Ever since Lingxiao and Lingsaki unfurled their domains, a tailwind pressed at my back. Power flowed like sunlight warming cold steel.

Maybe it’s a sibling resonance, a silver thread between two stars.

As their ultimates roared out, Loreen’s gaze swung their way like a compass to a magnet—no, she split it, one eye a moon for each shore.

Thanks to that, the weight on my shoulders eased like rain letting up. Her aura no longer felt unbreakable, the mountain showing its first crack. Add the three of us together, and our river met her sea without shrinking. That meant a chance—so long as the gap wasn’t a bottomless ravine, there was a bridge.

“Forbidden Light Magic—Aurora Lance.”

“Forbidden Dark Magic—Cataclysmic Nether Thunder.”

While I beat back Loreen’s strike, a tidal surge of power rolled from above like thunder over a ridge. I looked up, and a colossal lance of light, wrapped in lightning like a dragon of storms, tore down through the sky toward her.

To avoid getting dragged into that whirlpool, I snapped a Draw Sword Technique at Loreen, a crescent Sword Aura like a new moon, and leapt back like a startled sparrow. As for Loreen, there was no time to dodge—or rather, even with time, she wouldn’t. Every strike so far had been batted aside or died on her earth bulwark like waves on a cliff.

“Half‑Moon—Fallen Petals.”

She neither flinched nor fled, a war‑banner in the wind, and raised the Heavenly Lance with unblinking calm to meet us.

BOOM!

The Heavenly Lance’s afterimage smashed into the light lance and my Sword Aura. At the instant of contact, a sun blossomed, a blast so violent it shattered everything nearby like glass.

The ground and even the air split, a jagged ravine clawing across earth and sky.

Did it work? The question rattled in my chest like a caged bird as I stared into the boiling mist.

After a breath, the fog thinned like frost under dawning light.

“Impressive,” Loreen said, her voice cool as moonlight on stone. “Twin sisters bearing the Rule Book, your timing braided like twin streams. You forced a peak‑Saint forbidden spell into a divine‑grade first‑tier casting by fusion, like hammering iron into a new blade. But only the edge reached that realm; your grasp of the laws is still a step short, a lotus not yet in full bloom.”

She looked at Lingxiao and Lingsaki not far away, eyes warm like a winter hearth, as if the strike had done nothing at all. No—that wasn’t quite true; scuffs marred her armor like claw marks, and the pressure she exuded thinned like smoke on the wind. So it had bitten after all, a wolf’s tooth in the dark.

Huh—my eyes snagged on the bell hanging from her right hand; its copper mouths stayed intact, but the cord was frayed like an old pier rope. Good—victory peeked over the ridge like first light. One more push; even with my strength burnt down to embers, I could flare once more like a struck match.

“Ha… ha… thanks for the compliment,” one of the sisters said, breath ragged like wind through reeds. “Keeping so many peak‑Saint forbidden spells flowing is bone‑deep tiring.”

“Brother,” Lingsaki added, her voice thin as paper, “Lingxiao and I have almost no mana left, and our stamina too; at most we can last a minute,” the oil in her lamp guttering.

Lingxiao and Lingsaki kept wiping sweat from their brows while weaving recovery spells, their pretty faces pale as snow and their chests rising like bellows. From the moment they spread their domains to now, they’d hurled five peak‑Saint forbidden spells, a load that would break most early Divine Realm mages like ice underfoot. That they could last another minute in this storm was already monstrous, a bamboo bending without breaking.

“One minute?” I drew a deep breath like a diver before a plunge. “Enough.”

I looked at Loreen ahead and offered a proposal, casting the line like a fisherman at dusk: “Loreen, we’re running on fumes—me, Lingxiao, and Lingsaki. If we keep trading blows, we lose, like a candle in a gale. So, how about this. We’ll use our strongest moves together, one stroke to settle it, a single arrow deciding the hunt. Deal?”

“All together makes three moves,” Loreen quipped, a ripple across still water, then nodded. “Very well, I accept. Whatever you bring, I shall block, a wall against the tide. Whether you can settle it depends on whether you can knock down the bell in my hand.”