Chapter 157: Is That Ella’s Face?

Chapter 157: Is That Ella’s Face?

The moment that swirl of violet-gold blood touched the pale gray skull, a harsh searing sound tore through the air.

The skull carved from high-dimensional crystal began to shake violently, its bone-grain surface scorched to a deep crimson.

Torrents of violet-gold mist erupted from the skull's seven orifices.

The mist didn't dissolve into the vacuum. It churned and compressed wildly in midair.

Ryan watched the swirling mass, feeling the True Dragon Tyrant Blood inside him resonate at its peak — the blood in his veins rushing backward in a frenzy.

His heart slammed against his ribcage with a deep, thunderous beat.

The mist slowly cleared.

A figure hung suspended in the air.

It was a female warrior clad in dark purple high-dimensional battle armor, her entire body wreathed in raging violet-gold energy.

The frequency of that energy was the same origin as the Extreme Dao Flame burning within Ryan — even the rise and fall of their wavelengths were perfectly in sync.

Even the twisted spatial rifts surrounding her were directly absorbed and assimilated by that shared-origin energy.

The moment Ryan made out her face, he froze completely.

The violent violet-gold flames around him lurched to a sudden halt.

That face.

The brows, the eyes, the contours, the bridge of the nose.

Seven parts identical to the Ella back on Earth — the one lying in a hospital bed with a raging fever.

This was what Ella would look like, grown up.

"Familiar, isn't it?"

Saren floated in midair, her bony fingers stroking her staff. Violet-gold blood still seeped from the skull at its tip. "This is the greatest masterpiece of the Supreme Council's biological laboratory."

"We decoded that little girl's gene sequence, stripped away all the emotional and pain receptors of carbon-based life, and kept only the purest instinct for destruction."

"In your Earth terms, you'd call it a clone."

"You Earth people tinker around with your primitive gene editing in labs. We, on the other hand, directly reshaped a high-dimensional bloodline."

"Didn't you want to protect your daughter?"

"Well. Your daughter is here to kill you now."

With that, Saren raised her staff and pointed it at Ryan. "Tear him apart."

She moved. The space beneath her feet was crushed into a visible ring of sonic boom clouds.

A violet-gold afterimage carved a straight line across the retina. The metal floor along her path was plowed into a deep furrow by the force of her wild energy.

She raised her right fist. The Extreme Dao energy compressed to a sharp point at the front of her knuckles, forming a blazing energy sphere that drove straight toward Ryan's chest.

Ryan instinctively raised the broken sword in his hand.

The Extreme Dao Flame ignited and burst across the blade.

One thrust forward, and the meteoric iron sword would have sliced clean through the clone's torso and shredded her energy core with ease.

But the moment his gaze landed on that face, the memory flooded back — his daughter in the lab, arms wrapped around him, sobbing.

"Dad..."

Ryan's hand trembled. The sword jerked three inches off course. The blade grazed the clone's shoulder and cleaved past.

"Boom!"

Her fist landed square on Ryan's chest.

The physical defense Ryan had always been so proud of was utterly useless against this same-origin Extreme Dao energy. It didn't absorb a thing.

His sternum snapped with a sharp crack. Ryan lost his balance and was hurled backward, his massive body crashing into the dark-gold alloy wall behind him.

The wall caved in on impact, sending a storm of metal shards bursting in every direction.

Ryan's momentum didn't stop. He blew through three load-bearing walls in a row before finally slamming into the rubble at the fortress's lowest level.

Hundreds of heavy metal plates and pipes came crashing down, burying him completely.

The impact gouged a massive crater into the ruins of the lower floor. Smoke and dust billowed everywhere.

"Commander!"

Osiris's eyes went wide with fury. He grabbed his meteoric iron war blade and lunged forward.

"You old bastard, I'll kill you!"

War Ghost's reaction was even more direct. The thrusters on his back went straight into overload.

He swung his meteoric iron war hammer and rode the explosive thrust to slam it straight at Saren hovering in midair.

"You're out of your league."

Saren gave the wrist holding her staff a light turn.

A transparent spatial barrier materialized in midair in an instant.

The hammer crashed into it — but it felt like striking a mass of incredibly dense, elastic matter. Then a recoil force ten times his own strength surged back up through the handle.

"Pfft!"

War Ghost spat a mouthful of blood. He and the hammer were sent flying and slammed into the ground, carving out a massive crater.

The meteoric iron war hammer spun out of his hand and flew off.

Osiris charged forward with all eight thousand members of the Demon-Hunter Corps.

"Open fire!"

Thousands of high-energy particle cannons fired at once. Dense blue beams hammered into the spatial barrier.

The barrier didn't ripple. Not even slightly. Every beam was swallowed clean by the spatial rifts.

"Stop firing! Stop!"

Nicholas screamed at the top of his lungs. "That's an absolute spatial fault line! Nothing physical or energy-based can get through! The harder you hit it, the worse the blowback!"

"Then what the hell do we do — just watch the Commander get beaten?!" Osiris grabbed Nicholas by the collar, eyes burning red.

"That monster's energy index is still climbing!"

"Her internal energy circuit overlaps completely with the Commander's. His defenses are completely useless against her. They used his daughter's genes to build the perfect armor-breaker!"

Down in the lower ruins.

The heavy wreckage erupted. Alloy steel plates weighing hundreds of tons were sent flying straight up.

Ryan pulled himself up from the rubble, pressing a hand to his chest, and spat out a mouthful of bloody saliva.

The front of his shirt was soaked red.

That one punch had rattled his internal organs.

If it had been some alien creature, he would have already cut it in two with one sword strike.

But facing that face, he couldn't bring himself to do it.

A sharp whistling tore through the air from above.

The clone dropped through the hole that had been punched in the ceiling.

She loosely curled both hands. Two light blades, formed entirely from condensed violet-gold energy, appeared in her grip.

Each blade stretched two meters long, the surface crackling with wild Extreme Dao Flame.

The clone didn't hesitate for a moment. She launched herself straight at Ryan.

Both blades crossed, driving simultaneously toward his throat and his heart.

Ryan raised the broken sword to block.

"Clang!"

Light blade met broken sword, and a burst of sparks exploded between them.

The ground under Ryan's feet instantly collapsed. Both legs sank into the metal floor.

The clone's attacks had no technique or form at all — purely raw, primal beast instinct, every strike aimed at a vital point.

The light blades dissolved into two churning orbs of violet-gold light and launched into a relentless barrage of hacks and slashes.

Ryan could only keep retreating, afraid of losing control of his own strength and damaging that body.

His mind told him it was just a soulless clone.

His heart couldn't cross that line.

That was Ella.

That was the face of the daughter he had failed for five years — the one he had sworn to protect with his life.

"Ssst!"

A light blade caught Ryan's shoulder and sheared away a chunk of flesh.

Violet-gold blood sprayed outward.

Ryan grunted and swung back, slapping the flat of his blade into the clone's side, sending her stumbling a few steps back.

The clone steadied herself in midair and came at him again.

Saren hovered in the upper hall, watching the fight in the level below through the spatial fault line. "Earthling, your greatest weakness is these meaningless emotions."

"You clearly possess the power to destroy a star system, yet a genetic copy has pushed you to the brink."

"Give up. Once I've drained your bloodline dry, I'll go to Earth and bring that original specimen back to the Supreme Council."

"She'll become a more perfect weapon than this clone. We'll erase her consciousness entirely and turn her into the strongest hunting dog the Hunter Civilization has ever used to conquer new frontiers."