Nine Venoms Sect Founder

Chapter 144: Unyielding (2)

BANG!

Faster than a lightning bolt, the three-legged crow dropped on the Blood Matron Puppet, baring its elongated talons while its legions of cohorts became obsidian flashes of light as they stabbed at Harun's group. Great crevasses split the makeshift battlefield into several zones, a cacophony of cracking bones reverberated from within the gulfs, and to Mukri's deepest dismay, legions of skeletal knights road tidal waves of darkness as they climbed the gulfs to join the battle dance. Cackling laughs of bitter resentment grated the Birusk camp's ears, but undeterred, Harun joined his hands in a prayer sign. 

Rainbow-colored spiritual incense surged alongside rising tides of Life Essence, and as the two forces blended together, dazzling golden roots sprouted from the ground, spreading across its broken surface and growing to give birth to a succession of gilded redwoods. Oozing a hallowed allure, the golden trees forced their way through what remained of the ceiling—shattering it to pieces. Dancing vines, elastic branches and lianas shot forth, latching on the belligerent but brainless crows, who landed straight in their grasp. Split by the radiant forest, the skeletal knights raked their bone swords and slammed their spears at the reinforced trunks. But whenever they succeeded in scratching the surface, Essence and Incense healed the redwoods, enabling them to crush the bone soldiers with sweeping branch strikes. 

Ambling through the woods, Harun crossed his arms behind his back, looking past walls of unnatural vegetation to fix the crow, who traded blows with the Blood Matron Puppet. Three moves was all it took for Dolma Doll to lose her balance. The undead crow's massive wings smacked her in the face, sending her hurtling across the sky where Harun's redwoods lay in wait. 

Cushioned by a bed of leaves, Dolma Doll activated her lightning marks—unleashing a terrible suppression force that restrained the undead crows corrupt powers. Harun raised his right hand. The pitch-black essence of death flowed out, turning the gilded trees into bleak, ebony woods. 

Ambling across the air, Harun stretched out his hands. Black fog surged out of his sleeves, taking the form of hissing vipers as it surrounded the skeletal knights. Suppressed by Dolma's aura and restrained by Harun's forest of life and death, the skeletal knights couldn't escape the vipers' bites—instantly breaking down into piles of shattered bones. Commanding the osseous pile with the sheer force of his golden eye's telekinetic powers, Harun bound them into dozens of ten-meters long clubs, riding one as a flying sword while the rest shot at the suppressed Crow, clobbering him with impunity. 

But though each of those blows could split a mountain, they bounced against the crow's adamantine feathers, failing to put the tiniest dent in its weakened defenses.

Black rays shot out of the crow's lustrous plumage, soaring upward to condense a jet-black mirror. Revolving on itself, the mirror registered the faces of Harun, Birandar, Mukri and the 103 corpses, peering through their destiny to strike at their future selves—the Three-Legged Crows' Divine Power: Stygian Prophecy.

Though incomparable to their ancestral founder's ability, this Divine Power enabled Three-Legged Crows to divine the most likely future of whoever their mirror registered and erase that future—thereby destroying their target's fate standard. 

99% accurate and only useful against lower-ranked cultivators, in the rare cases where it failed, that Divine Power would turn against its caster instead. But as the mirror's occult energies prepared to obliterate Team Harun's future, the undying crow's surroundings changed, and again it stood before Harun's massive bone clubs, except that this time, Dolma's clawed hand stabbed into its neck as well—ripping one-third its throat off! Harun's golden lightning bolt overlapped with the Blood Matron's marks, strengthening the suppression force restraining the crow. 

Flying backward, the three-legged beast couldn't stop Harun's bone clubs from clobbering its wounded neck. And for a second, took the beating in utter confusion. 

Granted it commanded tremendous powers, at the end of the day, the crow was nothing more than a brainless puppet. Functioning on bestial instinct, its strategic mind barely outpaced a child's, making it unprepared for Harun's superior Fate gimmicks.

By giving the crow a glimpse of the future it sought, Harun bought Dolma enough time to deal their foe a brutal blow. But knowing that the opponent's strength still exceeded her by a significant margin, Harun pressed on, intensifying the wound with some targeted clubbing. With protruding spikes all around their surface, Harun's bone clubs tore through the dazed crow's festering wound, but before they could deal irreversible damage, the undead beast flapped its wings, sending squalls of black winds to tear the clubs to shred.

Joining his hands in a prayer sign, Harun crushed all the trapped crows into blood and gore, and as the essence unleashed by their deaths pervaded the atmosphere, Dolma became a flash of red light, chasing the three-legged crow who soared toward the sky. 

Under the pressure of the refiner's tyrannical fleshly body, space itself cracked, but no matter how fast the Blood Matron became, she couldn't measure up to this abomination. Setting itself ablaze, the three-legged crow became a dark flame meteor, reached the peak of its speed, then dropped down on Dolma. Point blank, the impact of those full-speed, blazing talons could no doubt end the fight. But as the beast neared her luscious face, an invisible space portal formed before the Blood Matron. 

Rushing through the portal's front side, Dolma vanished, reappearing besides Mukri while Harun emerged from the spatial gate's back side—nearing a blow that could end ten him with its aftermath alone.

Yet, the Plague Overlord flashed the three-legged crow a radiant smile. The sky became a flaming-red as Harun put his strongest card on the line: himself! 

Madness and savagery flashed in the Plague Overlord's eyes, Birandar's heart spiraled out of control, but before he could activate his Wheel of Causality, a genuine asteroid dropped from the heavens, carrying with it...the boundless might of a Cosmic Tribulation. Again, the undying beast was confused. But pursuing the speed of light, the asteroid, a 100 meters wide boulder of catastrophic destructive powers, blasted through all of its defenses—dragging it down as it aimed for Harun—the subsequent impact turned the First Range upside down.josei