A solid chunk of space itself dislodges from the air. Jagged cracks erupt from the hole, as a black void becomes visible as the eye of a powerful syphon of the Heaven's energy. The only figure with its arms raised out of the entire group, all of whom had assumed that the summoning would be a failure, could see directly through the tornado into the beyond. There were stars, and things beyond stars. Holes in the universe held stars together, moving together as one. Pillars of flame lashed around absolute blackness, cords of fire rotating. All together it moved away from the hole, and the figure understood that this was a fight between a dragon and a tiger. The stars, the holes, the silvery metal that came into view as it drew away, all of it was but a single arm of the one who had punched through reality itself.

However, when the sandpiper and the clam fight each other, it's the fisherman who benefits. These humans had come here for a specific reason, and this was it. The moment a chunk of the universe flung itself toward the mountain and dug a channel into it deeper than a well, the group activated their entire suite of array formations.

Lines of power race across the circle, spinning and weaving a net of energy to entangle and trap the unwary, bruised, and battered being thrown through the tangle. Some snap, but the severed segments, still stuck within the formation, simply reinforce the remainder of the trap. Enough power to restrain a rank eight existence coagulates into the most efficient possible shape, any inefficiencies shaved off by the force exerted upon their fragile branches.

He didn’t waste a moment. Immediately directing his confederates to proceed with the second stage of the ritual, he also began pouring life energy into the circle. This was the gamble all of them took. In order to commit to the third stage of this ritual, one must be emptied by the second stage. If this prerequisite did not exist, there would be no way for five members of the Chaotic Demon Sect to work together, trusting each not to sabotage the entire ritual for their own benefit. After this stage, there was no chance for anyone to turn around and stab their compatriots in the back anyway, as it had an exactly eighty percent mortality rate.

Hence the gamble. Each of these five had full confidence they were more powerful, that regardless of how much hidden strength the other four were concealing, they and they alone would be left standing after the ritual had taken its fill. This step not only empowers the ritual with the life force of four rank three humans, but it also empties out the remaining participant into a vessel for the purified power to flow into. A winner-takes-all ritual, this left the last with not only the absorbed strength of whatever was caught, but the combined energy of every one of their near-equals.

Its momentum halted, the being above the circle floats in front of the crack in space. Beyond it, the hand opens, and a literal supernova goes off within the forearm. Channeled through the structure of the body, the death throes of a star reverberate; not outward equally as they typically do in nature, but bounced around carefully arranged black holes to bring every bit of destructive energy to a single point, and then fire it. A torrent of plasma rages forth, atoms of up to twenty-five protons in size fusing together, radiation burning anything within a range measured in astronomical units.

The being disregarded the tendrils holding it in place. Its greatest weapon was its mind, not its body. Deducing that if it smashed through something to create a hole, there must be material that was smashed, it quickly scanned the area. Detecting the hole drilled into the mountain, it reached out with its mind and snatched the broken shard of space. In the face of complete annihilation, it put its trust in the strength of the barrier, and in the abilities its creator had given it.

Unsurprisingly, the chunk fit precisely into the hole it had just emerged from. With a solid push, the fragmented reality was suddenly whole.

On the other side, the force of a condensed supernova collides with space/time itself.

With the chunk being braced from the other side by the being, it stays firmly attached to the continuity of existence. However, this was an existence that could punch something so hard it shatters dimensional barriers, and this was an actual attack. A bulge forms in reality, space distorting along the fourth dimension. Solidly held in place by the ritual, the held being focuses its entire intellect upon grasping the intangible and propping up the areas under the greatest stress with material not currently bearing a massive load, bracing the impact with four dimensional triangles. Conveniently, it was currently floating in some sort of eldritch blueprint of that exact design. Very stable.

Even with the support structure linking together local space into a reinforced polygrid of interlocked network architecture, it was still trying to hold back ten to the forty-fourth joules of energy. While space didn’t bend and buckle, it did crack; hairline fractures along passageways that would be familiar to any who had watched as this area had slowly repaired itself over time. As a matter of fact, it was exactly the same. What none had known, and indeed, none could know, was that, time and space being linked, the breaks in space-time always spread outward. When a force breaks through time, the shattering diffuses in both directions. The past hadn’t had any help holding itself together over time, and had gradually deteriorated. Here, after the injury has occurred, there is at least someone pushing back against the damage.

Though not for long, if this ritual had anything to say about it. With four containers emptied, the orthoplexian array activates fully, proceeding in its purpose without consideration of any kind of outside factors, such as the creature to be disassembled being the only thing preventing a supernova from sterilizing the entire planet.

Firmly wrapped around each extremity and binding the center of the black garbed figure within what could be described in euclidean geometry as a circle, the tendrils start with the arms. In the vast majority of situations experienced by those on this planet, an individual would utilize their arms to in some way amplify their strength, whether that be through gestures or a simple strike. Not even a creak is emitted, material ungiving, as the tendrils attempt futily to simply crush the offending limbs and remove the resultant pulp. An unshiningly dark carapace, the material this creature is encased within has an anti-sheen; light is not reflected at all off of the surface, but rather absorbed. The same occurs with the crushing force. Energy is distributed not only on the surface of contact, but down a system of intertwined mechanisms to diffuse the input along all of the surface area. Unfortunately for the figure, this array was built to learn, and use what weaknesses it can find to demolish the most powerful masters of the craft with efficient energy utilization.

Said weakness on this armor was how it dealt with force. When an impact was detected, the energy was automatically diffused across the surface, working its way down layers of protection to the fleshy meats within. There, it would ricochet between extremely hard surfaces until the force was spent, transmitted fully into the being. However, it had little resistance to outward force, other than the sheer strength of the material.

In other words, the tendrils tore the arms clean off with a sudden jerk.