Chapter 364: Peering up the Mountain
Early Afternoon - Late Winter : The Nest
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*Vwoop-WHOOM* A heavy wave of mana blew over me the moment I exited the void inside the tree.
However, the moment my aura filled the room and light met my eyes, rather than catching the gaze of a thunderbird several times my size, I found myself face to face with an elder red and gold-scaled dragon. -H..huh?!- "What are you doing here?" My voice instantly warped with confusion. "You are Chrysí Flóga, right?"
His wings, slightly spread from shock, instantly clamped to his body. "L-L-Lord Ragnarok?!" He immediately threw himself into a panicked bow as his tail curled slightly.
But I instantly took a step back with a slightly horrified expression on my face. "H..how the fuck did you recognize me..?" It was truly odd to feel such a mix of awe, confusion, and disbelief all at the same time.
However, as he finally looked up and noticed my body, he started losing his composure. "A-Ah! I-I apologize, sir! I-I just saw the look in your eyes and thought you were someone-"
"You recognized who I was based on my eyes?!" -What the hell?- I was so taken aback that I forgot why I was even there for a moment.
But it didn't take me long to get a reminder.
*VWOOOM-CRACK* As a mass of aura slammed down on me, the wood beneath my feet splintered, and an eloquent, feminine voice met my ears. "The mighty Fenrir sprouted wings and horns after growing weak, huh..." Disdain coated her voice like poison. "Is that why you have the etiquette of a dragon? Are you dependent on them after-"
"Fuck off." *VWOOM-CRRUNCH* Cutting her voice short, the towering thunderbird glaring at me from behind Chrysi instantaneously disappeared as its irritating face was slammed through the floor, caving in the tree's trunk before blowing out the walls and ceiling.
The tree, mana strengthened over several millennia, was as strong as mythril, but under the force of my aura, it just turned the tree into a massive fragmentation grenade. *CL-L-L-L-LATTER* However, as the millions of wooden shards peppered the surrounding area, blowing apart other trees and turning unsuspecting creatures into puffs of blood and fur, the upper half of the tree, losing the support of the tree trunk after it was obliterated, began to fall.
*WOOOOSH* But as the leaves in the collapsing canopy howled and the ground around us darkened under its thickening shadow, my gaze just shifted from Chrysi to the space beneath him and my expression darkened.
*Vwoom* A glow almost instantly appeared within the cloud of dust as the calm voice met my ears again. "How naive."
It was the glow of hundreds of runes. -To use runes while being crushed by my aura...- A part of me was quite impressed, but at the same time, there was nothing but irritation on my face. "No wonder Acanthis managed to fuck up his own race so badly..." As the glow grew brighter, I snickered with annoyance. "His advisor was just as dumb as he is."
*Crackle-BRRRRRRMMMM* Nearly instantaneously, a colossal beam of pure energy, almost thirty meters wide, erupted from the runes, spreading into a cone just before it reached me as I used my aura to redirect the insane blast of energy around Chrysi and I. -To fire off something like that inside the cavern...-
It was a blast of several grams of antimatter, more than enough to turn the whole cavern into a microwave and cause liquid rock to rain down like hail.
But it was already obvious she didn't care about the other thunderbirds nearby. "Oh, how long I've waited for this..." With a hint of craze in her voice, a wave of bloodlust exploded from her. "Ever since the day I watched you kill my mother.. since the day you forced us into hiding.. I have yearned for this moment..."
*WOOM* As time began to warp, a god's presence suddenly erupted from her, growing by magnitudes with every passing instant.
"Everyone else has lived in fear.. fear that you would come to kill us off completely, but I..." *Crunch* Forcing herself up under my aura, a mix of anger and confidence flooded into her voice. "I took every waking moment preparing for your return..." *WOWOWOOM* Opening her mouth, she exposed a series of black artifacts embedded in her tongue before space started to distort and she began mobilizing her divinity. "So why don't you follow the wishes of heaven and stretch out your neck..."
-This.. isn't good...- My expression stiffened and my pupils dilated as my instincts heightened.
With each passing moment, her divine presence grew thicker and heavier, surpassing the likes of Myles, Acanthis, Freya, and even mine as the hair on the back of my neck stood up.
Before I could do anything, she surpassed all the divinity I had worked to accumulate. Even if I mobilized every spec of divinity I had, I wouldn't be able to catch her. -She might be dangerous...-
But while I needed a plan of some kind, she didn't give me time to think.
*Woop* Watching her instantaneously disappear as if she dematerialized, I ducked down as fast as I could.
But the next thing I knew, a talon caught one of my horns. "Too slow." *THWAAAACKKK-CRACK*
Snapping my horn clean in half, I was instantly launched off the splintered tree trunk, trailing a beam of light before ricocheting off the ground and plowing through another massive tree dozens of kilometers away. *CRRRUNCH*
But as I caught myself within the cloud of debris and gently began speeding up my divinity to try and close the gap between us, the thoughts racing through my mind vanished.
Realizing I had no chance of catching her with my eyes even if I raced every drop of divinity I had as fast as I could, I turned my attention to my aura.
But at that moment, my mind subconsciously switched from communicating with sentences to an endless array of numbers that meshed with my aura to reform the space around me to a map of constantly changing numbers, values, and formulae as if I were looking through the eyes of my soul. (like during the dragon sleeps)
It was a method of reading my aura completely foreign to my memories, but somehow, it carried an indescribable familiarity, as if it were programmed into my soul.
However, even with my efforts over the last week, my brain was not only way too slow for it, my consciousness had no clue how to read it. "ACK-" The method, while incomparably fast and efficient to the method I was using previously, seemed to speak to my consciousness in a foreign language. My own brain didn't even know how to read the map that it itself had made.
*VWOOOM* But as my aura exploded, and my mind shredded itself trying to render the map of numbers in my mind, there was an object that appeared right in front of me, and my mind instinctually used the map to respond to it as if to show me how to use it. *Vwoop*
It was her, the 'Secretary', reaching out her talons to grab my face and wing as if wanting to rip me apart with her own hands.
But before a thought could pass through either of our heads, a huge, thirty-meter-wide shard of wood just beneath and behind her flipped upside down before instantaneously disappearing into a column of light that pierced her torso.
However, as my mind slowly caught up to speed and I watched her head, wings, tail, and legs detach from her body, a chill passed down my spine.
The wall pierced by the beam of light, nearly fifty kilometers away, instantaneously ruptured, liquefying and shattering hundreds of kilometers of rock before finally, a beam of sunlight reached me.
*WOOOOOM* The sound was indescribable, like a deep hum coming from the fabric of space itself that you could feel throughout your entire body, but as I watched the wall and ceiling continuously liquify, the view of a bright afternoon sky filled my vision and the sound didn't even register.
In a matter of seconds, a hole hundreds of kilometers wide had been blown through the mountainside, releasing a plume of molten rock into the air as if it were a volcanic eruption before the thunderbirds' perceptions of safety vanished entirely.
However, while many shied away as they finally witnessed the horrors their ancestors had described, others, who had finally seen the endless blue sky for the first time in their lives felt awe, as if ignoring the destruction to observe the beauty of the sky beyond the bounds of the cavern.
The destruction was on such a massive scale it seemed to spread in slow motion, but while everyone else was entranced by it, my body tensed with fear. -That.. was so close to taking my head off...-
Looking back at the detached, feathered head of the secretary as it continued toward me, a heavy air settled around me.
For the first time ever, I feared my own power, not because of what I could do with it, or the responsibility it required to use, but rather because of how easy it was.
Even if I took into account that the secretary had done nothing but accumulate liquid divinity throughout her life, leaving very little crystalline divinity compared to the likes of Acanthis or me, using raw force of momentum to shear divinity, which I believed to be unbreakable by anything dependent on time, was nothing short of horrifying.
If the angle of the flip was a single degree off, I would have taken my own head off, and even if I somehow survived, my face would have been mangled. -If I get into a fight with a creature who can do that...- I would die before I could even react.
Or at least.. that's what I thought...
*Vwoop* Suddenly appearing right in front of my face out of a gate, my gaze landed on Ilios, carrying a completely charred and partially melted shard of wood a few meters long in his mouth. -Is that... There's no way...-
It was a piece of the wooden shard I had just vector flipped, still somehow intact, radiating enough heat to melt mythril like a piece of blazing coal.
But Ilios casually held it in his mouth, proudly wagging his tail as if it were a stick I threw for him.
"Did you.. catch that..?" My thoughts instantly tied into a knot. -Was the sectretary's body just that weak? Are we just that strong? Is he just that fast?- Nothing made sense. If my calculations were right, that fragment of wood was traveling at a speed even light couldn't scoff at.
But as I finally looked deeper into his eyes, there was an image that flashed in my mind.
A 3d map of numbers that replaced the image my aura painted in my mind.
The result of the method that came from the deepest reaches of my soul.
And the result of the next step I was going to have to take.
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