He tucked his legs and sprang like a loosed bow, his longsword scythed down on the Daemon he’d felled seventy-two times.

Unlike carving stone before, the blade slipped like water through its shoulder, stopping a breath from the heart.

Hope flared like a lantern in fog. Finally weaker?

Clang!

Reality broke that hope like ice under a boot; the blade jammed at the heart as if it hit an unbreakable stone, and even his longsword couldn’t bite.

Cold shock stabbed his chest, yet his body moved on habit, reaching to yank the blade free.

It wouldn’t budge, like rebar set in concrete, dead-stuck and laughing at effort.

But this wasn’t rebar; this was his weapon, the reaper’s edge he lived by.

He forced his breath to steady, a pond stilling under wind, and hunted for the reason the sword was trapped.

His eyes flicked fast, and the world seemed to slow like syrup sliding.

His gaze skimmed the Daemon’s body, and he saw the wounds he’d carved knitting like vines over bark.

Disgust rose like bile. Its regeneration’s become monstrous?

If it won’t pull out, then retreat along the cut.

He tried to back the blade out before the wound sealed, but the answer was another bright clang, a bell struck inside a tomb.

Wang Xiaoming stared, disbelief cold as rain; the Daemon, mindless by nature, wore a face shaped into mockery.

Maybe he was reading too much into a snarl, maybe the thing was born looking smug, but he’d been mocked, and he felt it like a slap.

“Get lost!”

He snapped a savage kick at its head, wind howling off his heel, but the Daemon slid aside like a shadow and drove a fist into his gut.

It shouldn’t have mattered; instead, pain twisted like a knife, and a strange force hurled him back like a leaf in a squall.

The elder moved like a net of wind, catching Wang Xiaoming and sparing him a second crash.

“You’re spent! Get back and rest!”

The words struck like a bell; he blinked, then nodded, relief washing in like tide.

Tired? Yeah…

He knew it in his bones; his body was at its limit, every muscle a frayed rope, unable to tighten again to meet the Daemon’s storm or cut its heart.

He let out a dry breath. So damn tired.

The Daemon roared, a cavern tremor that dragged his gaze; laid down by the elder, he could only turn his head, but the scene burned clear as lightning.

The Daemon seemed annoyed by the sword stuck in its flesh; it yanked it free like a thorn, held it up and eyed it like a toy.

One hand gripped the hilt, one the blade, turning the flat toward the ground like a craftsman measuring wood.

Its body, tempered by seventy-two deaths, had changed like iron quenched; even this longsword couldn’t match the stony hardness of its knee.

It dragged the sword down, and as it passed its waist, it snapped its knee up; the flat met the knee like hammer to glass.

The longsword wasn’t a divine blade; it broke, a clean snap that crumbled at the edge, a shatter like frost on a window, beyond repair.

Watching it, Wang Xiaoming felt his heart churned to pulp, as if a grinding wheel chewed through it.

It sounded like something out of a manga, yet that blade had truly walked with him through a thousand dawns and storms.

He’d first met it when he learned to hold a sword, maybe earlier; it had been there like a shadow, always at his side.

Stunned by the loss, he didn’t see the Daemon pacing toward him; his world had tunneled to that broken blade, everything else falling away like snow.

“Gather and burn it all—[Great Holy Light]!”

A flood of blinding radiance poured like noon-day sun, roasting the Daemon to third-degree burns; the elder glanced aside and saw another Daemon closing on Wang Xiaoming, his heart plunging like a stone.

“Wang Xiaoming!”

The shout hit air and died; Wang Xiaoming had slipped into a strange hush, ears closed and eyes veiled, a small world sealed like a walled garden.

And he’d sealed it himself; how do you wake someone who chooses to sleep?

“[Holy Light…]”

The elder began the spell, but the burned Daemon, bones bared like white thorns, clamped his ankle and shattered the casting like a dropped mirror.

He kicked the creature away and reset his stance, breath gathering like stormclouds.

Too late. The delay the burned Daemon bought was enough; the other Daemon stood over Wang Xiaoming now.

Its claw rose like a sickle to the harvest moon, ready to fall and reap a prodigy’s life.

At this moment, the elder’s shout or spell would be a river launched too late, breaking only on rock.