86

Of Strength

Unsurprisingly, his prayer went unanswered.

Damn, he thought. Guess I’ll have to do it myself.

Rian reached for the temporal energy on the other side of the portal. It was still available. He’d channeled it before to increase his level, but that simply wasn’t enough.

And the last time he’d tried it, he’d sustained the higher ranks—up to Senior GM—long enough to access the ban function. But the System would reject him if he tried to brute force it again. It had adapted to him, nullified his attempt at ranking up when he’d fought Trini.

Banning Yindra obviously wasn’t an option. She wasn’t a player inhabiting a Vessel. Rian couldn’t just smite her from existence with GM powers. But there was still something else he could do. And he didn’t need the higher ranks to do it—not if he could indirectly manipulate the System itself now. As long as he had even a sliver of access to GM skills, he was still aligned with the upper ranks. He had the potential to access them; they were just dark. Like blueprints yet to be realized.

Every class skill was an established temporal channel carved into the fabric of space-time in Miriad. Skills were just predesignated ways of harnessing temporal energy.

And with enough power, he could create a new path to the skill he needed, circumventing the original paths that the System was denying to him.

Rian went deep into Meditation. To control what was external, he first needed to look inward. It wasn’t long before he found it. The spatial-temporal connections he was looking for between himself and his targets: one, then another, then dozens.

Hundreds.

His alignment revealed them, an interconnecting web of nodes in Miriad. Alignment was the starting point. A road leading to familiar destinations. It pointed him to where he needed to direct his attention.

And Breath of Goam was the beacon that lit the way.

He consumed the final charge of the item, then pulled as much temporal energy into himself as he could. Tendrils of control exploded outward from him, carving new paths through space-time, extending through the portal and into Miriad.

Yindra had moved to envelop the portal, dark tendrils reaching out to consume it, close it off from Rian.

But Mom, equally as capable of reading Rian’s mind, was already in position to intercept. She had placed herself directly in front of the portal, and her gaze struck Yindra’s tendrils of control like a spear, an invisible ray of light dispersing shadow. But when the power of the Observer met the shroud of darkness around Yindra, it failed to penetrate it, and Yindra’s efforts only redoubled until the sky around the portal was filled with encroaching darkness from every direction.

Mom couldn’t deflect multiple attacks. The Observer, for all the power that the title endowed, could only focus on one target at a time.

Yindra’s attack overwhelmed her and threw her into the portal as darkness consumed it.

It bought Rian just enough time. He felt the items in Miriad resonate with his conscious awareness of them. And in an instant, he formed a temporal channel to each of them, rerouting their spatial coordinates from hundreds of locations all into one spot—his inventory.

He could even sense Yindra’s rising frustration at the thought of it.

That’s right, Rian thought. You know exactly what I’m about to do. Something you only ever wished you could’ve—

Rian heard the swish of movement, a body cutting through the air toward him.

Altrexis was still alive.

He must’ve narrowly survived Yindra’s gravity spell. His trench coat was tattered and he was bleeding. His ponytail had come undone. He looked like he was on the verge of death, but his gaze was as resolute as ever. At first he was approaching head-on; then he moved so fast that Rian almost thought Altrexis had teleported behind him. And when Altrexis lined up his blade for the back of Rian’s neck, his aim was true.

Altrexis swung, producing a burst of wind, fluttering both of their outfits.

Rian turned around to face him.

Smirking, Altrexis was hovering there, sword gripped at his side, having completed the arc of his swing. His smirk faded. He looked at his katana, and the blade was gone. He was holding an empty hilt. And then his eyes widened when he saw what Rian had done, what was floating in the air around him. The dark violet crystals surrounded by warped space. Around Rian, the hundreds of materials slowly revolved, rotating.

A deconstructed god.

Every single Godly Fragment of Goam. Organs. Skin. Bones. Muscle. Even the fingernails. The pieces surrounded Rian, separated from each other like a three-dimensional dissection.

Every nullshard that had once been Goam was also here as well. The nullshards now filled the spaces between the Fragments like a network of crystallized veins. Rian couldn’t move the nullshards—they were immune to touch, to physical manipulation. But he didn’t need to move them. He just needed to locate them, isolate every piece that belonged to Goam, and then form temporal channels to each of them, warping space-time itself to create zero distance between them and him.

He had formed a nexus, a point at which all the pieces would converge. He had stolen every piece of Goam from everyone, everywhere, and everything in Miriad.

Including the blade of Altrexis’s nullshard katana.

“Nice try,” Rian said. “But it’s time I showed you a real anime power-up.”

The Fragments and nullshards resonated with each other, then combined in the same way that Fragments and gemstones would fuse in the process of crafting a Sacred-tier item.

The nullshards suddenly lost their immunity to physical manipulation.

It was as simple as Corvis had shown him. Use enough force with his bare hands, and the Goam crafting method would yield something new from the materials involved. The outcome just wasn’t an item this time.

It was Goam himself.

And if he could endure it, Rian could treat his own body as a crafting material.

Rian screamed as he brought the materials close and pushed them together as hard as he could, using Mirage: Flux to max out his Power and Endurance.

The pain was unbearable, the heat otherworldly. So much energy, the raw power rebounding onto the space around him—Rian had gone from the chill air of the arctic tundra to standing in the center of the sun. Each breath he took scalded his lungs with fire. It filled his veins, ignited his nerves. A volcano was erupting inside him, liquefying his organs. He screamed as loud as he could against the pain but couldn’t hear his voice beneath the agonizing maelstrom of heat.

He thought he was going to lose his mind. It hurt so much. Every moment was an eternity.

LEVEL UP! (Lv. 68→69)

LEVEL UP! (Lv. 69→70)

LEVEL UP! (Lv. 70→71)

LEVEL UP! (Lv. 71→72)

LEVEL UP! (Lv. 72→73)

LEVEL UP! (Lv. 73→74)

LEVEL UP! (Lv. 74→75)

The System text cascaded in front of him. Another dozen levels went by. He was at the center of a burning whirlwind that spun faster than sound. It felt like he was on a completely different planet, in the center of the winds of a burning Jupiter. Faintly, he could sense Yindra trying to stop him, sending shadows to consume him. But they all faded against the light. The sheer, world-rending energy that was radiating from his hands and body was straining the System itself, threatening to destabilize the fabric of space-time.

His skin grew hard, then split open. It felt like hot knives had plunged into his arms, chest, back, and legs, and were pulled along to carve paths into burning stone. Heat like solar flares exploded from the cracks in his skin. But as each Fragment of Goam joined with him, the solidity of his body strengthened and rebuilt itself, and the bonds between each piece of himself healed over with increasing fervor.

Rian could sense Altrexis was still near. There was nowhere to go. Every point in space nearby had become an inferno, a supernova at point-blank range. Altrexis was bracing himself to no avail, the energy in the air blasting away at his body. But instead of fear, there was something else. Resignation. The acceptance of defeat.

Altrexis was no longer bracing himself. Rian felt it, perceived it. Altrexis had realized something.

Instead of resignation, there was contentment. Gratitude. Actualization.

Just before his body lost stability and was vaporized in the flow of energy, Altrexis died with a smile.

The outpour of energy began to slow, a tornado of fire unraveling around Rian. The cascade of System text came to a halt.

LEVEL UP! (Lv. 107→108)

Breathing steadily, Rian opened his eyes.

His body had reached the peak.

His skin looked exactly as Goam’s had during their fight in the past: hardened, glowing red as heat vented from cracks like volcanic rock. The muscularity of his body was the largest it could physically be. But there was more to it than that, Rian sensed. His Strength had risen so high that he could feel it extending past his body and into the space around him.

The sense of Power and Endurance went so far beyond himself that he saw no end to it. It was everywhere.

It was limitless.

Cobalt

Level 108 Monk

Species: Human-Novai-Demigod of Strength

HP: 9999/9999

—

Strength: ∞

[Power: ∞]

[Endurance: ∞]

…

His stats weren’t actually infinite, he supposed. The System was just flipping out, marking his stats as immeasurable. If he had infinite Power, then he could’ve destroyed Yindra in an instant—as well as the Earth, the galaxy, and the universe itself if he tried.

And though he could only glimpse an understanding of just how powerful his body was, he had a feeling that it was more than enough to destroy the planet.

His transformation had scorched the ground for miles. The pillars of ice that Yindra had dropped from the sky had completely evaporated. Even the ice on the tower had melted.

“Bastard.” Yindra seethed. “You don’t deserve his power.”

“It’s a shame,” Rian said, and his voice was layered with another—a much deeper voice speaking through him. “You never got the opportunity to do this. You’d always thought of it, but there was one thing getting in the way.”

GM skills. Miracians couldn’t access them. Only a human could. It was those powers that had sundered Goam, Ezre, and Altir to pieces, into indestructible Godly Fragments. And it was only those powers that could reform them, bring them together to one location again.

And now that there were three souls inside of Rian, his loyalty to Yindra had diluted enough for him to direct his vengeance toward her.

He flexed his fists, and Power resonated through everything. The sky. The continent below their feet. The bonds between atoms themselves. He felt it all.

“You still don’t understand what you’re up against,” Yindra said. “Your potential in that form is still a fraction of mine, and all that Power is useless without the knowledge to wield it. You can’t even throw a punch without destroying the planet you wish to protect.” She raised one hand to the sky and aimed her other hand at the ground. “It’s all for nothing, Rian. This is the end.”

Everything began to shift.