Chapter 904 - Against two Champions

The hydra is just as the information stated. It has five heads, stands about the height of my Regalia, and, among other things, is taking a while to fully awaken.

My fist crashes down, smashing one of its heads against the floor and drawing blood. Another head of the hydra moves and bites into my arm with its teeth, failing to pierce through.

I recognize the structure of a skill as the hydra begins to channel a sort of body reinforcement.

Using my eyes, I find a weakness and break through.

Two more heads bite me, trying to throw me aside, while the third moves in front of the head of my Regalia, launching a lightning beam into it that deflects off the helmet and tears a big circular hole through the cavern wall.

The monster begins to cast body reinforcement again, in a way that might actually bypass my disruption, but I channel my mana, adding more oomph to my eyes, and disrupt it again through the weight of my gaze alone.

This time, using a bit more power, I slam my fist into the head, causing it to explode into a cloud of gore and toxic blood that lands on my arms and sizzles across the surface layer. I move just as the head that shot lightning at me is preparing to shoot again, but I grab it, tearing it from its body and squishing the skull between my hands until it pops.

Meanwhile, the other three heads continue to attack me. One of them bites, the second one shoots a concentrated beam of red from its eyes, and the third one begins to cast reinforcement for the third time.

Instead of disruption, I throw a punch at the third head, causing it to shake and break its concentration on casting, as I move slightly to the side.

Like an enormous pillar coming from orbit, my [Empyrean Lance] comes down, stretching as it flies.

Just as the first two heads regenerate, the lance breaks through the ceiling and stabs through the hydra, with the body of the monster absorbing most of the impact, creating a crater of flesh and bone.

The lance pins the monster to the ground, and I eject myself from the Regalia. One of my subminds taking over instead, further pinning the monster down while the structure of Regalia begins to destabilize in an attempt to take the monster out in the most powerful explosion I could set up.

Landing on the ground, I begin to walk slowly. Beneath my outer layer is a skinsuit woven from pure mana, and on top of it sits another suit of armor that basically functions as a smaller version of the one that’s currently holding the hydra.

I locate the quickly approaching presence, and for a few moments, my heart converts all of its generated mana into kinetic energy. Taking another step, I slam my fist a few times against my chest, releasing all that kinetic energy to further temper the armor. It compresses, becoming thinner as the plating shifts to continue allowing me free movement. It ends up as a barely pinkie-thick layer of dark blue mana with purple and light blue streaks when the second Champion reaches me.

I take a step back and let the armor absorb the power of the attack that, with a deep, long thud, only serves to temper my armor further, and then I boost myself forward, delivering an uppercut to the four armed thylarin facing me.

He sways back but gathers his bearings quickly enough, and his tattoos, which trace a maze of lines, not unlike veins over the entirety of his body, begin to glow a vivid shade of yellow against his blue skin.

His punch misses me, and I pull him off-balance and deliver another punch aided by my mana and kinetic reinforcement, as well as mana disruption to push against his skills. Before he can attack me again, I move to step on his foot and then drive a punch into the side of his belly.

One of his four hands turns to a blur and slams into the side of my head, breaking upon impact. The second one moves slower and comes to a full stop against my chest as I absorb all of its kinetic energy.

I use that energy to bolster my movements and slam another punch into his ribs with my left hand, then hook the left side of his face with my other hand. Both of the punches leave bruises, and the dim glow of his yellow tattoos weakens.

His orange eyes have that empty look not unlike an avatar's, and over them a circular tattoo of piercingly blue color glows as the temperature in the mile-wide area begins to drop. Frost covers everything, the walls, both the hydra and Regalia, and me as well.

Making use of the sheer force circulating through my armor, I break through, cracking the layers of frost over my armor as I avoid the next barrage of punches, deflecting one and sending the thylarin staggering back after another punch to his head.

The temperature drops even further, and steam starts rising off of me as I fan the flames inside, the fire seeming to anger the thylarin, as his muscles start to bulge and his tattoos start to glow even more brightly, like sunlight running through his veins.

His body slamming into the ground blows the entire cavern away, while maintaining pressure on the hydra rolling together with the lance stabbed through it and Regalia holding it down.

Here, at the center of the explosion, the exploding mass of shrapnel that was the mountain halts mid-air, and even as the thylarin uses all four arms to block, my fist slams into his forearms as I release a cascading attack. Ripples of disruption weakening his reinforcement, as all the kinetic energy I’ve gathered bounces off each other in multiple quickly released waves and stack up.

One of his arms explodes as he is launched into the air, coming to a stop only against another mountain a mile away. That mountain's side shatters under the impact, and frost begins to cover it immediately after, spreading through the valley below and freezing the forest there.

Keeping an eye on him, I lift my arm to the side and create a barrier in front of my palm that blocks the incoming lightning attack from the hydra. It forks out like plasma, with its lashes melting through the rock and the surroundings as a whole. The beam itself even passes around my barrier and zigzags through the landscape while carving canyons of molten stone.

I need to kill both the hydra and the thylarin as close to each other as possible. The best would be within one second, as I worry that the system might not count it toward the achievements for my primary class if there’s too great a difference in time between them.

In the distance, the thylarin begins to stand up as I swing my hand, and the lance stabbed through the hydra dislodges itself. With ten stacks of boosts I add to it, it thunders and draws a straight line through the air and pins the thylarin to the mountain instead. The force of the impact tempers the lance further as the effect of my passive kicks in, and it doesn't break.

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Yet the thylarin redirects it slightly, so instead of nearly killing him, it explodes through his left side and takes both of the arms there with it.

With a slight sense of frustration, I fling my hand and deflect another barrage of lightning from the hydra, and with the same pull, bring the lance back and stab it through the hydra, sending it stumbling away from my Regalia.

Jumping in and taking over Regalia, I stabilize it through sheer force of will as I endure the backlash.

All five heads roar, and the hydra disappears, teleporting away to reappear high in the sky, wings of mana spreading far and wide from its form. Instantly, clouds begin to gather around it as a powerful wind begins to stir. The entire time, it still has my lance piercing through it, even as one of the heads attempts to pull it out.

A few projectiles made of ice slam into the hydra, which creates some sort of barrier in an attempt to defend itself. And I notice that this is being done by the same head that did that mana based reinforcement and teleported.

The thylarin grows in size again as he pushes off of the mountain. Behind him, there are four additional arms made of ice floating alongside him, none of which are directly connected to him.

Then three of the hydra's heads explode as the monster overclocks its minds to cast an attack.

A silence fills the area for a moment, broken only by the cracking of the ice as the frost continues to expand further and further. And after that mere moment, the silence is gone as the storm around the hydra spins faster and the air roars and presses down on everything around us.

Hundreds of lightning strikes rain down over an area that only grows bigger and bigger as time goes on, now covering the area of some of Earth's biggest cities. These lightning bolts zap across the sky and crash to the ground, each one in a burst of blue, entirely destroying anything they make contact with. Entire mountains disappear, forests cease to exist, and deep craters break up the ground.

Regalia acts almost like a lightning rod as dozens of them crash against it, entirely annihilating the zone around me.

I stand there observing it all. Each impact rings against the extremely thick and heavy plating of Regalia, and each impact further tempers it, pushing my new passive closer and closer to its limits.

That hellish view of dark clouds, the hydra with its wings of mana floating behind it, and the hundreds of lightning strikes gets pierced through by five pairs of red lasers.

By this time, the hydra already has its heads back, and red lasers are shooting forth from all its eyes, sweeping across the decimated terrain, uninterrupted beams of red several miles long sweeping across the area and drawing an enormous circle on the ground, surrounding me in the inscriptions it carves there.

I watch it all happen, standing with Regalia entirely covered in ice as the inscriptions begin to light up and hold me within. Furthermore, the blue mana wings grow, and in quick succession three more heads explode, powering the circle and lighting it up with the same red light as the beams it shot from its eyes.

More and more, that red light becomes denser inside of the circle, generating heat, radiation, and some sort of light-based attack. The surface of Regalia begins to sizzle just as all of the ice around us sublimates away.

Then I trigger a design left in the center of the lance stabbed through the hydra. The monster constantly, even now, strains to block out all signals, but it doesn't notice this one. After all, it is partially based on a Scalar Beacon.

A huge explosion covers the hydra, and the lightning attacks stop in an instant while the storm weakens. My mind goes into overdrive as I break apart the structure and take over the circle that’s been drawn around me, feeding it with my own mana while making my own changes in the process.

The red light increases, further damaging the surface of Regalia as the heat rises rapidly along with the radiation. After finding the right switch and swiftly fine-tuning it, I tilt it and narrow it, hitting the thylarin running my way.

That Champion slows down as the four floating arms made of ice grow in size, each one matching the size of the arms on my Regalia, and they cross in front of the thylarin in an effort to block the red beam. His yellow tattoos hum with a deep glow, and the same veins are spreading through the arms he’s constructed from ice as the Champion pushes through and begins to walk toward me. He pushes against the beam as it melts the arms and then finally passes through.

The red beam creates a circle as big as a building that shoots nearly as far as I can see with my unenhanced sight, for a moment stopping against the mountains, but gradually melting their surface and shooting through.

Then the power is gone and the beam flickers and disappears as the thylarin charges me. The arms of ice grow even further in size, as two of them grab hold of Regalia and the other two proceed to punch me. Each contact pulls all the heat from the air, causing more and more frost to gather. It’s so cold that heavy snow starts falling from the dark clouds that rained lightning down on us before.

A loud roar sounds from the sky once again as, from within the explosion caused by the destabilized lance, the hydra pushes through, just one head surviving, having been shielded by one that’s been neatly reduced to bits of bone and flesh.

The remaining head bites into the stump where one of the other heads once was and pulls, dragging out the newly forming head and causing it to regenerate faster. As it grows covered in slime and blood, it shakes itself off. The newly formed head then snaps the head that pulled it free and proceeds to look down at us while the other head explodes.

Instantly, the circle that was dead activates again, and like a huge pillar of red light, that beam surrounds me and the thylarin before shooting up high into the sky.

Using a decent chunk of mana and one of the markers I placed before, I teleport away even as the hydra tries its best to stop me and appear floating high in the air beside it. Regalia is missing an arm, which lies within the circle, connected to it and strengthening it even further to damage the thylarin, whose ice is beginning to melt and now finds himself unable to move under the circle’s effect.

I watch his life tick down as I destabilize Regalia and boost myself toward the hydra. A part of my mind touches another mark I’ve placed a bit further away, and I continue to gather more and more mana.

The hydra tries to teleport away, but I break the structure. Under my gaze, the wings formed of its mana begin to move and coil behind it, wrapping around the monster to tie it down.

While it begins to fall from the air, one of the heads explodes, and it tries to free itself, but I push further to stop it, feeling blood run down my nose as I do.

Another head explodes, and a ringing pain starts in my head.

When the third one explodes, my control almost slips, but I’m already about to crash into the falling monster. Regalia shines bright white as I make a check on the thylarin as well.

Then a third presence enters my detection.

With the speed of a hypersonic jet, it passes through the air, causing it to crackle in a series of subsequent booms, before crashing into the side of Regalia, which begins to spin, missing the hydra as its fourth head explodes, destroying the wings trapping it. Then, just before the monster falls to the ground, it teleports away.

With those sequential booms crackling through the air once again, the third presence returns, crashing against me at an incredible rate of speed I can barely track even in my current state of thought acceleration.

It hits me head-on, carving ridges into the chest of Regalia while the power of the impact tempers it like I’ve never seen and launches me in the opposite direction.

With the speed of a falling meteor, I am launched multiple miles away, crashing through the mountain, rolling through the ground, and bouncing off the surface of the lake until I come to a stop against another mountain, almost shattering it in turn.

Boosting Regalia to its feet, I stand up, bracing myself against the rain of the stone avalanche now threatening to bury me, and it stops, halting in midair while I shoot back in the direction I flew from.

Three it is, then.