At first, there was no sound in the area, but eventually, Arthur began to hear a low hum. After pausing to listen carefully, he realised that this hum was the sound of breathing.
He resud walking after that, and before long, the ’floor’ beneath his feet began to feel like a faint swamp, resembling muddy ground that had grown porous after rainfall.
"Tsk... this area’s been completely infected by her Sub-Edict. It’d be nearly impossible to purge its influence fast enough to matter."
Barda cursed as he felt the spatial platform he’d been maintaining start to dissolve under the toxin saturating the area, sighing as he stopped and pointed ahead.
"Look closely, Arthur. Focus on the shadow behind the fog."
Arthur infused cosmic energy into his eyes and activated his Spatial Authority, his vision zooming in on the dense fog.
At first, he saw sparks of green light, the imnse Cosmic Authority pushing back against his attempt to see through it, but Barda waved his hand in front of Arthur’s face, and the interference vanished, allowing him to see clearly through the fog.
"Let’s move a bit closer," Barda said, taking a step forward, and Arthur’s sight suddenly zood ahead so quickly that it took him a mont to refocus. This ti, however, he saw nothing because there was suddenly a massive wall in front of him.
A mont later, his brain reminded him that there weren’t supposed to be any ’walls’ here.
His eyes widened as he gradually reduced the cosmic energy flowing into them, slowly zooming out, and as he did, he began to notice irregular protrusions covered in dirt and rock, resembling a mountainous terrain.
When he finally zood out enough to see the colossal figure from a distance, his jaw nearly dropped.
It was an enormous black dragon.
There were four legs attached to its long, snake-like body, and four pairs of wings protruding from its back, each covered with sharp stakes.
The thought that within its skull was a powerful jaw lined with teeth capable of tearing through nearly anything made Arthur reluctant to even take a step forward.
It had four horns sprouting from its head, and its entire body was wrapped in green, poisonous cosmic fog that caused even the pristine white roots of the Cosmic Nexus above to rot and turn pitch black.
From head to tail tip, the dragon asured a little over 10 kilotres in length, making it practically a mobile city.
"That’s not her default size, though. It’s more like a layer of cosmic energy armour surrounding her body. Her real body is much smaller, hidden sowhere inside that entire mass, around the heart room."
Barda muttered this while glancing up at the rotting roots of the Cosmic Nexus, but that didn’t make Arthur any less stunned.
"That one’s still ridiculously huge, isn’t it? I could understand if it was a giant or a titan, but before you guys, I’d never seen dragons this big."
"We can talk about size later," Wyndella interrupted, her black pupils beginning to glow faintly as she grabbed Arthur by the shoulder and pulled him back.
"You need to leave, Arthur. Any closer and you’ll start lting."
Arthur didn’t hesitate for even a microsecond, imdiately looking to Barda as he said, "The icy universe."
"Got it," Barda replied, snapping his fingers and creating a Cosmic Gate to Niflheim, and right before Arthur stepped through it, he flicked a rune onto the godslayer’s back to conceal him from both conventional and non-conventional perception.
With it, he could only be seen if he allowed it.
The mont the gate opened, a deep rumble echoed through the vast expanse, followed by the sound of sothing dragging across a rocky surface, as the sheer amount of cosmic energy Barda had released was impossible for the senses of the massive dragon ahead to miss.
One would think moving such a colossal body would demand imnse strength and energy, and indeed, it did.
But the existence within that massive body was none other than a True Ancient Dragon.
The ’Blighted Dragon’ Nidhoggr.
An existence born in the early days of the Cosmos.
Even stripped of her Authorities and sealed at the bottom of a Cosmic Nexus, she was still an Ultimate Realm Existence.
She turned her gaze to see who had intruded upon this place, and the instant her eyes landed on Barda’s figure, her green pupils narrowed into thin slits.
|y-yoU!!!|
Nidhoggr had spent so long in this place that she’d gone through millions of mood swings and emotional changes.
From her initial rage and burning desire for revenge, she’d tapered down into loneliness, then despair, then apathy, then rage again, then numbness, then fleeting hope, then nihilism, then the quiet wish to die, then back to fury, resentnt, sorrow, madness, and finally, an empty stillness that no longer knew what it wanted.
But the mont her eyes locked onto the figure of one of the beings who put her in this prison of emptiness, all the rage repressed over hundreds of billions of years burst to the surface.
|DIE!!!|
It was a single word that carried her endless fury and desire.
The enormous 10km body moved as lightly as a feather in the wind, rushing toward Barda like lightning that transcended ti itself.
Her claws rose, seizing control of the surrounding cosmic energy and coiling it around them as she swung downward with the intent to tear him apart.
She wasn’t even sure if what she was seeing was real or just an illusion, but it didn’t matter.
All she wanted was to rip him to pieces.
Faced with this, Barda calmly looked toward the spot where Wyndella had vanished, shaking his head, and as he opened his mouth, reality around him slowed to a crawl.
"I have sowhere to be soon, so we’re gonna have to make this quick, sister."
He extended his right hand, cosmic energy bubbling from his dragon heart as he looked toward Nidhoggr and commanded.
|Dinsional Compression.|
The cosmic energy erupting from Barda flowed over Nidhoggr’s enormous body, and in an instant, all that higher-dinsional mass was flattened into a two-dinsional pane of glass suspended in space.
The ’Continuum’ in Barda’s main title referred to his control over not just the linear flow of ti or the curvature of space, but also the dinsional hierarchy that constituted those structures.
With that Authority, he could compress, flatten, or expand the dinsional existence of any entity within his influence.
By forcibly redefining how many degrees of freedom a being possessed, Barda effectively rewrote the target’s position within the cosmic coordinate structure, temporarily reducing their ability to exist across higher-dinsional axes.
So, as Nidhoggr’s motion, energy, and consciousness beca confined to a two-dinsional plane, her defences, which depended on higher-dinsional structure and projection, collapsed as they no longer had the ’room’ to function.
And just as that happened, a massive wing covered in white scales and tissue appeared from seemingly nothing, sweeping through space and shattering this 2D confined Nidhoggr.
The glass broke with a deafening noise that shook the entirety of the Cosmic Nexus above, and as Nidhoggr’s body returned to full dinsionality, the damage translated upward across her existence, leaving hundreds of bleeding cracks all over her body.
She crashed down onto the swampy floor, tumbling several miles before forcing herself upright and looking up to behold the enormous white dragon hovering in the air.
|That form...! WYNDELLA, YOU HYPOCRITE!!!|
Nidhoggr’s rage intensified at the sight of Wyndella as she launched herself off the ground toward the Creation Dragon, who calmly swept her wings inward, the left releasing a hail of stars while the right dropped bolts of pure purifying light.
The barrages thundered down on Nidhoggr’s body, cutting through the dense toxin cloud surrounding her and striking the black dragon across her body.
However, the actual damage was minimal as her Cosmic Armour absorbed most of it, and she opened her jaws, green energy rapidly condensing within.
But before she could unleash the breath, Barda appeared beneath her, his voice casual as always as he spoke.
"Now, now, dear Nidhoggr. Have you forgotten so soon?"
|!|
Nidhoggr flinched mid-charge upon sensing Barda’s presence directly in front of her chest, and just as she tried to twist her body to the side, Wyndella closed the distance and smacked her head downward, knocking her body back into Barda’s path.
Barda pulled back his fist, and everything around him lost colour except for himself as he tapped into the domain of potentiality, summoning every unrealised possibility of who he could have been.
His infinite possible selves, each representing every decision, tiline, and cosmic permutation that had never co to be, were montarily made real, erging through the cracks tearing open across the space-ti continuum, each echo flickering like film negatives.
They all moved in perfect synchrony, mirroring the real Barda’s movent as they pulled back their fists.
Then, as if drawn by a gravitational force, all those echoes collapsed toward Barda, rging with his body, and with every echo fusion, the cosmic energy gathered around his arm intensified.
|Collapse of All Futures.|
Barda’s fist collided with Nidhoggr’s chest, every instance of that punch across every possible tiline landing simultaneously, compressed into a single instant with a star-shaped flash of cosmic light.
The impact shook the entirety of Yggdrasil along with the universes attached to it, drawing the attention of all the Masters toward the Cosmic Nexus.
Down at the ’roots’, Nidhoggr’s cosmic armour violently cracked open like a coconut smashed across stone, Barda’s fist tearing through and striking the real Nidhoggr hidden within its heart room, smashing her right out the back of the armour.
The enormous armour, now with a gaping hole through its chest and back, collapsed like a puppet with its strings cut, while the real Nidhoggr was sent flying upward all the way to the Cosmic Nexus, crashing into the blinding white structure with such force that cracks spread across it.
Blood gurgled out of her mouth, her heart literally skipping a beat as her body’s functions ceased for a mont.
The dragon’s claws clutched her chest, a soundless scream escaping her lips at the first sensation of pain she had felt in over a trillion years.
Wyndella shot upward at top speed, reaching the stunned Nidhoggr and placing a hand on her chest, creation cosmic energy erupting from her palm and wrapping around the black dragon’s body like bandage strips, almost as if Wyndella was trying to mummify her.
Nidhoggr’s movents constricted, red bleeding into her eyes as she struggled with rage, but there was no way she could resist Wyndella’s power in her weakened state.
’That bastard’s Authority is still sealing my power!!!’
She cursed Aleksas in her mind as she tried to activate her Dictums, but aside from her Sub-Edict which dyed the surrounding reality with a toxin cloud that Wyndella easily resisted with her Aspect Armant, she couldn’t do anything.
Just then, she felt a gaze fall on her from behind, coming from high up along Yggdrasil’s length, the investigative gaze of the One-Eyed god who ruled one of the universes surrounding the Cosmic Nexus, and with it, a realisation dawned.
’If power is what I need! Then I’ll take it from the prison you put in!’
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