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’What the—!’
Kalvaro charged at Arthur before he could fully understand what had happened, and Arthur quickly used his own ti power to rewind his cracked shoulder, raising his swords to et the god’s strikes.
He intercepted Kalvaro’s strikes with the two swords, unleashing instant counters that were parried and imdiately reverse-countered.
Arthur deflected them with the flat sides of his swords, managing to match the god’s speed with maximum ti acceleration.
Suddenly, Arthur’s left eye flashed, and he quickly evaded to the right, narrowly avoiding a strike aid at his neck, the blow brushing past and cutting flesh with its force. He imdiately retaliated, swinging Celestia down on Kalvaro’s arm—
*CLICK!
"!"
Ti abruptly skipped backwards, and Arthur’s shoulder snapped, the joint cracking with the exact sa sound as before as it was forcefully dragged back to the swollen, wounded state it had been in monts before he rewound it.
The sudden pain and instability in his shoulder caused Arthur’s slash with Celestia to veer off course, creating an opening that Kalvaro imdiately exploited.
|Shear Force!|
The declaration rang out just as the impact struck Arthur’s chest, Kalvaro’s cosmic energy-infused fist drove into him, tearing through flesh and vibrating against bone, cracking several ribs on impact.
"huk?!"
Arthur was knocked backwards, and Kalvaro closed the distance, intending to follow up, but he quickly sensed the destruction spears Arthur had conjured above him and killed his montum, leaping backwards just in ti to evade them.
Crimson-silver spears rained down in pursuit, forcing him to continue retreating as he dodged, before gathering cosmic energy and hurling his fists forward, unleashing his own spears of temporal divinity that collided with Arthur’s and neutralised them.
Arthur hurled Lostvayne at him, and the god made the wise choice not to even attempt blocking, instantly leaping up and shifting aside to dodge the sword’s path.
But before it even reached his initial position, Arthur activated the Cosmic Teleporter, opening a portal that swallowed Lostvayne mid-flight and sent it out behind the god, right where he’d dodged to, piercing straight through his back.
"Guh—ARRGG!!"
Kalvaro’s groan quickly turned into a scream as the sword’s destruction energy tore through his body, and in that brief window, Arthur flipped Celestia into his left hand and swung down.
’Moon Split!’
"!!"
Kalvaro’s brows furrowed as he sensed the descending slash of destruction energy, raising his right hand to defend while his left grabbed Lostvayne’s blade, still jutting from his torso.
|Region Permanence!|
Ambient cosmic energy bent to his will, and in an instant, the entire region of space occupied by Arthur’s slash was frozen, its energy becoming completely unresponsive to Arthur’s will.
Kalvaro shoved Lostvayne out of his back, reached behind to seize its blade despite the searing destruction energy burning into him, and flung it aside.
He then turned his attention back to the Moon Split, a split-second before Arthur’s Authority shattered his, and the destruction slash ca crashing down toward him.
He imdiately clenched both fists, cosmic energy swirling around his left while divinity coiled around his right, and then hurled them forward in a simultaneous dual strike as he bellowed,
|Authority of Force: Rupturing Impact!|
The twin energies surged outward, rging into a single blast that tore through space as it collided with Arthur’s destructive slash, forcefully breaking it apart and scattering the destruction energy into shards of crimson light.
*CLICK!
Ti skipped backwards once again, and before Arthur’s eyes, the gaping wound Lostvayne had left in Kalvaro’s stomach vanished, along with the burns on his hand from gripping the blade.
Simultaneously, Arthur’s shoulder and his ribs cracked again, the pain shooting through his body in the sa intensity as before.
’This guy...!’
Arthur’s eyes widened as he clearly sensed the effect via his active Authority of Ti, but his expression quickly darkened as there were aspects of what just occurred that he couldn’t fully grasp, likely facets of Ti his Low-Rank Authority couldn’t access.
Luckily, he had Lostvayne around.
The sword flew back into Arthur’s hand, quickly relaying his findings.
[Master, I think I’ve figured out the power of his Unique Authority. It’s a form of Immutability.
It’s in the na: Permanence. Your Authority of Ti reacted to it, didn’t it?]
’Yes.’
[Then that confirms my conjecture.
Ti is the ’progression of events’, and with progression, things are eventually ’altered’ from their original states.
His Temporal Permanence halts that progression, anchoring things to a specific state and reversing any ’alterations’ back to that fixed point.
That would explain why all the damage you inflicted on him after he activated that Authority keeps vanishing. His body has been ’fixed’ in that state ’permanently’.
It also explains why your wounds keep returning even after you rewound ti to a point before they occurred. He’s ’fixed’ the state of those injuries ’permanently’, aning you can’t alter that state without breaking his Authority.]
Lostvayne gave this explanation as Arthur activated his Shattered Horizon technique through his Destruction Authority, releasing a burst of law energy that generated countless thin, laser-like beams erupting outward from his body.
The beams moved at near sub-relativistic speeds, slicing through anything in their path and chasing Kalvaro, who flew higher into space to avoid being caught in the expanding field of destructive light around Arthur.
Now that he understood how his opponent’s power functioned, Arthur could begin theorising ways to counter it.
Still...
|That’s a troubleso Authority you have there...
Anti-Divine Gravity Authority: Downforce.|
The moon trembled as Arthur magnified its gravitational field, dragging Kalvaro’s body back down, as the god’s speed wasn’t enough to escape the sudden 50x increase in gravity.
Kalvaro slamd into the moon’s surface, just as Arthur’s destruction beams rained down from above, intent on riddling him with holes.
Quickly enveloping his body in cosmic energy, Kalvaro forced himself up onto one knee and created a thick do of cosmic energy to block the rain of destruction, but at that mont, the ground beneath him cracked and crumbled, with rocks lifting into the air and slamming into him as they rose.
Just as a mountain-sized chunk struck him in the face and he angrily punched it apart, pulverising it with his Authority of Force, he caught sight of Arthur floating high above, right arm extended overhead.
|Did you know? This planet has two moons.|
Arthur clenched his fist and yanked it downward, and far beyond him, Kalvaro saw cracks spider across the surface of the planet’s second, larger moon, which Arthur had dragged close using his Gravity Authority.
That explained why the ground had suddenly fractured and rocks began rising—the second moon’s gravitational pull was tearing the one they stood on apart.
Kalvaro realised this just as Arthur’s anti-divinity tore out a quarter of the 4000km-wide celestial body, shattering it into massive fragnts that rained down on him.
|Authority of Destruction: Armageddon.|
Each rock was engulfed in Arthur’s crimson-silver energy, streaking down faster than teors and crashing with devastating impacts.
Naturally, Kalvaro didn’t just hover in place and let the destructive projectiles strike him. His magic coursed through his circuits, rging with the surrounding cosmic energy as he activated another of his Authority techniques.
|Authority of Force: Trajectory Recast!|
His magic burst outward, enveloping the entire area around him and granting him control over the direction of forces within that space.
The teors descending carried ’force’, so he redirected the vectors of those forces, causing the projectiles to veer off in different directions.
’Great, another troubleso Authority.’
Arthur clicked his tongue at the sight, then snapped his fingers and ripped another portion of the moon free, transforming it into a second wave of teors that fell at twice the speed of the first.
’Lostvayne, my Extre Nothingness Authority should be able to break his Permanence, right?’
[Unlikely. Though both are Unique, yours is composed of two Low-Rank Authorities, while his is a Mid-Rank. He clearly holds the upper hand in that matchup.]
Lostvayne laid out the truth bluntly, but Arthur didn’t mind. He’d known he was at a disadvantage from the start.
’In that case...Aspect Manifestation it is.’
[That would certainly do the job.]
At Lostvayne’s positive response, Arthur inhaled deeply, drawing in more ambient cosmic energy.
’I’ve recovered enough for an activation.’
He flew back and landed atop one of the falling teors, then launched himself forward using it as a springboard, dashing straight toward Kalvaro, who was flying to another part of the moon while still redirecting the teors targeting him.
He rewound his wounded shoulder and infused Lostvayne with his silver energy, instantly closing the distance and swinging his blade down at Kalvaro.
The god spotted him and reacted imdiately, crossing his arms as cosmic energy rapidly condensed before him, forming a multi-layered shield to block.
**CLANG!!!
Arthur’s sword collided with the shield, the impact ringing out like clashing tal. As he pushed against it, silver Null energy splitting through the layers with growing cracks, he unleashed his strongest card.
|Aspect Manifestation.|
"That..!"
Kalvaro instantly recalled Arthur using this in their first encounter, but the sheer destructive energy erupting from him now was more than double what he’d unleashed back then.
The god’s shield instantly shattered into pieces, the unleashed energy slamming into him and sending him crashing down onto the surface of the fracturing moon, with teors raining down on him a mont later.
Arthur raised his sword, charged it with power, and swung without hesitation, releasing a follow-up slash toward the god, but Kalvaro rolled aside just in ti, evading the destructive arc that tore through the ground where he’d just been.
*CLICK!
The damage from the teors was reset, but before Kalvaro could rise to his feet, the ground trembled, seismic waves coursing through the moon’s surface as cracks spread in a web-like pattern.
Kalvaro instantly leapt away from one of those cracks just as cosmic energy burst from the seams, the moon bleeding light before violently erupting in an explosion that hurled both him and Arthur in opposite directions.
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