Chapter 452: The Beginning Of The End [CXIV]

“Finished?”

The leader scoffed before raising his right hand.

FWOOOOOOM!

The army instantly rushed towards Aestrea.

The simultaneous snap of hundreds of wings folding shut as the army dropped from the heavens like a wall of falling mountains, divine pressure cascading ahead of them in a visible shockwave that split the ground below before a single foot had touched it.

The air itself changed as they descended.

Fwoshhh!

Fire bloomed across the left flank, a rolling wall of divine crimson heat that bent the light around it.

On the right, the wind had become something solid, compressed into blades that carved visible lines through the sky.

Straight ahead, water had abandoned the concept of being liquid entirely, moving in dense rotating masses that hit like iron.

And from above, space itself was beginning to fold inward at the edges, reality developing quiet creases that didn’t belong there.

’Fire left. Wind right. Water center. Space above. And that’s only what I can see from here.’

’…This is going to be quite complicated.’

Aestrea rolled his neck once.

Crack.

His right hand found the Heavenly Swallowing Sword. His left found Midnight, and both cleared their sheaths in the same moment.

『 ✯ Moon Mark ✯ 』

Glow…

Silver-white lines raced up his arm, across his collar, framing his jaw in pale lunar light that pulsed like a second heartbeat.

The air around him dropped ten degrees in an instant. His breath came out in a slow ribbon of frost.

His right eye opener, the Lunar Dragon Void Right Eye, burned white.

His left eye was next, showing nothing but a judgment scale.

’Alright. Let’s count.’

The first wave of gods came, and a God of Lightning arrived first, his entire body crackling with violet-white current that jumped between his fingers and left scorched afterimages in the air with every movement.

Beside him came the God of Magma, skin split along the forearms with glowing orange fissures, heat radiating off him in visible waves.

Behind both of them came a cluster of wind gods whose bodies had partially dissolved into moving currents of compressed air, barely visible.

’The lightning one is fastest. He’ll reach me first by about half a second. The wind gods behind him are the real threat as they’re using the lightning as a screen.’

“FOR THE PRIMORDIAL COURT—!” the God of Lightning bellowed, both hands erupting into branching arcs of divine current aimed directly at Aestrea’s chest.

Aestrea moved forward.

“WHAT?!”

He dropped under the lightning entirely, felt the heat of it scorch the air two inches above his skull, planted his left foot, and torqued his body hard.

Midnight came up in a clean diagonal that opened the inside of the God of Lightning’s forearm from elbow to wrist.

SHING!

“GHHK! You little fuc—”

The Heavenly Swallowing Sword followed immediately, pressing flat against the wound.

The God of Lightning’s divinity sputtered.

The current racing across his body flickered. He looked down at his own arm with an expression of total, uncomprehending disbelief, mouth working soundlessly.

“…What did you do. What did you DO to my—”

Before he could finish, Aestrea’s foot connected with his sternum.

KOOM!!!

“GHAAAAH!”

He went spinning backward through the God of Magma and two of the wind gods behind him, the impact scattering them sideways.

The remaining wind gods materialized instantly on Aestrea’s left, their forms half-dissolved into the current, compressed air blades screaming toward his ribs from three angles simultaneously.

’They’re using their intangibility to get inside my guard range. Smart… but it’s not efficient against me.’

“Moonlit Ice Lotus Sword Art…”

『 ReverseFirst Move! (✦ Ice Lotus Bloom ✦) 』

The petals detonated outward from his position in a silent radius, crystalline and razor-edged.

They found the wind gods’ partially-solid forms with unerring precision, the ice forcing them to solidify where it made contact, pinning their intangibility down like a thumb pressing a moth to a board.

“WHAT?! I CAN’T… MY FORM!”

“THE ICE IS FORCING ME SOLID! GET IT OFF!!!!”

“IT’S TARGETING THE SOLID PARTS!!! HOW IS THIS POSSIBLE?!”

Six gods dropped simultaneously.

“…Fuuu.”

He breathed it quietly.

『 Bleed 』

SPLUUURTT!

Every wound the lotus petals had carved simply opened wider.

The God of Magma looked down at the shallow cut across his forearm and watched it spread with an expression that moved cleanly through confusion, disbelief, and then outright fury.

“YOU LITTLE INSECT!” He drove both fists downward toward Aestrea’s skull, magma erupting from the fissures along his arms in a pressurized stream.

“I’LL BURN YOU TO—”

Aestrea stepped left.

The magma hit the ground where he’d been and spread in a glowing pool.

He stepped around it and drove the Heavenly Swallowing Sword directly into the God of Magma’s guard.

The divine heat across the god’s arms peeled away like bark.

The god stared at his own hands.

“…No. No, that’s not… that’s IMPOSSIBLE, my fire doesn’t just—”

—BAAM!

Midnight drove into his shoulder, flat side, with enough force to spin him sideways.

“Out of my fucking way.”

THRUUUM!

From above, the space gods arrived.

There were four of them, robed in deep void-black, their faces expressionless, their movements accompanied by the quiet wrongness of space warping around each footfall.

One of them simply reached out and folded the air between himself and Aestrea, collapsing thirty meters of distance into nothing.

He reappeared directly behind Aestrea’s back, divine hand already driving toward his spine.

’…Spatial compression. He folded the distance. He’ll do it again the moment I…’

Aestrea twisted.

The strike caught his shoulder instead of his spine.

“Ugh!”

“Caught you,” the space god said quietly, reaching to fold the air again.

’He’s going to fold me into a compressed space. If he completes that, I’m finished.’

The Heavenly Swallowing Sword reversed in his grip and drove backward without Aestrea turning around, finding the space god’s forearm by feel and white-eye trajectory alone.

Crack!

The god’s spatial authority sputtered.

The fold he’d been constructing collapsed mid-formation with a sound like shattering glass.

KRRSSSH!

“…My authority. You-you nullified my—” He paused as something close to genuine horror entered the space god’s voice.

“What ARE you—”

“Busy,” Aestrea said flatly, and drove his elbow backward into the god’s face.

KRAK!

“GRAGHHH!!!”

The other three space gods reacted immediately, all three attempting to fold reality simultaneously, creating overlapping compression points around Aestrea from multiple angles, layers of warped space designed to close inward on him from every direction.

’Three simultaneous folds. If they complete all three, I have nowhere to go. But the folds create visible distortion lines. I can read those trajectories because of Odin’s Eye.’

He moved between them.

Following the only path the white eye could calculate between three intersecting spatial compressions, a gap that was barely a body’s width, moving through it at a speed that left frost on the distortion lines he passed between.

All three folds collapsed into empty air.

Swish!

The three space gods stared at the space where he’d been.

“…He read the folds,” one of them said quietly.

“He read all three.”

“That’s not possible for someone at his level!”

“Then explain where he went—”

“—BEHIND YOU!!!”

Too late.

Fwip…

SPLUUUURTT!

…

“WHY WON’T HE GO DOWN—!” someone screamed from the fire flank.

“WE HIT HIM DIRECTLY! I SAW IT CONNECT!”

“HE TOOK THE HIT AND KEPT MOVING. WHAT DO WE DO?!”

“THE ICE KEEPS FORCING US SOLID! WE CAN’T MAINTAIN OUR FORMS!” a wind god snarled.

“THEN ATTACK AS A MASS, JUST DON’T GIVE HIM ROOM TO MOVE AT ALL!”

“HE NULLIFIES EVERYTHING WE HIT HIM WITH! THAT FUCKING SWORD STRIPS EVERYTHING!

“THEN USE YOUR BODIES, NO DIVINITY, JUST FORCE!”

“ARE YOU INSANE, HE’S…”

’Good. They are currently in a state of breakdown.’

Aestrea finally had time to breathe. He had been fighting already for more than an entire day, and was currently pushing the 『 ✯ Moon Mark ✯ 』to its absolute limit.

He was also using Divine Crystal to sustain it… But the few that he had stored with himself were about to end.

A bunch of water gods arrived next, and they were smarter than the others.

They didn’t attack him directly.

Instead, three of them positioned themselves at triangular intervals around him and simply released their authority outward simultaneously, flooding the entire combat zone with divine water that didn’t behave like water at all.

It moved against gravity.

It compressed and found the gaps in his guard and pushed into them like fingers.

’They’re not trying to hit me. They’re trying to fill the space and take away my movement options.’

The water rose to his knees.

Dense and wrong and pressing inward with divine weight.

“Drown in it,” one of the water gods said calmly, pressing both palms downward.

The density doubled.

“Even gods drown if the pressure is enough.”

’…The ice can counter this. But if I freeze the entire combat zone, I lose my own mobility.’

’Partial freeze. Create footholds.’

Chill…

The Authority of Ice pulsed outward from his feet in targeted lines rather than a full radius, crystallizing paths through the water, solid ground where there had been none, a network of frozen lanes radiating outward from where he stood.

“WHAT!?”

“He’s freezing it! Stop him, if he freezes the whole zone…”

Aestrea was already moving across the frozen lanes, the water gods’ pressure attack rendered irrelevant beneath his feet, heading directly toward the closest one at a speed the compressed water couldn’t slow.

“STOP HIM! STOP!!!”

The water god raised both arms to defend.

The Heavenly Swallowing Sword stripped his authority mid-raise.

Midnight followed two inches behind it, driving into the god’s guard with enough force to fold him backward.

“GHAAAAH—!”

’Two left in the water formation.’

“SURROUND HIM! ALL OF YOU, SURROUND HIM!!!”

They did.

FWOOOOOOOSHHHHH!

They came from every direction simultaneously.

Fire gods and wind gods and water gods and earth gods whose skin had become solid granite, and storm gods trailing black thunderheads behind them, and gravity gods whose footfalls bent the ground downward like soft clay.

All of them converged at once in a mass that blotted out the horizon in every direction.

’…Roughly four hundred and seventy left. The Moon Mark has about four minutes at the current output.’

’I need to end the mass. Now.’

His eyes glowed intensely as he brought his fingers together.

『 Bleed 』

Snap!

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