The eight-winged figure didn’t land.
It stopped, without even a single flap of its wings, it hovered roughly twenty feet above the scorched earth, its eight wings spread wide and motionless, holding it in place with the kind of stillness that suggested gravity was a courtesy it had chosen to dismiss.
Its golden greathelm turned slowly.
There were no eyes behind it. No visor or opening of any kind. Just smooth, seamless gold that caught the light and threw it back, and yet despite that, despite the absolute absence of anything to see with, Damon felt, with complete and unambiguous certainty, that it was looking directly at him.
The way its presence stretched toward him made it clear that it wasn’t here for Ivy or Nyla.
It was here for him.
"Step back," he said quietly.
"What?" Nyla’s voice was low and cautious, her hammer was already summoned, her eyes never leaving the winged figure before them.
"Both of you. Step back." Damon repeated.
"Damon—"
"Now."
He didn’t look at them, and neither did they look at him. They all kept their eyes fixated on the figure above, tracking it the way one would track a threat they had never seen before.
Ivy, though hesitant, touched Nyla’s arm, passing a quiet understanding that whatever was happening, Damon was best equipped to deal with it.
Noticing that the figure didn’t even flinch at the sight of the two girls leaving only confirmed Damon’s earlier suspicion.
’It’s here for me,’ he thought. ’Good.’
Without seeing the figure before him fight for even a second, he already had a feeling that it was beyond anything the two girls and perhaps even he could survive.
There was no logic to that feeling, only a primal instinct that ignited from the deep confines of his mind, one that screamed for him to run before the figure moved again.
But among that scream, there was another voice. One that dared to stay and face whatever had just arrived before him.
A short moment of silence, which felt eerily long, passed across the field before a deafening sound of words cut through Damon’s mind.
Then the words arrived.
"Bearer of the fragment of the *&^.(*%&*. Inheritor of the Frozen Domain and the Leader of the Dark Legion. You stand in violation of the Celestial Mandate."
Damon’s jaw tightened.
The voice spoke with a finality that was hard to argue against, even from the accused’s point of view.
"Your existence has been reviewed. Your continued presence within the mortal plane constitutes an unacceptable deviation. This is not a warning. Your sentence has been given, and it will now be carried out in accordance with the Celestial Mandate."
"I’m guessing you aren’t here to negotiate, are you?" Damon asked aloud, his voice sounding slightly less confident than he wanted it to.
Of course, just like he had expected, no reply came from the otherworldly entity.
The figure’s wings slowly shifted; it was the first movement it had made since stopping, a slow, singular adjustment, like raising an executioner’s sword before sentencing.
That was all the answer he got.
Then it vanished.
In an instant, the figure simply vanished, then reappeared right in front of him. The movement was far too fast for Damon to follow, even with the Heavenly Comprehension active, his mind was in complete disarray at how sudden, how impossibly instantaneous the move between the two spaces was.
The air imploded forward a second later, rattling Damon’s hair and armour with a pressure that would’ve been impossible to handle for most humans.
Damon didn’t see what happened next.
The moment the figure reappeared in his view, he activated the Dimensional Step. It was his most treasured ability, one that allowed near-instantaneous teleportation between two places. It had no wind-up or tell, it simply allowed him to move to wherever his mind took him.
He was gone almost as fast as the figure appeared before him.
But as his momentarily disoriented vision snapped back into focus, what he saw made his blood run cold.
The figure was already there.
It wasn’t in haste, it simply hung in the air in front of him, its golden greathelm angled toward him as if his attempt to escape was beneath its notice.
Damon stepped again.
This time, he chose a location he swore the entity couldn’t have expected, one of the countless worlds he had passed through while absorbing rift cores.
But just like before, the moment his boots hit the muddy earth of a world with no sun and three moons, the figure was already there.
It hung in the air at the same angle, same stillness, almost as if it hadn’t moved at all, and the world had simply rearranged itself around it.
Damon’s heart hammered against his ribs as his mind went into overdrive.
’How is it following me? Traces of mana?’
Every ability, technique or even physical attack left behind traces of expended mana. They were almost indistinguishable, even with Heavenly Comprehension, Damon was barely able to even notice them.
Damon stepped again, but this time, it wasn’t just a singular location, it was five.
Five different worlds scrolled before his eyes faster than his brain could register the change, before he arrived at the edge of the world of divine beasts, near phoenix clan territory.
And as the faintly familiar surroundings came into view, he let out a slow exhale.
’It’s not here—’
Before his thought could even finish, he felt something shift behind him. Dimensional Step fired up on pure instinct, taking him a hundred meters forward as he narrowly avoided a sword made of brilliant golden light.
The weapon looked as though it cut through the air in slow motion, its movement far too slow to truly hit a moving target.
And yet, as the weapon reached the space in the air where Damon had stood a second ago, a white-hot pain erupted through his abdomen with such force that it stole every coherent thought from his mind.
His body swayed helplessly, and his vision lost focus as Damon struggled to stay upright against the agonising pain. The attack that had seemed to have missed by a hundred meters, somehow found its mark.