Chapter 304: Pseudo Authority
’Wait a sec? Wasn’t it only his left eye that was blue?’
He was the one who clashed with Arthur the most so he was able to get the closest look at the boy’s facial features.
That’s why he was sure of it.
’The boy’s right eye wasn’t blue before. I’m sure of it.
So exactly when did it turn blue....and why?’
Even as he thought this, he didn’t stop his weapon slowly pushing it through the prison of time and towards the boy’s body.
But the closer his sword got, the worse the nagging feeling at the back of his mind, telling him that something was out of place became.
He wanted to push his sword in faster but doing that would disrupt the prison’s working process AND might unseal Arthur so he had to maintain the same pace as the others.
"Damn, this thing is slow as fuck."
"We have no choice, if we try to force it in the Chronosphere might classify our weapons as targets and apply the time stop to them too."
Two of his companions were talking amongst themselves but he alone kept his eyes on Arthur’s face, and that was precisely why he was able to notice it.
The blue irises of the boy who was supposed to be sealed in time darted around in his eyes, before locking gazes with him.
"?!"
He felt a cold chill run down his spine, and before he could open his mouth and warn his companions—
"Guys Somet-"
—Arthur’s lips curled up into a grin.
"-hing’s wrong!"
They all instantly stopped bickering, looking up to see the grin on Arthur’s face.
Even if they hadn’t been paying much attention to his face, they all knew that at the time they activated the Chronosphere, he was definitely NOT grinning.
An intense feeling of dread washed over them and they all simultaneously tried to infuse more energy into their weapons that were only a few centimetres away from piercing Arthur’s heart.
Sadly.
It was already too late.
The boy’s lips parted and a faux true voice rang out in the area.
|¬Pseudo Authority of Time. ¬|
The air crackled with tendrils of blue energy as Arthur’s immobile body radiated a brilliant aura of time energy.
With a thunderous force, the power of the law of time surged outwards, tearing through the confines of the seal with an unstoppable force and slamming into the six demigods that encircled him.
The one who had activated the Chronosphere coughed out golden blood due to the backlash, while the others all tumbled across the ground helplessly.
Just when they regained their bearings and turned towards Arthur, they saw his feet slowly touch the ground and he spread out his wings, letting the energy of the law flow through his entire being.
Tendrils of blue energy crackled around him as the law of time itself sought to bestow upon him an Authority, to give him greater control over it but the golden constraints of causality held it back, for Arthur had not met all the requirements to possess a full Authority.
Causality didn’t stop there, but wrapped around his body, scanning his entire being to see if he indeed possessed the right to dare to comprehend a law, only stopping when it confirmed that he was part of those who had special permissions: Progenitors.
Whether he noticed this or not, Arthur closed his eyes and savoured the feeling of possessing a Pseudo Authority over a law, taking in deep breaths and absorbing ambient energies into his body, before releasing them outward once more.
’So this is the power deities possess, and to think I’ve only barely scratched the surface.’
There was some sense of sacredness to his actions that left the demigods momentarily stunned, but they recovered instantly and lunged forward with divinity-infused weapons, intending to attack with their full power.
Just before they could reach him, Arthur opened his eyes and muttered two words.
|¬Temporal Stop. ¬|
He gave his command and time obeyed, freezing in its tracks as cosmic energy swirled around the six demigods, binding them in stasis.
Their movements ceased, their energies paused, and their entire existences were halted.
Looking at the six in front of him, Arthur nodded and spoke to himself.
"Every being’s time flows like a river. With my newly gained authority over it, I can simply place a temporary dam to halt that flow.
However, the stronger the existence, the harder it is to place the dam.
If they possess authorities of their own and are powerful enough to be conscious in a state of stasis, they can forcefully rouse their authorities and break free from the stasis, some can even take advantage of it to attack me through my link with the ’dam’ I placed in their flow of time."
Right before they activated the artifact completely, Arthur had roused his energies of time, internally infusing his body with it but using the ambient essence of the law of concealment to prevent them from noticing this.
As such, the instant he was placed in the Chronosphere’s bindings and trapped in a single unending moment, the powers of time that the boy possessed were stimulated to resist the artifact’s effects.
In this defiant act of resistance, his innate time energy surged forward to push against the foreign influence that confined him.
This subtle clash of temporal forces caused the boy’s understanding of the universal law to expand exponentially; as if a floodgate of knowledge had been opened.
In that unending moment he spent in the Chronosphere’s confines, his soul became a vessel, filled with profound secrets of time manipulation, its basic level applications, default techniques, associations and limitations.
The accumulated comprehensions merged and solidified, forming a radiant Time Origin Core in the depths of his being, granting him the ability and the ’RIGHT’ to enforce obedience upon the power of the law.
However, this Time Origin Core was only half-formed as forming a full core required one’s soul to be at the transcendent level.
"First, you need to go."
Arthur stretched out his hand to the weakest of the six, the one who had lost two whole existence realms from using the Chronosphere and condensed a ball of time energy in his palm, firing it as a temporal beam that shot towards the poor demigod.
Upon contact, a distortion rippled through the air, consuming him in the eradication touch of the beam, disintegrating his form and leaving behind nothing but a lingering residue.
"Now THAT, consumes a ton of energy."
He remarked with a light chuckle as he pulled out an energy potion from his subspace and downed it, before turning to the frozen group and attempting to switch the energy that was powering the temporal stop.
Unfortunately, he failed in this endeavour and the temporal stop was instead disabled.
However, before the demigods who were still in attack motion could hit him, he had already used Cosmic Energy to blink into the air, avoiding their attacks that crashed towards where he was a mere moment ago.
***BOOOOMM!!!!!
Looking down at the explosion, he sighed to himself and thought out loud.
"I guess my control isn’t that good yet."
Meanwhile, the demigods saw that their attack had not hit their intended target, jumping out of the smoke and flames and looking up to see Arthur casually floating while staring down at them.
Upon counting themselves, they realised that one of them was missing, but it didn’t take long for their brains to deduce that he had most likely been killed by Arthur.
"Fuck! Retreat!"
"You’re only making that decision now?!"
Arthur couldn’t help but retort upon hearing their leader’s words, but he quickly snapped out of it when he saw their motions to retreat.
’I can’t catch them if they run in various directions. Mum is watching and I don’t want to lose points for letting my opponents escape.’
"Since I’m in the zone, I guess I can enact this now, right?"
He spoke to himself in his time-accelerated state, his words only sounding like someone fast-forwarded a video multiple times as he held up a hand towards the ground and spoke.
|¬Bounded Field...¬|
Although it was not complete, it was at least half of the true Bounded Field that Arthur had intended to create with his two greatest affinities.
But for now, with his newly acquired Pseudo Authority, this was where it stood.
|¬...Hall of Fractured Time. ¬|
The energy of the laws of time and space expanded from his body, mixing in with the ambient cosmic energy to weave a radiant network of energy that spread out like a spider’s web, enveloping everything within a 500-metre radius of his position in resplendent light.
From the ground, a shimmering mystic boundary line emerged, delineating the confines of the technique with an ethereal barrier of energy, from which a colossal dome of energy materialized.
Both Arthur and the five demigods were encompassed within the dome, its translucent walls glowing with an otherworldly luminescence, as if reflecting the vast expanse of the night sky.
The once solid ground transformed into a sandy expanse that stretched across the entire area, with shimmering particles reminiscent of stardust dancing through the air.
The demigods roused their energies and tried to break through the barriers, but doing so without the energy of a universal law was flat-out impossible.
"My spatial comprehensions increased too? I guess Time and Space do go together."
