Chapter 707: Planetary Devastation
|Answer me, Ranus! Are you trying to start another Cosmic War?! Don’t you understand the consequences if the Aggressors and Progenitors find out about this?!|
Right after Jamie said that, the man felt a gaze on him.
His eyes narrowed as he turned toward the fractured sky, his senses zeroing in on the existence whose presence was watching him across space and time.
At that exact moment, Arthur had a sudden realisation.
’Wait ...everyone’s here.’
Everyone he’d predicted would be involved in the Nexus Event—those he’d seen through his narrowing Parallel Paths and the ones Time itself had told him about—were all present.
Through a chain of events, they had all converged on this planet.
Artemisia had been incapacitated and used as bait, luring him, Evan, and Beatrix to the teleportation point that brought them to Cruotis Prime. Before leaving, Arthur had launched an Anti-Divinity missile laced with Cosmic energy, drawing Jamie’s attention.
Jamie, noticing the energy, had gone to investigate and, in his haste, left the Cosmic Gate he used wide open.
Sensing something had gone wrong, Alvey and McEnda had followed through that gate. They’d ended up following Jamie to Cruotis Prime after he navigated through the Spatial Maze Bewússtsein had laid to deter any followers.
Like that, all seven of them had ended up here.
Arthur had long suspected that a Nexus Event wasn’t something that could be easily handled. For Jamie to be involved, the stakes had to be at a level where even someone like him would struggle.
But the current situation didn’t reflect that level of difficulty.
’If that’s the case...’
A troubling thought surfaced in Arthur’s mind.
’What if this is just the beginning?’
Before he could dwell on it further, a deafening roar shattered the air.
A massive pillar of cosmic energy erupted in the distance, shooting toward the shattered sky.
All eyes turned toward the source—the spot where Bewússtsein’s body had fallen after Jamie’s attack.
’He’s still alive? I made sure to use an attack that obliterates both body and sou—what th—?! This bastard!’
In an instant, Jamie realized something was wrong. The energies of certain restrictive laws were mingling with the planet’s ambient energy.
What’s more, the Aspect of Time’s energy suddenly disappeared from the planet altogether.
Without wasting even a microsecond, Jamie vanished, reappearing above Bewússtsein’s fallen body.
His fist, wreathed in searing cosmic energy, slammed down without hesitation.
***KAAABOOOMMM!!!!!
Jamie’s punch instantly obliterated every subatomic particle that composed Bewússtsein’s third body, reducing it to nothingness.
His fist impacted the ground below and a surge of cosmic energy erupted, unleashing a blinding burst of light that rivalled the brilliance of a star.
The sound of the explosion was deafening, a force strong enough to rupture any unshielded eardrums.
Alvey and McEnda immediately activated their Authorities, creating a protective barrier around the four teenagers to shield them from the destructive wave.
The shockwaves and energy ripples tore through the land, sending mountain-sized chunks of rock flying through the air as if tossed by an unseen hand.
A towering cloud of dust, smoke, flames, and cosmic energy billowed up into the sky, obscuring their vision.
Not only had Jamie deleted Bewússtsein’s body, he’d wounded the planet itself.
His cosmic spatial-destruction energy had carved a massive void into the planet, stretching over a thousand kilometres in diameter and plunging more than 12,000 kilometres deep.
It obliterated the planet’s crust, devoured the mantle and the space it once occupied, and even grazed the surface of the outer core.
What unfolded next was like a scene pulled straight from an apocalyptic film.
The explosion’s aftermath began with an unimaginable release of energy, shaking Cruotis Prime to its very core—literally.
The ground heaved and buckled, fractures radiating outwards in titanic lines of destruction that extended for thousands of kilometres.
As the material under the obliterated crust was also outright erased, the surrounding land collapsed inward with a deafening roar, sending shockwaves through the tectonic plates.
Arthur and the others, sensing the impending danger, launched themselves skyward without hesitation.
The earth crumbled like brittle parchment beneath them, and the air howled with surging winds from the pressure changes.
Alvey and McEnda poured more demonic energy into their Origin Cores, manifesting shimmering barriers against the maelstrom of shockwaves and debris.
Taking things a step further, Alvey used his Authority to bend space and warp the group to apparent safety—a distant edge of the horizon.
Yet even here, hundreds of kilometres away, the devastation was anything but distant.
The glowing, searing depths of the caldera created by Jamie’s punch were still visible, a hellish maw that seemed to breathe destruction into the atmosphere.
From the fissures at the caldera’s edges came rivers of molten rock, cascading outward in never-ending streams.
The outer core breach unleashed magma that surged like tidal waves, flowing over the collapsing land and blanketing the surface in incandescent seas. Lava lakes grew into oceans of fire, swallowing entire regions and incinerating all in their path.
On the other side of Cruotis Prime, dormant volcanic ranges erupted simultaneously, their fury unleashed by seismic tremors racing through the planet’s wounded interior. Fire and ash spewed skyward as mountains crumbled, their peaks blown apart in explosive displays that rivalled the destruction at the caldera.
Pillars of smoke rose high into the stratosphere, joining the growing planetary shroud of ash and soot.
The planet’s magnetosphere faltered, its protective field shredded by the damage to the core. Cosmic radiation poured into the atmosphere unchecked, triggering auroras that flickered wildly across the skies, their beauty mocking the chaos below.
As layers of the atmosphere peeled away into space, the air thinned, and the temperature dropped.
Trillions of tons of gases erupted from the ruptured crust and mantle, fuelling a dreadful transformation of the skies. The released gasses combined to form a toxic cocktail that heralded the onset of a nuclear winter.
Ash clouds, black and dense, spread like a planetary veil, blotting out the sun’s light, slowly plunging the world into an eerie twilight.
Due to the sudden loss of ’mass’, Cruotis Prime’s gravitational forces shifted unnaturally. Continents began to drift at an accelerated pace, the ground quaked without pause, and the caldera expanded as the planet’s crust continued to collapse inward.
As if all this were not enough, the disruption of the core triggered a catastrophic release of the cosmic energy within it.
The planet’s energy surged outward in radiant, violent storms, twisting universal laws. Gravity reversed in some places, while in others, time seemed to fracture and loop endlessly.
From their vantage point, Alvey, McEnda, and the four teenagers watched in silence, their faces illuminated by the flickering chaos below.
The scale of the destruction was beyond anything some had ever imagined.
But while the two demons were confused as to why Jamie suddenly did this, the four teenagers didn’t take long to figure out why.
Especially after remembering Arthur’s words about the worst-case scenario being to destroy the planet to kill Bewússtsein.
They understood that Jamie had just tried to do that now.
But Arthur, able to see cosmic energy, could also understand that for whatever reason—
’He didn’t succeed...’
The reason for that became immediately apparent from what occurred next, and the reactions that followed from Alvey and McEnda.
The Cosmic energy of the Aspect of Time within Bewússtsein’s Candidate Sigil suddenly surged outward, radiating through the air like an invisible storm.
Everything turned monochrome as time froze.
And this wasn’t just some localized halt in time—time across the entire planet had come to a standstill.
Then, in a strange and unnatural shift, the parts of the flow of time began to reverse.
It was a disorienting sight for Arthur. Amidst the currents of time pushing forward, some began to push back.
It was contradictory.
Then, the world regained its colour.
But something else began to happen. The chaotic ambient energies and the laws of the planet contracted suddenly around Alvey and McEnda’s bodies.
The two demons clutched their hearts, overcome by the sudden wave of pain as their demonic energies weakened in an instant.
The sensation of the universe’s laws constricting around them felt as though invisible chains were wrapping tightly around their hearts, binding their energy, placing an artificial limiter on their powers.
Arthur’s eyes widened as he recognized the phenomenon immediately. He’d seen it back home, after all.
’Existence Realm Limitation?!’
It was a planetary defence mechanism designed to restrict the Existence Realms of existences on a planet.
While mostly used by Lower Worlds to prevent Higher Existences from entering and destroying them, this Defence mechanism wasn’t lost at higher levels.
To bypass such a limitation, one either had to destroy the planet from outside or limit one’s power to the level allowed by the Limitation.
That was what Bewússtsein had imposed by sacrificing his Candidate Sigil.
A Candidate Sigil—essentially a mass of extremely high-quality cosmic energy drawn from a Concept of the Cosmos—was more than sufficient as a sacrifice to impose an Existence Realm Limitation...
’...on Jamie!!’
The realization struck Arthur like lightning.
Bewússtsein’s target for this limitation wasn’t Alvey or McEnda—it was Jamie’s power that had been restricted. Alvey and McEnda were simply collateral damage.
Arthur wanted to believe that Jamie was strong enough to resist this limitation, but then he remembered: this wasn’t Jamie’s real body.
It was an Astral Projection—given physical form through cosmic energy.
What’s more, Jamie’s vessel was nearing its limit.
He was expending far more energy than usual to maintain it and had already drained a considerable amount tracking them down to Cruotis Prime.
The current Jamie... simply couldn’t resist the Limitation enforced by the sacrifice of an Aspect of a Concept.
◇ ◇ ◇
Arthur had witnessed planetary destruction with his own eyes before. He knew exactly what the cosmic energies of a dying world looked like.
So, despite the chaotic state of Cruotis Prime—its cosmic energies in disarray and its laws spiralling out of control—he could tell it wasn’t on the brink of immediate destruction.
The planet was heavily damaged, but it wasn’t going to collapse.
That was why Arthur was so certain Jamie’s attempt to destroy the planet had failed.
Jamie had intended to strike with enough spatial destruction energy to punch straight through to the planet’s core.
However, the Existence Realm Limitation had taken effect just as his energy breached the top of the outer core.
The current chaos—the turbulent energies, magma surging from fissures, volcanic eruptions, storms of cosmic energy, a shattered magnetosphere, and all the rest—was simply the aftermath of his attack reaching the outer core.
But even with such catastrophic damage, it wasn’t enough to destroy a Prime World built to withstand Higher Existences.
Cruotis Prime wouldn’t be brought down by this alone.
Arthur activated the cosmic teleporter, opening a short-range cosmic gate that transported them to the ground, landing on a relatively stable section of the fractured continent.
Alvey and McEnda were still reeling from the effects of the sudden Existence Realm Limitation.
Of the three Major Aspects of one’s Existence, their Body and Energy Cores had been directly affected.
Their Souls, however, remained Deity Souls.
It was the imbalance between their fully intact Deity Souls and their forcibly weakened Bodies that had caused them to clutch their chests in pain earlier.
But Arthur’s focus wasn’t on them.
He was far more concerned about Jamie.
Jamie had been mid-attack when the Limitation was imposed.
The fact that Cruotis Prime wasn’t destroyed confirmed the Limitation had indeed taken hold of Jamie.
Barely seconds after that thought crossed Arthur’s mind, space warped, forming a spatial gate which Jamie staggered out of.
His appearance was a mess—but it wasn’t his dishevelled hair or burned clothing that drew attention.
It was the cracks.
Fine fissures ran across his skin, snaking out from under his clothes, spreading up his neck, and marring his face.
From these cracks, cosmic energy seeped out rapidly—the same energy that had condensed to give his astral vessel physical form.
There was no doubt now. The Existence Realm Limitation had hit him.
Everyone on Cruotis Prime had been forcibly reduced to below the Deity Realms.
