Chapter 511: Idrilla’s Request
While she could not interfere in Arthur and Crarox’s rematch, nothing stopped her from doing the same with Evan’s.
She was just so preoccupied with Arthur that she missed what was happening with Evan.
While Arthur was still reeling with laughter, a harpoon of black water with a chain attached to it shot through the air and towards his head.
His hand moved and he caught it, however, a second one came from the side and pierced in through the back of his palm.
Within a split second, hundreds more charged at him from all conceivable angles, trying to pierce through his body all over.
He dodged the majority, but a few succeeded in piercing his arms and legs, each one laced with a paralysing lightning that stiffened his movements, allowing more to hit him and successfully restrain him in the air.
Rising once more, Crarox charged at Arthur, with over two dozen magic circles hovering around him. Each one launched a beam of pressurized water, and within Crarox’s maw, power was rapidly condensing in preparation for a breath attack.
’Oh my, this is quite...dangerous.’
Crarox was putting his all into this one attack, and Arthur couldn’t take it lightly. But in the end, it didn’t matter if the attack was never launched in the first place.
|¬Stop. ¬|
Time froze, yet everyone was still conscious. Arthur left it that way.
He wanted Idrilla to see what he was doing, after all.
Destruction energy surged through his body and all the harpoons embedded in his body shattered to pieces.
He then held up his hands and like a fortune teller rolling their hands over their crystal ball, he moulded an orb of gravity law energy in his palms.
Arthur concentrated so much energy in the swirling orb that it bent space, and when his time power entered the mix, it began swirling around even faster.
Drawing upon more power, Arthur infused Destruction law energy inside it and the power of his Null.
Eventually, space broke down and a devastating singularity with a violently spinning accretion disk of destructive cosmic energy was born.
Its power was so great that it shattered Arthur’s time stop, making him receive backlash for his own actions!
|¬Accelerated Gravitational Singularity of Destruction. ¬|
Crarox’s two dozen torrents of pressurized water surged forward, and his breath attack reached Arthur in a split second.
Yet, all were pulled towards the singularity in Arthur’s palm due to its dense gravitational pull.
Crarox had memories of Arthur using this in their last battle, so he quickly cancelled his Breath attack as fast as he could to prevent the singularity from devouring too much power.
"You cancelled it? Oh well, it matters not."
Arthur condensed the singularity into his palm and clenched his right fist over it.
His pupils turned in Crarox’s direction and the Leviathan instinctively used gravity law energy to throw its body to the side, avoiding Arthur’s hand that manifested right where its head was a second ago.
"Huh? Where are you going?"
Arthur spoke like he didn’t understand that Crarox was running for his life, reaching out with his left hand once more and rotating Crarox’s gravity, generating a force that pulled the Leviathan towards him.
Crarox turned around and tried to fire a breath, Arthur’s fist struck forward faster than Crarox could muster his energy to attack.
Upon impact, the singularity contained within his palm erupted with a cataclysmic force.
The amalgamation of time, destruction, and gravity laws, coupled with the energy absorbed from Crarox’s failed breath attack, coalesced into a devastating explosion that erased more than half of Crarox’s massive form from existence.
Waves of destructive energy rippled outward, tearing through scales, flesh, and bone with relentless ferocity, pulverizing around 75% of Crarox’s 2km-long body.
Where Arthur’s punch landed, there was only a swirl of bite-sized remains and dissipating energy.
The Leviathan’s once-ginormous form, now severed and mutilated, left only a fraction intact—his head and the tip of his tail.
It went without saying that with such a significant portion of his body destroyed, the light of Crarox’s life began fading from his eyes.
However, before the final embers of Crarox’s life could flicker out, Idrilla dismissed the Leviathan’s summoning, pulling the remnants of his immense energy towards her.
At the same time, the bodies of the three winged creatures that Evan had beaten the shit out of disintegrated into pure energy, which Idrilla deftly swirled into a single, colossal mass hovering ominously above her scythe.
"Graveyard of My Enemies’ Adversaries; Supreme Art: Oblivion."
Absorbing the combined energy of all the Reborn Adversaries and coalescing them into a single potent mass of raw power, Idrilla locked onto Arthur and swung her scythe decisively.
She sent the dark mass darting forward with blinding speed, a devastating torrent of super-condensed death energy aimed directly at Arthur.
Arthur summoned his semi-transparent blade, Celestia, holding it overhead.
With cosmic energy serving as the base, he infused all his powers into the blade, creating a swirl of purple-silver energy around it.
|¬Extreme Nothingness. ¬|
He unleashed it all in a single slash, sending it flying through the air and cleaving through space as it hurtled towards the incoming torrent of death energy.
In that same moment, Evan darted in from the side, his sword shimmering with a fusion of elemental and destructive energies.
He attacked Idrilla with a swift, precise strike, forcing her to raise her scythe in defence. Their blades clashed with a resounding metallic clang as Idrilla parried Evan’s sword with a forceful swing of her scythe, sparks flying from the point of impact.
Undeterred, Evan pushed forward, their weapons locking in a fierce struggle for strength.
But before their little fight could reach a decisive end, Arthur’s slash, imbued with the concentrated might of his cosmic, time, and destruction laws, met the torrent of death energy head-on, cutting through the dark mass, and tearing it apart with a thunderous roar.
The resultant explosion of the two forces colliding surpassed the upper limits of what Idrilla’s Bounded Field could contain.
The boundary lines and walls of the field shattered under immense pressure, unable to withstand the overwhelming power. The remnants of the Bounded Field dissolved, and the combatants were abruptly returned to the forest outside Iklaque.
Resultant shockwaves rippled out omnidirectionally, sending Evan and Idrilla flying through the air.
Idrilla swung her scythe and used it to anchor herself to the ground, but the force that buffeted her body was still enough to send her tumbling a few dozen metres further.
As she crashed on the ground, she rolled to her feet with practised agility and willed her scythe back into her palm.
But before she could react, Arthur burst out from the smoke and black flames at supersonic speed, his form a blur of motion.
In an instant, he was upon her, his semi-transparent blade pulled back.
"Playtime is over."
He declared, and with those words, he thrust the sword forward with unerring precision.
**SHUNK!!
The blade pierced through Idrilla’s chest, the force of the stab driving it deep. The impact was immediate and brutal, her eyes widening in shock and pain as Arthur’s blade pinned her in place.
However—
"...!"
—Idrilla did not die.
Her facial markings shone with light and she channelled a surge of divinity that hit Arthur at point-blank range, sending the boy’s body hurtling into the air.
"...haaa...haaaaa..."
Heaving deep sighs, she used her scythe as a staff to prevent herself from crumbling to her feet, thanking her stars for her ’Last Stand’.
Just once, Idrilla could survive a certain death attack, provided it wasn’t one that destroyed her head, pulverized or vaporized her in an instant.
Nevertheless, her survival was not perfect.
In game terms, Idrilla had survived, but with only 5% of her health left. She needed to heal herself or even a weak Level 200 could kill her in this state.
Staggering lightly, she activated her Soul Harvest and drew upon all her remaining stored souls, turning them into fuel to cast recovery magic.
’First, I need to remove this blade...then I shou-?!’
Her thoughts were cut short when her senses finally picked up on something strange.
She could detect the presences of three people; however, she was fighting against four. Arthur, Artemisia and Beatrix all showed up in her perception.
"...where’s Evan?"
Answering her question, was Evan’s voice that rang out close to her right ear.
"I’m right here."
"?!"
**SHUNK!
Evan’s blade pierced through the back of her chest and burst out from the front. The energy she had generated from consuming souls was forcefully dispersed and Idrilla coughed out black blood.
Slowly, her gaze turned down and she looked at the two swords piercing through her, and then rotated her head to the side, meeting Evan’s eye as her vision blurred.
Idrilla’s scythe dropped to the floor and with it, she fell to her knees, heaving a heavy breath as the life within her body slowly began flowing away.
"That skill of yours is really tricky."
Arthur spoke as he walked up to them, referring to the skill Evan had used to disappear from everyone’s perception.
It was the same one he had used when he first arrived on Aramis, with Alvey and McEnda not noticing him until they used their Pseudo-Authorities.
Even now, Arthur had also lost track of Evan’s presence, so he used his Pseudo-Authority of time to find the boy, before accelerating his movements so he reached Idrilla before she could heal.
The words the two boys spoke seemed distant as Idrilla looked down on the swords piercing her, noticing one very important feature.
’There’s no energy.’
In other words, Arthur and Evan had attacked her with purely physical attacks.
"...what the hell’s this supposed to mean?"
She questioned them with a faint voice, and their gazes turned to her simultaneously. Despite the manner of her question, she couldn’t stop her lips from curling into a smile.
The fact that Arthur and Evan had used purely physical attacks, meant that her soul was undamaged by their powers.
If her Soul was undamaged, she could Reincarnate without any problems.
For them to do so on purpose, it could only be because she had spoken about her Reincarnation plan earlier.
"Your ability was a pain, but you seemed nice.
What’s more, your Karmic Alignment showed you’re surprisingly ’Ordered Good’.
Perhaps that’s because in the end, you were never truly willing to fight, but only did so because of the Oath you were forced to take.
Since you said you can reincarnate, then I hope your next life turns out better than this one."
Evan spoke as he held up his hand summoning his sword back into it. Immediately, blood began pouring out from Idrilla’s chest but she paid it no mind as she focused on sensing the power of the ’Oath’ on her.
She felt the strings of power dissipating, and a wry smile spread across her face.
"You know...I’m probably Iklaque’s best bet at protecting itself.
Funny, considering I’m the youngest one, and the one they ostracised and called a ’Cursed Child’.
Counting on the mercy you have shown me, I deign to ask you one last favour.
Please..."
Idrilla looked up, meeting their eyes with her obsidian black orbs, wearing the kindest expression they had ever seen from her.
For a moment, they thought she was going to plead for mercy.
But then, her expression twisted into one of pure disdain, and she screamed.
"I WANT YOU TO SLAUGHTER EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM! RIP THEM TO SHREDS, BURN THEM TO ASHES, AND ERADICATE THEIR WRETCHED SOULS FROM EXISTENCE WITH YOUR POWER OF DESTRUCTION! MAKE SURE THEY SUFFER UNTIL THERE’S NOTHING LEFT OF THEIR MISERABLE LIVES!"
"(꒪ö꒪)"
"(ʘᗩʘ’)"
Her sudden outburst left them both stunned, their eyes wide with shock.
Seeing their expressions, Idrilla let out one final, maniacal laugh that echoed through the air. Then, her head slumped downward as the last embers of life within her faded away.
"Did you...?"
"I heard her loud and clear, Evan."
Arthur replied, shaking his head as he unsummoned Celestia and turned around, telling Evan to handle things here while he went to find Artemisia and Beatrix who had been blown far away.
Evan watched Arthur’s retreating back for a moment before turning to Idrilla’s lifeless body. He heaved a sigh and placed his hand on her forehead.
"Burn."
By his command, prismatic flames erupted from his hand, engulfing Idrilla’s corpse. The esoteric flames shimmered in a myriad of colours, consuming her flesh and bones within seconds.
Her body was reduced to ashes, which the wind eagerly took up, scattering them across the battlefield and leaving no trace behind.
