAA!" Aaman roared, his eyes blazing with incandescent light as his core flared to life.

Meanwhile, the dark army continued to press the alliance vanguard backward with relentless force. Outnumbered nearly five to one, the defenders were steadily driven toward the main gates of Prisma, forced into a desperate, continuous retreat while fighting for every inch of soil.

The dark operatives possessed an immense advantage in open-field attrition: so long as a wound was not immediately fatal, their corrupted cellular regeneration restored their physical frames mid-combat, allowing them to advance without complex tactical maneuvers.

"Target their heads or sever their necks!" Commander Dasatama bellowed across the front lines, his voice amplified by atmospheric mana. "Destroy their neural cores so their physical vessels cannot execute cellular reconstruction!"

Commander Yarko fought alongside Dasatama, holding the flank while rallying the troops. The defenders had to endure the brutal onslaught, stalling the dark host until reinforcement columns from the four outlying continents arrived. From the opening seconds, the war had been inherently unfair, with the righteous sects caught in a hasty, imperfect deployment.

The dark army held every strategic advantage—staggering numbers, spatial mobility, and taboo cultivation disciplines that allowed operatives to bypass decades of rigorous training.

By devouring the lingering internal parameters of fallen grandmasters, dark cultists rapidly expanded their reserves without enduring painful physical conditioning. Furthermore, their rapid cellular regeneration granted them near-immortal physical resilience.

Yet those unnatural advantages came at a horrifying price. The forced assimilation of unrefined aura caused excruciating internal agony, corrupting the vessel's spiritual pathways.

For twenty years, the 10 Annihilation Demons had refined this forced assimilation art in subterranean isolation, perfecting cellular regeneration through continuous, brutal experimentation.

They had achieved their supreme parameters by studying dark cultivation charts provided directly by Lord Demon Shura, trading their humanity for rapid power.

They were practitioners of the dark path—desperate cultivators who had abandoned traditional light cultivation after finding their natural progress too slow. Desiring absolute parameters in a fraction of the time, they had embraced corruption to shortcut the martial path.

Now, the dark host pressed forward relentlessly, seeking to pin the defenders against the high walls of Prisma. Once the alliance was trapped against the stone gates, the dark cultists intended to execute a total massacre. Confident in their massive numerical superiority, they believed victory was absolute.

Yet the defenders of Prisma were intentionally playing a dangerous tactical game: holding the gates, absorbing the kinetic pressure, and stretching time until continental armies completed their march. Once total troop numbers balanced out, the outcome would be decided by raw skill and unyielding resolve.

Beyond the relentless pressure from the main dark legion, the defenders were forced to contend with the unmeasurable parameters of the 10 Annihilation Demons, who moved across the field like living natural disasters, tossing cultivators aside effortlessly.

Warrior Jiro continued to lock blades with Warlord Tora, holding the chain-wielding juggernaut at bay. Elsewhere, Widi—the master of high-tier illusions—was engaged by Commander Gonan, Elder Silvi, and a specialized team of Sky Squad operatives.

Meanwhile, Draudo was currently occupied by Aji and Aaman.

The remaining members of the 10 Annihilation Demons were similarly intercepted by high-tier grandmasters. The alliance commanders had systematically lured the supreme warlords away from the main infantry clash, drawing them into open, isolated sectors. By provoking their volatile tempers, the grandmasters redirected the warlords' attention away from the vulnerable defense divisions.

Warlord Rukio found himself confronted by Lao and a detachment of Sky Squad members. Rukio wielded a pair of razor-sharp serrated bladed gauntlets attached to his forearms.

Unsealing his dark core, Rukio summoned a massive legion of skeletal dreadnoughts—reanimated human skeletons wielding steel broadswords in their right hands and heavy shields in their left.

These were physical skeletal constructs imbued with high-tier dark magic and basic combat instincts. Operating under Rukio's direct control, the skeletal legion swarmed Lao's position. Lao dodged and parried the high-speed strikes of the reanimated skeletons, amazed by their operational velocity. Rukio's summoning discipline was a high-tier dark art, producing constructs that rivaled the parameters of elite dark operatives.

Seeing Lao swarmed by both dark cultists and skeletal dreadnoughts, Astro leaped into the sector, unleashing a wide-area kinetic slash to clear a perimeter. Yet the skeletal constructs proved difficult to destroy; whenever an energy slash severed their bony frames, the dark magic bound to their cores drew the pieces back together, restoring them instantly.

Elsewhere, Warlord Hexos—a towering juggernaut wielding a massive double-headed executioner's axe—was intercepted directly by Commander Dasatama. Eager to test his parameters against the God of War, Hexos welcomed the encounter.

Hexos had swept his massive axe toward a cluster of defense guards, intending to bisect them in a single pass, when Dasatama's broadsword intercepted the heavy steel.

"You are my opponent today, tyrant!" Hexos roared, his eyes blazing with bloodlust as he confronted the man celebrated as the strongest grandmaster in the martial world. Hexos prepared to unleash his absolute output in an epic duel he had anticipated for decades.

Spun his heavy vessel, Hexos rotated his double-headed axe in a continuous whirlwind, generating a violent kinetic gale that tore up the surrounding earth. Dasatama vaulted into the air, gripping his broadsword with both hands. He didn't intend merely to block the storm; Dasatama sought to execute Hexos with his own martial discipline.

The war raged furiously across every sector. Roars of defiance, cries of agony, and the thunderous clashing of steel filled the air. Though severely outnumbered, the defenders held their formations with remarkable discipline, absorbing wave after wave of dark magic.

The remaining three Annihilation Demons were equally entangled across the field.

Warlord Zero, a master of water-elemental dark magic who wielded a heavy trident, was blocked by Grandmaster Alex and a squad of Sky Squad spellcasters. Zero unleashed catastrophic oceanic tempests, but Alex deployed high-density earth and wind arrays to neutralize the watery onslaught. Alex sought not an immediate victory, but a firm containment—holding Zero in place until reinforcements arrived.

Grandmaster Nurin—the elder advisor from the Orpris continent who had once guarded the Heart Dragon artifact before its destruction—stepped onto the field to confront Warlord Alumero. Alumero was a master of high-speed sword magic whose martial discipline was exceptionally bizarre.

Alumero's blade functioned as an atmospheric conduit, capable of discharging thousands of high-velocity energy needles in a single second, or unleashing massive energy scythes that could cleave an ancient ridge in half.

Meanwhile, Grandmasters Yingnan and Gundala joined forces to engage Warlord Metri—a long-range specialist who combined long-range weaponry with dense, long-distance dark magic to neutralize targets from extreme ranges.

Recognizing the threat, Yingnan and Gundala instructed nearby Sky Squad members to support the main front line while the two senior advisors tackled Metri together.

"Damn it, how long has it been since we locked blades side-by-side like this?" Gundala quipped, offering a dry smile toward Yingnan.

"Let us execute this dark warlord first," Yingnan replied smoothly, adjusting his stance. "After that, I shall buy you a cup of tea."

With a shared nod, the two grandmasters surged forward, their high-tier parameters flaring to meet Metri's long-range dark magic in a thunderous clash.