Chapter 908: New Moon |
Astelia’s preparation for the fight had started even before coming out of the waiting room. She knew where the Revinthius kingdom once was, and was aware of the location of the closest mountain range. Every single defensive teleportation since the beginning had been working toward moving away from the flat plains of Revinthius and its weak sedimentary rock underground.
By activating her signature skill where she did, she accessed the best material possible for her Moon titan. Unlike the brittle sedimentary layers of the plains, the roots of the mountain offered dense igneous and metamorphic rock, hardened by eons of immense geological pressure.
The avatar urgently teleported back to the surface as the stone all around started to shake.
For the first time since the beginning, his attacks paused as he simply looked down.
Astelia was like a small black hole, inescapable gravity pulling everything around her, millions of tons of stone collapsing and consolidating around a single short vampire.
The titan grew and grew underground, a strange egg in a cradle of ore and stone bound together by boundless mana. The mountains cried and shook as they were torn apart. Then it all stopped, for just a few seconds, there was a simulacrum of normalcy.
The mountain collapsed like a pile of cards, and from the gigantic cloud of debris rose the titan, a giant almost two kilometers tall, taller than the mountain itself had been, with a slender humanoid frame of polished stone speckled with large ore pockets that reflected the moonlight.
It’s hundred of millions of tons moved with terrifying agility as it climbed out of the ground, each movement creating shockwaves, each step crushing the ground and shaking the entire continent.
Perhaps this kind of pushback was just what the avatar had been waiting for since the very beginning. The way he fought shifted immediately. The glowing figure teleported several kilometers high into the sky, and instead of a continuous stream of attacks, he began channeling a spell, an immense mana circle like an airborne ritual slowly forming overhead.
In the air, the titan hugged its knees. An immense gate appeared underneath it.
Just this one move would sap out the vast majority of Astelia’s remaining mana, but she felt it was her best chance. The world’s most devastating dive-bomb gradually came out of the gate above the Avatar.
It tried to fly away.
[Directionless Hegemony] pinned it in place.
Escaping through a teleportation meant giving up on the spell’s channeling and to potentially suffer immense backlash, so Astelia had bet that it would try something else first. Of course she had predicted that far, so her countermeasures to the teleportation were already in place, another skill she had sneakily used before even getting out from beneath the mountain.
Under everyone’s sight, Moon raised a hand from her seat among the rows of spectators, and spoke, her voice cold with a hint of pride.
Lock.
A single word. That was the most Astelia’s [Godly Incarnation] could handle. The avatar cancelled its spell, suffering no backlash whatsoever, and tried to teleport away.
Its soul could not leave its body.
Astelia did not end things there.
[Sunless Infusion].
The black stone titan fell like a true meteor.
Everyone got to watch the colossal titan pick up speed as it fell from the sky, envelopped in flames, the avatar pinned under it, completely unable to move.
The avatar still struggled, unleashing spell after spell at the titan, cataclysmic waves of mana that left deep cracks in the immense being, chunking out tons of stone at a time. But it was too little too late.
The impact from the swords earlier looked like child’s play in comparison to the extinction event that now unfolded in the toybox.
After the blinding flash of the impact, after watching the ground shake and mountains crumble, the cloud of fiery dust was so opaque and dense that only the system itself could possibly tell what the result of that attack was.
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The spectators did not have to wait very long. A sudden shockwave cleared the dust and debris. At the bottom of an immense crater, the Avatar held Astelia by the neck.
The titan had not survived the impact, that was always the plan, as Astelia was almost all out of mana anyway. But the avatar did. It looked worse for wear, dim and glitchy, its form flickering about like the system angels, but still alive and moving.
In comparison Astelia looked weak. The impact had clearly taken a toll on her health and stamina, even with the titan’s protection, and she fiercely struggled, feet dangling in the air, hands clawing away at the avatar’s fingers that were tightly locked around her throat.
The avatar fully gave up fancy spells. It unleashed a torrent of raw mana directly into Astelia’s body. Unable to do anything, not even use any spells as her mana circuits were fully overwhelmed by the foreign mana, Astelia perished. Her mana heart shattered by the inescapable mana overload.
The avatar was not done, tossing her corpse in the air and unleashing a deluge of mana blades that gradually tore through her armor until they could completely rip her body apart into a rain of gore.
That avatar’s form grew even dimmer, but it had won, again.
The spectators were silent, even the Seraphs watching had an ugly expression. Except for one, Afil, who was in charge of her group, looked undisturbed. That by itself would not raise many eyebrows, but she wasn’t alone in her stoicism. Moon, Sofia, Nex, and even Creation were all silent but intently watching the scene.
The third trial, on Cerberus beta, contains a secret single-use skill that may only be obtained by defeating a total of ten different Sunless bosses like Everelle, Tarren and the Sunless titans.
[Sunless Soul]
Around the avatar, all the ambient mana suddenly collapsed into one point. Despite being the avatar of mana, it could do nothing to stop it. In an explosion of black light, a petite female body rebuilt itself out of pure mana only, a permanent transformation to a Sunless of the highest caliber, with highly inflated stats, various immunities, and a doubled mana regeneration.
The avatar lost no time in sending out another slew of mana blades, but Astelia simply disappeared.
She reappeared much further to the side, away from the lake of magma the avatar was floating above, where chunks of her own flesh had been scattered moments before. The avatar followed closely, appearing next to her, but she left again, a large chunk of her own bloody flesh in hand.
The avatar tried to restrain her with magic as it had done before, but it had grown much weaker, weak enough for it to be resisted by [Greater impairment negation].
Astelia teleported several times, and, locating her white cross-shaped new core, she slammed the chunk of flesh inside of her own new strange squishy body, squeezing out the blood.
Sunless or not, she still bore the blood curse of a vampire, but this was no longer her blood. She could ‘drink’ it.
The sudden high dramatically sharpened her senses and reaction time, it would come with drawbacks later, but they wouldn’t matter if she could only end this impossible fight.
Again she teleported away and the avatar followed. A black and a white figure took to the skies, continuously appearing and disappearing from view in a match of high speed teleportations. The avatar attacked with raw mana explosions, always just one step too late, leaving behind a visible trail of white explosions in the night sky.
Astelia couldn’t afford to attack, but she didn’t need to. With each cast the avatar’s form grew dimmer, since she couldn’t kill it, she could only outlast it.
Soon the avatar continued to follow but stopped attacking.
Astelia kept fleeing, her mana almost depleted.
Then, after a dozen teleportations, the avatar attacked again. But it was not an explosion, it was a spell it had created on the fly specifically for this situation. A burst of strange mana bolts.
Astelia teleported; the bolts teleported with her. They contained artificial souls, constructs capable of latching onto a teleportation to continue pursuing their target.
“Waning crescent.”
With a wave of Astelia’s fingers, the vast majority of the mana bolts in front of her disappeared, erased, and the mana they contained directly flowed into her.
The rest of the bolts pelted her for minimal damage before she could teleport away again, but she had survived, and what mattered most was that she had to keep moving not to let the avatar catch her again. Its follow-up teleportations were starting to get slower.
But it could use the spell again. And it did. Every few teleportations, the avatar weaved in a cast of the seeking bolts, slowly transforming Astelia’s body into a modern art piece full of holes once more.
As a Sunless, the pain was not too bad. She could easily endure it, as long as her health did not hit zero.
All this time she had only been fleeing, and now the avatar showed clear signs that it was starting to run out. The conditions were perfect.
Astelia used [Flicker] one last time, but to the avatar’s shock, she had teleported directly behind it.
It was her turn to grab her opponent’s neck.
The avatar’s body shook, pumped full of viscous cursed mana as every last bit of Astelia’s mana and lifeforce left her until her stats all showed a perfect one, all used to fuel the last-ditch spell. The ultimate phase of the [Lunatic Lunations].
Ascended and gods alike gasped and threw Moon disturbed glances as they witnessed the power of this spell of her creation.
The avatar screamed and struggled, clawing at its own morphing body, unable to do anything. Its form became bright and round, inflating like a giant balloon, drawing in ambient mana to fuel its rapid rise and growth.
While Astelia fell from the sky, a second, perfectly round moon, rose away from Veliadren. Free from gravity, it ascended, before settling into orbit where it took its rightful place.
The [New Moon].
