Chapter 848: The Pedigree’s Power
Arthur fell forward, but before his face hit the ground, he planted his hands and used sheer arm strength to spring upward, kicking out while upside down and connecting with Altrishia’s jaw.
The force of his kick sent her airborne, but she simply flipped mid-air and came right back at him, forcing him to teleport away and regain balance before dashing in to clash with her again.
As their arms and legs flew at hypersonic speeds, Altrishia silently analysed every detail she’d gathered on Arthur.
’His physical body is stronger than his Existence Realm would suggest. His attacks are all imbued with gravitational power, and he’s proficient enough that it doesn’t disrupt his teleportations by distorting space.
His earlier attack used destruction law energy, but even though that’s the strongest of the Authorities I can sense from him, he’s not using it again. Why?’
She weaved multiple feints into her strikes as their limbs collided, but Arthur easily saw through all of them and blocked every attack, all while keeping that leisurely expression on his face.
Just as she wondered why Arthur wasn’t using his destruction power, the momentum of a clash pushed them apart, and Arthur extended his right hand and pointed downward.
"Downforce."
"!"
Immediately, the gravity of the planetoid acting on her body spiked more than tenfold, slowing her movements instantly and forcing Altrishia to activate an Authority to brute-force her way through it faster than Arthur’s fist could hit the side of her head.
|Amethyst Fulgur.|
Purple lightning instantly erupted from her dragon heart, coursing down her energy circuits and through every inch of her body as she ducked to avoid Arthur’s fist, the shockwave blasting everything on the ground to her side away.
She rose with a punch aimed at his jaw, but Arthur leapt into the air to dodge, landing with a drop kick that forced her to leap to the right.
The gravitational downforce spiked again, and she barely managed to move her hands fast enough to block Arthur’s follow-up kick with his left, the force throwing her cleanly away.
Arthur kicked off the ground to chase her, but the moment his feet touched down and his fist shot out, something erupted from his shadow and stabbed straight through his wrist, severing bone and nerves instantly, and as his balled fist drooped, another object shot from her shadow and smacked his hand aside.
’The fuck?!’
Arthur didn’t hesitate to teleport away, even if it meant letting Altrishia regain her balance, looking down at his shadow with narrowed eyes.
’That thing definitely came out of my shadow. She can manipulate other people’s shadows, too? And what even was that? It was covered in so much purple lightning I couldn’t even make out its actual shape.’
He grabbed his right arm and forced out the residual lightning with a pulse of destructive energy, then rewound time to heal his arm.
His temporal energy use was so controlled that not a single bit leaked from his body, so Altrishia, watching from afar, could only see it as him having an absurd restorative ability.
Arthur watched her shadow warily, even as she closed the distance to attack, only moving at the last moment to guard as a heavy shockwave coursed through his left arm from blocking her punch.
By the time he raised his right hand to counterattack, Altrishia was already gone, and Arthur caught something ’purple’ flashing in the corner of his vision as a shockwave hit him from behind.
’She’s faster? Even with 15x gravity? Her Unique Authority is at least as good as mine.’
Those thoughts crossed his mind as he was hit from all directions, not getting a single chance to counterattack, though he hadn’t intended to.
’Well, I suppose she knows I’m watching the shadows, so she probably won’t use that thing, waiting for me to drop my guard.’
With that thought, Arthur immediately abandoned all thoughts of defence and spun around, throwing a punch in the direction he predicted she would come from, and as expected, his fist collided with her face at the same moment her claws raked across the side of his face.
His gravity-enhanced punch trumped hers in raw power, so while he only bent backwards slightly, she was blown away as if she weighed nothing.
Her beautiful face was streaked with blood, and the scales that had formed just before his fist hit shattered into fine dust, scattered by the wind.
Altrishia flipped mid-air and shot toward Arthur again, her expression impassive as her wounds regenerated, a faint steam rising from her face.
Arthur tapped his foot on the ground, infusing it with destruction energy, causing countless spears of crimson-silver light to erupt from the ground, forming an inescapable area attack aimed at Altrishia.
Faced with this, she slammed her legs into the floor to brake, instantly leaping upward and curving in the air at a right angle to shoot down toward Arthur in the centre of the sea of destruction spears.
Arthur leapt off the ground to clash with her, but just as he did, something shot out of his shadow again, and he immediately spun around to grab it, only for the lightning-clad appendage and Altrishia to switch places, her hand seizing his and pulling him close for a knee strike to his stomach.
Simultaneously, she slammed her elbow into his back, scissoring him between her knee and elbow.
Silver blood spilt from Arthur’s mouth, and a pair of draconic wings burst from Altrishia’s back as she shot upward at breakneck speed, reaching a height where the platforms the Levites watched from looked like small specks, before diving down.
Using her downward momentum, she threw Arthur onto the ground, before his hands grabbing her lower arms completely crushed them, and she immediately pooled cosmic energy into her mouth.
’I’m no lion that goes all out when hunting rabbits, but...’
|Authority of Dragons.|
’...this guy’s no rabbit.’
A shrieking sound echoed across the land as a hyperbeam of deep purple cosmic energy erupted from her open mouth, shooting toward Arthur at sub-relativistic speed.
Falling toward the ground at several thousand metres per second, Arthur sensed the incoming devastation and immediately extended his arm.
Falling toward the ground at several thousand metres per second, Arthur sensed the oncoming devastation and immediately extended his arm.
’Celestia!’
Cosmic energy gathered and erupted in his palm as Celestia appeared in sword form, temporal and destructive energies flowing seamlessly into the blade as Arthur thrust it forward.
|Extreme Nothingness!|
The two ’purple’ beams collided mid-air, the resulting explosion detonating with supernova-level force, sending cosmic energy shockwaves that rippled through space, obliterating entire planets.
As for the planetoid below, Barda simply made it spatially intangible, so the cosmic energy waves passed through it as if it weren’t even there, only restoring its solidity when Arthur, blown away by the blast, crashed onto the ground and tumbled across the earth like a dirty rag.
He used his gravitational law energy to reorient himself, and the moment he landed upright and called Celestia back into his hand, six streaks of purple lightning erupted from the shadows of rocks and debris around him, striking from all directions.
Arthur’s pupils darted around, locking onto all six, and he spun, slashing through them in an instant, his sword cutting through the dense lightning coating them and revealing their true forms.
’Scales and...blades?’
The appendages retracted into the shadows faster than he could examine them further, so he put the thoughts aside and immediately dashed toward the dragon who’d sent them.
He closed the distance to Altrishia, swinging Celestia at her neck, which she blocked with her claws, though the impact shattered all of them into pieces.
Arthur reversed his grip and swung down again, destruction energy erupting from the blade as he executed a horizontal Planetary Split, the attack splitting the atmosphere of the planetoid that Wyndella had just recreated after the earlier clash of powers and causing further damage to the celestial bodies beyond.
The target of the attack, however, vaulted over the slash like a high jump, her leg swinging straight toward the side of Arthur’s head and knocking him down toward the ground.
Altrishia immediately raised both hands, and as she balanced in the air, she pulled back her right hand, an ornately designed matte black straight bow materialising with a single-fletched arrow of crackling lightning forming on her fingertips.
|Candescent Writ.|
For a moment, Arthur felt as if he saw the illusion of a black star behind Altrishia, but it vanished as she released the arrow, sending it shooting straight at him.
Extinction law energy flowed into Celestia through his arm, mixing with destruction energy as he swung his sword downward, unleashing a vertical slash that rent space.
|Cataclysmic Divide.|
The massive silver arc collided with Altrishia’s arrow in a blinding burst of light, bright enough to make the nova-level blast from earlier look cute.
Space ruptured as the energy from the arrow was drawn in, the rupture collapsing midway and triggering a secondary blast with enough force to extinguish stars.
Arthur’s feet hit the ground, and he looked up just in time to see a rain of similar arrows piercing through the bright sky, descending toward him at hypersonic speeds.
’How many did she fire in a single instant?’
He wondered as he unleashed a burst of destruction energy, creating countless thin, laser-like beams that erupted in all directions from his body.
The beams of his Shattered Horizon technique shot through the air, colliding with the descending arrows in devastating explosions that disintegrated all matter nearby, the chaining blasts filling everything in sight.
Arthur used the Cosmic Teleporter and conjured a gate to the top of the planetoid’s atmosphere, appearing behind Altrishia, who was about to draw her bow again, and just as she turned upon sensing him, he teleported to her left side and delivered a horizontal slash aimed at her neck.
She immediately swung her bow to block his sword, the impact knocking them both back.
Arthur conjured another Cosmic Gate behind her, and just as she turned toward it, expecting something to come out of it, he teleported to her side and delivered a kick that sent her flying right through it, her body emerging on the surface of another planet and slamming into the earth.
The giant planet’s immense gravity instantly quintupled, completely pinning her in place as Arthur dove out of the Cosmic Gate after her, Celestia raised above his head with destruction energy swirling around the blade.
Altrishia unhesitatingly unleashed a breath attack, forcing Arthur to teleport away and giving herself time to cancel the downforce of his Gravitational Authority using her own.
Arthur reappeared from the side as she got to her feet, but his attempt at attack was thwarted as one of the bladed appendages shot out from her shadow to deflect Celestia’s blade, another shot toward his free hand shooting forward for a follow-up punch, and a third lanced at his spine from behind.
With his attacks thwarted, Arthur unhesitatingly let go of Celestia, who flew through the air on her own to intercept the appendage heading for his back, while he unclenched his left hand, grabbed the appendage shooting toward it, and immediately blasted it with as much destruction energy as he could muster in an instant.
"—!"
Altrishia, who had just summoned her bow and was about to pull it, flinched as the crimson-silver destruction energy overwhelmed the purple lightning covering the appendage, coursing through it and shattering the scales along its length while Arthur’s gravity-enhanced grip crushed the blade at its tip.
The dragon immediately dismissed her bow and zapped several hundred metres away in an instant, the appendage in Arthur’s grip retracting into his shadow as she moved.
However, Arthur didn’t chase her or take advantage of the opening.
He stayed where he was, holding up a scale that had broken off the appendage as he said, "Hey, Miss Pedigree. Those things striking me from the shadows, I thought they were constructs, but from your reaction just now..."
His gaze raised to meet hers as he asked, "They’re part of your physical body, aren’t they?"
"..."
Altrishia didn’t respond, but Arthur was certain of his deduction.
When he’d shattered the scales on the one that attacked him from the side, Altrishia flinched, almost as if she felt pain, and even cancelled her attack to put distance between them.
