Chapter 905 - Against three Champions

There are currently six Champion-grade beings here on this floor.

Thylarin.

Hydra.

Falcon.

Human.

Skeleton.

Mage.

Two I’d prefer not to meet, and one I definitely want to avoid for now. I have information on every single one of them, though I have yet to find out how and when they’ll be back to ten Champions on this floor.

I hear another series of booms as the falcon, whom I've yet to see as anything more than a speeding blur, draws closer again.

I teleport with Regalia, appearing in the sky directly above the fighting hydra and thylarin. The thylarin is out of the circle now, holding the hydra as it continues trying to escape the grasp of his glacial arms even as it’s in the process of being frozen solid.

I push myself down with a quick boost and dropkick the thylarin. Regalia's legs frost over with ice at the merest touch, and as we slam into the ground, the ice spreads outward in waves, growing into crystals that reach toward the sky.

The hydra's lightning attack hits the back of my armor as I punch the thylarin with Regalia's remaining arm. His body is burned from the hydra's attack, he’s missing both of his left arms, and of the remaining two, one remains broken.

My hand closes around his body as I begin to squeeze, and the temperature drops rapidly, frost reaching deeper into Regalia and freezing through several layers of mana. All around us, ice crystals explode through the ground as the thylarin thrashes, yet his efforts lack any real power. With a part of his torso and two arms missing, his circuits have been heavily damaged, making it far more difficult for him to reroute his mana than it is for me. After all, I have much more experience with that.

Regalia continues to endure. The thick plating of heavy, dense, manifested, and tempered mana deflects weaker attacks, while the more powerful ones only slowly push through. Parts of my back sizzle up, scar, twist, and begin to crack, but the armor I made holds. And Adaptive Defense supports it all.

I use [Selective Adaptation] to further adapt to the cold, and the skill applies itself, even to my mana, which I’ve come to see as part of me. The active skill gradually gathers more data, adapts further, and lessens the cold's effect on me. The cold begins to spread more slowly and doesn't reach as deep.

[Selective Adaptation - lvl 49 > Selective Adaptation - lvl 50]

I attune myself to the area around us, to every floating particle of mana and every wave of disruption, stretching the effect as far as I can.

When I hear the thunder, I react immediately, ordering Regalia to release the thylarin and moving my arm just as the falcon crashes into me.

[Redistribution] activates at full force for a brief moment, forcing the falcon to slow down. Finally, I get a clear look at this plane-sized monster, its white belly, brown wings with blue accents, and its unblinking yellow eyes.

Before my hold slips, Regalia grabs it by the neck, and I eject myself. In the next moment, with a sonic boom, both the falcon and Regalia are gone. The impact tempers the armor, and its sheer weight pulls the falcon down as they crash to the ground far off in the distance.

The thylarin uses the opportunity to stand up and attack.

[Empyrean Lance] forms and shatters in the palm of my hand as I cover my fist in Empyrean mana, dodging the almost clumsy attack from the thylarin's single remaining arm. My punch lands at the center of his chest as I attempt to damage his heart, but his glowing, vein-like tattoos shimmer, weakening the strike and absorbing some of the impact.

I feed more Empyrean mana into my fist and form it into a lance, shooting it toward the hydra, piercing through the beast. Once again, I’m aiming to deal damage to the area around its beating heart, a spot the monster has a much harder time fully regenerating. It’s already been damaged by my earlier attacks, limiting the creature.

Yet it still manages to teleport to the top of one of the mountains nearby.

Right after, one of its heads shoots lightning while another fires a red laser from its eyes. I move behind the thylarin, who takes on both attacks and is immediately blasted away, crashing through one of his own ice crystals.

Snow already covers the ground, and the snowfall continues to grow denser as I walk through and it begins to reach up past my ankles.

Then the falcon returns and crashes into the hydra.

The hydra falls back, missing one of its heads, which the falcon has clearly torn clean off. I watch the falcon flap its wings and land on the side of a nearby mountain, where it spreads its wings victoriously and shakes the snow off them before biting into the neck of the severed head.

From between the crystals of ice, the thylarin emerges once more. With each step, the ice crackles, the crystals around him grow taller, and the temperature in the area surrounding them drops drastically. Even one of the lightning strikes the hydra sends the thylarin’s way freezes in midair, and when it crashes against him, it shatters into harmless particles of ice.

I reach out toward Regalia, which the falcon had thrown away, and teleport it in front of me just as the bird charges again after a wild launch that destroys the mountain it rested on.

Regalia is thrown across the landscape, bouncing off the earth and breaking through trees, as the falcon spins around and, with multiple thundering booms, charges me once more. At the same time, two of the hydra's heads explode in an effort to disrupt my teleportation.

I barely eject myself from the smaller suit of armor and use Wraith Dance, now unhindered by the heavy suit, to move away. The falcon flies off with the armor in its claws while the lightning from the hydra tracks me, forcing me to keep moving just to avoid it.

The armor held by the falcon destabilizes and explodes, but the monster notices just in time and manages to let go in time to fly out of the blast radius at an incredible speed.

I get a moment of breathing room as the thylarin crashes into the hydra. I trigger the lance embedded in the hydra’s body to explode between the two of them, but I find myself almost wanting to chuckle as I watch most of the explosion literally freeze.

Of course, I know that as a Champion, the thylarin has the second stage of his attribute upgrade, suspected in his case to be potency, with the second stage being dynamic mana. But this is straight-up ridiculous.

The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

Still, there’s a problem with the way the thylarin moves his mana, and the hydra exploits it, overclocking three of its heads and teleporting the thylarin somewhere far into the distance. The moment I locate where he lands, I know it isn't good.

My Regalia appears in front of me again just in time to block another barrage of lightning from the hydra. However, the lightning moves like a living snake now, passing around the huge suit of armor and striking against the woven, skin-tight mana suit I’m currently wearing.

Even now, I refuse to use black mana or my ichor.

The second arm of Regalia falls to the ground and then disappears as I teleport it away along with the fragment of the Nameless Tree in my left hand. Far in the distance, one of the inscriptions activates, and the tree begins to grow rapidly, fueled by the immense amount of mana contained within the arm.

The falcon returns. This time it doesn't even aim for me, it sweeps Regalia aside, tearing off the helmet and throwing it far into the distance before it can explode. Supersonic booms sound one after another as the falcon circles back, taking another piece of Regalia with each pass.

My focus remains on fighting the hydra. I continue breaking apart its mana-based attacks and disrupting them however I can. It tries to teleport me away, tries to break through my natural barrier and armor, and tries to use my own mana against me.

[Focus - lvl 87 > Focus - lvl 88]

Far in the distance, I notice a huge pillar of ice piercing the sky, and another presence shakes the area.

The wind begins to pick up, and blue lightning starts to crackle between dark clouds as the hydra gathers power for its attack. The falcon rushes toward Regalia once again.

Then, someone flips a switch, and everything turns black and white.

[Eclipse - lvl 79 > Eclipse - lvl 80]

I spot a lapse in control within the hydra's skill due to its damaged heart, and I take over its mana.

All of the lightning gathers and strikes down in a single beam aimed straight at the monster.

And in that moment, the front side of Regalia shifts, and a spike instantly sprouts from it, timed perfectly to match the falcon's speed, calculated using one of my subminds running deep in thought acceleration.

Unable to stop its flight, the falcon desperately flaps its wings in an attempt to redirect itself, causing the spike to stab through one of its legs instead.

Nearly the entire hydra is burned to a crisp from the lightning, but all four remaining heads pop, and in a desperate attempt, one of the heads manages to teleport somewhere far away despite my efforts to stop it.

From Regalia's back, arms made of mana sprout as the armor shrinks and loses some of its density. The arms reach toward the falcon, which flaps its wings and flies backward, pulling the spike out of its leg. The monster crashes to the ground and rolls. My projectiles follow it, tempering upon impact and piercing holes through its body. The falcon screeches and twists before gaining height and flying high into the air.

I teleport using a mark one of my projectiles placed on the falcon, while the destabilized remains of Regalia teleport through the pathway the hydra used to escape.

A lance forms and breaks in my hand as I turn it into a spear with a core of gold and white mana, as I appear right on the back of the flying falcon.

It spins in the air, trying to dislodge me as we hurtle through the sky at incredible speeds. I detonate the spear, tearing a hole in the monster’s side, the damage extending up its wing.

Like a falling plane, we rush toward the ground as another lance manifests in my hand, and I ignore the damage the explosion caused to my armor. I look into the distance where Regalia landed and watch the mushroom cloud of an explosion forming. A shockwave spreads through the fifth floor, and with lance ready to stab at the falcon's head, I wait for the notification.

It doesn't come.

Instead of falling down, the falcon remains in the air, picks up even more speed, and then crashes against the ice pillar with full force.

It almost doesn't seem to damage the bird, but I fail to fully absorb the immense kinetic impact, and even as the mana skinsuit tempers itself, my ten constitution body shakes within, breaking my bones in dozens of places as I slide across the side of the ice pillar and crash into the ground.

[Selective Adaptation - lvl 50 > Selective Adaptation - lvl 51]

For a few moments, I lie there in a heap of snow that almost entirely buries me. The woven skinsuit mana armor around me unravels, and I activate one of my stored arrays to manifest it into an incredibly durable Zweihander.

Even with [Selective Adaptation] active, the sensation of cold is immense, and I feel it pressing in against my skin and hanging in the air, so I raise thermal energy inside of my body, letting it power the healing passive that near-instantaneously snaps my bones back into place.

I concentrate further, and taking advantage of the high density of mana in my empyrean ichor, I force it to keep moving through my body as it begins to circulate faster and faster. The sheer momentum of that hyper-condensed mana generates a disruptive field around me, thwarting any attempt to hinder my mana better than most of my active defenses.

Then I push my blood a bit faster, causing two streams to clash and slide against each other as the liquid flows. A white and golden flash sparks at the impact, and I fan it, generating the same sort of mana that forms inside of [Empyrean Lance].

The sword I hold crackles and its edges glow a little as it starts to oscillate, and that same white and golden spark starts to flow through the threads that compose it, lighting it up at its core.

I push myself back onto my feet. Standing there in little more than my casual clothes, I watch in the distance as the thylarin fights against a human man who is surrounded by a dozen different rock golems in every shape and size, some as big as a dog, others the size of a building.

Plan A has failed, but it's not like I wasn’t expecting this to happen. Nothing’s ever that simple, yet my preparations have still borne fruit. The thylarin has a huge weakness in his missing circuits that I’ll be able to exploit before he adapts. The hydra had to regenerate the entirety of its body, meaning that it’s going to take a while before its heart is back to full power. And the falcon is wounded as well, and still bears many of the marks I placed on it.

And my fragment has continued to grow uninterrupted somewhere off in the distance.

I quickly activate dormant subminds and put others to sleep, and I change the way I’ve been using Mana Cycling, letting some of the mana seep out and beyond my body before pulling it in closer to rest on the surface of my skin as an invisible defensive layer.

Then I use one of the marks I placed on the falcon to teleport to it just as the hypersonic booms start sounding off again and the bird almost grabs me in its claws. Without hesitation, I stab the sword downward and carve a deep wound through its body and feathers, and then find myself being flung off as the monster spins.

Falling through the air, I close my eyes, listen, and just before I get hit by another attack, I teleport to the next mark I’ve placed on the falcon and stab my sword through it again. The mana it’s made of oscillates as the gold and white light crackles wildly, and the weapon pierces through its incredibly durable body.

This time I jump off on my own and boost myself several times, aiming directly at the human Champion.

Multiple golems move swiftly, a building-sized snake, a drake made of white stone, and even a huge humanoid golem.

I weave between them, cutting through their limbs as they reach for me and jumping off their bodies to land in front of the human. My sword moves in a flash as I stab it toward him and pierce his chest.

Yet, it is as the information said. The moment my sword pierces through, the human turns to stone, and one of the many golems crackles, and from within, steps the very same human, unharmed.

I look around at the sheer number of the golems, many currently occupied fighting the thylarin, and I take note of the movements of the mana around them and wavelengths still hanging in the air after the skill activated. I pull some of that mana from the area and spin it over my head, pulling it into the shape of a halo that begins to pull in more and more of the ambient mana.

Before the golems can crash against me, I teleport away.

The human connects to what remains of my teleportation path, and one of the lion-like golems passes through and jumps after me, only to be held in space, midair, by my kinetic absorption. My hearts beat in unison, and the air shakes, emitting a high-pitched noise, as the stone lion explodes into tiny pieces.

I erase traces of my teleportation so it can’t be followed through and modify my technique so it won't happen again, and then I use Wraith Dance several more times, heading toward where the hydra must have escaped.