Chapter 457: The Beginning Of The End [CXIX]

FWOOOOOOO!

In the blink of an eye, Caelid appeared right in front of Aestrea, swinging his claws that were coated with the energy of destruction.

At the same time, Aestrea also threw himself at Caelid.

“HAHAHA, ARE YOU FUCKING DUMB?!”

Caelid sneered as he saw Aestrea let go of both weapons.

The Heavenly Swallowing Sword tumbled away to the left.

Midnight fell to the right.

Both spinning freely through the open air of the Divine Realm, catching the pale light as they went.

In Caelid’s eyes, those weapons were the only reason Aestrea had survived this long.

The Swallowing Sword that nullified divinity. Midnight that cut through everything else.

Without them, the boy in front of him was just a bleeding, broken True God with no business being conscious anymore, let alone throwing himself forward with empty hands.

’…I just need a single millisecond.’

Swip!

Caelid’s right claw came first.

A wide horizontal sweep aimed at Aestrea’s throat, destruction authority coating each finger like a second set of blades, the air immediately ahead of the swing simply ceasing to exist as it passed through it.

Aestrea’s head dropped below it.

The claw passed through the space where his throat had been, and Aestrea felt the displacement of it against the top of his skull, the destroyed air leaving a cold, wrong sensation across his white hair as he ducked beneath the arc.

’Too wide. He’s used to opponents who try to block.’

Caelid’s left claw followed immediately, a tight diagonal from above aimed at Aestrea’s collarbone, faster than the first, the follow-up designed to catch whatever the opening swing had pushed the target into.

Aestrea twisted his torso sideways, turning his body parallel to the diagonal, making himself as thin as possible against the line of the strike.

The claw passed in front of his chest close enough that the destruction authority grazing the very front of his torn shirt removed that section of fabric cleanly.

He felt the cold of it against his sternum.

’…Stay patient.’

Fwooosh!

Caelid snarled and drove both claws forward simultaneously in a straight double thrust aimed at Aestrea’s chest.

Just a direct forward destruction condensed into two points moving at a speed that compressed the air ahead of them into visible ripples.

Aestrea threw his upper body backward, spine nearly parallel to the ground, both claws passing directly over his chest with a sound like reality being unzipped, the destruction authority so close to his skin that it raised the fine hair on his forearms as it went by.

His legs kept moving forward through the motion, his body bent almost completely backward at the waist, feet still planted and stepping, carrying him forward even as his torso escaped backward.

FWOOOOSH!

Caelid’s eyes tracked him with pure fury.

“STOP FUCKING DODGING AND HOLD STILL!”

He swept his right claw downward in a sharp vertical aimed at Aestrea’s bent midsection, the angle designed to be unavoidable for someone in that position.

Aestrea’s right hand hit the air beside him, and he used it as a pivot, swinging his lower body upward in a full rotation, both legs clearing the downward claw as his body completed a full aerial revolution and his feet found the air below Caelid’s extended arm.

He landed in a crouch directly beneath Caelid’s guard.

Inside it.

Too close for the claws to matter.

Caelid looked down at him.

Aestrea looked up.

’…There.’

Fwip.

His foot pressed hard against the air beneath him, finding purchase, driving him upward that final distance in a single explosive push.

And as he rose, the strange energy condensed around his right fist.

White.

Dark blue.

Coiling together in a way that those two things had no business coiling, light and absence braiding around his knuckles in a pattern that pulsed with something that wasn’t heat or cold or force but something older than all three.

『 ✯ Authority of Karma ✯ 』

A faint white and black energy leaked from the corners of his eyes like ink bleeding through paper.

The yin-yang symbol condensed in the air directly behind him, vast and slow-turning, outlining his broken silhouette in perfect monochrome.

It didn’t announce itself or build dramatically.

It simply appeared, the way fundamental things appear, as if it had always been there and the world had only now remembered to show it.

Caelid’s eyes dropped to it.

And for the first time since the battle had begun, since he had descended from the sky with six wings, since he had watched four hundred of his gods fall without moving a single muscle to stop it, since he had laughed that wide, satisfied laugh over a frozen battlefield…

His eyes completely went wide.

The professional amusement of the second-in-command of the Primordial Court, one of its seven key pillars, the God of Destruction himself.

All of it…

Was gone in that same instant…

Because that authority.

That specific authority condensed around a bloody fist rising toward his chest in the space too close for his claws to reach.

He knew what it was.

He knew the grade of it.

And the grade was not something that should have existed inside the body of a 7✯ Late True God from a mortal planet who had, twenty minutes ago, been mocking him about his wife.

“…That’s…”

The word left him before he could stop it, barely above the loudness of a whisper.

“That’s impossible. That grade… that shouldn’t be POSSIBLE WHO ARE YOU?!”

Aestrea’s right palm pressed flat against the center of his chest.

The contact was almost gentle.

His pale lips parted.

A cold breath escaped them, visible in the air between them, frost curling from the words as they left his mouth in barely more than a whisper.

“Moonlit Ice Lotus Sword Art Variants…”

The yin-yang symbol behind him stopped turning.

The white-dark blue energy around his fist stopped coiling.

Everything in the immediate vicinity of his palm simply went still, the way things go still in the last moment before something absolute and irreversible happens.

His crimson eyes, half-lidded and utterly calm, found Caelid’s wide ones from a distance of four inches.

『 Frostbound Arcana! (✹ Flash Freeze Counter ✹) 』

Caelid had exactly enough time to look down at Aestrea’s palm against his chest.

At Aestrea’s face, and then back at the palm.

“Oh… fuck.”

KABOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!

The release hit him point-blank.

A single, focused, absolute column of Frostbound Karma that drove into his chest at a vector that pointed in one direction and one direction only.

Away.

FWOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOSH!!!

Caelid left.

Not gracefully or with six wings spread in a controlled retreat.

He left the way cannonballs leave cannons, the way lightning leaves clouds, the way patience leaves a man who has just been told one too many things about his wife.

Instantly and completely, and with zero input from his own intentions about the matter.

His body carved through the air of the Divine Realm at a speed that left a visible tunnel behind him, the atmosphere splitting apart in his wake and then collapsing back in on itself.

BOOOOOM!

He hit the first divine structure in his path.

A floating celestial formation, one of the great stone rings that orbited the upper Divine Realm, three hundred meters of ancient divine-carved rock that had existed since before most current gods had been born.

It ceased to exist on contact.

Not from his destruction authority, but simply from the velocity.

KRRRRRRSHHHHHHHHHHH!

The debris field spread outward in a perfect ring as Caelid continued through it without slowing, his body trailing frost and Karma energy and several pieces of what had been a celestial formation, the cold blue-white light of the Flash Freeze still burning at his chest like a brand that hadn’t finished its work yet.

BOOOOOM!

The second structure.

A divine mountain range that floated at the mid-tier of the Divine Realm, peaks that smaller gods used as landmarks for navigation.

Caelid hit the largest peak directly.

The mountain range moved.

The entire floating formation, its peaks and base, and the clouds that had accumulated around them over centuries, were displaced sideways by the impact, with a grinding sound that shook the air for fifty kilometers in every direction.

Caelid continued.

Still accelerating somehow.

The Karma component of the technique ensures that the force didn’t dissipate the way normal force dissipated, ensuring it compounded instead, each impact feeding back into the momentum rather than reducing it.

BOOOOOOM!

A third formation.

Divine clouds, compressed to near-solid density at this altitude.

He passed through them and they exploded outward in a ring of white that spread for a hundred kilometers before thinning.

BOOOOOOM!

A fourth.

A divine palace belonging to someone who was, right now, extremely grateful to be elsewhere.

The palace became architecture.

Rubble.

Particles.

Then nothing.

BOOOOOOM.

BOOOOOOM.

BOOOOOOM!

He went through six more things that had previously been considered permanent features of the Divine Realm’s upper geography.

Each impact produced its own individual catastrophe as the Karma energy continued its work of ensuring that Caelid received the full and complete return on the investment he had made by attacking Aestrea today.

The trail he left behind him was visible from the ground.

A line of consecutive destruction carved through the upper Divine Realm in a perfectly straight vector, smoking at the edges, lit blue-white in the middle where the frost still burned, punctuated by the slowly expanding debris clouds of everything he had passed through.

One million meters.

Maybe a little more… until he finally stopped.

Not because the technique had finished, but because he hit something that didn’t move.

The boundary wall of the Divine Realm’s outer shell, a structure that existed less as a physical thing and more as a conceptual one, the edge of the realm itself, the place where the Divine Realm decided it was done, and whatever lay beyond began.

KRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!

The impact produced a sound that was less like a collision and more like a realm-wide announcement.

The boundary wall didn’t break, and it instead absorbed everything Caelid was currently carrying, all the velocity and the Karma and the frost and the accumulated force of one million meters of consequence, and it held it.

Held him.

In the resulting crater of the boundary wall, Caelid hung suspended.

His six wings spread around him limply, not with authority, just catching him. His chest still burned blue-white at the point of contact.

His armor, ancient and divine-grade and not designed to look the way it currently looked, had lost its structural integrity somewhere around the fourth divine palace.

His face, composed and ancient and professionally amused not so very long ago, was currently doing none of those things.

He hung there for a long moment.

The Divine Realm settled around him with the specific awkwardness of a space that had just witnessed something it wasn’t sure how to categorize.

Then, slowly, from one million meters away, a voice reached him.

Carried by what remained of the technique’s Karma trail, traveling the entire distance without losing clarity, as if the universe had decided this specific message deserved to arrive intact.

“AND ANOTHER THING ABOUT YOUR WIFE!!!”

The blue-white light at Caelid’s chest flickered.

His eye twitched…, but at the same time, his body slowly started vanishing into particles, meaning that he was about to die…

A 9✯ Early True God like him… was going to die from the single blow of a 7✯ Late True God.

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