Chapter 398: Irene Fully Charged |
Foxy reverted to her true form, the gigantic nine-tailed demon fox surging into the sky with a howl as Fox Fire splashed out in barrages that nearly tore the cloud deck, and the massive explosions from her fox-tail missiles shook the low, heavy clouds.
Luna flashed and weaved through wind, rain, and thunder, cutting down the snarling, frenzied beasts; phantoms of the knight order appeared now and then in the illusions beside her, poised to drag any nearby, isolated black-robed cultivator onto a battlefield of death and souls.
Meanwhile, Yu Sheng and Irene kept their attention fixed on the grim, imperious white-robed Hermitage Order priest.
Irene suddenly leaned to Yu Sheng’s ear and murmured: “Hey, Yu Sheng, after all this fighting we still haven’t drawn anyone in.”
Yu Sheng frowned slightly, his gaze sweeping the surroundings.
The sky still sagged in a bizarre state like shattered mirror glass, as if the structure of the entire space had slipped out of joint. Under the slanted, broken firmament, everything looked layered and double. Buildings on the ground flickered into an eerie transparency, and whenever lightning flashed, the glare seemed to penetrate the surface of the earth and light up a primitive, jagged landscape beneath the city.
Under the amplification of this anomaly, the sensation of two spaces overlapping grew stronger and clearer.
At the same time, Yu Sheng noticed that the white-robed Hierophant had not pressed any further attacks. He was on home turf, his side had the numbers, and an out-of-control Artificial Saintess had jabbed his nerves more than once in the vicinity, yet for most of the time he simply kept a cautious distance from the center of the battlefield, as if [he could neither strike at will nor stray far from where he stood].
Yu Sheng recalled the scene from when he first discovered the Hermitage Order’s Black Tower.
“Okay,” Irene answered quickly, “but this body is almost out of power, so don’t take too long.”
Yu Sheng nodded, said no more, and drove the fox tail in a slanted rush into the sky, toward a point behind the white-robed Hierophant.
The Hierophant reacted the instant he saw Yu Sheng move; his face changed at once. He raised his hand with a sweep, and thunder gathered again, converging above Yu Sheng’s head.
At that very moment, swathes of black threads abruptly blossomed in the air beside him. The threads, as if alive and aware, wove into webs in an instant, proliferating with abandon; a soul-freezing chill seeped out of the webbing. Then several beams carrying great-cultivator-tier heat lanced through the darkness and swept the sky.
Tiny electric arcs jumped through the air, etching the web’s path. Sensing the danger of those threads and rays, the white-robed Hierophant had to abandon control of the thunder for the moment and, within a cramped space, dodge the web’s snares and the scything beams. In that split second, Yu Sheng was already at his flank.
Yu Sheng grinned in the next heartbeat, because things were exactly as he had predicted: although the Hermitage Order priest had avoided the attacks with agility, the area in which he could move was tiny, barely a hundred meters across. It was not that his mobility was limited; it was that he had to hold up that shattered mirror in the heavens at this very spot to keep the barrier from collapsing completely.
“You dare…” the white-robed Hierophant roared. Finally shedding the web that had almost wound around him and scattering it with a string of small lightning strikes, he turned at once, raised his right hand high toward Yu Sheng, and a dense lattice of lightning formed almost instantly at his pointing fingers, then crashed down.
The protective aura around the fox tail flickered again and slammed into the descending lightning; after a single massive blast, it was spent.
Yu Sheng snatched Irene from his shoulder and set her on the fox tail, then, staggering, rose and hurled himself forward from midair, diving toward a vague, ghostly rift that had surfaced in the rain curtain when the lightning flashed just now.
In the next second, he thrust out both hands as if to seize something in empty air and braced against it, then pulled hard to either side.
“Found you,” he said.
A keening shriek and the rumble of a collapsing barrier rang across the space-warped battlefield. The already canted and ruptured sky was veined in an instant with vast translucent fissures. Another world, a wasteland scourged by the same torrential rain, began to rapidly replace the buildings on Moxing’s edge; with this eerie tableau like a spatial swap, everyone saw the astonishing sight that had been hidden in the other space.
They saw that the grand ancient refining tower was gone; in its place yawned a gigantic black rift that seemed to pierce heaven and earth, a chasm that reached upward through cloud and atmosphere into space itself, pointing from afar toward some location in the deep starfield.
Moxing’s urban sprawl had become a craggy wilderness. Gullies and chasms of every size cut the land, and within them countless luminous “rivers” surged and heaved. Streams of light rose from the ground and flowed toward the sky, then vanished into a colossal mechanism striding the horizon like an orbital track.
In the distance, a mountain lay in pieces, its broken mass floating in midair as if freed from gravity. The mountain’s heart seemed built around something; huge artificial structures jutted from its shattered ridge.
Yu Sheng had no time to see more.
Not far away, the white-robed Hierophant watched the “brute” tear open the space barrier with his bare hands and turned deathly pale. He ignored the reappearing black web, threw caution aside, and swept his hand. Thunder far greater than before gathered from every direction. Bolts vaulted over the airborne monsters and black-robed cultivators, over the hasty barrier Foxy had thrown up and the knight phantoms at Luna’s side, and fell in an instant upon Yu Sheng’s crown.
Yu Sheng had time only to lift his head, and, in the blinding flare, blurt: “Holy crap.”
Then he exploded.
The collapse of space ceased at once; the shattered sky was almost instantly made whole.
A heartbeat later, the threads sank into flesh; the soul-chilling cold and pain drew a muffled grunt from the Hermitage Order priest hanging in midair. Straining to move, he fought to tear free of the web’s control and lifted his gaze toward the fox tail still floating nearby, with two eerie dolls clinging to it.
In the next instant, he realized the two dolls were showing none of the grief or panic one might expect at a companion’s death.
In truth, the dolls were panicking a little, but about something else entirely.
“Oh my god aaah…” both Irenes screamed at the top of their lungs on the fox tail, “Yu Sheng, you never told me how to control this thing, holy crap… Foxy! How do you and Yu Sheng usually coordinate through a tail, holy crap aaah I want to go home.”
The uncontrolled fox tail careened across the sky; one of the two tiny dolls was flung off on the spot, the Rebar one, while the other clung tight to a tuft of fur before looking up to find the Hermitage Order priest already in her face.
Shock curdled to fury on the priest’s features, then into murderous resolve.
“You have ruined the Sage’s plan, so pay the price,” the Hierophant shouted, then pointed.
A peal of thunder crashed down, obliterating the tail beneath Irene and blasting the little doll into the air.
Tumbling, Irene raised a hand on instinct and pointed at the enemy, only for a few brief sparks to spit from her fingertip.
“…Holy crap, I’m out of power.”
“Foolish,” the white-robed Hierophant bellowed, then closed his hand. Wind and rain warped and shuddered, and a crushing force ground down from every side, pinning the flailing Irene in midair. “You all must die.”
Bound by an unseen power, the little doll creaked all over. In the next heartbeat, thunder erupted.
Blinding bolts slit the sky, one after another slamming into Irene, dense as a storm.
Standing in midair, the white-robed Hierophant summoned thunder and hammered the bizarre doll that stood barely more than half a meter tall yet filled him with an immense sense of strangeness and danger.
Despite such a “tiny” foe, he still struck with his full strength, without mercy, because from a moment ago a peculiar danger and unease had been pounding in his heart, and with every passing second it grew more agitated.
[When did this unease begin? From when that damned human tore space open with his bare hands? From the instant my perfect concealment was seen through? Or when these inexplicable creatures suddenly appeared in this place?]
Thunder boomed, yet the unease that had lasted through the battle did not diminish under this ruthless execution; it only swelled, until the alarm bells in the white-robed Hierophant’s chest crashed and he halted abruptly.
[No. The feedback is wrong.]
He dispersed the thunder pooled in the air and looked at the eerie doll who should, in theory, already have been reduced to ash.
For a heartbeat, he felt as if he were staring at the sun.
Irene hovered there, a powerful electric field propping up her body, which was only 66.6 centimeters tall, with overflowing streams of energy coursing around her.
She had charged herself full.
The white-robed Hierophant stared, aghast, a sense of being cruelly mocked by fate detonating inside him. He seemed to understand something, yet managed to squeeze only a few words from his throat: “What the hell are you…”
In the next instant, Irene raised her hand.
A scorching torrent thicker than the white-robed Hierophant himself ripped the sky open.
This novel is translated and hosted on bcatranslation
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