Birth of the Demonic Sword

Elder Laura had her fair share of issues facing the defensive formations. She shot arrows against the ballistae's bolts, but her attacks couldn't stop those inscribed weapons' attacks completely.

The ballistae were inscribed weapons in the middle tier that launched bolts with power at the peak of the lower tier. The might that they were capable of was superior to most gaseous stage powerhouses.

Elder Laura had to perform evasive maneuvers multiple times to dodge all the attacks coming in her direction. She even shot her morphing arrows toward the weapons when she found an opening, but her techniques would always crumble under the power of the bolts.

Even if her arrows transformed into giant magical beasts, the bolts shot by the ballistae always pierced them to converge on her position. Moreover, the golden light filling the coastline was fixing the spears, so she was about to face formations on two sides.

Still, Elder Laura couldn't do anything to avoid that outcome. She could only do her best and try to find a flaw in the ballistae's array.

Elder Julia didn't have any issue facing the hybrid army and dealing with the coastline at the same time. Her wind-slashes filled the sky above those regions and flew through everything that shone or moved.

The formations on the coast couldn't do anything against that display of power, but the hybrids opposed some resistance.

The hybrid army had one Poisonous Giant Frog in the sixth rank as its leader. The creature's centers of power were near the bottom of the sixth rank, but it had many weaker beings ready to give their lives to defend it.

The creatures in the army didn't belong to their leader's species. They could only display basic battle formations, but that didn't influence their battle prowess in front of a powerhouse.

The weaker hybris had power between the fourth and fifth rank, and only a few of them had a quasi-rank 6 body. It seemed that the Elbas family didn't invest too much in raising them and solely relied on their sheer power as a form of defense.

The Royals only wanted an army that could protect their regions, and the chains locked on the creatures took care of that task. The Elbas family couldn't care less if all the hybrids died to complete their missions. They were disposable assets anyway.

The Poisonous Giant Frog was a threatening opponent for a cultivator. It had a strong body, but it didn't lack long-range attacks that could match human spells. The Royals had also taught it a few techniques, so its battle prowess was far above the level of its centers of power.

'It's a bad copy of the Ancestors,' Noah thought when he looked at the Frog.

He could see how the Elbas family had tried to improve the leader's condition, but they had been quite sloppy at it. The Frog's spells empowered its innate poisonous abilities, but it didn't add other attacks to its arsenal.

The Royals didn't even try to make the creature express its full potential. They had disregarded fundamental aspects of its innate superiority as a hybrid.

'Their desire to control everything has always been their greatest weakness,' Noah thought as a sigh escaped his mouth.

He had suffered from the same behavior when he was only a human cultivator. The Royals desired to have complete control over their underlings, which affected their troops' overall power.

Elder Julia made most of her wind-slashes converge toward the hybrid army, and many of her hidden attacks pierced the ranks of the weaker beasts to crash on the Frog.

The army's leader used the creatures with a quasi-rank 6 body as its shields, but Elder Julia's attacks were hard to notice, and even its superior awareness couldn't help it in the task.

It would have been different if the Frog was a bit stronger, but its level was far below Elder Julia's, so it could only endure her attacks as it waited for an opening in her offensive.

Elder Regina summoned an army of puppets that detonated whenever they clashed with the red wh.i.p.s. Part of her creations was already on the ground, dealing with the inscriptions that the golden light kept on rebuilding.

The wh.i.p.s were massive and tried to catch her with their fast attacks, but Elder Regina was in complete control of the battlefield. Her puppets moved following precise battle formations that always left an escape route open for her.

The puppets detonated every time the wh.i.p.s crashed on them, but Elder Regina never stopped creating more beast-like creatures to refill her army's ranks.

That battle style depleted her "Breath" quickly, but she didn't care as long as she managed to inflict some damage on the red wh.i.p.s. Her goal was to make the Elbas family consume their reserves of energy, and she was doing great at that.

Flying Demon and Dreaming Demon were experienced fighters, so the appearance of that strange creature in the nearby region didn't worry them.

Moreover, they were among the best gaseous stage powerhouses in the world, and they were fighting together. They had nothing to fear in that situation.

The creature appeared made of a mixture of metal, mud, and terrain. The Demons destroyed large chunks of its body with their attacks, but the region always provided more materials to fix those spots.

Its arms could also stretch, and sharp spikes shot out of the four fingers of its vaguely humanoid hands. A dense gas came out of its large mouth too, but the Demons avoided all those attacks.

Flying Demon covered the entire region on the coast with his white flowers. Ice spread from them, and his influence soon reached the strange creature.

Ice began to cover the monster that replaced the frozen pieces of its body with more materials. Its endurance appeared connected to the number of resources in the ground, so defeating it slowly would hurt that area's value.

Dreaming Demon used Flying Demon's ice to make her consciousness seep faster in the creature's fabric. She wanted to take control of it, but she soon understood that the task wouldn't be easy.

The materials in the creature's body were already under the influence of another consciousness, and the Royals seemed to have placed protections against her methods.

Something or someone was already controlling the ground in the entire region, so the Demons had to find the existence behind that defense if they wanted to avoid ruining that land forever.

"I'll open a path," Flying Demon said toward his lover. He waved his hand, and the flowers shattered to release a storm of ice-shards that crashed on the monster.

The creature's movements slowed down as the attacks landed on its body. Pieces of frozen ground fell from its figure as the monster tried to replace its wounded parts, but Flying Demon's offensive didn't give it enough time to heal.

The monster eventually stopped moving, and ice covered its whole figure. Flying Demon joined his hands in front of his chest, and a tall flower grew on the frozen creature.

Then, Flying Demon's hands separated, and cracks appeared on the tall flower's structure. A vertical fissure spread from the white plant's top and reached the creature.

The crack began to spread on the frozen creature, and it soon opened a large cavity that divided its body in half. Flying Demon only had to split his hands further to open the monster and reveal its insides.

Frozen terrain and mud fell from the creature's insides when Flying Demon forced it open. Dreaming Demon's consciousness shot forward to inspect it, but her mental waves had to reach deep inside the region to find the monster's core.

There was a small golden sphere made of a smooth metal under the monster. Dreaming Demon shared that vision with her lover, and Flying Demon couldn't help but find similarities between that item and Noah's Beast Cores.

It seemed that the Elbas family had tried to create a fake sea of consciousness to give birth to that monster. They wanted to give life to the very ground of a region so that it could fight with them.

The Demons exchanged a cold smile at that sight, and the same idea appeared inside their minds.