Villains Aren't Stepping Stones!

Above the ground, the battlefield that had been locked in a suffocating, tense standoff suddenly shuddered as the sky itself seemed to breathe a sigh of violent release.

The Great Array, which had stretched across the entire sect like an impenetrable celestial dome of crimson and azure light, let out a final, hollow vibration before its runic circuits fractured into millions of flickering particles.

Standing along the carved battlements, watchtowers, and broad courtyards, thousands of upturned faces reflected the dying embers of the defensive barrier.

The native sect elders, disciples of the fallen orthodox lineages, and the battle-hardened masters of the Four Sacred Grounds tightened their grips on their talismans and spirit weapons, their eyes wide as the cold, unfiltered northern wind rushed in to bite their skin.

Beside them, the players, numbering hundreds of thousands, watched their system interfaces chime in unison, their heads buzzing with notifications confirming that the environmental barrier had dropped to zero integrity.

Up in the firmament, the sudden evaporation of the protective veil left an unobstructed path straight down into the valley.

Tens of thousands of upper-realm cultivators, floating atop spirit clouds, riding primeval mounts, and hovering on their flying swords, blinked in sheer disbelief.

For hours, that very barrier had repelled their probes and mercilessly obliterated every reckless vanguard who had dared to step across its perimeter.

To see such a terrifying, high grade slaughter formation suddenly crumble without them even lifting a finger, was an unexpected turn of events that caught the entire host off guard.

Even the formation masters of the academy looked stunned. They haven’t even done analyzing the formation yet, but it already crumbled?

Was this formation this fragile?

But they didn’t think much of this scene.

After all, if it was broken, then it was broken.

”Hahaha! The turtle has actually cracked its own shell!” a young master from an ancient sword clan roared, tossing his head back in arrogant amusement. ”This is hilarious!”

”Hahahaha! The heavens themselves have stripped away their coward’s shield!” Another one laughed, ”It seems the heavens really favored us!”

”Slay them all! Cleanse these lower-realm monkeys from the face of the earth!”

Deafening, mocking laughter swept through the ranks of the Imperial Academy like wildfire.

Emboldened by their illustrious bloodlines and high-grade celestial techniques, they abandoned all formations and plunged downward from the clouds like a torrential, multicolored rain of meteors.

Flying swords hissed through the air, divine beasts unleashed elemental roars, and radiant beams of celestial energy lit up the sky as they raced one another to claim the first harvest of lower-realm blood.

However, the slaughter that the academy students were expecting didn’t happen.

The moment the imperial disciples crossed into the sect’s airspace, ready to casually reap the lives of what they believed to be frightened, unorganized rabble, they did not find a panicked flock of sheep scurrying for cover.

Instead, an earth-shattering wave of counter-killing intent erupted from below like an uncoiled dragon!

”Blood Oath Guild, on your formation! Don’t be afraid! We are invincible!” A guild leader amongst the player shouted, slamming his shield down the ground.

Behind him, tens of thousands of players, all with shield, roared and slammed their shield on the ground.

Then, miraculously, within a thousand meter radius around them, all allies was suddenly enveloped by golden aura, increasi their defense and durability by thirty percent!

One native cultivators blinked, noticing the strangeness in his body, ”This... What is this technique?”

Another native cultivator patted him on the shoulders, ”Don’t think about it. The enemies are coming!”

”Kill them!”

”Kill these otherworldly demons!”

BOOM! CRASH!

The initial clash was a catastrophic collision of raw, violent martial force that completely inverted the expectations of the Academy students!

One Nirvana Rebirth student was surrounded and was torn to shreds.

Another one was sneak attacked from behind and had his head cut off.

The weaker students were all swarmed by hundreds of thousands of players!

This situation was actually to be expected, no matter how superior the Imperial Academy’s are, they are only numbered in the tens of thousands, with the vast majority of their students were still Golden Cores, Nascent Souls, and Spirit Ascension.

Only a few hundred truly monstrous scions had reached the terrifying threshold of Nirvana Rebirth.

But down in the basin, the unified army assembled beneath the banner of the Rising Dragon Sect was overwhelmingly dense with top-tier power.

Thousands of native elders all at the Nirvana Rebirth Realm leaped into the sky simultaneously!

The Sword Saint of the Sacred Sword Pavilion swung his wooden blade, unleashing a gray sword-domain that instantly sheared thirty academy disciples into bloody pieces.

The Wind Emperor conjured howling, razor-sharp gales that shredded celestial beast carriages into splinters.

The Nine Lives Demon King roared as his demonic claws caved in the protective talismans of imperial scions.

And the Xuan Yuan Saint crushed entire squads beneath the weight of ancestral earthen seals!

And every imperial disciple who dove forward found themselves instantly swarmed by four, five, or even ten Nirvana-level combatants who fought with wild, ferocious abandon, completely overwhelming their individual technique advantages through suffocating, brute numerical superiority.

Meanwhile, while the players were getting slaughtered, they will soon come back!

A prodigy from an ancient thunder sect thrust his spear clean through the heart of a player named LootGoblin69, vaporizing the warrior’s torso in an explosion of purple lightning.

The student sneered, pulling back his weapon with practiced arrogance and went back to killing several more.

But just a few minutes later, his eyes widened when the exact same player he had killed actually returned to attack him again.

”Bro, your lightning build has terrible tick damage! Let’s go again!” the player, LootGoblin69 laughed hysterically.

”What... what the hell is this?! I destroyed your soul! How can you return!?” the thunder sect prodigy shrieked.

”Scared!? You shoupd be!”

The prodigy’s eyes widening in pure horror as another player he had decapitated leaped from a nearby roof, screaming and swinging a war hammer straight into his ribs with bone-shattering force!

The academy disciples were used to death being final and feared.

Yet these strange, fearless maniacs treated severed limbs and pulverized organs like a mild inconvenience.

They threw their bodies onto spears to create openings, self-detonated explosive talismans while hugging their enemies, and charged straight into meat-grinding formations with wide, manic grins on their faces, completely immune to the psychological dread of mortality.

Then, every time an imperial cultivator expended half their spiritual reserves to incinerate a vanguard squad, those very same fighters rematerialized moments later at full health, laughing, mocking their attackers, and dragging them down through sheer, endless attrition.

Crushed beneath thousands of native Nirvana-stage masters and battered by an immortal army of laughing lunatics who refused to stay dead, the arrogance of the upper-realm host shattered like brittle glass.

The academy students were losing.

”Hahaha!” A guild leader, ”Blue Guild! Slaughter these demons!”

The blood-tinted fog hanging over the valley deepened into an impenetrable, suffocating mire.

The proud, pristine robes of the Imperial Academy, garments woven from heavenly silk, enchanted to repel dirt, blade, and mortal filth, were now stained with the bile of their own pulverized organs and shredded into ribbons.

Across every sector of the sect, the battle had devolved into an agonizing, grinding meat-grinder.

The academy students, who had descended from the clouds with the arrogant leisure of aristocrats attending a seasonal hunt, found themselves trapped in a living nightmare.

”Fall back! Regroup into the Nine Star Defensive Array!” an elite senior student from an ancient clan screamed, his throat raw, spit flying from his lips as his fingers frantically burned through his spatial ring’s reserves.

He threw three several Golden Aegis Talismans into the air, erecting a shimmering, layered dome of divine light that had once withstood the full-force strike of a void beast.

”Hahaha! Don’t think having that barrier will save you!”

Before the runes could even stabilize, six native Nirvana Rebirth elders from the Fallen Sword Sect hurled themselves directly at the barrier.

They did not attempt to probe for weaknesses or unravel the array’s spiritual veins; their faces were twisted into masks of feral, suicidal hatred as they use their full power to try and destroy the barrier.

KABOOOOOM!

The concussive shockwave of six simultaneous Nirvana Rebirth realm powers completely blew the golden barrier to shards.

Before the academy student could even raise his sword to defend himself, dozens of players swarmed into the breach like ravenous locusts.

”Stun-lock him! Interrupt his casting time!”

”Tear off his spatial ring! The loot table on these elite mobs is cracked!”

A rain of crude iron maces, jagged cleavers, and blunt war-hammers battered down upon him.

He swung his ancestral sword, cleanly decapitating three players in a single horizontal arc, their blood spraying across his face.

But even as their severed heads flew through the air, the headless corpses clamped their hands onto his forearms like iron vices, pinning him in place.

Less than three seconds later, three bright blue pillars of light detonated right beside him.

Out stepped the exact same three players he had just beheaded, laughing hysterically as they plunged heavy daggers straight through his armpits and collarbones, dragging him down into the dirt where dozens of boots stomped his ribcage into powder.

His dying screams were choked out by the wet sound of his own marrow being pulverized.

One by one, the scions of the upper realm began to fall.

A proud maiden from a prominent celestial family, whose beauty was celebrated across three star provinces, stood atop a shattered watchtower, her spiritual qi nearly depleted.

Her hair was matted with gore, her breathing coming in ragged, bloody gasps.

She had unleashed her family’s supreme divine art four times, turning hundreds of enemies into ash.

Yet, looking down at the courtyard, she saw those same men walking out of the resurrection light, dusting off their tunics, grinning up at her with mocking, lecherous eyes.

”Why... why won’t you stay dead?!” she wept hysterically, tears cutting clean lines through the blood on her cheeks. ”I severed your souls! I burned your cores! What kind of demonic sorcery is this?!”

”Cry more, trash mob!” a player laughed, throwing a heavy grappling hook that bit deep into her shoulder blade, violently yanking her off the parapet and into the waiting sea of blades below.

Despair, cold crushing despair, began to wrap its suffocating fingers around the hearts of the surviving students.

The realization struck them with the weight of a falling world: their illustrious backgrounds, the names of their ancient ancestral monarchs, their peerless bloodlines—none of it meant anything here.

To the native elders, they were invading devils who deserved nothing less than complete extermination; to the laughing, unkillable players, they were merely digital bags of experience points and rare equipment waiting to be harvested.

The pride that had defined their lives was completely crushed under the weight of this relentless, undying tide.

Young masters who had once looked down upon the lower realm with disgust were now falling to their knees, begging for mercy through mouthfuls of blood, offering ancient scriptures and celestial spirit stones in exchange for their lives.

But their pleas were met only with the cold, unforgiving edge of steel and the wild, mocking laughter of players who simply swung their weapons harder.

The academy’s ranks shattered.

The glorious charge had turned into a desperate, chaotic rout, with terrified students trampling over the mangled corpses of their own classmates, crying out for their elders, crying out for their clans, and weeping in raw, helpless terror as the shadows of death closed in from every side.

Above the sky, away from all these battle, Shen Xun’er simply watched, completely unbothered.

Just then, her academy token suddenly began to beep, and she suddenly smirked, turning towards the horizon.

”...you guys are finally here. Any more and these people might really get annihilated.”

At that moment, an enormous figure fell down from the sky, directly at the center of the sect.

It was a titan made up of rocks and magma, dwarfing all buildings in the surroundings.

Its appearance caused everyone to halt and stare.

Then, a figure gently landed on the Giant’s head.

Long crimson hair that danced with the wind, form fitting red dress that emphasized her curves, a pair of crimson eyes that burn with confidence, and smirk filled with pride.

It was Huo Yue.

”It seems you enjoyed slaughtering my people,” Huo Yue grinned at the players and the natives, ”You will pay for that, you mongrels of lower realm.”

• ~ ~ •

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