The mountainside shook with every blow.
Liu Shen stood in a clearing of shattered stone, his sleeves torn, the soil around him still steaming from the last strike. Before him, the Phoenix General unfurled his wings fully—each feather a sliver of living fire, dripping molten light into the cracks below.
"You should have stayed in the shadows, fallen one," the General said, his voice ringing like a war gong. "The heavens have decreed your end."
Liu Shen brushed ash from his shoulder. "And yet here you are—bleeding already."
The General's eyes narrowed. A faint line of black, almost unnoticeable, ran along his right wing where Liu Shen's earlier strike had bitten through the divine fire. "That cut will cost you your life."
He struck.
The world became flame.
Liu Shen didn't step back—he stepped forward. His demonic qi surged, black currents swallowing the flames that tried to consume him. He drew the Abyssal Fang sword in a single motion, its edge humming with a sound that gnawed at the soul.
The first clash shattered the trees for a li in every direction. The Phoenix General's spear blazed brighter, but Liu Shen's blade drank in that light like a starving void.
"You've forgotten something," Liu Shen said between strikes. "I'm not the one trapped in a cycle decreed by heaven. You are."
The General roared, thrusting with enough force to break the air itself. Liu Shen twisted aside, his sword carving upward in a black arc—severing three feathers from the General's left wing. They burned to ash before they touched the ground.
Blood—golden and steaming—splattered across the stones.
The General staggered, then grinned through his pain. "You… are stronger than the records claimed."
"Records," Liu Shen replied, circling him, "are written by the victors. I'm here to rewrite them."
From the western slope, a distant boom echoed—the sound of Yu Meixing's formation holding. For now.
The Phoenix General's eyes sharpened. "Then come, Demon Sovereign. Let us see whose script the world will remember."
They clashed again, the night sky was burning and bleeding all at once.