Chapter 483: Tides of Wrath
[YOU FIENDS KILLED MY FATHER AND YOU DARE TO ACT OBLIVIOUS?!]
"Dude, chill. I didn’t even know your dad was dead."
To be honest, Arthur was truly oblivious until yesterday. No one had known that Alvey had secretly killed off Yedrist, but even Alvey did not know Yedrist had a child in secret.
Crarox lunged towards Arthur and tried to chomp down on him, but the Progenitor dodged and swung his blade, easily tearing through Crarox’s multi-layered barrier and his scales before rending his flesh and spilling blood.
Next, Crarox’s tail lunged through the air and tried to pierce him, only to suddenly enter a time-slow field which gave Arthur time to escape its trajectory.
It was then that Arthur noticed that the wound he had given Crarox earlier was regenerating at an insane speed, and it didn’t take him long to figure out the reason why.
It was Crarox’s skill; Ocean’s Embrace.
| Ocean’s Embrace
Type: Rare Skill
Effect;
Heal allies with the soothing power of water, simultaneously cleansing negative status effects and providing a regenerative effect over time. |
By itself, it was already pretty powerful, but when compared with Crarox’s Pseudo-Authority, it resulted in the ridiculous regeneration that Arthur just witnessed.
The best way to deal with this would be to take Crarox out of the water, but that was easier said than done. Besides, the nearest patch of land was still miles out so they’d be fighting on water for a while.
With his Destruction Energy, however, Arthur could invalidate Crarox’s healing, so he wasn’t too bothered.
Crarox began gathering magic in his maw, while Arthur infused his sword with swirling temporal and destructive energies.
Simultaneously, they unleashed their attacks—beams that tore through the air and collided almost instantly.
Crarox’s Aqua Breath collided with Arthur’s Extreme Nothingness and the clash of powers did wonders to the fabric of space around them.
The Aqua Breath, already laced with gravity law power, bent space, and when it met Arthur’s destructive energy, the already bent space finally shattered, sending ripples in all directions.
Crarox then waved his tail, conjuring a massive tsunami that surged toward Arthur. The progenitor responded swiftly, using his gravity law energy to increase the gravity acting on the water, forcefully dispelling the tsunami and preventing it from reaching him.
The Leviathan followed up with a conjuration, manifesting an enormous forearm wielding an equally large hammer that levitated near Arthur.
Obeying Crarox’s will, the hammer forearm swung the hammer horizontally, aiming to smash Arthur out of the air but Arthur had an incredible reaction speed which allowed him to turn around and unleash a slash of aura which split the construct in two.
This construct turned out to be just one of many as five more hammers manifested, all swinging down on Arthur with barely a second’s interval between them.
Rather than confronting them directly, Arthur flew downwards to avoid the blows. Yet, the water below surged upwards in a vortex, catching him off guard and sending him flying into the path of one of the hammers.
The hammer struck Arthur, launching him through the air. Midway, a serpentine dragon of water burst from the ocean, jaws wide open.
Regaining his bearings, Arthur sliced the water dragon attempting to bite him in two with his sword, but it was quickly followed by a more dangerous bite, coming from Crarox himself.
The Leviathan’s supersonic bite narrowly missed Arthur, but his jaws succeeded in tearing away half of Arthur’s left wing in the close shave.
To Crarox’s surprise, an unstable pulse of magic power erupted from Arthur’s body, shredding through the Leviathan’s gravity barrier and cracking his scales. The expression on Arthur’s face and his next words quickly revealed this was unintentional.
"Fuck! This is why I hardly use these!"
Arthur cursed, rewinding time on his wings before retracting them and switching to cosmic energy flight.
Using life energy, he healed himself, having just experienced something he rarely encountered—Spell Backlash.
Since learning to fly without his wings, Arthur mostly used Cosmic energy to fly, primarily using his wings as the Built-In Magic Catalyst that they were.
He had been preparing a spell to unleash on Crarox, but having his wing bitten off was like a Mage having their staff broken mid-spell casting. His spell was disrupted and he received backlash, rendering him unable to use spells for a scant few seconds.
It seemed like a short time, but in a high-speed battle, that was enough to decide life and death.
Like now where Crarox bombarded Arthur with over 3 dozen supersonic Aqua Javelins, as well as a swing with his forked tail and an Aqua Breath—all within 4 seconds.
Arthur responded by creating Destruction Energy projectiles with Eradiation Torrent to counter the javelins, used Celestia to block the tail, and fired a blast of pure destructive energy to meet the Aqua Breath.
Crarox roared and slashed at Arthur with his horn, meeting Arthur’s sword in a clash that sent sparks flying.
The Leviathan’s forked tail sliced through the air, piercing right through Arthur’s torso from behind, causing silver blood to spill into the air.
’What...? What’s with this eerie lack of impact?’
Crarox immediately sensed something amiss. Despite having stabbed Arthur, there was a strange lack of impact, as if he had pierced nothing.
His intuition was confirmed when the real Arthur appeared above, delivering a punch that sent Crarox’s tail plunging into the water.
The Weighted Impact Punch shattered his scales and sent blood spurting through the air, but he ignored the pain and lunged at Arthur with his jaws wide open.
Arthur, however, spun to avoid the bite and used the momentum to deliver a high kick to the side of Crarox’s head. The force of the kick sent reverberations through the Leviathan’s body, shaking his brain within his skull.
By the time Crarox regained his bearings, Arthur had already charged up a breath attack.
Arthur released the energy, and the breath attack struck Crarox with devastating force, nearly blinding the Leviathan’s right eye.
The blast shattered the scales along the right side of his face, sending bright red blood and chunks of flesh flying. Crarox roared in agony, his vision momentarily blurred by the intensity of Arthur’s attack.
Arthur didn’t let up, instantly charging forward and throwing another Weighted Impact Punch, but the Leviathan’s instinctive defence saved it from further harm.
’Crystal Shield!’
The skill summoned a crystalline barrier to shield himself from the incoming punch, providing a reliable defence against Arthur’s punch as it took the Progenitor two more strikes to finally shatter it.
By then, Crarox had already begun using his Ocean’s Embrace skill to heal from the wounds Arthur’s breath had caused.
’Frostbite Barrage!’
Shards of razor-sharp ice conjured by Crarox were launched as a barrage of freezing projectiles, however, this all turned out to be futile as Arthur simply enveloped all the projectiles in dense gravitational power and crushed them to dust.
Even so, Crarox continued the barrage, all while activating another skill to attack Arthur from behind.
’Radiant Tides.’
Water and light law energies were combined to unleash a series of blinding high-pressure jets of water.
At first, Arthur simply tried to use gravity to bend the light, but the presence of the Pseudo-Authority charged water weakened the effects of Arthur’s gravity powers.
What’s more, they moved fast enough that Arthur was barely able to dodge after failing to distort them, even with his time-accelerated movements.
Just when Arthur thought he had avoided them, the jets curved and followed him, with two of them succeeding in piercing him from behind.
’Explode!’
Crarox gave the command and the energies detonated, blowing out huge chunks of flesh from Arthur’s body.
"GARH!!"
Arthur roared in pain, the force of the explosion momentarily overwhelming him. Crarox’s sea-green eyes glinted as he took advantage of this chance and charged forward, his jaw wide open as he prepared to unleash a point-blank Aqua Breath.
The beam of pressurized water shot forward with an unstoppable ferocity, hurtling towards Arthur like a tidal wave compressed into a singular, devastating line of force.
The sheer velocity of the beam caused the surrounding air to ripple and distort, while the water itself shimmered with a deadly, crystalline clarity.
As it surged towards Arthur, the ocean behind Crarox seemed to be pulled forward, amplifying the might of the attack with the full power of the Leviathan’s wrath.
Faced with this, Arthur only had time to make one choice.
Either rewind time on his body to deal with his wounds, or stop time around him; effectively stopping the Aqua Breath as well.
He didn’t even need to think twice to make his decision.
’Pseudo-Authority of Time: Temporal Stop! —into— Greater Teleportation!’
When Arthur ’Stopped Time’, he had a limited range of movement within the area affected by his Time Stop.
His use of Greater Teleportation right after teleported him to a distance outside this range of movement and this caused the ’Temporal Stop’ to unfurl.
However, before the time law energy could disperse, Arthur gathered it and created a ’Time Echo’.
**BOOOOMM!!!!
The Aqua breath collided with this Time Echo, with blood spluttering into the air as the Echo was knocked down into the ocean by the powerful torrent.
Since it was merely an Echo of Arthur’s presence, there should not have been any blood. Yet, Crarox had seen silver blood spurt.
The reason was that Arthur had used his Pseudo-Authority to make Crarox see a ’future which Arthur did not teleport’.
Since Arthur’s comprehension of the law of time superseded anything Crarox knew about the law, the Leviathan could not realise that what he ’saw’ was not the true Reality, but a possible reality that can now never come to pass.
As for Arthur, he teleported thousands of metres into the air, with green steam rising from his body—the residual energy of Crarox that had entered his body.
His shredded flesh and lightly cracked bones were exposed for a moment, with cosmic energy surging into his body and regenerating his flesh in the next.
Arthur then used spatial magic to swap out his shirt for another in his inventory, before holding out his right hand and chanting.
"Souls Lost in Hell.
Doomed to roam the fields of Asphodel in vain for all eternity."
When Arthur teleported, he did not maintain his flight, as such, gravity took hold of him and was bringing him down to the ground while all this happened.
"Heed to my call and bend to my will."
The world’s colours inverted for a split second, and then Arthur disappeared in a flash of spatial light.
*VUP!
