253 Escalation Against Void And Blood

A fraction of a second before she had detonated the wormhole, she had left one of the various Blazebreeze Throwing Knives she had forged before leaving the Sky Seizing Castle primed to unleash a storm of fused hellfire and frigid ice. Consequently, even if she were a million kilometers away, Elizabeth could have seen the bright flash of annihilation that resulted from the two cataclysmic explosions.

A mortal's eyes may have been blinded had they stared at the explosion from Elizabeth's position, but she could clearly see the bright blue flash before she made another wormhole gate to return and assess whether she had won or not.

Unfortunately, she hadn't.

"No damage, huh?" Elizabeth sighed. Though all three Opal Devil Kings looked a bit disheveled, no doubt because of the shockwaves, wind, and spacetime pressure that followed the explosion, none of them were so much as scratched.

Still, Difarl, despite his hostile appearance, was compelled to comment, "Taking that attack at point-blank range might have actually achieved something against my two brothers, but I'm untouchable through the Void." He immediately returned to attacking Elizabeth as unpredictable as before, before suddenly stopping.

"So the correct course would be to target your Soul?" Elizabeth said as she palmed his head, his eyes having grown lifeless the moment she touched his scalp.

"W-what?!" The sudden death of their Difarl was unbelievable to the two remaining Opal Devil Kings. Thus far, aside from the initial test of physical strength, Difarl had been utterly untouchable. Even from the angle of him losing out in a contest of soul strength it was utterly inconceivable for him to lose against Elizabeth, if not only because of their difference in cultivation.

Difarl wasn't just a Nascent Cultivator, he was one at the peak of the Nascent Cultivation Stage; he had matured his Nascent Soul into a Soultwin Avatar; his Understanding of the Void having even reached the level of Universal Insight! As a Core Formation Stage Cultivator, even if she was exceedingly powerful with regards to energy and physical cultivation, Elizabeth shouldn't have been able to hold a candle to him with regards to one's soul cultivation.

"What did you do?!" Both remaining Opal Devil Kings immediately let a torrent of their own Energies spill as they asked with palpable fury.

"You two want to come at me together?" Elizabeth nonchalantly asked.

'Hmm, must be the Cataclysm's way of rewarding me for challenging the bosses of the Second Stage earlier than I was meant to,' Elizabeth thought. Unfortunately, while the Divine Transmission she had received on the Opal Devils contained a vault of valuable information, many of the most important questions Elizabeth had about them were left unanswered.

Aloud, she said, "I extinguished the mark of his individuality in his Nascent Soul. There, you happy?"

"We already knew that! It's how you accomplished it that eludes us," the colorless-haired Opal Devil King barked.

"You know," Elizabeth started rather cheekily, "after cultivating over twenty Profound Truths and several Soul Skills, my Soul Force can match that of the most pure peak cultivated Nascent Souls, if only for a little while."

Though she taunted mercilessly, the truth was that she was both in the right and wrong at the same time. The only way she managed to kill Difarl so easily was because of her twenty-odd cultivated Profound Truths and Soul Skills. But, most importantly, the key to her seemingly effortless assasination came down to the new Bloodline Skill she had instinctively learned after attaining her Rudimentary Wolf God Form.

[Skills

Name: Bloodline Skill: Phantom Whip

Level 60

Experience: 12,050,000/12,139,348

Spirit Grade: A

Energy Cost: 1 unit of Core Qi per second.

Description: Innate to young Ghost Gods, the user can now project phantom limbs that stretch with that totality of one's Soul Force to deliver vicious soul attacks.

Range: 1 kilometer about the user's limbs. Range may increase with the use of Soul-augmenting techniques.

Primary Effect: Creates phantom limbs that may stretch and reach out of the user's grasp.

Secondary Effect: Invisible to the naked eye, only Cultivators with Soul Force comparable or greater than the user's may perceive the aura of the phantom limbs created with this technique.

Ultimate Effect: When used under a Wolf God Transformation, a phantom tail can be created and used like a whip for instantaneous assassinations. While Phantom limbs can carry the totality of the user's soul force for brute force attacks, a phantom whip from the tail can concentrate that totality into a single point to deal exponentially more damage.]

"Impossible! Strong as you may be, Core Formation Stage Cultivators can't hope to compare with Nascent Cultivators who've matured a Chaotic Doppelganger."

For a second, the colorless-haired Opal Devil King's words confused Elizabeth. To him, it was an admission of her lies, until Elizabeth responded, "Don't you know that Chaotic Doppelganger isn't even the highest level for Nascent Souls?"

Now it was the colorless-haired Opal Devil King's turn to look confused before he realized her insulation and hatefully asked, "Your arrogance truly knows no bounds: actually claiming to have a soul purity higher than that of a Chaotic Doppelganger..."

��Well, it's the truth," Elizabeth shrugged her shoulders. "So, who wants to go next?" she asked.

"Tsk," the red-haired Opal Devil King clicked his tongue to get Elizabeth's attention before he said, "come at me if you want to compare physical strength."

Elizabeth helplessly smirked at him as the rapier in her hand transformed once again, this time into… a broadsword.

Now, while Elizabeth couldn't exactly be described as thin-skinned, she wasn't outright shameless either. Armed with the comically large sword resting on her shoulders at the moment, even a certain "resentful cloud" would approve.

"Superioria," Elizabeth muttered.

It was the fourth incarnation of her Inferioria Blood Armament and could only be described to be antithetical to its base form. Without activating the blade's blade-lengthening secondary effect, Superioria was nearly two meters long. It didn't have a cutting edge, being thick and blunt from top to bottom; but, what it lacked in piercing potential, it more than made up for in raw, unadulterated power.

The thickness of Blade Armaments was where physical strength and energy could be channeled to increase power, after all. Needless to say, the eight-million-unit strike Elizabeth displayed earlier was far from her absolute max Strength output; especially when she activated her blood armament's quaternary effect.

"You seem pretty sure of yourself when it comes to strength," Elizabeth started. "So, let's start our fight off with, say… a strike of ten-million Strength units," she concluded while smiling cheerfully, as if she were a child about to receive a present.

"I don't really understand," the red-haired Opal Devil King admitted, "but it's not like that really matters now, does it?"

"Guess not," Elizabeth said as she vanished from her spot.

Boom!

The battle began with a collision between broadsword and claymore strong enough to emit winds travelling past the speed of sound; beyond anything even remotely earthly.

The red-haired Opal Devil King's eyebrow rose despite him not losing an inch to Elizabeth's initial strike and as the two held were locked in a stalemate, he coldly asked, "You… you were just playing with Difarl earlier, weren't you?"

"Even if I was, when it came to physical combat it wouldn't have mattered in the end, right?" Elizabeth passively responded, "Any potential physical attack against him would just be lost to the void because of his Understanding."

"Hmph!" The red-haired Opal Devil King scoffed as he shoved Elizabeth away with ease. In a burst of crimson energy, all his muscles flexed before he got back into proper stance and coldly said, "Prepare yourself."

Moving so fast it could be misunderstood as teleportation, only a faint red mist was left over as the red-haired King swung his massive sword at Elizabeth.

Shoosh!

Elizabeth was sent flying for kilometers as she blocked; the red-haired Opal Devil King launching an unending barrage of attacks prevented her from doing anything else. She frowned as she flew, knowing she had utterly lost even after blocking with the equivalent of fifteen-million-units of strength.

With a squint in her eyes, the broadsword's already thick frame grew to nearly seven inches as she manipulated the spacetime behind her to stop herself from flying. Rich and pure Yang of Physicality made her arms and Superioria glow golden as she swung at the approaching red-haired Opal Devil King; but to her dismay, she still lost out.

Seeing Elizabeth only get sent a couple meters back, and feeling the massive jump in power against his claymore this time, the red-haired Opal Devil King grew flustered; though, he didn't outwardly show it.

'What kind of creature is this? Human? Wolfen? Dragon? Even young legendary beasts of Immortal descent aren't as ridiculous as this... thing,'' the red-haired Opal Devil King thought.

��Impressive," the red-haired King's thoughts were disturbed by Elizabeth's voice as she continued, "You actually surpass my current max strength."

"Forty-million units of strength is not bad for a Nascent Cultivation Stage Cultivator, but," Elizabeth's voice darkened as grey Core Grandmist from her 4th Chaos Seal covered her body, "against sixty-million, can you hope to struggle?"

Now even faster than the red-haired Opal Devil King, Elizabeth copied his approach in not teleporting and letting her movement speed speak for her increase in strength as she retaliated.

Shooh!

More than just getting smacked a fair dozen kilometers away, the red-haired King ended up with internal injuries as he bled from all his facial orifices after receiving just one of Elizabeth's sixty-million-unit smashes. However, to the red-haired King, it didn't matter whether his blood was in or out of his body after being rendered helpless in his current form.

Chip…

"Ah, he's actually gone and used it… The Red Demon Art: Limitless Blood," the colorless-haired Opal Devil King muttered to himself as he watched his only remaining brother's skin crack and evaporate off his body. Shaking his head, he could only hope Elizabeth didn't have any more strength left in reserves to defend against his brother's costly technique.

Elizabeth didn't pursue him after smashing him away and immediately concluded it was the right call, as she held up her broadsword to tank what felt like a moon-sized meteor crashing into her body. Without Precognitive Divination and the distance between them, she might not have been able to activate her fifth Chaos Seal in time and survived.

Still, though the red-haired Opal Devil King attacked barehanded, his claymore having been discarded for reasons unknown, Elizabeth's boosted eighty-million units of strength utterly lost and she was launched once more.

"Heh," Elizabeth coughed a mouthful of blood as she let her broadsword carve apart the spacetime along her path to stop.

Seeing as her opponent didn't chase after her and stood where he last struck, simply staring at her in disbelief and despair, Elizabeth felt another one of her bouts of insanity flare up as she deposited her broadsword into her spatial ring and activated her sixth Chaos Seal of Augmentation.

Paradoxically, Wood, Ice, and Death Core Qi superimposed on her nearly black frame as she psychotically smiled and said, "Come on now, we've both just unleashed our strongest physical states."

As the space around her quaked sporadically, her tone only intensified as she said, "Don't slow down now."

She teleported to his side and sent a kick only to be blocked by his left forearm.

Boom!

All the red-haired King could do was block, not counterattack or retreat; a mistake he would soon come to regret.

"Combo time," Elizabeth cryptically said as her second attack came at the red-haired King in the form of an elbow; this time it was marginally faster and momentous.

Boom! Boom! Boom!

Elizabeth's attack came without pause, without mercy, and most unforgiving of all, they all became slightly stronger as the sequence progressed.

One to six, six to eighteen, and eighteen to thirty-six. Kicks and elbows, punches and knee strikes all culminated in the thirty-seventh strike where Elizabeth grabbed the near lifeless body of the red-haired Opal Devil King by the throat and gripped; breaking his neck and infecting his body with entropic Death.

With a sigh, Elizabeth calmed down. All that remained of the red-haired Opal Devil King was his skinless, brutalized, and lifeless body; even his Nascent Soul had been cleansed of consciousness by her Death Qi. Luckily, a status check revealed a previously unseen reward as Elizabeth stored the body.

[Status

Name: Ancient Opal Devil Blood King's Corpse

Spirit Grade: SS

Description: Having been killed in a state where a Blood Body-augmenting technique was being utilized with an Understanding at the level of Universal Insight, this corpse can be refined into body-refining medicines suitable for Cultivators at the Law Chasing Stage.]

Grandmist aura pressuring the world around Elizabeth, she gave the final, colorless-haired, Opal Devil King a look and asked, "You ready?"