That moment of frozen shock lasted for another few seconds, before a resounding battlecry rose from the lower airzone. The Five Lands’ troops there had broken into a sudden charge, forming up into a lethal edge that was poised to carve a path through the unmoving body of the demons.

Qi exploded out of Aziz’s own back a moment later, and he, along with the other Guardians, closed in on the demons. For some reason, their enemies seemed sluggish and stupefied, but there would be time to examine the finer parts of today’s battle after they were done wiping out the enemies.

Plunging his combat knife through an unprotected throat, the colonel decapitated his target with a single horizontal swing. Silvery arcs danced around him, and the five demons that had been giving him trouble fell to three. Urgency licked at his heart, and Aziz forced himself to continue the onslaught while his enemies were still off-balance for some reason.

For some reason, the actions of the Demon Sovereign had weakened the demons themselves. That, however, was none of Aziz’s business, and space seemed to rip as his next slash, backed with as much strength as possible, tore the next demon into two.

Aziz glanced at his weapon in shock, before bobbing backwards to evade a hastily-thrown punch. The Thruster artefacts on his boots kicked into action a second later, and a sickening crack followed as his leg slammed into the fourth demon. His target threw up blood, before falling from the skies.

The last demon glared at Aziz, and then beat a hasty retreat, fleeing back towards the Wildlands. The colonel, however, wasn’t interested in chasing that fellow down; he was far more interested in the fact that his strength had abruptly increased.

It wasn’t just him either; the other Guardians were also disposing of their own foes with an unnerving ease. Their attacks were faster and stronger, compared to their performance prior to the two great gods’ appearance.

What exactly was going on?

The sea of demons began to recede moments later, having taken disproportionately huge casualties in the aftermath of the two gods’ confrontation. The fliers beat a retreat that was faster than Aziz thought was possible, leaving behind the massed infantry to be slaughtered by the thousands.

As artillery fire mopped up the demons’ ground forces, Aziz glanced at the ongoing battle in the upper airzone, where these surprising changes had seemingly no effect.

The explosions did seem a tad brighter and more devastating, however.

Shaking his head, Aziz joined the others in retreating. As they pulled back into the Heaven-cleaving Fortress, a sudden palpitation assaulted his heart, and a sense of deadly crisis flooded his mind.

He didn’t need to look for the source, however. As one, the Guardians turned to look at a pinprick of light streaking through the skies. In fact, even the Paragons and the Exemplars duking it out had stopped fighting, and Aziz felt the unity of the battlefield as every single combatant stared at it.

There was something inexorable about that tiny radiance, one that commanded all attention. In fact, Aziz could even swear that he could hear a faint calling from it, something that both intrigued and terrified him.

The world lost all colour seconds later, as the speck of light expanded rapidly. An enormous flower of both heat and light swallowed the retreating demons of both the lower and the middle airzone, sending gigantic cracks through the entire battlefield.

Those cracks…didn’t just affect the ground, though.

Black cracks, like the ones that had appeared in the sky when the Demon Sovereign was fighting with the Sentinel of Space, had manifested physically through the lower and middle airzones. In the backdrop of the white sun that was rising in the middle of the battlefield, they stuck out like a sore thumb, but that didn’t matter to Aziz any more.

That attack was far too familiar, far too nostalgic, for him to have forgotten its user.

“Hey,” Marie, who had snuck up on him at some point in, whispered in his ear. “Is that…who I think it is? That kid?”

“I don’t think there’s anyone capable of creating such an attack, but…how many sigils did that need? Or did his strength grow by a ridiculous amount in the past few years?” Aziz asked, his eyes trained on the black cracks in the very fabric of reality itself. “If Gaius could fire off attacks of such a scale, wouldn’t the world be destroyed after a month or so?”

An audible gulp came from Marie, but before she could reply to his words, a solid wall of air had slammed into the Guardians, who were already in the middle of retreating. Forcing himself still with a liberal application of qi, the colonel continued to watch as the ball of fire, now flanked by bolts of lightning, continued to ravage the demons.

The colonel wasn’t surprised to see that an atmosphere of fear and panic was ravaging the Heaven-cleaving Fortress as they landed. All kinds of measuring and detecting artefacts had been set up in the headquarters of the Five Lands’ combined military, but from how the analysts were examining and recording numbers with pale faces, it was clear that the earlier explosion was not something anyone had accounted for.

“That was…scary.”

“I thought I was going to die there.”

“Was that the great gods attacking?”

Chatter filled the air as the Guardians lingered around the landing zone, looking out at the seething sun that had blossomed in the battlefield’s centre. A second one would put an end to the demons camping around the Great Divide, but Aziz, for some reason, didn’t want that to happen.

Those black cracks were the source of his fear.

“Gaius…was that you?” Aziz muttered, looking around. “Or was it someone copying your tactics?”

“We’ll find out soon,” said Marie. “But it seems that today has been…a rather fearsome day. Come on. Follow me. We’ll see if that’s Gaius or not.”