💔
Kirone hovered in the empty vacuum, the silence pressing down on her harder than any force she had endured, and under that weight, sothing inside her finally broke.
Her parents were gone.
So were the mbers of the Xagna family who had mattered.
She had arrived too late.
She had seen the aftermath with her own eyes.
There was nothing left to save, nothing left to protect, and no excuse she could cling to that would soften that truth.
Rage flooded through her, her grip on her spear tightening as she stared at the space the hooded figure had escaped through, hatred burning so fiercely it drowned out everything else.
She wanted to chase them, to tear through space until she found them, but there was nothing to follow, no trace, no destination she could lock onto.
She knew all too well that spatial tears like that could send soone anywhere across the universe, just like so of her subordinates had been thrown outside the galaxy earlier.
Her subordinates closest to the area finally arrived, the warped space having slowed their return.
All were stunned into silence as they stared at the emptiness and the lone surviving frozen body drifting nearby.
None of them spoke.
None of them needed, or dared to.
It was at that mont that Kirone’s mind latched onto sothing else.
A single thought that cald the chaotic waves in her head.
The reason she had been thrown so far away that by the ti she returned, the Absolute Zero had already been enacted.
Her own attack had been blocked and reflected by a barrier she knew.
A barrier whose structure was etched into her mory.
A barrier she believed only one person in the universe could possess.
That thought made her breaths hitch.
’No.’
’It couldn’t be.’
Her senses told her that person was far away, in a completely different location, nowhere near this battlefield, and she clung to that as desperately as she could.
What she had was circumstantial, nothing more, and she refused to accept it, refused to let that conclusion take root while her mind was already drowning in grief and fury.
But the seed of doubt had been planted.
And it wouldn’t leave her alone.
She didn’t speak to her subordinates. She simply turned, tearing open space with force, and vanished, racing toward the location she could sense, compelled by the need to see it with her own eyes and prove, no matter the cost, that the fear gnawing at her heart was wrong.
🥀
The mont the spear of brown light entered Mallory’s right side, golden blood sprayed from the wound, and she imdiately clutched her stomach as a grunt of pain escaped her.
Her attack, the slash she had launched, went wide and completely missed its target, and in that sa instant, the one responsible vanished through teleportation.
The brown divinity instantly coursed through Mallory’s energy circuits, inflicting imnse pain throughout her body.
Because of her recent predicants, her regenerative abilities were currently far below their original capacity, and even if they weren’t, the power and Authority contained within that brown divinity were more than enough to impede her recovery.
Mallory was acutely aware of this, as she knew the true owner of that brown divinity, which was precisely why she could neither understand nor compute how or why it had manifested here through the thief who had stolen her amulet and attacked her.
Her imdiate response was to contain the damage the brown divinity was causing within her body, suppressing it and preventing the cracks spreading across her skin from extending any further than they already had.
Spatiotemporal damage was not sothing to be taken lightly, as it hard the very space her body occupied across all spatial dinsions while simultaneously affecting her along the temporal axis.
The temporal damage caused any attempts at regeneration or mitigation to fail completely, as regeneration would either be undone, or the nature of the damage could lock the wound in its current state and prevent it from changing at all, or even accelerate the spread of the injury.
On top of this was the soul damage inflicted by the Authorities over Space and Ti, and for Mallory, whose soul was still recovering from a prior injury, sustaining another at this mont was the worst possible outco.
Mallory could not afford to pursue the thief, even setting aside the fact that she had already marked them with her Track Down skill and could locate them later, provided they did not notice the mark and erase it.
Her priority at this mont was addressing the damage to her body and soul and ensuring it did not worsen or interfere with injuries she had not yet fully recovered from after purging her existence of all prior modifications.
She did not remain in that region, unwilling to risk staying behind in case other attackers were already on their way.
While she could sense her subordinates approaching, she could not afford to wait for them to arrive.
Mallory forcefully activated her authority over one of her personal dinsions and used its ergency function to teleport herself into it.
This was not the sa personal dinsion she had occupied for the past two weeks following her infection with the anti-evolution virus, which had just been attacked by an automation army, but an entirely different one.
It was known to only three, perhaps four, of her subordinates at most, and of those, only one knew its location, its spatial coordinates, and the planet where its entrance existed.
It was one of her safe houses, so to speak, a place ant for hiding and recuperating from grievous injuries beyond the reach of most threats.
There was no dust or indication that the place had been uninhabited for over a thousand years, despite the fact that it had, a result of the self-sustaining maintenance and cleaning spells Mallory had cast long ago, which continued to function using the ambient magic power present within the dinsion.
The mont she entered, she imdiately sensed an imnse burst of energy erupting from a distant point across the galaxy, and only a few seconds later, a second burst followed, even greater than the first, leaving Mallory deeply confused as she processed what she was sensing.
After all, the signature of that energy, one she could feel even across galactic distances, was identical to the divinity that had just attacked her.
She could not make sense of it.
The thief who had teleported away had wielded that sa divinity against her, and now she was sensing it erupting violently in a distant location.
Had they arrived there and imdiately engaged soone else, fighting again right after fleeing from her?
She attempted to sense the presence of the individual she knew to be the true owner of that divinity and Spatiotemporal Authority, and what she perceived only deepened her confusion, as their location matched exactly where those imnse bursts of energy were emanating from, bursts unmistakably produced by attacks capable of killing the average High-Tier Deity Level existence.
Mallory had to pull her focus away from that distant conflict, however, as the energy raging within her own body was a far more pressing concern.
She concentrated fully inward, attempting to suppress and stabilise the storm of spatiotemporal energy before it could inflict even greater damage than it already had.
It was during this complete focus that she sensed soone intruding into her personal dinsion.
No, intruding wasn’t the right word, as her dinsion’s defences didn’t react at all to this presence and instead allowed them to move through unchallenged, as if they had every right to be there.
A series of loud noises echoed from sowhere beyond the room, and within seconds, the door to the chamber where Mallory stood was thrown open, revealing the dishevelled figure of soone she knew more intimately than anyone else in the universe stepping inside.
The instant that figure entered and saw Mallory, their eyes widened in profound shock.
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