The Primeval Era-Chapter 156: Who Decided?! II

Happy.

Damian noted the word without letting his expression change.

"Can you tell me who else is here? Can you tell me how you came to be in this holy land, and if anyone is occupying it?"

There it was.

The probing hidden behind welcome. The intelligence gathering disguised as concern. Sir Alex didn’t care about Damian’s wellbeing. He cared about threats. He cared about whether some powerful entity had taken the lost prince under their protection. He cared about whether this confrontation might cost him more than he was willing to pay.

This fucker was a snake through and through.

Damian’s response came out calm.

"It is just me here."

He gestured at the garden surrounding them, at the trees and streams and vegetation that seemed to pulse with inner light.

"I have been living alone here all these years after the Ancestors took pity on me and granted me this land as recompense for the betrayal my father and my mother faced at the hands of their own people."

He let those words settle like stones dropped into still water.

"This garden has been mine to own and to tend to."

The eyes of Captain Alex sharpened.

All pretense of warmth vanished from those star-filled pupils. The smile remained on his face, but it no longer carried even the illusion of happiness. What replaced it was something colder, something that looked at Damian and saw not a lost prince to be welcomed but an obstacle to be removed.

"Is that right?"

Three fuckin’ words!

Sir Alex waved his hand with casual authority, and his voice carried across the assembled forces.

"We have been reunited with the traitorous prince. The criminal who has been a fugitive under the laws of the Dominion of Crimson Stone."

His star-filled eyes fixed on Damian with hunger that had nothing to do with protection or justice.

"Capture him. Break his legs and bring him to his knees for me to question who aided in his escape and exactly why he is in this holy land."

BOOM!

The shift was instant and heavy.

Damian looked at this being as his eyes began to shine with tremendous amounts of blue and gold flames. His rage was about to overflow, fury that had been building across eight years of hiding finally finding an outlet worthy of its intensity.

Beside Sir Alex, two Physique Awakening Warriors stepped forward with grim expressions.

Seventh Circle cultivators whose power exceeded Vessel Completion, whose Physiques had begun to manifest in ways that elevated them beyond ordinary Warriors. They moved with the confidence of predators approaching prey, their stances shifting toward combat readiness as Mana gathered around their forms.

One of them cracked his knuckles with deliberate menace. 𝘧𝑟𝑒𝑒𝘸𝘦𝘣𝑛𝑜𝘷𝑒𝓁.𝘤𝘰𝓂

The other simply smiled.

They expected this to be easy!

Damian coldly watched the incoming Seventh Circle Imperators.

Their Mana signatures blazed around them, auras pressing against the air with weight. One of them was already gathering crimson energy around his fists. The other’s skin was beginning to harden, taking on the grey sheen of mountain stone.

They expected this to take seconds.

They expected him to break.

At this moment, Damian felt like everything slowed down.

His rage did not increase. Instead, it crystallized into something purer, something colder, something that no longer burned but froze. His mind became clear with absolute focus, every thought sharp as obsidian, every perception heightened beyond normal limits.

Inside his mind, his voice rang out.

Persevere.

HUUUM!

Blue radiance shone within him with unfathomable concentration.

The Primordial Mana Core in his chest spun with velocity that turned white droplets into streams. Energy flooded through his channels, through his connection to the clouds above, through his blood painted into every inch of this paradise. The Cradle of First Flames responded to its creator’s will with eager obedience.

And the earth moved.

The vibrant land beneath the feet of the two Physique Awakening Imperators simply opened.

One moment they were striding forward with arrogant confidence. The next, the soil parted like a mouth hungry for flesh, and they plunged downward with shocked expressions that had no time to become anything else. Dark sand rushed upward as they fell, filling their mouths before they could scream, flooding their nostrils before they could breathe, packing into their ears before they could hear their own thoughts.

They were powerful beings.

Their cultivation should have let them resist, should have given them time to break free, should have allowed them to blast their way out through sheer force.

But surprise was a weapon sharper than any blade.

And Damian wasn’t finished.

Golden lightning thundered down from the darkened clouds above.

The first bolt struck with force that shook the entire garden, a pillar of destruction as thick as an Ancient Pillar smashing into the earth where the two Imperators had been swallowed. The ground around the impact point crystallized from sheer heat. The lightning didn’t stop after one strike. It continued in rapid succession, bolt after bolt hammering downward, driving the buried Warriors deeper into soil that refused to release them.

Their bodies lit up with resistance.

Seventh Circle cultivation blazed beneath the earth, Physiques activating in desperate attempts to survive. The one with Stone Titan’s Flesh hardened his skin to maximum density. The one with Crimson Storm Heart tried to generate his own lightning to counter what was striking him.

But they were buried and suffocating.

And the lightning kept coming.

Their forms became scorched beneath the relentless assault, flesh that should have been invulnerable charring under temperatures that exceeded what their defenses could handle. The surprise of the initial attack had denied them the precious seconds needed to mount proper resistance. Now they were paying for that lost time with their lives.

Damian opened his mouth.

A golden beam of extremely dense and pure Mana erupted from between his lips, energy concentrated to levels that made the air itself scream in protest. The beam split in two as it left him, twin rivers of destruction diving into the earth where his enemies lay buried.

The impact was cataclysmic!

Oh!

Soil exploded upward in geysers of dirt and stone. The golden beams bored through the ground like drills, seeking the signatures of the two Imperators with unerring accuracy. When they found their targets, the screams that finally emerged were muffled by earth and sand and the weight of a garden that wanted them dead.

Golden lightning continued to strike from above.

Golden beams continued to pour from below!

The two Seventh Circle Warriors were being crushed between heaven and earth, caught in a vise of pure destruction controlled by a being whose cultivation they had dismissed as insignificant!

Then the land closed.

The soil that had swallowed them compressed with sudden violence, earth packing tight around bodies that had stopped resisting. The screaming ceased. The struggling ended!

What remained were two forms entombed in sacred ground, their lives flickering like candles in a hurricane!