Chapter 1011: “I’m Gonna Have to Die Again"
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Celestia immediately froze as Arthur forced himself upright on one knee, gripping his wounded shoulder while speaking through the pain.
’Don’t let him know you can move autonomously!’
It was an order Celestia couldn’t refuse, so she was forced to remain inactive, lying on the surface of the universe’s barrier like a normal sword without an Ego would after being knocked out of its wielder’s hand.
Roseborn immediately closed the distance using the power of alacrity, pulling his spear back as death and extinction law energy coiled around its tip. Some of the ambient cosmic energy bent to his will and joined the mixture as Arthur’s Cosmic Energy Domination was temporarily weakened due to the sudden lapse in concentration caused by the pain of his arm being nearly blown off his shoulder.
|Authority of Death + Extinction + Music: Song of a Gruelling End!|
The spear vibrated intensely as it shot toward Arthur’s chest, and just when it came within half a metre of Arthur’s body, the ambient cosmic energy once again fell under Arthur’s control.
|Aspect Manifestation: Time!|
Arthur focused the full power of his Temporal Aspect on Roseborn’s existence alone, slowing the man’s movements to a crawl and giving him the time to lean to the left to avoid the thrust.
Summoning Lostvayne back into his right hand, Arthur leapt upward, gritting his teeth through the pain from his left arm as he unhesitatingly swung his sword straight toward Roseborn’s neck, the silver light of Null engulfing the blade.
|Extreme Nothingness: Chaos.|
The slash cleaved straight toward Roseborn’s neck, all Arthur’s cosmic energy forcibly redirected into the blade, unintentionally deactivating his Aspect Manifestation.
Even so, there was no time for Roseborn to move his right hand back into a position where he could block Arthur’s attack as he’d already committed to a full-powered thrust.
Every hastily formed magic barrier was cut apart by Arthur’s blade without resistance, leaving him with no remaining option but to force the activation of an ability that his current clone’s soul fragment was too small to use.
’Innate Ability: Hollow Marionette!’
Roseborn’s soul fragment began to crack as his wounded left arm was wrapped in dense magic power and dragged across space like a puppet on strings despite the worsening damage it caused him.
The left arm moved to try and catch Lostvayne’s blade, but only succeeded in slowing it for half a second as Arthur’s slash sliced through his fingers, tore into his palm and into the arm itself. It pushed his arm back and continued its path into his neck unimpeded, cutting deep and embedding itself halfway through to the bone.
That half second his left arm bought was enough for Roseborn to puppet his right arm into a normally impossible manoeuvre, shifting his spear into a reverse grip which angled its tip toward Arthur’s right side, then swinging it back for a reverse thrust that aimed to pierce Arthur’s body before the blade could finish its cut through his neck.
But before his intent could become reality, a hand appeared from seemingly nowhere and grabbed Roseborn by his hair, pulling his head toward the right and forcing his neck further into the path of Arthur’s sword.
The combined force of Arthur’s blade moving leftward and the sudden pull of Roseborn’s head to the right ensured the cut was fully completed in less than a second, and Roseborn’s body, having lost all commands from his brain, collapsed downward.
At the same time, Celestia, now released from Arthur’s restraint, crossed space at light speed and descended with full force, striking Roseborn’s spear and knocking it downward toward the universe barrier beneath them, redirecting it away from Arthur’s side as it stabbed uselessly into the immense surface without hope of piercing it.
Roseborn’s body crumpled onto the barrier in the same moment his severed head was released, and as it fell toward the universal barrier below, Arthur, staggering forward, stabbed Lostvayne downward like a crutch and looked up warily.
The portal from which the hand that had grabbed Roseborn’s head extended widened, and a familiar blue-haired woman stepped out, her cold gaze falling on Roseborn’s severed head.
"Stupid old man. Don’t you think I took too long for a simple ascension to the Monarch Realm?"
She stepped forward and raised her foot, intent on crushing Roseborn’s head, but before she could bring her leg down, Arthur spoke.
"Wait a goddam minute! I need that."
Alexia paused mid-motion, then turned her eyes toward him. Her gaze fell on his injured shoulder, and after analysing the damage, she snapped her fingers and declared.
|The Ruler of Time Commands: Be Reversed.|
The laws of time obeyed her will, and the state of Arthur’s left hand was reversed to the state it had been in before Roseborn’s attack had nearly blown it off his shoulder.
"What could you possibly need his head for?" she asked after healing the grievous wound like it was nothing. "You do realise it’s still conscious, right?"
"Yeah, I know," Arthur replied. "That much is obvious, given how much it’s glaring at us."
He stepped forward, flexing his restored left arm to confirm its condition, then reached down and grabbed Roseborn’s severed head by the hair, lifting it from behind.
"There’s a little something I want to see if I can get from this guy’s soul fragment," he said.
Two words followed, spoken without sound.
’Core Absorption.’
Cosmic energy spiralled around his arm, sparks of crackling violently around his hand and Roseborn’s head as the law of causality attempted to intervene.
"?"
Sensing causality’s attempt at interfering, Alexia’s eyes widened slightly as she wondered just what Arthur was trying to do.
Arthur could sense her inquisitive gaze, but he didn’t respond and simply groaned softly before spitting in disgust.
"This feeling is very, very disgusting. Can never get used to having impurities in my soul."
He tossed Roseborn’s head back toward her without hesitation.
"Do whatever you want with it. I got what I wanted."
Arthur clenched his fist, inhaled deeply, and absorbed in ambient cosmic energy, using it to purge the minor impurities that had attached to his soul after the absorption process.
Alexia stepped forward and brought her foot down, crushing Roseborn’s head without hesitation, the cosmic energy imbued in her leg obliterating the soul fragment within the clone.
"What was that about?" she asked, referring to Arthur’s use of Core Absorption, but Arthur simply spat out again without giving a clear answer.
"I absorbed some disgusting things. I need some time to clear them out of my soul."
’It’s a useful ability, but I can’t ever get over this part.’
[It’s a necessary cost since you’re literally absorbing fragments of another person’s soul into your own,] Lostvayne said. [Those pieces are definitely not going to mesh well with yours.]
’Yeah. That’s why I hardly use the damn thing.’
Arthur snapped his fingers and rewound the damage to his clothes, then summoned Celestia back into his left hand as he turned to ask Alexia.
"Your words earlier. You went ahead and broke past the Monarch Realm, too?"
The woman silently nodded, dropping the matter of causality’s interference since Arthur didn’t look like he was going to give her a straight answer anytime soon.
"Congratulations, Miss Primogenial," Arthur said with a dry laugh, unsummoning both blades.
"Thanks," Alexia responded curtly, seemingly not caring too much about her new power level.
The woman had long since met the requirements for the Monarch Realm tens of millennia ago, and she hadn’t slacked on improving herself, meeting all the Requirements for the Realm beyond not too long after.
The First of the Sub-Cosmic Realms, the Primogenial Realm, was where one began the transition from a ’universal’ existence to a ’cosmic’ existence.
It was where one began the journey up the realms only Cosmic Superior Existences could attain, and there, one simply focused on gathering the baseline energy necessary for advancement into the higher realms.
Roseborn and Arthur, even with all their powerful attacks, couldn’t make a single crack in the barrier of the Valmone Universe beneath them, but by the time one was done with the Primogenial Realm, cracking the barriers of secondary universes could be done even by accident.
The minimum requirement for this Realm was the complete comprehension of a Monarch-Rank Universal Law, and Alexia had met that requirement long before Arthur’s mother was even born.
As such, when she’d healed her soul damage and ascended to the Monarch Realm, she didn’t exit the healing pod and simply pushed on to the Primogenial Realm, which was the ’Final Phase’ that Roseborn’s other clone had been trying to interrupt.
"Oh, did you destroy his other clone?" Arthur asked, crouching and forming a knifehand with cosmic energy around his left palm.
"Yes, I did. Why?"
"I could’ve used the divinity," he said, stabbing his hand into the chest of Roseborn’s headless clone and grabbing his heart.
|Divine Spark Absorption.|
Roseborn didn’t have a ’Divine Spark’ per se, but he had divinity in the energy cores in his heart, and Arthur greedily devoured every last bit of that energy to enhance his physical body’s power to a new high.
"Any other gods part of his cohort whose corpses you didn’t obliterate?" he asked, removing his hand from the corpse and cleaning the blood from it.
"There should be some," Alexia responded, turning the corpse to ashes. Arthur felt like he saw her lips curl up lightly in satisfaction as she did this, and he barely held back the laugh that nearly escaped him.
"I’d come by to check on them later."
Arthur yawned lightly after speaking, then looked around at the space around them, at the distant universes so far away they looked no bigger than basketballs, and then he said,
"Man, we’re so small in the grand scheme of things."
Hearing his sudden words, Alexia raised an eyebrow, then looked up at the sight of the many universes around them.
"Isn’t that why we all seek greater power? To not be so ’small’ on the cosmic scale?"
"Mhmm. I never thought about it like that," Arthur replied with a contemplative look. "Power’s only ever been a means to an end for me, which is freedom from the assassination attempts and the schemes of the gods back home."
"Well, start thinking about it now. If you can’t understand that, you wouldn’t be able to become a Primogenial," Alexia shot back in an advisory tone.
When Arthur turned to her with a surprised look, she continued. "You didn’t think just accumulating cosmic energy and law comprehension was enough, right? The Sub-Cosmic Realms involve upgrading your existence from the ’Micro’ scale to the ’Macro’ scale. That’s what it means to go from a ’universal’ existence to a ’cosmic’ one."
"So you’re saying that even at your level of power, you’re still operating on the micro scale? Crazy."
Arthur shook his head with a sigh at that realisation. He then clenched his fist and exhaled deeply before calling out, "Alexia."
"What?"
"Remember what I said about a plan for 100 years in the future?"
"Yeah, I do," Alexia responded with a light nod.
"I’ve finally mapped out the details of that plan," Arthur said. He turned to her with a wry smile and then added with a shrug, "And for it to work perfectly, I guess I’m gonna have to die again."
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