Stas carefully calculated each step, as a single mistake would jeopardize the entire group. Hundreds, if not thousands, of chaos monsters were around, and drawing their attention would be incredibly foolish.

Izanami's technique, activated at its full potential, created a refraction of incoming light, making it difficult for the group of assassins to navigate the area. However, this was the only way they could be sure that the warlocks' search spells wouldn't detect them.

On the other hand, the air blurring before their eyes shielded them from the horrors filling the chaos-ridden city. The unholy symbols on the walls made one's mind drift and contort. If one looked too long, they might not notice when their soul was no longer their own.

But what the technique didn't shield them from was the foul, rotten stench that permeated everything. What more could be said when even a helmet crafted specifically for blocking gases could not protect Stas from the loathsome miasmas?

Oddly, it seemed as though the surrounding stench had shifted from a physical to a conceptual presence. The world around them was rotting, and no amount of "gas masks" could hide the stench.

"I spotted a warlock over there," Sora signaled to the Nine-Tails, pointing towards a partially destroyed building. "I suggest we reduce their numbers before the battle begins."

"We can't. Our main objective is the priority," the Kitsune signed back negatively. With her experience, it was no surprise she knew the secret gesture language of warmasters. "Otherwise, we might alert the others too soon."

Walking slightly aside, Jun smirked and gestured something that made Soru respond with the local version of the "middle finger."

Despite their apparent relaxed attitude and frivolity, both warmasters perfectly controlled their surroundings, moving like shadows. Perhaps that's why Izanami merely threw at them a disapproving glare. All the supremes had their quirks, and sometimes, it was easier for commanders to accommodate them rather than confront them.

For Stas, it was much harder. Lacking such impressive skills, he was gravely tense, afraid to make a mistake and let everyone down.

The city streets were often shattered and scarred by techniques and samurai slashes. Many houses had collapsed onto the roads, making their advancement a real torment.

Their team had to maintain absolute silence. This meant moving in such a way that not a single stone underfoot would crunch.

Need it be said how difficult this was, surrounded only by these crunching stones? Moreover, any use of techniques was strictly forbidden, as their energy traces couldn't be completely concealed.

Yet, Ordyntsev managed. Though drenched in sweat, he successfully followed the example of the others, avoiding the lying about, reveling, or just aimlessly wandering chaos servants.

Although many of them had left the city, some remained. Worse still, they had captives with whom they continued to have their fun, filling the air with screams of terror and pain.

Some of the tortures were so horrific and disgusting that Ordyntsev, accustomed to many things, preferred to push these images out of his mind. But for the most part, it was futile.

Unfortunately, Izanami's technique didn't mute sounds either.

However, their leader knew what she was doing. The streets and houses kept changing and finally led directly to the scorched walls of the palace complex. The surrounding burn marks made it clear that the Hizoru had been at work here.

As soon as they climbed through one of the breaches inside and passed a couple of flights, a magnificent view of the Great Serpent, sprawled in the courtyard, opened before them.

Stas flinched and shook his head slightly. The Serpent King looked too horrific, bringing back memories of the past that the spirit had sent him long ago.

He had just recovered from nightmares about the depth, filled with blood, pus, and larvae, only to find himself back at the beginning.

Around the gigantic coils, warlocks and mere servants bustled about, performing some incomprehensible magical manipulations. The beast's head was not visible, as it was behind some massive structure.

The group exchanged tense glances and nodded to themselves. Words were unnecessary for them to proceed further. The plan had been discussed dozens of times in advance.

They needed to spread out to the maximum distance allowed by Izanami's concealment, prepare their strongest techniques, and then simultaneously attack the unsuspecting Serpent with everything they had.

This should have been enough to incapacitate him sufficiently for Stas to perform his procedure.

They weren't worried that the Serpent might die. The enormous reptile was one of the strongest great spirits. And after being infused with chaos rot, he became even harder to kill.

The group cautiously moved along the wall, intending to take positions opposite the head.

*****

Leviathan was irritated. She had been waiting for several days for her master and the others to finally decide to act.

And now, as they finally moved into the city, Levi doubted.

Her instincts and common sense suggested that entering this frightening place was unwise and it was better to wait for them here, but her feelings told her that Stas might need her help right now.

The young snake didn't doubt her stealth skills; after all, she had not been discovered during all these days.

However, Levi didn't know that the warlocks' spells had, in fact, detected her, but it wasn't enough to pique their interest.

So what if some fairly powerful magical beast settled in a nearby grove? Such monsters were not unusual, especially in these troubled times when there was no one to exterminate them.

But it would have been a different story if the warlocks had spotted a warmaster or a yokai. In that case, an inspection would have been unavoidable.

Resolving, Leviathan cautiously crawled forward, directly toward the center of the cursed city.

However, if a typical magical beast wouldn't have interested anyone, a beast deliberately crawling into a deadly place for no apparent reason was quite another matter.

*****

"Something's wrong!" Sora signed quickly, irritably glancing around. "They've noticed something!"

"Impossible!" the Nine-Tails jerked her head, but her movements betrayed the understanding that Sora was right.

And one didn't need to be very observant to notice something was off.

The movement of the warlocks intensified significantly. Surviving doors and gates cracked open, releasing an endless stream of chaos creatures and cultists.

Green chaos circles, flashing here and there, severely unnerved their group.

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But worst of all was the rising head of the defiled spirit. It grew larger and larger, beginning to tower over all the buildings around and, it seemed, over the city itself.

A surge of blinding fear clutched at Stas's heart for a moment, causing him to lose himself. But this confusion lasted only until he realized where these feelings were coming from.

'Leviathan!!!' The earthling's anger when the cause of the alarm became clear was hard to describe. 'Hide quickly, you naughty girl, and pray that nothing happens to you! We'll have a talk when this is over!'

To Ordyntsev's relief, Leviathan didn't argue and did exactly what was asked of her. However, this didn't spare her from future punishment.

"Change of plan!" Izanami barked, abandoning the "radio silence" state and turning to the attentively listening fighters. "Yamato and I will deal with the Serpent. You give us that chance by keeping the warlocks from interfering. If you manage, help us. Is everyone clear?!"

"Less talk, yokai," Yamato's growling voice had nothing human left in it. His legs began to sink into the ground as his body started to transform. "RA-A-A-A-A!"

Stas didn't even blink as dozens of stones rattled against his armor. The leap of the transforming dragon leader literally tore up the pavement around.

One could only see a growing red blur that, speeding across the inner courtyard, smashed into the neck of the rising Serpent King.

'Definitely didn't go without magic. Otherwise, I can't explain the force of the impulse,' Stas grumbled, trying to stay upright under the suddenly very solid gusts of air.

He even had to anchor himself with prana to the surface to avoid being blown away.

Meanwhile, the Serpent King was clearly not having a good time. The impact of the red dragon's body, accelerated to incredible speeds, acted no worse than a boxing glove hitting a hamster, sending the entangled titans tumbling right through the already damaged city streets.

Red and putrid-green, with a deafening crash, time and again embedded themselves into the ground and flew further, tearing with claws, constricting coils, and whatever else they could muster.

From their falls and tumbling, not just houses, but sometimes entire streets turned to dust. If there were ordinary people living here, the number of victims would have exceeded a three-digit figure in seconds!

But Stas had little time to admire the terrifyingly destructive war of titans, as the warlocks and all the arriving defiled warmasters weren't planning to stand aside.

There were champions with chaos spawn here as well, but unlike the previous battle, only elites went on this mission, and for them, all these horrific creatures posed no danger.

"How long I've waited for this!" Jun laughed, spinning his club in his hands, casually turning the charging chaos servants into pulp. Anyone who had the audacity to get within a couple of steps of him inevitably ended up dead. "Come now, let's have some fun, ugly creatures!"

A stone wave broke against the walls of fire of the approaching Hizoru, and the Avasaki hovered behind them.

The Great Serpent, twisting, powerfully shoved away Yamato, whose body made a whole "clearing" a few houses long, but he had no chance to continue his attack, forced to urgently dodge and fend off the furious Izanami.

The Nine-Tails was magnificent in her rage. Giant flaming tails continuously dripping liquid fire, a mane fluttering in an invisible wind, blurring the boundary between her fur and the flames.

Although the fiery spirit of the fox was smaller than the defiled serpent towering above her, she didn't look like someone who could lose.

The hatred for her wounded sister burning within her filled the yokai with unimaginable power.

A pause lasted a second while the inflamed, almost invisible eyes of the cursed great spirit met those of the Nine-Tails, and then the enchantment ended.

Filthy, rotten water, swirling around the reptile's coils, surged forward to meet the nine fiery blasts of the Kitsune. A massive explosion of steam marked the beginning of a legendary battle.

*****

"Charge!" Jishin roared loudly, encouraging the fighters around him. He knew that to his right, Katashi was also shouting, filling the hearts of his clansmen with righteous fury.

Before them, endless ranks of cultist infantry froze, and it seemed as if that day was repeating itself once more.

But it was not the same.

They would no longer stand like sheep waiting for the butcher's strike.

No more defense and waiting for the inevitable. The united army would hit with all the force, anger, and despair they had.

Enough of fighting on the enemy's terms.

They would shatter the ranks of chaos, scramble its plans, and turn its strategy against it.

The army of warmasters, yokai, dragons, and samurai did everything they could to hold out as long as possible and wait.

Yes, they didn't know what they were waiting for, but they still believed in their leaders, who seemed to know what they were doing.

And watching his people die, Jishin sent a prayer to the Kami that Jun and Shiro would be successful.

Although his uncle was a complete asshole and his friend was quite a slippery eel, they possessed a quality that was nigh impossible to find.

They were competent and very rarely failed at their job.

*****

Stas casually moved his head aside and let the axe blade pass by, causing the laughing cultist to falter forward.

Of course, the attacker was a samurai, and the ability to stick with prana to the ground gave him a unique opportunity to maintain balance. But Ordyntsev wasn't going to give him that chance.

The spear spinning in his hands hardly noticed the resistance of metal and decapitated the samurai, splattering the contents of his skull on the nearby stones. Imbuing the weapon with prana - this trick the man had mastered only recently. In such a state, even wood was no less durable than steel, allowing him to wield the shaft just as well as the blade.

As for the fact that the dead man didn't think of falling, continuing to swing his katana, it might have surprised Stas if he hadn't known about the capabilities of chaos.

There could be several possibilities, from a duplicated brain somewhere around the buttocks to some kind of energy version of the head.

But, one way or another, it didn't matter.

The etheric bomb he stuck in the samurai's chest and the push into the sky was something the samurai couldn't survive. His remains cheerfully scattered around, drenching his comrades. If he could still survive and reassemble after that, Stas would seriously consider emigrating to another universe.

There were so many enemies that this game of tag with death was starting to turn into some unnatural routine.

As soon as the thought crossed his mind, the man had to leave that part of the battlefield quickly, as Atara again lost her bearings and unleashed her magic on everything around.

The Yuki-onna was terrifying in her beauty. Exuding a hissing white smoke into the air, she, with cold apathy, froze and shattered anything that moved even slightly.

Her sadism deserved special mention. Sometimes, she didn't just kill the chaos servants but only froze their legs, forcing them to amputate their own limbs.

She wasn't bothered by the fact that the cultists didn't care about their own wounds. The yokai was completely lost in her hatred, smashing everything she saw. Her revenge overshadowed her duty, and she didn't notice the mess she caused.

Because of such actions, allies had to keep their distance from her, which couldn't end well.

But if the Yuki-onna went down the path of blind rage, her face becoming an icy mask, then the two supremes acted precisely the opposite.

Stas's sensei openly enjoyed what was happening. The danger swirling around him was like water for a fish. He darted from enemy to enemy, drawing unimaginable pirouettes with his mace.

The heavy piece of metal in his hands seemed lighter than a feather, but even a fleeting touch would be enough to shatter all your bones.

He didn't shy away from using techniques, either. Given the size of his reserve, they made the city tremble to its foundation. More than one ugly crack had crossed the surrounding space, causing the land to collapse downward, carried away by streams of water.

Yes, water.

If Jun acted like a frenzied threshing machine, then Sora flickered like a thin but deadly dagger.

In speed, she not only matched the supreme Sumada; she surpassed him. Those warlocks that tried to catch her quickly realized how wrong they had chosen their target.

Their attempts to teleport sometimes helped, but with Sora's speed and brains, she managed to catch them upon their emergence.

If she couldn't catch someone, she simply unleashed a stream of the most powerful water techniques in the required direction, seeking out enemies from the other side.

Chaos warlocks usually didn't possess much durability. They were like "glass cannons," focusing exclusively on damage and mobility.

Quite presumptuous in a battle with someone like warmasters, who could easily bend and twist steel with their fingers.

Thus, if Jun focused on the warmasters and Sora on the warlocks, then Stas and the Yuki-onna struck at everyone.

So far, the earthling encountered ordinary enemies, who were often weaker than him, and such clashes, due to his lightning-fast attacks, ended very quickly.

But fate wasn't about to favor him to the end.

A water explosion, scattering the surrounding chaos servants, nearly touched Ordyntsev, who had retreated into the ground.

The key word was "nearly."

Leisurely emerging from the ground and looking at the one who had attacked him, Stas subconsciously knew who it was already.

"Well, hello, Minoru. I don't want to be rude, but you look terrible. Chaos clearly hasn't been kind to you."