Totem Xuan Serpent vs. Silver Dome Lord (Part II)
No matter how fiercely the White Demon Eagle Legion charged — no matter how great their numbers or how high their morale — every last one of them turned to a corpse and fell from the sky.
The Totem Xuan Serpent rode the mist and stood tall in the sky, its gaze fixed on the Silver Dome Lord with imperious contempt. The White Demon Eagle Legion — thick as driving rain — it never spared them a glance. Thousands upon thousands of White Demon Eagles failed to diminish its Domain by even a fraction. As if mocking the Silver Dome Lord's foolishness, it flicked its scarlet forked tongue in a brazen challenge.
The Silver Dome Lord realized this approach was only sending its subjects to die. It ordered the White Demon Eagles to fall back and instead unleashed the storm of razor feathers surrounding its body, sending them hurtling toward the Totem Xuan Serpent.
Those silver blades had already been scattered by Councillor Zhu Meng's fire lance, their power significantly diminished. The Totem Xuan Serpent stood unmoved upon the clouds. The blades left only shallow scratches on its metallic scales. It didn't dodge, didn't flinch — it simply watched the Silver Dome Lord with those unblinking eyes, as if waiting for it to exhaust every trick it had.
Then, without warning, the Totem Xuan Serpent shot forward — fast as a purple-black bolt of lightning. The dense storm of blade-feathers posed no obstacle whatsoever. It rocketed straight to the Silver Dome Lord, clamped its jaws onto one of its wings, and hurled the creature savagely toward the ground.
Out on the city's outskirts, great crowds of people were still scrambling inward toward the center. Whenever Demon-Beasts attacked, every city immediately activated its Safety Barrier — humanity's refuge when disaster struck.
Safety Barriers covered only a limited area. Each district might have just one, and getting everyone evacuated inside before disaster took full hold was never a simple task.
From high above, the dense tangle of streets was reduced to a tiny grid. Buildings and streams of traffic looked impossibly small — to say nothing of the people themselves.
The crowds were nothing but clusters of black dots, and only when they massed together could you tell they were moving at all — painfully slowly compared to the White Demon Eagle Legion bearing down on them. Had a shroud of blue-green toxic mist not hung continuously over the city's outskirts, these people would long since have ended up as food in the eagles' bellies.
"Good God — look at that! What *is* that?!" In one of the evacuation columns, several students suddenly spotted something silver plummeting from the chaos of the sky above.
The creature was covered head to tail in feathers — razor-sharp and gleaming in the morning sun, as though armored from crown to wingtip in silver blades. Its wings hit the ground first. A broad swath of low-rise residential buildings near the city's edge was reduced to rubble, and a massive cloud of dust and debris billowed out across several city blocks.
Most of this western district had already been evacuated. The Silver Dome Lord hauled itself upright, furious — then shook the dust and debris from its body with an air of almost vain fastidiousness, as though it couldn't bear its pristine feathers staying soiled for a moment longer.
It rose to its full height: a creature of apocalyptic scale, like something out of a disaster film. Residential blocks, streets, parks, hospitals, schools, and highway overpasses all looked like toy models before it.
The evacuees had fled far — yet even from across half the city they could see the great silver bird spread its wings to their full span, and the sight sent a wave of primal terror crashing through every soul watching.
"Something else is falling!" In one of the schools, a female teacher who had been shepherding students to safety shrieked and jabbed a shaking finger at the western sky.
Even while it was still high in the clouds you could make out the shape of a blue-black serpent. As it plummeted at terrifying speed, people realized it was immeasurably larger than it had first appeared.
The Silver Dome Lord was already on a catastrophic scale — yet the blue-black serpent lord was more than twice its size.
It dove. The moment the Totem Xuan Serpent hit the ground, the shockwave vaporized everything around the impact in an instant — a towering column of dust surging skyward — leaving the distant onlookers barely able to trust their own eyes.
Magic had long been revered by humanity as a force beyond all measure. Standing here now, watching these two colossal Sovereign-class beings tear each other apart, it suddenly seemed to belong to an entirely different league.
Up on the Totem Xuan Serpent's head, Mo Fan and Lingling had both gone dead white.
This massive creature wanted to throw down with the Silver Dome Lord and couldn't even give them a heads-up first? It could at least have set the two tiny humans clinging to it like insects down somewhere safe before going berserk — did it have to have such an absolutely catastrophic temper?!
The Totem Xuan Serpent truly did have a hair-trigger temper — its world contained nothing but the cold-blooded Silver Dome Lord in front of it. Fortunately, it wasn't completely heartless: it had tucked Mo Fan and Lingling inside several layers of its scales for protection. Without that, the shockwaves from two Sovereign-class beings colliding would have reduced them both to paste.
**SHRIEEEEK!!!!!**
The Totem Xuan Serpent gave the Silver Dome Lord not a single moment's reprieve. The instant the creature spread its wings to take flight again, the serpent whipped its great tail around—
It descended like a falling mountain range, crashing squarely into the Silver Dome Lord's face just as it lifted off the ground.
Smashed down again. The Silver Dome Lord let out a screech of pure fury — and from its open maw erupted a torrent of devastating Destruction Sound Waves.
The waves thundered through the city blocks toward the Totem Xuan Serpent, obliterating everything in their path. Even the serpent's hardened scales splintered under the sonic onslaught, fractures spreading across the surface.
The Totem Xuan Serpent paid it no mind. It answered in kind — the mountain-range tail swinging again in a vicious arc toward the Silver Dome Lord. It swept straight through the sonic blast zone — and connected directly with the Silver Dome Lord's gaping beak.
The Silver Dome Lord reacted like a terrible singer who had just been slapped silent mid-note: the Destructive Sound Wave cut off instantly. The creature staggered backward several steps, crushing a highway toll station flat beneath its weight.
"That beast is *brutal*!!" Tucked inside the Totem Xuan Serpent's armored scales, Lingling's eyes shone with undisguised awe.
Mo Fan nodded vigorously beside her.
Earlier, when they had risen into the sky, he had watched with his own eyes as five full Transcendent Tier Mages attacked the Silver Dome Lord simultaneously — and been utterly routed.
Then the Totem Xuan Serpent stepped in. First it let the Silver Dome Lord have a free shot, standing there while it poured its Domain attacks in unopposed. Then came the bite and the slam into the ground. Then two of the most brutally direct tail-slaps to the face imaginable. That Silver Dome Lord — so imperious, so devastatingly powerful — could do nothing before the Totem Xuan Serpent but scream in impotent rage.
"So many people are watching!" Lingling turned around. From the Totem Xuan Serpent's height, she could see deep into the city center, where countless people were observing the battle from afar — packed onto rooftops and high-floor windows at every spot with a decent vantage point.
Whether it was the Silver Dome Lord or the Totem Xuan Serpent, both were so immense that the clash between them was clearly visible from across half the city.