Chapter 385

Adulation (IV)

Flashing lights blurred and burned against the cosmic background of nothingness, two figures repeatedly clashing against one another in a series of mind-bending explosions that seemed powerful enough to dig a hole the size of a mountain in the ground.

Cain continued to procure quasi star cores and suffuse them with a kindle, and the continued to explode. The giant, though, continued to bat them away with his swords, seeming entirely irrational, as though in a decent to madness. The four arms never stopped moving, cutting through the barrier of sound and breaking the spacetime around them with each swing.

The blades left gashes in space as they fired off arrays of burning light, most of which was either black or dark crimson. They were suffused with the kind of Mana that couldn’t be found anywhere below the 50th floor, the putrid and holistically shaven kind that underwent thousands of purifications.

Each strike carried the momentum of a thousand winds, and each clash burned amidst the two, procuring explosions that shook the netherspace. Nonetheless, the space stood and lived, always appearing untouched and anew.

Cain blinked forward aggressively, abruptly, past the giant’s incoming strike, his right-hand palm wide open, Mana trickling down and infusing into a spherical bomb. Spinning as he appeared behind the giant, he threw the sphere as though he were throwing a baseball, though, unlike the latter, the sphere expanded rapidly as it rammed into the giant’s back.

The ensuing explosion knocked Cain several miles back, and the giant several miles forward, forging massive distance between the two. Cain was the first to recover and, after glancing at the remaining health and Mana, silently cringed. Slamming his palms together, Mana within him burned once more as the leis of Mana lit up around him like fireflies. One mote after another appeared, each the size of a tiny corn, hundreds of them forming a shape of a halo.

On the other hand, the giant roared once again, shaking the surrounding space, as the four blades left his hands, alighting in black and crimson. Three blades formed the shape of a triangle with the fourth one cutting through the center from the bottom, its tip touching the tip of the triangle.

From within the golden halo, a star slowly emerged—it was hot and large and gigantic, its mass pulling at the surrounding space and causing it to tear and bend and fold. Cain’s frame turned wholly black, shadowed within the bursting light of a star. It wasn’t a true star, naturally—he was still far from being capable of forming an actual star, especially so quickly, but it was a Mana-suffused replica, the kind of attack that could evaporate nearly all water on Earth.

On the other hand, the giant’s triangle seemed to tear a hole in the void and summon a singular sword from within—it was ebony-black, obsidian liquid dripping off the edges like molten lava, and it seemed to be at least half a mile long, tip of the blade to pommel.

It caused the surrounding space to writhe and similarly tear, shaking like leaves in the wind. It bore down with the kind of primal energy that left even Cain feeling slightly startled. It was an attack that can absolutely kill him—or, well, remove one of his lives from the equation. Or, perhaps, even more than one.

Taking a deep breath, Cain blinked back, behind the star that grew to be the size of small skyscraper in height, proportional in width. It began to spin unto itself, generating the kind of pull that even Cain found difficult to resist. Closing his eyes, he burned nearly 40% of his remaining Mana just to gently push it forward. However, that was more than enough—as it began to move, it began to gain speed and tear away at everything surrounding it.

The black sword, similarly, moved forward as the triangle shattered into millions of motes of crimson light—just like the quasi-star, it seemed to weigh the world.

Suddenly, space above tore open as a figure stepped in, looking down at the two objects with a helpless gaze. She sighed and began moving her arms aggressively; the space all around began to seemingly grow layers of depth, as though preparing for something it could not handle. Neither Cain nor the giant noticed the woman as they were desperately trying to recover their Mana, drained till they were dry like firewood.

Before the sword and the star even touched, the mere approximity caused one explosion after another to create a cascade, a symphony of ruin. The space, shockingly, recovered even more quickly than before—speeding up after each new tear until it seemingly never even got destroyed with how quickly it was being repaired.

When the distance between the two objects came to be less than two miles, they began to slow down as the Mana vortex appeared between the two. The sheer pressure they exuded caused them to repel one another, and yet also attract. It was akin to watching two cosmic objects slowly coming together at a scale that human mind couldn’t comprehend.

The surrounding spacetime started bending and folding further and further, displacement beginning at the center point between the two objects. It was a strange sight, akin to tearing paper from within itself outwardly, a strange, multi-dimensional blooming of a flower. And yet, not quite like that either. The forces and energies in place caused even the woman above to begin sweating, her eyes dancing like starlit figures, trying to find the weakest points of the dimension as to reinforce them.

If the dimension collapsed and the collision of the two attacks got out, it would absolutely annihilate the entire planet, without question. Even right now, she spotted the after-effects escaping the dimensional locks into the outer world. The energies were uncontainable, she knew, but she still had to at least displace them. Luckily, there was a way.

The sheer quantity and sharpness of Mana at the center of the two approaching objects became to dense that they birthed a tiny, but still a genuine, singularity. Shocked at the sight, the woman still found delight in it, realizing it was possible to create a temporal and spatial vortex to literally transfer most of the collision somewhere in the open space.

Working quickly, she spun the singularity forcibly and poured even more Mana into it on top of what it was already sucking. The singularity itself didn’t grow, but its radius of impact did—and as it approached the sweet spot, the woman did the unthinkable for most—she reversed it.

The abrupt reversal of flow and even nature of Mana threw the entire aspect of the singularity onto its end, contrasting it—it ballooned and tore open a tiny, yet dimensionally massive vortex that linked somewhere, millions and millions of light years away. Without even considering anything else, she pushed more Mana out toward the approaching star and blade, using them to feed the vortex. The temporal and spatial wormhole wasn’t the kind that would self-sustain. In fact, it was like a kindled fuse in the raging rain—ready to implode at any moment.

Cain noticed the oddities, his eye veering upward toward the source of unknown interference; though he didn’t recognize the hazy frame within the boundless fog of energy, the Mana signature felt faintly familiar. Besides, it wasn’t as though there were many candidates when it came to who could it be.

Looking toward the center, he saw the star and the blade stage within the imminent collision; bracing himself, he heaved what little Mana he recovered and doused himself in it, head to toe, creating ethereal armor. It wouldn’t block everything, but it would block enough--especially with the strange hole sucking away a lot of the spreading Mana.

What came soon after, for the time itself was being beyond stretched and bent and distorted, was a simple, blinding flash of light that scorched Cain’s eyes within a nanosecond. The pain pulsated crazily as he screamed, the sheer ripple of energy washing over him, melting his clothes and armor and even parts of his body. Terrified, he concentrated every ounce of Mana, even suffusing it with the Divine Seed within him, to defend himself--only then did the scorch ease, and his body began regenerating.

He couldn’t hear anything--for at the exact moment that his eyes met their demise, so did his eardrums. He couldn’t see, hear, feel, or even smell anything--all his senses had been fried, and he was an inch away from being burned to the crisp. He had vastly underestimated the sheer volume and power of the Mana generated by the collision of two attacks of that scale. Cringing inwardly, he wondered what the effects would have been if the woman hadn’t assisted them in alleviating some of the pressure.

Eons or seconds or cycles ticked by--for the time was not--before his body was restored to the point where he could hear or open his eyes. By then, everything was gone, he realized--there was neither the star nor the blade there... and there wasn’t a giant either. There was just a remnant, he saw, a blood-soaked and ghastly apparition floating there, the remnant will of awe and agony spawned from the last few moments of the giant’s life.

All else was white, Cain realized--pure, untainted white. There was nothing else there but him and the apparition--and the woman somberly looking at it. Despite having the clear sight of her, her features remained hazy, as though his eyes were too weak to appreciate her form.

“Now,” her voice was soft and melodic as she turned toward him. “That was a bit dangerous, wasn’t it?”