Chapter 921: “Kalonex”
The Avatar immediately reacted to the damage Layla’s shotguns caused, spinning its head 180 degrees towards her and firing a beam of cosmic energy that burst into a wide scattershot, but Rishia dropped down between them, her naginata flashing as she cut the beams apart mid-flight before vanishing into her own shadow.
That opening was all Layla and Nicole needed, the two of them pouring half of their remaining energy into a cannon Layla formed with her Creation Authority and firing it immediately.
It tried to force Arthur back with raw power, but he manipulated gravity, generating equal force to act on the Avatar’s body from all directions at once, locking it in place just long enough for the combined shot from the two devils to connect.
The resulting blast erased the island in an instant, reducing it to dust, while the ocean beneath collapsed inward as a massive hole was torn open at its centre, the aftershock rippling outward towards the continents of Taemia as tsunamis that the Spirits of Iohodis struggled to block from devastating the land.
The Avatar burst out of the hole in the ocean, spinning through the air and returning its bladed arms to normal, slamming its palms together to generate dozens of rapidly expanding polygons around its body, all of which unleashed streams of cosmic destruction energy in all directions.
|AGSD!|
At the sound of Arthur’s voice, the fabric of space broke down, and a singularity formed, attracting the beams towards it and devouring their energies.
Purple lightning flashed as Rishia dashed in behind the Avatar, and when it spun to slice its bladed leg at her, she blocked it with one of her left wings, sacrificing the limb in the process as the space between her arms ruptured.
Cosmic lightning burst from the rupture with violent force as Yamigetsu appeared, and the moment she gripped it, she swung it upward and into the Avatar’s body, the impact breaking off several pieces of metal as it was sent flying toward the atmosphere, where Arthur, who’d condensed all the energies of its attack just now into his palm, appeared and slammed everything into its head.
**BOOOOMM!!!!
The blast tore a hole through Taemia’s atmosphere, rupturing the fabric of space-time and blasting the Avatar’s head apart, knocking it back down toward Rishia, who flew upward at top speed and stabbed her naginata straight through its chest from behind, purple cosmic lightning crackling through its entire body.
The moment she did that, space ruptured, and grey chains of causality burst out, wrapping around its broken limbs and binding it.
Rishia immediately pulled Yamigetsu out of its body, ripping out some of its internals in the process and sending gears and circuit boards falling below as she backed away, just in time for pulses of energy from the causality chains to slam into the Avatar’s body.
Immediately, the giant shell that’d been battling the Infernal Devil Lords and had taken down close to half of them turned its colossal arms in their direction.
The land below trembled as the many hands moved, but just as they began to descend, beams of dark green light erupted from below, crashing into them and knocking them upward, delaying them long enough for more chains of causality to coil around the Avatar of Execution.
Charisse’s chains restricted its Authorities and even its link to its giant shell, making the shell’s lights flicker erratically, and its movements stiffen. All the hundreds of thousands of automations it commanded went offline for a second, thousands falling towards the planet before coming back online and flying upwards again.
The chained Avatar of Execution made an unintelligible grinding sound, its arms struggling to spread out as it unleashed all of its remaining cosmic energy, the furious waves spreading out in all directions and knocking anyone below the Mid-Tier Deity Realm they crashed into away.
A giant gear began to form behind it as it tried to activate its Machine god Authority, and seeing this, Arthur and Rishia flooded their weapons with cosmic energy and charged straight toward it.
|Soul-Devouring Oblivion!|
|Strike, Yamigetsu!|
Arthur dashed down from above while Rishia shot up from below, their blades slicing right through the Avatar of Execution’s torso and shattering it all to pieces. Rishia’s crackling lightning mixed with Arthur’s destruction and electrified the broken fragments, detonating every piece in massive explosions.
The moment that happened, a streak of crimson gold light shot toward space, racing for Valkalonex’s shell, and the instant Arthur noticed it, he spun mid-air, released Lostvayne, and shouted with his arm stretched outward.
|Authority of the Progenitor godslayer: Divine Spark Extraction!|
The streak of light immediately came to a halt mid-air, revealing its true form to be a shard of divinity that struggled to fly upwards and escape the invisible force of Arthur’s Progenitor Authority.
He clenched his fist and pulled his arm down, but the Authority of the Machine god within that Divine Spark fragment resisted his pull, cosmic energy bursting out in furious waves as it tried to escape his grasp.
Rishia flew towards the spark fragment, ready to swing Yamigetsu to destroy it, but just as she pulled back her naginata, her eyes widened in surprise.
|Lady Berlal!?|
Her hands froze mid-swing as Berlal appeared in the air above the divine spark fragment and raised a finger toward it, the world around them slowing to a crawl as the river of time was flooded with pitch-black darkness.
"A billion years is enough for many changes, but I guess some things and people never change, isn’t that right, Kalonex?"
Berlal’s finger stopped just short of touching the divine spark fragment as she spoke, and outside the planet, the massive body of Valkalonex began speaking in its mechanical True Voice, the sound echoing normally even though time was slowed.
|[Overmind: V.A.L.K.A.L.O.N.E.X ONLINE.]|
|[Identity Confirmed: Eclipse Dragon, Berlal Levite.]|
||Question: Why dost thou interfere with my affairs?||
Hearing the question, Berlal raised an eyebrow.
"Interfere?" she asked, tapping the divine spark fragment and removing something that resembled a small chip. "I’m doing nothing of the sort. I’m simply stopping your little module from compromising the target of my curiosity."
She crushed the chip between her fingers, and immediately, the lights across Valkalonex’s body began to flicker erratically.
|[—##ERROR! DATA CORRUPTION DETECTED.]|
|[Aspect Fragment ’A1’ assigned to existential records i—!!]|
|[Overmind: V.A.L.K.A.L.O.N.E.X OFFLINE.]|
Cracks spread across the body of the giant colossus outside the planet as time returned to its normal speed, and then the pull of Arthur’s Progenitor Authority dragged the divine spark fragment down toward his open palm.
The instant it touched his hand, fractures raced across the fragment, and the massive body of Valkalonex beyond the planet completely collapsed into dust, so much so that it filled a large stretch of space between the planet and its moon.
Seeing this, Berlal shook her head and muttered, "Arthur was right. This universe is really rife with the interference of cosmic powers.
To think one of that snake’s pawns was lurking in here, too."
She looked down toward Arthur just in time to see divinity leak from the cracks in the fragment he held, his body greedily consuming the immense energy to fill the remaining gap needed for him to reach the ceiling of the Superior Stage of the Mid-Tier Deity Realm and push even further beyond.
It was only a fragment of Valkalonex’s divine spark, which itself was another fragment of a greater god’s divine spark, but the energy within it was still immense, enough that Arthur’s exhausted reserves were filled completely, with additional energy continuing to pour into his body to strengthen it, while the remainder flowed into his soul to further enhance its quality, raising it beyond that of a Mid-Tier Deity, though still not close to High-Tier level.
As Berlal watched this in silence, the space beside her distorted, and even though Arthur and Rishia’s attacks had ripped multiple tears in the fabric, a spatial gate still formed, from which a ten-foot-tall devil with twisted horns and two spiked tails emerged.
"The battle is over now, isn’t it?" Miacav asked as he unfurled his reverse wings and hovered in the air. "Can we finally speak about the collateral damage caused in the process?"
Without taking her eyes off Arthur, Berlal replied, "That demon must have warned you about me, and you still dare to speak with that tone. You’re a bold one, devil."
’That demon’ was clearly referring to McEnda II, and knowing this, Miacav answered her calmly.
"I have to be bold, given my position in this universe. What happens here may be inconsequential to someone like you who comes from elsewhere, but to those of us who live within it, these matters are everything."
At that, Berlal finally turned her gaze toward him, shrugged lightly, and spoke. "I care not about the fates of affairs within your universe.
However, this collateral damage in this particular incident could’ve been avoided if I hadn’t stopped you from acting the moment that pawn entered this dimension."
Her words revealed that Miacav had noticed Valkalonex’s arrival in the Infernal Dimension and had refrained from eliminating the Machine god’s Aspect Fragment, not by choice, but because Berlal had restrained him just as she’d restrained the other Infernal Devil kings who’d sensed Valkalonex during its earlier battle with Arthur and Rishia.
Once she finished speaking, Berlal called out, "Barda, could you come here for a moment?"
Silence lingered for several seconds before space split open beside her. A hand reached through, pulling the fabric of space aside like a curtain, and Barda leaned through the opening.
"What is it, Berlal? We’re kinda bus—??"
His voice cut off mid-word as his eyes swept across the area in front of him. Within a second, his gaze traced everything that had occurred along the river of time, and then he raised an eyebrow in mild surprise.
"Oh, wow. Kalonex? It’s been a while since I’ve seen one of his probes."
Like Berlal, he immediately recognised the ’Imperium Probe’ known as ’Valkalonex’. Not caring about that revelation a second time, Berlal asked, "Can you rewind the planets that were destroyed?"
At that, Barda fully entered the Infernal Dimension, his eyes scanning the surroundings until he noticed the massive fifty-light-year-wide void carved into the galaxy.
"Ah, I see," he said. "That was quite the blast."
He raised his hand, and as his Continuum Dragon’s Dictum activated, he felt a pang of curiosity at what he discovered.
Barda could sense that the souls of those who had perished in the explosion had not been claimed by death. Something was preventing the law of death from touching those souls, and that ’something’ was Berlal’s power.
"Why?" he asked.
It was but a word, but Berlal understood that Barda wanted to know why she’d gone out of her way to stop the souls of a few trillion mortals in some random universe, and she answered him accordingly.
"This devil is Arthur’s ally in this universe. It’s far too early in that alliance to let this level of damage within his territory slide, especially given the disparity in power between them."
"Oh? I see," Barda replied simply.
He shrugged lightly, then extended his left hand, isolating the divine spark crystal whose energy Arthur’s body was greedily absorbing within a specialised spatial bubble.
The flow was cut off immediately, preventing Arthur from drawing in any more power, as Barda had already seen that Arthur was nearing his current limit.
With the influx halted, Arthur’s body switched from ’consumption’ to ’digestion’, using the absorbed energy to reinforce his physical body down to its smallest cells, raising its strength to match his enhanced soul and expanding his energy cores in the process.
"Wyndella and I are almost finished with our roguelike trial construction," Barda continued. "I’m heading back to Draco Sirus. The old man is there as well, if you want to discuss Arthur and Syndra’s situation."
After saying that, he tore open space once more and slipped back into the Draco Sirus universe, leaving Berlal behind, who then glanced at Miacav in the corner of her vision.
"I believe that addresses your concerns."
Miacav nodded slowly. "Yes. It does."
He looked down at the planet below, the shattered continents and ruined landscapes fully restored to the state they had been in before Valkalonex appeared by Barda’s power, making it seem as if the battle with Valkalonex had never occurred at all.
