Chapter 468: Chapter 468
My armor grinned, mana falling from me in a crimson wave. It fought back the ice, my dimensional wake stretching over it like a cloud of smog in a clear sky. A wave of excitement rushed through me, melting the cold and hastening the states of matter near me. I spoke, my voice a thrumming violence in my wake.
"Then let's see your stillness save you."
Ghelid bolted towards me. As it did, causality shifted where I stood and over itself. The entity affected me on a dimensional level, trying to change my core being. It carved into my dimensional wake, a strange, insidious altering creeping in. I rebuffed on instinct, my dimensional wake's density pulling the altered space apart.
Ghelid rammed me with its antlered head. All the while, it spoke from all directions.
"You're entire being...It's quite dense, isn't it?"
I slammed my fist forward, and it collided against Ghelid's forehead. Like a pipe bomb in my palm, the forces exploded. Ice beneath us cracked for kilometers in all directions. The clouds parted above, a spiral ushering in the clouds. The blizzard around us rippled out, a momentary clearing bringing the sun's light.
Sonic booms erupted the entire time, both of us passing the sound barrier as we fought. I had wielded immense amounts of gravitation to propel my fist, and I clasped a dimension in my palm. It slammed into a thick telekinetic panel. A bullet of force erupted over the space, and it slammed into the entity.
Ghelid implanted itself into the ice, and cracks radiated across the horizons. The monster laughed.
"I am that which you see in all directions. I am the ice, the cold, even the air you breathe. I am everything here, and your blows mean less than nothing to me."
It was odd hearing him speak this way, though the entity likely hadn't had much company. If it were me, I'd try to befriend anyone I could talk to after eons of loneliness. It felt fitting that it tried to dominate all that made contact, especially considering it operated as a set of principles more than a living being.
Those thoughts darted in my head as I threw out a dozen more strikes. My pummeling began to rupture glaciers far in the distance. Ghelid snarled.
"Futility. Come like all the other animals here. Show me your fangs, and I will show you what it is to feed."
It kept the oppressive aura over me before the ice came to life. My surroundings stabbed for my vitals, but ice shattered against steel. I stood there, and Event Horizon melted the assault before Ghelid reached out its hands. Our shifting dimensional forces clashed, and I stood as the victor. Within my wake, at least. It tilted its head.
"You leave no mark on the realm, yet you control the space around you with such force. An oddity."
"A Harbinger, some might say."
I bolted towards the monster. I compressed time around myself as it redoubled its efforts. Swaths of eldritch died below us, their demises a sweet mercy as Ghelid's principles strengthened. They met the unmoving wall of my dimensional wake, and Ghelid's eyes widened.
"Ah, now I understand."
The principles began bleeding around me, no longer trying to create the same shift in my being. Instead, they warped my surroundings, and the reality I occupied crushed down on me. I shrank down, the weight of the attack palpable. My skin ruptured, and several bones broke. Ghelid nodded before molding into the ice below.
It spoke from all directions.
"You aren't within this realm at all, yet you are still beholden to it. Fascinating, if not flawed."
It crushed me from all sides. Ghelid laughed.
"You are surrounded by something foreign. While I may not mold you, I can change what you move through, and that is enough."
I pressed out with my wake, but Ghelid's pressure mounted. It sacrificed thousands of lives every second to crush me, and I bent under the strain. It was unlike any battle or pain I'd ever experienced. My mind, mana, and being began slowing to a standstill. It was like facing Medusa, and I had met her gaze before turning to stone.
Before I molded into a frozen statue, I pulled my wake inward, keeping it close to my skin. The dense aura fought off the shifting principles far better than my dispersed wake. I kept that knowledge in the back of my mind for later. Before I could escape Ghelid's jaws, its colossal mind rumbled. From all sides, it poured into my head.
A cold invaded my thoughts, and I slowed down further. I processed everything in slow motion, and my senses faded. I summoned mana, but it trickled in. What was once a raging storm weakened into a mild gust, and a pang of fear sprang into my chest. I put that fear behind me, and it spurred me on.
Before I rallied, Ghelid jumped out of the ice, swinging at my frosted form with an icy halberd. It was a beautiful weapon, one that carried hundreds of small, densely clustered leylines all fused into a single blade. It held enough of these principles within to leave me frozen in time. Before it cleaved me apart, I took my cold-infested minds and shredded them to a pulp.
Ghelid gawked at me in disgust before I flooded its mind with the remnants of my own psyche. Droning chaos entered its psyche, an annihilating chaos of thought, spirit, and impulse. It could overwhelm yet not sustain, and my psionic flood crowded out the lines of coherence that formed Ghelid's mind. The eldritch struggled to maintain its cognition as I met its incoming swing with my fist.
We clashed, and we both flew backward with heavy wounds. Bits of my body converted into void ice, the material eating away at me like a chemical reaction. Ghelid carried no marks on his surface, but he hobbled forward with jilted steps.
"You're a warrior willing to tear your own mind apart. You remind me of Firamnia, but the price you pay for that is steep. Still, you're devoted. I'll give you that."
I answered his words with an ominous silence. I tore all my cold-infested minds apart, gushing them toward his immense mind while eliminating its cold poison. I walked out of my stiff, dying body and into a new one. Ghelid stared in horror as I turned the building wounds into mere memories. It raised a pearlescent hand.
"You have a phoenix-oriented skill? You must be aligned with Firamnia. No matter. I've faced that kind of revival before, and it has its limitations."
"You'd be surprised by how lax those limitations are."
We ran towards each other. We met charge for charge. Each time we met, wounds covered me from head to toe. Ghelid dispersed the damage to its vast, continental form. I regenerated instantaneously, and in this conflict, we reached an impasse. After an hour of slugging it out, Ghelid sighed.
"It's obvious that neither of us is making any headway. Firamnia, I know you can hear me. We can just end this before fighting another day. There's no need to give Balsht and Emeralga an opening ."
"I'm not aligned with Firamnia, and you should know something about me. I've fought for weeks on end before. For months, even. I'll fight you as long as I need to, whether thats years or hours doesn't matter."
Ghelid's form rippled, and its legs broke. It stood atop them, its hoof-shaped hands turning into fingers and palms. I rolled my shoulders,
"Do you honestly think this is an impasse? A stalemate?"
My smile turned wicked.
"No. You've met an unstoppable force, and it will grind you to dust."
Ghelid rolled its eyes.
"You've come from a far-off place, and your entire bearing evokes a sense of fear and dread. Though you lack the explosive finality I can unleash, there is an air of, hm-"
"Inevitability about you. I can see that. However, surely there are better uses of your time than this?"
I glared down at the creature.
"It's been a while since I've let loose. It's time to show you just how much destruction I can unload."
Before it replied, I spread my hands. My body flashed bright as mana erupted in an endless torrent. I wielded the flood, and it turned to darkness. Singularities feasted on Ghelid. It stopped the singularities that began feeding on its body with its use of laws, but it couldn't stop them all. Singularities formed near its humanoid form, and the black holes fed on the air.
They erupted, and vast swaths of ice began disintegrating far in the distance. Ghelid roared.
"You're destroying this land."
"I'm destroying you."
"It will leave nothing for those who live here."
"You've left nothing here to live for."
Ghelid bolted to me, trying to close the gap.
"Then let's test how devoted you really are. Tell me, warrior, are you willing to destroy yourself?"
I smiled and turned into a liquid. My armor let out metallic laughs far into the distance as I flowed over him, and we erupted into plumes of light and darkness. Ghelid's unmarked form ran away from me, but I followed. A writhing blot of black metal, I flowed over the ice and over him time and time again. I fed my body to my magic, and my magic made murder.
It sank into the ice, and I followed as a singularity storm. We ran across many kilometers of ice, back and forth. I began letting my body fall from my dimensional wake, carpet-bombing our surroundings with my corpses. I saturated them with gravity wells, and they reached terminal velocity in seconds.
As was the case with Chrona's Planet Wielder skill, my Orbital Bombardment became stronger on larger worlds. After all, the more gravity a planet had, the faster my body could fall. As they unleashed devastating waves of kinetic destruction, Ghelid bellowed.
"What kind of abomination are you?"
"Daniel Hillside. I was an amateur boxer."
"What the hell is a boxer?"
"Can't you read memories?"
"Not unnecessary ones. That's trash about your old world."
"Obviously, we have different ideas of what's considered trash."
We continued our battle for hours. After ravaging a country-sized section of ice, Ghelid reached a radiating mass of ice. At the center of the mound, a strange space bled into our reality. It shifted the color of all objects to a cerulean blue, and it reached out in fractal-laden branches like a snowflake carved from eternity.
A strange core radiated at the space's center. It reminded me of the yellow core on Leviathan-7, but it lacked the sheer energy flow. However, the flavor of this space was far more defined. It was as Ghelid wished - a domain dominated by absolute stillness.
This book is hosted on another platform. Read the official version and support the author's work.
Ghelid fled into the odd space, and I followed before crashing against a wall. At least it felt like one. It was actually a pure and perfect stasis. It held the air in such a state of stillness that it became harder and denser than rock, metal, or even my armor. Unlike a material, this subdimension didn't hold atoms together. It simply stopped them from moving.
Cold spread from matter, evening out the ambient temperature. Since this didn't spread, it left the density without the chill. Regardless of how, the wall kept me and my magic out. Ghelid went beside the core and began fusing with it. Ghelid snarled at me.
"You've forced me to burn everything to stop you. What a waste. The others will conquer my realm, and I will need to hide for millennia. I can only pray that another careful balance is achieved."
I gazed at him. Cracks spread over his body, and chilled, mana-based plasma leaked out from him like a cracked vase seeping water. I sighed.
"Why do you want everything to be still?"
"Are you really this powerless to stop something you were born with? Are you really so unable to change who you are?"
Ghelid stared at me. Despair crept into its voice.
"Who I am? Do you think I know what I am? My mind is something constructed by the memories and thoughts of other living beings. My body is made of the swirling principles of a world that does not care for me. It is indifferent. It doesn't offer answers, only silence. I am that silence."
"You think you're speaking to me, but you're only speaking to another shade of yourself. I am a reflection of all that is, and therefore, I am nothing more than a mirror. An echo. A likeness."
"I am not truly alive. I never was."
I turned a hand to it.
"Then why would you want everything to stop?"
It roared before murmuring.
"In that stillness, I will find an endless silence. I will be alone with no minds, thoughts, or laws to define me. All that will be left is my own self. I will uncover who and what I really am. I will be untainted and pure."
"If you're made of other people and the laws of nature, then stopping those concepts will undo you. In trying to find yourself, you will die."
Ghelid let out a caustic laugh.
"That is a risk I must take. Otherwise, I'll live as you've said: as a parasite. That is my curse, but it will not define me. After I've spread this stillness to all that is, I'll have nothing left to feed on. All will be silenced."
Ghelid's eyes filled with resolve.
"Only my voice will be left, and it will be the first time I've ever heard what I have to say. What I genuinely think. What I actually am. If I die, then I'll die having tried to live."
I rubbed my temples with my hands.
"Let's think. You don't need to extend that stillness to literally everything. It only needs to be as far as you can influence, right? We could make this patch in the void of space where nothing is. Out there, you'll find this quiet and stillness you want."
Ghelid shook its head.
"I have to be sure. If anything occurs, then I will always doubt what thoughts and voices I hear."
I shook my hands at Ghelid in frustration.
"I'm giving you an option despite everything. Why aren't you taking it?"
"Because my other option is to survive this fight. Survive, and to hurt you."
"I know where your home planet is."
"Now, there is no turning back in this conversation. My mercy has limits, and you've found them."
"I will destroy everything that I possibly can. I'll kill every human I see and destroy the Earth's entire environment. Once I've ravaged Earth, I'll do the same to the moon. I'll find Blegara next and leave it ravaged."
I reached out my hands, unleashing a storm of singularity around Ghelid. While just outside the altered reality, my magic worked fine, it couldn't pierce the veil of stillness. I raised a brow before running into the wall again. I bounced off without doing anything. My blood ran cold as my stomach sank.
I had no idea how to stop this.
Ghelid narrowed its eyes.
"You think I'm unable to hurt you? You think you're invincible?"
I slammed into the space a few more times. Ghelid droned on.
"Oh, there are ways to torment the living beyond mere death. I'm quite adept at doing so, as you've seen."
I roared in frustration, unable to pass this barrier. Even my dimensional wake struggled to press into the space. Ghelid cackled.
"You've seen these monsters trapped within the ice. They believed themselves ready for death. I gave them something worse. I will do the same to your friends, family, and loved ones. Diesel would be an easy target. So would his wife and kids. I wonder what they sound like howling in the ice?"
I bolted into the air before crashing myself down in an Orbital Bombardment. I vaporized everything for kilometers in the distance, and a pit of boiling water carved itself into the middle of the glacier kilometers down. Rivers ran down the sides of the mountainous pit, and clouds formed overhead from vaporized water.
The stasis was left unaffected. Taking a breath, I dove into thought. I glared at the entity.
"You can't even reach Earth, can you?"
Ghelid took out a glowing, purple rock and seethed.
"I will take a portion of these stolen leylines from Balsht's territory. I'm not a master of space, but I can do this much."
My eyes locked in on the stone, and a hunger surged in my chest. Crackles of purple lightning rippled across the stone, and it made space shiver around itself. I took a breath. Now wasn't the time for greed. Having a moment to think, I considered my options. Physical forces had no effect on this weird subspace, and neither did magic.
Ghelid developed that bead for a long time, turning it into a regional catalyst for all this madness. Trying to destroy it would require an enormous amount of...Something. I honestly had very little understanding of what was going on, at least in detail. However, I could deduce a few things from how Ghelid acted and what he said.
This entity was a congregation of laws. Likely, this subspace was something similar, perhaps laws bound to a certain space. Peering closer, I uncovered something. Beyond the pale blue glow of the core, an innumerable number of leylines condensed over the bead's form. They had amassed the majority of the region's energy, and Ghelid collected that energy to strengthen itself.
Sensing my surroundings, I could feel Ghelid's ability to warp the world. With each passing second, the subspace shrank, and Ghelid was empowered. I probably had a few hours before the eldritch consumed the entire bead. After a few attempts at esoteric magics, I pivoted my approach.
I opened my pocket dimension and swung the opening at the core. My personal dimension slammed into the edge of the subspace, and they both gushed energies. Immense forces passed through our surroundings, kilometers around us standing still. Even I froze for a moment before regaining my bearings.
Ghelid eyed me from within his altered space.
"I've spent millennia on this, gathering all I could to change it. You cannot dismantle it in hours."
I ignored him. After a few slams of my pocket dimension later, I began to understand the issue. Ghelid's altered space exceeded my own. The laws, mana density, and influence it carried were simply more than mine. Whenever the two objects clashed, I still whittled away at the forces holding the space together. However, it wasn't fast enough.
My dimensional space rippled on the brink of destruction with each slam. On the other hand, Ghelid's altered area held strong in the face of the clashes. It didn't surprise me. While I understood a little about my pocket dimension, I'd never truly cultivated my use of it. Sure, I had a few nifty tricks I could use it for, but was I taking full advantage of the resource?
That became more apparent as I crashed it against this other subspace. While it lacked the fluidity of my own pocket dimension, Ghelid's stasis field was something ingrained into reality. It reminded me of cipheric changes, but with a key difference. While the cipher converted the existing laws of space, Ghelid's bead created new laws altogether.
In effect, it made the space absolute. While I could bend and resist the changes of the cipher, even ignore it altogether at times, this was different. This patch carried an enormous amount of stability and would maintain itself forever. Ghelid had amassed mana, laws, and mental energy into this tiny patch for millennia, and my dimensional abilities couldn't compare.
Knowing I'd eventually exceed this patch's effects offered me little comfort. By the time I eclipsed it, Ghelid would've killed every person on Earth. Feeling my psyches strain for solutions, one of them came up with an insane idea. I took a deep breath before taking out the tiny dungeons I carried with me all the time.
I wielded them in my hands once more. Taking a second to center myself, I swung them together in front of Ghelid's stasis. The spatial openings cracked against each other, each one fighting to remain a singular entity. They reminded me of atoms clashing in a star, and like bouncing atoms, they unleashed devastating force.
A cosmic ripple echoed across us. My bones broke. My skin split. Blood leaked from my nose and eyes. Liquid pooled in my lungs, and my face was a bloody mess. I heaved for breath, my exhausted form struggling to hold together after withstanding the torrential forces. I peered up, my gaze hopeful.
I smiled. Ghelid's form cracked. The eldritch gawked at me in horror, and Ghelid snapped.
"You're swinging worlds at me?"
"It's more like I'm clapping them."
Though my wounds were many, they left me in an instant. I clapped the dimensions together in front of me several more times. Damage mounted on Ghelid, but the eldritch would still escape before I could kill him. He laughed as plasma dripped from his mouth.
"Every morsel of pain you've put upon me, I will magnify on your worlds a thousandfold."
I racked my brain for more insane ideas. After finding one faster than I'd like, I clapped the dimensions once more. This time, I opened my pocket dimension, and I wrapped it around the epicenter of the collision after my hands snapped back. The portal covered over half of the collision, most of it facing me.
I nodded as my pocket dimension soaked in all the cascading ripples in those directions. Ghelid narrowed his eyes, and I kept colliding spaces together while capturing as much of the excess as possible. After several minutes, I experienced a fullness. An instinct told me that any more force would be dangerous, and it reminded me of the wounds I gained from Marcella's death.
Taking a breath, I opened my portable world towards Ghelid. The entity hid behind its core, confident in its protective stasis. From my portal, a vast, cosmic wave ushered forth. It shot out in a persistent beam, and it created a series of oscillations that vibrated the fabric of reality. Time bent. Gravity shifted. The entire area devolved into an approximation of existence as the space-time bent away from the blast, even the stasis.
It was only for a moment, but it was enough. I snatched my pocket space at the core of Ghelid's stasis. The eldritch wrapped itself around the core, but my dimension sheared right through its body. In a moment, I stole the core of Ghelid's subspace along with both his arms and a portion of his torso.
Plasma gushed from his body, and the stasis rippled. Without the core sustaining it, the eternal stillness faded in seconds, and normalcy returned. I faced a dying monster, and it gave me a smile. Ghelid gurgled his words.
"I was meant for nothing then."
"The moment you threatened my home, I stopped caring."
I ripped him into shreds with the portals I carried. They separated Ghelid into many fragments across the dungeons and inside my pocket dimension. Slicing the entity apart didn't kill it at all, but I had time. Over the next few hours, I dismantled each fragment in extended conflicts. Even when separated from its glacial feeding ground, Ghelid's tenacity was something to behold. However, it was still only the dying throes of a once planetary force.
Once I destroyed the last fragment, I finished my quest and gained a series of notifications.
Quest: The Death of The Frostlands's Ruler | Rank: S- | Description: Whenever you killed Ghelid, the Beginning of Stillness, you not only eliminated a solar tier threat, you freed a portion of the populace of [Rebirth.] This was a feat of courage and bravery, giving you ample awards, Sovereign.
Awards: +10 blue cores, +100 red cores, +100 million credits, +The Frostlands territory is assimilated into your guild, The Harbinger's Legion.
Chain Quest Activated!
The Death of a Planetary Pillar | Rank: S | Description: On this planet, there exists other planetary-scaled eldritch, all vying for control. The ones you know are Balsht, Firamnia, and Emeralga. There exist five of these lords, each carrying causality-disrupting powers. They have achieved a delicate power balance since the inception of this planet, and with Ghelid slain, they are no longer bound to that previous status quo.
The first part of this quest will be to gain ownership of the Icelands. Establish cities, clear out the eldritch, and seize your territory! After gaining your rule of this area, you must dismantle the other planetary pillars of [Rebirth]. Once killed, you will gain ownership of Rebirth along with any bonuses that may entail.
Ghelid Slain | 1 out of 1
Firamnia Slain | 0 out of 1
Balsht Slain | 0 out of 1
Emeralga Slain | 0 out of 1
??? Slain | 0 out of 1
Bonus Objectives: Uncover the hidden secrets of [Rebirth].
The quest came in handy. It gave me a supply of blue cores, which were always in short supply, and I could use the red cores to upgrade my stats. Of course, this fight changed my ideas about my current path of progression. My strategy revolved around amassing as many stats as I possibly could. Ghelid had nullified that entirely.
If anything, the fight showed how meaningless raw attributes were in the face of different tiers of magic. While I was an absolute powerhouse in lower-tier conflicts, I barely got out of this one unscathed and entirely due to luck. If I weren't carrying those dungeons with me, then Ghelid would've traveled to Earth and unleashed an unreal amount of devastation.
I furrowed my brow. Now that I thought about it, the ideas I arrived at were also quite timely. I took a breath, wondering if Schema may have nudged me in the right direction during the fight. I had an enormous amount of luck, so it made sense that the AI may give me a slight nudge here and there. I'd never noticed it, but I couldn't shake the feeling it had done something today.
Either way, I never wanted to rely on something so intangible. I would just appreciate it and strive to eliminate my need for it. To that purpose, I pulled out the charged, sparking bead that Ghelid had tried to use. As I thought, it was a collection of condensed leylines, though they nested over a blue dungeon core.
The leylines channeled mana and converted it into the strange, deep purple shaded mana. A quick tap verified that the blue core was radiant at the center like those on L-7. To fully understand it, I'd need to sit down and research it for a while. At the same time, I'd have to go out and take over the Frostlands for my quest.
I could get the others to help me out, and they'd power up in the meantime. As we did, we could scout out places of interest and see if we couldn't find Amara's origins. After all, I found almost no ruins in the bleak ice. If anything, it appeared as though civilization never spawned here. A list of objectives pooled in my head alongside a few status updates.
Taking a moment, I allocated my attributes from the fight, finalized my selections, and inspected my status.
Things were looking good.
The Living Multiverse | Level 39,918 (Cap: 46,000) | Current Influence: The Rise of Eden | Class: Sovereign
Strength – 789,155 | Constitution – 796,314 | Endurance – 1,232,700
Dexterity – 532,312 | Willpower – 1,489,506 | Intelligence – 1,095,903
Charisma – 577,730 | Luck – 737,796 | Perception – 423,414 |Awe - 67,361
Health: 38.18 Billion/38.18 Billion | Health Regen: 9.348 Trillion/min or 159.81 Billion/sec
Stamina: Infinite +++++++++++++++++++++++++ | Ambient Mana 123,152 Trillion
Mass: 32.358 Billion Pounds(1.471 Billion Kilos~)
Height: 63'02 |19.25 meters | Actual: 63'02
Damage Res - 99.835% | Actual: 99.835% (Infinity) | Dimensional Res - 100%
Phys Dam Bonus – 1.298 Trillion% | Damage Bonus – 40%
The Rise of Eden - enhances base stats by 30%, increased to 40% to allies within aura's radius
Mana Conversion(Elemental Furnace Count: 14) - 632.2 Billion mana/min siphoned into runes and armor