Chapter 907: Execution sequence |
Astelia dispelled her [Gates]. The few clouds in the night sky instantly disappeared, bright dots, like falling stars, shone brightly from outside of the atmosphere.
Even the spectators with the best eyes could just barely appreciate the spectacle. The night was chased away. Forty-five pillars of white-blue plasma fell down from the heavens at a terrifying speed, and at their tip, a sword. They tore through space in perfect silence.
That was all.
The pillars precisely hit the tournament master, and nobody could see anything anymore. A white light brighter than the sun erupted, followed by the harrowing sound of the overlapping collisions and explosions.
The first thing people saw when the light started to fade was the illusion of the moon, finally cracking open, Astelia silently floating in the air above a screaming world.
The ground still shook from the impact. The lake was gone, vaporized, turned into a gigantic glass-lined bowl with a fuming cadaver in its heart, while the world around was unrecognizable, burned and blown to dust, a field of ruins as far as the eye could see.
It was the first time Astelia had been able to use this combination attack at full power, something that had been designed by herself with the help of Sofia, humbly named by Everelle : Swords from Moon.
She was satisfied, looking down at the fuming, battered armor, impaled by forty-five glowing swords, swimming in a small pool of bubbling magma. Just the weight of the swords, without [Weight of the Moon], was still a combined total of 135 tons, enough to give even Tartaros a difficult time should he be buried under them. Yet, despite all this, she knew: the tournament master could not be truly dead. The system was desperately silent, so this was not the end.
But a quick mana scan revealed that his mana heart was well and truly shattered, his limp body left sinking into the magma, with no signs of life. Attacking it more right now would be senseless. So what was left to do?
Saria’s expression turned serious. “There we are…” she grumbled, her chin resting on her joined hands.
“I assume the next part is where you failed?” Sofia asked.
“Where I failed. Where Sen failed. Where Tartaros failed. Where Ezerid would have failed had you not been there to stop him… The second half of the fight is just…”
“What is it?”
“Just watch, and see. She’s in a better state than I was at this point, I hope she can do it…”
“Is it as bad as Lilith?”
“Very honestly? It’s just as bad,” Saria answered, “really just as bad.”
“Well shit. What is Jin going to…”
While the spectators chattered, trying to work out the math of her kinetic bombardment, Astelia fully cleared her mind, and replaced her flying swords with her older, weaker ones. The current ones were thoroughly fused with the tournament master’s armor, there was no point in even trying to recall them.
She also took this time to carefully infuse her armor with mana, helping it fix itself faster from the violent battering she had taken before.
She still felt confident, she had plenty of tricks in reserve, but the long silence was starting to make her nervous again. To quell her fears, she flew higher, watching over the corpse from high above.
Soon after, it started. The tournament master’s armor began to emit noises, creaking like a bent sword about to snap. Slowly, cracks spread over its entire surface. A faint white glow with a slight blue hue escaped from within.
Astelia narrowed her eyes.
This isn’t light… Pure mana… How much… Visible to the naked eye like this…
Trillions.
The sight of this thin-looking fog completely overwhelming her mana senses from such a distance was already worrying enough, but the amount just kept increasing incomprehensibly, soon becoming so blinding that Astelia had to cut off her mana senses entirely to avoid becoming dizzy.
She had to fly higher and higher as the density of mana in the air was becoming sickening, all emanating from that tiny cracked armor at the bottom of a crater.
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Whatever was coming, it really could not be good.
Astelia flew away even farther, almost reaching the distance where the shockwave from her previous attack hadn’t reached.
More strange events occurred. Wide arcs of mana pierced the sky above, from one end of the horizon to another, like the meridians drawn on a globe materializing in the real world. Moments after, truly like the lines on a globe, longitude circles appeared, crossing the previous ones, creating a large array of triangles and squares in the sky.
The lines seemed to be constantly expanding, like a large sphere constantly growing bigger, enveloping all of Veliadren, until they started to contract.
Astelia had to teleport out of the way to avoid the falling line of mana, hundreds of kilometers wide, that fell from outer space.
The mana seamlessly seeped back into the planet.
What is–
For an instant, the colors of the world were inverted, black moon and stars shining over a pure white sky.
Then, all of the mana in the air, sickeningly dense like a soup, collapsed back toward the crater in a sudden tide. Astelia had to fully mobilize her [Directionless Hegemony] specialization on herself to avoid getting swept in.
A blue-ish white glowing figure rose above the crater. It looked human, but not quite so, more like an angel, in fact, a being of pure mana, its transparent body like a small sea of stars. Unlike regular angels, its body was whole and in a single place.
The system finally reacted, pushing the light chime of a notification directly into Astelia’s ears.
[The final duel, second half: Defeat Jin, Avatar of Mana]
Astelia read the words, feeling her heart sink. She was overcome by nervous laughter.
The Ark’s Grand finale?
Is this not just a public execution?!!!!!
Astelia tightened her grip on her sword, looking up at the sky. Moon give me strength.
If the system placed this hurdle in my way…
Astelia stared at the immobile being in the distance that watched her back, as if waiting for a sign to start.
Then it can be beat!
As if sensing her resolve, the avatar disappeared.
No!
Astelia teleported back hundreds of meters, watching the avatar reappear in the exact spot she just was. It had tried to teleport inside of her.
The avatar raised a finger. Hundreds of spears of pure mana rained down from above. Astelia immediately teleported out again, but more spears appeared above her again and again. The avatar was wasting mana, but at this rate, it was still Astelia who would run out a thousand times before he would.
[Gates].
After Astelia teleported again, a spatial gate appeared above her, and another one in front of the avatar.
The rain of spears pierced the avatar from head to toe. It barely seemed to do anything. The avatar tried teleporting into Astelia again.
Astelia tried to teleport away again, finding her soul stuck inside of her body, as if imprisoned by an invisible cage of mana. She barely managed to move out of the way with [Directionless Hegemony].
On arrival, the avatar held a brighter spear of mana in his hand. It struck too fast, piercing Astelia’s heart from behind.
Waning Gibbous…
The spear disappeared, absorbed by the Moon rune at Astelia’s fingertips, and her wound closed back up in a small fiery explosion as she finally broke through the mana cage and teleported away again. She continued to teleport in the same direction every single time, leading the avatar farther and farther away from the Revinthius kingdom.
The avatar acted just like the tournament master before. It started simple, and slowly but surely layered more and more devastating attacks together, methodically working up perfect counters to all of Astelia’s strategies.
The following time she tried to redirect his spears toward him with a gate, he himself opened a gate between him and her, impaling her with a dozen spears before she could escape.
As it continued, more attacks were added, first, traits of light that continuously streaked through the sky like a rain of falling stars piercing everything they touched, forcing Astelia to carefully consider her teleportation locations. Next, pure circles of turbulent mana, like giant walls, started to appear everywhere, impossible to fly or teleport through, slowly boxing her in. Spears continued to rain, leaving a long trail of devastation below as the fight moved from ruins to forests to a desert, to tall mountains.
All this while, Astelia barely ever counter-attacked after her first try. She leveraged every bit of her huge health pool, regeneration focused [Celestial Eternal] specialization, and greater negation passives to keep her alive with minimal mana usage as she did nothing but chain hundreds of cheap teleportations.
Several times, the avatar personally impaled her with a spear again, leaving her riddled with bloody holes that struggled to regenerate, but she could not afford to slow down in the slightest.
Finally she had made it to a decent location.
She teleported straight to the ground at the base of the tallest mountain around.
Her fingers aimed at the ground, she unleashed the sixth phase of her [Lunar Lunations].
“Third Quarter,”she mumbled, spewing out her own blood as the avatar appeared behind her.
The spear she had absorbed earlier was unleashed, all the uncontrolled mana erupting forward, digging a gaping hole thousands of meters into the ground as the avatar attacked her again and again.
Ignoring her dwindling health bar, Astelia teleported to the bottom of the abyss she had just created.
The avatar followed, and, for the very first time, was pushed back by Astelia’s magic.
[Moon Titan].
