She activated the binding in Netherclaw, and a huge, clawed hand Forged itself in midair from blood and sword madra.
The hand struck the inside of the leviathan’s jaws, and her technique wrestled with the monster among the sloshing waves as she called a Thousand-Mile Cloud from her void key.
Then she turned, locking her perception on the other leviathan. The one taken over by its parasite.
It was clashing with its golden opponent, freezing water into waves of ice even as it cast nets of liquid blood.
Yerin gathered her madra, the aura along the edge of her sword, and her soulfire. As the red leviathan beneath her crushed the Netherclaw technique, she launched her Final Sword.
A silver-red sword of light streaked through the darkness.
The blue leviathan sensed it and raised a wall of ice, but the Herald from the Eight-Man Empire was a step ahead. He blew the ice away with a slash of his over-sized cleaver.
Without resistance, the technique landed on corrupted sapphire scales.
The leviathan had still managed to twist, so Yerin’s Final Sword didn’t land directly. The technique carved a chunk out of the serpent the long way, slicing a line down its body.
Which gave the man in gold an opening.
He Forged force madra into a huge, ghostly cleaver, which plunged down like the weapon of a heavenly executioner. It severed the leviathan in half.
Yerin didn’t get a chance to see the Remnant rise, because her own crimson leviathan had latched onto her spirit. Flows of blood madra speared toward her like striking snakes themselves, and she couldn’t move her cloud fast enough to evade them. She sliced through each one with the Flowing Sword Enforcer technique, making her sword shine brighter every second.
She wasn’t fast enough.
One red tendril pierced through her shoulder like a harpoon, but instead of feeling the pain in her shoulder, she felt it in her head.
Her headache magnified a hundredfold in an instant as the Phoenix’s song filled her, grating on her soul. She screamed as she was dragged back, hurled into the depths.
Into the open mouth of the waiting serpent.
Even distracted by the pain, she plunged her sword into the side of the Shadow’s mouth. The entire leviathan’s shape deformed as it started to collapse its own body, ready to crush her and dissolve her at once. It didn’t react to the pain—in fact, she thought it might not feel anything from her sword.
See if it feels this, Yerin thought.
She’d absorbed the Diamond Veins that she’d won in the Uncrowned King tournament, and after that, her merge with Ruby had improved her madra channels even further. Her body and spirit were no longer separate, and her will infused them both.
In other words, she could use a lot of techniques at once without her spirit exploding.
Now seemed like a good time to see how far she could push it.
Yerin activated the Netherclaw binding, and another clawed hand appeared over her head, braced against the walls of the leviathan’s mouth. As the Endless Sword echoed around her, Yerin swept her sword in every direction, launching Striker techniques with every motion.
The Blood Shadow of the leviathan exploded.
She emerged from the center of a wet detonation, and she found herself glad that this wasn’t the physical leviathan, or she would have been soaked in gore.
The gold-armored man with the cleaver hovered over her, a Forged green-and-gray blade over his head. He blinked as he looked down at her, then let his Forger technique dissipate.
Yerin gave him a quick wave before she realized she was below sea level.
Her battle with the Blood Shadow had pushed the water away for hundreds of yards, but now the sea came crashing back. She sloshed around like a crab in a pot, idly wishing the pain in her head would go away.
When she could tell which way was up, she controlled water aura to throw her body into the air. Her Thousand-Mile Cloud caught her.
Now the two members of the Eight-Man Empire had only one enemy left—the monstrous blob-like Blood Shadow in the sky—and they made short work of it. In the first few instants, one blasted the clouds away while the other hauled the bulbous spirit out of hiding and split it into a thousand hideous pieces.
It shrieked as it died, which did nothing to help Yerin’s headache.
She drifted over to the two of them while she held wet hair out of her eyes. Eventually she could pull the moisture out with aura, but that still took time.
The closest Herald of the Eight-Man Empire saw her and put his fists on his hips. He threw his head back and laughed loudly. “A fine showing, young Herald! I see your grudge against the Phoenix has lent you power!”