Chapter 920: Cracking the Shell
Rishia raised her other hand, intending to summon Yamigetsu, but before she could, a bright light shot out from the sphere of creation, piercing through the planet’s atmosphere in an instant and reaching their location a split-second later.
When it was a kilometre away from impact, a portal of cosmic energy abruptly appeared in front of it, and with the speed it was moving, it couldn’t stop or evade and fell into the portal, emerging from the exit atop a dead volcano in the east of the continent.
As it crashed into the dead volcano with a massive eruption, Arthur, who had used his Cosmic Teleporter to send it there, deactivated the artifact and spoke to Rishia.
"Rishia. Forget about Charisse for now. Focus your special eyes on that thing."
"Huh?"
Rishia hesitated, but seeing the seriousness in Arthur’s face, she looked up at Valkalonex’s massive body still engaged with the Devil Lords and activated her Clairveil Eyes on it.
While she did that, Arthur turned to Charisse and spoke with a cold tone, "You owe us an explanation. You will also be assisting us in the coming battle."
His words left no room for argument, and Charisse didn’t appear bothered. She simply nodded silently, raising a hand to push Rishia’s blade away from her neck.
As for Rishia, she didn’t even notice when Charisse did this because she was focused on the differences she instantly spotted.
"Its cosmic energy is gone? Where? What’s more, that thing is hollow."
For some reason, Valkalonex’s body contained no cosmic energy, she couldn’t sense the power of its Authority, and its existence felt like nothing more than a ’lifeless husk.’
Even some of the lights on its body had dimmed, reflecting this change.
Hearing her analysis, Arthur replied, "I appraised that thing the moment I noticed it poured all its cosmic energy into its hands, and something stood out immediately."
|Name- Shell of "Aspect Fragment ’E’."|
When it had initially appeared, that name was just "Aspect Fragment ’E’." But now, the words ’Shell of’ had been added in front.
If so, then where was the real Aspect Fragment ’E’?
Rishia didn’t even need a moment to figure out the answer, her eyes immediately turning toward the distant volcano where Arthur had redirected that beam of light earlier.
"That thing’s priority, even while under attack from those Devil Lords, is still killing me," Arthur said.
Instantly, a pillar of cosmic energy erupted into the sky as the volcano split open, and from within the pillar emerged a 3-metre-tall humanoid body, sharing the same crimson, gold, and black colour scheme as the colossus in the sky.
Its black body, lined with crimson gold, was composed of jagged, armour-like plates that appeared to float, with a massive halo covered in thorns on its right side and antler-like spikes protruding from its head on the left.
Its arms were long and thin, the chest pinched at the waist, and the legs lacked feet, tapering into sharp points just like the colossus above.
It had a small head, faceless, with a golden gear hovering just above it.
The moment it appeared, Berlal emerged from Arthur’s shadow, holding Layla and Nicole, and dropped them on the ground.
Arthur turned upon sensing her, and she crossed her arms behind her back, speaking with her usual calmness.
"I’m sure you’ve noticed that due to the difference in density of the materials used, that smaller body is a glass cannon, so they," she paused, glancing at Layla and Nicole, "would be of help."
With those words, her body sank back into his shadow and vanished, and just as she disappeared, the Avatar of Execution, hosting Valkalonex’s cosmic energy and Authority, shot towards them at top speed, splitting the sky as it moved.
Its bladed leg sliced down at near relativistic speed, aimed at Arthur’s neck, but with a purple flash, Rishia’s naginata parried the slash, and Arthur, summoning Lostvayne, immediately unleashed a Destruction Crescent.
The crimson-silver streak of energy was blocked by the Avatar’s arms crossed in front of its chest, but the force still knocked its body backwards.
Only after these actions did the immense shockwaves ripple outward, carving craters into the land, and seeing this, Layla frowned and spoke to Nicole beside her.
"...We need to slow that thing down to a level where we can properly see it."
Arthur, Rishia, and the Avatar of Execution had moved so quickly that Layla and Nicole had barely been able to trace the trails of light left by their energies.
Nicole didn’t respond to Layla, only slamming her hand into the ground, causing a pillar of water to erupt from where the Avatar had crashed after being blown back by Arthur.
The Avatar immediately dodged the rising pillar, but spears of water shot out from it toward its body, and it waved its hands to knock them aside, judging that they didn’t require a barrier.
The moment its hand touched the water, the liquid instantly turned to solid ice and spread across its entire arm in a second, threatening to cover its whole body immediately after.
It shattered the ice with a burst of cosmic energy, but the fraction of time it took was enough for Layla to close the distance, teleporting through its shadow and conjuring a giant cannon with her Creation Authority.
She fired almost instantly, the Avatar of Execution barely able to turn before the massive beam of dark green magic and law energy slammed into its body, sending it soaring skyward.
As its body tumbled through the air, Arthur and Rishia dashed toward it, a sword and naginata cutting toward its waist and head, respectively.
Two hexagonal barriers of cosmic energy appeared to block the blades, cracking and shattering as the weapons tore through them and slammed the Avatar back into the ground, which was now flooded with four feet of water.
The moment it crashed into the water, Nicole swirled it upward in a pillar carrying the body, and Rishia didn’t hesitate to use Stormcall, dropping a bolt of lightning that mixed with the water for a devastating conductive strike.
Nicole froze the supercharged water instantly, encasing its entire body in thick ice, and Arthur appeared right in front of it, his sword pulled back with purple energy mixing destruction and temporal power swirling around it.
|Extreme Nothingness!|
The blast sent the Avatar flying through the air at several thousand miles per second, and mid-flight, Rishia nocked her bow and unleashed a rain of arrows that caught up to it and struck its body from all sides, piercing through its shields faster than they could solidify enough to block the arrows properly.
A portal opened immediately afterwards, and a frozen lance barrage shot up from below, with Layla appearing above, surrounded by hundreds of cannons.
She fired her cannons at the Avatar, but it spun mid-air, streams of cosmic energy lashing out and slicing apart each cannon blast and frozen spear in flashes of light, causing explosions to ring out simultaneously.
The Avatar burst through the smoke and landed on solid ground with its legs, but its body was suddenly yanked forward toward a portal that appeared in front, from which Arthur and Rishia’s gravity- and lightning-charged fists shot out and collided with its head.
Arthur and Rishia’s combined punches, packed with the force of 100x Taemia’s gravity at the point of impact, sent the Avatar flying off the cliff it had landed on and straight into the ocean, slamming into the waves with enough force to send ripples toward every shore with the strength to crumble entire mountains.
The clouds darkened, and lightning dropped from the sky, but before it could hit the water, the Avatar shot out and swung its arm, releasing a bolt of cosmic energy to deflect the lightning, then spun and swung its bladed, cosmic energy-infused leg to block Arthur’s sword.
Four heptagons appeared around its arms, and it thrust its palms toward Arthur, blowing him back with an immense explosion of creation energy, and as his skin burned from the shockwaves, the Avatar chased him, streaks of crimson gold light surrounding its body.
Arthur flipped in midair and landed on a platform of compressed energy, then leapt off just before the Avatar’s bladed leg pierced through it.
The platform exploded, revealing its secondary function as a mine, but the Avatar withstood the blast and swung its right leg, firing beams from the tip that homed in on Arthur.
He was about to use Shattered Horizon to counter them when he sensed a wisp of creation energy behind him, coursing through the air and condensing in front, forming multi-layered inclined shields that deflected the beams, shattering in the process.
Arthur unfurled his wings and immediately flapped them, dashing straight at the Avatar, while Layla, the one responsible for the shields, raised her hand and conjured a 7-ringed magic circle, from which a beam of dark green energy descended.
The Avatar conjured a hexagonal barrier that then released a focused stream of light, curving through the air and wrapping around Layla’s creation magic beam, compressing and crushing it like a snake coiling around its prey.
Purple flashed in his vision immediately after, and Rishia, wielding Tsukikage, her naginata projection, attacked the Avatar, bursts of light scattering in all directions as she met its long, bladed legs head-on.
The two clashed repeatedly while moving, blades grinding and sliding past one another as they flew above the ocean surface, the Avatar matching Rishia’s strikes while simultaneously adjusting its trajectory to avoid the pillars of water erupting between each sweeping arc of her naginata.
Crimson silver light descended from above as Arthur dropped into the battle, his arrival kicking up a massive wave of water that surged outward before the Avatar hastily formed a shield to intercept it, only for Nicole to freeze both the shield and the arm that extended to generate it.
Arthur teleported behind the frozen limb while he activated his Aspect: Selective Destruction, Lostvayne already in motion as he unleashed a Stellar Split aimed directly at the immobilised hand, forcing the Avatar to reshape its other arm into a blade and swing it down to intercept his strike.
Sparks of destruction energy scattered as metal met metal, and before Arthur could press further, a hexagonal barrier formed to halt Rishia’s forward thrust, the Avatar immediately swinging one of its bladed legs upward to meet her naginata and deflect it away from the barrier’s surface before it broke through.
The three of them continued to move without pause, Arthur and Rishia attacking as they moved through the air while the Avatar rotated and reoriented its limbs in ways no organic body could manage, its arms and legs spinning through impossible angles to block, deflect, and counter their attacks as water pillars erupted beneath them and collapsed in their wake.
Arthur wielded both Lostvayne and Celestia, destruction energy and anti-divinity flooding the blades, his Gravity Authority activating at the points of impact to multiply their weight and slam into the Avatar’s frame with crushing force, each heavy blow knocking its body just off balance long enough for Rishia to slip in with precise, cutting strikes from her naginata.
Even when partially blocked, her attacks dealt great damage to the Avatar’s already low health, lightning crackling in through the gaps in its joints to fry whatever internal systems it could.
The three of them sped through the air above the ocean as streaks of light, weapons and body parts clashing again and again without giving either side a moment to breathe.
Arthur abruptly intensified the gravity acting on the Avatar, the invisible pressure locking down its limbs mid-motion and dragging its bladed legs and arms into a forced stillness that robbed it of the fluid mobility it had relied upon until then.
Nicole immediately took the chance to generate a giant ice pike that erupted from the water below, piercing straight into the Avatar’s chest and carrying its body skyward in a violent arc.
Rishia was already moving, assuming her dragon form and sprinting up the length of the ice pike as it formed, and once she neared its tip, she fired a breath at the Avatar’s torso and blasted it cleanly off the pike, hurling it high into the air.
Cracks spread across its chest as it flipped through the sky and crashed down onto a nearby island, its bladed legs carving deep trenches through stone and soil as it skidded backwards across the surface.
Arthur descended from above a moment later, both swords raised as gravity gathered around him, and he brought them down with crushing force that forced the Avatar to block with crossed bladed arms, the impact splitting the ground beneath its feet.
Layla emerged from Arthur’s shadow in the same instant, twin shotguns already in her hands as she fired point-blank into the Avatar’s head and upper body, the barrage hammering it down toward the waist and spreading fractures across its frame.
