"What are you doing, Shura?!" Rukio bellowed, halting his own duel as he stared at his master. To Rukio, this indiscriminate, suicidal slaughter was the act of a complete madman.

Total annihilation. Rukio had never imagined that Shura’s catastrophic wave would sweep over his own host, expanding continuously, spreading a dense blanket of midnight fog that left only agonizing shrieks and ash in its wake. In time, every single orthodox cultivator on the plain would suffer the exact same fate.

Is this what Shura planned from the very beginning? Has he lost his mind, intent on destroying everything in existence?!

"Calm yourself, Rukio," Shura’s voice echoed serenely from above, echoing through the minds of his followers. "I shall resurrect all of you when the work is complete. For now, you merely need to sleep! And that applies to you as well, Rukio—so rest in peace!"

The dark fog expanded, its rolling tide growing taller and denser by the second. The dark operatives scrambled over one another in a frantic stampede, but thousands were swallowed by the creeping shroud. Rukio, a warlord of the 10 Annihilation Demons, had anticipated many outcomes, but never total betrayal by his own deity.

Shura's baseline parameters were staggering—more than enough to enforce this doom. Rukio refused to stand by silently while his own physical vessel was reduced to ash. He finally grasped the terrifying truth: Lord Demon Shura sought the death of every living entity on the five continents so he could claim absolute, solitary dominion over creation.

Though Shura claimed he would resurrect the fallen using the celestial parameters of the Blood Supreme, Rukio knew the resurrected would be nothing more than hollow, soulless thralls—marionettes stripped of individual will, hope, and ambition.

That was Shura’s true paradise: an absolute domain where dissent was impossible because humanity was reduced to a mindless collective.

The expanding wave of dark aura roared across the plain, generating violent, chaotic gales. Whenever the thick black smoke touched a dark operative, their skin melted, their bones dissolved, and their vessel disintegrated into airborne dust in a fraction of a second.

"No! I don't want to die!"

"Save us, Lord Demon!"

"I want to live!"

"Help us!"

"AAAAARRGGHH!"

The terrifying screams of thousands echoed across the enclosed basin. Panic seized the orthodox grandmasters as well. To the defenders, the approaching wall of midnight smoke resembled a catastrophic tidal wave—a dark tsunami of absolute death surging forward to swallow the basin.

This wave brought zero life—it was execution incarnate. The moment a cultivator touched the black mist, their life force was extinguished, their body turned to ash.

Desperate to survive, spellcasters and grandmasters across the alliance unsealed their internal reserves, discharging long-range energy beams and elemental blasts directly into the creeping dark wave, hoping to blunt its momentum.

Multi-elemental spells streaked across the sky, colliding with the front line of the midnight fog. Grandmasters joined forces to manifest giant defensive barriers, attempting to lock the dark aura behind a wall of pure energy. Their combined efforts temporarily halted the wave's forward march, buying precious seconds for the retreating infantry.

Near the spatial portal, Warrior Jiro maintained strict discipline, directing the orthodox troops to step through the glowing gateway in orderly waves. Hundreds vanished every minute, reappearing safely inside the central teleportation hub of Prisma City.

Yet dread gripped every heart. The rumor of Lord Demon Shura’s cruelty and absolute power was no longer a distant legend; it was unfolding directly before their eyes. The sovereign of darkness was sacrificing his own loyal army without a flicker of hesitation, determined to reduce every soul inside the domain to dust.

Orthodox grandmasters and dark operatives alike poured their remaining parameters into holding the line. They knew that if the dark fog broke through their joint defensive wall, every soul trapped beneath Shura's spatial dome would perish.

Defensive barriers materialized across every vector. Even the dark cultists, realizing their master had marked them for death, unsealed their dark magic to bolster the defensive wall. Though they wielded corrupted parameters, they pushed their dark aura forward to help hold back the creeping fog, fully aware that failure meant instant incineration.

Driven by the primitive urge to survive, the dark host joined forces with their sworn enemies, fighting side by side with the orthodox alliance to hold back the tide of absolute death.

The combined force of hundreds of thousands of cultivators struck the advancing fog, straining every core to keep the dark aura contained—or, if possible, neutralize the wave entirely.

Meanwhile, along the outer perimeter, several grandmasters launched desperate strikes against the translucent spatial dome sealing the basin. Yet their armaments and spellwork bounced off harmlessly. The boundary remained absolute, showing zero structural weakness.

Dasatama unsealed his Ultimate God of War parameters, driving a high-density kinetic strike into the barrier. A fine spiderweb of cracks appeared across the surface, but before the God of War could execute a follow-up blow, the spatial boundary healed itself instantly, returning to its pristine state as if the strike had never occurred.

The leaders of the five continents, alongside the senior advisors, combined their highest-tier parameters to breach a single exit point. A larger spatial fissure opened momentarily, only to snap shut a second later, re-establishing its flawless, impenetrable surface. The structural stability of Shura's barrier was mathematical perfection.

"Do you truly believe your feeble parameters can halt my divine work?" Shura’s booming voice echoed from the heavens, carrying absolute authority. "How utterly naive! I am God! I am the supreme sovereign descended to bring true justice and absolute order to creation!

"I shall forge a paradise free from strife and greed! Every soul shall merge with my core, and a world of absolute harmony shall be born!"

Spreading his arms wide, Shura initiated a secondary sequence. A terrifying gravitational pull erupted from his vessel, targeting the dark magic signatures across the entire basin.

He was forcibly reclaiming the dark parameters he had planted within his subordinates.

The surviving dark operatives gasped as an invisible, agonizing force latched onto their cores. It did not pull their physical bodies skyward; instead, it forcibly extracted the dark magic saturating their internal pathways. Even the remaining members of the 10 Annihilation Demons felt their corrupted aura being violently torn from their vessels.

Streams of black magic erupted from hundreds of thousands of cultists, surging skyward like rivers of ink flowing into a singular ocean: Lord Demon Shura.

From the moment Shura had bestowed the seeds of dark magic upon his followers, he had engineered those parameters as borrowed strength. Now, he triggered a total recall. Stripped of their corrupted aura, the dark operatives were left with only their baseline, natural internal energy, rendering them powerless.

Vast rivers of dark magic merged with Shura's vessel as he activated the absolute parameters of the Blood Supreme. The siphoned dark energy from every soul in his army flooded his channels, elevating his baseline strength to god-like proportions.

The dark parameters met their ultimate master. Hovering mid-air, Shura wore a cold, victorious grin. Decades ago, he had planted countless dark seeds across the five continents, anticipating that his followers would eagerly cultivate the power under the delusion of pursuing personal strength.

Driven by arrogance and greed, those cultists had believed they were building their own legacy, dreaming of standing beside the Demon Lord or even surpassing him.

In truth, they were nothing more than living batteries—vessels engineered to gather and refine dark magic through slaughter and artifact assimilation. The parameters they had proudly claimed as their own were merely a temporary loan, marked for extraction the moment Shura required absolute fuel to achieve total integration with the celestial artifact.

As the dark cultists attempted to save themselves by helping the alliance contain the midnight fog, Shura stripped away their parameters, reducing them to ordinary, exhausted mortals incapable of discharging even a basic aura blade.

The swirling dark magic condensed into Shura’s core. Feeling the boundless parameters saturating his pathways, his eyes blazed with divine madness.

"The day I have anticipated for a century has finally arrived!" Shura roared toward the sky. "Look upon me, Grandfather Mahesa! I am proving to you that I can forge a world of absolute justice! You should have trusted my vision! I shall prove it to all creation!"

Shura’s thunderous roar reverberated across the basin. Most combatants were baffled by his words, having zero knowledge of his origins or the name Grandfather Mahesa.

Yet one man on that battlefield understood every word.

Aji’s right fist tightened until his knuckles turned white. The name evoked the painful memory of Grandfather Mahesa’s death—murdered by Shura’s hands nearly a century ago.

Aji remembered that tragic day clearly. Returning from a hunt in the wilderness, he had found Grandfather Mahesa lying in a pool of blood, his chest blackened by corrupted dark magic. Nearby, the young Shura had fled into the shadows, clutching the stolen Blood Supreme in his trembling hands.

During those seven years of childhood training, Shura and Mahesa had known Aji solely by his original name: Bagas. Shura had zero knowledge that the youth named Aji Bagaskara operating within the Sky Squad was his former adoptive brother, Bagas.

Aji had held the dying Mahesa in his arms. With his final breaths, the old grandmaster had explained Shura’s radical, tragic delusion: Shura craved an end to all evil, believing the sole method to achieve absolute peace was to extinguish every human life on Earth, then resurrect humanity as mindless thralls using the Blood Supreme.

Reanimated without desire, ego, or free will, humanity would exist in perpetual tranquility under Shura's absolute reign. That was Shura’s paradise—a world without war, achieved by stripping away the human soul.

Grandfather Mahesa had attempted to stop Shura before he could bind himself to the relic, but the old master had been exhausted from years of purifying the Blood Supreme. Shura had unsealed a fraction of the relic's dark parameters, striking Mahesa down with a fatal blow to the chest.

With his last breath, Grandfather Mahesa had imparted a final mandate to Bagas: Stop Shura, no matter the cost. Though Shura’s underlying desire for a peaceful world stemmed from a noble impulse, his method was a catastrophic madness that would bring about absolute global extinction once he fully integrated the celestial artifact.

That dying mandate now rested heavily on Aji’s shoulders. The terrifying energy accumulating within Shura had reached a critical threshold, capable of shattering the five continents.

Aji looked up at the floating deity, his eyes blazing with unyielding resolve. I must stop him now—before it is too late!