The demon horde pressed forward again, and the three defensive lines braced themselves. Ripples of tension spread through the ranks, but at the central line, the Origin and Duskbane warriors stood tall, floating in the void with blades, essence, and mana burning.
Thalren's voice crackled through the command node, "All lines, engage on my mark."
The demon horde churned closer, a tide of shadow and flame.
"Mark."
The entire frontline surged.
Warriors pushed forward from all three lines, racing to meet the incoming tide of darkness. Those assigned to guard the rear formation held back, but the rest accelerated forward, streaks of light across the blackened horizon.
Adrian's gaze narrowed as he tracked the central line.
Before the other clans even reached halfway across the void, the central line had already collided with the demon horde.
Every watching warrior froze in disbelief.
Rather than slowing down when they met the demons, as was natural in any void battle, the central line plunged deeper. They pierced straight into the demon formation like a spear dipped in starlight, unstoppable and deliberately reckless.
And at the very front of that spear, blinking through space with manic enthusiasm, was Kai.
He vanished and reappeared with such relentless rhythm that his afterimages blurred into the haze of battle. Each appearance brought a rotating blade of compressed space that tore through lesser demons; each disappearance left behind a trail of broken bodies drifting silently in the void.
His attacks were not fatal to all; some demons survived, others shrieked, others simply fell apart, but the effect was undeniable.
"Kai, you're getting sloppy," Seraphina's voice cut through the network, teasing.
"Sloppy?" Kai blinked mid-strike, his blade carving through a demon's throat, "I'm three hundred kills ahead of you."
"Quality over quantity."
Behind him, dozens followed with equal ferocity. Helena danced through the battlefield like a streak of flame, her blade moving with such elegance that it seemed she painted the void with fire rather than fighting in it.
Every blink left a spiral of flames behind her, and her blade, wrapped in a golden-red aura, cut through demons like parchment. Even at a distance, lesser demons recoiled instinctively from the pressure surrounding her, as if the very aura warned them that anywhere she appeared would be the place they die.
Scarlett appeared and vanished in coordination with Helena, drawing water in the void, water that should have been impossible to conjure here, yet materialized with her essence. Her torrents swept demons aside, and Ironwood, calmly following her wake, crystallized steel into the flowing water, impaling every incapacitated target in an instant.
"Left flank," Ironwood said, his tone flat.
Scarlett didn't answer. She simply shifted, her water twisting mid-flow to engulf a cluster of demons attempting to flank them.
Not far from them, synchronized movements continued. A cluster of warriors launched a stellar-level fireball together, which was blocked by the demons' coordinated defense, but the instant their defenses lifted, an ice shard slipped through from another warrior, spearing through their skulls.
Nothing matched any battlefield logic that the demons or the allied clans understood.
To the demons, every Origin and Duskbane warrior became an impossible enemy. The moment they lunged, they vanished; when they struck, someone blinked behind them. Fire bloomed from one hand and ice detonated from another; life essence sealed wounds the moment they were inflicted.
The demons felt it first, a rising sense of confusion steeped in fear.
"How do they use so many essences?"
No one could explain it.
Nor could the warriors from the other clans. They stood frozen for several heartbeats, watching as the central line carved the demon horde apart piece by piece.
In the northern line, a Voidrender captain stared at the battlefield projection, "That's… impossible."
His lieutenant didn't respond. He simply watched as another Origin warrior blinked through a demon, cast fire with one hand and gravity with the other, then vanished before retaliation could land.
"They're all multi-essence users," the captain whispered.
"All of them?"
"All of them."
They had all heard about the Origin Path; some had dismissed it as exaggerated propaganda, others had bought a second affinity sphere and tried to comprehend anything, concluding the idea would need too much time. Some even laughed at that time, saying they could stop wasting effort and use it to become a stellar.
But now, watching hundreds of SSS-ranks blink, cast two affinities, heal wounds, the entire frontline knew they had been wrong.
If these were SSS-ranks… then SSS-rank had ceased to mean anything.
In the entire galactic path, for a stellar with two domains, they called them lords. More than two, they called them warlords.
But there had never been a situation where an SSS-rank with multiple essence seeds appeared.
Should they call them SSS-rank warlords now? No one knew. They didn't even have a cultivation classification for this.
And still, even if they followed the Origin Path, it should have taken them centuries to do this!
So how did the Origin and Duskbane warriors do it this soon?
Are they a hidden clan just surfacing now?
Questions ripple through the allied forces, carrying on confusion and awe.
Above the chaos, more than eighty remaining demon commanders watched with a growing sense of irritation. They did not understand what the empire's lesser beings were doing, but they knew one thing with certainty: Regardless of tricks or illusions, SSS-ranks could not threaten Stellars.
With that confidence, every demon commander expanded their domain, flooding the battlefield with suppressive force.
Everyone felt the shift instantly, a cascade of overlapping pressures that crushed down on the void itself. The lesser demons rallied beneath the protection of their commanders' domains.
In response, the Stellars of the clans activated their domains, all eighty-seven of them.
Even they had been uneasy moments earlier, believing they would be outmatched by the hundred demon commanders; but the moment the origin forces shattered through the demon frontline, hope returned to the allied Stellars. They pushed forward with renewed force, matching the demons blow for blow.
But it was the central line that terrified the demons most.
Twenty-six Stellars, fifteen from Origin, and eleven from Duskbane blinked into the void above the horde. For a moment, the demon commanders froze. These were the same beings who had killed twelve commanders earlier in the blink of an eye.
They descended into the fray like falling stars, and chaos erupted.
Each spell they cast carried the weight of Stellar-level power, yet none of them relied exclusively on their primary affinity, which they had used to form their domain.
A Stellar of fire blinked and attacked with ice. A Stellar of gravity blinked again, then launched a water spell. A Stellar of ice bound a demon commander with shadows.
The commanders froze for a moment, unable to comprehend what they were witnessing.
If they could unleash Stellar-level spells from multiple concepts… did that not make them equivalent to Warlords?
And if so, why did none of them reveal multiple domains?
This was warlord-level combat, but without the presence of any additional domains.
The commanders felt an uncomfortable sinking sensation, as though the galaxy's laws were bending beneath their feet.
Selena trapped a demon commander in a gravity snare so dense that not even his domain could shake it.
"Now," she said calmly through the origin net.
A heartbeat later, a fireball stronger than any stellar spell she had ever cast before tore through the demon's chest. The demon's torso split open, flames devouring the wound from the inside. As the stunned commander faltered, Elara blinked behind him and severed his head cleanly.
The body drifted apart in silence.
"Three," Elara said, her voice steady.
"Two," Selena replied.
"You're counting?"
"Always."
The central line Stellars worked in fluid motion, chaining affinities, concepts, techniques, and attacks. Demon commanders screamed as they fell one after another. Below them, lesser demons were dying in sweeping arcs of fire, water, and steel.
Thomas appeared in the midst of five demon commanders, his fire domain blazing so bright it scorched the void itself. One lunged at him with claws wreathed in shadow. Thomas didn't retreat. He shifted sideways, blinked through space, and struck the demon's spine with a blade of compressed ice that shattered on impact, freezing the commander's entire torso solid.
Another commander attacked from above. Thomas raised his hand, and gravity snare crushed the demon downward so violently that its bones snapped audibly even through the void.
"Thomas, you're wasting mana," Kael's voice cut through the network.
"I'm fine."
"You're at sixty percent."
"Still fine."
Kael blinked beside him, slicing through a third commander with a spatial blade. The demon's body separated cleanly at the waist.
From the command hall, Thalren and Seraphis watched in silent awe, unable to reconcile the chaos unfolding before them with any known framework of cultivation. Every theory they formed collapsed.
Thalren's eyes tracked the battlefield projections, analyzing essence flows, mana consumption rates, domain interactions. None of it made sense.
"Patriarch," one of his officers said quietly, "the central line has eliminated nineteen demon commanders in four minutes."
Thalren didn't respond. He simply stared at the projection where Draven blinked through a demon's domain as though it didn't exist, then detonated a shadow spike inside the commander's skull.
It was not like a siege now; this more and more looked like the origin clans' training ground! Not even a single death from the central line has been registered till now.
They could no longer pretend these were skill scrolls. No scroll lasted long enough to sustain this. No scroll could generate this many spells. No scroll could allow thousands to blink through space or heal without pause.
The same thought ran through both Thalren and Seraphis, "Perhaps Origin was a hidden ancient clan? Perhaps they had been preparing for millennia?"
But when Thalren noticed the Duskbane warriors fighting alongside them, the same warriors he personally knew were ordinary before a few weeks, every theory crumbled.
He could not understand it, could not categorize it, could not justify what he was witnessing.
How was the origin clan doing this?