Strongest Family System

Robert looked at Zilton Walker for a long moment, then turned his attention toward him. Jack, he said quietly, "kill them. All of them. No one leaves the Osborn compound tonight."

Jack did not respond with words. The presence behind Robert simply shifted, and the shift alone was enough to make the six Level 4 cultivators understand that whatever instructions they had been given before entering this clan no longer mattered.

They attacked anyway, because retreat was no longer an option that their training had prepared them for. The nearest cultivator activated his Iron Veil Technique, throwing up a defensive barrier at full outcome as though it might buy him even a single second.

Jack moved through it without effort, and the barrier dissolved the way mist dissolves against a blade. The cultivator dropped before he had time to register that his defense had failed.

A second cultivator came from the side with the Heaven-Splitting Palm, his strike carrying everything his cultivation level could produce. Jack was no longer where the strike landed. The force returned along the same path it had been sent, and the cultivator's own technique put him on the ground before he understood what had happened to him.

The third and fourth came together, the trained paired response the Walker Clan drilled into every team—one technique aimed to close distance, the other aimed to strike the moment the gap closed.

Both techniques arrived at the space. Jack was already standing where they had started, and both cultivators fell within the same breath, their bodies meeting the cracked ground almost simultaneously.

The fifth tried something faster — a burst of movement technique that should have carried him eight meters in a single step, far enough to escape whatever this presence was. He covered the distance. Jack was already there waiting for him, and the fifth cultivator went down without managing to complete a second step.

The sixth ran for the gate. It was locked. He reached it anyway, some part of him hoping that locked metal might somehow matter more than what was behind him. Jack was at the gate before he was. The sixth cultivator looked up, made a sound that was neither a word nor a technique, and dropped to his knees before he went still entirely.

From the moment Robert gave the order to the moment the sixth cultivator hit the ground, less than two minutes had passed.

The yard was silent again. The cracked ground around the building's base had stopped settling.

Six bodies lay scattered across the outer compound, and nothing in the surrounding night had changed—the stars were the same, the wall was the same, and the locked gate was the same.

Zilton Walker had not moved.

He stood with both feet planted at the gate's inner edge, his cultivation energy held at full readiness, and for the first time in longer than he could remember, he did not know what that eagerness was for. Two minutes.

Six of his clan's most capable Level 4 cultivators — men who had trained under his own guidance, who had executed paired techniques against him in sparring sessions a hundred times — were reduced to bodies on the ground in less time than it took to drink a cup of tea.

He looked at the figure standing near the gate.

He could not find its ceiling. He could not find its floor. He could not find anything at all, and that absence had stopped being merely unsettling and had become, in the space of two minutes, something closer to the only fact in the world that mattered.

The three Duskfall cultivators had gone completely still. Daven Duskfall—the one who had spoken moments earlier, the one who had invoked his clan's name as though it were a shield—stood with his travel pack still strapped to his shoulders and his mouth slightly open, the composed expression he had carried through eleven days of observation now entirely gone.

The senior of the three Duskfall figures looked at the bodies on the ground. Then, in the presence of Jack, who was standing near the gate. Then at Zilton Walker, as though some shared understanding might pass between them simply through eye contact.

None passed. Zilton was looking at the same thing they were looking at and arriving at the same place they were arriving at, and there was nothing in either of their expressions that offered the other any comfort.

Robert looked at the four of them—Zilton Walker, Daven Duskfall, and the two Duskfall cultivators beside him—and said nothing for a moment. Then he looked at the jack standing near the gate.

"Them too," he said. "All four. Make it last. I want them to understand exactly what this clan is before it ends."

What followed did not resemble the two minutes that had come before it.

Jack moved toward Zilton first — not because Zilton was the priority, but because Zilton was the only one among the four who attempted to respond as though resistance was possible.

He released his cultivation fully, Soul Manifestation Level 5 Peak Stage pouring outward in a single committed technique, a strike built from decades of refinement and every advantage his bloodline and training had ever given him.

It met Jack the way the six Level 4 techniques had met him, except this time, Jack did not simply absorb it and move on. He held the contact.

Zilton's strike pressed against something that did not yield, and did not break, and did not retreat—and slowly, over the span of several seconds that felt considerably longer to the man producing the technique, Zilton's outcome began to fail not because it ran out but because whatever it was pressing against had decided it had received enough information about what Zilton Walker was capable of.

Jack let him feel every second of that failure.

Then Zilton went down—not destroyed in an instant, but reduced, his cultivation foundation taking damage of a kind that Iron Restoration Pills and weeks of recovery would not undo quickly, the particular damage that a cultivator received when their full power was met and held and slowly overwhelmed rather than simply struck aside.

The Duskfall senior tried next and lasted longer than Zilton had—his cultivation level was genuinely higher, and it showed in how long the exchange continued, in the number of techniques he attempted before each one failed in sequence.

But longer was not the same as different. Each technique met the same outcome. Each failure took something from him that the next technique could not compensate for.

The second Duskfall figure did not attack at all. She tried to run, the same instinct that had sent the sixth Level 4 cultivator toward the locked gate, and found the same result—Jack was simply present wherever he arrived, without urgency, without effort, as though running were a concept that did not apply to him.

Daven Duskfall—the youngest, the weakest of the three, the one who had spoken with the most confidence—lasted the shortest time of all four despite going last. Whatever courage his clan's name had given him in the moment of speaking, it had nothing left to offer him now.

Thirty minutes passed.

It was not thirty minutes of constant motion. Long stretches of it were stillness—Jack standing across from each of them in turn, waiting, allowing them to attempt whatever they believed might work, and allowing each attempt to fail completely before the next began.

Robert had asked for them to understand, and understanding took time. Jack gave them the time.

By the end of it, four bodies lay in the outer yard alongside the six that had come before them. The cracked ground around the building's base had spread further, the radiating pattern reaching nearly to the compound's outer wall on every side.

The spatial lock continued to hum quietly around all of it, sealing the compound from the city beyond, exactly as Zilton Walker had designed it to do.

Robert stood at the yard's center and looked at what remained.

Ten bodies. The Walker Clan's operational team. The Duskfall clan's observation team.

Seven individuals who had entered Magical City in disguise, separated through different gates, coordinated with precision across eleven days—all of it converging on this single outer yard, all of it ending here, inside a pocket of silence that had been built specifically to ensure no one outside would ever know.

No one outside would ever know.

Jack then picked up the storage ring, removed the seal from it, and handed it over to Robert.

Robert nodded, took the ring, and instructed Jack to clear the body. Jack nodded in response and left to take care of it.

John, standing behind Robert, was shocked to see and hear everything unfold. Within just 45 minutes, the cries had faded away, and there was his son, proudly standing next to a powerful cultivator.

Robert mentioned to his father that they should inform the clan members to take it easy and request the elder to remove the array from the clan compound. John nodded, and the two of them made their way to the inner courtyard to begin their tasks. Tomorrow would be a new beginning for the Osborn clan.