Chapter 763: 763. They’ve Becoming Desperate Now... My Avatar Really Did A Great Job!
"It shifted!" Valentina’s voice was a sharp, frantic command, cutting through the low, nauseating hum of the distortion field.
Inside the shimmering bubble of warped reality, she could feel the Avatar’s consciousness pressing against them like a physical weight. The geological awareness was lashing out, its sensory tendrils sweeping through the stone, but it was hitting the massive, distorted mass signature of Morwenna’s field instead of the delicate, lethal architecture Valentina was weaving within it.
"I have thirty seconds! Don’t let the rhythm break!"
"Twenty nine," Morwenna grunted.
Every muscle in her body was locked in a state of violent tension. Her teeth were gritted so hard they threatened to crack, and a thin trickle of blood escaped the corner of her mouth as she fought to maintain the spatial curvature.
"The field is stable... but it’s fighting me. I can feel it... it’s trying to peel back the edges of the distortion like it’s looking for a seam!"
"It’s probing!" Valentina shouted over the rising roar of elemental energy.
Her hands were a blur of motion, weaving energy into the air. "The geological awareness is hunting for a gap!"
"It’s going to probe the boundary, looking for a single spatial inconsistency in the distortion pattern to find a way inside!"
"There is no inconsistency!" Morwenna roared back, her eyes glowing with a fierce, desperate light.
CRACK!
A vein in her temple throbbed visibly. "I have been carving space since I was nineteen!"
"The boundary is clean! It’s a perfect, seamless lie!"
"Then it will probe for nineteen seconds and find nothing!" Valentina replied, her voice trembling with the sheer effort of her concentration. "Which gives me eleven seconds of breathing room!"
"Don’t you dare let go!"
She pushed her energy to the breaking point, forcing the compressed elemental output to its absolute maximum accumulation rate. Inside the lattice of the spatial compression, the assembly was terrifyingly rapid.
The compression acted like a hyperbaric chamber for magic, forcing the elemental components into unnaturally close proximity, preventing the energy from bleeding away.
FWOOOOOM!
First came the fire, a roaring, incandescent thermal foundation that turned the air inside the field into a shimmering furnace.
WHOOOOSH!
Then came the wind, a howling, cyclonic kinetic carrier that began to whip the heat into a frenzy.
CRACK BOOM!
Finally, the lightning, the jagged, violet thermal accelerant. The lightning didn’t just strike; it fused the wind and fire, turning the kinetic energy of the gale into a pressurized, non-dispersive lance of pure, elemental fury.
This wasn’t just three spells layered together. It was something new.
Something monstrous.
It was the emergent expression of the elemental mastery’s compound function, a singular, screaming entity of destruction that was exponentially more powerful than anything Valentina could have conjured in the open air.
"Fifteen seconds!" Valentina gasped, her skin beginning to flush a deep, feverish red from the heat. "Assembly is at sixty percent!"
"Twenty two seconds remaining!" Morwenna warned, her boots grinding into the stone as she fought the urge to buckle under the mounting pressure.
"He’s going to react!" Valentina’s eyes went wide, her pupils dilating. "Tremor’s going to realize the Foresight is blind and the ground is silent."
"It’s going to shift its approach!"
"What’s left to shift to?" Morwenna hissed, her voice strained by the effort of holding the spatial walls upright. "If the foresight and the geological awareness are both constrained, what the hell is it going to do?"
"Pattern recognition!" Valentina screamed. "It’s a construct!"
"It will scan the history of this entire goddamn fight! It’s going to look for the last time we coordinated a high-energy movement!"
"We haven’t deployed combined workings before!" Morwenna countered, the sweat pouring down her face, stinging her eyes. "This is the first time!"
"Then it will look for the closest analogy!" Valentina’s voice rose to a crescendo of tactical desperation. "It will look for the last time we moved in sync!"
’It’s going to treat this like our coordinated positioning from two minutes ago!"
Morwenna’s heart hammered against her ribs like a trapped bird.
THUD THUD. THUD THUD.
"Which means it won’t aim for us," she realized, the horror of the logic sinking in. "It’s going to send a geological strike to our last known positions."
"It’s going to strike where we were, not where we are!"
"The field occludes our current positions!" Valentina yelled, her hands trembling as the elemental pressure reached a screaming pitch. "The last known positions are outside the boundary!"
"It’s going to strike empty ground!"
"It’s going to strike the ghost of us!" Morwenna yelled.
"Exactly!" Valentina agreed, her eyes burning with a manic, beautiful intensity. "And when that strike hits the ground and returns no impact data, no shattered bones, no blood, and no human mass signature, it’s going to have to recalculate!"
"How long?" Morwenna demanded, her voice a guttural snarl. "How long is the recalculation?"
"Longer than the half-second lag!" Valentina cried out. "This is a total system shock! It has no reference model for this!"
"It doesn’t have a lookup... it has to derive the answer from scratch!"
"Ten seconds!" Morwenna commanded, her entire body vibrating as the spatial field began to groan under the sheer density of the energy inside. "Assemble it, Valentina! NOW!"
"Eighty percent!" Valentina screamed, and the air inside the field began to scream along with her.
BOOOOOOOOM!
The earth didn’t just shake; it screamed. The Avatar struck.
A huge column of broken rock and powerful tectonic energy shot up from the plaza with the fierce force of a Forbidden Apostle’s anger. It tore through the stone at the exact coordinates the Foresight had last confirmed, the precise, lethal spot where Morwenna and Valentina had stood mere moments before.
The strike was a masterpiece of calculated destruction, calibrated to crush the specific human mass signatures the Avatar had read before the distortion field had swallowed them.
CRUNCH! SHATTER!
The pillar slammed into the broken plaza with enough force to liquefy the very stone beneath it, sending a shockwave of dust and debris screaming outward. But there was no scream of pain to follow.
No sound of snapping ribs, no spray of crimson, no crunch of bone. The strike had hit nothing but a hollow ghost.
It was a god’s hammer striking a shadow.
Morwenna watched the Avatar’s reaction through the shimmering, nauseating edge of the field. She saw the titan’s massive, stone-hewn shoulders twitch and its head tilt in a way that felt unnervingly predatory.
"It is deriving," Morwenna grunted, her voice a strained rasp.
A bead of blood escaped her nose, tracing a hot, red line down her lip. "It’s processing the error... It’s trying to make sense of the void."
"Five more seconds!" Valentina screamed.
Her voice was barely recognizable, a raw, guttural sound. She was hunched over, her hands glowing with a blinding, violent light as the elemental pressure inside the field reached a terrifying, unstable peak.
VREEEEEEEEE!
The air was vibrating so fast it was beginning to hum a high-pitched, ear-splitting note. "Just five more seconds!"
"It is deriving faster than we calculated!" Morwenna’s voice took on a terrifying, jagged edge, the sound of a veteran watching a life-or-death margin vanish in real time. "The derivation cycle is accelerating!"
"It’s not just calculating; it’s brute forcing the logic! It’s going to pierce the spatial signature of the field in three seconds!"
"I NEED FIVE!" Valentina roared, her teeth bared in a snarl of pure, unadulterated agony.
Her muscles were trembling so violently they looked like they might tear themselves from her bones.
"I know!" Morwenna hissed.
She didn’t have a choice. She had to gamble.
She didn’t expand the field; it was already at its twenty-meter limit, but she did something far more dangerous. She pushed the density.
She poured every remaining ounce of her mana into the intensification of the spatial distortion, thickening the "lie" she was telling the universe. She cranked the interference quality to a suicidal level, forcing the space to warp with such violent, jagged intensity that it would become an impenetrable wall of sensory static.
It was a desperate, brutal trade: she was buying two seconds of additional occlusion, but the cost was the structural integrity of the field itself. She was essentially setting the foundation on fire to keep the roof up.
SHHHHHHH KRACK!
The Avatar’s derivation cycle slammed into the newly intensified boundary. The god’s consciousness hit the thickened distortion like a ship hitting a reef.
The interference was massive, a chaotic, screaming wall of spatial nonsense that forced the construct into an immediate, jarring recalibration.
Two seconds. That was all the time she had bought.
"Five percent!" Valentina shrieked, her eyes rolling back in her head from the sheer mental strain. "Four! Three!"
CRACK!
A hairline fracture appeared in the shimmering air of the field. The sustainability ceiling had arrived.
The spatial distortion was beginning to shred itself apart under the weight of its own density.
"Valentina!" Morwenna yelled, her voice a command and a plea all at once.
The ground beneath them began to buckle as the field started to collapse inward.
"DONE!" Valentina screamed, her voice cracking as she unleashed the compressed fury she had been weaving.
