Chapter 781: A Show of Force
It had been three days since Arthur’s unplanned stop at a certain High-Level world, where he had acquired detailed information about his target Realm, and ensured there were no witnesses.
Now, he sat in the cockpit of his spaceship, playing a game on one of his portable consoles, his body leaning in sync with the vehicle on the screen.
[Master...tilting your body isn’t gonna help you drift better...]
Celestia remarked as Arthur nearly slipped off his seat while leaning, though he kept himself suspended in the air using gravity laws and continued playing.
The moment his car crossed the finish line, Arthur leapt up, striking a mid-air victory pose, a second before a dozen beams of divinity rained down on his ship from all directions, triggering an explosion powerful enough to obliterate several small planets.
The explosion expanded outward in a radiant sphere of light and intense heat, warping space itself as its glow consumed the surrounding darkness, like a miniature sun erupting into existence.
From a safe distance, twelve full-body armoured figures watched the detonation, their hands gripping long staves, the mechanical tips of which spun softly, emitting an even whir as the built-up divinity within them slowly dimmed.
Their visors remained fixed on the roaring eruption, the blaze mirrored in the sheen of their armour as they quietly observed the destructive aftermath of their coordinated strike.
The squad leader holstered their staff onto their back, activating their comms as they opened their mouth to speak.
[Mission Comp—]
|Attacking on sight? And here I wanted to use the dialogue-before-violence option...|
That calm, unbothered True Voice echoed through the space around them, and instantly, every member of the squad looked up, staring at the ship they were certain had been obliterated, and at the figure perched casually on its helm, legs crossed, eyes calmly fixed on them.
[Impossible!]
[How did—?!]
[Form up! Surround the target!]
The squad leader’s loud orders snapped the rest out of their daze, and they immediately flew upwards, encircling their target while pumping divinity into their staves.
Still seated atop the ship, Arthur sighed as the contact lens in his right eye dissolved away.
|I’d say it’s fair to assume you lot are courting death, wouldn’t you agree?|
With that remark, he activated the technique Lucifer had taught him over the last 12 years.
|First Concretization: Aspect Manifestation—Destruction.|
Concretizations.
The stages of embodying and mastering Conceptual Cosmic Powers, and the Aspects born from them, advancing along the infinite path toward true Conceptuality, the source and foundation of all laws.
The First Concretization enabled one to manifest the abstract ’Aspect’ of a ’Concept’ directly into tangible reality.
Any Concretization beyond the first was forbidden to existences below the Sub-Cosmic Realms—that is, to those still within or beneath the Monarch Realm.
Yet even just this initial stage elevated Arthur’s power to a whole new level, empowering him to unleash a burst of destruction energy with the force of a planetary-annihilation shockwave, tearing through the bodies of the twelve Low-Tier Deities surrounding him.
Their defences were rendered meaningless as the energy bypassed their durabilites, striking their souls directly and forcing out agonized screams from every last one of them.
|Still, this is a rather discourteous way to greet visitors from another galaxy...|
Arthur paused mid-sentence, his gaze shifting to the left as the figure of the one who had issued the order for this ambush emerged through a spatial gate.
|...wouldn’t you agree, god of Permanence?|
He calmly locked eyes with the mixed-coloured eyes of the god radiating the strongest aura among the group surrounding him.
The man’s expression was completely neutral, his gaze calm, revealing nothing about how he truly felt in this moment.
Arthur mirrored that calm. His relaxed smile gave the impression that he didn’t view the encirclement of gods as any kind of threat.
Floating about a metre behind the god of Permanence, positioned on either flank, were two armoured gods, their expressions contorting the moment Arthur addressed their Ruler.
The one to the right raised his spear and pointed it at Arthur, shouting,
|How dar—
|Shut up, dog. I’m talking to your master.|
Arthur snapped his fingers, instantly activating AGSD and forming a singularity right in front of the spear aimed at him.
In less than a second, both the spear and the arm holding it were sucked into the destructive singularity, and the god who owned them screamed as he hastily activated his Authorities to resist being pulled in entirely.
However...
’My Authority isn’t working?!’
Arthur’s Unique Authority of Gravity nullified his efforts, and the man’s body was devoured by the singularity—is what would have happened if the god of Permanence hadn’t sliced off his arm at the shoulder and immediately enveloped the singularity in his own divinity, overloading it with energy in an instant.
It immediately reached its limit and collapsed, violently expelling all the energy it had absorbed in one go.
Except that violent expulsion was instantly contained within a barrier of dense divinity and temporal law energy, shielding everyone present from the waves of destructive force that would have otherwise torn through the area.
Silence fell over the area as the singularity’s explosion was suppressed within the barrier created by the god of Permanence.
All the gods present felt chills crawl down their spines.
They had just witnessed Arthur conjure what was, in essence, a miniature black hole with nothing but a snap of his fingers, and had seen it instantly consume the arm of one of the most powerful gods in their galaxy.
They all instinctively understood that if Arthur wanted to, he could have killed the 12 that had ambushed him. He simply chose not to.
But as the others slowly came to that realisation, Arthur and the god of Permanence—Kalvaro—stared at each other in silence, confirming the suspicions they already held about the other.
’ ’He has a Unique Authority.’ ’
After all, Arthur’s Authority had overwhelmed the multi-layered divinity barrier formed by the higher-ranked Authority of the god whose arm he’d destroyed, while the god of Permanence’s Authority had successfully contained Arthur’s singularity explosion without allowing a single joule of energy to escape into the surroundings.
|You didn’t train your dog well, god of Permanence. How dare it speak while its master is being addressed?|
Arthur asked calmly, his gaze fixed on the god now bleeding from his severed arm, a look one might reserve for something as insignificant as an insect.
The god beside him, who had rushed over to assist with his injuries, turned and glared at Arthur, but the moment Arthur’s eyes began to glow with destruction energy, he instinctively flinched.
|Stand Down.|
Kalvaro finally spoke, ordering those who had been tensely clutching their weapons to lower them, and ordering the battleship stationed over a light year away to power down its charged cannon.
Arthur silently turned his gaze toward seemingly empty space, shook his head slightly, and snapped his fingers, dispersing the swirling orb of destruction energy that had taken shape beneath the battleship without its crew ever realising.
Kalvaro was the only one who had realised that Arthur’s First Concretization hadn’t just targeted the twelve gods surrounding him, but had also dispersed destruction energy across the area, energy which Arthur had then recondensed into a Destruction Nova.
The others only became aware of it when Arthur made it visible, just before calmly dispersing it and reabsorbing its energy into himself.
Then, he turned back to Kalvaro and said,
|You just saved your subordinates’ lives with that order.|
Brushing a bit of space dust off his shoulder, he added,
|Because my next move wouldn’t have been nearly as kind.|
Arthur then summoned Celestia, the weapon appearing in a flash of radiant silver light and radiating waves of Anti-Divinity.
He grasped the hilt, suppressed the energy emission, and set the sword down on the roof of the ship beside him.
Then, turning his gaze back to Kalvaro with a light smile, he said,
|Now then, let’s talk like civilized people.|
|...|
Kalvaro remained silent, simply staring at Arthur, countless thoughts coursing through his mind as he studied the enigmatic young man before him.
His Unique Temporal Authority informed him that Arthur had barely lived three decades, and yet Kalvaro still could not grasp the full measure of his power.
The way Arthur carried himself gave no indication of what he truly thought, and although he came off as the ruthless type who considered erasing someone with a black hole to be kind, that too could easily have been a front.
’And that sword... it emits the same negative energy that contaminated the area around the breach.
So that blade is the source...’
Unbeknownst to Kalvaro, he had fallen for Arthur’s subtle misdirection, lulled into believing that the Anti-Divinity originated from Celestia rather than being Arthur’s own power.
But ironically, despite his passive-aggressive actions, Arthur had zero desire to fight.
As had been stated many times before, Arthur’s Progenitor Authority granted him the ability to suppress the powers of beings with divine factors within its area of effect.
Specifically, it used irresistible cosmic energy to impose artificial limits on the amount of power they could draw from their divine sparks.
The extent of suppression was directly proportional to the Existence Realm gap between Arthur and his target.
However, for Arthur to suppress someone’s power, he first needed to understand how much power they possessed.
Which meant that no god could conceal their strength from Arthur.
And it was exactly because of that, the moment Arthur laid eyes on Kalvaro, he understood.
’I can’t win... even with my Progenitor Authority.’
