Chapter 3047: Supreme Duel

"Alright, the rest of you may leave."

The Sage raised one hand and swept it casually through the air.

Space immediately rippled.

Emery expected to be returned to the council chamber, but when the distortion faded, he realized something had changed.

Warwick, Ferrin, Grendel and Nine heaven supreme were gone.

Only Emery, Ronan, Kaelgor, and the White Sage remained.

Emery found himself standing beside the seated Sage, while several dozen meters away, the two Supremes had already separated and taken their positions. Both stood silently, their auras slowly rising as they prepared for the battle.

The Sage leaned back in his chair, looking completely relaxed despite the two monstrous presences gathering before him.

"You two may begin."

Ronan moved first.

Nine serpentine heads suddenly erupted from his back, each one belonging to a different aspect of his terrifying power. One crackled with violent lightning, arcs of electricity crawling across its scales. Another was covered in layers of frost, freezing the empty space around it. A third constantly released streams of corrosive poison that twisted through the air like living serpents.

The remaining heads carried different forces—flames, crushing earth, darkness, and other elemental force.

Nine heads.

Nine different powers.

The full form of the Nine-Headed Nightmare Hydra.

Across from him, Kaelgor responded without hesitation.

A massive spectral tiger suddenly materialized behind the Raging Sun Supreme.

Golden flames erupted from its body, burning so fiercely that the surrounding white space seemed to distort beneath the heat. Its enormous frame was easily three times the size of an ordinary physical tiger, and its eyes burned with the same fierce amber light as Kaelgor’s own.

The moment it finished forming, it moved.

The enormous tiger crossed the distance in a single leap.

Ronan’s nine heads surged forward to meet it.

The two forces collided head-on.

BOOM!

The impact shook the entire white void.

Fire collided with venom. Lightning tore through the flames while enormous spectral claws ripped through several hydra heads. Frost spread across the tiger’s body only to be burned away moments later, while waves of poisonous energy twisted around its limbs.

Every exchange generated enormous shockwaves.

They rippled through the surrounding space like waves across a lake, except each wave carried enough power to flatten a mountain.

Emery had seen Supreme-level combat before — he’d stood in the middle of one himself, back on Baeldum — but nothing there had come close to matching this.

These two Supremes were fighting within their own specialties, using their strongest abilities without needing to worry about collateral damage.

Every clash contained enough destructive power to wipe out an entire city.

Yet neither Ronan nor Kaelgor showed the slightest concern.

Then Emery finally noticed what was protecting them.

The white void had changed.

A massive dome had formed around the battlefield, its surface covered in countless overlapping layers that resembled the shell of an enormous tortoise. Each plate was connected to the next, forming a vast defensive structure that completely enclosed the battlefield.

The shockwaves slammed into it.

Nothing happened.

Not even a ripple escaped.

Emery stared at the barrier.

The scale of the formation was so far beyond anything he could currently comprehend that he couldn’t even begin to estimate its strength.

All these scenes were so fascinating that Emery almost forgot to ask why he’d been allowed to remain and watch.

Then the White Sage, still seated beside him, finally spoke.

"What do you think? Who has more advantage?"

Emery turned toward him with a respectful bow. "I apologize, Senior. I can’t really say. All of this is... well beyond my comprehension."

"Haha. Modest, are you." The Sage’s eyes crinkled with amusement. "Tell me whatever’s actually on your mind."

Emery took a slow breath and let the thought out anyway.

The Raging Sun Supreme fought like the sun itself — anything that drew too close simply burned away into nothing, and it was plain even to Emery that Kaelgor stood in a higher realm than Ronan outright. His Dao ran on nothing but pure, untethered intensity, savagery given full rein rather than restrained into something more refined. Where most cultivators built strength through control, Kaelgor’s power seemed to come from the opposite.

And yet Ronan wasn’t simply losing.

His command over the elements let him maximize every ounce of force the Hydra’s nine heads could produce, but his real advantage ran deeper than that.

Regeneration.

Every limb the fire decimated away simply grew back, over and over.

"These are just my rough observations," Emery admitted. "Whether Senior Serpent can actually break through Senior Raging Sun’s flame, I think, comes down entirely to how long he can keep regenerating."

The Sage smiled, clearly pleased. "Good. Your grasp of this runs deeper than you probably realize. Most Grand Magus couldn’t make sense of anything happening in front of two Supremes at full strength."

The White Sage remained calm as he added, "If you have any questions, you may ask."

Emery didn’t let the opportunity go to waste. He had been watching the battle closely, and one question in particular had been bothering him.

He had heard that the Raging Sun Supreme was one of the strongest half blood Supremes, already standing at the peak of the Two-Halo realm. Yet Ronan, who had only recently regained his Supreme body, was somehow able to fight him head-on without being overwhelmed.

"Because Ronan cultivate the path of the Undying."

Emery listened closely as the explanation unfolded.

Surprisingly, Ronan had only broken through recently. The tragedy that had befallen the Serpent race decades ago, which ended with the destruction of his original body, had ultimately become a strange blessing in disguise.

Year after year, he went through the process of creating clones, transferring his soul, rebuilding his body, and experiencing death and rebirth again and again.

Through those experiences, his accumulated comprehension added with the assistance of the supreme gene project, he eventually break through the bottleneck that had trapped him for thousands of years.

From that breakthrough, he formed his Burning Torch, finally stepping beyond the Two-Halo threshold.

The White Sage also explained that a Burning Torch was particularly powerfull to someone walking the Dao of Undying.

Emery immediately understood.

That was why Ronan could fight Kaelgor with such confidence despite the enormous difference in their current cultivation. Kaelgor stood at the peak of the Two-Halo realm, while Ronan had only recently entered it, but Ronan’s Dao made him exceptionally difficult to kill.

As long as he could continue regenerating, most of the damage Kaelgor inflicted could simply be recovered from.

The words, paired with the scene playing out in front of him, settled into Emery’s own understanding somewhere he couldn’t fully name.

[Your understanding of the Law of Nature has increased.]

"Thank you for the explanation, Elder."

"I only opened the door." The Sage’s smile didn’t shift. "How much you actually carried through it was your own fortune."

Emery kept watching, completely absorbed.

As the battle intensified, both Supremes finally revealed their complete beast transformations.

The two gigantic beasts collided again and again, each clash stronger than the last.

Around them, the Sage’s enormous turtle-shell barrier continued to absorb every shockwave, preventing even a trace of their destructive power from escaping.

Emery was completely fascinated. Every exchange between the two Supremes contained decades of accumulated comprehension, and as he watched them fight, he occasionally gained small insights into the Laws they wielded. It felt as though he were watching years of cultivation compressed into a single battle, with every movement and technique revealing something new. The longer the battle continued, the more Emery understood just how different Supreme-level combat truly was.

After another hour of increasingly fierce exchanges, neither side had gained a decisive advantage, exactly as Emery had predicted.

Eventually both Supremes simply stopped on their own. Kaelgor looked satisfied enough, having spent his temper thoroughly across dozens of destroyed hydra limbs. Ronan, despite clearly having the worse of it overall, seemed just as pleased — finally given a real chance to test the strength of his new breakthrough against something worth testing it on.

When it was over, the Sage spoke a few final words to each of them in turn, then turned his voice inward, directly into Emery’s own mind.

<Until we meet again.>

The gathering ended there. Emery left alongside a visibly worn-out Ronan, already turning his thoughts toward what came next.

"Now, let’s sort out your clone situation."