Chapter 839: Clean-up
Arthur, the one responsible for pinning Baruuk down, silently cancelled the completion of his Three-Stage Summoning since it couldn’t find any existences meeting the third stage’s requirement, and to keep Baruuk from doing anything else, Arthur activated a different Aspectual Authority.
|Aspect Manifestation: Time|
Both his eyes turned blue from the influence of the Aspect of Time, and Arthur took a deep breath as the entire world slowed to the absolute limit.
’Slowed so much, it was practically stopped.’
That was the ’feature’ of the Concept of Time that the Aspect Arthur possessed embodied.
He’d once thought it was either Slow or Stop, but since he couldn’t acquire its Aspectual Authority like he had with Destruction, he’d gone to Barda for advice, and the Continuum Dragon, who had long since figured it out, told Arthur not to think only in terms of ’extremes’.
That was what had given Arthur the enlightenment to realise that neither ’Slow’ nor ’Stop’ was the answer, but something in between.
"Lostvayne."
[Yes?]
"If I kill this guy... I’d get his Aspect, right?"
[It depends on what you want. You can either acquire his ’Destruction over Time’, or you absorb the cosmic energy within his Aspect to increase the energy of yours and strengthen your ’Selective Destruction’.]
Hearing Lostvayne’s explanation, Arthur took a moment to think about it.
’I can achieve a similar effect with my normal Destruction Authority... but that’s not its primary function, so it wouldn’t be as effective or efficient.’
"So I guess taking his is the way..."
The moment Arthur said that, Celestia abruptly transformed into her humanoid form, grabbing Arthur by the hands and looking him in the eyes as she spoke.
[That is most definitely NOT the way, Master.]
"??"
Arthur blinked in confusion, and before he could ask what she meant, Celestia quickly continued.
[Rather than take his Aspect and widen the connection to the Chaotic Concept of Destruction you already have, how about you just absorb the cosmic energy that constitutes his Aspect into yours to strengthen your ’Selective Destruction’, that way your connection to the Concept wouldn’t widen.]
"..."
Arthur silently held Celestia’s gaze after she spoke, and for a moment, no words were exchanged, until Celestia added.
[You are worried about your connection to the Chaotic Concepts...right?]
Towards the end, her voice trembled a little, almost like she was hoping that he was worried, and noticing this, Arthur quietly nodded.
"I guess I’d go with the strengthening option."
He acted like he didn’t notice the visible relief on Celestia’s face as he pulled Lostvayne’s blade out from below Baruuk’s heart and stabbed it right back through the Demonic Dragonkin’s heart.
Almost immediately, his Aspect of Time forcefully deactivated as a flood of black cosmic energy erupted from Baruuk’s body, rising into the sky as a pillar of darkness that gradually faded the higher it climbed, returning to its default multicoloured state.
The pillar then crumbled, the cosmic energy streaming into Arthur’s body and shooting straight into his soul, merging with the already existing mass of cosmic destruction energy within it.
Arthur’s vision blanked out for a moment, and he found himself staring at the familiar sight of his star-system-like Soul Realm, his Soul Core shining like a silver star at its centre as the Origin Cores of his Authorities silently orbited it.
4 Mid-Ranks, 10 Low-Ranks, and 9 Basic Rank Origin Cores for a total of 23, and closer to his Soul Core, along with two luminous masses of Cosmic Energy, was the Origin Core of his Extreme Nothingness Authority, with faint threads of cosmic energy linking it to his Temporal and Destruction Origin Cores, as its progression was directly tied to them.
Arthur turned his focus to the luminous masses of Cosmic Energy now occupying far less space than they had decades ago, and he watched the red one gradually expand, glowing brighter and brighter until its light almost rivalled the intensity of his Soul Core.
He blinked, and his vision returned to the icy expanse, and taking a deep breath, he looked down at Baruuk’s corpse and spoke.
"Time to eliminate all evidence."
All Candidates had Watchers.
Official Candidates, that is.
Arthur was technically an illegal one, so he had no Watcher and absolutely didn’t want Baruuk’s Watcher on his trail.
Right now, they weren’t present, and Lostvayne had helped him confirm there was no one nearby, so Arthur intended to make sure that even if they did come, they’d find nothing left.
Raising his right hand and condensing silver energy into it, he muttered.
|Everything began from Null, and Everything would eventually return to Null.|
With the shortened chant, the small silver orb of energy, barely the size of a ping-pong ball, slowly drifted from his palm and onto Baruuk’s corpse.
The moment it touched the Demonic Dragonkin’s body, it erupted into blinding silver light, and an eerie silence overtook Arthur’s senses as everything around him was broken down on a molecular level.
After about a minute, colour gradually returned to the world that had been dyed silver—correction, the vacuum of space that had been dyed silver, since there was no longer a ’world’ left around Arthur.
Having just voided the planet, Arthur felt slightly lethargic, the immense cosmic energy expenditure putting a strain even on his vast reserves.
Still, he couldn’t let himself fall or lose consciousness, as there was still work left to finish. Activating the Cosmic Teleporter, he returned to the region where this whole mess had started, extending his hand towards Baruuk’s ship before clenching his fist.
|AGSD|
The laws of gravity, space, time, and destruction intertwined, condensing into a compact singularity only 30 centimetres wide above his fist.
He dropped it onto the ship, and the gravitational energy within generated a crushing pull that tore apart the hull, drawing every fragment inward and disintegrating it with destruction, all compressed into a single moment by accelerated time.
As the fabric of space-time warped and destabilised, the battlecruiser’s alarms screamed, but Arthur silently concealed himself, letting the singularity finish consuming the ship and everyone aboard, his Null suppressing every defensive measure that attempted to resist the pull.
The singularity tore through the battlecruiser from within, its gravitational core devouring bulkheads and decks as they crumpled inward like paper pulled into a whirlpool, while jagged fragments of the ship warped and stretched before breaking apart completely as they neared its centre.
The distortion expanded with every piece of matter consumed, its gravitational pull growing stronger until Baruuk’s subordinates finally noticed the singularity eating through their vessel and tried to escape, only to find their movements sluggish as space itself bent against them, dragging their bodies back no matter how hard they ran.
Arthur activated his Anti-Divine Gravity Authority, amplifying the singularity’s gravitational field until it extended beyond the battlecruiser, latching onto nearby fighters and the smaller vessels orbiting it.
One by one, they were pulled into its widening grasp, their engines howling in vain as the pull overpowered them and dragged them off course, their hulls bending as they spiralled inward.
When Arthur saw anyone who looked like they could resist, he would teleport behind them, stabbing them with either Lostvayne or Celestia or both to weaken them before kicking them toward the singularity’s core, making sure they were pulled in and erased.
He kept up this systematic slaughter until the battlecruiser and everything around it had been consumed, the singularity swelling past the point of stability until it abruptly detonated, releasing the mass and energy it had devoured in a single cataclysmic eruption.
The blast tore through space for several million miles, ripping apart the fabric of space as it went and obliterating everything in its path, including the uninhabited planet Baruuk had been trying to terraform.
The destructive wave even reached the area where the legion of Divine Dragons Arthur had summoned fought against Baruuk’s minions, and in the instant before the devastation engulfed them, Arthur cancelled their summoning.
Arthur waited until the devastation had run its course, then swept the silent vacuum with his cosmic energy for any trace of survivors.
He found nothing at first, his spatial perception spreading outward without resistance, until he detected a faint distortion coming from something that remained intact.
Turning his gaze toward the anomaly near where the battlecruiser had been, he flew to investigate, expecting to find a corpse or perhaps one of Baruuk’s subordinates still clinging to life.
Instead, what awaited him was a black box with gleaming gold linings. It was sealed shut but had no visible locks, and when Arthur carefully opened it using Lostvayne, the interior revealed only a cushion and a single card the size of an A5 sheet.
He reached in, lifting the card to examine its metallic surface marked with the same black-and-gold motif, before reading the words etched into it.
[You are cordially invited to the 78th ’Ember’ Reign Alpha Sirus Grand Festival.]
’Alpha Sirus?’
That was the galaxy cluster where Celestia’s fragment was most likely located.
Arthur studied the invitation again, turning the card over to find what looked like a rough sketch of a map leading to a place called ’Athion’.
There was no name on the invitation, so Arthur had no way of knowing who in the battlecruiser had owned it.
He silently placed it back in the box and tossed it into his subspace, deciding to ask about it later before turning around to search for any survivors.
This time, he found several Mid-Tier Deity Realm dragons scattered around the edges of the blast radius, barely alive.
Arthur ended their suffering, sending them to the afterlife, then erased their remains to ensure nothing was left behind before finally opening a Cosmic Gate leading directly into the Trial Grounds where he’d taken Barda’s Sword Trial, on the other side of the galaxy.
