Stella exited the aether beside the beam of light in a single breath. Despite the beam being composed entirely of Light Qi, it was so hot that it ignited the air.
Wait, this isn't Light Qi. It's Sun Qi. Who's doing this? Stella wondered, shielding her eyes from the scorching light with her arm. Someone from the Luminarch Conclave? I don't remember there being anyone this powerful when I came here to kill Councilman Verath Tindrel.
Defensive formations crackled along the outside of the building, shielding the inside from her spiritual senses, so she was unable to peer inside to see the source.
"What's going on?" Diana called out as she glided through the air and came to a stop behind her. "Is Moros fine?"
"I have no idea," Stella admitted. "But the Qi density of this beam is obscene." She glanced at Diana. "Is this your main body?"
"Why? Are you worried about me?" Diana asked with a playful smile.
Stella scowled. "Forget I said anything—"
The light beam abruptly vanished, revealing Moros shrouded in layers of void shields. Its flank was smoking as one of the trees had been set on fire, but the airship seemed otherwise fine.
Stella's eyes widened in surprise. Moros really survived that?
A sudden sense of impending doom gripped Stella's soul as Moros responded to the assault in kind instead of retreating. Artillery flowers sprouted along the flank of the ghostly airship that was partially out of the aether. The flowers swiveled to aim downwards, their petals curling inward to cradle growing orbs of void.
Then all at once, the petals parted, and a barrage of void orbs silently descended upon the building. The building offered no resistance to the assault as the crackling defensive formations weren't worn down—they were outright deleted.
Moros wasn't done. The aether trees upon the airship erupted with power, yet on the surface, nothing seemed to happen. But Stella saw through the aether plane that tremendous ripples were crashing down upon the building. The fading remnants of the defensive formation still laced through its structure flared to resist, only for the ripples to endlessly ramp in power. One by one, the formations failed. Fractures webbed across the walls, and then it all came down.
"What have you done?!"
A Qi-empowered voice erupted from the debris, and a figure of blinding light shot out from the cloud. They had the vague silhouette of a woman, and instead of going after Moros, the Monarch pointed a finger at Diana.
Diana instinctively shrouded herself in her wings just as a beam of light slammed into her. Her feathers ignited, and the impact shoved her back. Stella whipped out a mirror artifact she'd acquired long ago and angled it into the beam, shooting the light back at its owner.
The Monarch simply raised a hand and drank the light back in.
"Thanks," Diana said, opening her smoldering wings as she drifted to Stella's side.
"Are you all right?" Stella asked, the mirror crumbling to dust in her grip.
"If that had been my clone, it would have been obliterated," Diana murmured as demonic mist coiled around her, hardening into a shield. "How do you want to handle this?"
"I'll handle her." Daggers flashed into Stella's hands. She stepped forward, slipped through the aether, and reappeared behind the Monarch with a blade already swinging for her neck. The Monarch glared at her and burst into light, searing Stella's vision white. She completed her swing, her daggers finding nothing but air.
Blinded physically and spiritually, Stella cursed and retreated back into the aether plane. Here, she was able to track the Sun Monarch's movements and discovered she had teleported over to Diana and was engaging her in a melee.
Why is she targeting Diana over Moros or me? Stella wondered as she emerged from the aether beside the Sun Monarch, only to be blinded again by a flash of light as they vanished before she could land a strike.
"She hits quite hard, too," Diana grunted as she opened her smoldering wing and rolled her shoulder. Demonic mist hissed around her as if it had been boiled by the light.
"This holy land belongs to the Sun God!" The blinding figure screeched. Stella's focus snapped in that direction and found her above Moros with the blazing sun to her back. She was gathering power while pointing at Diana.
"For defiling the Sun God's sanctuary, I will purge you from this realm!"
So that's why she's so powerful, Stella realized, recalling the merchant who had surrendered his soul to the Sun God to gain power. I'm not sure if this Monarch did the same thing. But a Sun cultivator fighting with the sun at their back is going to be far stronger than one fighting underground in a ballroom.
"Diana, I can't get close to her without being blinded," Stella explained. "I have a plan to get around that issue, but I need her to stay still for half a second," she glanced at her friend. "Do you think you can tank that?"
"Oh, Stella, you underestimate me," Diana said huskily, mist coiling from the corner of her lips. "My demonic mist may be rather useless in a large open space like this, but I'm an Archdemon. I can tank all the hits she throws at me."
Her eyes shifted from calm gray to inky black. The finger-length horns on her forehead curved skyward as her bloodline answered the call, and her body began to swell. She grew taller and broader, her feathered wings unfurling wider with every breath. A dense haze of demonic mist billowed from her, swallowing the rest of the change from view.
From within the fog, the massive silhouette of what Diana had become threw back her head, and a demonic roar reverberated out through the haze.
Stella felt her hair stand on end and now understood why the Sun Monarch had targeted Diana. Because they were friends, Stella had forgotten that Diana was an Archdemon. A fearsome tainted being that a devoted follower of the light would wish to eliminate at all costs.
"Vile creature!" the Sun Monarch shouted. "Perish under the Sun God's wra—"
"Domain of the Aetherial," Stella said, surrendering her body to the aether. Otherworldly light bled through the fractal lines on her skin, her eyes turned white, and reality was reminded that she didn't belong. In the immediate space she occupied, reality fractured and tried to push her out, but the aether pushed back, sheathing her in a bubble of itself. She now coexisted between two planes, with one trying to reject her while the other warmly welcomed her.
A terrible weight settled onto her soul. It was like being teleported to the bottom of the ocean, with the crushing weight of the water above pushing down. If not for her Phantom Veil Amulet masking her existence on a day-to-day basis, she would feel this all the time. It was only upon activating her domain that the Phantom Veil Amulet could no longer hide her.
But it was worth it.
The friction of swapping between reality and the aether plane no longer existed, as she was present in both. Before the Sun Monarch finished speaking, Stella was already beside her. The Sun Monarch noticed her presence immediately. She shot the light beam she had been powering up at Diana, then emitted a pulse that had previously blinded Stella twice.
Except this time, the light didn't reach her instantly. It slowed as it crossed the bubble. When she'd tested the bubble with Kael, she'd told him to stab her. His dagger had stalled a hair above her skin, refusing to advance, and he'd been certain she was blocking it. She hadn't. She'd only used the aether to make the distance between the blade's tip and her skin thousands of miles instead of centimeters.
Against a dagger, that gap swallowed the attack entirely. But light was a different beast. It crossed vast distances in the blink of an eye, and Stella had counted on half a second to strike before the blinding hit.
She'd miscalculated. Her domain didn't buy her even a tenth of that.
She was blinded once again, but this time her daggers bit into flesh. The Monarch vanished like before, but Stella's daggers trailed golden blood through the air. Her domain, removing the friction between the aether and reality, had given her the edge she needed to land a hit, but not enough to finish the job.
She needed more.
I can either burn more Qi to forcefully expand the range of my domain, which will increase the distance of my bubble, or I can compress it tightly against my skin to increase my speed at the cost of defense. She glanced over her shoulder at the blindingly bright Monarch, who had retreated far away over another spire and was clutching her arm. I think in this case, speed is king.
"It's really you," the Sun Monarch cursed, giving Stella pause.
Stella pointed at herself. "Me?"
"Stella Crestfallen, daughter of the dark god," the Sun Monarch spat with disgust. "I hoped you were dead. We all did."
"Well, that's not very nice," Stella frowned. "Whatever did I do to you?"
"You assassinated Verath Tindrel in cold blood while he was in closed-door cultivation."
"Okay, well..."
"You then butchered many other Monarchs without rhyme or reason, as if it were for fun," she continued, "and you even dared to try and kill the Crowned One at a ball held for peaceful negotiations."
"Peaceful negotiations?! The ball was obviously a trap—"
"Your father then led a wave of beasts to flatten our cities, murder billions of innocent lives, and then sent in cultivators to kill many other upstanding Monarchs, bringing the Celestial Empire to ruin."
"Are you done?" Stella asked.
"No," the Monarch answered sharply. "Your list of crimes is—"
Stella took advantage of the Monarch's distraction to compress the aether to her skin and close the gap in a literal instant. She stabbed forward with her daggers, without wasting time aiming for vitals. Both daggers tore through the Monarch's protective barrier of Qi as they made use of her aether bubble, but neither managed to bite flesh.
The light in the Monarch's eyes flashed, and her body blurred as she reacted in time, grabbing Stella's wrists. Her aether bubble slowed the Sun Monarch, but not enough. Stella had sacrificed the distance for speed, and it was coming back to bite her. There was a sharp crack of pain as the Sun Monarch snapped both of Stella's wrists, making her teeth clench.
"It's not so easy to kill us when we aren't disarmed or asleep," the Sun Monarch hissed, and Stella got a good look at her face for the first time. Half of her face had solidified into bark, and her eyes were glazed over. Yet, Stella recognized her. She had been the representative for the Luminarch Conclave at the ball.
"Maybe not," Stella replied. "But I love a challenge."
She retreated into the aether and snapped her bones back into place. They were superficial anyway, as her body had been disintegrated and rebuilt out of aether during her ascension to the Monarch Realm.
"Stella? Are you alright?" Ash's voice rang in her mind.
"Of course," Stella replied. "But this one is admittedly tricky to deal with. I knew my domain would be weaker against Monarchs that manipulated space, but light might be even more troublesome."
"Do you need any help?"
"No—" Stella instinctively replied, but then remembered the bark on the Sun Monarch's face. "Actually, she is infected with your cursed blood. Can't you use that to stop her from teleporting?"
"If she's over land I control," Ash replied. "If you can get her to fight you over Moros, Red Vine Peak, or under the canopy over my Sanctuary, then I can ground her."
Stella hadn't heard the word Sanctuary before, but she assumed it referred to the continental landmass he had floated into the sky.
"I don't think she's foolish enough to go near Red Vine Peak or fight under the canopy, which will cut her off from the Sun God's assistance. That leaves Moros as our best option, but how can we bait her to land on Moros..." Stella paused. "Wait, I got it. The Sun Monarch hates Diana and considers her existence to taint the land. Tell Diana to board Moros and have Moros continue to bomb the buildings of the Luminarch Conclave. That should force the Sun Monarch close enough to Moros for your spatial lock to work."
"Good idea. I'll get on it," Ash replied, and Stella felt Moros shift forward through the aether. Power rippled through the airship as Erebus fed void Qi into the artillery flowers. Moros had already proven it could survive the Sun Monarch's firepower, and Diana had also shrugged off the attacks.
All Stella had to do was continue lurking in the aether and await her moment to strike. However, while tracking the Sun Monarch, she noticed something. Looking down, she peered through the destroyed building and detected the presence of another Monarch among hundreds of other cultivators.
Except this Monarch was running away.
Maybe I should go after this one first, Stella thought.
For safety, she burned Qi to expand her domain outward, encompassing a full meter around her, before she teleported through the aether and appeared in front of the fleeing Monarch.
"Where do you think you're going?" She demanded, forcing the armored man to stop.