The Foreman's faceplate cracked under the pressure of the battle, already weakened from the fight. A hint of skin was visible below, the pearly white of an eye and a sliver of brown flesh. That eye was blazing with rage, and a strange sense of enjoyment.

Sam couldn't help but laugh. "Damn, you're actually enjoying this? All you cultivators seem to be cut from the same cloth…"

"Why wouldn't we be?" the Foreman replied. "Ascension comes from struggle."

Sam sneered. "Struggle? I doubt you've seen a tenth of the things I have, with your pathetic Dao. What good has it done you now, having to clean up the messes your servants made?"

A flash of fear crossed the Foreman's face as his Dao cracked, with him realizing the truth in Sam's words. It was a tiny crack, but it was a herald of things to come.

Sensing victory at hand, Sam continued. "Where is your wealth now? Your armor, your weapons? They're being destroyed along with you and your Dao. Just give in."

More fear appeared on the Foreman's face. The E Ranker's mouth twitched, but he realized that nothing he could do could repel Sam's verbal assault. Sam's Dao was crystal clear in its purpose. The Foreman had sent a group of plunderers that had injured both Sam and his allies. Revenge was pure and certain, far too much so to be broken so easily.

The Foreman's immense hammer swept around towards Sam, with shards of glittering obsidian fluttering around it as the lava it exuded cooled down in the air. They fell like snowflakes towards the ground far below, with their owner plummeting down to join them. Sam's hammer smashed through the shards, crushing them into dust. Suspended amidst a thousand darkly twinkling mirrors, the Foreman's fury filled face twinged with fear as Terra's Will blasted into his torso.

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Sam's hammer struck with the entire force of his descent behind it. The weapon glowed much brighter than Sam had expected, the raw conceptual energy of his Earth elemental energy enhancing the mass of his attack to ridiculous quantities. Rather than simply being a Dao enhanced slab of metal dozens of feet long, it was now flickering with flames of a more mundane provenance. Catalyzed by the sheer weight and mass descending at almost ten thousand miles per hour, it was so forceful that the Foreman's armor, almost completely impermeable until now, cracked wide open beneath the thunderous flight of Terra's Will.

At this point, the trajectory of the powerful E Ranker sped up beyond the limits of Sam's perception. One minute the Foreman was pancaked beneath the head of Terra's Will, and the next, he was planted in the ground, laying in the base of a crater. Sam's meteoric descent continued, gravity unwilling to let him go. As he neared the ground, mere milliseconds away from impact, the Foreman rose, eyes sparkling with molten fire.

The cultivator roared, the dust around him stirred up by the force. With a colossal boom, his armor exploded, revealing a heavily muscled man below. His hammer held loosely in one hand, the Foreman slammed his free hand into his chest. A titanic eruption of fire and sound blasted out of him, knocking Sam off course. The world melted, streaks of fiery rock falling to the ground as a disk of annihilation seared across the world, flattering out the ground for a dozen miles in every direction.

Sam struck a patch of gemstone trees just beyond the edge of the conflagration, smashing through with a series of tinkling cracks. Before he could even get to his feet, the ground shook as the Foreman bolted towards him, each step tearing free great chunks of earth. He was far faster than he had been before, easily three of four times so. Whereas before, Sam had the man beat in terms of speed, now he was the one on the back foot. A single desperate teleport took him out of the way of a hypersonic punch that sent a cone of air pressure out for a few miles behind Sam's original position.

Sam blasted the Foreman with a beam of searing Dao energy, but to his surprise, the magma cultivator dodged, the bolt of red and blue speeding past uselessly.

"A volcano has two aspects," the Foreman said smugly. "It gatherers its power patiently over millennia, and then it releases all of that potency in a single moment!"

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