Consort moved right when Phei disappeared... she disappeared too from the far side of the mirrored winter and arrived beside one of the male Vampires so abruptly that even his crimson eyes barely managed to contract before her katana was leaving its sheath.
Consort drew her sword, she turned her wrist so fast than instant and thrust.
The motion was immaculate as her blade seemed to begin its journey halfway through the Vampire’s body, the distance between the sheath and his heart having somehow been discarded as unnecessary.
He survived because Vampires possessed an obscene relationship with speed:
A circular blood shield erupted between them, deep crimson and strangely translucent, its surface trembling like a membrane stretched across an abyssal sea. Layer after layer of compressed blood occupied that thin barrier, enough blood aura to drown cities was reduced into a disc scarcely wider than his torso.
Consort’s katana struck its centre and a perfectly circular depression raced across hundreds of metres of ice as the pressure from the attack descended, yet the shield remained intact. Consort’s blade drove several inches into its surface while violent ripples travelled through the blood, each one carrying enough force to rupture mountains. The barrier swelled around the sword, it devoured the attack momentum and contracted with a pulse that made every reflection across Anactica turn crimson and it returned the strike to her.
Consort’s own sword attack erupted from the shield, condensed into a thin line of murder so pure that the space behind her opened from horizon to horizon. The reflected pressure of that thrust crossed the Dead Winter Realm without dispersing, punched through several glacial mountains and vanished into the darkness beyond, leaving a tunnel of absolute emptiness through everything it touched.
Consort tilted her head.
The attack missed her cheek by less than an inch.
That was all the movement she granted it.
The Vampire had already vanished.
He appeared behind her with his freshly regenerated hand extended; his fingers lengthened into hooked crimson claws while blood essence flooded the arm. He slashed towards Consort’s exposed back, and five red wounds opened through the air before his claws arrived, each scar vomiting blood radiance into the blizzard.
Across the battlefield, the female Vampire saw her companion emerge behind Consort and the claws descending towards the Head Maid’s spine, and she saw Consort’s face that was reflected upon the flawless winter beneath them.
That was what made Seraphine’s eyes widen<anno data-annotation-id="d5d77ecb-8ee7-36f2-922f-0bc06cb0b938" data-title=".">.1</anno>
Consort was smiling... small, cold and so saturated with contempt that Seraphine understood something had gone terribly wrong a fraction too late.
"Behind y—"
Phei appeared and even the gathered World Transcendents felt no trail of him... a white-haired nineteen-year-old had materialized inside the narrow space beside him with one hand already reaching for the Vampire’s attacking wrist.
Phei caught it but his wrist broke instantly.
The sound was dry, ugly and unmistakably mortal.
The Vampire had been moving at full speed, his arm driven by his whole World Transcendent raw power, not to mention his race and cultivation so far beyond Phei’s that catching the strike barehanded amounted to volunteering his bones for demolition.
His wrist folded, the bones inside his hand and fingers broke into fragments before the impact exploded along his forearm and tore through his elbow... his muscle ruptured beneath his sleeve and his shoulder nearly left its socket, while bruising darkened his flesh so quickly that the entire arm seemed to rot in a single heartbeat.
Phei groaned through clenched teeth.
The Vampire’s claws stopped less than a finger’s breadth from Consort’s back.
His expression changed; that Mortal had known what awaited him!
Phei had seen the strength inside the descending arm and understood exactly what would happen if he tried to catch it. He had known his bones would shatter, his muscles would tear and the World Transcendent’s momentum might rip the entire limb from his body.
He had grabbed him anyway.
What other choice did he have?! Consort had given him an opening!
Phei’s mangled fingers tightened despite being in tatters and the Vampire felt those broken digits close around his wrist and, for the first time, gripping fear!
Too late... Phei cantilled:
"Lust Reality!"
The Vampire’s crimson eyes emptied.
There was no explosion of essence and no visible clash between souls and the battlefield continued raging around them while something far more intimate opened inside the Vampire.
His deepest desire became a world.
Lust Reality seized the longing buried beneath centuries of blood, violence, servitude and cultivated restraint, then unfolded it with horrifying completeness. Sky, earth, memory, sensation and possibility assembled around his consciousness in less than a thought. Every detail carried the familiarity of something he had wanted for so long that his soul recognised the lie before reason could question it.
For the first time since his enslavement, the chains were gone and only freedom and peace stood before him.
Whatever face it wore, whatever heaven it promised, the Vampire reached for it.
The false world closed around his yearning spirit and his soul disappeared from his body; the claws remained suspended behind Consort, close enough to stir the dark fabric at her back, but the will driving them had vanished. The Vampire’s knees buckled in empty air as every trace of intelligence drained from his face.
’Peace at last!’ He thought as his soul rejoiced!
Phei used True Void Steps before the weight of the collapsing body could drag his ruined arm with it.
He vanished as the soulless Vampire fell.
His body struck one of the colossal mirrors rising across Anarctica; the flawless surface bowed beneath the impact, hurled him away and recovered without a single crack. He rolled towards the frozen plain below, limbs jerking while immense vitality continued pumping blood essence through meridians whose owner now existed inside another reality.
Phei reappeared several hundred metres away, pain surging in him.
"Fuck..."
His right arm hung uselessly.
From the shoulder down, it looked assembled by someone with only a hostile understanding of anatomy. His hand had swollen into a blood-dark ruin beneath torn skin. Several fingers bent in directions fingers had no business discovering, and fragments of bone shifted visibly whenever his Dragon regeneration tried to force the limb back into shape.
Primordial Blood surged; the first bone snapped into alignment.
Then another and then his regeneration... it seemed like whatever had happened when he touched the vampire had almost made his regeneration useless. His wrist straightened with a nauseating series of cracks while shredded muscle crawled together beneath the skin. New marrow filled splintered gaps, veins repaired themselves and the purple-black bruising began receding beneath waves of ancient vitality.
Phei stared at the fallen Vampire and grinned through the pain.
Two.
The other watched in horror:
Bromgar, the Half Behemoth-Dwarf, lay soulless at the bottom of a crater large enough to bury mansions. Now Valerius, one of the two Vampires under the Vampire Lady, was now beside Bromgar.
Two World Transcendents had been removed by a Master Stage cultivator who should have died from the pressure of their presence alone.
Phei enjoyed that for perhaps half a second.
The vampire lady disappeared while everyone looked at the fallen Vampire, and Phei void stepped further.... she had spent the whole time and the same half-second before Valerius fell, learning Phei.
Unlike Valerius, she no longer cared where Phei stood: she cared where the Void would return him.
Her ancient eyes tracked the disturbances traveling through the mirror field, the changes in Infinity Control whenever Phei surrendered his position and the spatial hollows intersecting around Consort. True Void Steps swallowed him beyond perception, but the Vampire lady had survived too many centuries by refusing to chase what she could predict.
She was more experienced and she had the top speed compared to everyone else here... speed was her forte and she knew how an amateur, regardless of their insane speed, would move and appear.
She knew the safest exit he’d choose away from his crimes.
And Phei reappeared exactly there but the air around him had turned red when he appeared!
Hundreds of hands erupted from nothingness tearing reality!
<annotations style="display: none;">The female vampire (but not the vampire lady)</annotations>
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