Chapter 764: 764. Nice Try... But Don’t Worry! I Still Have More For The Avatar!
The synergy was absolute. By running Morwenna’s spatial distortion and Valentina’s spatial compression in perfect, violent coordination rather than in sequence, they had created a localized pocket of nonexistence.
The field wasn’t just hiding them; it was actively warping the very medium the Avatar’s Foresight relied on to "see" the future.
The Avatar was, for the first time in the engagement, truly blind.
THRRRRRUMMMMM!
But the god was not helpless. It pivoted with terrifying, machine-like speed, shifting its consciousness to the Earthen Authority’s geological awareness.
This was a different sense entirely, not a visual or temporal scan, but a deep, seismic pulse that traveled through the very marrow of the world. Through this subterranean read, the Avatar felt the truth: the two women were no longer just hiding; they were building a monster.
It felt the mounting pressure of Valentina’s compressed elemental output and the terrifying amplification provided by Morwenna’s spatial warping. It sensed the mass signature of a combined working so immense that it transcended the capabilities of any individual mage.
The Avatar’s pattern recognition layer processed the data in a millisecond, calculating the output potential and the sheer, unadulterable violence of the impending strike.
The response was instantaneous, dictated by the escalation protocols embedded in its core: ’Do not attempt to block it. Escalate beyond it.’
[LINK ESTABLISHED. INSTRUCTION RECEIVED.]
Deep within the consciousness link, Rex’s will surged through the connection like a lightning strike.
[INITIATE EARTHQUAKE PROTOCOL.]
KRA KOOOOOOOOOM!
The Avatar didn’t just strike the ground; it became the ground. It drove both massive, stone-hewn gauntlets into the island’s surface simultaneously with a force that felt like the world was being split in half.
It channeled the Earthen Authority at a precise, terrifying output level, the exact threshold of sustained substrate resonance. It wasn’t a strike; it was a frequency.
The entire island didn’t just shake; it screamed.
This wasn’t the localized, bone-jarring impact of the previous strikes. This was a global, resonant vibration that turned the entire floating platform of divine compressed stone into a tuning fork of destruction.
The vibration didn’t care about targets; it moved through everything connected to the substrate, a relentless, high-frequency shudder that bypassed armor and skin to rattle the very souls of those standing upon it.
SHHHHHHHH VREEEEEEE!
The root containment structure around the dragon buckled and groaned, its ancient wood splintering under the sonic assault. The ice platform Mireya had painstakingly extended shattered into a million jagged shards.
Diana’s footing on the broken plaza vanished as the stone beneath her turned into a liquid-like blur of motion.
And for Valentina and Morwenna, the catastrophe was total.
The precise, delicate coordination required for their combined working demanded absolute physical stillness, a razor’s edge of stability. But the island was no longer stable; it was a vibrating nightmare.
CRACK SPLIT!
As the resonance tore through them, their synchronization shattered. The magical feedback was violent.
The component outputs, instead of fusing into a singular, god-killing lance, violently decoupled. The massive, unified working discharged prematurely, spraying elemental energy in a disorganized, chaotic burst.
Instead of the apocalyptic deliverable they had intended, the Avatar received only Valentina’s component alone. It was a massive, roaring blast of fire and wind, but to the Avatar’s reinforced stone armor, it was merely a significant, manageable surge of energy.
FWOOOOOOSH!
The Avatar absorbed the impact, the stone plates of its armor glowing red from the heat but remaining unyielding.
Then, it began to build.
GRRRRRRRRRR RUMBLE!
For forty agonizing seconds, the Avatar reached into the very heart of the island. It pulled massive quantities of bedrock from the substrate, compressing it, molding it, and forcing it into a terrifyingly dense construct.
It wasn’t a work of art; it was a work of pure, unmitigated lethality. A sphere of compressed island bedrock, eight meters in diameter, materialized at the Avatar’s own altitude, held in place by the crushing grip of gravity manipulation.
Then, the Avatar fed the beast.
SHHHHHHH BOOOOOOM!
It didn’t just give it fire. It poured the entire elemental cocktail into the meteor: the roaring thermal foundation of fire, the screaming kinetic force of compressed wind, and the jagged, violet accelerant of lightning.
The meteor didn’t just glow; it throbbed with a violent, unstable energy. It was no longer just a rock; it was a celestial engine of destruction, a geological mass wrapped in a screaming shroud of elemental fury.
Valentina and Morwenna, battered, bleeding, and gasping for air, looked up.
The sky was gone. There was only the meteor, descending like the fist of a god.
Valentina’s eyes were wide, fixed on the descending nightmare. Her expression wasn’t one of simple terror; it was the hollow, terrifying look of a mathematician who had just solved an equation and realized the answer was death.
She had processed the variables: the mass of the bedrock, the velocity of the gravity manipulation, and the sheer, screaming volume of the elemental payload, and she had reached the conclusion before the meteor had even finished its descent.
She looked at the meteor.
She looked at the Avatar.
Then, she looked at the yawning, impossible gap between their current, shattered defensive capacity and the apocalyptic force currently being assembled over their heads.
"Tell me you have something for this," Morwenna said.
Her voice was unnervingly controlled. It was the voice of a woman who had spent twenty years staring into the abyss and had learned to speak to it with a steady tone.
It was a voice forged in the fires of a thousand life-or-death crises, a voice that had mastered the art of the calm facade. But beneath that practiced composure, there was a jagged, raw honesty, the sound of a soldier asking a final, desperate question.
Valentina didn’t blink. She couldn’t.
Her eyes were locked on the way the lightning danced across the meteor’s surface, lashing out like hungry serpents.
"The spatial compression at full output..." Valentina began, her voice trembling with the weight of her realization, "...it would intercept a standard geological mass of that size."
"It could handle it. But this isn’t standard." She swallowed hard, a bead of cold sweat tracing a path through the soot and blood on her cheek. "It’s not just mass, Morwenna."
"It’s an active elemental payload."
"The compression disrupts spatial geometry, not elemental reactions."
"When the compression field meets that much fire, wind, and lightning... the compression won’t contain it."
"It will accelerate the reaction. It will turn the impact into a supernova."
"So the very tool we use to stop the earth from crushing us," Morwenna whispered, the grim reality sinking in, "just makes this one more violent?"
"Significantly worse," Valentina choked out. "It’s a detonator..."
"We’d be trying to catch a bomb with a net."
"And the spatial distortion?" Morwenna pressed, her eyes darting to the shimmering air. "The field? Can we bend it away?"
"The distortion bends the medium the meteor is traveling through," Valentina replied, her words coming faster now, a frantic recitation of doomed logic. "It will warp its trajectory, yes."
"It will change the path. But it doesn’t address the mass."
"It doesn’t dampen the payload. A bent trajectory still arrives somewhere, Morwenna."
"It just hits a different target."
Morwenna’s jaw tightened so hard a muscle in her temple pulsed violently.
"Somewhere currently occupied by the people who haven’t evacuated the market district," she said, her voice dropping an octave.
"Yes," Valentina said, a single tear carving a clean line through the grime on her face. "That’s right..."
The meteor groaned, a deep, tectonic sound that seemed to vibrate in their very bones.
RRRRRUUUUUMMMMMMBLE.
The air around it was beginning to ionize, smelling of ozone and scorched stone.
Morwenna looked up at the descending god fist, her eyes hardening into flint. The time for calculation was over; the time for the gamble had arrived.
"I can buy three seconds," Morwenna said.
Valentina turned to her, her eyes incredulous. "Three seconds? Morwenna, three seconds is nothing!"
"Listen to me!" Morwenna snapped, the control in her voice finally fracturing into a fierce, desperate command. "If I take the spatial distortion working not as a protective field but as a concentrated, maximum-density lance and apply it directly to the meteor’s approach vector... it won’t stop it!"
"And it won’t break it as well, but it will fight the gravity..." Morwenna exhaled. "It will also drag against the descent, and it will slow it for sure."
"Three seconds is not enough to rebuild the combined work!" Valentina argued, her hands shaking as she gestured to the ruined, vibrating ground beneath them. "The earthquake protocol shattered our foundation!"
"Our energy is a mess, our footing is gone, and our synchronization is dead!"
"We can’t just rebuild a god killer in the time it takes to draw a breath!"
Morwenna looked at the meteor, then back at her partner, a grim, bloody smile touching her lips.
"I know," Morwenna said, her voice steadying into a final, lethal resolve. "But three seconds... is three seconds."
