It was just that the Ice Heart Valley disciples were few in number and the battlefield was spread so wide that he hadn't encountered a single one since then.
But who would have thought he'd run into them now — and more than a dozen of them at that!
He could see it clearly. Beside that mature, beautiful woman stood over a dozen of her fellow disciples, their attire and the Secret Arts they wielded unmistakably cut from the same cloth as her own.
Time to collect some interest! A genuine smile spread across the Sand Demon's face.
A soft hiss cut through the air without warning, followed by a bone-piercing chill. As the aura of death descended, every hair on the Sand Demon's body stood on end. Instinct drove him to plummet downward, attempting to burrow into the earth.
He had no idea what had just happened, but he knew with absolute certainty that he was under ambush.
As he fell, the Sand Demon finally had a moment to assess the situation. His gaze snapped toward the source of the sound, and his expression twisted in horror.
The colleague who had been standing right beside him moments ago, chatting away without a care, had been cleaved in two by some unseen attack. The wound was perfectly smooth, and pitch-black blood gushed from the severed halves like a fountain. Even now, a look of bewildered blankness lingered on his face, as though he still hadn't processed what had happened.
A private wave of relief washed over the Sand Demon — lucky he'd reacted quickly, or he'd have suffered the same fate.
But that thought had barely formed before his pupils contracted to pinpoints. Threads of pain had suddenly blossomed in his chest, and the Demon Qi circulating within his body had inexplicably seized up.
He hit the ground but failed to burrow underground. Looking down, he saw threads of blood seeping from his chest. An instant later, a tremendous force erupted from the wound, blasting the upper half of his body into the air.
So... I've been hit too?
His upper torso cartwheeled away while his lower half remained standing. As the Sand Demon's vision tumbled end over end, he caught sight of a figure charging into the midst of the battle.
An Upper Demon King!
The newcomer was unmistakably an Upper Demon King, his Demon Qi dense and refined, his age not particularly great. Sharp brows like blades, eyes bright as lightning, he gripped an absurdly broad longsword and whirled through the outskirts of the battlefield like a cyclone.
Wherever he passed, the Demon Race was thrown into absolute chaos. Several hundred demons proved as fragile as paper — wherever the sword's edge pointed, individual demons burst apart in sprays of blood mist, their bodies utterly annihilated. The crackling detonations came as densely as popping beans.
With this powerful reinforcement, the human warriors trapped at the center erupted with both shock and eldritch joy. They surged to their feet and joined the slaughter, and the glow of their Artifacts and Secret Arts blazed several shades brighter.
The demons simply couldn't put up any resistance!
In barely ten breaths, the demons clustered on the perimeter had been completely annihilated.
Only then did that lightning-swift figure finally slow, coming to a stop before the Sand Demon's bisected body. A Million Swords rested across his shoulder as he gazed down.
The Sand Demon wasn't dead.
"Demon Heart unbroken, Demon Race undying" — that was no idle saying. As a Demon King, the Sand Demon naturally had more than one Demon Heart within his body. Even cleaved in two, he could still cling to existence, and given enough time, there was no telling whether he might recover.
The Sand Demon wasn't the only survivor. The other Demon King from before was still alive as well, though both had suffered devastating damage to their Yuan Qi.
Their four eyes met, and the Sand Demon's mind raced through a hundred bewildered theories: "Why?"
He couldn't understand it. Why would an Upper Demon King attack his own kind without a word? Only the human side had ever produced traitors — when had the Demon Race ever had a traitor? And an Upper Demon King at that!
Yang Kai flashed him a grin, then brought Million Swords cleaving downward, reducing him to nothing. He repeated the process on the other lingering Demon King, who swiftly followed the Sand Demon to the grave.
Having dispatched both Demon Kings, Yang Kai finally turned around and offered a slight smile to the several hundred people behind him. "Everyone alright?"
There were no tears of gratitude or cheers of jubilation. Instead, every last one of those several hundred people stared at him with expressions of confusion and deep suspicion. The Emperor Realm cultivator at their forefront looked especially guarded — his Emperor Qi hummed with barely restrained power, and the sword intent radiating from the Artifact longsword in his hand surged and fell like restless waves, poised to strike at a moment's notice.
When Yang Kai turned around, the Emperor Realm cultivator even swallowed nervously before barking out in a low voice: "The Demon Heavenly Path?"
Yang Kai raised an eyebrow, shifting his gaze away from the Emperor Realm cultivator and toward the mature, beautiful woman at his side. "Fan Xin?" he said.
It had been many years, and he'd almost failed to recognize her. But Yang Kai was fairly certain his memory hadn't failed him — this was Fan Xin.