Chapter 977: Progenitor vs. Progenitor: Round One
Arthur silently glared at Luka, who still wore a smile as she gestured for him to come closer with her blade.
He extended his right hand and summoned Lostvayne, and the moment his fingers closed around the sword, Lostvayne’s voice echoed within his mind, [Master, my Weapon Authority—]
’I know,’ Arthur replied immediately.
Right now, Arthur couldn’t use Soul-Devouring Oblivion because he had expended every soul Lostvayne had devoured during his battle with Harlamagne, and he hadn’t replenished them due to the chain of events that followed his departure from Barda’s Tower.
Soul Devouring Oblivion required devoured souls as fuel, and with none currently stored within Lostvayne, activating the Weapon Authority was impossible.
Using his own soul as fuel would be the height of folly in his current condition, since doing that would weaken his ability to use his other Authorities.
’I’ll have to use that then...’
Silence lingered for a moment after Arthur made his decision, and then cosmic energy erupted from his body and engulfed the moon of Solymus within a split second.
|Extreme Nothingness: World Collapse.|
Crimson silver light erupted outward, and the entire moon vanished completely as it was vaporised and erased from existence by the power of Arthur’s Null.
Arthur launched himself out of the expanding blast at near relativistic speed, his figure streaking through space as he attempted to leave the star system.
However, he had not travelled very far before Luka appeared directly in front of him and asked, "And where do you think you’re going?"
Arthur, having already coated Lostvayne in a mix of law energies, swung the sword upward toward her without hesitation.
|Extreme Nothingness: Chaos!|
The silver slash of energy tore space apart along its seams as it rushed toward her, but just when it looked like his strike would connect, Luka lifted her left hand and caught Lostvayne’s blade with her bare palm while saying, "Oh? Nothingness manipulation?"
She pushed the blade back and lifted her eyes to meet Arthur’s before continuing, "But you know you’re not the only one who can pull off that trick, right?"
"..."
Arthur clenched his teeth silently as he forced his sword upward against Luka’s palm, but she did not budge even an inch.
He had expected it, though seeing her halt his strongest attack with nothing but her bare hand was still a bitter pill to swallow.
However, this was far from the time to dwell on it, so he immediately took his left hand off Lostvayne and summoned Celestia, stabbing the sword toward the side of her head.
Naturally, Luka saw this coming from a mile away, and she raised her own sword to deflect Celestia’s blade.
But the instant she did that, Arthur rotated his grip, and power erupted from the semi-transparent blade as he activated Extreme Nothingness again.
|Seismic Surge!|
The area was instantly swallowed by purple light as the mixture of temporal and destructive energies devoured everything in sight.
Arthur quickly shot out of the blast radius and created as much distance as possible, but Luka appeared directly behind him, her tone curious as she asked, "Exactly what was that? The other energy you mixed in there with the divinity, I mean.
To begin with, why can you even use divinity?"
Arthur didn’t bother responding to her question as he spun around and swung Lostvayne straight toward her neck, releasing another Extreme Nothingness: Chaos.
Luka lifted her sword to intercept the slash, redirecting the blade downward as she leaned closer and asked,
"Divinity and that other...negative divinity? No, it feels more like a counter for divinity."
Arthur pulled Lostvayne back and slashed at her again, but she blocked it without difficulty and deflected the follow-up with Celestia using the back of her palm.
She then swung her sword and released a slash of cosmic energy that Arthur hurriedly teleported away from to avoid.
Then, resting her sword on her shoulder, she muttered, "It’s just like how anti-magic is to magic, so it’s anti-divinity, right? Please tell me you call it anti-divinity and not some other cringe name."
She seemed more interested in figuring out the nature of Arthur’s energy, but her sword still moved at blinding speed as she cut through every spear of destructive energy Arthur had sent flying toward her.
Just as that happened, she lifted an eyebrow and glanced around, realising that all the rocks within the asteroid belt Arthur had led her into were now rushing toward her with immense force, each one engulfed in crimson silver destructive energy.
Arthur clenched his fists and combined his Gravitational Maelstrom with his Armageddon techniques, and when Luka saw this, her expression changed to one of disappointment.
"Do you really think such a slow attack can g—?!"
**BOOOMM!!!
Luka’s words were cut short as every asteroid engulfed in destructive energy that had been far away instantly skipped through time and was already crashing into her body.
Arthur immediately brought his blade down, sweat gathering along his brows as he released a third Extreme Nothingness: Chaos, the silver slash cutting through the bright flash produced by the exploding asteroid belt.
His slash did not connect, however, because Luka lifted her sword above her head and blocked the silver light extending from Lostvayne’s blade with her own.
Without even a trace of smoke or soot on her clothes, Luka spoke with a smile that completely contrasted the disappointment she had shown earlier.
"An attack that skips through time? Now, that’s a rather interesting trick. You got any more for me?"
Cosmic energy flowed into her sword as her blade cut through Arthur’s silver slash, and as the silver energy was forcefully scattered, she pointed her sword at him and said,
"And that anti-divinity of yours. Let’s see how strong it is, shall we?"
With a star-shaped flash of light, a beam of divinity erupted from the tip of her blade, shooting straight toward Arthur at light speed.
In the instant the beam required to reach him, Arthur teleported several thousand miles backwards, then activated four of his Authorities and conjured a gravitational singularity of destruction within his left palm.
He lifted it just as the light reached him, and the gravitational singularity absorbed the entire beam of divinity, dragging it into its core as the mass expanded.
The moment Luka realised her attack was being absorbed, she cancelled it immediately, and the instant she did so, Arthur appeared behind her and swung his palm containing the unstable singularity directly toward the side of her head.
Luka spun around at an even faster speed and caught Arthur’s left hand, and with strength far beyond what one would expect from her slender arms, she rotated his arm and slammed his singularity-holding palm into his face, forcefully detonating the unstable mass.
However, even through the immense explosion that tore apart space and time, Arthur still stabbed Lostvayne’s blade toward her right side, forcing her to release his hand and reach out to intercept it.
The instant she deflected the blade with her own, Celestia’s blade stabbed toward her left side, the anti-divinity coating the semi-transparent blade piercing through the layers of divinity surrounding Luka’s body before hitting her directly and sending her back several hundred metres in an instant.
"Ah, you got a hit in," Luka said as she looked down at the torn divinity barrier around her skin.
Then her expression changed when she noticed streams of temporal energy surrounding the point of impact.
"You did something with your Temporal Authority, didn’t you?" she asked while looking up, her eyes widening slightly when she noticed an illusion of herself occupying the space she had been in a second earlier, with Arthur’s blade swinging straight toward the illusion’s neck.
|Stellar Split!|
Lostvayne cut straight through the illusion’s neck, and in that same instant, Luka felt destructive energy crash into her own neck, sending her flying into a gas giant, tearing through its core before bursting out and crashing onto one of its solid moons.
"Oh wow. So, a technique that causes attacks to skip from the present into the future, and then another that attacks my past to influence my present through Temporal Imaging. You have quite the arsenal of temporal tricks there, don’t you?"
Luka rose from the ground and brushed the dust from her clothes while speaking, and immediately afterwards, she looked up and saw the entire moon engulfed in crimson silver light.
"And this is the World Destruction technique, right?"
She spoke during the same instant Arthur activated World Collapse, completely erasing the moon from existence.
However, just as expected, Luka burst out from the blast without a single injury, her sword coated in a mixture of cosmic energy and divinity as she said, "I suppose I should start retaliating in earnest now."
The sound of her voice did not travel far through space since there was no energy infused into it, but Arthur did not need to hear her words to understand her intentions.
Luka raised her blade above her head, a dull golden light erupting from it as she declared.
|Divine Light of Dawn.|
The light that burst from her blade engulfed Arthur’s body faster than he could reinforce his cosmic energy shield, bending the surrounding reality to Luka’s will.
Arthur quickly retreated to create distance, only for his back to collide with a solid surface.
"?!"
He looked around and realised that he was now on an unfamiliar planet, and his Spatial Authority immediately informed him that his current spatial coordinates no longer aligned with the region of Solymus, or even the entirety of the Mekiria Galaxy.
’...where?!’
"Behold...this universe’s ’Dawn’."
Luka’s voice rang out from above, and when Arthur looked up, he saw the woman gently descend, her sword still radiating that dull golden light as she continued, "The cradle where the new galaxies that fill the space produced through the universe’s expansion are born."
She took a casual step forward and lightly spread her arms while speaking.
"You manipulate Destruction and bring about endings. I manipulate Light and spark beginnings. That is my innate ability, my Dawn, as opposed to your...Null, was it?"
Arthur had never explicitly named his Nothingness Manipulation ability in Luka’s presence, but she already seemed aware of it, which was not particularly surprising when one considered that she was a higher-dimensional existence who perceived time and space as things that could be panned across like a map displayed on a screen.
Luka quietly lifted her left hand and pointed toward the star-filled night sky above the planet they were standing on, and then she spoke.
"Millennium Of Dawn."
Instantly, the light of every star in the sky, the many millions scattered across the darkness, intensified in brightness, and Arthur immediately teleported a split second before all of that light converted into lasers that pierced through the location where he had been standing, completely erasing the planet they had been on.
