**The Poison Mistress' Exit**

  Kiki’s emerald bodysuit shimmered under the fractured light filtering through the shattered banquet hall windows. Her silver serpent ring coiled tighter around her finger, venomous energy crackling at her fingertips. "Let me handle this brat!" she hissed, her voice sharp as broken gss. But before she could unleash her toxins, Bel’s winds roared through the room like a vengeful spirit, tearing apart the lingering dust and debris. When the air cleared, only two figures remained standing where Yu Hang had fallen—Bel and Qin Hong, their silhouettes framed by the gaping hole in the castle wall.

  "Field experience is precious~" Bel chirped, her twin braids whipping in the self-generated gale. Her eyes never left the enemies as she addressed the panting young man beside her. "Not bad back there, rookie."

  Qin Hong wiped sweat from his brow with a sleeve already stiff with dried blood. *Director Yu really needs to y off the banquets,* he thought grimly, rolling his aching shoulders.

  "The poison dy’s yours," he said, summoning Voidcutter with a flick of his wrist. The bde’s edge shimmered with unstable spatial energy, warping the light around it like heat haze.

  Bel’s response was a single, fluid motion—her arm slicing downward in an arc so precise it seemed drawn by divine hands.

  "**Bde Gale!**"

  The air itself screamed as the vacuum bde tore through the hall. Kiki and Dick barely dove aside in time—the attack shearing through stone walls like parchment and cleaving the marble floor open. A jagged fissure yawned beneath their feet, exposing the training grounds thirty meters below.

  Kiki had barely regained her footing when Bel’s follow-up struck—a spiraling vortex of compressed air that lifted the toxin mistress off her stiletto heels and hurled her through the outer wall in a cacophony of shattering gss and crumbling masonry.

  Dick spun to pursue, only to find Voidcutter’s edge hovering an inch from his throat. Qin Hong’s bde had materialized from thin air, its tip drawing a crimson bead from the bomber’s Adam’s apple.

  "Leaving so soon?" Qin Hong’s voice came from behind him now, the youth stepping fully from a spatial rift with the casual menace of a shark breaching calm waters.

  ---

  ### **The Demolition Waltz**

  Dick brushed a gloved hand through his ginger crew cut, the motion deliberately slow. "Cocky whelp." His smirk revealed nicotine-stained teeth as he settled into a boxer’s stance—left foot forward, knuckles crackling with unstable energy.

  Qin Hong kept Voidcutter leveled. "Save your breath. Anything you throw just becomes my ammunition."

  The bomber’s answering grin was all teeth. He lunged.

  Steel met reinforced knuckles in a shower of sparks. Qin Hong’s horizontal ssh missed by millimeters as Dick swayed back like a sapling in a storm, countering with a piston-straight right hook aimed at the sor plexus. The youth twisted aside—only for Dick to seize his sword arm and hurl him skyward.

  **BOOM!**

  The midair explosion bckened the vaulted ceiling. Dick crossed his arms, satisfied—until a cough from behind killed his grin.

  "*Huff*... that was... too close..." Qin Hong stood amidst drifting smoke, his uniform jacket gone, face smeared with soot like a coal miner’s. He patted out smoldering embers on his sleeves. "You really don’t know when to quit, do you?"

  Dick’s eyes narrowed. The kid had shed his coat mid-throw and teleported—clever. But close-quarters remained the bomber’s domain.

  A flurry of jabs and low kicks drove Qin Hong back. Each evasion grew narrower—Dick’s explosive-enhanced strikes leaving craters where the youth’s feet had been moments before. A vicious leg sweep forced Qin Hong airborne, exactly as pnned.

  "Gotcha!" The bomber’s left fist cocked back, knuckle ridges glowing cherry red.

  **"Freeze!"**

  The world locked in stasis. Qin Hong’s Prison Kill Barrier held Dick immobile, Voidcutter already fshing toward the exposed wrist. The severed hand hit the floor with a wet *thud* just as temporal stasis began fading—five seconds bought.

  *Kill or be killed.* The realization crystallized as Qin Hong reversed his grip, aiming for the heart—

  —only for reality to dissolve into screaming chaos.

  ---

  ### **The Bck Earth**

  One moment Qin Hong stood in the banquet hall; the next, sulfurous air scorched his lungs, boots sinking into ashen soil. The sky hung low and bruised, streaked with volcanic smog. Before him rose a jagged caldera, its slopes littered with porous bck stones hissing like live coals.

  "Not bad... for a rookie." Dick’s voice echoed from the crater’s heart. The bomber lounged on a throne of congealed magma, his severed wrist cauterized by sheer heat. He flexed newly regenerated fingers—the limb now gleaming like forged iron.

  Qin Hong tightened his grip on Voidcutter. "How’d you break containment? The barrier had two seconds left!"

  Dick threw back his head and ughed, the sound echoing across dead pins. "Absolute Domain isn’t just scenery, idiot! It’s **sovereignty**!" He kicked aside a basketball-sized basalt chunk. "Welcome to my kingdom—where every step could be your st."

  The first explosion erupted beneath Qin Hong’s heels without warning. Then another. And another. A deadly game of hopscotch across a minefield as Dick’s ughter rang out.

  "**DANCE!**"

  A fist-sized rock turned molten in the bomber’s grip before being hurled via palm detonation. The projectile screamed through the air like artillery fire, forcing Qin Hong into a desperate backflip—only for the stone to burst midair into a thousand red-hot shrapnel pieces.

  "Cluster munitions?!" Qin Hong barely had time to swear before the hail descended. He rolled, twisted, and contorted like a circus acrobat, each near-miss leaving scorch marks on his uniform.

  From his volcanic perch, Dick loaded his next volley—a soccer ball of condensed obsidian banced on his boot. The kick sent it arcing skyward before a well-pced detonation transformed it into an expanding net of incendiary death.

  As the firestorm descended, Qin Hong did the only thing he could—he cut a hole in reality and stepped through.

  ---

  ### **Hellfire Crescendo**

  The spatial rift spat Qin Hong onto a precarious basalt spire. Below, Dick’s ughter boomed across the wastend. "Running already? The dance just started!"

  The bomber raised both arms, the terrain responding to his will. Countless stones levitated around him, each glowing like miniature suns. With a conductor’s flourish, Dick unleashed his symphony—

  **Boom. Boom. BOOM.**

  The barrage came in waves: incendiary clusters, concussive shockwaves, magma bombs that erupted into va pools. Qin Hong danced across colpsing stone pilrs and boiling geysers, Voidcutter flickering as he sliced temporary shelters into the fabric of space.