Chapter 935 - Beyond event

"Am I correct to assume the change in the system message has something to do with your lovely sword, Brich?" Fiona asks, still politely.

"You can be sure of that, bitch! He might now be my true master, but I will fucking enjoy watching you bunch get a second asshole torn into you!" Calvorn stops laughing only to say that.

Fiona's eyes widen. "Oh my, how vulgar!"

Even then, I observe the continuous buildup of the heat signature inside of her body. Each of her movements leaves a blurry afterimage behind it, as that heat disrupts her environment already.

"You don't have that schmuck with you anymore, so good luck doing anything against my master! Honestly, I almost stayed quiet because I hate the idea of seeing a mere imitation of my master, but I prefer it over spending one more second with this crazy fucker!"

"I thought we were friends! I even let you drink my blood!" Brich raises a complaint.

"You are the dumbest person that ever laid their hands on me!" Calvorn shouts back.

It all sounds like he is getting out some pent-up anger, and I observe it curiously. The sword got stuck in that room for millennia and didn't seem to mind that much, yet just a short amount of time with Brich caused it to act like this.

My respect towards the future follower of The Ant rises slightly.

Calvorn then modifies its voice, and it becomes almost a perfect imitation of Victoria's. Almost, because unlike hers, it sounds gentler, like there is a barely hidden smile behind it.

"And you, Nathaniel, I will savour watching you get killed very much. In a way, I respect you the most out of all the people I met after I got freed from that place, but honestly, you are pathetic."

Victoria's voice gives a laugh as Calvorn opens its bladed mouth wide, tongue flickering and teeth clacking as it continues to talk to me.

"Like those low-tier vampires Master made. They were the sort of people that were never too compatible with his power, yet even just a bit of it made them stronger and allowed them to live longer. But I have always seen it, the desperation they barely hid, knowing they lack the talent, and the way they pushed themselves, sacrificing their long-term prospects just to temporarily become comparable to the middle feeders."

Calvorn gives a laugh, and Victoria's voice sounds younger now, more innocent. "And then, when they got to their limits, they realized that there are levels they couldn't even imagine. Just like you will one day!"

When he stops talking, I fall into a silence for a while.

That silence almost begins to stretch when, out of nowhere, I give a chuckle.

It causes the sword to snap in a way that shows it is taken aback, and even both Fiona and Brich to look at me in surprise.

With a smile forming on my lips, I just look at that sword.

"Sure."

That's the only word I say.

I gesture to both my teammates, and together we walk through the city.

There are some attendees and locals who begin to follow us. They are participants, just like we are. The Champion of this city isn't among them, likely deciding to stay to be sure his people are safe, since the vast majority of them likely chose a pacifist role.

Unlike the three, well, five of us, including Dame Vesta and Calvorn, the other participants begin to organize. There are hundreds of them, and some seem to have experience in combat that requires group cooperation. This is especially true for the locals, as the attendees aren't likely used to it.

It is the sort of stuff where you select front-liners, share information on some of your skills to allow for such distinction, and then have more people going into support, long-range, and such. Rarely, you have people who can make other people stronger by sharing their mana, having the same skill, or through special arrays that are able to support the use of that skill in many more ways.

Though this sort of combat is interesting, it's not something for me, as I'm the most effective when I don't have to hold back due to the people around me. And so far, I haven't had trouble with groups collecting to fight against me, as I was always able to brute force through them or find a weakness.

Out of curiosity, I slam my hand through one of the statues we are passing by, and it explodes into a rain of stone just as it would normally. The only difference is that we are now on the Echo Plane, and as the statue is destroyed, I for a moment see the real thing underneath that remains untouched.

It's akin to us being out of phase, or the system recreating a perfect copy of the second floor. In a way, this is weirdly nice, but I guess even if it was not the system directly, then the Rulers made such a change.

Otherwise, I can imagine some events entirely wiping out the floors.

It becomes obvious the others are tracking us, with some of them very likely noticing the change was due to Calvorn or having heard its shout. Though some might just follow us because we are S ranks.

I also notice three signatures leaving at high speed, my sister and her team. It is all likely due to some sort of super wide-range mental detection Genevieve had used. At least I think it was her, since I'm not a mind mage, and it had a hint of mana reminiscent of her signature.

I don't like to be too confident about these things, as I can easily imagine someone mimicking her signature. I could do that, so why wouldn't someone do that to me?

Being paranoid remains one of my best traits, and that pays off as I due to my constant scans detect an attack and move to the side, and the projectile with a flickering golden and white core whizzes through the place where I just stood after easily piercing through who knows how many buildings.

It flies far into the distance, just as easily destroying everything in its path and exploding one of the attendees that is unlucky enough to stand in its way.

My skills surge as I calibrate my detection, pushing it to reach further and become especially sensitive towards anything reminiscent of empyrean mana.

I avoid the second projectile much earlier and extend my senses even further, locating the direction of the attacks somewhere around where Vic and her team headed.

When a third attack lands right where I was just standing, I rule out the possibility that it's a coincidence.

Then a rain of empyrean projectiles follows. Hundreds of arrow-like shafts fly across the sky like a swarm of small, golden-and-white meteors. They fall over a wide area, mincing everything in their path, whether defensive barriers, arrays, or solid walls.

A dozen attendees and locals who find themselves in the way are killed without any chance for them to fight back. Brich has good detection and is fast enough to move away, but Fiona gets hit. She is pierced by multiple arrows even with the defenses she sets against them.

She falters backward with blood pouring and spraying from her wounds, her heart beating quickly to keep it circulating. She coughs up blood even as one of the projectiles entirely destroys her jaw, another tears through her neck, and some others explode her shoulder.

The heat that kept concentrating inside of her body rises, and it evaporates all the leaking blood, creating a red steam around her. With a series of cracks, her flesh and bones melt, sizzle, and bubble as they reform into new flesh, and she regains her balance.

Even as blood red flames erupt beneath her, launching her at high speed toward the attacker with a long fiery trail, I notice her expression.

There is no fear or shock at all. Instead, her expression is one of slightly amused surprise at her near-death, followed by a bright excitement, like a child throwing themselves into a fun game.

As a new barrage of projectiles reaches us, I force the blood in my veins to surge, igniting a series of internal sparks. Like turning a key to crank an engine, those sparks flare higher and higher, until the rushing circulation threatens to derail my mana cycling. My eyes burn hot as my mind focuses in on the incoming swarm.

Then, before any of them so much as touches me, my blood surges one last time, and just through my sight alone, all of them halt in front of me.

A droplet of my blood drips from my finger, and the projectiles break into mana particles that spin and swirl around that droplet. They spin until they entirely become mine, elongating and forming into the shape of a halo that settles over my head.

I float into the air, and another barrage of projectiles ends the same way, breaking apart to be pulled into my halo.

There is a fight going on where I sense my sister and her team, as well as Fiona, approaching them like a burning, blood-red projectile. Yet, the person they are fighting still finds the time to attack me.

Lances break apart in front of me, then there is a myriad of small, bee-sized projectiles that shoot toward me like a minigun firing a barrage of tracking rounds. Where the attacker fails to overwhelm me with singular powerful projectiles, they try a myriad of different ones. This forces my mind to keep up and observe the unique wavelength of every single projectile shooting at me.

I slide into thought acceleration, but the idea of dodging to the side and letting them miss me doesn't even cross my mind. I fly in a straight line, my eyes twitching in my skull under the intense strain. My minds and my Cognitive Vector Module, further strengthened by the Synergy Feed, take it all in as I gather more and more of that mana into my halo.

Multiple pillars of red flames pierce from the ground like an exploding volcano, forcing my sister to weave between them. She uses her own black right arm to block the empyrean projectiles shot at her.

Genevieve now has a helmet on and, entirely covered in armor, moves across the battlefield while carrying two swords: one made of blue crystal, and the other of a green, rusty metal.

Flint is taller and more muscular than previously, and he is now bare-chested. The entirety of his body has plates made of bone in various places, and these plates seem to grow from the inside out.

Their opponent is a black-haired human woman wearing a white cloak with a golden fur mantle. She moves swiftly through something akin to a warp teleport and continues to launch these projectiles.

As I get closer, she focuses more attacks on me, and Flint uses the opportunity to get closer with surprising speed and the use of an item. Bone armor covers the entirety of his body, and he slams against her before she can warp away.

Yet, she isn't affected by it at all. Instead of hitting her, he disappears only to appear behind her, warped around by her defenses.

He turns around to face her, his plating thickening even more, and he stops one of the empyrean projectiles. But then the rest follow, piercing through that same exact place as the barrage drills a hole right through his chest. He falls down seemingly dead, but as the bone helmet cracks open, it reveals that no one is inside the armor.

The flame that pierces the ground near the woman waves, redirects, and warps away, encompassing Genevieve in the flames instead. It causes the feylith woman to scream in pain until another golden-white projectile shoots out, tears apart one of her wings, and sends the smoking feylith spinning to the ground.

Victoria misses the woman who warps away, but there are dozens of body pieces of my sister scattered around, and the woman appears near one of them, from which my sister duplicates. That duplicate reaches out with her black hand first, and unlike previous attempts, she isn't warped away. Instead, she reaches the woman and grabs her arm, pulling her off balance. Multiple more duplicates overclock themselves to reach the empyrean heir that fights against the suppressive effect of the black arm.

I pull some mana from the halo, forming it into the shape of a lance that shoots ahead with a thunderous crack and pierces through the middle of the woman's chest. The lance is thicker than her arm and twice as long as she is tall.

Her body jerks as the projectile stabs itself into the ground. The next one that I aim at her head breaks into a smoke of blue, golden, and white colored mana as she mimics my previous efforts.

Like a lizard getting rid of its tail, she cuts off the arm that Victoria holds. Even through my efforts and everything happening, she warps a few miles away, though I quickly track her location.

The arm she left behind pulls my attention back, as an insanely pure presence radiates from it now that the natural barrier of the woman doesn't hold it back. Victoria's duplicates standing nearby have their skin darkening, shriveling, and even sizzling up.

Like a nuclear reactor ramping up to an explosion, the presence of the arm rapidly continues to strengthen, and everyone moves away, no matter how wounded they are or where they stand. At full speed, they exit the area and move even further away.

Meanwhile, I watch it from where I am, even for a moment forgetting about the woman.

The cut-off arm, with extremely pure Empyrean Ichor filling it, breaks into pieces and then implodes into itself to form an extremely bright white and golden core that then expands outward like a pillar.

At first it is the size of a telephone pole, but it quickly grows to the size of a tree, a building, a skyscraper, and even further. It reaches high up like a pillar drawn between the ground and the ceiling of this floor, and then it continues to widen and widen.

I fight against that pressure and notice that just a weakened shockwave of it overloads many of the attendees miles away. It causes them to faint or straight up kills some of them.

That pillar disappears as quickly as it came, leaving a perfectly smooth, round, deep hole, and I notice that the space is entirely void of mana. All the ambient mana is gone, and no new energy rushes into that place.

Brich crashes into the ground below me and scrambles to his feet, barely dodging a figure that slams down where he just stood. The creature is vaguely humanoid, but taller, leaner, and distinctly predatory. Thousands of tiny, uniquely shaped mirrors coat its entire body like a reflective second skin.

Another empyrean projectile heading my way breaks into particles that I pull into my halo as I watch the slim mirrored figure avoid Brich's attack and touch him just briefly during the combat.

In the next moment, a second Brich stands there, entirely the same as the original one, with the only exception being that he is not carrying Calvorn.

And that Calvorn in the hands of the real Brich continues to giggle and screeches again like a banshee toward just one direction, unlike its wide-ranged call previously. It faces a place a dozen or so miles to our north. It is like there is something over there that it is trying to contact.

A boost sends me toward the ground, and both the real and the mirrored Brich move away as I land there. Following up with a Wraith Dance and reinforcing my body, I catch up to the fake one. The explosion of one of the mirrored items only tempers my barrier, as do multiple following attacks.

Moving further in, I grab the fake Brich by the neck. Reinforcing my body and disrupting his defenses, I break through the armor to close my hand around his actual neck.

I watch as the Mirror throws off one of its armored gloves, groping around until I allow it to touch my hand.

In the next moment, its form morphs into a perfect reflection of me.

It almost seems like these records have more personality than usual avatars, as the mirrored me gives a smirk.

But that smirk quickly disappears as its eyes widen and it begins to struggle to grasp and control the mana inside its body, which it now has to circulate.

A moment later, it explodes with a force comparable to the blast from the heir's arm.

I turn my head, letting the spray of blood hit the side of my face instead of my eyes. None of the stray energy goes to waste. I catch the exploding mana, pulling it into my body to cycle alongside my own.

[You have defeated Mirror - lvl 487]

[Lvl 487 > Lvl 488]

[Lvl 488 > Lvl 489]

I wipe the blood from my cheek, glance at the floating notifications, and turn my eyes to the north.