Upon sensing the familiar presence, which for so reason was greatly weakened, Kirone rose to her feet, and in a flash of light, she was already beyond the planet’s atmosphere in interstellar space, appearing directly in front of a man who was plunging straight toward the planet she’d just left.
Her sudden appearance made him crash straight into her with imnse force, the impact sending her several hundred ters backwards through space.
The man instinctively roused his divinity, preparing to attack, but the mont he saw her face, his energy died down, and a relieved expression washed over his face.
"Lady Beatrix!"
He quickly reached out, grabbing her shoulder as he tried to speak. "Help, Lady Artemi—!"
Before he could even finish saying Mallory’s na, the adrenaline sustaining him vanished with the relief of seeing Kirone, and his body slumped down on hers.
The life within him slipped away, and only then did Kirone notice the three arrows embedded in his back, golden blood pouring from his wounds.
Kirone recognised this man. He was a god king who served Mallory, one of the few who knew of Kirone’s relationship with Alvey and one of the even fewer aware of the location of Alvey’s mother.
He’d clearly co here for her, which was obvious from the relief on his face when he saw her, and he’d co to deliver a ssage about Mallory, but he’d succumbed to his injuries before he could say it.
As if that weren’t enough, the instant his life faded, a powerful Authority dragged his soul from his body, leaving Kirone no chance to extract any information about what he’d intended to say.
Kirone didn’t even need a split second to teleport back down to the planet, right into the grounded spaceship that she’d arrived in.
Her subordinates had sensed the man’s approach and had also felt Kirone move to intercept him.
When she appeared before them carrying the corpse of soone they recognised, their expressions turned grim.
Kirone said nothing, leaving the body with them, and instantly teleported back to where Alverix was with his grandmother.
The sight of Kirone appearing suddenly with golden blood staining her clothes stunned both grandson and grandmother, but she didn’t even give them a chance to voice their shock.
Grabbing Alverix by the shoulder, she said, "Stay here with your grandmother."
Before he could respond, a blinding flash of brown light filled his vision, forcing him to shut his eyes.
When he opened them, all he could see were a few strands of white hair disappearing into a massive tear in space-ti, turbulent spatial energy whirling inside as it slowly sealed itself.
❤
Kirone’s Unique Authority over space-ti folded the fabric of space over itself repeatedly, then tore straight through those layers, letting her cross vast distances that would normally take days or weeks in just hours.
Before long, she reached the nearest dinsional gate she knew in the region, located on a planet ruled not by gods or demons, but by celestials.
Even though the New Gods maintained alliances with so celestial factions, that didn’t an she could simply enter their territory and use their dinsional gates without following protocol.
Right now, though, Kirone didn’t care at all.
The mont she appeared, she expanded her Authority’s influence outward, dominating the surrounding spaceti fabric, and naturally, the dinsional gate that tore through space to transport travellers across imnse distances fell under her control.
She forcefully bypassed every restriction on the gate, activated it, and plunged through before any of the celestials on the planet could react.
In the sa way, she burst out of the exit gate on the other side and shot away from the planet, with only a handful of Celestial Lords managing to glimpse her white hair as she vanished into deep space.
As she sped toward Orithyia, she naturally tried to use her telepathic link with Mallory, needing to know what was happening and why one of Mallory’s subordinates had appeared before her barely alive.
All she could sense in the link, however, was static, a clear sign that sothing was interfering with the connection.
Distance wasn’t the problem. They had accounted for that when creating the link, and a few million light-years was well within its range. At worst, ssages should have been delayed, not blocked.
After that failed attempt, Kirone tried to sense Mallory’s location directly. This ti, she could only determine her general direction, not her exact spatial coordinates.
There was interference here as well, and it was the type she recognised imdiately.
Their ability to sense each other relied on spatial detection and positioning through the sa connection that supported their telepathy, and Kirone quickly realised that she couldn’t pinpoint Mallory because a dinsional gap existed between them, disrupting her Authority’s ability to lock onto Mallory’s exact location and leaving her with only a general direction.
Naturally, she also quickly understood the cause of this interference.
Mallory had to be inside so kind of isolated space, shielded by a dinsional barrier strong enough to block even Kirone’s Authority. There were very few places like that connected to Mallory, and Kirone knew all of them.
Within seconds, she reached the obvious conclusion.
’She used her Dinsional Lockdown?! What the hell happened?!’
Kirone was well aware of Mallory’s personal dinsions and their lockdown protocols. Mallory didn’t have just one such space, but several, each equipped with that safeguard.
Kirone knew this because she was the one who had created those lockdown protocols for Mallory in the first place, using her Unique Authority over space-ti.
She also knew that Mallory wouldn’t activate them unless sothing extrely serious had occurred, like the last ti she had used the lockdown during the Great Valmone War, when several Devil Kings attacked one of her bases.
Mallory activating a Dinsional Lockdown, combined with the fact that one of her subordinates had appeared dead before Kirone, with his life stolen by an unknown Authority of Death, was more than enough for Kirone to understand that sothing had gone terribly wrong.
Because of that, she spared not an ounce of power to control the ambient cosmic energy, tearing space apart, punching holes through it, shrinking it, and manipulating it however she needed, doing everything possible to reach Orithyia even a single second faster.
But considering the imnse distances involved, travel still took several days, even for her.
Only after those days had passed did she finally reach Orithyia, and even then, she still couldn’t pinpoint Mallory’s exact location.
The Dinsional Lockdown was still active.
Without hesitation, Kirone pulled several devices from her pocket dinsion and tried to contact multiple individuals at once, both her subordinates and her associates.
The first person she reached out to was her Aunt i, her father’s elder sister.
The connection went through instantly, and Kirone was about to ask if i knew what was happening and request that she investigate before Kirone arrived, but her words died in her throat as the first sound that ca through the device was not i’s voice, but an explosion.
It was followed by i’s grunt, then a heavy crash as though the device had been knocked from her grasp and fallen to the floor, with loud explosions continuing in the background.
Kirone’s blood ran cold.
She imdiately altered her course, heading straight toward the location from which i’s signal originated.
The closer she got, Kirone’s thoughts raced, considering many possibilities.
How was it possible that she hadn’t sensed i fighting?
A battle intense enough to make i struggle should have released energy fluctuations so imnse that Kirone could have felt them from outside the galaxy.
The reason she hadn’t noticed anything revealed itself to her as she sped toward the signal’s origin.
Her senses detected a veil spread across the entirety of the Omicron System’s Oort cloud, a veil concealing those massive energy fluctuations.
Without hesitation, Kirone tore the veil apart, and only then did the enormous waves of energy from the ongoing battle flood outward into the galaxy, alerting everyone that sothing was wrong.
Kirone’s ho planet, Aidos, was under attack.
The attackers? Automations.
Kirone was instantly filled with rage. Divinity erupted from her body, dominating the entire star system’s space-ti fabric.
Millions of the many automations attacking the planets and those living on them were imdiately crushed by the space they occupied, reduced to roughly spherical masses of tal before exploding in brilliant bursts of light.
The stronger automations, however, weren’t entirely destroyed and struggled against the overwhelming spatial pressure, their movents slow and erratic as they resisted.
Those defending the planets took advantage of the mont, unleashing concentrated attacks on the immobilized automations that tore through their chanical bodies.
Kirone’s sudden arrival and subsequent actions drew the attention of the defenders, so visibly relieved while others appeared even more alard.
A few rushed toward her, likely intending to report or explain the situation, but Kirone ignored them all, plunging straight through Aidos’ atmosphere toward a specific location.
The mont her feet touched the ground, her expression turned ugly.
She had wanted to believe her senses were deceiving her, but she could no longer deny reality.
For reasons she couldn’t comprehend, she couldn’t sense her parents anywhere on the planet, nor could she detect the other mbers of her extended family who should have been in the sa region.
💔
The Xagna Family Manor was engulfed in flas.
Kirone arrived to witness the aftermath of a battle that had already ended. Corpses littered the ground, the flesh-and-blood remains of gods and the few humans who lived there, including servants and guards, alongside the shattered chanical bodies of the automations they had fought to the death.
The space in the area was completely distorted by the clash of conflicting Authorities and law energies, and the planet’s records were corrupted to such a degree that even attempting to use retrocognition through her Authority over Ti would only produce warped and fragnted images.
Kirone could eventually cleanse that distortion, but it would take ti, and ti was sothing she didn’t have, not when her family mbers were missing.
The battle had likely ended only minutes before her arrival. The scene was still fresh, and from it, she could gather certain details as she sped across the land toward the continent’s edge.
Having expanded her Chrono-Space Dominion to cover the entire star system upon arrival, an imnse amount of information about nearly everything within the dominated space poured into her mind, including the area surrounding her Family Manor.
From that information, she noticed one critical detail.
Most of the corpses she passed shared the sa cause of death.
A single stab wound straight through the back, piercing the heart and the divine spark embedded within.
That was how these gods, the guards and servants of her Family Manor, had been killed.
Her temporal abilities revealed that those felled by a single strike had been dead the longest. In other words, they were the first victims, slain before the larger battle whose aftermath she now flew over had even begun.
A single killing blow from behind indicated extre stealth, but these were Deity Level existences who guarded the Xagna Family Manor, ho to so of the universe’s most influential existences.
On top of that, the region surrounding the Manor was fortified with far more security asures than could be easily counted.
How, then, could not one, two, three, or even ten, but several dozen gods be caught off guard and killed with a single blow?
That led her to a far more plausible conclusion.
They had recognised their killer.
They had lowered their guard and turned their backs because they trusted the person or people responsible. That explained why they hadn’t been on alert, and the expressions of shock and betrayal on so of the corpses confird this theory.
All these thoughts raced through Kirone’s mind in the seconds it took her to cross the land and reach the edge of the continent where the fiercest fighting had occurred.
There, she saw a body she recognised. i.
But it wasn’t the real i. Kirone could tell that imdiately, not just from sensing it from afar, but from what she could see with her own eyes.
The legs of this i were shattered into fragnts of black ice, so she knew it was nothing more than an Ice Clone of i.
Still, Kirone had co here first because she could sense a fragnt of i’s soul clinging weakly to the clone.
Sensing Kirone’s approach, the clone tried to lift itself upright, even as cracks spread across its arms and face. It was already collapsing, and within seconds, it would likely crumble entirely, just like its legs had.
The mont Kirone arrived, the clone spoke urgently, trying to relay whatever information it could before crumbling.
"Rilene! She’s injured! She protected your f—!
The clone couldn’t finish as its arm crumbled away, followed by its torso, and just before its head collapsed, it forced out a final warning.
"Black hood! Cosmic Superior! Be caref—"
The clone disintegrated into dust before it could finish, and as it did, the soul within it shot upward and vanished into space, returning to its main body.
In other words, to where the real i was.
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