Chapter 862: A Flash of Crimson
The faint grey aura surrounding Elaine turned black as she converted the life energy from her life well through her heart and into death energy that flowed through her arms and into her staff.
She swung it down onto her target’s injured shoulder with an impact that generated a shockwave that shattered the remaining windows nearby.
Seconds after the death energy poured into the wound, the flesh of their arm began to rot and blacken, decaying until it resembled the limb of a corpse long buried.
They screamed in agony at the pain wrought upon them, but Elaine cut it off with a thrust of her staff’s butt into their forehead, sending them crashing backwards and unconscious.
The moment her strike knocked them out, all the other attackers around the area suddenly froze mid-action. Those scaling walls, breaking through windows, or fighting civilians all collapsed at once as if invisible strings holding them upright had been severed.
"Huh?"
Elaine looked around in confusion, caught off guard by the eerie stillness that followed.
Others nearby were equally stunned, frozen in disbelief as their opponents suddenly collapsed mid-fight without any clear reason.
Before anyone could make sense of it, Arthur appeared beside Elaine, effortlessly lifting the opponent she had just defeated.
"Look at his mouth, Elaine."
Elaine turned at the sound of his voice, her gaze landing on the man’s face and focusing on his mouth as Arthur said.
She immediately noticed his elongated canines, far longer and more pointed than those of an ordinary humanoid.
Arthur then gestured toward the floor, where the opponent’s once-solid crimson blade had melted into a puddle of blood.
"Glowing red eyes. Blood Manipulation," he said, pointing at the puddle. "Fangs and regenerative abilities."
He gave her a questioning look that told her he expected her to draw the conclusion herself.
Cross-referencing those traits with everything she had learned over the past year, Elaine muttered, "Vampire."
"Good," Arthur said, nodding before dropping the unconscious vampire and gesturing towards the others fallen across the area.
"All of those were thralls bound to this one. When you defeated their master, the thralls all fell unconscious."
’Still, that was a bit too many thralls for a vampire of this level...’
He kept that thought to himself as he crouched beside one of the fallen attackers and lifted their head slightly.
Their eyes were open, even though they were unconscious, and their pupils were unnaturally small.
"See? Glazed-over eyes. Pupils contracted to the limit. Classic signs of vampiric compulsion."
He let the body fall limp again and rose to his feet.
"Now then," he continued, his tone turning analytical, "we’ve got the ones using mobile mechs to blow things up, drawing the attention of every nearby security unit to this location.
Then, on the ground, there are vampires causing more havoc with their thralls. With that, the security forces at and around the event would naturally focus their attention here, which would leave the surrounding areas far less defended than they normally would. Don’t you think?"
When Arthur said that, Elaine blinked, and at that moment, large shadows passed over the ground, making her look up to see the sky filled with a fleet of security mechs and dragons, each radiating immense power as they soared through the air to confront and neutralise the rogue mechs.
The sight made the realisation dawn on her, and she immediately turned back to Arthur.
"Wait... this whole mess. It’s a diversion?!"
Arthur smiled at her question.
"Bingo."
He held up his palm, conjuring a 3D map of the area as he explained.
"There’s a major weapons factory in this district, one that’s also part of this exhibition. They’ve deployed most of their guards to protect their mobile mechs on display and are responsible for the fleet you just saw flying above us.
So tell me, doesn’t it make sense that their factory is far less defended right now?"
"Then whoever orchestrated all this... they’re after the weapons factory?"
At Elaine’s question, Arthur nodded, recalling the other vampires he’d taken down earlier. He’d seen some commanding their thralls to capture technicians and engineers who were trying to escape, and after interrogating them, he’d learned that they’d been ordered specifically to capture the technicians from the nearby factory.
Assuming they needed the technicians to work on something only they could understand, he’d expanded his cosmic spatial perception to cover the area, and when he scanned the weapons factory the technicians were from, he detected several presences beyond sealed doors that had been locked down in response to the chaos at the exhibition venue.
Those presences were moving toward what he sensed to be the nuclear reactor powering the facility, and there was no way he could believe they had any harmless intentions being there at a time like this.
"Let’s find out what the vampires are up to here, shall we?" Arthur said, tapping Elaine on the shoulder before teleporting them both high above the weapons factory.
He then locked onto the area where the presences he’d sensed earlier were escaping through an emergency exit and teleported them again.
A moment later, they reappeared inside a metal-lined hallway just as a spacecraft flew above their heads, moving out through an open hatch and into the sky.
Not intending to let it escape, Arthur raised his right hand toward the ascending craft and activated his Anti-Divine Gravity Authority, amplifying the gravitational force around it severalfold and dragging it back down.
He placed his left hand in his pocket and walked toward it as he slowly lowered his raised arm and clenched his hand into a fist.
The massive ship strained against the unseen pull, but even with its engines firing at full power, it couldn’t break free.
Arthur then drew back his clenched fist, and the ship’s descent accelerated, crashing into the ground below with earth-splitting force.
Leaping through the shockwave that split the tarmac and shattered nearby structures, sending dust billowing upward like a storm cloud, Arthur reached out and grabbed the edge of the ship’s top hatch.
"Now then, let’s see what they were after."
He tore the hatch open in one go and was instantly greeted by a barrage of blinding magic beams.
The concentrated streams of energy struck his body in rapid succession, but each one ricocheted harmlessly off the gravitational field surrounding him, scattering across the walls and other parts of the landing zone, blasting metal and fire in every direction.
Arthur even had the leisure to look away, covering Elaine in a protective layer of cosmic energy before turning his focus back to the vampires inside the ship.
He jumped in, and they immediately charged toward him with weapons raised and spell circles glowing.
Arthur finally pulled his other hand from his pocket, clapping his palms together to release a pulse of temporal energy that slowed time with the echo of the impact.
In that slowed world, he dashed through the storm of attacks, deflecting what came his way and striking back wherever he needed to.
He sent an elbow to one’s throat, a palm strike to another’s chest and a kick that sent a third crashing into the ship’s bridge. One by one, he beat the Inferior Stage Vampires to unconsciousness, not a single drop of blood staining his clothes.
’This isn’t surprising considering my Mid-Rank Gravity Comprehensions are almost at Completion, like my Destruction Comprehensions.
The ’base damage’ I can deal when coating my fists with gravity law energy already exceeds the average physical output of a Superior Stage.’
That thought crossed Arthur’s mind as his gaze shifted to the large, reinforced container in the rear area of the ship.
It radiated powerful cosmic energy, and when he opened it, several basketball-sized orbs came into view, each etched with runes and magic circles, their concentrated energy so dense it distorted the surrounding space.
He reached in and picked one up, turning it in his hand as its glow reflected in his eyes.
"Hold on...this looks just like the core of that golem in Athion. Celestia, Lostvayne, what do you two think?"
[It’s the same thing, Master,] Celestia responded immediately.
[This one feels a lot lower in quality. Its energy isn’t properly contained, so it’s leaking out everywhere,] Lostvayne added.
Arthur nodded at their assessment, and just as he did, he sensed several approaching presences, those of dragons drawn by the explosions caused by the ricocheting magic attacks.
Stepping out of the wreckage with the core still in his left hand, Arthur tried to analyse it further with his cosmic energy.
But the moment he looked down at the core, his black irises abruptly turned blue as the energy of his Temporal Origin Core was roused.
—Memories of the Future: Auto-Activation.—
Memories of the Future’s Auto-Activation wasn’t something Arthur could control enough to assign conditions to yet, but until now, it had only ever activated when a threat capable of harming him faster than he’d normally be able to react approached.
In the same instant that Memories of the Future revealed its vision to him, something descended from outer space, reaching the ground in less than a second despite the vast distance between the upper atmosphere and the planet’s surface.
It streaked through the air and passed through the twelve approaching dragons, and in a blink, every one of them was incapacitated.
The first had its head crushed beneath a descending kick. The second’s wing was torn off before it was slammed into the ground. The third received a punch to the gut that shattered every rib in its body. The fourth had its tail ripped off by sheer force. The fifth through eighth were slashed across their bodies by claws that cut through their scales, while the ninth to twelfth were impaled by countless beams of crimson light striking from every direction.
In less than a second, twelve Mid-Tier Deity Realm dragons, all at the Intermediate Stage like Arthur, were completely neutralised.
All within the span it took Arthur to make a 45-degree turn and extend his right hand to activate the Stellar Guard for the first time in over four decades.
The shield of cosmic energy formed just as a blood-red cosmic energy beam collided with it, the immense impact sending him backwards, hurling him through the air and away from the damaged ship.
Arthur flipped once and landed on his feet, his boots skidding across the metallic ground as he dropped the glowing core and summoned Lostvayne and Celestia into both hands.
He instantly lifted his gaze, locking eyes with the crimson pupils of his attacker.
The pale-skinned Vampire dressed in a spotless white suit stared back at Arthur in silence, his cosmic energy spreading around the unconscious vampires Arthur had defeated inside the ship, along with the box containing the remaining two cores.
Then, without looking away from Arthur, the man muttered.
"Mass Teleportation."
With a flash of red light, he and everything he’d wrapped in his energy vanished, and a second later, the Planet Lord’s aura washed over the area, finding nothing but the residual cosmic energy of the teleportation.
"Arthur!"
Elaine’s worried voice rang out as she ran toward him, but Arthur didn’t respond, his expression darkening as a realisation dawned.
If that vampire had chosen to stay and fight...
’...It would’ve been an instant loss.’
Arthur was 100% sure of it.
After all, that pale-skinned vampire emanating an overwhelming stench of blood, though merely a blood clone, was without question an Ancient-Breed Vampire.
