Sword Fragment

To one side of the battlefield, a giant compass hovered in these skies. Though the incantation of the compass spun around, the people within could move with no restrains. Kirin stood on the north pole, Arnold on the east, Cynthia on the west, and Rina on the south. The positioning was critical as the occupants would receive different benefits from taking their respective poles.

Kirin as the head, would receive an overall boost to all his abilities; be they physical or spiritual. Arnold on the east would get a tremendous boost to his energy reserves. Rina would see a significant rise in defensive prowess, while Cynthia would get the augmentation for offensive prowess.

On this side of the war, the skies were also filled with thunder, but unlike Danger Noodle's pure red Sage thunder, Kirin's Saint thunder was red with a faint yellow outline. As the head of the formation, it was quite ironic that he spent more time supporting than fighting; though that was his plan from the start.

He wasn't an idiot who thought himself to be invulnerable and this was a critical situation. What was the situation again? Three Saint Masters and a Saint Grandmaster fighting five Saint Gods, while in formation? If it were any other groups of people, the result wouldn't be worth debating. However, the Cultivation Academy's core disciple class weren't exactly normal.

All of them were worth Saint Lords individually. With all the pills and talismans buffing them, they could just barely be considered Saint God level combatants. Arnold would have been as strong as a Saint God, but he was still missing his arm, and the side effects of taking the Bedevilment pill were still holding him back. Now, the plan was just to hold back the Mu Clan. If they could prevent this formation from bothering Jam and Danger Noodle or the Junkies, it would be a resounding success.

The Mu Clan's patriarch, Mu Hai, laughed arrogantly at the four "weaklings" before him. He said "You have exactly one second to decide if you want to fight against us. Come over to our side and kill off the Junkies or we'll destroy you." The energy transmission was sent and understood in less than a hundredth of a second.

Needless to say, neither Kirin nor any of the others capitulated. Kirin also laughed, though his was a meek chortle, he said "Let's see you destroy us then~" Kirin used his Thunder Dao Domain to forcefully teleport into the Mu Clan's common Pentagon Formation. As he moved, the Compass Formation expanded to keep him within it.

Kirin's black spear laced with thunder dangerously swiped at Mu Hai. Spear intent and yellowish red thunder lightly whipped Mu Hai as he dodged. A thin line of red on his neck indicating that he had been wounded disappeared almost as quickly as it appeared.

The other Mu Clan Saint Gods moved in to kill Kirin as he couldn't teleport out. However, Cynthia halberd countered one Saint God, Rina's sword countered another one. As the last two flew in to slash Kirin up into pieces, Arnold appeared already berserking. He flipped himself upside down and did perfect split to counter two Saint Gods at the same time.

With boundless light energy covering one leg, and darkness energy covering the other, Arnold managed to avoid receiving any serious injuries while also protecting Kirin. His Martial Dao Intent also played a significant role in preventing the armor covering his legs from shattering as he confronted two people with superior strenght.

Mu Hai became a bit more serious, he didn't expect this kind of power from Masters and Grandmasters, but the advantage was still in his hands. He said "You fight pretty good, but it won't be enough to save you from this!"

A red talisman tagged his sword making the Yang energy it emanated almost triple in volume. Mu Hai laughed as he charged at Kirin; the sword in his hands looked like it flailed randomly, but the attacks were all precisely focussed on vitals.

Clang! Clang! Clang! Kirin's spear bounced off with tremendous recoil as he struggled to defend from the over changed sword. Though the spear bounced off like it would break at any moment, it never chipped or flexed more than Kirin could support. Seeing this result, made Kirin sigh in relief. He feigned weakness as best as he could, sometimes pretending that the attacks were too strong and flung himself off a couple meters to the side.

While he silently acted to stall for time, he sent Rina a message "Blight them." A couple hundred meters from Kirin, Rina's eyebrows quirked up. 'He wants to set up Blight runes in the middle of this fight?! It's insane… but I like it~'

Internally, Rina entered a laughing fit, on the battlefield she loved chaos a bit too much, despite her noble appearance. Yet on the outside, her face kept its solemn appearance; acting was a part of fighting, or so she had been taught, so this wasn't hard to pull off.

As they "struggled" to fight with their Saint God opponents, Rina and Kirin would periodically condense Thunder and Fire Blight Runes — the same runes that helped Jam nuke the Munchie village — and send them through the ground; precariously setting up a great net that could explode at a moments notice.

While neither of them fought to their utmost potential, doing their best to stall for time and set up their explosive finisher, Cynthia and Arnold were fighting like there was no tomorrow. Arnold did his best to manage two opponents, but would frequently get a hand from Cynthia whenever things took a bad turn.

Upon berserking, Arnold's body didn't become a hulking mass of muscles, rather, his physique would actually shrivel up and compact; condensing into a skeletal monster… Coupled with his strange and ghostly application of Martial Intent, Light and Darkness energy, Arnold fought with an uncanny mood pervading his surroundings.

His armored legs took on spear and sword, as his sole arm was left to defend. For a long while, Arnold and Cynthia worked to hold down three Saint Gods, but in a scheme to kill at least one of them off, a calamity descended.

Seeing that their efforts to fight the one armed armored monk and a teleporting demoness were futile, the three Saint Gods from the Mu Clan devised a plan. "Jianshi, I'll use a sword fragment to stop kill off the monk."

A frenzied voice came back at the man who spoke. "Mu Sangzi! Are you insane?! Using a fragment from the Temporal Sword on these two?"

Mu Sangzi did not become hostile even with Mu Jianshi's yelling. Instead, he calmly replied with "Yes, I know fully well how important the fragments of the Temporal Sword are. But we've been fighting for minutes and these two have not taken a single critical hit. Even their friends off to the side are fighting like they did from the start. All this time has passed and not a single one of them have died! If the situation continues on like this, we'll be screwed once the Red Hawks or Whirls arrive!"

"But the fragment… We don't have too many shards left, and to use one on kids that aren't even Saint Lords… How humiliating." As Jianshi sulked at the thought of wasting a treasure as precious as a fragment from the Temporal Sword, the last Saint God in this group, Mu Shuren quietly commented "Do it… they may be mere Saint Masters and Saint Grandmasters, but to be able to hold us up for this long… I don't think we can call it wasting a fragment, if we use it on them. If we don't kill them quickly, they would absolutely slaughter us if they grew a bit more..."

As the trio conversed they kept fighting at the same pace, but after the decision was made to use a sword fragment, Mu Sangzi and Mu Jianshi teleported away from Arnold. Sangzi threw an incredibly small piece of metal at Arnold. Shimmering with cyan rays of power, the sword fragment disintegrated far from where Arnold currently stood. As a result, he was caught off guard and momentarily lost himself to a complete Time Stop.

This sword fragment came from an Immortal's sword; it had the essence of a Mastered Dao. To Arnold who didn't possess profound insights into time, or even a Dao which was similar to Time, he was put in the worst position possible. A complete Time Stop, left him frozen for over a second at the mercy of the Saint Gods.

In this moment of complete vulnerableness, Arnold didn't even know he was at the precipice of death. In a complete Time Stop, he wouldn't know anything until the fragment's energy ran out. Unlike Arnold, Cynthia could tell almost immediately that he was caught in a deadly trap. She had a Space Dao Domain, which picked up on Time Dao influences. Yet, it was Arnold's energy becoming static that caught her attention.

His figure frozen in the air as the two Saint Gods which previously retreated inched closer with their swords. The moment that Cynthia saw one of the swords pierce Arnold's chest, mere inches away from his heart, her eyes blanked out and the world fell silent.