Chapter 506: Surpassing the Original
Wang Yu drove his heel into the ground, charging toward Sulla in a straight line with a force unlike any he had ever unleashed: the Chariot's might, amplified by the Void Engine. Every obstacle that might have slowed him was swept aside by the divinity of the night, clearing a perfect path for him to wield his full strength.
"Locking down the space around me? Your spatial mastery is impressive, but still missing something essential. The Gate of Phases was conceived for me. What you learned and now use is... likely not most suited to you."
Sulla had prepared plenty of magic that would be available on a moment's notice. Time manipulation and enhancement spells elevated his thinking to a speed fast enough to track Wang Yu's movements. Within the projection field cast by that colossal heart, the void served as the extension of his senses, allowing him to perceive Wang Yu without eyes, ears, or any mundane sense at all.
The instant Sulla's figure vanished, Wang Yu's heavy punch hammered into empty space. The air detonated. Shockwaves rippled through the underground chamber, bouncing wildly and shattering rock and soil in every direction. Sulla's voice lingered in the spot he had just vacated—likely directed at Avia, whose spatial lock moments earlier had failed to restrain him.
Wang Yu's fingers aligned into a blade. Fighting spirit, compressed to an extreme, gathered at his fingertips. He flung it toward Sulla, who had reappeared in the distance. The taut filament of energy sharpened into a cutting line, an attack that would cleave anything in its path, boosted further by Wang Yu's monstrous speed and strength.
Sulla raised a hand. A spatial rift appeared at his gesture, interposing itself between him and the incoming filament of fighting spirit. Wang Yu's strike was capable of shearing earth and mountain alike, but even an attack that could slice through most matter could not sever space.
Wang Yu clicked his tongue. He still had no idea how that so-called sword saint, Ethan, had managed to cut space before. Wang Yu himself could only tear open void rifts by hand, but a void rift and a spatial fissure were not the same thing. Against a legendary magician like Sulla, whose mastery of space was clearly beyond legendary, many of Wang Yu's normal methods were simply ineffective.
Fine. If he couldn't break through Sulla's defenses by force, he would go with the method he knew best: overwhelming speed and power. He would crush everything.
A pale, ghostly flame ignited across his body as he activated his Cursed Fire. The divinity of night within him was transmuted into pure life force to fuel the flame. Void Engine: Bloodburn Drive, engaged.
Wang Yu bent his knees and disappeared. His Chariot-fueled steps allowed him to boost himself off anything and everything—air, rock, and even mana itself. No eye, spell, or sensor could track his path. Only the explosions in the air, the rising dust, and the spiraling turbulence of runaway mana marked where he had been.
His punch landed. The air shattered. As Wang Yu had predicted, if his speed and power surpassed a certain threshold, Sulla would no longer be able to cast spatial spells. That threshold, roughly speaking, was faster than the flow of magic itself. It sounded difficult. In truth, it was even harder. But Wang Yu, supercharged with divinity, had managed the impossible feat.
"What an extraordinary body. A monster at this level... It seems that killing you in the material realm is impossible. But you understand this as well, don't you? You can't kill me in the material realm either."
The punch Wang Yu had thrown struck Sulla directly. Sulla's body, which was reinforced to the level of a legendary knight, burst apart. The shockwave carved a tunnel more than fifty meters long straight through the stone behind it.
But Sulla's voice continued to echo around him. It was clear enough that that body wasn't the real Sulla's. It was just a puppet. His true consciousness dwelled in the void.
"..."
Wang Yu said nothing. He didn't care whether Sulla lived or died. His aim was simply to obliterate everything Sulla projected into the material world.
"So... there's no persuading you to come to me willingly. In that case, forgive my rudeness."
Sulla sighed, genuinely exasperated. Since Wang Yu refused to cooperate, there was only one option left.
In a bold move, Sulla warped the space at Wang Yu's side. Layered time acceleration allowed magic to circulate faster than Wang Yu, even in his Bloodburn Drive mode, could react.
A massive quantity of void energy surged around him even before his fist could finish pulping Sulla's puppet. Accelerated space filled this high-energy environment almost instantly.
The space around Wang Yu distorted. Dozens of spatial anchors pierced the region. A chunk of space that included Wang Yu was severed from the world as cleanly as a brick taken from a wall. Then it began to move, dragged toward the region of Sulla's choice.
"How interesting. You're deliberately trying to distort space so that I can't use the Gate of Phases to relocate you. Clever, but limited. All I need do is move the entire space around you. That bypasses your interference entirely."
Sulla manipulated the spell with leisurely ease, smiling as he spoke. Even with the divinity of the night, Wang Yu seemed unable to counter a legend of yore in his own domain of expertise.
"Alright. Come with me."
With a preset spatial jump, Sulla slipped past Wang Yu's follow-up punch. Then he teleported back to his previous position, extending one finger toward Wang Yu. Void energy and a spell model coiled around his fingertip—an unmistakable spatial transfer meant to drag Wang Yu directly into the void.
His speed was impressive. Perfect prediction and flawless timing gave the illusion he was a step ahead of Wang Yu, but in truth, he only had that advantage for a single fleeting moment. Everything after was pure prediction, carefully threaded between Wang Yu's attacks.
Then, a palm collided with Sulla's finger—a young woman's hand. Avia leaned halfway out of the space surrounding Wang Yu, blocking Sulla's touch an instant before it landed. Her eyes were icy as she stared at the puppet before her.
"Oh? You stepped out of that sanctuary I couldn't touch? Good. Once I dispose of you, he'll be much easier to handle."
Sulla's voice carried mild surprise, and then his head detonated. Inside that puppet body lurked something else hidden beneath its outer shell.
It was an eye. A grotesque, unknown creature's eyeball emerged where Sulla's head had burst apart. It was filled not with mana or void energy, but rather something more like life force or fighting spirit. It fired at Avia right away.
The Stellar Eye, discovered in the same era as stardew, was suspected to be some kind of foreign organism. Its energy belonged to none of the three major paths of transcendence.
It was able to fire an unavoidable, near-instantaneous attack that could ignore all ordinary defenses, drained all life force and energy upon contact, including the spirit, and then reclaimed it all, destroying both the target and the eye itself in a flash of annihilation.
The fact that Sulla was willing to waste such a precious tool on Avia meant that he understood the danger she posed. Wang Yu, with her backing, was far more dangerous than either of them alone.
Then came a soundless impact. The Stellar Eye's attack struck Avia, but produced no effect. There wasn't even any recoil. The entire attack was erased the moment it touched the faint golden glow covering her body.
"This... is utterly incomprehensible."
Even Sulla was shocked by the outcome of the attack. A Stellar Eye's attack was something even he himself could scarcely defend against. How had it been blocked with such nonchalance? Yet the surprise did not end there. Something even more unexpected occurred.
From the magical feedback at his fingertips, Sulla had assumed the spell meant to drag Wang Yu into the void arena he'd prepared had been disrupted and rendered useless by Avia. But the opposite was true—the spell remained fully active. Avia's gesture of blocking his finger had not been intended to stop Wang Yu from being pulled into the void.
What Avia had done was rewrite the spell—one founded on the principles of the Gate of Phases, interwoven with void energy and mana to produce an exceptionally potent teleportation that could breach the boundary between matter and the void.
The power of the Chariot surged directly into the spell Sulla had constructed, reshaping the circuitry he had woven, and which Avia had deciphered with unnerving clarity. Supported by the divinity of the night, she ruthlessly replaced the Gate of Phases parameters that determined the destination with values of her own choosing, sending them somewhere far from Sulla's carefully prepared battlefield for the Utopia.
After all, one facet of the Chariot's power was the Silent Hall. No matter who Sulla was, casting spells properly near Wang Yu was simply impossible.
Sulla wanted to drag Wang Yu into the void, into his own domain. Wang Yu wanted to do th same. Now that he had finally begun to grasp the nature of his own power, Wang Yu understood that the void was his dominion as well.
The spatial transfer triggered at once, pulling both Wang Yu and Sulla toward the void—but not to the controlled staging ground the Utopia had painstakingly prepared. Rather, they were hurled toward a point unimaginably distant.
"Apologies, but I can't accompany you all to some unfamiliar place."
Sulla prepared to rewrite the spell's effect with the power he commanded. He had originally configured the spell to bring both Wang Yu and himself to the same target location. But now that something had gone wrong, he could not afford such a gamble. He still had his real mission to complete.
Yet as he attempted to alter the spell before its activation, he abruptly discovered that he could not complete the changes required. Avia's intrusion prevented him from achieving his objective.
The distorted space that Avia had shaped earlier to stop Sulla from teleporting Wang Yu now served to interfere with his modifications.
Of course, it wasn't as if Avia's mastery of spellcraft had surpassed Sulla's, though it very well might one day. The Gate of Phases was simply uniquely tailored to computation.
The Chariot was a superlative tool for rewriting the world. The divinity of the night allowed for computational ability vastly beyond anything humanly attainable. And from Wang Yu, Avia had obtained mathematics that this world had never developed.
With those three forces aligned, Avia's Gate of Phases briefly surpassed that of its original creator. She overwrote Sulla's modifications.
In the blink of an eye, Wang Yu and Sulla vanished from the material world, drawn into the void battlefield Avia had chosen. In the material realm, the colossal heart continued its furious clash with the Alliance, while Wang Yu and the other intelligent races faced their own battles.
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