Sturton hovered in midair. Though the battle around him was brutal, he remained unmoved — like a reef standing firm against the tide.
Sturton watched it all with cold indifference.
Warriors and villagers of the tribe were dying, and he couldn't have cared less.
"Should be about time," Sturton murmured in a low voice.
"Now!" a hoarse voice rang out abruptly. From among the Black Dragon tribe warriors clad in black robes, three figures suddenly surged forward. These three black-robed figures, along with Sturton, charged simultaneously toward the two enemy commanders.
The tiger-headed giant and the gaunt gold-robed man both smiled.
"So Sturton did have hidden cards after all. I just didn't expect there to be three of them," the gold-robed man, Klatman, said quietly.
"Fortunately, we came prepared as well," the tiger-headed giant replied coldly.
Klatman's eyes narrowed, a sliver of cold light escaping from within, and he gave a sharp shout: "Kill!" The instant the word left his lips, two gray-robed figures burst out from his own ranks. These two gray-robed figures, together with the two commanders, charged toward their opponents in unison.
Three black-robed figures and Sturton!
Two gray-robed figures and Klatman, Rachel!
Four against four!
"You hired Demons too?" Sturton said coldly.
"And here I thought you were rich enough on your own, hiring three Demons," Klatman sneered.
The moment the words were spoken, neither side bothered with any more talk. Four from each side — eight powerhouses in total. Every single one was a Highgod, and all of them had ascended through their own efforts. Each possessed extraordinary abilities, and they began fighting each other with savage ferocity.
"Boom!"
The very fabric of space shook violently, and terrifying shockwaves rippled outward in every direction.
"What?" Many onlookers stared in shock.
One on one, split into four pairs, they clashed madly in the sky. The dreadful spatial tremors kept radiating outward.
One moment a body would dissolve into nothingness...
Another would transform into a colossal elemental beast...
Another still would reshape into the form of a sword...
A Highgod's battle was extraordinarily brutal. With four pairs of powerhouses fighting to the death, nobody dared approach. Even the Midgod warriors who had been fighting desperately just moments ago tacitly pulled back, and the intensity of their clashes dropped dramatically.
"How pragmatic," Lin Lei remarked, watching the scene unfold.
Earlier, with both commanders watching from above, the warriors had fought tooth and nail. Now that the commanders themselves were locked in combat, the two sides' warriors backed off as though they had some unspoken agreement.
Dilia smiled faintly. "Perfectly normal. Nobody wants to die. Right now, whichever commander is still standing in the end will claim victory. For ordinary warriors, it really doesn't matter much who's in charge."
Lin Lei watched the four pairs of Highgods battling above.
He had to admit — the gap between Highgods and Midgods was staggering.
"At the very least, a Highgod has comprehended all the profound mysteries of an elemental law," Lin Lei thought to himself. "The difference lies only in the degree of their fusion."
Weaker Highgods hadn't fused any of their mysteries at all.
Stronger ones might have fused two. And the most powerful had fused three.
"Two down," Lin Lei murmured, tilting his head back to watch.
Of the original eight Highgods, two had now fallen — Klatman and one of the black-robed figures. Those two had been locked in combat against each other. Klatman had forced himself to take grievous injuries in order to kill his black-robed opponent.
But just then, Sturton had conjured a clone and struck suddenly, finishing off the critically wounded Klatman. Klatman had a clone as well, but it had only reached the Midgod stage. That too was destroyed in the same breath.
"Sturton!" The tiger-headed giant's expression shifted. "I didn't expect your Wind-attribute clone to have reached the Highgod realm as well."
"Hmph!" Sturton scoffed. "Klatman is done. You're next."
For powerhouses like them, absorbing divine sparks was generally out of the question. To become gods, they relied on their own cultivation.
"Is that so?"
A cold glint flickered through the tiger-headed giant's eyes, and without warning, a phantom figure burst from his body, hurtling straight toward his opponent — the black-robed figure. It was essentially the tiger-headed giant and his phantom attacking together.
"A Highgod clone!" The black-robed figure recoiled in alarm, retreating immediately.
Sturton's face darkened as he regarded the tiger-headed giant. "Rachel, you've been hiding your hand deeper than I thought!"
"Not as deep as you." The phantom solidified into a physical form — another clone of the tiger-headed giant Rachel, this one attuned to the Darkness element.
From a distance in the crowd, Lin Lei watched it all unfold and couldn't help but marvel. "That seemingly reckless tiger-headed giant Rachel is every bit as cunning as Sturton." At this moment, Lin Lei understood that when Sturton and Rachel had their subordinates fight each other, darker motives may have been at play.
Just then—
"My Lord Boddie, how long do you intend to wait?" Sturton transmitted through his divine sense.
In the open sky, black light coalesced abruptly, taking the form of a silver-haired elder in silver robes. The elder gripped a long black whip and shot straight toward the tiger-headed giant and the two gray-robed figures.
Whoosh! The whip cracked through the air, warping space itself.
One of the gray-robed figures snorted coldly. The spear in his hand elongated in an instant, and where it passed, clusters of black flames bloomed out of thin air.
The whip and spear collided.
"Hmph," the silver-robed elder scoffed.
"Aaaargh—" The gray-robed figure's entire body began to convulse. He let out a terrified scream, then went completely still and plummeted straight from the sky.
The sight left every bystander stunned. They had all witnessed the gray-robed figure's strength moments ago — he was unmistakably a formidable Highgod. Yet before this silver-robed elder, he had been killed in a single move.