Chapter 913: Uninvited Guest
"Great," Arthur said, rolling his eyes. "So now I get to spend my life hiding from the Progenitor Angel."
Berlal frowned slightly, since the situation was undeniably troublesome.
’Tsk... I’ll have to talk to the old man about this.’
Just as the thought crossed her mind, Arthur spoke again. "Oh well. I lived for decades without letting it bother me, and I’m not about to let it start now."
Turning toward Barda, he asked, "We’re done here, right? Where’s Elaine? I’ve got somewhere else to go before I leave the Infernal Dimension, and I want to take her there."
Barda couldn’t help but quietly admire Arthur’s mental resilience despite the threat hanging over him.
Then again, Arthur had been born with a threat looming over him in the form of entire god-ruled pantheons, and now there was the fact that the Progenitor goddess Luka was searching for him.
Adding Syndra to the list wasn’t gonna make any difference to his day-to-day life.
Barda lifted his hand and teleported Elaine to their location, and as usual, she immediately ran toward Arthur and wrapped him in a hug the moment she saw him.
Arthur returned the embrace and lifted her slightly before speaking again. "Mind releasing the Devil Lords so I can break my contract with them? All the terms have been fulfilled."
The request was directed at Berlal, who glanced toward the fifteen shadows stretched across the ground, with nothing visible to cast them.
From those shadows, the bodies of the Infernal Devil Lords she had sealed away over a month ago rose up, all of them gasping for breath with eyes wide in shock the moment they broke free.
Arthur momentarily wondered what they’d experienced while trapped inside their own shadows, but he didn’t linger on the thought.
Instead, he retrieved the orbs of Destruction Energy he’d infused into the defeated Devil Lords, and the instant he did, the contract binding him to them was severed.
"I’ve gotten what I wanted," Arthur said. "You can keep the rest of the magic power and whatever else is left."
Naturally, he made no mention of the fact that the object responsible for forcing the planet to expel that excessive energy had already been removed from its core.
Hoisting Elaine onto his shoulder as usual, he spoke.
"Now then, onto our next destination, a nearby Apex World I visited the last time I was here."
◇ ◇ ◇
Barda didn’t stay to accompany them on their journey to this next Apex World, instead returning to whatever other universe he had been in.
Berlal, however, remained, not because she intended to travel with them, but because she wanted to speak with Rishia about something.
For that reason, she chose Arthur’s spaceship, moving through the vacuum toward Apex World Taemia, as the place for their discussion.
Layla and Nicole were already on the ship, having been dropped off by Wyndella when she had come to retrieve Barda and bring him back to wherever they had been over the past few years.
The addition of the two devils to the group was greatly appreciated by Arthur, especially since he planned to show them some of the locations he had only mentioned when he returned to Hell after his first trip to this universe.
Apex World Taemia was the planet where Arthur, Evan, Artemisia, Beatrix, Crim, and Hibiki had spent nine weeks following their spaceship’s explosion on the way to a ’Secret Realm.’
In the end, it turned out that Taemia was within the ’Secret Realm,’ and everything they had gone through had been planned by several Race Rulers, Infernal Devil King Miacav, and Denerth Sect Master Chang Shaoting.
Of course, the mastermind behind it all was a fellow protagonist of Arthur and Evan’s, Jamie.
Now, Arthur was heading to Taemia, partly to see how things were now and also to meet up with some of the friends he’d made there, including the Prophetess of Iohodis, Charisse.
At some point during the trip, while Arthur was talking with Elaine, Berlal, who was speaking with Rishia, suddenly paused and looked toward the back of the ship. She then glanced at everyone on board before returning her gaze to Rishia and continuing to listen to what the younger dragon was saying without a word.
Not noticing this, Arthur continued speaking with Elaine, his hands disappearing into the entrance to his subspace as he sorted through the collection of law crystals within it.
"Alright, Elaine, while we’re on Taemia, you’re going to be doing some levelling up so you can reach transcendence as quickly as possible and begin comprehending universal laws," Arthur said, selecting a few law crystals that matched Elaine’s affinities.
During her trip on Choth, Elaine had finally taken a life willingly—actually, two lives—and Arthur didn’t want her trauma to resurface, so he planned to have her get accustomed to the sensations and emotions tied to willingly killing. That was exactly why he had decided she would be doing intensive levelling up while they were on Taemia.
Observing from the side, Layla remarked, "You really treat her like she’s your kid, Arthur."
At that, Arthur blinked, glanced down at Elaine sitting on his lap, and replied, "I suppose I do."
Just as he finished speaking, and before Layla could respond, he rubbed his left eye.
"I feel itchy," he muttered, pressing his palm against his eyelid.
Layla raised an eyebrow at his comment. "Itchy?"
"Yeah, I don’t understand why," Arthur replied, continuing to rub his eye.
For a moment, his iris, hidden beneath his eyelid, flickered a faint blue, but the light didn’t spread fully across his iris before vanishing as he continued to rub his eye.
He stopped for a moment, but the itch persisted, making him frown.
He told Elaine to stand for a bit, then got up and moved toward a mirror to see if something was stuck in his eye, causing the irritation.
As he rubbed it again, the same blue flicker appeared beneath his eyelid, and this time, the moment it happened, his body froze.
He was suddenly hit with a strong feeling that something was very wrong.
It was a deeply unsettling sensation he couldn’t explain, and it made him extremely uncomfortable.
He blinked, still feeling the itch in his eyes, and looked around.
"Something’s off," he muttered.
When he turned toward the back of his ship, where the engines were, the uneasy feeling intensified, and he could feel some of the hairs on his arms rise.
Arthur kept his gaze fixed in that direction for several seconds without speaking, before finally muttering in his True Voice.
|First Concretization. Aspect Manifestation: Time.|
Cosmic energy poured into his soul and into the condensed mass of conceptual power within it, instantly breaking the veil that had been cast over him without his awareness.
Both of his eyes immediately glowed the brilliant blue of the law of time, and a Memory of the Future flashed across his mind.
"!"
Arthur kicked off the floor with enough force to dent it, dashing through the ship’s hallways in a blur, ignoring the worried calls of his friends.
He broke through a hatch and landed atop the moving spacecraft, the hull breach alarms blaring as he ran across its surface, before leaping off with such force that the vessel tilted.
[Master?]
[What’s wrong?]
Both of his Ego Weapons questioned him, but Arthur didn’t answer, silently summoning Lostvayne and channelling as much cosmic energy as he could in an instant.
At the same time, he infused his Null power, silvery light streaming from the jet-black blade as he swung it downward.
|Extreme Nothingness: Chaos!|
His strongest attack was unleashed without hesitation toward the seemingly empty space behind the ship.
At the same moment, that empty space shimmered, and an immense beam of cosmic energy shot out, colliding directly with his silver slash.
The impact created a brilliant flash that outshone the nearby giant star, illuminating even the most distant planets in the system.
Shockwaves from the clash radiated in all directions, slamming into Arthur’s ship, instantly depleting its shields and hurling the interstellar vessel across space with tremendous force.
For reference, this was an interstellar exploration vessel from Hell, built for combat, with shields several magnitudes stronger than the best in the Valmone universe.
Even so, those shields were instantly depleted by the mere shockwaves from the collision.
The impact sent Arthur careening back, his body slamming him against the ship’s hull and tumbling across its surface. He managed to grab onto something to prevent being flung into the nearby planet, activating his Authority of Gravity to maintain balance.
He immediately looked up, eyes narrowing, as the instincts that had warned him of danger even when a veil had been cast to prevent his Authority of Time from sensing future threats alerted him again that the danger hadn’t disappeared.
And those instincts were correct.
As the bright flash from his attack colliding with the beam of cosmic energy faded, Arthur saw a giant four-pointed star-shaped tear in space, with a massive pair of metallic hands reaching out to grab its edges, stretching the tear wider.
Crimson-gold rectangular blocks of spatial glitches formed around the fingers, making the scene appear like a crumbling simulation as the hands expanded the rift.
At the centre, a huge ring of fire glowed, with what looked like a white-hot star at its core, the surrounding bloody-red space filled with swirling clouds of heat and light.
As the hands tore the rift apart, a bright flash erupted, forcing Arthur to stabilise his body and spaceship with his gravity as something of immense size emerged from the tear.
When he waved his hand to clear the red clouds of hot dust from his vision, Arthur’s eyes widened in shock, lifting his gaze to the entity now before him.
It was a massive armoured colossus with four arms, its upper body composed of jagged black plates, held together by a glowing white light at its core.
It had a tall, pointed head resembling a helm, with two long, segmented arms stretching out to the sides while two smaller ones, disconnected from its torso, floated below, ending in claws that looked capable of tearing anything apart.
Crimson-gold sparks of cosmic energy crackled along its length down to its lower body, which didn’t have legs but tapered into a sharp, dark metallic spoke.
’What the...FUCK?!’
Arthur’s reaction was entirely justified, not because of the overwhelming aura the entity emanated, but because of its sheer size.
The only reason Arthur could even perceive its full shape from top to bottom was the information he received as it occupied 3D space and fell within his spatial perception range.
His eyes couldn’t even capture the full scale of one of its palms because of how close he was, after all, this thing measured at least 30,000 kilometres from top to bottom!
Its width, with its disproportionately elongated arms stretched out, was even greater.
Before Arthur was a literal planet-sized mechanical colossus.
He quickly used his Authority of Gravity to reverse the curvature of space caused by its presence, moving himself and his spaceship further away in seconds and giving him enough room to observe more of it, enough for the Appraisal Skill to function.
The results that came back, however, did nothing to ease the situation.
