Leonardo fixed his gaze on the bone fragment, and for the first time, an unshakable sense of unease stirred in his mind. Not waiting to let it finish whatever “transformation” it was undergoing, he raised his hand. From the tip of his finger, a vine sprouted, lengthening and shifting until it became a massive serpent with scales of overlapping leaves.

  With the swiftness of lightning, the serpent darted toward the bone shard and opened its enormous mouth, swallowing the evil relic whole.

  As the attack finished, Leonardo’s expression darkened. He slashed his hand downward, severing the root of the conjured vine. From the serpent’s head, a spreading blackness began to race across its entire body. In seconds, the leafy creature decayed and collapsed, rotting into nothing but a foul heap of sludge.

  “Bone of a demigod… So what’s the scheme here? What are you trying to pull?” Leonardo growled through clenched teeth.

  The archdemon’s bone ascended, drifting upward until it passed through the rift and floated above the Serene Temple.

  “Knock it down,” Leonardo commanded.

  Spells and assaults unleashed from Sicily struck against it again and again, yet not a single attempt had any effect.

  “Evacuate everyone immediately!” Leonardo shouted.

  Many people had already begun to flee the moment chaos erupted, but a large number still lingered. They stayed out of reckless curiosity, and many even raised their phones to capture the horrific scene on camera.

  Years of uninterrupted peace had made people careless, dulled their sense of danger.

  “Leave right now!”

  “Move back, get back!”

  The city guards pushed forward, struggling to guide the crowd away.

  “Oh the Flow…” A young woman gasped, raising both hands to cover her mouth.

  From the edge of the gateway into the Dream Realm, thousands of heads began to emerge. Each head was eyeless, noseless, nothing but grotesque faces with wide jaws filled with serrated fangs. Their long crimson tongues lolled out, flicking at the air.

  Then a figure appeared beside the sacrificial altar. It was a half-human, half-spider young guy, with six arms, and in each hand he gripped a huge ten-foot-long bone blade. His voice rang out cold and commanding:

  “Advance. Slaughter them all, and seize the Gift for me!”

  The longnight spiders leapt from the rift, landing in a harsh rustle of limbs and armored bodies. They swarmed toward Leonardo and the city’s guards.

  Bên c?nh ?ó, t?ng k? n?t nh? h?n c?ng hi?n ra ? kh?p Golden Wheat Valley, và quái v?t tràn ra r?i xu?ng t? ?ó, gay ra ?? lo?i h?n lo?n.

  “Foolish, nightmare-born creatures. You have no notion how insignificant your strength is next to mine,” Leonardo sneered.

  From his sleeve, a small wooden snake slid free, lengthening and hardening as it twisted into a staff. With a sharp motion, he swung it toward the oncoming swarm. At once, the grass beneath the spiders’ feet surged upward, twisting and binding around their limbs. The green tendrils pierced through their thick skin, burrowing deep into their bodies. Every spider attacking across Gold Wheat Valley was caught in the same snare.

  “Gurgle… ghrkkk…”

  The spiders choked and thrashed, clawing at their own throats as if to rip something out from inside themselves. Yet their desperate struggle was useless. From within their mouths, plants began to sprout, stems forcing their way outward. Buds formed, blossomed into full flowers, and as the petals spread wide, the spiders fell still, motionless.

  “Stay calm. What you see are low-rank creatures at best, and the rats hiding beyond the rift are only at arcane rank. If they dare crawl out of the Nightmare World, Sicily will graciously recycle them into high-grade fertilizer for our land,” Leonardo declared.

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  Though his words carried confidence, his body betrayed tension. Every sense was sharpened, every muscle prepared, for he knew well enough that only a fool would throw themselves toward certain death. His eyes lifted again to the bone fragment hovering above, his stare filled with wary vigilance.

  “… beneath the sable radiance of our Lord.”

  The prayer on the other side of the rift reached its end.

  “The moon…” a woman stammered, her voice trembling.

  No one could tell when it had happened, but the pale golden full moon had already turned into a pure, pitch-black sphere. It was a lunar eclipse.

  “Everyone, please move back! Guards, form up the defensive formation at once!” Leonardo commanded with a booming voice.

  So that’s their plan… our magic power has been pressed down one rank lower. No wonder these pests dared to assault Sicily. This is going to be troublesome. Leonardo frowned.

  He lifted his staff high, chanting under his breath. Across the slopes of Echo Hill, every plant sprang to life with unnatural vigor. Vines, roots, and flowers twisted together, reshaping themselves into tens of thousands of plant-born creatures and wooden warriors clad in bark armor. Even though his own rank was suppressed, Leonardo’s amount of magic remained that of a Grand druid, enough to summon an army of nature.

  The half-spider guy hefted a giant bone blade onto his shoulder and sneered:

  “You think sheer numbers put you at an advantage? The feast begins now, my children.”

  More and more longnight spiders poured out of the portals and flooded the valley. Then, with a violent leap, the guy led the longnight spiders charging toward the Serene Temple. The monsters crashed headlong into Leonardo’s forest soldiers and the defending city guards, and battle erupted with deafening force.

  “Careful! There are forty-eight ferocious ranks and seven elder ranks. Damn it! Without that thing, I’d wipe them out myself!”

  Her hair and even her eyebrows blazed with a fiery red hue. Her hands never paused as she pulled back her bow, loosing arrow after arrow made of flame into the swarm of monsters. Each shot struck true, igniting and tearing through a spider. She was Sicily's Chief of Civic Security.

  “Cindara, how much longer before reinforcements from Gnomon arrive?” Leonardo asked her.

  “I sent an emergency alert the instant the rift appeared,” the woman answered. “But since the projection of Sable Moon rose overhead, all contact with the outside has been lost. Worse still, no one within the valley can leave the Dark Side now. We have no choice but to deal with these monsters ourselves.”

  Her arrows continued to drop spider after spider, but still more poured from the widening rift.

  Leonardo summoned three towering mantises, their massive frames woven from leaves, bark, and twisted branches, and sent them surging forward as one.

  The spider guy met them head-on. His six stone blades flashed as his body blurred across the battlefield, each swing carving a sweeping arc of force, the shockwaves ripping through the ground and splitting the earth open in fissures that stretched for hundreds of feet.

  Nightmare magic bled from him with every motion, warping the air and gnawing at the mantises’ minds. Yet they pressed on regardless, clashing with him in a relentless storm of blades and splintering wood.

  As they fought, the land itself turned hostile: grass, roots, and thorned vines erupted from the soil at their command, winding tight around his legs and arms, constricting with crushing force.

  Barbed thorns drove into his flesh, while thinner tendrils slithered upward, clawing for his eyes, his ears, his mouth, forcing their way toward every gap and opening in his body. It was never enough to halt him outright, but it dragged at every movement, gnawing away at his speed, step by step.

  From their wounds, glowing dark green etherized blood poured from their shattered bodies, vaporizing into a shimmering mist that clung to the air.

  The fog dulled the spider guy’s movements, sapping his speed and dulling his strikes, and where the mantises’ scythe-like forelimbs cut into him, dark mold bloomed instantly along the wounds, spreading like a living curse through his flesh.

  Again and again, his blades split the mantises apart, cleaving them in two, crushing them into splinters, yet even in pieces they wrapped themselves around him, wooden limbs locking tight. In the next instant, Leonardo’s power surged, knitting bark, leaf, and branch back together in a heartbeat. Each time they reformed, their bodies seemed denser, their movements sharper, their presence more oppressive.

  Within moments, the battlefield itself was no longer recognizable.

  Trees twisted upward where cracks had been, vines choked the air, and grotesque growths spread unchecked. What had once been open ground rapidly transformed into a warped, living forest, one born from blood, nightmare, and unrelenting regeneration, where all four continued their savage struggle.

  “You fucking rats, what the hell are you waiting for? If you keep hiding any longer, I’m done with this shit!” he shouted in frustration.

  “Coming, coming. What’s wrong, Carlios? Just five minutes and you’re already calling for help? That’s kind of pathetic,” a voice rang out.

  The mocking voice belonged to a burly man in a black suit who leapt from the rift. He looked to be past forty, his scalp polished bald, and a black circle tattooed right in the center of his forehead.

  “He’s a Grand being, you fucking retarded! If you think you’re so tough, then get in here and fight him yourself! I swear I’ll collect what’s left of you afterward!” Carlios snarled back at him.

  To his left, a swirl of smoke condensed and took shape, becoming a woman dressed in black priestess robes. She stretched out her hand to touch one of the mantises. At once, the creature rotted away, collapsing into a heap of foul sludge, and couldn’t regenerate.

  “Hand over the Gift of Peace,” she said, her voice cold as ice.