Sevrak, a satisfied grin on his sickly pale face, slipped in behind Throgar, ready to drop the ogre with a clean sneak attack.

From the start, he had stayed hidden, watching the battle unfold while his Blood Dragon ground down the 3 Titled Practitioners, breath by breath and strike by strike.

At last, after Liora took damage from her own attack and lost consciousness, and after Zephan pushed past his limits and sagged with fatigue, Sevrak chose his moment.

Throgar, who was locked in concentration with both his hands and mind fixed on restraining the Rank 4 Spark, was the perfect first target for him to finish.

I will kill you three first, then annihilate the Outer Region, and bend the land into one empire bearing my name. The thought lit his chest with elation as he lifted his hand toward Soulforge's back and primed his deadliest skill, a neat stroke meant to sever life in an instant.

Yet at that moment, he felt something was off in the 2 Titled Practitioners' reactions.

Kneeling and breathless, Zephan showed neither panic nor shock-contrary to expectation.

As for Throgar, he didn't even look back at him and held steady, never diverting his focus from the Blood Dragon, far too calm for a man about to be taken from behind.

Then the reason revealed itself a heartbeat later.

When Sevrak came within a breath of the kill, his limbs locked. A cold weight pressed through his muscles, and his mind began to slip from his own grip, as if fingers of iron were closing around his thoughts.

"So you weren't careless after all." He flicked a glance to the 2 figures that had appeared at his sides and understood. The one lured into a trap was him.

Two ogres, each 3-4 meters tall, stood tight to his flanks. Their skills bit into him like clamps, fixing his shoulders and hips, denying him even the smallest motion needed to release his strike.

The force of the bindings told its own story. These were 2 Rank 4 Practitioners of the Gorathim, patient and silent until now, hiding all this time and waiting for Sevrak to expose himself.

Then 2 more figures stepped into place behind him, their silver hair and irises catching the light.

The Lunari pair raised their hands. From their palms, 2 bright,

hammered-looking chains shot out and wrapped around Sevrak's torso, ribs, and legs, each loop cinching tighter until his already pinned frame felt wedged into a narrow mold. They meant to make certain this Titled Practitioner would not run.

"Hahahahaha." Sevrak's laugh rose warm and genuine. Even pinned by 4 Rank 4 Practitioners, he sounded almost pleased to test them.

"Is that all you can do, hold me down?" His voice carried a bored confidence.

As a Nether Path whose specialty was defense, he could feel the limits of the bindings.

His confidence proved right. The bright chains wrapped around his body began to dim to a dull brown as rust bled along the links, and thin cracks lifted the metal in sharp flakes. The mental bonds faltered first, loosening in uneven pulses, showing they wouldn't hold for long either.

Even 4 Rank 4 Practitioners weren't enough to hold a Titled Practitioner for long, but that much was enough.

Before Sevrak could tear free, a voice he did not expect brushed the air behind him.

"You enjoyed enough?"

Liora stood there, speaking in a teasing tone, repeating Sevrak's own words from earlier as if to mock him.

Her body was no longer lying in a pool of blood. Her brown fur looked clean, most of the scars had faded, and her shape had changed as well.

The massive ape form had shrunk to just over 6 meters-leaner, lighter, and with only 2 arms, resembling a normal monkey, only larger and taller.

This was the third form of her Titan Ape form.

This was the most important power-up the Synergy Crystal had given her, granting her full control over her transformation and allowing her to switch freely between 3 different forms.

Her first form was the colossal Titan Ape, with a full simian frame and 2 arms, striking a balance between stamina and strength.

Her second form was the massive, 4-armed version she had before taking the Synergy Crystal, built to overpower and overwhelm, but at the cost of stamina

and speed.

Her third form was this compact body, tuned for speed, recovery, and stamina -a survival form developed to cover the weaknesses of the other two.

With control over all three forms, she became far more versatile than before, compared to when she only had a single form.

"So you really tricked me." Sevrak's amusement thinned at last. His gaze slid to Throgar's back, hard with hate.

From the beginning, they had shown him a staged struggle against the Blood Dragon, as if they had forgotten the danger of its master.

In truth, beneath that show, Throgar had been guiding everything through silent mind-link, threading instructions between allies and laying the net.

Liora's injury and collapse, Zephan's faltering at the edge of his limits, the brittle look of a line about to snap-all of it was a clean performance designed to draw Sevrak from cover and lock him here.

Sevrak understood it now, but it was too late.

Behind him, Liora's lean frame surged again, swelling back into the 4-armed Titan Ape, tendons standing out under the skin as power rushed through her

limbs.

At full height, she thrust out one massive hand and closed it around Sevrak's small frame, ripping up a slab of earth with him. Soil and shattered stone

ground together in her fist.

"Try escaping this, you rotten old man."

With Sevrak trapped in her palm, she tightened her grip, the slow, cruel

squeeze of a press meant to end a body.

Knowing pressure alone might not suffice, she layered on her skills. Her hand flashed to metal, knuckles turning hard as forged plate, and the squeeze

narrowed with a biting, uncompromising crush.

Then she called on Colossith's Seismic Pulse skill.

The clenched fist began to hum, low at first, then rising until the air around it

trembled. She drove the vibration inward, packing the force into the small space of her palm, like an earthquake sealed inside a metal box.

Not stopping there, she folded her other 3 hands around that fist and triggered Seismic Pulse through them as well, channeling three more streams of

vibration into the closed core.

The tremors built and peaked, forming a dense, punishing rhythm centered on

the prisoner trapped within, intent on shattering Sevrak's body under the full weight of the destructive resonance.

The tremors were so intense that even Liora's hands began to ache, blood seeping through the gaps between her fingers. She was injuring herself, but didn't care and pressed even harder.

She knew Sevrak was a durable cockroach, and to kill him completely, she couldn't afford to hold back, even if it meant hurting herself.

And soon, within the small waterfall of light-red blood streaming from between

her fingers, a darker shade began to appear.

It was the Umbraen's blood, drawn from that small body and mixing into the flow before spilling onto the ground below.