Sweeping his right arm upward in a wide rotational arc, Aji discharged a kinetic shockwave that flung the swarming dark operatives backward. Ultimately, he chose to disengage, prioritizing the survival of the Sky Squad members who had recklessly charged forward behind him.

"Fall back!" Aji shouted. Alicia was right. If he pressed forward, he might reach Lord Demon Shura, but his comrades would not survive the push. They would merely be sacrificing their lives inside the dense encirclement of the dark army.

His primary fear was that the Demon Lord would unleash his ultimate, cosmic-tier devastation. Such a catastrophic deployment would instantly dismantle everything the alliance had fought for. That terrifying, world-ending power wielded by Shura was something Aji dreaded above all else. Across the entire global coalition, Aji alone understood the true, catastrophic depth of the Demon Lord’s hidden potential.

That cosmic-annihilation force, should anyone witness its unsealed state, would reduce them to absolute dust in a single breath. Aji had attempted to force his way to the center specifically to prevent Shura from charging that apocalyptic spellwork.

Yet, seeing the Sky Squad members drawn so far into the fire, Aji could not proceed. He reversed his momentum, cutting a path backward through the remaining dark operatives. Seeing their leader withdraw, the Sky Squad members who had followed him followed suit, fighting their way back toward the outer perimeter.

Aji needed to forge another tactical avenue to approach Shura before time ran out—and he had to execute that approach entirely alone. He needed a strategy that would keep the Sky Squad occupied elsewhere, preventing them from following him deeper into the dark host's meat grinder.

"What is our next move, Aji?" Aaman asked once they reached the outer edge of the dark host, where the broader battle raged on.

The Sky Squad members had successfully extracted themselves from the central encirclement. Surrounding them, the global alliance had locked the dark army into a complete, multi-layered ring, denying Shura’s forces any opportunity to breach the perimeter.

Aji looked at Aaman calmly. "There is no shortcut. We systematically clear the dark army. We press forward step-by-step to reach the Demon Lord and defeat him together."

Aaman nodded, finally understanding Aji's underlying intent. From the beginning, Aji’s target had been Lord Demon Shura himself. He had intended to cut through an entire army alone to engage the Demon Lord in single combat. Yet, to Aaman, such an attempt appeared mathematically indistinguishable from suicide.

The dark host still fielded hundreds of thousands of active operatives, all standing as a living shield around Lord Demon Shura. Positioned at the very heart of the formation, Shura was surrounded by dense ranks of high-tier units across all vectors.

Generally speaking, the dark army functioned under a strict hierarchy of strength. Beneath the Five Gates and the 10 Annihilation Demons stood Tier-1 elite commanders, followed by Tier-2 captains, and finally Tier-3 foot soldiers, who made up the bulk of the host. Every single operative, regardless of rank, commanded varying degrees of Black Blood cellular regeneration.

The global alliance operated under a nine-tier classification system. For this final campaign, the orthodox sects had deployed only martial artists of Tier-5 and above, ensuring every defender on the field possessed substantial parameter density.

Frontline intelligence confirmed that the dark army was being squeezed tighter into the basin. Surrounded on all sides by the combined coalition, their operational area was shrinking rapidly. Yet Lord Demon Shura displayed zero panic, reclining on his throne as he lazily observed the slaughter.

His mind operated on a plane detached from the carnage. Though several of his supreme Annihilation Demons had fallen—a minor surprise given how significantly the orthodox grandmasters had evolved—Shura remained utterly unbothered by the tactical setback. Even as the alliance identified the structural weaknesses of Black Blood and pushed his forces back, the Demon Lord’s expression remained serene.

Perhaps there were traitors leaking confidential intelligence from within his ranks. It mattered little to Shura. Every variable unfolding across this battlefield fell directly within his long-term calculations. He had already perfected the assimilation of the celestial artifact, the Blood Supreme, and the decades of sacrifice were finally coming to fruition.

Through the Five Gates, his lieutenants had harvested vast volumes of human life force and spiritual energy across the five continents. What those fallen Gatekeepers had never realized was that their absorption arrays were hard-wired directly into the Blood Supreme. Shura could siphon their accumulated parameters whenever he pleased.

On the surface, the Five Gates had slaughtered thousands of cultivators to cultivate their own dark magic. In truth, the refined nutritional energy derived from those thousands of human souls flowed back to a single vessel: Lord Demon Shura.

When the Five Gates were slain, Shura simply reclaimed their dark parameters. To him, the dark magic wielded by his lieutenants was merely borrowed strength. He had simply waited for the opportune moment to trigger a total recall, flooding his core with the accumulated dark magic of the realm.

Now, that dark energy was returning home. The residual dark magic of Nesia and the fallen Five Gates was streaming rapidly into Shura’s core. Every dark operative who perished on the field had their internal aura siphoned back into the Demon Lord's vessel.

The fallen members of the 10 Annihilation Demons, along with every defeated cultist, had their energy pulled toward the center. Yet across the entire battlefield, only two grandmasters possessed the sensory refinement to perceive this invisible siphon: Gayatri and Aji.

Engaging a swarm of advancing dark operatives, Gayatri flicked her fingers, directing floating light blades through the air. The energy constructs streaked across the field, driving directly through the cardiac cores of her targets, sending them tumbling lifelessly to the earth.

Yet the moment they expired, their residual dark magic did not disperse into the atmosphere—it was forcibly siphoned away. Focusing her sensory domain, Gayatri traced the trajectory of the fleeing aura. A dense, suffocating current of dark magic, so concentrated it obscured the spiritual heavens, was streaming steadily toward the center of the dark host.

The airborne dark energy was being absorbed by the single figure seated upon the floating throne. There was zero doubt: that was the source of all evil. The absolute density of that dark aura transcended anything Gayatri had ever conceptualized. Should that entity unseal his parameters, the resulting devastation would reshape the geography of the continent.

Gayatri’s vision wavered. She could not fathom what manner of power could possibly overcome such an entity. The sheer parameter volume commanded by the Demon Lord was staggering. It confirmed the terrifying truth: Lord Demon Shura was a being feared by all creation. As Aji had once warned, even if every martial artist across the globe united as one, they could not defeat the Demon Lord through conventional combat.

Were his words truly accurate? How can anyone hope to defeat Lord Demon Shura if the entire world combined is not enough?

"There is only one way!" Aji’s past words echoed clearly in Gayatri’s mind. At the time, many would have dismissed his statement as absurd, yet Aji had spoken with absolute, unshakeable conviction, unbothered by whether others believed him.

"I shall seal him inside a dimension completely detached from this world, trapping him there for eternity!"

The true meaning behind Aji's statement was now fully clear to Gayatri. He intended to construct a spatial domain specifically to imprison the Demon Lord. No matter how divine Shura's baseline parameters were, being locked inside an isolated spatial void was a sentence no mortal or immortal entity could break.

The ultimate conclusion Gayatri reached was that Aji possessed absolute, master-tier control over spatial dimensions. As demonstrated in their prior engagement, Aji had opened a spatial portal to isolate the reanimated thralls of Saint Ganada and Saint Yonan, transferring them into the Mirror World alongside Alicia and Barsha.

Gayatri recalled the exact moment that spatial portal had materialized. The energy signatures of Barsha and Alicia had vanished from the physical plane instantly, leaving zero atmospheric trace. When Gayatri had expanded her sensory domain to track them, she had found nothing.

Aji had constructed an isolated pocket dimension—a realm where Alicia and Barsha existed completely detached from the five continents. Though Gayatri did not fully comprehend the underlying spellwork of spatial mechanics, she recognized the existence of overlapping dimensional planes.

Spatial manipulation was the discipline of bending structural reality. Master-tier spatial spellcasters could open conduits across vast distances, much like Lord Demon Shura had deployed a high-tier spatial array to teleport his massive dark legion directly outside Prisma’s gates in a single sequence.

Unlike the standard teleportation arrays situated in major continental cities—which were bound to fixed single-dimension coordinates and limited to ten travelers at a time—a deep understanding of spatial mechanics allowed a master to pierce the veil between distinct dimensional planes.

Aji felt the exact same atmospheric shift. The volume of dark magic siphoned into Shura was escalating rapidly. If Shura fully integrated the Blood Supreme, the situation would turn apocalyptic. Twenty years ago, before the Demon Lord had perfected the celestial artifact, his baseline parameters had already been terrifying.

If Shura unsealed his cosmic-annihilation spellwork today, it would be too late. The global alliance and the dark host alike would be swept into total, irreversible extinction.

Aji’s mind raced as he evaluated his options.

"Aji," Gayatri said softly, stepping to his side. "Is there truly a way to defeat the Demon Lord now?"

Aji looked at Gayatri, knowing her refined sensory domain had caught the dense dark currents flowing toward the center. His original tactical plan had been to close the distance to Shura, engage him directly, and use the celestial artifact embedded within his own vessel to forcibly sever the Blood Supreme from the Demon Lord’s core.

Yet Aji could no longer guarantee the success of that extraction. Having achieved total integration with the Blood Supreme, Shura's core and the celestial artifact were no longer distinct entities. Severing the artifact from a vessel that had fully assimilated its parameters might prove mathematically impossible.

"Shura is the core of this absolute catastrophe," Aji replied quietly, his eyes fixed on the distant throne. "If Shura falls, the war ends instantly. I am striving to reach him, but penetrating this dark aura field remains an extraordinary barrier."

The dark host still fielded massive numbers, presenting a daunting wall between Aji and his target.

All around them, the global war raged on with unabated fury. Explosions thundered, armaments clashed, and colliding aura fields cast violent shockwaves across the province. Every second claimed dozens of lives, painting the earth in blood.

War, as always, demanded everything.