"Blitzzerstörung!"
A burst of lightning exploded from him, striking the airborne Arthur faster than he could defend and sending him crashing straight through the side of a towering skyscraper.
Glass shattered and steel beams groaned as Arthur tore through multiple floors, debris cascading around him like a waterfall.
Unscathed by both the wreckage and the initial blast, he raised his hand and bent gravity to his command, wrenching the 300-floor skyscraper from its foundation and hurling it at his opponent.
The man dismissively snorted and unleashed destructive energy to obliterate the building into countless fragnts, but Arthur was unbothered since he'd never ant for it to serve as a true attack.
It was only a distraction to buy the ti he needed to prepare his real strike.
Amid the tumbling debris, he lifted Lostvayne, silver energy coiling around the blade.
|¬Extre Nothingness: Chaos.¬|
"!?! Echobarriere!!"
Arthur's slash cleaved through space, tearing apart the man's barrier and cutting into him directly. He was thrown to the ground, blood spraying as a deep gash stretched from shoulder to chest.
Even so, cosmic energy continued to erupt from his body, as though his reserves had no end.
His eyes glowed as he channelled destruction, death, and slaughter into a single terrifying combination, weaving them together into a catastrophic symphony.
"Letzte abyssale Konvergenz!"
But even an attack of such magnitude, capable of consuming everything in its path and shaking the earth, held no aning if it never reached its target.
And Evan ensured it never did.
The instant Artemisia completed the circle, Evan stepped into its centre, activating it through the Akashic Page.
'World Magic: Spell Number 28: Gaian Expansion.'
The amplification circle activated, fuelling and magnifying the power of the spell he released an instant later.
"Spell Number 12: Karmic Fire of Carnage."
Black flas burst from Evan's grimoire, engulfing the man from behind and burning through his flesh as they seared into the wounds left by Arthur's blade, compounding the damage.
Although the man's command over the law of Karma dulled the attack's full 'Karmic' force, the flas spread steadily, crawling up his arm until they reached the swirling energy above him, triggering a violent detonation that tore through his body.
The blood that sprayed was instantly vaporised by the heat of his "Letzte abyssale Konvergenz's" detonation, and pieces of charred flesh were ripped away, leaving his body battered and scorched.
Taking advantage of the opportunity, Arthur stomped the ground, commanding gravity to hurl the man into the air.
Arthur then teleported above him, spinning to gather montum before swinging Lostvayne with his full strength.
"Cataclysmic Divide!"
The man twisted at the final instant, narrowly escaping a killing strike, though the blade carved across his chest and left a deep, jagged wound.
Arthur imdiately followed with a powerful kick that struck the man's side, the impact sending him higher into the air.
As the man's body spun uncontrollably through the air, Evan locked onto him with Track Down, combining the skill with Distant Strike as he simultaneously conjured five magic circles.
"Quintet Nuclear Magic Activation: Nuclear Cannon. Gravitational Implosion. Nuclear Fla. Radiant Cataclysm. Atomic Annihilation!"
His Grimoire's pages fluttered as the five spells activated in succession, converging on the man in mid-air, each releasing its own devastating power.
The Nuclear Cannon fired a concentrated beam of imnse energy, tearing across the sky in a blinding flash. Gravitational Implosion warped the space around him, generating crushing pressure that collapsed everything within reach. Nuclear Fla spread in a blazing inferno, engulfing him in searing heat and filling the area with irradiation. Radiant Cataclysm burst forth in a wave of blinding light that tore through his form, while Atomic Annihilation detonated with the fury of a miniature star, erasing even the air molecules caught within its radius.
The man was hurled through the air, his body consud within the storm of converging spells.
Without sparing a glance at the destruction he had unleashed, Evan quickly uncorked another potion, swallowing its contents as he opened his inventory to retrieve a fresh batch of magic stones.
Danger Sense blared an alarm, and Evan quickly activated Spell Number 4, but when the alarm didn't subside, he imdiately layered an additional spell onto it.
"Spell Number 4: Absolute Defence. Multiple!"
As the air cracked under the fury of the nuclear spells, five dozen-tre-wide shields of energy ford in front of Evan, between him and the blast.
Suddenly, a beam of destruction energy burst out from the explosion in the air, tearing through the first four shields in re monts. The man's retaliatory beam of cosmic destruction was finally halted at the fifth shield, its strength diminished after piercing through the first four barriers.
A thousand magic stones dimd and shattered into dust, but Evan didn't blink as he transitioned seamlessly into his next array of World Magic.
"Spell Number 20: Sword of Damocles. Spell Number 8: Graviton Convergence."
The man's burned body broke free from the inferno of the nuclear spells, but his escape was short-lived.
Above him, an imnse ethereal sword materialised, suspended by a fragile thread of magic that snapped almost instantly, sending the weapon plunging at near-relativistic speed into his back with a resounding crash, detonating at the exact mont Graviton Convergence activated.
At the core of the explosion, a singularity erged, its gravitational pull tearing apart all surrounding matter and energy. Residual nuclear energy from the earlier spells, debris from annihilated skyscrapers, shattered buildings, and molten ground were all drawn inward with trendous force.
The atmosphere compressed, thickening into an overwhelming gravitational field as space itself began folding and collapsing.
The fusion of nuclear energy and gravitational distortion magnified the destruction, transforming the man's surroundings into a vortex of destruction. No fragnt of matter or trace of resistance could escape the singularity's grasp as it condensed everything into one catastrophic point of energy.
Evan's magic stones vanished as quickly as they poured from his inventory, while Artemisia clenched her teeth, struggling to sustain the magic absorption circle.
Suddenly, a Cosmic Gate opened beside Artemisia, Beatrix, and Evan, startling them.
Simultaneously, Arthur descended from above in a trail of crimson-silver energy, bringing his blade down upon the collapsing space.
|¬Soul Devouring Oblivion: Oblivion Rend!¬|
A slash of concentrated energy erupted from Lostvayne's blade, but before it could make contact, Arthur lifted his left hand. With his Gravity Pseudo-Authority, he forcefully hurled Artemisia, Beatrix, and Evan into the Cosmic Gate, then teleported to its front and leapt in imdiately after.
As the Cosmic Gate sealed behind him, Arthur's strike crashed into the man's body amidst the Graviton Convergence.
The detonation that followed was so imnse that it completely vaporised an entire continent. Over two hundred million square kilotres of land vanished within monts.
From space, the destruction spread with overwhelming scale. A blinding radiance illuminated the planet's surface, expanding outward in widening rings.
Enormous waves of cosmic energy rose from the point of impact, crashing outward and consuming the nearby land. Shockwaves extended further, their force tearing apart surrounding landmasses, breaking islands into scattered fragnts, and hurling them across the seas.
◇ ◇ ◇
On the other side of the Gate Arthur had opened with his Cosmic Teleporter, he dropped to the ground before the others, breathing heavily as he spoke.
"That should have killed that body."
But Arthur had spoken too soon.
Before anyone could answer, the space behind him suddenly split open.
Arthur turned on instinct, intercepting a bloodied fist that tore through the rift and slamd against Lostvayne.
The earth beneath them broke apart, shockwaves bursting outward and throwing the others back as Arthur's feet sank deep into the ground.
The figure before them was almost unrecognisable.
His body was mangled and drenched in blood, his clothes torn to rags, clinging to ruined flesh. One of his eyes was gone, one of his legs missing, and what remained of his skin revealed shattered bone beneath.
Despite such devastation, the cosmic energy radiating from him had not weakened. If anything, it had only grown stronger.
"…you've got to be fucking kidding ."
The man—this body—was still alive.
Even with a gaping hole tearing through his right side, missing an arm, a leg, and an eye, and after taking a continent-level combo from both Arthur and Evan, he was still fucking alive.
The man pulled back his hand and readied another attack, but Arthur moved first, releasing a point-blank Extre Nothingness that blasted him away.
Breathing heavily, Arthur staggered and drove Lostvayne into the ground, using it as a support to keep himself upright.
The others managed to rise to their feet, except for Evan, who had never fallen in the first place and had balanced himself mid-air.
His grimoire's pages fluttered as he searched for another spell, trying to find the right one to pour the last of his remaining magic power into.
Artemisia reached for the last of the Divinity fragnts Arthur had entrusted to her a week prior, absorbing its energy to maintain the buffs she had placed on Evan and Arthur, with Arthur in particular demanding most of her focus.
His Transcendent-level stats consud far greater energy to reinforce, and the strain was quickly draining her reserves of both divinity and magic power.
Beatrix, standing beside her, wished to remain hopeful and believed that this body they fought was the last their opponent possessed, since he had not abandoned it despite the state of being beaten, battered, and bruised.
Still, she could not convince herself that their ordeal was drawing to a close.
The four teenagers lifted their eyes to the man now floating in the air. Arthur's grasp on Lostvayne tightened, and the Akashic Page hovering above Evan's palm glowed as its pages fluttered.
Before they could launch an attack, a sudden eruption of cosmic energy burst from the man's body, its force far greater than anything he had released before.
'Does he have so kind of ability that makes him stronger the more damage he takes?!'
Evan scread inwardly as he lifted an arm to block his face from the storm of broken rocks and swirling dust.
Law energies erupted from the ground and gathered rapidly, forming into a thick vortex around the man as he hovered above them, staring down with his one remaining eye.
Arthur's gaze locked on the vortex, but at that mont, sothing else drew his attention, sothing he hadn't noticed before.
"He's… absorbing cosmic energy… from the planet?"
As Arthur continued to study the man within the swirling vortex, his eyes widened in disbelief as a chill ran down his spine and the hairs on his neck stood upright.
"…why is his energy signature… the sa as the ambient cosmic energy of this planet…? How didn't I notice this until now?"
Arthur's mutter reached the ears of the other three, and two of them imdiately turned their gazes toward him in shock.
As for the third, Artemisia, her expression grew darker, and she shifted her attention to Evan instead.
"Evan. Appraise him."
"What?"
Evan blinked, startled by the sudden request.
"I already tried before. All I saw were question marks."
It was true, Evan had attempted to appraise the man the mont he had incapacitated Artemisia back on Aramis. The results had been nothing but incomprehensible, filled with question marks and garbled symbols.
But even after he reminded her of this, Artemisia only repeated her words.
"Evan. Appraise him."
"…"
Evan was silent for a mont, but since Appraisal required only a minuscule amount of magic power, he turned his gaze back to the man hovering within the swirling vortex of cosmic and universal law energies, activating his Appraisal.
"…eh?"
The results left him completely speechless.
Arthur's expression darkened even more, and he didn't need to see Evan's Appraisal results to guess what it had revealed.
His lips curled into a frown as he spoke in a grave voice.
"This bastard… he's not just absorbing cosmic energy from the planet. He IS the planet."
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