Chapter 948 - Against Lily Chen (Patreon)

[Calibration - lvl 29 > Calibration - lvl 30]

I could remove Lily's healing marks on me, yet I don't do that. I find her use of them extremely fascinating, and it is fun trying to come up with ways to counter them.

I am of the opinion that the surprises, the skills you don't know how to deal with, are what kill you in combat. Well, one of the things. So I am using this as an opportunity to improve my way of handling these sorts of attacks.

Lily must realize it as well, but she continues to push on instead of getting hurt by me donating her such a way to attack.

That is exactly as things should be. She should use everything she can, ignore what I might think, use my arrogance against me, and search for any mistakes I make. While both of us dance on the edge of the blade the entire time.

And who knows, she might win somehow. She might surprise me and force me to acknowledge her point of view. Then I might listen to her as someone who proved to be stronger than me.

But I don't think that will happen. Not today.

Lily grows in size, her height matching mine. With sickening crunches as her bones crack and elongate, her muscles also bulge and become more pronounced. Somewhere inside her chest, two smaller hearts form and begin to beat. These are temporary, fake kinetic hearts that flood her body with the same fake kinetic energy.

Her stance lowers, mimicking that of Tacita's. Her wings stretch behind her, failing to match her speed and turning into two blurred stripes following her as she reaches up to me.

My defensive layer tempers under her punch, and I use the same kinetic energy to force my body to move. I use my submind to deal with the confusing signals, and another to keep my body together under the attacks of her healing marks.

Her bone ax cuts into the barrier over my forearm, and she kicks at my chest, sending me sliding back. When she catches up to me, I absorb all the kinetic impact of her attack and reuse it to push her back this time. I follow through, and mana oscillates across my palm as I slam it against her bone ax, cracking it but failing to break it entirely.

The weapon heals itself, growing, but to save material, it is akin to 3D printing out of bone. It seems that Lily also spoke with Min-Jae.

That ax slams against my forearm again, and ignoring the breaking and fixing bones, Lily turns into a blur, violently slamming it against the same place.

Her legs turn slimmer in just a few heartbeats, the muscles change the way they are connected to her bones, and she dashes at a much faster speed.

Two more arms grow out of her back, moving in attacks like a scorpion's tail.

Her healing mark begins affecting my bones. They start breaking apart, becoming more brittle and requiring me to use more of my passive to heal. Yet even here, her previous healing mark continues to reduce the output of my hearts, and slowly, the other few combined marks adapt to my passive. Lily knows a lot about healing, and so the healing effect of my passive becomes weaker and weaker against the mess that her marks do to my body.

As if to prove to me she doesn't have to rely on that, I notice particles floating in the air, but it is too late as I already breathe them in, connecting them with the particles already inside me. Some even almost begin to pass through my defenses before I swiftly modify them and cut them off.

Using mana threads to pull my body and kinetic energy to move it further, I defend against her constant barrage while delivering some attacks of my own.

A burst of my raw mana explodes, erasing everything in one direction, and out of the smoke, Lily pushes through, already restored.

When I continuously launch the very same attack, it begins to carve a canyon into the area around us, stripping Lily of her skin and flesh, but like an unstoppable monster, she continues to push forward. All of the damage is healed by the insanity that is her natural regeneration, with her stats, passives, and traits restoring her body with barely any need for mana.

Her skeleton changes, and the flesh visible to my eyes grows and reconnects to her body as she moves step by step towards me.

Then, by mimicking the movement that is my Wraith Dance, she reaches me. My next raw blast of mana is deflected by her side as she attacks again, always careful to never touch me for too long so I can't steal her mana.

When I grab hold of her with [Redistribution], she pushes through, breaking and restoring her body. She almost touches me, until I use all the absorbed kinetic energy to blast her away.

“Lily, I have a question,” I say as I use Wraith Dance to move closer and watch her stand up, her composition switching again.

“Yes?” she asks me.

Her entire body slims down, her limbs become longer, and her frame narrower. Her legs gain another joint.

“Did you give me a supercancer or something?” I ask, feeling my body beginning to give up.

“Temporarily.”

“Temporarily.” I nod and this time teleport away, watching Lily's incredibly fast charge stop only after a mile.

Once again, she turns in my direction and charges incredibly fast, but only in a straight line, so I just take a slight step to the side, and she misses me.

Taking it a bit more seriously, my output increases and mana fills the area. Mana Cycling I keep up the entire time starts leaking mana outside, and the pressure of my blood increases under my will, flowing faster and constantly creating sparks of white and golden light around me.

When Lily charges me this time, I throw much more mana at her, losing sight of her entirely until she digs herself out of the ground and throws a projectile at me that I identify as being made of her bone. I let it slam and temper my defensive layer, and it falls down.

Three of her healing marks remain inside of my body when it entirely gives up, almost folding and causing me to fall to the ground. But I harness my kinetic movement to keep myself standing, and more threads of mana extend through what remains as I pull on it like a puppet.

My healing passive now just keeps the main functions running as I continue to calibrate it and fight against the anti-healing effects of her attacks.

[Disintegration] covers Lily's body like a second skin, making her look like a smoky gray figure as she launches another charge.

My blast of mana gets broken apart and devoured by her [Disintegration], and her punch cracks my tempered barrier. That gray smoke rises around her, pushing towards me in a stream, like smoke blown by an industrial fan. It eats at my layer, which I continue to strengthen, feeding it more and more mana just to endure that skill she had unlocked on the first floor.

Even as I am forced to use much more mana than she is, I can keep up, even as she continues to use [Sacrifice] to increase her output.

But then even she realizes that in a game of endurance, I will win, so she stops, instead pulling it across her skin as I begin to attack.

Thousands of projectiles rain from the sky. My presence presses against her, and tricolored mana continues to explode with such force that it shakes the ground and sends shockwaves far out.

One of the three remaining marks activates, and my body falters as I try to channel all this mana the attacks require.

My vessel grows behind my back, mirroring my scars, and in a blink, it turns pitch black. A black halo floats over it and then rises higher into the air, expanding to make a half-mile circle that continues to spin and pull mana from a wide area.

I use the full force and presence of that amount of mana to press down on Lily. I let it all seep out, with the radiation ramping up like a nuclear reactor at the brink of a meltdown.

Just being near it causes the surface of her [Disintegration] armor to wobble and move, as if a powerful wind is pressing against it.

Some of that mana radiation seeps into the ground, changing it in ways that will linger for decades, maybe longer. As the density increases, light passes through and reflects in new ways. It acts like the beveled edge of a mirror functioning as a prism, emphasizing the blue and black hues.

This continues until my domain expands outward, spreading across the landscape like spilled ink as the pressure increases. The enormous halo's spin in the air becomes audible, a deep hum of something moving faster and faster.

Mana continuously flows in towards me, like the water of a lake flooding into a whirlpool as I reach further.

When more of my subminds combine to increase that effect, I am confident the ambient mana from an area the size of a small country reacts to me.

"Lily," I say, taking a step towards her, never stopping the pressure on her, "You, myself, or anyone else, for that matter, can destroy my body."

I narrow that pressure, blowing off parts of her armor and revealing her face.

"And I would not care." I feel an anger swell inside me as I spit these words out. "I will continue even then. I will drag this dead, broken body across the ground through my will and mana alone if I have to."

That is what I do even now, puppeting my own flesh instead of simply moving it. Though my body is ruined and broken, my mana is not. It flows through me and surrounds me, bending entirely to my will.

It is something that I arrogantly believe will always be the case. They can warn me and dislike how I go about things, but none of that will stop me from believing that.

This is my mana, and no one will take it away from me. I will never return to that scared kid I used to be.

And in the future, all mana will be mine. Because I want to and because I can.

"Yes, I know," Lily says, even under all that pressure.

Releasing the armor around her, she uses power of her body, and mind only to stand against me with a soft smile.

"Don't be angry, but I have to try this one more thing, or I won't forgive myself. My limit is just a few seconds, so be careful."

After that, her body falls to the ground, void of any consciousness.

A single tick of a signal pings from her and towards somewhere in the distance. I track it, using mana to strengthen my sight until I find its source as I zoom in on the airship we flew here on.

Near the hole we made through it, a clone of Kindness stands. Just a blonde girl with violet eyes, and those eyes change their color, becoming exactly like Lily's.

The soulless, mindless clone moves, closes and opens its fist, and then looks around, finding my gaze over the vast distance.

The next moment, her face fills the entirety of my vision, and a punch tempers my barrier like nothing before, and the next one breaks it.

I teleport high into the sky and bring down a myriad of mana projectiles, each the height of a building as they crack and thunder, boosted downward by kinetic energy.

And launching from the ground like a rocket, once again, the clone slams against me, grabbing my hand as it does so.

I would steal its mana, yet there is none at all. All of it is the pure strength of the body, made out of the DNA of the immortal Ruler.

Even with my defenses activated, she pulls my hand off as if plucking a flower from the ground, and another impossibly fast punch slams against my chest.

But this time, I absorb all of its kinetic energy and turn that huge amount into mana, further adding it to everything around me. It solidifies, and out of the area, arms made of black mana shoot out, stretching long and grasping after the clone, which jumps off them and runs across to get back to me.

Multiple times in a row, her movement mimics Wraith Dance, but this time, the body doesn't break and endures it. The clone reaches up to me after my teleportation. Still, given enough time, new defenses surround me, and the air screams as I use all that mana to cut horizontally.

She jumps over the attack, and a mountain range five miles in the distance gets cut horizontally, breaking apart and falling down. Another of my attacks carves craters into the area, taking her with it.

And as I calibrate myself, I continue to adapt, channeling faster and throwing that mana into attacks like a giant hammer slamming down, projectiles, and other constructs made of mana.

But there is no more movement. Below all of the attacks and pressed into the ground, the clone lies there as soulless as before.

My attacks come to a sudden stop, which causes a wave of sadness to wash over me. But still, I pull my domain back, and colors return to the area. The black mana breaks apart, and the halo turns blue, shrinking and floating over my head.

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