V4C96: The Ju District, Part 2

The moment that they could, the Arbiters equipped with plasma cannons raised them and fired at the automatons hiding within the wall, the mechanism of which wasn’t fast enough to allow for the shutters to close before a number of energy bolts got inside and struck the automatons on the other side. One or two projectiles wouldn’t have been anywhere near enough to defeat a regular railgun walker, for instance, as their shields were protected by the majority of the capacity of an energy core, but what they faced was not an exact replica.

Instead, it was the railgun detached from the walker portion, and the energy core had been devoted to the weapon and spherical shield, which meant that without the spherical layer of the barrier, there was nothing that they could do against the impact of the glowing plasma spheres.

Upon their destruction, most of the automatons exploded, and when so many did so at once, the whole of the wall was shaken, with numerous parts being pierced entirely and a number of regions on the top dipping in as their foundations were shaken. The wall did not go down entirely, and around half of the automatons that had been standing openly on the top still survived and were able to shoot towards them, but their effect was far lessened as the Arbiters charged right inside.

There was too little space for all of the army to breach the wall in one go, so they instead used the many holes that had formed all the way through the wall and flooded in from several places, bringing their shield generators with them and making sure that nothing on the other side could do much damage to them. Wei Yi chose to go last, firing off a few more railgun shots to take care of the enemies atop the wall, and then phased right through the obstacle via her movement method, joining the rest of the army on the other side, where a number of automatons were already waiting for them, mostly being those that had not had the chance to pass the wall while they were speaking with the Ju Patriarch and subsequently attacking the district.

Infantry, tanks, railgun walkers, colossi and so on filled the open sandy field before them, complete with five constructor orbs positioned at an equal distance apart from one another to manage the battlefield most efficiently. All of them had spherical shields save for the few at the very front, who must have been put into place before the idea to switch their defences was brought up.

Together, all of them fired upon the invading forces, this time staggering some of their attacks so that instead of a curtain of death – which is what it would be against a typical force consisting mostly of those below the fifth realm – there was an irregular shower of projectiles. Once again, this displayed a degree of tactical thinking that had considered her capabilities and took them into account when formulating a strategy, and the source was clearly not any of the constructor orbs, as they barely looked upon them as they formed some of their spare parts into more automatons to throw in their direction. If nothing else, it made her cautious.

Simply thinking more about defeating her wouldn’t yield the automatons the victory, as she had a few too many things up her sleeve at this point, and even her body couldn’t be severely damaged thanks to the scale armour projecting a layer of Armour Forming energy all around her, but it did suggest a deviation from their initial strategy of simply overpowering and overwhelming the enemy. That meant that there was either a human force in command, or that there was a new automaton design.

The latter was more concerning simply because of the potential of anchor energy. With one or two particles, it was sufficient to power the railgun walkers, but if they decided to go all out and shove all of the weapons, all of the energy cores, and every other capability they had yet to demonstrate onto a single automaton, there was a good chance of making a dent in her army before they had the chance to break the automaton’s defences and destroy it. This would not be ideal for obvious reasons, and so she was naturally forced to consider how to overcome such a thing before it even had the chance to make itself known to them.

If it was truly able to learn and advance, it would attempt to overcome the abilities that she had displayed so far, which would either mean avoiding firing in her direction, or using methods that were more difficult to flip over than the railgun bolts. Stronger shields would also be a necessity, perhaps using the strengths of both the hexagonal and spherical designs to overcome the ease with which it was possible to generate the fracturing ripples in the latter and to pierce a single piece of the former. The most logical and easiest would simply be to force all of the current automaton forces to attack her forces, rather than attacking her. They would be unlikely to kill her unless everything in the Ju District was wasted just on her, but if they defeated her Arbiters, it would be a rather terrible loss to the world as a whole, not to mention her own faction.

Even if she went on to fight against the Greats alongside the Ju District, the loss of numerous talented individuals, as well as the warriors from the four districts in open support of her, would be damaging, if not outright damning.

‘The factories for these things appear to be over in that direction, so if something does arrive, it will be from there,’ she reasoned, quickly considering some adjustments to their current positioning, ‘Alright, I will attempt to occupy that region, then allow the rest to resolve issues at the other sides. The moment that something appears, outright teleportation to Paragon might be necessary, if there are enough automatons left and if the threat is significant enough.’

Of course, there was always a chance of her overestimating her foe, but she was not going to simply go along with that and ignore the potential threat. Anything that she does to over-prepare could be used elsewhere, while most people are not easily resurrected, even if she was to turn them into hatred automatons. It would ruin their physical states and damage their minds, and that is even if she manages to successfully transform them after however much damage is done to their bodies as a result of whatever weapon the Ju District’s automatons manage to bring out against her.

In other words, it was not worth it in the slightest.

The Arbiters and the automatons fought quickly and intensely, with railgun bolt after railgun bolt being fired from either side. Despite the forces of the Ju District having the advantage of fighting in their home terrain, with the aid of factories and constructor orbs to produce and repair them, the Arbiters were having far more success than one might imagine even if one did not take Wei Yi’s aid into account. They were still able to destroy their enemies, prevent them from being repaired, and even keep themselves alive with their shield generators, as they also employed the exact method that they had just breached through a minute ago.

When placed closely together and allowed to partially intersect, the spherical shields were able to spread damage out throughout each one with a connection to the other, and thus the shields of a hundred could endure the shots against them together.

As soon as the Ascendant’s aid was taken into account, things became even easier for them. Her Mysterious Earth Vein energy, as she had decided to call it when she first discovered it, allowed for the earth vein to continue supporting them with even more energy than before, aided in part by the continued revitalisation of the world and her increased cultivation. By occasionally activating one of her many searing marks, it was even possible to further boost the amount of energy infused into the shield generators for a short while, and thus give them enough energy to endure even more powerful blows from the enemy. If railguns or plasma cannons were fired at the same time, it essentially guaranteed that the attack would pierce the shield of anything it hit, provided that the automatons weren’t using the same strategy as they were.

Despite the effectiveness of it, most of the black and orange robots weren’t making as much use of it as Wei Yi would have imagined, perhaps due to the shields leaving far less space around the automatons than they did around her human forces. It was notably more difficult for even the infantry to stand close together in the right formation to spread the ripples across the shields, and they, alongside elite infantry, were the only ones that were able to take full advantage of the method.

It was important to state that any kind of direct contact was sufficient for damage to be passed along, but when the two shields didn’t flow into one another and instead simply touched one another, it meant that the ripples would crash into the other shield and do more damage to it as a result, creating more ripples that could quickly cause the two shields to overwhelm one another if they were positioned particularly poorly, and if the ripples came from the right direction and at the right time. She had only managed this kind of thing a few times, as it was rather challenging to get the right angle, but it was possible.

As such, the automaton forces were rapidly losing their numbers, whereas the human forces were just able to endure without a single loss.

It was only a matter of time for whatever the last attempt to turn the tide would be for the Ju District’s leadership, and it came not too long after, heralded by the blare of an incredibly loud siren produced by otherworldly means. On its own, it could have been used as a weapon against those without the ability to protect their ears, so mostly the third realm and below, but in the current situation, it was the incoming giant that was far more fearsome to the Arbiters.

Even the colossus looked small in comparison to that which emerged from the factories, floating onto the battlefield in the same manner as the constructor orb. In fact, it had a similar shape and locomotive function, but everything else differed greatly.

First of all, while it was still vaguely spherical, the structure was far more angular and irregular, with the front-facing eye sticking out and a number of smaller, yet still positively enormous eyes being positioned around it at various levels of horizontal depth, all of which were currently looking onto the battlefield with a bright orange glow that was projected onto it. On the sides, top and bottom, there were numerous attached plasma cannons, and all of it was surrounded by an incredibly dense shield that rivalled the one that had surrounded the district itself.

In fact, she was almost certain that it was that exact same barrier, as the side was slightly thinner and weaker as it was in the middle of repairs, as if it had not yet fully recovered from the previous attack.

In place of the small amount of metal parts that circled the regular constructor orbs, this thing – an overlord orb, according to Miyu – had almost fifty times as many parts all hovering near the back, ensuring that the pieces didn’t get in the way of the cannons and constructor eyes at the front, of which there looked to be no fewer than ten, although she was still struggling with understanding exactly what allowed for any of the eyes to perform the assembly and reformation process of the automaton pieces.

Had this been a force that was purely dedicated to standing by and assisting the rest of the automatons, like the constructor orbs were want to do, she would have been left to question exactly what the purpose of most parts of the overlord orb were for, but this one was far less passive. It quickly rushed straight towards the front of the battlefield, all of the metal pieces storming forward into the line of sight of the ten smaller eyes at the front. With impressive speed, all of them were quickly assembled into railgun walkers, which were then thrown out of the spherical barrier and onto distant parts of the battlefield, where they promptly aimed at the force of the Arbiters and shot the moment that they could.

Meanwhile, the overlord orb itself flew to a place where it would be out of the way of any of the railgun walkers and aimed its primary eye at the Ascendant. It became brighter while the shield in front of it became weaker, and after a few seconds of charging, by the end of which the eye was outright blinding to almost everyone at the battlefield, it shot out a powerful beam of raw energy.

‘I see that they have taken inspiration from my Obliteration- no, obviously they didn’t, but the orange does make it look like an inferior version of my own technique,’ Wei Yi noted in her mind while she reached out with one hand and manifested some Obliteration energy in the palm of her hand, ‘If the Ju Patriarch wants to compete, then I see no reason at all not to show to him just how mistaken he is if he thinks that this orb will be enough to finish anyone off.’

A moment after the orange light from the overlord orb shot out, so did her Obliteration beam, this time making use of the most ordinary Straight Beam aspect of the technique as to be able to compete properly with the automaton.

Something like the Delayed Pulses or the Divergent Storm moves would have been poor choices against the long-lasting beam fired by the overlord orb, with one only striking a few times while the other would keep the orange beam far too close for comfort, and Orbital Call would be impractical unless she wanted to take out the orb and then resolve the beam while it was being destroyed. However, given that the orb was making use of the shield that had previously protected the Ju District, it would not be easy to take it down unless a weak point was specifically shot at and targeted with her full strength.

Thus, the Straight Beam was most effective in this regard, as the two weakest points in the shield at the moment were at the front, where it had weakened with the presumed intention of allowing the orange beam to be shot out without any interference, and at the back, where the previous damage to the shield had moved to after it built ten railgun automatons.

Her Obliteration beam hit the orange one only moments before it approached her own skin, stopping its movement forward by replying with a similar degree of strength. Neither one was scattered as a result, not right away at least, but the energy that was unable to proceed onwards spread out in the only direction available to it, resulting in a vast circular pulse of energy shooting out from the point of collision. It struck the ground and flew into the air, instantly cutting a thick line into the ground and even reaching the distant walls to the north and south of the district, cutting through a few roads and smaller structures that were fortunately unoccupied at the moment that the splitting occurred.

She was able to keep going after the initial collision, and so was the automaton overlord orb, resulting in their energy continuing to scatter and damage the terrain, forcing all of the other Arbiters to scatter and take on the railgun walkers instead of directly combatting the overlord orb. They were unable to do much to that enormous monstrosity, and so they had to focus on the enemies that they were genuinely capable of opposing, as the current railguns and plasma cannons wielded by the Arbiters were both sufficient to inflict a significant degree of damage to the spherical shields used by the vast majority of automatons, especially once their attacks were coordinated well against a few targets like the newly created railgun walkers.

Half were taken out in one go, while the rest fired upon the weakest of the shields that they were able to detect, or so it seemed based on their targets. Three chose to go for those with a cultivation in the second realm – the lowest in the army due to the requirement to be able to fully externalise energy – whereas two others targeted a barrier that had been worn down by the attacks of other automatons, even if their own strength was notably higher.

“Delay!” Wei Yi exclaimed while directing more of her energy into the Obliteration beam.

Their railgun bolts shot at the shields and nearly struck them before Wei Yi’s words were able to take effect. All of the bolts froze in the air, but their momentum was not completely cleared, instead being temporarily decreased to an absolute crawl before it would return to full speed a moment later.

If they attempted to leap into the bolts while they were in this state, they would be met with the exact same degree of force as if they allowed it to return to normal speed, as this was only a delay forcefully applied by the manipulation of Law and the world’s nature, not by actively removing any speed from the object. For that reason, the Ascendant was forced to quickly inform them not to do so, as this would be incredibly risky and foolish, and instead warned them to apply a great deal of energy to their own barriers and move as far away from the original destination of the bolts so that they would not suffer as greatly.

The mere shockwave caused by the bolts striking the ground would be enough to put pressure on some of the shields, but it would not be as damaging as enduring a direct hit.

Meanwhile, Wei Yi constantly providing more and more energy to the beam emerging from her hands, putting both of them to use to allow for as much of her meridian network to be actively used, healing the damage that her Command of Law was able to impose onto the world while she actively drove her body to its limit. She knew that the automaton she was opposing was likely responsible for the increased intellect of the army she was facing and also far more capable than the vast majority of the automatons she had destroyed so far combined, but she had yet to make full use of the majority of her strength. In fact, she could even add some of the strength from certain less used Dao to boost the power of the Obliteration beam to levels exceeding the seventh realm, but she did not yet need to do so.

There was only one enemy that she knew of at the moment that would have her using all of her power, and that could easily result in permanent damage to her despite everything that she had invested into her own survivability, and so she was not going to dignify this force with such a thing when it was merely the creation of an otherworldly gift that skipped so much of the work that would have otherwise been required just to discover the concept of anchor energy.

‘Actually, isn’t that one of the worst things about otherworldly gifts? They all allow for things that are theoretically possible, and yet all of the effort, all of the discovery, all of the knowledge that would otherwise be required to obtain those opportunities are skipped with some random gift from an unknown entity and world… As I had theorised before, there might be nothing about the azure lights themselves that impact one’s mentality, but it might easily be the possibility that they offer that corrupts so many… Frankly, it’s rather disgusting that there is something that even creates such things,’ she frowned, noting that her left arm had transformed again into the killing will state, ‘Alright, looks like my mind is not keen on holding back. Let’s go, you big ball of metal!’

As she inhaled, the circles in her eyes lit up as the power of the Absolute Dao was applied to the Obliteration beam, instantly causing the crimson hidden within the black light to brighten by several folds, elevating the power of the beam by a similar degree. It pushed back against the orange beam being fired by the overlord orb and quickly brought the point of contact to the middle of the battlefield between them.

Due to the speed at which the energy had travelled, it barely had the chance to make a dent in the terrain, although the moment that it stopped, all of the Obliteration energy that had been unable to keep pushing forward scattered once again, bursting open an enormous hole in the terrain. It left cracks that kept spreading for almost a kilometre out from the current point of collision, and as one could see from the slow push of the blackened crimson against the orange, it was hardly going to stop there. Instead, it continued to travel forward, not because the power of the beam actively increased at a slow speed, but instead because of the very attribute of the Absolute, which she had recognised some time ago to be a manifestation of the Ire Dao.

It was a rebellion against the very possibility of failure, a statement against the world that would permit the efforts of any single soul to fail. As she was the only one to grasp the notion of the Absolute Dao for now, she was also the only one to truly take advantage of it.

Against a human being, it would have been less effective, but when facing a machine with limited intellect and little true wisdom, it grew far more powerful due to the simple fact that the Dao were predicated on comprehension, understanding, learning and personal application. An automaton could likely be made with all the Dao that someone wanted to infuse into it, but in an active scenario, an attack executed with a Dao at the level of the Fifth Stage merely through the combination of the concepts that it relies upon was far more powerful than the concept-less creations of the otherworldly gifts.

Perhaps that was one saving grace against the incredible power that the otherworldly gifts offered. When utilised via the azure light that was almost always embedded in it from the start – as far as she knew, at least, given that she had yet to encounter a gift that hadn’t intentionally been separated from the azure hidden within – it completely overcame the natural ideas and mental processes that were present in the minds of most. It was unable to call upon the greatest power in the Planar Continents.

As she had once read in a book about the Eastern Continent, there was a belief that the world all emerged from the Great Dao, and that the Great Dao encompassed all. There was apparently a prevalent belief that it could be represented via the sequence of numbers from one to ten, which was insufficiently explained in that book for her to understand it, but whether or not that part was accurate, it was impossible to deny the fact that everything could be encompassed even with a simple Dao like the Dao of Law – simple in a relative sense – so the Great Dao would indeed need to be even more powerful than the ability to affect anything and everything under the heavens with a single word.

Of course, if something overpowered the earth and the heavens themselves, that would be a different matter, but the otherworldly gifts never gave their users quite that much strength.

She ignored the continued killing will state of her arm and exclaimed, “Complete!”

In an instant, most of her internal organs were once again turned into a crimson mist that she had to get rid of in a manner that wouldn’t be too obvious, but the clash between two beams was suddenly brought to an end, with her Obliteration beam hitting the front eye of the overlord orb in a single instant, an explosion of incredible scale following right after.

She knew that the automaton was not destroyed, but what was hit was the large clump of materials that was floating by the side, within which must have been contained several energy cores that could have been used for constructing new automatons without needing to collect existing wrecks which did not have their internal cores destroyed. Her Obliteration beam could only do so much, and when exploding from the outside, the cores far less than when they blew up from the inside, so when the blackened crimson wave finally cleared, the state of the automaton was not surprising in the slightest.

Out of the fifty weapons that it had on the sides, thirteen looked to have been brought out of commission. The spherical shield had a number of additional weaknesses within it that were obvious even to the naked eye. Its front eye was cracked and the light coming out of it was weakened greatly, allowing her to see glass and a number of metal components hiding behind that light. Where it previously hovered nicely and smoothly above the ground, one part of it now dipped and the occasional bobbing motion was staggered and clearly unsteady, causing it to tilt and slightly turn every single time that it bobbed. Altogether, it was in a worse state than Wei Yi was at the moment of using the Dao of Law, but it did not have regenerative functions.

As such, by the time that the two of them could see one another with their own eyes, her body was close to recovering sufficiently whereas it would not be benefitting from any of the damage, to put it mildly.

‘Come to think of it, what are the heavens? What exactly are they up to? People have so many theories, but which ones have any validity in the slightest?’ Wei Yi took the opportunity to continue her line of thought, which looked to be bringing her some favourable results so far, ‘They do not visibly interact with the world, but their own comprehension is what seems to lead to the development of Dao. From this, it is possible to conclude that some interaction does occur with the world, intentional or not. The heavens have an understanding of what is happening, so they have intelligence, but not enough to know the entirety of the Great Dao… Is it possibly above the heavens themselves?’

She felt a gaze upon her, but since she was unable to find anyone suspicious within the full extent of her spiritual perception’s range, which was about the same as that of someone in the eighth or ninth realm without a mental energy cultivation, she did not let herself be bothered by it and instead proceeded onwards with her attack. Much of the automaton was now exposed and weakened, and judging by the flickering of the largest central eye, it was not going to be able to repeat that manoeuvre any time soon, so there was no need to save up energy for Obliteration.

Instead, she reached out both her hands and manifested a great deal of energy, placing down her Endless Monolith behind herself and surrounding herself with the Subterranean Shell. Around her, a great deal of unclear light gathered, but not even when it was ready to attack had it acquired a proper solid form.

‘Techniques are always used in a format that people can imagine, but that is clearly limiting everyone, possibly including the heavens themselves. The Primordial Deities might still fall for it, but the Hunger of the Beyond may be so difficult to kill simply because they overpower such notions. In that case, I should begin experimenting on something that can beat the heavens and everything beyond alike… Except that it is rather difficult to imagine something that is incomprehensible to the human mind. Since I have neither the intention nor the means to transform beyond that… Dao time, I guess,’ she sighed in her mind as she targeted her creation at the overlord orb.

She had no clue what she wanted to create, what it should look like, nor what it should really do beyond damaging her foes and not damaging others, but she did have an idea of what she wished to make use of for that purpose. As her primary focus was the Dao of Law, she needed something that made use of them for a purely offensive purpose, and something that could overcome any Laws that she encountered that might act against her. Laws surpassed humans and even included otherworldly gifts, with the only caveat being that they were too powerful for her to affect just yet, and so, as long as she could rival them with her own technique, then it would be good enough. When it was, the name, the means of attack and all the rest could be determined at a quieter time.

Thus, the fabric of space before her was suddenly torn, and the overlord orb that floated before her was broken into a thousand pieces. None were truly separated from one another, and yet she could distinctly see the strange energy that connected all matter together.

Right before her eyes, the individual pieces were all affected in different ways, some decaying, others heating up, some almost transforming into something entirely different that could only be compared to the original if one saw the process all the way through. Despite that, they were still together, and after the moment that lasted an eternity passed, she witnessed all of it come back together, clearly not impacting the enemy as much as she had wished when it came to the destruction aspect.

Still, what suddenly fell onto the ground was not at all her opponent any longer. Even while most of it held together, only a small fraction of the orb’s structure was still reminiscent of what it had begun as, and even those parts had rusted, rotted, or otherwise decayed as if they had been left out for over a million years without any proper supervision or care.

“Well- ugh…” she contained another burst of blood and viscera from emerging from her mouth, as she knew that it would make it all too clear that this was not something she could replicate endlessly.

Furthermore, she knew that while she had succeeded with the technique’s usage, she had not acquired some integral element that would complete it and allow it to be reproducible, so if there was another overlord orb that the Ju Patriarch wished to throw at her, she would not be able to destroy it in the same fashion. Perhaps she would be able to accomplish something as effective, yet different, but it was far more likely to simply fail and cause the next orb to grow flowers or something similarly silly.

“Ju Patriarch, your strongest automaton looks to be dead. As for the rest of them,” she raised her hand and conjured as many railgun rails as she could with the energy that was still remaining within her, “Can be destroyed quickly enough. Shall we get back to talking?”

When the elderly man reappeared, it looked like the answer and the outcome was clear.