Chapter 1654 - 1654. Defeat
Chapter 1654 - 1654. Defeat
Noah had played by the rules for too long. Heaven and Earth needed help, and he was willing to aid them as long as benefits came in his way. However, the environment on the other side of the Immortal Lands was too hateful.
Heaven and Earth were basically asking Noah to help his enemies building an army. His patience had a limit, and the last interaction with the natives had triggered his anger.
Noah was in an environment invaded by enemies of Heaven and Earth. Helping the Devils and the mutated magical beasts would benefit him in the long run, but his companions always made sure that he didn't cause any mess.
His knowledge about that side of the Immortal Lands had always been too poor to evaluate the whole higher plane. After all, his side also had fanatics and zealots. It would be unfair to judge the entire political environment after knowing only a few forces.
However, Noah was in a distant region now. The three upper tier cultivators didn't know whether the other settlements featured any survivor, and his companions were only two liquid stage experts.
The second lake had offered Noah the perfect chance to do something that could hurt Heaven and Earth, and he had taken that chance without showing any hesitation. The two leaders only had to piss him off with speeches about their cultivation journey to make him take a decisive step.
The two leaders trusted Noah's team completely. Heaven and Earth had sent those experts, so there was no need for precautions. Of course, that didn't apply to Noah since he didn't show any respect for rulers and similar existences.
Noah instantly deployed the unstable substance to achieve his peak physical might. He couldn't use other techniques in that situation. The two leaders would notice them and deploy defenses to block his sudden attack otherwise.
His fingers curved and released slashes. That slight movement of his hands was enough to launch attacks that could rival spells cast by liquid stage cultivators.
The two leaders couldn't do much at that distance. They had innate defenses, but Noah's attacks had piercing capabilities. His slashes also carried his sharpness, which ended up giving birth to singularities before reaching their targets.
The cultivators' heads crumbled. Countless cuts opened on their surface and dug deep into their insides. Their consciousness went dark in an instant. Noah had managed to exploit his situation perfectly. He had taken the leaders by surprise and had delivered a deadly blow.
Harold and Fay didn't know how to react to that scene. Everything had happened too quickly. The leaders had bent to shake Noah's hands, but their heads had exploded into a gruesome mess less than a second later.
It immediately became clear that Noah was to blame for that mess, but the two cultivators still struggled to realize what had happened. Everything had gone exceptionally well until then, but their situation had turned upside down in a single instant.
Noah wasn't like Harold and Fay. Dark matter quickly came out of his figure and covered all the structures inside the floating lake.
His ploy depended on the complete lack of witnesses. He couldn't let any of those cultivators leave to preserve his façade in front of his group.
"What are you even doing?!" Harold eventually shouted as the dark matter tried to suppress his existence. "Why did you kill them?!"
Noah was the only one who could hear Harold's words. The dark world could suppress his sounds even if his existence could fight the weakening for now. Yet, there was no need to answer those questions.
The various structures featured entire armies of cultivators, but the best of them were in the gaseous stage. Noah had already killed the strongest experts in that force. He only had to perform a slaughter to complete the initial part of his plan.
Harold and Fay weren't weak. Those experts had fought against mutated sharks and Devils for years already. Those creatures had removed any flaw that still afflicted their battle style.
Fighting the Devils had also improved the stability of their law. Harold and Fay had developed a few countermeasures to those chaotic laws, and they ended up working quite well with the dark world.
Noah's technique changed the environment to suppress the experts' laws, but the latter quickly deployed defenses to keep their existence safe. Harold and Fay didn't suffer from the dark matter. The dark world only managed to limit their range.
Harold and Fay couldn't see and sense anything. Their consciousness barely covered an area of ten meters, and blackness filled their vision.
The environment didn't give them the chance to unleash their full power, but it also failed to restrain them completely. Harold and Fay could still use their abilities, and they soon turned the whole dark cloud into a mess.
Their attacks only managed to destroy a large chunk of the dark world. Their discharge of power had freed them, but a series of massive six-armed dragons soon came out of the black smoke and started to converge on their position.
Harold did his best. His whip released lightning bolts whenever it cracked in the air. His attacks could pierce those dragons in half, but the horde of magical beasts seemed endless.
Fay did the same. Ice spread from under her feet and gave birth to puppets that could hold that horde back for a while. The problem was that Noah didn't leave them any way out of that barrage.
The workshops inside the dark matter worked non-stop. They continued to create six-armed dragons and send them toward the two experts. Noah even made them use fake cores to gain more time while handling the rest of the army.
Harold and Fay slowly pushed back that offensive, but the dark world was too troublesome to handle. The horde of magical beasts had no end. The two experts could only clear the area while they continued to escape from Noah's range.
The dark world eventually allowed Harold and Fay to look through its insides. The dark matter stopped suppressing their senses and gave them the chance to inspect the destruction that Noah had unleashed during those exchanges.
The various buildings were still intact, but black flames burnt on their surface and slowly absorbed the energy that filled their fabric.
The two experts couldn't sense any trace of life coming from the buildings. They initially guessed that the cultivators had activated the inscriptions in the area, but the white lines were silent. That lack of auras could only mean that Noah had taken care of them.
"What have you done?!" Harold shouted, but Noah limited himself to shrug his shoulders.
"You killed an entire army that could have been useful in the mission!" Fay complained.
"That's the whole point," Noah explained. "I'm switching sides. It's finally time to make Heaven and Earth suffer a complete defeat."