“Try it, if you think you can,” she said, her voice a blade dipped in frost.

Black mist welled around Tisya, alive like coiling serpents, clinging to her like inked rain.

“Go, Dark Tentacles!”

She swept her staff. The shroud hardened into razor tendrils, spears of night lancing for Yumigawa Senki.

“You dark mages are seriously gross,” Senki muttered, disgust rising like bile, eyes cold as moonlight.

She didn’t slack for a breath; a Holy Peak-tier dark mage was a thorned briar, famous for tricks and smoke.

“Light Sword: Heaven’s Holy Radiance!”

Against darkness, light was the cleanest blade. Under its dawn-glow, the mist-tentacles melted like frost in sunlight.

“Piercing Orb!”

Seeing her tendrils fail, Tisya swung again. A black spiked orb blossomed, spinning like a storm fruit, flinging rot-scented spikes.

“Again with the small stuff? She’s stalling,” Senki thought, urgency beating like hooves; she had to reach the Emperor.

She raised the Sacred Life Sword, resolve hard as iron, and unleashed a Sacred Realm finisher.

“Light Sword: Blade of Judgment!”

A colossal sword of light formed behind her, its brilliance a sunburst, its aura crashing like a tidal wave.

“Slash!”

Senki sent the giant blade at Tisya; the air froze solid, a glass lake under the sword’s pressure.

The spiked orb and its darts vaporized in the radiance, like dew burned off at dawn—no hindrance at all.

“My my, why the rush? Phantom!”

At the instant the blade fell, Tisya dissolved into black mist, a shadow slipping past the strike’s horizon.

“Ice Sword: Thousand Miles of Frost!”

As she reformed, cold crept in like winter fog, wrapping her tight; ice bit her ankles and locked her feet.

“This is… ah, so cold!”

The chill gnawed to the soul; her pretty face blanched like paper in snow.

She gritted through the pain and cast a twin-element spell. “Infernal Bloom!”

Hundreds of fiery blossoms fell like meteors, heat rippling, melting every shard of ice—including the cuffs around her feet.

When the ice was gone, her anger flared like a torch. “Damn it, you’ve really lit my fuse!”

She glared at Senki, eyes like knives; frost cracks marred the skin of her feet, pale and angry red.

“How odd. You chose to block me. You lost, and now blame me? That’s laughable.”

Senki shrugged, calm as drifting clouds, gaze saying, Are you out of your mind?

“Curse you—Magic Domain: Palace of Death!”

Humiliated fury burst like thunder. Tisya spread her domain in full, sealing a kilometer of space like an iron coffin.

When a domain opens, it cuts this world from the outer sea—only a Holy Peak-tier can pull it off, at double the cost.

“Oh? That’s your domain? Grim.”

Senki looked at the field of corpses and bones, death-qi pooling like swamp miasma; her fine brows tightened with distaste.

“Hmph! Perfect for your grave.”

Mocked again and again—so she believed—Tisya’s patience snapped like brittle ice.

“Domain Spell: Ten Thousand Demons Pierce the Heart!”

She drew the domain’s might and its laws, loosing a Holy Peak-tier spell like a locust storm.

Tens of thousands of bone arrows, swathed in heavy death-qi, launched at Senki, a full-sphere kill from every angle.

“How annoying. Are dark elements the only thread left here?”

The domain barely bound her, but using elements outside dark felt like dragging chains through mud.

She could awaken the Sacred Life Sword’s true power and end it, but the backlash bit like poison—half a day without magic.

Only at the Divine Realm could her body bear that river without drowning, cutting the venom to a trickle.

“Forget it. Element-wise, I’m stuck with dark. But I can still use time, space, and life.”

Decision settled like a stone. Senki swept her sword. “Dark Sword: Meteor Shower!”

A violet magic circle opened high above, a cold moon-gate; dark-element meteors fell like iron rain.

Boom! Boom! Boom!

The bone arrows shattered before touching her, crushed under the falling stars, dust like ash on the wind.

“What in the world?! How many systems can you wield? Light and ice were bad enough—now darkness too?!”

Before the domain, she’d been wounded; after the domain, she still couldn’t pin Senki down. Frustration boiled like blood.

“I’m sorry. I’m all-series.”

Smiling, Senki swung the Sacred Life Sword again. “Spatial Sword: Multiple Cuts!”

“What?!”

Tisya couldn’t block it; hundreds of slashes hid in the seams of space, invisible blades in the air.

Unless she could break space itself, that technique was a silk net that turned to steel—inescapable.

“Shift—” Puff!

With domain power and soul magic, she barely warped away, but her grasp of spatial law was a dim lantern against Senki’s sun.

Several cuts still found her. Her black robe tore into rags; pale skin opened with bleeding lines like red threads.

“Damn it!”

She layered healing spells; pain ebbed like a slack tide, wounds knitting like moss over stone.

She knew she wasn’t Senki’s match, yet stubbornness burned like a banked coal; she refused to quit.

“Still want to fight? I’d advise surrender. Next time I won’t stay this gentle.”

Senki’s voice was weary wind; there was no deep grudge here—no need to trade lives.

“Surrender? Fine—if you can weather my strongest!”

She lifted her staff high, a black banner against a storm, and cried, “Hymn of Despair!”

In that heartbeat, the domain’s mana and laws rioted like a volcano waking, the whole sky trembling.