The barrage of phantom swords was still hamring the cone from every direction while I sat inside, leaning back on my little throne, with my ice leg crossed over my knee, and I couldn’t help but start giggling to myself.
[He’s probably up there thinking he has in the bag,] I thought, listening to the continuous Kabooms of redirected supersonic blades detonating a trench around , while I sat perfectly comfortable in the eye of it all, working through my spell splicing like a man reorganizing his desk.
The slot that had been handling Ice Pebbles was now running Dominium Radicis at full bandwidth, and the roots responded the way they always did at full power, thick and imdiate and darkening to jet black within seconds as I reinforced them, not just maintaining the cone but weaving fresh layers into the barricade behind that was still within my ten-ter Domain, packing the existing structure tighter and harder, and repairing and reinforcing the existing ones while the phantom swords kept bouncing off the outside, carving that trench deeper with every passing minute.
And floating beside my right shoulder, pulsing with a warm, brilliant gold that was getting noticeably brighter with every second, was the orb.
[Two minutes and counting...] I chuckled, watching it pulse and trying to contain the giddy, slightly unhinged excitent building in my chest while I shoved mana into its conjuration at the rate of 60 MP/s, and the math was doing things in my head that I genuinely could not stop thinking about.
It’s been 150 seconds so far, at the rate of 60 MP/s, which was 9000 MP give or take, and for reference, Nom-Nom, who was a Tier 5 Perfected Stage Greater Dragon and basically a walking tactical nuclear, had a total mana capacity of around 1500 MP, and I was currently sitting at roughly six tis that and still going.
Yes, she has her draconic physiology, and she barely needs reinforcent to basically rip just about anything apart with her bare hands, and then there’s her Devour... but still, more than 9K MP can’t be too far behind.
[Dude is giving all the ti I needed...] I thought with a fresh wave of cackling despite the pain. [He is up there raining down thousands of those swords at a rate that is eating through his reserves, thinking he’s overwhelming , and what he is actually doing is giving ti to cook the single most overpowered thing I have produced in my entire life.]
The barrage outside shifted slightly in rhythm, and I felt the cone shudder just a fraction harder against the redirected impacts, so I fed another burst into the outer layer and watched the roots darken further, the whole structure settling back into its clean deflection geotry while I humd to myself and watched the orb grow brighter.
And then I switched slots.
The Dominium Radicis feed dropped, and in its place, I routed the full bandwidth into the shotgun charging, because 400 grams of Virtual Mass required 800 MP and twelve seconds at my charge rate, and I had a feeling that dude’s about to figure out just how useless his little pokes had been.
[I’ll let you charge for a bit more...] I looked at the orb pulse while the barrel of the shotgun began to glow that white furious hot, and I started counting under my breath while the phantom swords kept hamring away outside and my little cultist kept confidently burning through his reserves, thinking he was winning.
Twelve seconds later, the shotgun hit capacity, and I felt the charge lock in with that familiar deep vibration that ran up through my palm and into my shoulder, and I felt the sword no longer hamring against my cone.
[Alright... Showti~]
The roots peeled back slowly and deliberately, spreading outward while the cool night air hit my face and the full scope of the devastated basin ca back into view, revealing the five-ter trench had been carved around , the gold-shimring outlines of thousands of Outsiders standing in that wide ring of instinctive stillness, and above it all, my cultist floating on his phantom blade with hopefully his reserves burned down to critical levels.
[Dude’s got a literal flying sword? That is so cool!]
He looked down at with those glowing red eyes in that stupefied look of a man whose equation had just stopped working.
I tilted my head at him with one eyebrow up and leveled the shotgun one-handed with all the urgency of pointing out a bird on a fence.
"Huh... cool trick," I said, genuinely impressed with that hover sword. "You must be real popular with all the jade beauties back ho~"
And before he opened his mouth.
-BOOM-!
60 kilojoules of 00 Buckshot hit him directly in the chest before whatever he was going to say got further than the back of his throat, and the impact sent him off the phantom blade and straight down into the basin in a long, crashing arc that ended with him crashing on the ground on his back hard enough to make a small crater.
I watched him land and felt a grin spread across my face so wide it pulled at the dried skin on my lips.
[Okay, little guy,] I turned to the glowing orb beside . [Your turn.]
-Woosh-!
And what stepped out of the orb was a Ferrum Knight in na and form alone.
One look and you’d know that was a hurricane looking like a gust of wind.
Which is to say it had the shape of a Ferrum Knight with the twelve-foot covered black plate, the ten-foot greatsword, and the gold light burning in the seams of the armor, but the gold was not steady like the others, it was blazing, pouring out of every gap in the plate in thick rolling waves as though the armor itself was struggling to contain what was inside, and each step it took sent a ring of pure mana rolling outward from its foot through the dirt like a stone dropped in still water.
-THOOM-!
The first ring hit the nearest cluster of Outsiders sent every single one of them flinching back in unison, those shrieking, rabid Eldritch monsters that had been hamring the living quarters’ walls for hours, flinched as though death itself had walked amongst them.
Through the golden perception of Amaterasu’s Blessing, I could see their shimring outlines pulling back, the ones at the front pressing backward into the ones behind them as the whole mass rearranged itself away from the knight’s path with a wordless, animal unanimity of things that recognized sothing they should not stand in front of.
The knight kept walking, and the Outsiders kept parting, screeching and snarling and snapping their serrated tentacles in the air around it, but not one of them actually daring to attack, and the sight of it was genuinely... beautiful.
I let myself appreciate it for a full two seconds before routing the freed bandwidth back into mass production and cranking the Ferrum Knight conjuration back to sixteen per second while gold orbs blooed at the edge of my Domain and stepping out as fast as I could push them while the knight with more than 9000 MP behind it walked with complete and unhurried authority toward the man in the dirt who had just taken his first breath after the shotgun stole it.
Getting up on his feet he looked at the knight and the red glow behind his visor changed quality in a way that I had not seen it change in this entire fight, going from that asured professional calm to sothing colder and more imdiate while the mana the knight was barely containing washed over him in slow, rhythmic pulses, and his blood ran cold and I could see it running cold, could see the micro-adjustnt in how he was standing, the weight shifting back a fraction, the sword coming up a fraction higher.
Then he looked at .
I was still sitting in my throne with a 60 MP boulder of an AP Ice Pebble already charged above, while I was mass-producing knights at full rate, looking back at him with the expression of soone who had been having a very good evening and was about to have an even better one.
And for the first ti since this fight began, Kaius brought both hands to the sword, dug his boots into the dirt, dropped his weight, and got into a proper stance, four phantom blades materializing behind his back in a ready arc, and honestly, it felt like a complint.
[Let’s see what you’ve really got...] I thought as I placed the shotgun on my lap and cupped my hand around my mouth, and yelled across the basin.
"Hey, cultist! I’m gonna count to three, so get ready!"
I saw his grip tighten on the sword while I began-
"One!"
He activated the first sequence, ready to manifest three additional blades the mont he swung, while his whole body went completely still with the coiled in total focus of soone who had spent decades learning exactly how to wait for an opening, and I cackled because the opening was not going to co when he was expecting it to.
"Three!"
"Wa-" he had barely started when the knight moved.
-BOOM-!
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