Chapter 919: Execution Avatar
"The ’Effect’ that is our future encounter, has already been ’Caused’."
It had been 85 Valmone Years since Arthur and Charisse had last seen each other, and she really had spoken those words to him just before he left Taemia. He had simply forgotten until she reminded him.
Back then, Arthur hadn’t given it much thought, but in truth, the effect that led to their next meeting had already been set in motion. After all, Arthur had already killed Kalon on Aramis by that point, which was why Valkalonex’s Aspect Fragment ’E’ was now pursuing him.
In Year 1054, Arthur had been in the presence of far too many Demon Kings for Valkalonex to act after he killed Kalon, and when he returned to Valmone in Year 1090, before heading to Draco Sirus, he had spent less than six months there. Valkalonex didn’t have enough time to track him, and even if it had located him, his activities were within the influence of Gozon’s 72 Demon Kings, with whom he was allied, so it couldn’t take action then.
Now, Arthur had returned to Valmone and stayed for close to two years, more than enough time for Valkalonex to locate him, and he had even moved outside the influence of any Race Rulers he was publicly allied with, remaining there for over a month.
Valkalonex had locked onto his location and silently followed him until he was a reasonable distance from the nearest Infernal Devil King before taking action.
During the course of the battle, Valkalonex had suffered severe damage, and after detecting the moment Arthur’s consciousness was pulled into Conceptual Space, it misidentified him as possessing Higher Order conceptual power and concluded that its current system health wasn’t sufficient to handle such a foe.
To repair itself, it moved to the nearest location where suitable ’materials’ were available, which happened to be Apex World Taemia.
Of course, the presence of those ’materials’ wasn’t coincidental. It was still connected to Arthur’s act of killing Kalon, and to what Valkalonex’s other Aspect Fragments had discovered while tracing his movements after that event, gathering information on him and his powers for when it eventually had the chance to eliminate him.
Arthur, of course, still didn’t know why Valkalonex was after him, so there was no way he could figure all of that out.
Even Charisse, with her power to see and manipulate cause and effect, didn’t know the full extent of the history between them. There were existences with Authorities equal to or greater than hers involved, which limited the information she could obtain.
As for why she intervened and used her power to drag Valkalonex down to Taemia, that wasn’t something she explained, and Arthur was going to find out soon enough.
She looked up at the skies, observing the flashes of bright light and explosions from the battle between the giant Valkalonex and the Infernal Devil Lords on Taemia.
"There are a dozen Devil Lords on this planet. You can use their presence and power to help wear down your foe," she said.
Hearing that, Arthur recalled the first time he had come to Taemia, remembering how he had aided the spirits of Iohodis in repelling an invasion by Infernal Devils.
He also remembered that, due to the interventions of Jamie and Denerth Sect Master Chang, a deal had been struck with Miacav, preventing the Infernal Devils, who had taken control of the rest of the planet, from interfering with the Iohodis continent.
As a result, the spirits of Iohodis maintained sovereignty over their continent.
The conquered continents, in contrast, were now ruled by the Infernal Devil Lords who served Miacav. Twelve of them in total, four Low-Tier Deity Realm Junior Devil Lords, and among the remaining eight Mid-Tiers, only two were Superior Stages.
Considering that Taemia was an Apex planet with vast untapped resources, this level of force made sense, and those forces were now proving useful to Arthur as they fought against Valkalonex.
Although they had noticed the chains restraining Valkalonex and the shift in gravity caused by Arthur, before they could determine who had done what and why, they had to first deal with the ’divine’ enemy before them, which posed the greater threat.
Not long after Arthur and Charisse met, several spirits rushed in from the distance, catching up to her, and Arthur recognised a few familiar faces, spirits of Nature’s Dwelling and Tír Síorghlas, the Orders of Spirits on the eastern and western halves of the continent.
Lightning fell from above, and Rishia emerged from the bolt, her eyes narrowing as she scanned the group of spirits before turning to Charisse.
"She’s the one who used those causality chains. You know her?" she asked.
"Yeah," Arthur nodded, glancing up at the ongoing battles in the sky before continuing. "They can stall that thing for now, but it has a reserve of divinity as large as its cosmic energy reserves. The only reason it hasn’t used divinity against us is probably that it knows divinity is useless against me.
Well, I haven’t used mine against it either."
Arthur understood that Valkalonex was after him specifically. That much was obvious, considering it called him ’Elimination Target’ repeatedly, and if it could analyse and counter his law powers, it was smart enough to know not to use divinity against him.
But against the Devil Lords, who had no special powers or resistances to divinity, Valkalonex was free to unleash it.
That quickly became clear as lights flashed at the side of the Machine god’s torso, and it generated hundreds of polygons of light around the palms of its upper left arm, firing a scattershot of divinity beams that forced the Devil Lords to dodge.
Two of the Junior Lords were too slow to avoid them, one sent flying toward the moon while the other crashed into an ocean with meteoric force.
In that single strike, Valkalonex had taken out two of its opponents.
The remaining Devil Lords launched barrages of attacks at Valkalonex and commanded their spaceships to continue firing, the cannons depleting its shields and preventing Valkalonex from regenerating them fast enough to block the onslaught.
Suddenly, half the cannons of the Devil spacecraft fleet redirected their fire away from Valkalonex, targeting Taemia instead, specifically the eastern region of the Iohodis continent, and opened fire.
"Huh? Why are they—?!"
Arthur’s question was cut short as he sensed hundreds of thousands of divine presences appearing in his perception, all shooting toward the sky at incredible speed from different parts of the continent.
Rishia noticed them too, narrowing her eyes as her special optical ability activated, revealing the true nature of these ’divine presences.’
"Robots?" she muttered.
"The correct term would be Automations," Charisse corrected, prompting Rishia to turn toward her with a suspicious gaze, silently asking how she knew that.
Charisse didn’t have time to explain, because the colossus in the sky suddenly made a massive move, releasing powerful cosmic energy and shattering the chains that had held it to Taemia.
It pulled back from the planet slightly, though not too far, and spread its lower arms wide, generating thousands of light polygons to attack the Infernal Devils.
Arthur’s eyes widened at the sight, not because of its attack, but because he could see the cracks and gaps he and Rishia had created in Valkalonex’s body slowly closing up.
"It’s repairing itself...!"
"Those Automations are made of the same material as that thing!" Rishia exclaimed, immediately summoning her naginata and swinging its blade, stopping just short of beheading Charisse as she demanded.
"Why did you drag that thing here?"
The spirits present naturally tried to attack Rishia, but they were completely outmatched as a single burst of lightning from her paralysed them all, and her tails erupted from their shadows, piercing the necks of the few Inferior Mid-Tiers among them.
Rishia’s words about the material making up the Automations made Arthur understand why Valkalonex had come here.
The suitable ’Repair Material’ it had detected was the bodies of those Automations, and it had absorbed some of them to repair itself during the short time it had been fighting the Devil Lords.
Just then, its loud True Voice echoed across the planet, and for the first time since appearing in this star system, Valkalonex used an Authority.
|[Detected Elimination Target Location.]|
|[Switching to Precise Elimination Mode.]|
|[Activating Engine of Creation.]|
The giant gear wheel appeared behind it, and Arthur’s first instinct was to use his Aspect of Time, but the moment he tried, he quickly realised the amount of cosmic energy he had recovered was barely enough for one Aspect Activation.
’If I use it now, I won’t be able to use my Aspect of Destruction until I recover more, and that will take a while...’
The thought of not being able to use his Aspect of Destruction to actually ’fight’ Valkalonex made him hold back, and that moment of hesitation was more than enough time for Valkalonex to gather the bodies of close to a hundred thousand of the Automations it had summoned from across Taemia.
It sent the majority of the summoned Automations, numbering over a million, to attack the armies of the Devil Lords both in the spaceships and on land, and as its lower arms continued to wave and unleash various attacks with different law energies and divinity, its upper arms summoned the specially gathered Automations and cradled their bodies within a sphere of creation law energy in its palms.
|[Machine god Authority: Execution Avatar.]|
An enormous amount of cosmic energy was infused into the sphere as it swirled, so intense that Rishia, who was busy demanding answers from Charisse, flinched and snapped her gaze toward it.
