Villains Aren't Stepping Stones!-Chapter 54: Reunion(2)

The sandstone cavern, which had offered a brief and cooling sanctuary, was no longer a refuge.

At this moment, as the thunderous voice of the Lamia commander reverberated through the sandstone walls, Zhu Ziyan emerged from the dim recesses of the cave.

Her feline ears were pinned flat against her hair, and her fingers flicked with a sharp, agitated rhythm.

Her face was pale, reflecting the absolute terror of someone who is only at the Foundation Establishment realm facing a regional apocalypse.

"They found us?! So quickly?!" Ziyan’s voice was a frantic whisper, her eyes darting toward the cracks in the ceiling where sand began to pour in like a countdown timer.

Huo Yue didn’t look back at her; her eyes were fixed on the tunnel leading out.

She felt Xiao Mei slither back into the safety of her sleeve, the small Rainbow-Scaled Divine Serpent sensing the murderous intent radiating from outside.

"Yeah," Huo Yue nodded grimly. "Right now, we really have nowhere to run. They’ve surrounded the entire mountain range."

"COME OUT! HUMAN THIEF! RETURN WHAT YOU HAVE STOLEN OR WE SHALL FLAY THE SKIN FROM YOUR BONES!"

BOOM! 𝘧𝓇ℯℯ𝑤ℯ𝘣𝓃ℴ𝓋𝑒𝑙.𝑐𝘰𝑚

An explosion of concentrated spiritual energy slammed into the mountainside, and in that instant, the structural integrity of the sandstone, weakened by centuries of erosion, gave way instantly.

The entire cave trembled violently before the ceiling groaned and collapsed in a cascade of boulders and fine silt.

Huo Yue frowned, flames erupting from her hands as she shield herself and Ziyan.

Outside, if a human were to see this scene they will surely be overwhelmed with dread as thousands of Lamias, all radiating bloodlust and anger, had formed a suffocating perimeter around the base of the collapsed peak.

The air was literally shrouded with the scent of ozone and venom, so much so that if an ordinary cultivator were to inhale the air here, they will die of poison within seconds.

This was not a mere hunting party; this was a vanguard of the desert’s most dangerous race.

Not a single Lamia among them possessed a cultivation lower than the Nascent Soul Realm, and several figures hovering in the air radiated the bone-chilling pressure of the Spirit Ascension Realm.

Standing at the forefront was the commander, Hua Lin.

She was a vision of lethal beauty, with long, flowing pink hair and tanned skin that shimmered under the desert sun.

Her lower half was a powerful, pink-scaled snake tail that coiled and uncoiled with predatory grace.

As the third strongest of the entire Lamia race, with the cultivation of a 7th Stage Spirit Ascension, her qi possessed heat that caused the very sand at her tail to vitrify into glass.

Just then, from the smoking rubbles of the collapsed mountain, a brilliant dome of bluish-green flames erupted.

It was a spectacular sight, a hemisphere of pure elemental heat that pushed back the falling debris and vaporized the dust.

And as the dome dissipated into flickering sparks, Huo Yue and Zhu Ziyan stood in the center of the crater, completely unharmed.

This dome was a spur-of-the-moment defensive technique Huo Yue had devised by weaving her two Heavenly Flames together: the newly absorbed Blue Lily Earth Flame and her first flame, the Green Spirit Flame, which is ranked 22nd.

The combined heat was so extreme it acted as an absolute barrier, a solar shield that could melt steel before it even touched her skin.

"You thief! Give us back our Queen!" Hua Lin screamed, her voice cracking with fury as her eyes were fixed on Huo Yue’s sleeve where the royal aura lingered.

"Hey! It’s not my fault you couldn’t satisfy your Queen!" Huo Yue retorted, standing her ground with a defiant smirk, with her red hair whipping at her back in the thermal updrafts created by her own flames. "She’s just pursuing her own happiness! She told me she couldn’t live without my thing anymore!"

By "thing," Huo Yue was referring to the specialized nourishment of her Heavenly Flames, but Ziyan, standing right behind her, turned a deep shade of crimson at the unintentional, or perhaps very intentional, double entendre.

Hua Lin and every Lamia present felt their faces turn a mottled red from pure, unadulterated anger as their collective auras burst out simultaneously, causing the sky to turn a bruised, stormy purple and the air to become so stagnant it felt like breathing soup.

"You! You! Aren’t you a woman?!" Hua Lin demanded, her grip tightening on the hilt of a scimitar made of monster-bone. "What have you done to our Queen?! What ’thing’ could a human girl possibly possess?!"

"The thing that can make her very satisfied, unlike yours! And everything that should be done has been done!" Huo Yue barked back, recalling how she had spent earlier petting and feeding the tiny snake. "She is mine now!"

Although she looked like a defiant goddess of fire on the outside, internally, Huo Yue was a mess of screaming nerves.

’Master! Help! Help! Help! They look like they are really, truly going to kill me! You don’t want your beautiful, precious, talented, beautiful, and beautiful disciple to die right here, do you?! I’m too young to be snake food!’

A weary, almost mocking voice echoed in her mind. ’Why haven’t I realized how narcissistic you are? How many times have you called yourself beautiful in one sentence?’

’Important things must be said thrice! Now hurry and help me, oh my glorious, kindhearted, talented master whose beauty is second only to mine!’

’....The last part isn’t necessary.’

’Master!’

’Quiet, child. No need to fret, I can feel the Qi of your fiancé is approaching, and since he’s coming, I am not needed here.’

Huo Yue’s heart skipped a beat. Haoran? He’s here?

"You bitch! I will kill you myself!" Hua Lin roared.

She slithered forward with terrifying speed, her tail snapping like a whip against the sand.

The full-blown aura of a Spirit Ascension Realm expert erupted from her body, creating a shockwave that sent the weaker Lamias sliding back.

"Back off!" Huo Yue tried to bolster her act, pointing her ruler at the approaching commander. "Believe it or not, my husband is from the Central Region, and he is someone you absolutely cannot afford to offend! If you take one more step—err, one more slither forward— I will throw your Queen to him and let him play with her until she forgets her own name!"

By that, she meant letting him tickle the snake until it laughed itself to mind breaking euphoria.

Ziyan’s eyes widened so far they looked ready to pop out as she immediately grabbed Huo Yue by the shoulders and began shaking her with a frantic, desperate strength.

"What are you saying?! Are you insane?! Do you want us to die that badly?! You’re taunting a Spirit Ascension expert with threats of her Queen’s defilement!"

"Shut, my good friend, I know what I’m doing!" Huo Yue hissed back, though her eyes were frantically scanning the skies.

But at this moment, Hua Lin’s rage had reached the point of no return. "It seems like you really don’t want to live anymore! Die for your insolence!"

She raised her bone-sword, the blade glowing with a sickly, necro-pink light, and slashed it down.

The world seems to lost all its colors as a massive, crescent-shaped Qi slash of absolute destructive power burst from the blade.

It was a strike intended to level the entire mountain range, traveling at a speed that defied the perception of the human eye.

To Ziyan, time seemed to slow down as she realized they were about to be erased from existence.

But Huo Yue remained perfectly calm. She didn’t raise her ruler to try and defend, nor did she flare her flames. Instead, she took a deep, lung-bursting breath and screamed at the heavens:

"HAORAN!!!"

SWOOSH!

From the high atmosphere, a streak of golden light descended like a falling star as a second Qi slash, this one composed of sharp energy, tore through the clouds.

It struck Hua Lin’s pink crescent in mid-air with the force of a tectonic collision.

The two attacks clashed for a fraction of a second, the energies grinding against each other and warping the space between them, before they both detonated in a massive, blinding shockwave.

BOOM!

The resulting wind-blast was so powerful it flattened the nearby dunes for miles.

Ziyan stumbled back, falling onto her butt as she stared in absolute shock before she began frantically feeling her arms and legs to see if she was still complete, unable to believe she hadn’t been vaporized.

Huo Yue, however, was smiling brightly as she looked up, her red hair dancing in the dissipating smoke.

There, standing atop a hovering white sword that glowed with a divine, arrogant light, was the man she had thought of every single day for the past two years.

His blonde hair caught the desert sun, and his golden eyes looked down upon the Lamia army with the indifference of a god looking at ants.

Shen Haoran.

The moment he appeared, the atmosphere changed instantly, and the heavy, venomous pressure of the Lamias was neutralized by a new, domineering force—the aura of the Infinity Dragon God Divine Physique.

"I heard someone calling my name," Haoran said, his voice smooth, cold, and carrying an authority that made Hua Lin’s bone-sword tremble in her hand. "And it sounds like someone was threatening to turn my woman into dust."