Chapter 544 - Vs. Virillius Augustus V

  With the pesky planet out of the way, the first thing Claire did was assume her true form. Her face elongated, growing into a snout as her body extended to its full size. Her feet became talons like her forelimbs while her wings lengthened to match her newfound size.

  Boris, who she still held in her hands, was about half charged. Though not used in the most recent attack, he’d happily relished in the planet’s destruction and absorbed the magic that held it together. That wasn’t the only reason his bar ticked up. He was passively taking in little bits of Claire’s mana at a time to further strengthen his construction.

  His mistress, however, wasn’t quite so keen on waiting.

  She pumped him full of magic and divinity and instantly filled his meter the rest of the way.

  It was far less efficient than allowing him to finish on his own, but she didn’t care. Her mana was quite literally infinite and the billion points of divinity she spent returned in the blink of an eye. She only needed a scant few seconds—perceived seconds. And with her adrenaline cranked, any such recovery time was effectively moot.

  Raising the fully-charged lizard in a sword salute, Claire activated two abilities in turn.

  The first was her realm.

  Grabbing hold of their surroundings, she sucked them straight into a world of her making.

  The sun. Her father. The orbiting planets.

  Everything was spirited into the realm whose ruleset she defined.

  The frozen evernight mountain extended far into the distance, its peak looming so high that she could only see it forty thousand years in the past lest she engaged her divinity. Its base was equally as vast, spreading so far that it swallowed two neighbouring systems.

  But only Claire was able to see so far. The roaring blizzard obscured her father’s gaze as it drained his vigour. Her eyes were all he could see. A pair of bright blue slits glimmering in the wintry darkness.

  All she needed to do was wait for him to succumb to the cold. Just as she almost had when she broke atop the mountain.

  There was only one small problem—her realm required her to fully dominate the space. And her father had denied her by casting the same type of spell.

  Suddenly, half the world was his. The mountain’s base gave way to a dusking hillscape. Up and down the grasslands flowed, littered with broken weapons. It was not a plain, but a clearing in a sparsely filled forest. Trees stood in the gaps between the hills, and some even deigned to sit on top of them. But proud or not, most were broken, mauled in the battle that had created the world around them. There were blades stuck in every stump and scattered all over every mound. There were no corpses, but the lost weapons were accompanied by bits of broken armour still reddened, yellowed, and greened by the blood of their once wearers.

  The forest grew denser around the world’s far edges. And beyond it, at least to one side, there was a distant fort.

  It was a place that Claire had seen in hundreds of paintings—the place where her father, only once ascended, had slain his very first aspect. And evidently, from the less-than-happy look on his face, a place that had remained with him as a piece of weaponized trauma.

  A laugh bubbled up from the depths of her throat.

  It was funny how similar they were. She’d fought against it for oh so long, pushing desperately to find her own path.

  But in the end, all she found was that they were the same.

  Even the realms’ effects were similar.

  She could feel him stealing her numbers, taking her abilities scores for his own in much the same way she sapped his energy and life force.

  The one big difference she noted explained his inflated status. He’d used his system access to modify the spell; by disabling the callback that reset his numbers post-cancellation, all his gains were permanent. Claire stole the trick in a heartbeat, immediately incorporating it into all of her spells as she focused on the other ability she’d cast.

  Technically, it wasn’t really hers.

  As far as the system was concerned, the ultimate belonged to Boris even though it was she who inscribed and activated the formula.

  It wasn’t impossible for him to cast it by his lonesome, but being the Aspect of Indolent Adaptation, he could only draw out its maximum output and reap all of its bonus effects if not the one to engage the skill.

  Mirror’s Edge, as the ultimate was called, allowed him to gain different enchantments based on the objects ingested at the time of activation. For their first trick, she fed him a chunk of divinity-packed true ice—a necessary step in expending his meter.

  His shape remained the same, but the material that made up his body distorted. It didn’t quite turn from metal to ice, but it did visibly change colour, becoming a pale shade of blue not all too different from the surrounding snow.

  And then, she charged. She dashed across the snow and left nothing but her taloned prints behind.

  Gripping the sword in her mouth, she became a mass of energy, a blur that crossed the heavens in the blink of an eye.

  Her father matched her with ease.

  Imbuing his weapon with a hefty chunk of divinity, he galloped straight through the forest. The trees in his path were irrelevant. Disintegrating at the slightest touch, they never once reduced his speed. For he too had engaged a powerful ability.

  It wasn’t quite an ultimate, nor a charged spell like the one that Boris was set to unleash, but it was still a capstone skill—an ars magna that he had personally designed.

  Coming from his Godbreaker class, it was not the pitifully weak severance-based ability that he’d spent the past thousand years faking. Nay, that was just another ordinary skill—a cantrip he’d picked up in his youth during a duel he certainly should have lost. In fact, it was within the very clearing replicated by his realm that he had first discovered it. For he’d had no choice but to derive a method to cut through lightning to survive the aspect he slew.

  The ability he’d activated was nowhere near as bland or simple.

  As far as classifications went, it was technically a curse—an effect that used divinity to inflict a lasting malediction. Known as Divine Aberration, it would corrupt any divinity it touched and render it entirely unusable.

  Just like Vella’s god-slaying poison.

  And if it happened to seep into one’s soul, then that was effectively the end.

  Even among the divine, there were only a select few capable of withstanding the rot.

  It was the sort of deadly, destructive weapon that he shouldn’t have even considered using against his daughter. It would hurt her in a much different way than anything he’d pulled out so far. But his gut was telling him that she would find a way to resist it. And he couldn’t help but want to see exactly how she pulled it off.

  A faint smile crossed Virillius’ lips as they closed the distance.

  At five paces—five thousand kilometres—he began to focus.

  His muscles swelled.

  That alone was enough to push him past the lightspeed barrier. But it was only one of the dozen things he did to bolster the strength of the blow.

  Skills of all different shapes and sizes flared to life.

  One allowed him to ignore the cap on mortal systemic damage.

  One boosted his weapon to a billion times its true mass.

  One guaranteed that his attack would strike his target’s greatest weakness.

  One multiplied his blows so each swing would deliver a million.

  So on and so forth, he piled on his power. Until his arms began falling apart, unable to bear the weight of his infinite strength. And even that degradation was used to further the force of the blow. For he had no need for his flesh.

  The accompanying mass was readily converted to raw energy.

  Even more fuel for the fire.

  And then, right as his power reached its peak, they clashed.

  Across their realms, at the edge of night and day, a flash of red and blue.

  Long after the trade was already concluded.

  His spear cut through her hips. Obliterating the true ice with its god-slaying curse, it deleted everything between her pelvis and opposite shoulder with his myriad mirrored slashes.

  It was a heavy, ruinous blow—one that should have easily decided the battle’s outcome.

  But it was easily matched.

  Just as he had sliced her in two, she had run her sword through his lower body and split it right down the middle. His sudden acceleration had done nothing to catch her off guard. If anything, the extra force had only worsened the damage.

  He fell to the ground.

  He had no legs.

  Her greatsword had not only claimed them from him, but outright destroyed the concept. They refused to regenerate even as he poured his strength into the place that was once supposed to house them.

  But, just a blink of an eye later, he was returned to an upright position.

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  Because what he’d lost in flesh, he’d simply replaced with raw energy.

  Like his arms, his legs were unnecessary—nothing but a vessel for the astral form that puppetted his divinely-mandated meat sack.

  His no-longer-divinely-mandated meat sack.

  It was as Flitzegarde had stated.

  All restraints were off; they were allowed to fight unbound by the system’s rules.

  That was the only reason he’d been able to use his god-breaking ability in the first place. On Mara, it was sealed away, gated by a decree issued by the Goddess of Order.

  The curse kept Claire’s body in two pieces. She waited for her regeneration, but her body refused to heal. The pitch-black corruption was slowly but surely eating its way through her flesh, readily gobbling up even the divinity with which she’d attempted to keep it at bay.

  She almost wanted to complain. The curse-cleansing technique that she’d only just learned was already proving inapplicable. But as it turned out, removing the malediction was as simple as using her breath; it immediately crumbled before the power of destruction.

  She almost laughed as she spun around and caught the conflicted look upon her father’s face. It was only there for the briefest of moments, gone by the time she’d registered its presence. But she was certain she saw it—the same dumb look she’d seen so often reflected in Aurora’s mirror. He hadn’t expected her to defeat his technique so quickly.

  They were still flying in opposite directions, their sheer speed carrying them into the space controlled by each other’s realms.

  Negating all of the vectors affecting her freshly-healed body, Claire came to an abrupt stop atop a forested hill. Cracking her neck, she brandished Boris and changed him from a greatsword to spear while also assuming her centaurian form.

  The charged attack was ineffective.

  Taking advantage of the time required for her father to skid to a halt, she extended an open talon and pointed it in Mara’s direction. The planet shook, not because it was subject to an attack, but because she’d dislodged an object.

  A spear flew into space.

  Slowly.

  Just so everyone on Pria could witness the moment that she plucked it from Tornatus’ shell.

  Only then did she flick her fingers and call it to her side. It was with a portal that she covered most of the distance. She didn’t really have much of a choice. There was no other way for the spear to cross ten quintillion light-years before the battle concluded.

  But even then, the moment that she’d given the Cadrians to see the weapon was a thousand times longer than the time it took for her father to come to a halt.

  So what then did she do in the meantime?

  She activated Boris’ ultimate again.

  The second sacrifice she devoured was one that far outclassed the first. It was not just a random piece of ice she generated in the blink of an eye, but a glimmering beacon with a storied past—something that had experienced over four-billion years of continued existence. Something that had weathered countless orbital bombardments and established a zone of cosmic control.

  The system’s star.

  The very same one that sat upon the horizon, within her father’s realm.

  Size was irrelevant.

  Opening his mouth, Boris crossed the sky and consumed the heavenly fireball. He stole the primordial spark that fueled its core, swallowed its seemingly eternal flame, and cast the world into an endless night. With its consumption came a change explicit only to the observers.

  Claire’s numbers began to rise.

  Slowly at first before shooting straight through the roof.

  Prior to the duel, it would have been a temporary measure.

  But stealing her father’s trick, she distorted the system and arranged for a permanent addition. Because just as it filled Boris’ stomach, so too did the solar mass flood through her veins. It burned her blood to ash and circulated through her body in its place, carrying magic and strength in turn to every last nook and cranny.

  For just as Boris was a part of her, she was a part of him.

  Wreathing his body in ice and fire, she met her father head-on.

  Tens, thousands, trillions of thrusts, possible only because their realms refused to give in the face of the world-breaking damage. He carried the corrupted, blackened divinity with which he’d imbued his weapon. Each sweep blotted out the night, almost as if consuming the distant stars. Hers launched blasts of ice and fire, nuclear bursts and sudden drops to absolute zero.

  The deadly dance of spears was almost reminiscent of the battle’s second phase—the moment they’d decided to shy away from nothing but brute force. And that was precisely why they’d fallen into an odd pattern.

  For the first few blows of every exchange, they’d swing with all that they had. Far exceeding the speed of light, the devastating attacks would tear apart their ever-restoring realms.

  And then, briefly, they would enter a lull, a momentary pause that signaled the start of another godspeed exchange.

  A natural consequence of exceeding the speed of light.

  They could only plan so far ahead.

  Every attack that was sensed would be sensed too late. Incoming blows could only be predicted, meaning they approached each exchange with a set of expectations and altered their plans based on how the other responded.

  And inevitably, there would be stalemates, breaks where they had their weapons stuck together, with neither willing to make a move without a moment of observation—a moment where they had to return from their superluminal speed.

  It was a problem that neither had ever experienced first-hand—a problem that both had already solved, at least in their minds. But even knowing how to get around it, neither was yet willing to commit to execution.

  Because even though their individual strikes could easily doom whole planets.

  Because even though they were both dancing right in front of death’s door.

  Their lips were curved towards their eyes.

  The artificially restored sound that the spectators heard reflected not just their clashing spears and whooshing magics, but their jovial laughter.

  For through their dancing blades, they each conveyed a sense of achievement.

  An understanding that their actions had meaning.

  Because they could see, plain as day, that Claire had come into her own.

  That she had truly grown strong.

  Alas, like everything, the moment of bliss had an end.

  And it came when Claire opened a portal and retrieved the weapon on the other side.

  It was the spear she called for—the one that had obliterated the City of Progress and started the conflict between Cadria and Vel’khan. Cutting into the space between them and forcing the fighters apart, it rose into the sky above their realms, where it joined the countless others armed and ready to fire.

  They fell the moment Claire snapped her fingers.

  Faster, stronger, heavier than ever before, the orbital missiles turned their tips to her father and began their world-ending assault.

  Wrapping them in her vectors, she instantly accelerated them to an imperceptible speed and bombarded their dueling realms. The artificial worlds didn’t quite shake in the same way as a planet. Instead, they bent and warped before giving out. For though they held strong against the fighters’ exchange, even they crumbled in the face of heavenly annihilation.

  There was a flash of white as the realms collapsed—a giant explosion that consumed the Alcora Eleven system and wiped all matter from its bounds.

  And yet, somehow, the battle was still ongoing.

  Virillius soared through the empty space, twisting and turning as he evaded the icy spears. It was only for a moment that he seemed to run. Waiting for them to be aligned, he spun around, brandished his shieldlance, and delivered a single mighty blow.

  A golden ray crossed the void.

  The divine light was so intensely concentrated that it almost seemed to darken.

  It wasn’t just an application of brute force, but an attack that stole one of Claire’s tricks. For by analyzing and deconstructing her breath, he was able to imbue the strike with the very same property.

  The ability to destroy anything it touched.

  It was concept against concept.

  The eternity of true ice against the inevitability of annihilation.

  Reconciliation was impossible. Their axioms were completely at odds.

  That was why they were decided by force.

  And in a case of a carelessly constructed spell against Virillius Augustus, that always meant the latter. His golden light consumed the world-ending spears and reduced them all to dust.

  Claire, in the meantime, prepared another cast of her lizard’s ultimate. She returned him to his iguana form, ordered him to open his mouth, and shoved her arm straight down his throat. Brandishing him as she would a shieldlance—she called for the skill’s activation.

  The world twisted and warped.

  The surrounding stars almost seemed to lose their shape as they were sucked towards the girl and her lizard. Because they’d suddenly released so much raw mana that the very fabric of reality began to lose its form. It cracked and splintered, breaking apart as Boris ran his magic through his offering. Despite all appearances, it was not Claire’s flesh.

  It was the Phantom Blood—the Blood of House Augustus.

  Their might was felt across the universe. Across every world that dotted the realm.

  Even back on Mara, ten quadrillion light-years away, they felt it the moment that it was engaged.

  Grinning, Virillius put together an apocalyptic spell of his own. Tracing a circle with one arm, he crafted a magic formation as large as the sun. His formula was so densely inscribed that it was impossible to read, let alone decipher. Finally free of Claire’s realm—without his resources being actively drained, and without his spells being torn apart—he was able to demonstrate the full extent of his power.

  It was a race to see which of the two would be first to produce their constructions.

  And Claire was in the lead.

  The magic she’d poured into their surroundings returned to her, condensing as a silver membrane that envelopped lizard and wielder alike.

  It began to bubble and morph, to grow into an all-powerful weapon.

  But then, just as it took the shape of a lance, it shattered, scattering into their surroundings as a mass of broken shards.

  Despite her utmost confidence, the spell had failed, leaving all three of the battle’s participants blinking in confusion. Virillius looked questioningly at Claire who directed the same look at Boris in turn. The iguana—the ultimate source of the failure—did his utmost to avoid her gaze. If lizards could sweat, he surely would have been soaked through.

  A quick review of the system’s records revealed the problem.

  Despite being a level-capped aspect, Boris was not quite powerful enough to process the blood he was given.

  Claire sighed. “Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem like this particular exchange is possible just yet. We’ll have to save it for a little bit later.” Removing her hand from her lizard’s gullet, she put it on her waist and gave her head an exaggerated shake. “Would you like to see a trick in the meantime, Father? I assure you, it is one that will shock even the gods.”

  “I don’t see why not.” To agree was clearly an act of folly, but Virillius couldn’t stop himself from undoing his magic and nodding. He just couldn’t bring himself to refuse. Not when she wore her mother’s impish smile.

  “You won’t be disappointed.” Laughing, Claire spread her arms wide and unleashed a torrent of energy even greater than the one that had preceded her weapon’s failure. She gripped the surrounding space. All of it. Everything in Alcora Eleven and every adjacent system. All of it was seized by her magic.

  The planets began to reform. One speck at a time, they grew, becoming again everything that they’d been before. As with the system’s prior recovery, it was perfectly lossless. All of the plants, creatures, and microscopic organisms they’d eradicated were brought right back to life. The sun was the only that was missing, and by the looks of it, that too would soon be reformed. Her lizard was coughing up its flames, as if about to expel it.

  Virillius had to admit, it was an interesting trick. At a single glance, she’d already learned to reproduce the system’s protections. Even though most gods could not.

  “There is no reason to be impressed yet, Father,” she said, with a mischievous giggle. “That was just the first step.” A seemingly infinite amount of magic gathered in her fist. It continued to expand, growing by billions, trillions with every passing moment. Until, finally, she opened her palm to reveal a super-condensed particle. Though small as a grain of sand, it glowed with a radiant, blinding light.

  “This is a little something I learned to make after spending far too much time with a certain old pervert.” She lifted the speck of dust up to her face and sent it off with a puff. The particle slowly floated towards Eudysseus and vanished in a sea of green. “It’s called a seed of life. And it’s the one thing that this planet lacked.”

  And then, channeling her divinity, she toyed with the hands of time.

  Faster and faster they ticked. But only in the ever-growing patch of the world seized by her infinite power.

  Turning humanoid and spreading her wings, she floated to the place that belonged to the sun and became a beacon of light—one just as bright as the nuclear engine she’d silenced. Exactly as per her namesake.

  The process was completed just in time.

  For it was as she became a frozen star that the seed first saw the sky.