"Bighead, head that way, and don't go too far. Korsha, take this side. Spill the camel blood as you go, one finger's worth every three meters."

Out on the yellow sands, old Shaar stood with his face wrapped in cloth, his clouded old eyes scanning the surroundings as he gave his orders with practiced calm.

The moment Shaar finished speaking, a group of Shurimans immediately moved according to his instructions. They spread out in all directions, and every few meters, they tipped the camel blood from the goatskin bags in their hands onto the ground. The blood hissed as it touched the scorching sand, and a thick, metallic stench quickly spread through the air.

Shaar crouched and pressed his palm against the ground. He lowered his cheek against the back of his hand, the heat in the sand burning against his skin. Enduring the pain, he shut his eyes and listened carefully.

"They're coming!"

Beneath the surface, Shaar heard the rolling, bubbling rush of movement. It sounded like underground springs surging upward, but Shaar knew perfectly well that the sands beneath the Bone Sea had long since been torn apart by the tunneling Xer'Sai.

Hoping there was water down there?

That would be easier than hoping gold might fall from the sky.

The moment Shaar shouted, the people who had spread out around them rushed back toward the point where he stood. There was fear in their eyes, but it was quickly swallowed by resolve.

They couldn't be afraid. If they had chosen this path, then they couldn't be afraid.

"Lord Logan, please don't kill these Xer'Sai!"

From the ground, Shaar lifted his head and shouted toward the sky.

He immediately explained, "Rek'Sai is intelligent. If too many Xer'Sai die, she'll notice. If we don't want to alert her too early, then we have to capture this batch alive!"

High above, Logan hovered in the air. From where he was, he could see Jax and Taliyah hiding on a nearby dune.

As for Jinx... well, Jinxie had wandered off on her own and was now squatting in the shade reading a comic book.

As for whether leaving Jinx off to the side by herself was dangerous, Logan didn't think so.

Because sitting on top of Jinx with the comic in her hands was a beautiful little blue bird. The bird had one wing draped over its face and was fast asleep.

Janna only needed an instant to arrive, and Logan had naturally called her over too. Shurima was every bit as dangerous as the Freljord, and there was no telling whether some other troublemaker might show up once they started fighting Rek'Sai.

Much as Logan hated to admit it, he thought that was very likely.

He and Jax both had demigod-level strength. Rek'Sai herself was only at a transcendent level, but the problem was that behind Rek'Sai stood a true demigod.

As a turncoat within the Void, Bel'Veth wanted to devour the Void itself and become its master, its true empress. Her ambition was enormous, and her strength was just as terrifying.

And Rek'Sai answered to Bel'Veth.

So Logan figured that if they fought Rek'Sai, there was an eighty percent chance Bel'Veth would be drawn out, and a ninety percent chance that would escalate into a demigod-level battle.

A demigod-level clash could affect Runeterra itself, and powerful figures across the world would sense it. By then, who knew how many nosy spectators might come poking around?

Still, Logan wasn't worried about that.

After all, he had a lot of friends now.

On the surface, it looked like he only had one true demigod and three fighters half a step below that level, Logan, Jax, and Aatrox.

But in reality... if Logan called into the Spirit Blossom realm, he could pull in three or four more demigods to help in a fight in no time.

"Got it," Logan called back in response to Shaar's warning, then added, "Don't leave the area I marked out."

Shaar and the others nodded and huddled together, crowding around Aatrox, who had been stabbed into the sand.

Aatrox released a vast murderous aura that formed into a shield around Shaar and the others. He had no objection to doing that.

After all, Shaar and the rest were Shurimans, and decent Shurimans at that, so Aatrox naturally had no problem protecting them.

Beneath the ground, the blood of the sand camel drew in a huge swarm of Xer'Sai. Currents rolled through the sand, kicking up a disturbance not unlike what happened when Taliyah used her magic.

Seeing that, Logan raised his right hand and pressed two fingers to the center of his brow. At once, the Spirit Blossom sigil there slowly bloomed into a beautiful pink-white flower. His hair lengthened until it reached his waist, and starting at the roots, it turned the same soft pink-white.

With Elemental Mastery drawing in the power of wind, Logan locked onto every Xer'Sai that burst from the sand. In an instant, cages of wind trapped those enormous creatures.

Amid miserable howls, Logan captured dozens of Xer'Sai in a heartbeat. And they kept coming. Before long, more than a hundred Xer'Sai had been suspended two meters above the ground, pinned helplessly within the wind cages, crushed together as they shrieked in agony.

The Xer'Sai had extremely sensitive detection organs, so they had to be kept in the air. If they stayed on the ground, the disturbance would be too great and Rek'Sai would notice ahead of time.

Because if one underling after another vanished, only to later be found trapped on the surface screaming their heads off, then if Rek'Sai still came charging out after that, it would be a miracle.

Time passed little by little.

More than ten minutes later, when Shaar sensed the sand had finally gone quiet, he looked up at Logan and said, "Lord Logan, we need to move somewhere else. We've already drawn in all the Xer'Sai in this area."

"And these Xer'Sai?" Logan's right hand remained raised, maintaining the wind magic.

"We can only keep them imprisoned for now..." Shaar said after a brief hesitation.

He was worried that if these Xer'Sai died, word might somehow reach Rek'Sai ahead of time. No one could say for certain whether the brood had some way of passing information along like that.

So just to be safe, this was their only option.

Logan nodded. "Alright, then we'll keep them imprisoned. Shaar, let's move and keep going."

"Yes, sir."

No one would ever imagine that ten thousand meters beneath Shurima's sands, there existed another world entirely.

Between thick layers of sand and rock, countless purple tunnels crossed and intersected like woven silk, stretching throughout that hidden realm. Those tunnels had been painstakingly built by the Xer'Sai, allowing them to emerge from one end of the world and appear at the other.

And the one who had them build it all was the master of this strange domain.

A school of small purple remora drifted through the world below the tunnels. Purple coral swayed in the current, and beneath the buried wasteland there were still faint traces of human civilization. The little remora slipped past ruined walls and broken remnants, then emerged into another chamber, where an enormous purple beast over twenty meters long lay sleeping, its pair of tusks like small hills.

The little remora bumped against the massive beast.

Once, twice.

Then the beast awoke. Its huge claws stretched forward, its thick, long tail swayed, and it opened its jaws in a yawn, revealing row upon row of densely packed fangs.

"Gegedadada."

A string of meaningless sounds came from its mouth as it turned to look at the disappearing fish, then lifted its head toward the tunnels above.

Its children were gathering in one place...

Wait, why were so many of them missing?

A question rose in its dull mind. It wasn't intelligent enough for complicated thought, but the loss of so many of its brood left it uneasy.

It wasn't worried about its children.

It was worried about itself.

If the number of Xer'Sai dropped too much, then it wouldn't be able to complete the task its master had given it. And if it failed...

Then it would become one of those little swimming fish and be turned into part of her.

At that thought, the beast shuddered, then immediately swam upward.

Yes, swam.

This was a sea, an ocean hidden beneath the sands, unknown to the world above, a place called the Lavender Sea.

The moment the giant beast entered the tunnels, it rushed toward the place its brood had been swarming to. It was countless times faster than an ordinary Xer'Sai. In the blink of an eye, it had already reached another tunnel.

But that tunnel was too small for its massive body.

So its huge claws lashed out and widened the passage as it advanced, digging as it went.

But in a place beyond its notice, just above one corner of the tunnel it had dug, an underground cavern began to shake from the violence of its movements.

In that lightless cavern, the bodies of countless small Void creatures were scattered everywhere. These were creatures spawned from old Void rifts left behind on Runeterra. Rek'Sai disdained them completely. They were weak, they stank, and they usually resembled dog-sized beetles. Worst of all, they tasted awful.

Though they were also Voidborn, Rek'Sai regarded them as enemies, not in the sense of hunter and prey, but as true enemies.

That was her master's will. Rek'Sai didn't really understand why her master felt that way, but all she needed to do was obey.

"Gegedaladada!" Rek'Sai roared at the Void insects she had drawn in, sounding distinctly annoyed.

Normally, she would have pounced on them, crushed them, and eaten them, but right now she didn't have time. She had to find out what had happened to her missing brood as fast as possible. 𝓯𝙧𝓮𝓮𝒘𝓮𝙗𝙣𝒐𝒗𝒆𝓵.𝓬𝓸𝒎

And yet, as if suddenly seized by a cruel little whim, Rek'Sai deliberately dug toward that underground cavern, trying to collapse it and let falling rubble crush those hateful bugs to death.

"Gedadada~"

A pleased sound came from her vast mouth as she happily moved on.

But she didn't notice that after she left, a figure slowly crawled out from beneath two slabs of fallen rock inside the cavern she had shaken.

Smooth black hair fell over her shoulders. Dodging the stones still falling from above, she lifted her head toward a piercing shaft of light, and in that light, a beautiful, almost perfect face appeared between the strands of black hair. Along both sides of her cheeks ran several strange purple markings.

"..."

"Light."

The murmured word echoed through the underground cavern. The woman raised a hand. Her fingers were long and elegant, with violet light glowing faintly at their tips. She reached toward the beam of light, and under that brightness, her hand was revealed to be covered in sharp purple spikes. On closer inspection, her skin itself was purple, hard and shell-like, and most shocking of all, it seemed to be writhing.

After a moment's hesitation, she clenched her hand tightly, as if finally making up her mind. The purple skin spread from her neck in an instant, forming a strange purple mask that covered her entire face.

Purple pods like bony sacs emerged from her shoulders. She raised a hand toward the light, gathered violet energy in her palm, and in the next moment, fired a terrifying blast upward into the rock overhead.

But aside from a thunderous crash, the purple bolt did almost nothing.

Grinding her white teeth, she fired several more blasts in quick succession, but the result was no different.

Just as she was starting to give up, a brilliant green light suddenly appeared.

The glow spread like ripples from a drop of water falling across a still surface, gentle and calm, yet it filled her with alarm.

Her breathing grew difficult. Sharp pain ran down her spine. To her, that green light felt soothing, but to the living skin wrapped around her, it was like a natural enemy.

And as those rippling green waves spread into the underground cavern, the stone shattered apart. The corpses of the Void insects she had killed vanished in an instant, yet she herself remained unharmed.

Seeing that, she reacted on instinct.

"No, I have to get out."

Ignoring the resistance of the armor and enduring the pain of sharp spikes driving into her flesh, the woman forced that skin into motion, the same skin that had brought her pain, but also hope.

She lifted off the ground and struggled upward toward the green light. She could feel it pulling at something, and with her heightened hearing, she also caught countless miserable screams.

They were the cries of Void insects. That green light was killing them.

"I'm the master of this body. You're nothing but my tool."

Drawing in a deep breath and enduring the pain, she finally reached the top, then stretched out a hand toward the green sword-light shining through the violet stone.

In the Lavender Sea, schools of purple remora streamed toward a ruin.

They began circling a gigantic, abandoned windmill.

In the next instant, a wing unfurled, and that single wing alone was countless times larger than the windmill.

Then the wing folded shut, and an incomparably vast figure emerged from the ruins, allowing swarms of purple remora to whirl around her.

A deafening sound rang out, shaking the seams where the Lavender Sea and Shurima's space overlapped, and thousands upon thousands of purple remora poured out through the cracks.

The sound seemed capable of bending everything, crushing everything. It was both a whisper and a shriek, like an aria made from a million voices layered into one.

Under that sound, countless overlapping spaces began stacking and unfolding, expanding without end.

They spread upward, growing wildly.

The remora swarmed around her and surged upward with her, and the strange purple sea itself seemed to move with her.

"Utterly foolish creature."

Two pairs of eerie lights bloomed from the giant figure's chest, grotesque and terrifying, yet strangely beautiful.

In the next moment, she surged upward on a tide of violet sea and appeared above the collapsing tunnel. With a piercing screech, violet light crashed into green light, instantly overwhelming it and carrying the purple sea upward with it.

Deep in Shurima's Bone Sea, Shaar stared with his eyes wide and his jaw hanging open at the massive rift stretching across the desert.

The rift was dozens of meters wide, but its length vanished beyond sight, as if one single sword stroke had split the entire Bone Sea in two.

And in the center of the split earth, an enormous beast was writhing and roaring in pain.

It was Rek'Sai, the nightmare all Shurimans feared.

But now, she looked like a beast facing death, letting out helpless roars of fear.

In the air, Zaun's ruler hovered there calmly.

Looking at him, old Shaar badly wanted to ask one thing, if this didn't count as a god, then what the hell did?

With that single strike, the yellow sands had been split apart, and the cut stretched without end.

The Bone Sea itself had been cleaved in two.

But Logan paid no attention to Shaar's awestruck gaze. His eyes passed right over the screaming Rek'Sai on the ground.

Though Rek'Sai had been the main target of this trip, meant to serve as an important specimen proving the existence of the Void to the world, the truth was that even the Xer'Sai alone would have been enough to prove it, though a giant creature like Rek'Sai would make the nations of the world pay more attention.

But the real reason he wanted Rek'Sai was because she truly mattered. She was one of the rare Void creatures with intelligence.

Rek'Sai could become a future research subject for the scientists of the Twin Cities.

If Logan handed a living Rek'Sai over to Singed, maybe Singed would get some new inspiration from it.

Who knew, maybe he'd come up with Shimmer 4.0.

That was why Logan's full-strength sword strike had not killed Rek'Sai. He had deliberately left her alive.

And now, Logan was looking below, because he had sensed that the force of his last strike, which should have kept carving through the Void creatures underground, had been blocked and devoured by another powerful force.

Seeing that, Logan merely clapped his hands once.

On the distant dune, Jax didn't need the signal.

He was already prepared for battle.

Because he had sensed that approaching power too.

She hadn't hidden her presence at all. She had arrived carrying a scent Jax knew all too well.

Aatrox also flew into a rage, filling Logan's mind with curses, his voice thick with disgust and revulsion for that power.

Jax took the long staff from his back and gripped it firmly. With his other hand, he tugged the wrapping free and revealed the true form of the last light of Icathia.

Then he leaped forward.

Holding the last light of Icathia high overhead, Jax moved like an ape through the air. The fire at the head of the weapon drew a beautiful trail as it burned, and then he brought it crashing down onto the earth with all his might.

Boom!

The shock was even greater than the destruction Logan had caused, so violent that Shaar and the others were briefly lifted off the ground.

Jax gave a savage shout of exhilaration and roared,

"Hmph!"

"Come on!"

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