Chapter 850: Breaking the Sky
|You only have the type advantage.|
As Altrishia spoke, violet energy coalesced into a dozen spears that shot toward Arthur from every direction, but he simply unleashed an Annihilation Pulse, erasing them all with destruction law energy.
His left eye glowed as he extended his hand and created a Chronosphere, trapping Altrishia just as she summoned her bow.
|!|
As her movements slowed to a crawl, Arthur condensed an orb of cosmic energy and tossed it into the Chronosphere, a smile on his face as he spoke.
|Here, have a Destruction Nova.|
The orb exploded the moment it made contact with her bow, nearly creating a reaction similar to Extreme Nothingness as it consumed everything in that region of space in blinding light.
Arthur charged straight through the blast, his fist aimed directly for Altrishia’s head as she reeled from the explosion, her armour cracking everywhere.
His destructive energy messed with her perception, so by the time she registered his approaching, energy-less fist, it was too late to evade.
’Umbra: Full Moon!’
The illusion of a full moon appeared behind her, and her body immediately seemed to elementalize into shadows, granting her complete physical intangibility.
Arthur’s fist phased right through her shadow body, and her tails shot out to pierce him from his blind spots at the same time.
’Elementalization? No...I’ve seen Berlal do this before. She called it Darkness Mimicry, didn’t she?’
As Arthur analysed her technique, he used his Temporal Authority to slow all her approaching tails, simultaneously infusing destruction energy into his left arm.
|GAH!|
Altrishia immediately screamed in pain as his destruction energy broke her intangibility, de-elementalizing her body and blasting her back with immense force.
Even as she was thrown back, she flooded her tails with law energy to break them free from Arthur’s temporal hold, and as she raised her bow to check the damage done to it, Arthur’s voice echoed.
|Let’s wrap this up, shall we?|
She looked up to see him holding his sword, crimson silver light erupting from the blade and elongating it as he declared.
|Split Series: Fifth Split—Stellar Split.|
The elongated blade of destruction descended with enough force to split a star at its core, but the attack, while powerful, was useless if it never hit its target, and Altrishia was fast enough to make that a reality.
However, Arthur knew this, so he used his Temporal Authority, making the attack skip time for a second.
|!|
Before Altrishia’s eyes, Arthur’s slash, which was still several seconds from impact, suddenly appeared just a few metres away, the full fury of his destruction energy spreading out in all its glory.
’I can’t evade!’
Neither moving at her top speed nor warping through shadows would be fast enough.
She realised it in a split second, and in the next, she unleashed her Umbra Authority’s final stage.
’Umbra!’
|New Moon!|
Her hands coated in darkness shot out to catch the slash, and the collision of destruction and darkness warped space as the crimson silver light of destruction tried to cut through the darkness that sought to consume it.
Altrishia groaned as her darkness absorbed and drained the attack’s potency, its incandescent glow dimming quickly as the cosmic energy fuelling it was siphoned away, weakening its destructive force with every passing second.
Just when she thought she’d reduced the attack enough to safely tank it in her Dragonoid form, a sudden, searing pain lanced through her body.
She felt every nanosecond of agony as something pierced her back, right past the side of her heart, and burst out of her chest.
Warmth flooded her mouth as she violently coughed up blood, her eyes dropping to see a blade, glowing with the purple swirl of temporal and destructive energies, protruding from her chest.
’...hah??’
Altrishia’s brain took a moment to compute the fact that she had been attacked, and the moment her cognition caught up to the reality, the destruction slash she was holding back shattered into harmless motes of light.
The blinding attack vanished, revealing Arthur, whose sword was not aimed at her but piercing through the chest of a light blue illusion of herself, his words finally reaching her ears.
|Extreme Nothingness.|
Altrishia didn’t understand.
Arthur had stabbed what appeared to be an illusion of her, and the attack had somehow affected the real her, bypassing her durability and piercing right through, missing her heart by only a few centimetres.
’What sorcery is this...?’
Altrishia was talented, yes, but the law of Time wasn’t one of her gifts, so naturally, in the interest of efficiency, she had chosen not to comprehend a law that would demand several times more effort for minimal results, instead focusing on her own affinities.
As such, realising that Arthur had attacked her from her past didn’t come to her immediately.
Calmly, Arthur withdrew his sword, and the illusion shattered into motes of light, his voice calm as ever as he spoke.
|Didn’t I say we were wrapping this up?|
Altrishia silently clutched the wound in her chest, blood spilling uncontrollably, her regenerative abilities failing to work due to the sheer potency of Arthur’s power.
|I doubt continuing combat in your current state would be wise, so let’s just end this here.|
Arthur lowered his sword as he spoke, but truthfully, he said it more for himself than for Altrishia.
He was the one really hoping they ended it here.
After all, he had just used Past Manipulation to affect Altrishia’s present.
The higher the target’s Existence Realm and the stronger their Authorities, the more energy he needed not only to capture a temporal image of them, but also to interfere with it.
On top of that, that energy cost was completely separate from the energy he’d spent on the Extreme Nothingness attack.
Bottom line, Arthur was down to less than a quarter of his cosmic energy reserves.
This was the same Arthur whose energy reserves had always been abundant, and whose energy quality was multiple times higher than the Cosmic Average.
That same Arthur was now below 25% just from using Past Manipulation on Altrishia.
’She’s strong. Any more than this and I’ll have to break out the Aspects.’
[Or you can just use my technique.]
Barda’s voice suddenly echoed in Arthur’s head, and his brow twitched at the sound. He silently turned his head toward the dragon’s direction, eyes narrowing as he replied.
’Can you not stalk my thoughts?’
[...why do you make that sound weirder than it actually is?]
At the same time Barda’s response came, Altrishia happened to look up, and she saw Arthur not even glancing in her direction.
To anyone unaware that he was busy discussing with an Ancient Dragon trying to use him to show off, it would seem as if he no longer considered Altrishia worth fighting, now that he’d dealt enough damage to push her vitality close to the red.
And Altrishia just happened to be that ’someone’.
Her brows furrowed at the sight, and she ground her teeth hard, forcing cosmic energy out of her dragon heart despite the pain coursing through her body, and roared loudly.
|!|
The sound drew Arthur’s attention, and he snapped his gaze back to Altrishia just in time to see her forcefully activate her Authority.
|Umbra: New Moon: Beneath Dark Tides!|
She unleashed an omnidirectional wave of darkness that formed a boundary zone around her, the energy slamming into Arthur like a tsunami and pushing him backwards as it engulfed him with her fury.
’My body feels...sluggish...’
Arthur’s movements were heavily impeded, and he could feel Altrishia’s darkness consuming the skin-tight, multi-layered energy barrier coating his body, even infecting his skin and reducing his durability.
Lightning followed the darkness, and though he blocked it with his destruction energy, another burst of cosmic energy immediately hit him as Altrishia cancelled her polymorph spell, returning to her full draconic form, eyes glowing red.
’Did she go berserk or something!?’
The purple-scaled dragon with six tails pooled energy in her mouth and unleashed it as a full-powered breath that reached Arthur faster than he could wrap himself in spatial energy to teleport.
The attack slammed into him unimpeded, its force sending him straight through the vacuum and into the atmosphere of the Levite’s Residence Planetoid, crashing into the middle of an ocean with enough force and heat to instantly vaporise it and crack the bedrock beneath.
Steam filled the air as Arthur slammed onto the ground, his skin from elbows to knees marred in third-degree burns that crackled with residual paralysing lightning.
Blood dripped from the corners of his lips as he unhesitatingly activated his temporal Aspect Manifestation, using its power to almost halt the progression of his wounds, then drew on his Temporal Authority to force as much of a rewind as he could.
Even with his Destruction Authority, instantly dispelling the residual lightning of Altrishia’s Amethyst Fulgur—her Unique Lightning Authority—was impossible, so he could only rewind the unaffected areas for now, giving himself enough mobility to dodge whatever came next.
He hadn’t even finished when the cloud of steam split open, Altrishia’s massive dragon arm swiping down toward his head, and he immediately expanded the radius of his Aspect Manifestation, trapping her in his slowed world.
Then Barda’s voice echoed in his head again.
[Arthur. Now would be a good time to use a certain person’s technique.]
Arthur sighed, clutching his chest as he rose to his feet and activated his Gravity Authority.
’Repulsion.’
The gravitational force on Altrishia’s body instantly reversed, sending the dragon shooting into the sky, and then Arthur pointed downward and said,
"Downforce."
Her body abruptly changed direction, plummeting uncontrollably toward the ground at supersonic speed, slamming deep into the earth with nuclear force, but from the wildly crackling cosmic lightning, Arthur could tell Altrishia still intended to fight.
He sighed, stomping his foot to lift up rocks and pressure-crafting them into a single sword, and as he gripped it, he rewound more of his wounds and stepped forward while drawing in the ambient cosmic energy.
The absorbed energy coursed into his body and straight up to his sword, mingling with sword law energy to strengthen the blade, preparing it for what was coming next.
He raised his hand high, memories of one of his training sessions with Barda from the past four decades flashing across his mind.
◇ ◇ ◇
The most fundamental aspect of Sword Combat was Slashing.
Upward Arcing, Downward Arcing, Diagonal, Horizontal, Vertical, and so on.
Barda had once wondered.
’How can I unleash the maximum amount of power with this basic ’Slash’?’
Arthur had asked himself the same question, too.
Not a slash like the Split Series Lucifer taught him, which required time to charge, or his Extreme Nothingness: Chaos, which demanded fusing multiple law energies and creating a link via cosmic energy to draw in a fragment of the nothingness beyond existence in the form of his Null energy.
The question of how to release the maximum power with simple slashes, without any fancy techniques, gave birth to the first Sword Technique Barda Levite ever created.
◇ ◇ ◇
Arthur, sword raised overhead, stepped forward with his right foot as cosmic energy flowed from his heart up his arms and into his sword.
|Breaking the Sky.|
His sword descended in a diagonal arc from left to right, the slash of cosmic energy tearing through space as he declared the ’Step’.
|First Step: Shatter the Earth.|
A tremendous downward pressure slammed onto Altrishia, the slash instantly reaching her and rupturing her scales, making them fracture as if hit by an earthquake.
Arthur lifted his blade to shoulder level, stepping forward again.
|Second Step: Part the Sea.|
He swung a horizontal slash from right to left, the energy from his blade sweeping across everything in its path like a crashing wave, slamming into Altrishia from the side and sending her hurtling through the air.
She flipped through the air, covering herself with her Volt Aegis to withstand the impact, but the force caused cracks to spider across her shield, eventually shattering it into fragments of light.
At this point, even Arthur felt the strain in his arms, but he pushed forward and took the final step.
He forced his trembling arms to raise his sword overhead and brought it down in a simple downward arc, the most basic of slashes.
|Third Step: Rend the Sky.|
