Volatile dark energy radiated in roaring pulses from Lord Demon Shura’s hovering vessel. Along the outer edge of the spatial dome, orthodox cultivators launched high-tier martial strikes and destructive spellwork against the barrier, desperate to breach a path to safety. Yet their attacks bounced off harmlessly, deflected by the absolute density of the midnight shroud.

Finding the barrier completely immune to physical steel and elemental magic, the defenders were forced to turn back. In the distance, Shura stood shrouded in midnight aura—the sovereign of the abyss, a living terror whose name inspired dread across the five continents.

Uncertainty rippled through the ranks. What is his endgame in sealing us all within a single isolated domain? Does he truly believe his parameters are sufficient to slaughter the entire global coalition? How arrogant must he be to openly challenge the combined might of the world's grandmasters inside his own trap?

Recognizing that Shura was charging an absolute, wide-area annihilation spellwork, Aji unsealed his communication artifact, broadcasting an urgent warning across the Sky Squad’s private channel and to every commander linked to the network: "Fall back to maximum distance immediately! Shura is preparing to detonate the entire domain and reduce every living soul inside to ash!"

Gayatri gasped, her sensory domain catching the violent, fiery parameter surge coiling around Shura’s vessel. Though she could perceive the volatile density of his core, Aji’s claim that the Demon Lord intended to annihilate both armies indiscriminately sounded utterly absurd.

Yet, ever since she had first met Aji, every piece of intelligence he provided had proven to be absolute truth. He spoke with unwavering authority, devoid of deceit. Whether the tactical assessment sounded logical or impossible, Gayatri chose to place absolute faith in his words.

Ignoring the skeptical whispers of nearby cultivators, she unsealed her spellcasting matrix to broadcast Aji's evacuation directive across the orthodox ranks.

On another vector, Alicia received the warning through her communication artifact. She harbored zero doubt regarding Aji’s assessment; when human lives hung in the balance, Aji never exaggerated.

Deploying wind-elemental flight, Alicia surged across the front lines, directing the alliance divisions to retreat as far from Shura’s central coordinates as possible.

Barsha acted with equal urgency. As the captain of the Sky Squad, she immediately contacted the high command of the Martial Association and the senior leaders of the Continental Defense Forces, instructing them to signal a total, high-speed tactical retreat away from the Demon Lord's execution range.

The evacuation order trickled down rapidly through the chain of command. Guided by the Sky Squad, the orthodox infantry began pulling back from the central basin in disciplined formations, desperate to put distance between themselves and the gathering dark tempest.

Observing the sudden retreat, the dark operatives assumed victory was theirs. The orthodox defenders were falling back in apparent terror, fleeing before the absolute presence of the Demon Lord.

To the cultists, the arrogant alliance—which had so recently pressed them into a corner—now resembled cowardly prey scattering without direction. They believed the orthodox grandmasters had finally recognized the futility of resisting Shura's divine strength, leaving surrender as their sole remaining option.

The dark operatives watched with arrogant satisfaction as the alliance divisions retreated toward the outer perimeter, only to be halted by the impenetrable dark barrier separating them from the outside world. Trapped like livestock in a pen, the orthodox defenders faced total execution at Shura's hands.

"Flee all you want! You cannot pierce the sovereign's midnight shroud!" a dark army commander bellowed, his laughter echoing across his division. "You are all fated to become our mindless thralls! Hahaha!"

As the alliance troops backed up against the dark barrier, finding zero physical exit vectors, a sharp command echoed over the panicked crowd.

"Deploy spatial conduits!"

It was Alicia.

Landing on a raised ridge near the barrier, Alicia centered her focus, unsealing her high-tier spellcasting matrix to construct a spatial portal. Drawing upon her advanced understanding of dimensional mechanics, she manifested a three-meter-tall glowing gateway of translucent light.

Gayatri joined her instantly, channeling stabilizing light mana into the spatial matrix to prevent the portal from collapsing under the heavy environmental pressure.

A detachment of alliance grandmasters stepped through the glowing threshold, vanishing from the basin. The exit vector had been hardwired to a secure location: the primary teleportation hub inside Prisma City's central square.

Warrior Jiro took charge of the evacuation, organizing the surrounding cultivators into orderly queues to enter the portal. Through this method, the defenders could bypass Shura's midnight shroud entirely—the fundamental laws governing spatial conduit travel operated on a higher dimensional plane than physical barriers, allowing travelers to slip past the sealed dome.

Under Jiro’s firm direction, orthodox martial artists rushed into the spatial gateway. Jiro’s heart pounded against his ribs; in all his time alongside Aji, he had never seen the youth display such acute panic. Aji was ordinarily unflappable, which meant he possessed intimate knowledge of the apocalyptic threat Shura was about to unleash.

"Warrior Jiro! Evacuate every single cultivator from this domain immediately—by any means necessary, regardless of the risk!" Aji had ordered when they briefly crossed paths minutes prior, his face pale with urgency.

"What is Shura planning to do to everyone inside, Aji?" Jiro had asked, baffled.

"He is going to detonate his core and annihilate every living soul trapped inside this dome, Jiro! If we do not empty this basin now, everyone dies!" Aji had warned before vanishing into the dark ranks at sound-shattering velocity.

Annihilate everyone inside the barrier?! Jiro had pondered in horror. Would the Demon Lord truly slaughter his own dark army? Could a sovereign sacrifice hundreds of thousands of loyal thralls who had bled for his cause? Yet, coming from Aji, Jiro could not treat the warning as a bluff.

Aji understood Shura's true parameters better than anyone alive. He knew the energy accumulating within the Demon Lord was designed for total, indiscriminate annihilation. If the basin was not evacuated post-haste, the war would end in global extinction.

Jiro amplified his voice with mana, urging the grandmasters to accelerate their retreat through the portal array constructed by Alicia and Gayatri, extracting as many lives as the spatial conduits could sustain.

A steady stream of alliance troops poured through the gateway, escaping the sealed basin. High above, Lord Demon Shura caught the spatial parameter signatures emanating from the far edge of the orthodox ranks.

His dark eyes narrowed. Have they realized I am charging the full power of the Blood Supreme? How are they escaping my enclosed domain?

It defied logic. To recognize a cosmic-annihilation spellwork before its activation required intimate, confidential knowledge of the celestial artifact. Who on this field could possibly understand the true mechanics of the Blood Supreme?

A solitary figure surfaced in Shura's mind—the strong youth operating within the Sky Squad who claimed to be the successor to the Three Legends. If that youth was indeed who Shura suspected, he was the sole entity alive capable of recognizing his technique, presenting an existential threat to his grand design.

Shura was currently channeling massive volumes of dark aura to stimulate his core, attempting a total, flawless integration with the Blood Supreme. The process required uninterrupted concentration to ensure the resulting energetic detonation would vaporize every soul in the basin in a single breath.

Under normal parameters, the cosmic-annihilation strike was a instantaneous catastrophe—a single flash of blinding dark light that would incinerate a hundred-kilometer radius in less than a second, leaving zero temporal window for evasion.

However, the spatial portal operating in the distance was systematically dismantling his strategy. Hundreds of alliance cultivators were slipping through the gateway every minute. If he maintained his slow, methodical charge to achieve a perfect cosmic blast, the entire orthodox army would evacuate before the spellwork completed.

Unacceptable!

Forcing a sudden abort of the cosmic-annihilation sequence, Shura abandoned the full integration process of the Blood Supreme. Hovering mid-air, he reconfigured his dark core, opting for a lower-tier, immediate detonation supported by the artifact's raw parameters.

Though the baseline output was smaller, it required zero charging time and could be discharged instantly to wipe out the remaining forces inside the dome, even if the wave expanded at a slower kinetic velocity than a true cosmic blast.

Clenching both gauntlets, Shura unleashed the volatile dark magic coiling around his vessel.

BOOOOOOM!

A deafening, ear-splitting roar echoed across the province as a rolling typhoon of midnight-black dark magic erupted from Shura's body, expanding outward in a slow, suffocating wave.

Unlike the instantaneous, one-second cosmic blast he had originally envisioned, this modified detonation rolled across the landscape like a dense, creeping fog of absolute darkness.

Yet its lethality remained absolute.

The moment the rolling midnight fog touched a living entity, their physical vessel dissolved instantly, reduced to fine, airborne ash in a fraction of a second.

Gasps of absolute terror erupted across the field.

The dark operatives watched in utter horror as the expanding wave of midnight fire swept over their own ranks, incinerating hundreds of cultists into ash. In that horrifying instant, the dark host finally realized the terrifying truth: their revered sovereign intended to slaughter everyone trapped inside the dome, treating his own loyal army as expendable fuel.

Panic seized the dark host. Abandoning their combat formations, thousands of dark cultists fled in wild desperation toward the outer barrier, praying to find a way to breach the wall before the rolling wave of death consumed them.