Chapter 882: Metallic Creation I
|Authority of Creation.|
Segmented metallic tendrils with spiked tips burst from the ground around Orjool and shot toward Arthur, forcing him to jump back to avoid them.
The spiked tendrils stabbed into the ground where he’d stood, and right after, a second wave erupted with twice the speed of the first, reaching him before his feet even touched the floor.
With almost no room to dodge and needing cover, Arthur waved his hand, splashing the silver blood pooled in his palm across the incoming tendrils, then detonated the cosmic energy in his blood to destroy them and throw up a smoke cloud.
He landed on his feet, staggering back a few steps before dropping to one knee and clutching his chest.
The gash across it cut a rough diagonal line from his left shoulder down to the midpoint of his stomach, the cut shallower around the ribs and deeper near his stomach.
’Fuck, this is NOT healing anytime soon. Most I can do now is stop the bleeding.’
Taking a deep breath, Arthur used his divinity to do just that, but he barely had the time to finish as a gust of wind swept away all the smoke covering him, a large shadow overlapping his on the floor.
’!!’
Orjool flashed in behind Arthur with ridiculous speed, great sword raised high above his head and fully prepared to come crashing down on him.
’This guy’s speed...!’
**BAAAAMMM!!!
Arthur rolled to his right to dodge the law-energy clad slash that split the ground and carved a fissure that tore from one end of the hall to the other, ripping through the broken throne in the centre.
The godslayer infused his leg with cosmic energy, launching himself upward and delivering a high kick straight toward Orjool’s head.
However, the former Orc Lord was fast enough to pull up his great sword and lift it high enough to block Arthur’s kick, leaving him pushed back by several dozen metres.
He staggered, stabbing the blade into the ground to balance himself, but by the time he did that, Arthur was already upon him with his fist clenched and pulled back.
Arthur’s fist, however, met not Orjool’s face but a giant shield of law energy that spawned in the space between them, his punch cracking the shield with an immense shockwave.
"Guh!"
The rebound from the shield, along with the damage from the creation law energy woven into it, made Arthur groan as he hurriedly pulled his hand back, blood spilling from his knuckles.
Orjool swung his great sword in a wide slash, but Arthur quickly unfurled his wings and flapped them, flying away to avoid the upward-arcing slash of law energy.
’Tsk...my wound opened up again.’
Arthur landed on the ground and immediately used divinity to stop his bleeding, the presence of the energy throwing Orjool off for a moment.
The orc blinked, rubbing his eyes as he stared at the devil-like wings sprouting from the back of the same man wielding divinity, illusory question marks practically floating above his head.
But beyond that, Orjool was even more confused about something else.
[Why are you holding back your Authorities? Do you really come here seeking death?]
"Shut the fuck up. You think I’m here because I want to be?" Arthur snapped in irritation, but the former Orc Lord simply nodded in understanding.
[I see. You’re one of those sent here on tests. And here I thought they sent you here to dispose of you,] Orjool said with a laugh.
[I take it that you’re incapable of using your full power then. A pity. But you’ll earn no sympathy from me.]
With those words, the orc stomped on the ground and dashed toward Arthur, swinging his great sword in a downward diagonal with immense force.
Arthur dashed toward him, folding his wings and sliding between the giant orc’s legs, conjuring a whip midway and wrapping it around Orjool’s left leg. The moment he slid out, he sprang to his feet and pulled on the whip, forcing Orjool down on one knee.
As soon as the orc dropped onto one knee, Arthur formed another whip with his left hand and swung it toward Orjool’s neck, but the orc reached out with his left hand and grabbed the whip.
Orjool tried to drag Arthur along with it, but Arthur detonated both whips without hesitation, the cosmic energy blasts smacking the orc in the face with full force.
He tried to move in for a follow-up, but sensed energy building above him, unfurling his wings and using them to veer his body to the right to avoid the rain of spears that shot down from above.
Arthur landed on his feet, his legs skidding across the broken floor, and he looked up to see that the entire airspace of the 500-metre-wide hall was covered with javelins of creation law energy.
|Metal Rain!|
Orjool’s declaration had them shooting down toward Arthur at supersonic speed, giving Arthur less than a second to create a dome-shaped barrier of magic power around himself.
That barrier, however, only offered protection against the first wave, as the javelins exploded with bursts of creation and earth law energies when they impacted his shield, crumbling it in the process.
’Whip Authority: Tendrils of Disruption!’
Arthur punched the ground, and erupting from the earth were several dozen whip thongs that cracked through the air, either striking the descending javelins to redirect them or wrapping around them and swinging them to knock the others out of the air.
Explosions rocked Arthur’s surroundings, each one releasing bursts of creation law energy, which he quickly countered with timed bursts of cosmic energy, but unlike him, who couldn’t move much while defending against the metal rain, the one who summoned it was capable of freely moving and attacking.
Orjool dashed in and swung his blade horizontally, aiming for Arthur’s neck and forcing the godslayer to redirect some of his focus to firing a beam of cosmic energy from his mouth, aiming for Orjool’s wrist holding his sword.
The force of the blast knocked Orjool’s hand back, making him nearly drop his great sword, but in the instant Arthur took to do that, several javelins slipped past his guard, grazing his limbs and leaving multiple cuts, including one along the side of his face.
Before the javelins could hit the ground and explode, Arthur quickly summoned whips from the floor that wrapped around them and flung them back toward Orjool, preventing the orc from charging again.
Orjool tightened his grip around his sword’s handle, swinging the blade with all his strength and unleashing an Authority-charged slash that obliterated all the javelins in one massive blast, then reactivated his Authority of Creation and summoned another wave of spiked metallic tendrils.
Arthur leapt into the air to avoid them, but that was exactly what Orjool intended as he summoned another metal rain, trapping Arthur in mid-air with javelins raining down from above and his sides while spiked tendrils shot up from below.
On top of that, Orjool raised his great sword and infused it with sword law energy, elongating the blade to several times its original length.
He had every intention of swinging it down, and Arthur had no intention of being on the receiving end of that planet-splitting strike.
Arthur drew on the divinity and anti-divinity within his energy core, sending them coursing down his arms and forcefully condensing both into an orb of energy within his cupped palms.
The unstable fusion of the two energies exploded within a second, bursting outward in an omnidirectional wave that destroyed all the projectiles heading toward him as it expanded.
The technique was very similar to Arthur’s Extreme Nothingness: Seismic Surge, but without the temporal and destructive energies involved.
Instead of being a wave that surged across a surface, it expanded three-dimensionally, hitting targets in the air with equal force.
When Arthur had created Seismic Surge, it was fine since most of his battles occurred on land, but now that most of his opponents were capable of combat both in the air and space, Seismic Surge was becoming less useful over time.
This led Arthur to begin developing an omnidirectional variant of Seismic Surge, an AOE version of the technique to add to his arsenal.
Now that he couldn’t use his Temporal and Destruction Authorities, Arthur relied solely on raw divinity and anti-divinity, unleashing it as an AOE blast that obliterated everything around him and knocked back Orjool’s massive frame.
It destabilised the energy the orc had been gathering around his sword, but it took him only a few seconds to stabilise it again and swing his blade, giving Arthur just enough time to form a whip in his hand and begin winding his arm around.
’Ecliptic Whirlwind!’
