Above the ruins, majestic righteousness and baleful ghostly miasma crashed and squeezed against each other. The air cracked under the burden with explosive booms, and even space warped slightly, forming an invisible boundary line.
"Such trampling of life, such desecration of souls… how cruel!"
Jeanne's voice was no longer gentle; it trembled with a repression pushed to the extreme. She gripped her holy standard so tightly her knuckles blanched.
The silent wails and despair of countless resentful spirits stabbed like the sharpest needles into her kind heart, making her tremble faintly with wrath.
This saintly maiden, gentle by nature, revealed for the first time in her life a killing intent so clear and cold.
Even when facing the anti-matter legions—those voidrangers born only for destruction—she had merely fulfilled her duty to end them without hatred in her heart, for they were but the remnant embers of annihilation that should not exist—beyond saving, yet not deserving of blame.
But the evil soul masters before her were different.
They had been living humans, yet they committed atrocities against their own kind, using the blood and wails of innocents as the steps to climb toward power's peak. This thorough, willfully chosen fall into evil was a sin Jeanne could never tolerate and must utterly purify.
In her eyes, these evil soul masters of the Holy Spirit Cult were more wicked and unforgivable than mindless engines of destruction.
"In my Lord's name, I shall judge such grievous sin."
No longer hesitating, the saintly maiden, kindled by blazing anger, shattered the deadlock first.
She raised her holy standard high. A dazzling sacred radiance burst forth, like a second sun rising in a dim world, dispersing all gloom and, with peerless purifying power, roared toward the Holy Spirit cultists.
Judgment descended.
Jeanne's war boots stamped down, shattering the scorched earth beneath her. Gravel and dust splashed and churned in the turbulent air currents around her, like a storm girding a saint.
The lance wrapped in the sanctified banner became a golden meteor that tore the dim heavens. At its tip, a brilliance sufficient to purge all evil gathered, and at a speed beyond vision, it pierced the void—straight at Zhongli Wu.
Among all the evil soul masters, the Holy Spirit Cult's leader had the most oppressive, sinister aura. The resentment and blood-sin coiling about him had nearly condensed into substance, making him like a vortex of wailing souls—naturally Jeanne's first target for purification.
"Not good!"
Zhongli Wu's face changed drastically as a mortal crisis stabbed into his heart from the depths of his soul.
He could clearly sense that what the lance contained was no ordinary soul power, but a higher order force—a natural absolute bane to all filth and darkness—divine might enough to burn soul-flames and purify the origin.
He knew how terrifying Servants were; facing one personally now, he knew it all the more.
At the brink of life and death, Zhongli Wu held nothing back. Soul power surged around him like a flood bursting its dam.
Nine soul rings rose at his feet—black, black, black, black, black, black, red, red, red.
Especially the last three blood-red hundred-thousand-year rings—when they appeared, the crushing pressure seemed to congeal the air itself, enough to stall an ordinary Titled Douluo's soul power and shatter their mind.
"Roar—!"
A dragon's bellow shook the wilds. Space before Zhongli Wu twisted and caved, and a vast, suffocating terror descended.
It was a dark-gold bone dragon over a hundred meters long. Every bone gleamed with metallic chill, its colossal frame outlining an awe-inspiring silhouette of death.
In its eye sockets, two clusters of ghostly blue soul fire blazed, projecting a will of greed and destruction.
Its bony wings snapped open; the shadow they cast fell like the curtain of death, blotting out a large swath of sky—this was Zhongli Wu's strongest beast soul, driven by his Death God Demon Puppet martial soul: the Bone Dragon King, with defenses comparable to an Ultimate Douluo.
Clang—!!!!!
Jeanne's banner-lance, imbued with supreme holy power, crashed into the Bone Dragon King's dark-golden skull as hard as divine iron.
The deafening metal clash cracked like thunder. A ring-shaped shock wave of rampant energy spread out at once.
Gold light and ghostly blue soul fire intertwined, eroded, and annihilated each other madly.
The Bone Dragon King's mountain-like body staggered back several steps under the terrifying kinetic force contained in that strike. In the center of its previously indestructible skull appeared a fine yet shocking crack. The ghostly fire within flickered violently as if beaten by gale winds—clearly grievously wounded.
"What terrifying power!"
Zhongli Wu's heart surged with towering waves.
He could feel it clearly: not only physical impact rode upon that lance tip, but also a pure holy energy like boiling sacred water, frantically eroding and purifying the Bone Dragon King's soul fire at its source.
If not for the Bone Dragon King having been condensed by his lifetime of effort, with fathomless foundation, it would likely have been pierced through and wholly purified in that instant.
Failing to finish it in one blow, Jeanne's eyes cooled. With a deft twist of her wrist, the banner-lance flowed into a sweeping strike.
The tip cleaved the sky, trailing a gorgeous, deadly golden crescent, rending the air with the momentum to split mountains and seas, and hacked at the dragon's relatively slender neck bone.
With just a simple sweep, Jeanne's lance carved a deep, bone-revealing gash across the Bone Dragon King's thick neck.
Crack!
A tooth-aching fracture sounded. That seemingly simple sweep had cut a massive, bone-deep fissure in the dragon's hard neck.
Holy power clung to the wound like the greediest flame, racing inward along the crack to burn and purify, sizzling incessantly as foul black smoke billowed.
Under the continual damage from this natural bane, the soul fire in the dragon's eyes dimmed visibly to the naked eye. Even the beat of its vast bony wings turned sluggish and stiff, scraping harshly under the strain.
Zhongli Wu's eye twitched; his heart bled. The Bone Dragon King was the crystallization of half his life's effort; every fracture was carved upon his own soul.
Yet he dared not recall it—lose that stoutest bulwark, and Jeanne's terrible lance would, in the next second, sweep forward unstoppably and purify him together with his soul.
He could only grit his teeth, face contorted, and madly pour his vast soul power into the Bone Dragon King, trying to steady the collapsing trend and suppress that saintly energy that clung like a bone-borne canker.
"Cult Leader!"
Behind him, the Holy Spirit cultists turned pale with shock.
They had never imagined their mighty leader would be completely suppressed in a single exchange, and that even the strongest beast soul—the Bone Dragon King—would be on the verge of shattering.
Terror gave way to cornered frenzy. Several Titled Douluo-level evil soul masters crushed their fear of Servants and roared as they unleashed their most vicious soul skills, hoping to relieve pressure by attacking elsewhere.
Sky Centipede Douluo spewed a sky-filling dark-green poison miasma. It reeked nauseatingly; wherever it passed, even space sizzled as if corroded. The scorched earth melted, bubbling with countless lethal blisters.
Ten-Thousand Souls Douluo manifested behind him tens of thousands of twisted, tormented wraiths. Their soul-rending screeches converged into a gray-black spiritual torrent, ramming straight into Jeanne's sea of consciousness.
Abomination Douluo's body swelled like a bellows into a towering mound of flesh, stitched from rotting meat. It thundered forward with earth-shaking steps, hurling itself at Jeanne in a reckless charge…
"Don't you dare!"
Would Shrek Academy's elders stand idle while evil soul masters swarmed Jeanne? Almost the instant the enemy moved, they struck without hesitation.
From atop Xuan Zi's head, the horns of the Taotie Divine Ox blazed with heavy ocher light. His twin fists hammered out with mountain-rending force; the violent fist wind was near tangible, blasting and evaporating the spreading poison fog.
Another elder—white-haired and sharp as a sword—blurred into afterimages. With a guide-like sword finger, his soul power fanned into a sky of dazzling, razor-edged sword shadows that poured down like a tempest, precisely intercepting and shredding Ten-Thousand Souls Douluo's tide of wails midair.
Meanwhile, Elder Song appeared soundlessly in the Abomination's path.
The Greenshadow Divine Eagle's phantom flickered behind her. With a light beat of its great cyan wings, countless slicing cyan gales cleaved at space itself, forming a chasm-like barrier before the mountainous flesh monstrosity.
Boom boom boom—!!!
Soul skills of wildly different attributes but equal might collided and exploded over the ruins.
Dazzling, dangerous halos flashed madly. Shock waves spread ring upon ring like tsunamis, grinding the already tottering wreckage to dust. The earth groaned in agony.
A Titled Douluo melee was calamity; it could remake terrain in moments.
By the usual unspoken rules of the Douluo Continent, Titled Douluo must take their battles aloft to avoid harming innocents and cities.
But now, the entire Mingdu had been reduced to ruins—casualties beyond count, a living hell.
The survivors cowered in corners, clinging to life. Rules and scruples were powerless before this apocalyptic scene.
In such a situation, who cared for rules?
Both sides had only one thought—break the enemy as fast and as hard as possible, by any means.
In a blink, Shrek's elders and the Holy Spirit Cult's evil elders were fully entangled in carnage.