Chapter 2940: Horrified Veerott |
Date: Unspecified
Time: Unspecified
Location: Myriad Realms, Card World, Southern Region, Blossom District, Sky Blossom City
"Don’t count me out yet!" Veerott roared, refusing to yield.
Then, to everyone’s surprise, he slammed his amputated wrists together. The severed stumps collided with a sickening crunch of flesh and bone.
For a brief moment, nothing happened. Then a tiny spark appeared between them. The spark rapidly grew brighter, fed by Veerott’s immense soul energy and compressed further by his celestial force. What should have dispersed naturally was instead forced into an impossibly dense point between his arms.
The surrounding air and space began to distort. Even the ambient energy in the area was drawn toward the growing sphere of light, spiraling into it like water rushing down a drain.
My Soul Pupils immediately picked up the danger. The amount of energy wasn’t what made the attack frightening. It was the concentration. Veerott was compressing soul energy using his Viltronian strength aided by celestial force, forming a beam no thicker than a man’s torso, enough to pierce a hole through the world’s crust and vanish into its lava core.
"AAARGH!"
The recoil alone drove Veerott arm’s backward a little. Despite the agony of firing an attack through freshly severed arms, he didn’t stop. Instead, he poured even more power into it, thickening the beam.
Even Aqualas and Seraphina stared in stunned silence. Because they understood the same thing. Veerott resorting to soul energy meant he wasn’t just desperate, this was a last stand.
The concentrated soul-energy beam was unbelievably fast. Fortunately, my Soul Pupils had already foreseen its creation, trajectory, and impact point long before Veerott unleashed it.
Just like before, my first instinct was to take the attack head-on. With my cellular restructuring abilities and regenerative capabilities, surviving the beam wasn’t the issue. The problem was everything behind me, the one thousand curse fields.
The moment I analyzed the attack, I realized it wouldn’t stop after cutting through my body. The beam possessed enough penetrating power to punch through the one thousand curse fields and potentially break the battle array itself. That was unacceptable. So, for the first time since the duel began, I decided to properly deal with Veerott’s attack instead of simply tanking it.
Watching the beam tear across the battlefield, I couldn’t help but acknowledge what Veerott had accomplished. It was incredible. By combining his Viltronian martial prowess with celestial force, he had compressed soul energy to such an absurd degree that it helped a noble-class go far beyond its natural limits and threaten a battle-array formation constructed from more than a thousand semi-ruler-class blood curse incarnations.
Very few beings in existence could claim such a feat. Even fewer could achieve it through pure skill and brute force. The attack itself was proof of the terrifying potential hidden within the Viltronian race. Unlike most species, Viltronians already possessed overwhelming physical bodies. Their greatest weakness was their limited understanding of active soul control and knowledge of martial arts.
But if they were ever given enough time to master both... the consequences would be terrifying. Card apprentices and supreme beings would lose their dominance to them. Entire power structures that had existed for ages would be overturned. And knowing Viltronian culture, they wouldn’t stop there.
Their obsession with strength and disdain for weakness would inevitably push them toward their age-old conquest. What began as a struggle for influence would eventually become a campaign of universal domination, with every race deemed weak facing either eradication.
Looking at Veerott, I couldn’t help but think that he was the perfect example that that future was very likely.
A single noble class Viltronian had nearly breached a formation powered by over a thousand semi-ruler-class primordial ethereal spirits. If an entire civilization of them ever reached this level and above, the myriad realms would have a very serious problem on its hands.
I glanced at the incoming attack nonchalantly under the deadpan gazes of Aqualas and Seraphina. Then my chest opened. The flesh split down the middle without a drop of blood spilling out. My ribs unfolded outward like a pair of doors, their pale arches forming a grotesque frame.
The concentrated soul-energy beam that should have pierced straight through me instead disappeared into my open chest. It simply vanished as if there was drain in it.
Open a closer look, Aqualas, Seraphina, and Veerott found that behind my opened ribcage, there were no organs, flesh, heart, or lungs. Instead, an enormous gateway occupied the space where my torso should have been.
A gateway leading directly into the Spiritual Plane. The interior of my body had become a window into an endless expanse of darkness and drifting spiritual currents. The concentrated soul-energy beam entered the gateway and left the Physical Plane entirely. Once inside the Spiritual Plane, the attack continued forward for a brief moment before rapidly dispersing into the endless spiritual void.
An attack capable of tearing through battle formations and mountains alike simply became insignificant against the immeasurable vastness of the spiritual plane.
Veerott’s eyes widened. Suppressing his horror, he immediately tried to redirect the beam. The concentrated stream of soul energy curved sharply as he exerted control over it.
Yet before it could escape, a powerful suction emerged from the gateway. Greedily pulled at the beam into the Spiritual Plane. The attack twisted unnaturally, bending through the air before being dragged back into the opening in my chest. No matter how Veerott adjusted its trajectory, the beam continued disappearing into the dimensional gateway occupying my chest.
"What the fuck are you doing?" Veerott finally blurted out. "Are you even human anymore?"
That was a fair question. What I was doing was something I picked up from Agent Lois for my own use.
With the aid of my cellular restructuring and dual existence, I had enlarged the spiritual channel of the mutated ego gem inside my body and transformed it into a temporary doorway connecting directly to the Spiritual Plane.
Agent Lois used that connection to travel through the Spiritual Plane. I was doing the exact opposite. Rather than entering it myself, I was bringing a piece of it here. A localized gateway large enough to swallow incoming attacks and redirect them into an entirely different plane.
"Fuck it." Veerott finally gave up. The soul-energy beam flickered before collapsing completely. .
After witnessing his deadliest attack, an attack capable of tearing through the world itself, disappear into another dimension without accomplishing anything, there was little point in continuing.