V4C91: Inhuman Invasion, Part 3

The beginning had not looked good for them, but as the situation proceeded, things changed in their favour. The creation of the Railgun Bolt and Repeated Bolts techniques allowed them to recover some of the edge that the automatons seemed to have taken away, and so there was a chance of victory in sight.

From the start, the biggest issue was that the automatons had large numbers that seemed difficult to decrease with any means that they had available, so the moment that this changed, they might as well have gone from fighting on the same realm, to overwhelming the enemy just like the typical seventh realm cultivator would easily overpower anyone in the fifth realm and below. The numbers still played a part, but they would decrease with each defeated automaton, whereas Wei Yi had sufficient vitality to recover a thousand more arms before it became even slightly troublesome to keep it up.

Even then, the constant development of lifeforce from the Kong Prison Realm and the districts in her control would make running out nearly impossible. In essence, all that they needed now was caution, as acting recklessly would let the powerful weapons of the enemy become too great of an advantage.

Hence, they quickly divided up their targets according to personal strength and ability. Wei Yi and the Patriarchs were able to inflict great degrees of damage upon the distant, stronger automatons, such as the tanks and railgun walkers, while the rest could damage the infantry consistently. Luo Na couldn’t participate in the standard way, and so she instead had to work hard on making talismans right there and then, ones that would accurately strike the energy with true physical force.

At some point, the Jiang Patriarch did also make it over, although he had not been present during the explanation of the way in which planar energy functioned and so proved to be about as effective as Luo Na for the moment. Both of them were trying to develop their skills to have some kind of effect on the battle, and as the two of them realised this, they glanced at one another and began to compete with one another. Whenever one of them made any progress, they would look up and check whether the other was any closer to their own objective than before, and after a while, all of their attention was purely focused on one another.

Wei Yi would have stopped them if they didn’t need to focus, and if she did not have something far more important to do on her own.

As a few of the automaton troops were destroyed, she had been collecting the anchor energy from afar, and in no time at all, they were upon them, even if the front lines were constantly being barraged by their collective railgun-type attacks. As such, she had to stop the first line of defence, that being the railgun bolt barrage, and move onto the second line of defence, which involved shoving all of the anchor energy points she had collected into the Obliteration technique via the Truth of the Universe and rushing out with Jia Rong and the Chao Patriarch.

Together, they were the few that had enough physical strength needed to pry open the automatons without using some unique technique – which was yet to be developed, hence the others staying back for the moment – and so they were the only ones that could begin the tidal wave of victory.

A surge of violet burst out of the Ascendant’s body as the three of them leapt down from the walls they had established, with the majority of the defensive measures on the wall activating the moment that they went past it. With everything that they had shoved into the small length of wall, it was bound to be able to endure at least one railgun shot from the walker, but it would have been a waste to keep it active prior to this as Wei Yi was both the primary target for the railgun walker and someone that could survive it so long as it kept flying at her left shoulder. Soon enough, she would even have enough material from the recovering Crimson Robes of the Third Arrival to make a few dozen more, albeit without the killing intent threads woven in that permit them to regenerate.

The blast of violet once again caused the hexagonal shields of the automatons to flicker, giving the three an opportunity to rush past them and approach one of the infantry soldiers each.

Actually, Jia Rong failed to make it in time, struggling to perfectly match her strength with her intentions, due to her frequent jumps in strength coming from her unique cultivation method, and so she collided with the hexagons in her way. They put up a little resistance, but they only served to slightly slow her down as she just fell through and continued on, as if the barrier was merely a suggestion.

Her fist was able to go straight into the chest of the infantry automaton, crushing the glowing core and sending a splash of orange fluid flying out of the back. The anchor energy within was freed, allowing Wei Yi to grab it up right away and direct it into the development of Obliteration. The individual points weren’t of great assistance to her for the moment, with each stage requiring more energy than before, but as they went through more and more troops, the four or five points that were needed were quickly acquired.

In no time at all, it went past the previous highest stage technique, and was soon at the Eighty-Fifth Stage, prompting her to manifest the Titanic Conqueror again just to try out the improvements to the technique.

A vibrant scorching beam of blackened crimson fell from the skies as the first hour of the battle went onto the second.

When the weakness of an enemy was known, defeating them merely required sufficient caution to prevent them from learning of one’s own flaws. In other words, the weak infantry forces of the automaton army were only able to delay the forces of the Arbiters, who were slowly moving their attention to the other types of automatons that were coming their way. As the elite infantry had a very similar structure, all that needed to be dealt with was the second set of arms, but it was everything that came after that was more dangerous.

The centaurs did have a blatant spot where their core likely resided, as plenty of orange light poured from the gaps in their metal bodies, but the shell was thicker and the plates were placed closer together, making it more difficult to grab at them and pull them off at the same time. Wei Yi and Jia Rong were still able to do it, as the latter reached the third stage of Emergent Anchor, but the Chao Patriarch could not.

From the tank onward, it was a little more challenging to understand where the core could be, and it continued to be this way until the colossus, which had a large body that was almost guaranteed to have the core in its very middle. The tank, however, could have a core in either the upper cannon part, or the lower body, as it could be called. Both would still function with whatever technological magic the otherworldly demons were able to invoke, and both were tough enough to not make it easy to break in and figure it out. Fortunately, random Burst Fire was able to destroy them, but that method tended to give the tank a few shots at them before it would explode in a wondrous, yet confusion fashion. After all, when broken normally, the energy core wouldn’t explode, only spill its orange internal fluid, so why the Railgun Bolt-type techniques were able to invoke a different reaction was uncertain.

With the artillery, the trouble changed from the location of the core, which had to be in the primary body, but rather that it looked to be in the very centre of what looked to them to be an enormous hunk of metal that even the Ascendant was unable to breach with ease. Of course, this continued with the railgun walker, which had a core somewhere – as proven by the explosion after enough shots had hit it – but the confusing thing that Wei Yi discovered after rushing up to one for an experiment was that it looked to actually have two cores.

Aside from the vibrant light that surged out of every single gap on every automaton, making her think that this force was never meant to be quiet or stealthy, the primary cause for this conclusion was the subtle energy of the anchor energy that she was attempting to attune herself to. Even with the Planar Dao at Full Success, it was difficult to focus on it without needing the purely visual assistance of the Truth of the Universe, although it could also be due to her Dao that she has any idea that anchor energy is present in the first place. One of the cores looked to be near the front, and was the one that she had hit during an earlier barrage of railgun bolts, but another was placed at the back and it looked to connect to the railgun itself.

Nothing about the automatons suggested that there had to be only one core within every single automaton but given the nigh endless quantity of energy that seemed to be contained within any individual core, it seemed unnecessary. Even she wanted to obtain one due to that property, but it seemed that they must not be as efficient and boundless as she had assumed as a brief observation of the railgun walker’s operation before it exploded made it a little clearer.

One of the cores was responsible for the shields and the motor functions of the walker, or the legs and movement, while the other was purely dedicated to the railgun. Perhaps the second one was able to operate the shields when the railgun wasn’t active, but she didn’t have the chance to see that when she was in the middle of destroying an active walker that was in the middle of firing.

Fortunately, this was clearly not thought out properly, as the destruction of one of the cores in an explosive fashion was more than sufficient to destroy the other one as well, so if the last two automatons they had knowledge of so far were also making use of several cores to allow their many weapons to be active at the same time, it would still be possible to detonate the entirety of a colossus or a weapon platform just by finding one of the energy cored within. While finding and getting to such cores within the two largest automatons seen so far will obviously be difficult, as it was incredibly risky to approach something with seventeen or even more weapons that should be able to move independently and target anyone in sight without the requirement of typical human thought.

Had they been controlled by people, they might have been fallible to be unable to continually focus on all targets at all times, whereas the automatons functioning on their own appeared to have the ability to control all parts of their body with high precision, but little forethought. Their planning and cooperation skills looked to be non-existent so far, save for not running over one another or not intentionally shooting one another. So far as Wei Yi could tell, they would be far better off being led by a more complex and reasonable mind, even if the rest of them remained rather lacking in complexity.

‘I hope they have not had that idea, though. Wouldn’t be very good to see a properly organised army… although it does give me some ideas for future conflicts…’

The third hour brought automaton casualties into the quadruple digits.

Meanwhile, human casualty remained at zero. When the robots seemed about to overrun the walls, Luo Na finally completed some of her work and stuck a lot of fresh talismans onto the surface of the wall, nearly covering the stone at the top and converting it to yellowed paper. Upon activation, rather than acting in an offensive manner against the flooding automatons, they caused the barrier to be empowered with the energy that had been pushed towards it and converted the way in which it functioned. Just as the rest of them had spent considering how to convert planar energy into appropriate force, she managed to instead accommodate the defences into one that held up against the attacks of the enemy.

The automaton forces had only a few primary methods of attack, and every single one employed commonly was ranger, featuring a projectile of some sort. Despite the fingers of the infantry, even the weakest of the automaton troops didn’t seem interested in fighting in direct melee.

With that, Luo Na converted most of the defensive potential of the walls into one specifically resisting the approach of enemy projectiles, hence increasing its overall efficiency at resisting that kind of threat. Then, she also incorporated the specific types of attack demonstrated so far, that being the plasma weaponry of the majority of the automatons, the rotating gun attached to the arm of the centaur, and the railgun of the walker, and added particular retaliatory and protective measures to the individual talismans so that they could be activated upon the collision between the barrier and a projectile.

Each time a talisman was used for that purpose, it would need to be redrawn and reapplied to the walls, but given that Luo Na had little else to do, this did not seem to be as much of a problem as it would have been if Wei Yi was the one to be creating these talismans. Naturally, while she found something to occupy herself with, the Jiang Patriarch also came across an interesting method of assisting in the defence.

As the Patriarch of a district focused primarily on refinement and alchemy, he naturally had a great understanding of herbs and medicinal materials that were often utilised in pills and elixirs, and that extended to metal-type materials. He had not worked with traditional metals as much as a blacksmith, but he still knew whether their properties could be utilised to improve the chances of a successful refinement, as well as which materials best complimented which recipes for the vast majority of pills that he knew about. Pulling upon all of that knowledge, he also took out a variety of ingredients and got to work.

In a rough manner, he converted them into unrefined medicinal essence, then scattered it over the wall and allowed it to seep into the various structures built into it, thus imbuing them and the structural bricks themselves with the medicinal essence.

Other than slightly strengthening the wall further, it also applied an odd metallic sheen to the barriers standing between the forces at the back and the three still trying to fight at the front. On first glance, one might assume that it does little, but it truly showed its worth when a large squad of automaton infantry broke through Wei Yi, Jia Rong and the Chao Patriarch’s defensive attempts and rushed at the wall with the intention of shooting at its weaknesses from a close distance to make up for otherwise insufficient precision in their aim.

Before they could get too close, however, their energy seemed to ebb away, causing them to move far more slowly, weakening their shields and even decreasing the performance of their weaponry in every way possible. They took longer to charge, were slower to fire, heated them more, and when one of the plasma projectiles did land on the barrier before the wall, it did far less than it should have.

With that, it was significantly more easy to defeat those that passed the defences than before, and it gave Wei Yi just enough time to bite through the skin of her thumb and use the blood to replicate the talismans created by Luo Na, using her killing intent to draw out the symbols in the air while she healed the wound and went straight back to destroying the automatons. The moment that the symbol completed itself in the air, it flashed back to the wall and became emblazoned at the front, glowing with cosmic light as it permeated every aspect of the defensive measures, adding to the current metallic sheen with her signature chained cosmic vibrance.

The next time a projectile struck the barrier before the wall, rather than activating one of Luo Na’s talismans, the characters at the front of the wall lit up instead, some of the energy they had accumulated pouring out to deal with the attack most effectively before dimming.

They were still able to act quite a number of times before they would be exhausted, and the constant flow of planar energy towards them from Wei Yi repeatedly raising the stage of her Obliteration would make the recovery of uses even faster than it would otherwise be, but even if that was not present, they would easily save anywhere between fifty and a hundred talismans, depending on the attacks the bloodline talisman endured. The basic plasma was easy to resolve, but the railgun bolts were simply too fast to stop in any meaningful way.

She had thought about changing Luo Na’s design to instead flip the momentum of the railgun bolts and cause them to fly back at the railgun walkers, but that would require too much energy and a high involvement of the Dao of Law to have any chance of working, which would force her to stay near the wall and constantly apply her Command of Law to keep the effectiveness up.

It was much easier to do with the small projectiles fired from the weapon of the centaur, which the otherworldly demons knew as a minigun. Since there was no use to questioning the name, she did not bother with it, and instead confirmed the typical design of bullets for such a weapon and combined it with what she had been able to observe in order to allow the barrier at the wall to apply a very specific force to incoming bullets. With it, their trajectory would change and they would effectively flip around and fly back at the army in most scenarios, or at the very least have their precise aim ruined so that they only have the chance of grazing the barrier.

Given that plasma was also something physical, as far as the otherworldly demons knew, she suspected that it would be possible to modify that aspect of the talisman and affect them in a similar way, but for the moment, simply cooling and dispersing the tight spheres of orange matter made them inflict far less damage on the barrier, as the looser spheres would cool far more quickly and fly far more slowly.

‘A thousand might be down, but only three of the railgun walkers have been taken care of, and the rest of the dangerous automatons are still on the battlefield, occasionally firing in our direction. This will be a long fight no matter how we fight, but I would like to get rid of them as quickly as possible…’

As that thought passed through her head, she grabbed yet another few anchor energy points from the surrounding broken energy cores and threw them into Obliteration, finding only at the last moment that it had reached the Ninety-Ninth Stage already. With no previous experience of what such a stage even meant for a technique, she wasn’t sure what to expect, but when it blurred and changed to the Dao Ascension Stage, she knew that it was not a mistake to develop a technique to such a nonsensical extent.

The very moment that the stage was reached, she felt many of the complex meanings behind Obliteration becoming clear within her mind, stabilising themselves in the form of the Dao of Obliteration, which was a segment of the Ire Dao, which was beneath the Dao of Law. The top Dao was at Great Stride, seemingly in perpetuity, while the Ire Dao lingered at Initial Accomplishment as a result of her not contemplating that particular aspect as much as the Dao of Law and the Planar Dao. Nonetheless, their combined comprehension reached Full Success, so even if she did not achieve the effects of a Full Success Dao right away, the power of the Dao of Obliteration was instantly the highest of all the Dao at that stage.

She had been intending to launch a few Railgun Bolts at a few of the distant automatons a moment prior to this, so she proceeded with the plan, but the change from before was immediately obvious. The rails and the projectile alike blazed with the hint of Obliteration energy, the whole technique functioned more quickly, and when the bolts were launched, they did so with a burst of energy that would have likely functioned as a weapon perfectly well on its own.

Once it hit, it was similar to watching a miracle occur right before one’s eyes. The bolts passed through the hexagonal shields with little effort, releasing an identically powerful burst of blackened crimson as they did so, destabilising the shields around them and momentarily blinding some of the nearby automatons, yet they continued on with seemingly the same amount of imbued energy as before. When they then hit the automatons themselves, that burst occurred again, and unlike the last time she used Obliteration, it looked to be immensely effective, especially when it then passed through the automaton and exploded one last time upon hitting the ground.

The typical railgun bolt created by her technique was able to sever an arm, leg or head, but it would only do so much brute damage to the enemy due to its small size. However, with the Dao of Obliteration being invoked, the accompanying burst of energy tore apart a hole three times the size.

‘So, there’s a Dao Ascension Stage… All techniques can reach the level of Dao, so, by that logic, all Dao can reach the level of Great Dao? No, I think it would instead become a complete fragment, as the Great Dao shouldn’t be something that can be encompassed with a single notion alone. Fire alone wouldn’t complete the elements, no matter how hard one tried to substitute water with fire, or earth with fire, so the same ought to apply in the instance of Dao,’ Wei Yi reasoned while she took a step back and quickly created as many pairs of railgun rails in the air as she could, choosing to take full advantage of her newly acquired strength, ‘Nonetheless, if all of my techniques can reach Dao Ascension, I suspect that my combat strength would climb once more to a level where very few even have the chance of damaging me. Something like the Black Sun at Dao Ascension might be enough to destroy the whole world…’

The Great Dao was still a relatively unknown field for her, as she obviously lacked any experience with the complete comprehension of any fragment of it, with the forbidden arts that she had the opportunity to read likely being either flawed or missing valuable information regarding the nature of the world. Forbidden arts should be incomplete fragments, pieces of the Great Dao relevant to the Dao of Nature, for example, which would be something that she improves upon with the last stage of a Dao.

Even if all that a normal Dao amounted to was a fragment of a fragment, it would still be incredibly powerful in comparison to any ordinary technique, so there were plenty of reasons for her to pursue it for every technique she currently possessed. For instance, her Railgun Bolt and the derivative Repeated Bolts were suitable for a kind of Propulsion Dao, as it was focused entirely on the acceleration and propulsion of energy, so she naturally contemplated the insights that she had obtained from the three hours of barraging the enemy with the railgun bolts and compiled everything that she could into some kind of cohesive principle.

Propulsion, or the action of kinetic force being applied to an object to cause it to move, was clearly a simple aspect of the Dao of Law, or simple by comparison to certain things like intelligent thought, emotion, deduction and so on. For that reason, she placed the Dao into that category, allowing herself to benefit from her comprehension of the Dao of Law directly to boost its power, and the power of every technique that was based upon the Dao.

Of course, if she wished to make use of that and that alone, she could have also considered the fact that her method of propulsion was achieved via planar energy, hence making it follow the Planar Branch of the Dao, at least in part. If considering the fact that it was also based upon the elements, primarily fire and metal, the elements that compose lightning, which is what she needed to replicate the principle of the railgun of the automatons, she could easily gain eight additional stages of raw power via those Dao, but she did not choose to do this due to her continued belief in the path that she had chosen.

That was not the path of the Ascendant, as one might assume if they looked at her naming convention so far. With each step that she took, she felt that it did not fully adhere to who she was, and who she wished to be, and the less she bound herself to it, the better it would be.

It was for that reason that Obliteration was an aspect of the Dao of Law via the Ire Dao, rather than being an Ascendant method. Even if the Dao of Law was forever stuck in the state that it is currently in, that being the Great Stride stage, she would believe it to be a worthwhile investment simply because it would not be bound to whatever impulse had brought her the Ascendant Dao in the first place. Although it was too late to modify the Ascendant’s Path technique due to her cultivation having been settled for quite some time, she was still working on integrating aspects of Law that she understood into her technique to prevent it from falling behind her comprehension of the natural laws of reality, since that connection was going to bring her above the rest – which seemingly included the heavens.

One more thing that was really brought to the forefront by the current battle against the automatons was the fact that her power, or the power of planar energy itself, was currently effective, but would not be as effective in the many other worlds that looked to exist around her. She had no clue whether she would ever end up in such a place, but others would come to the Planar Continents.

She was certain of that simply due to the frequency of the otherworldly demons, who were appearing in the world without any awareness of the reason behind their travel. If it was this simple to end up in another world, then there was had to be those that intentionally travelled to the Planar Continents for one reason to another. Perhaps planar energy was seen as some kind of valuable resource, or maybe one of the many materials in the world had significant value elsewhere, or maybe there were just groups that liked travelling around the many worlds for the sake of personal entertainment. Either way, they would make use of abilities that seemed to make no sense when viewed through the planar lens.

Against those kinds of threats, the only thing that would be effective was a fundamental principle, something like Law.

‘The Hunger of the Beyond is likely to be an example of that exact kind of force. They may be native to the Planar Continents, but the various descriptions of them clearly make their abilities out to be far beyond anything that the people of the world have been able to display so far. That means that they would be best opposed with something that does not care about realm or a specific type of energy,’ she thought while setting up even more railgun rails in the air, ‘For instance, in all worlds where living things exist, they will need to search for energy. That energy will often be contained within impure environments such as dirt or the air, which contains a vast variety of elements, so…’

She lowered her gaze to her hand, and found that her energy had suddenly transformed into a strange, translucent state that did not contain much power on its own. However, she was also able to feel something far beneath the ground that greatly overwhelmed anything she had on her at the moment.

As such, she casually raised her hand and tried to bring out that power, channelling it towards the approaching army. It did not seem to do anything immediately, but after a moment, a vast surge of colourless energy suddenly burst out of the ground, shattering the earth and twisting the terrain as if the Great Worm itself rose up and attempted to make itself known to the world once more. Many of the automatons were thrown off balance and even damaged by the quake, but what was far more significant was the fact that a vast sea of planar energy was brought to the surface.

All of it was funnelled towards the railgun rails that she had manifested, and they were charged nearly half a second more quickly than she had originally intended, causing a number of them to miss.

‘Eh… I guess that’s a Mysterious Earth Vein energy type, and not only is it the combination of the wood and earth-type element, but it can also power the railguns, the wall, and can allow me to step back and essentially do nothing… Man, contemplating the Dao of Law sure brings me a lot of useful abilities, hasn’t it?’