V5C58: Second Confrontation

The last time that Wei Yi fought the Great Leeches, in particular, one of the first generation of the Great Ning, they had chosen to invade the Kong Prison Realm through some random field in the Central Plains, where they had made a breach into the spatial realm and then brought in their cavalry, so to speak. This time, it did not appear like they were planning to take the same approach.

In many ways, this was likely due to the inefficiency of attempting the same strategy after it had been clearly shown that a weaker Ascendant and a weaker set of Arbiters were able to handle the situation without any preparation for it. Now that they were stronger, more prepared, and the Greats hadn’t grown stronger to even out the odds to a similar level to what they might have been before, so taking the same approach would naturally lead to the victory of the same force, with fewer losses. For all they know, Wei Yi might have even figured out a way to stop their Reality Severance, in which case they might have no more cards up their sleeves.

All they did have was the apparent ability to manifest replicas of those she had already slain, for the figures she observed were far too similar in appearance to those that had fallen for it to be coincidental. Even if the Great Leeches possessed the ability to reproduce and age faster than most insects, the new generation would likely possess at least a few notable differences.

Their approach this time was to go to the Luo District, do so openly, and with their energy ready to strike at what they saw.

Obviously, the Ascendant did not simply let them do such a thing, and, after placing herself and the Arbiters upon the walls of the district – walls built since her last visit there, in addition to the layers of talismans – she leapt down and vanished from the spot, reappearing a significant distance further ahead and much closer to the Great Leech forces than either side anticipated.

Last time, they ended up having a chat, with her being plunged into their strange realm of easily refutable statements, and neither of them were stupid enough to presume that they would repeat this part of the process either, so once the Greats caught sight of her, they spread out their anchors and activated their standard point beam techniques. Only the first generation member of the Great Ning family, Ning Huang, did not immediately strike out, and now that the Ascendant was in a higher realm, she could tell that he was amassing the energy of his searing marks and anchors in order to condense one of his incredibly powerful planar constructs. It wasn’t enough for her to identify the full nature of the technique to the extent of replicating it, like she able to do with the point beams, but she would get there in time, provided that they showed off such methods often enough.

She did not stand still and watch them do whatever they wanted, raising her Arm of Slaughtering Shadow and repeating the process of gathering the energy that connected it. Before firing it at the leeches, however, she brought out the concept of Obliteration and surrounded the ray of light with it.

Before a single one of the point beams could be condensed and fired, a blast of light shot out.

Only a moment after it emerged and exploded in a flash as it collided with the body of one of the second generation replicas, a vast and overwhelming blackened crimson ray exploded from her Arm with a dozen times the radius of the initial ray, and an even greater speed. The two ended up striking only moments apart from one another, and a massive eruption of energy followed.

A blast of blackened crimson and absolute white formed into a whirlpool that expanded with every second that it existed, much like her black star.

That got Ning Huang’s attention, for he instantly took the energy that he had already built up and manifested a flaming hand. It appeared above him and then flew over to the storm of crimson and white, its fingers opening up during the flight. For a moment, it froze above the storm, with the glow of a searing mark igniting clearly being visible upon the planar construct, and only then did it crash down onto the eye of the storm.

What followed was a massive eruption of energy as the flaming hand was ripped apart by the Obliteration energy, but also led to the destabilisation of the whirlpool that she had accidentally created with the two distinct energies. As a result, a mass of overwhelming power, raw and violent, exploded outwards, devouring a number of the Great Leech replicas, shredding them into purposeless energy – and bits of anchor energy, which the Ascendant snapped up the very instant that they became available. The storm cleared after many minutes, although neither Wei Yi nor Ning Huang needed to wait for it to know that all of those caught within it had perished.

“That is… the moment we come back, I am learning that!” Zhi Qiu Ya exclaimed, speaking more freely now that the Ascendant was not listening, “Maybe I’ll be able to make use of it!”

“I doubt it. I’m no expert, but both the white beam and the blackened crimson beam came from a combination of energies. My body is barely managing with two, and that is after I’ve split up my meridians and managed to modify myself quite significantly, far more so than the Blood Alchemists might have recommended had I still been in their lands,” Long Huang shook her head, glancing at the wolven woman’s head, “Now that you’re out of the spatial realm, are those getting any worse?”

“Those… ah, my bestial features? They’ve not calmed down at all since Wei Yi got… y’know, captured, or so it seemed. I’ve been trying everything we had, but not even the most rigorous of massages have been of any use…”

“… I see. Do keep an eye on that, not that I need to tell you to do so.”

“There you are, silly girl. Your new arm is not as good as your old one, is it?”

“How can you say that when I have just obliterated a whole lot of your idiotic replicas? Last time, those they are replicating had given me quite a lot of trouble, but this time, you needed to waste one of your enormous hand constructs for the sake of dealing with my methods. If you’re just trying to show off your bravado, sound just a little more reasonable,” Wei Yi said, managing to keep her mood in check due to the combination of needing killing intent to rebuild her Arm and the poor attempt of her foe to rile her up so poorly.

“That arm lacks full mobility. Did you think that we wouldn’t notice something like that when you broadcast it to all of us?” Ning Huang said.

“Again, how fucking stupid are you? Look!”

She brought out Moon Splitter and waved it around using the Arm, applying some of her spiritual will in order to move the sword a little more flexibly than she actually could. Due to the nature of her spiritual will, there was practically no chance of him being able to detect her mental energy, and so she was confident enough in the manoeuvre succeeding.

“Let’s assume you are being honest, stupid girl. That sword is another example of your folly.”

“Nope. Here, look at what it can do,” the Ascendant said, quickly swapping the weapon to her other hand before swinging down with a fractured blade.

All of the shards flew out and towards the first generation Great Ning family member, who simply projected his core around himself and all of his anchors, beginning to work on another condensation of a planar construct hand.

Thus, when the blade shards suddenly accelerated and then exploded in a mass of cosmic light, with the former Shard of Warfare bursting into a significantly larger mass of absolute crimson right on top of the core. Wei Yi didn’t check the outcome of this bombardment before she charged in, thrusting the hilt of Moon Splitter forward so that the many shards had a far easier time of returning to it, each one crashing into the weapon and assuming their rightful place among one another by the time that she made it to where Ning Huang was.

She was instantly greeted with a series of point beam blasts, forcing her to put Moon Splitter before herself and will it to transform into a shield, the many shards forming an incredible barrier between themselves.

All of the beams struck either the shards or the barrier they created and were nullified, but they occupied enough of her time for the cosmic light and killing intent to clear and reveal Ning Huang’s position. He stood in the same place, but the core had vanished between the explosions and the release of his point beams. The construct he had been manifesting had also clearly changed in its aura, and had obviously changed in shape when it appeared a moment later in the form of a flaming mass vaguely carrying the shape of a sword. The Great Ning family member grabbed onto the weapon and swung it down, with the Ascendant blocking it before it could descend more than half-way.

“Five, six… seven. Seven in the fifth realm, while we have Great Dark in the sixth, me and Long Huang in the fifth, Zhi Qiu Ya in the fourth…” Luo Lia Kun muttered as she looked upon the replicas that remained, “Yi Shi Ming, how much can you do at this distance from the spatial stabilisation point of the Luo District?”

“Well, it is of no issue for me to reach out to the Luo Matriarch. Luo Na will come within a minute, and she has a number of talismans that will be of use to you. With her cultivation having been in the seventh realm for some time now, they have improved a great deal,” the spatial spirit replied before waving her hand and manifesting a series of railgun bolts in the air, “Furthermore, Wei Yi’s radius of energy manipulation has expanded greatly, and so has my ability to act outside of the Kong Prison Realm. Combining that with her techniques…”

“You’ll be able to kick ass, right?” Long Huang nodded, “I’m taking that ugly one.”

“They’re all… are you certain that it is a good idea for you to be fighting them while in the same realm? Don’t you remember what happened the last time they tried to invade?” Luo Lia Kun asked worriedly.

“Her choice of target is very sensible… that one’s energy is in slight disarray, meaning that bloodline power will have a larger effect…” Great Dark noted, “Furthermore, with talismans and the automatons of the Ju District… we will have a far better chance than the last time… when we had not prepared sufficiently.”

Zhi Qiu Ya sniffed, “Where are they, by the way? The automatons? I can’t smell them anywhere.”

In response, both Great Dark and Yi Shi Ming simply looked out to the field between the battle of Ascendant and Ning Huang, where the seven Great Leech replicas were rushing in their direction at the highest speed allowed to them by their fourth and fifth realm movement methods. Both were relatively impressive when compared to the average movement method, but when taking into account the Ascendant’s instant movement between any two points, it ceased to have any power to amaze.

There, after a moment of nothingness, the ground was suddenly shaken and torn as numerous entities broke out of the ground, each one glowing with an obvious orange colour that started out dim and brightened quickly, until each point of light was as bright as a star at night.

Out of a total of fifty automatons, forty were elite infantry, eight were centaurs, and two were railgun walkers, with the latter ten appearing significantly further away from the seven Great Leeches in order to have a chance of attacking them and succeeding in it. They had been underground, mostly dormant so that they wouldn’t waste the power that they obtained from anchor energy, but the moment that they were activated in full, they were able to locate the threats and begin their attempts to neutralise all seven of them within two seconds.

Eighty small blasts of plasma and eight larger bursts shot out at the seven, and although the Great Leech replicas did their best in order to evade these attacks, the concentrated fire guaranteed that half of both types of attacks fell upon them, their cores and their anchors. The orange light completely overwhelmed the scene for a few moments, forcing all other than Yi Shi Ming to shield their eyes or look away.

She threw off the mass of flames and then stabbed forward, seeming to do so in the standard thrusting action for a sword. The end of the blade would have been just a little short, especially once Ning Huang took a step back, but then the blade suddenly slid apart and extended outward, forming into the shape of a spear in the blink of an eye.

The tip of the spear collided with the anchors of the Great Leech, clearly cracking the surface of one, but he brought it back and instead blasted point beams from every other anchor.

“You-”

He had to stop when he saw her Arm stretched out one more, blackened crimson emerging from within. At the same time, he noticed a large figure floating behind the Ascendant, all four arms glowing with the same Obliteration energy, having already gathered a great quantity of it into two spheres that lingered near the right and left pair of arms respectively. With his previous exposure to her methods, he recognised that immediately, and the ignition of that same light within one of the Ascendant’s eyes while the other filled with an eldritch radiance and the phantoms of tendrils put him on alert instantly, forcing him to put up his core and block everything that travelled towards him.

The Elysian Blast hit first, then the Obliteration aftershock, then the effect of the Elder Watcher and Conqueror’s Eye were applied, grasping onto the Great Leech and distorting the world around him as to make it nearly impossible for him to escape. Finally, after all that, the two beams from the Titanic Conqueror were fired out and began to converge upon his position, one that he could only barely shift from with obvious effort.

Her initial Elysian Blast caused a crack within the core, one that was quickly mitigated by the ignition of a searing mark. The aftershock hit the same point, and it forced that gap open once more, cracks spreading across the core as it merged with the remaining Elysian energy and formed the same vortex as before. Using nothing but the faith that the present Arbiters had in her, the Conqueror’s Eye was able to influence the open cracks and conquer their position, making the ignition of a second mark – and the third in this battle, out of a total of fifty-two that she was able to see – unable to have the same effectiveness as that of the previous mark. With the Elder Watcher ability, she distorted the core’s structure, causing it to bend and twist ever so slightly, but sufficiently to influence its stability.

A core was at its strongest in a spherical form, for it allowed the entire structure to support itself, the energy within, and be supported by both the dantian and the inward pull of the anchor, at least in the cultivation of an ordinary person. For the Greats, the presence of the anchor was usually absent when the core was internal, but externally, the multiple anchors more than sufficed for this same purpose.

Once the spherical shape was influenced, however, that same pull lost a great deal of its beneficial properties, and instead became a liability. Now, certain parts of the core were closer to the pull than others, and all they needed to become vulnerabilities was a little bit of external pressure. Luckily for the Ascendant, she had two sources of exactly that converging upon Ning Huang’s location, and when she stepped back to prevent herself from being caught in the blast, she not only willed for a series of railgun bolts infused with Obliteration energy to appear in the air, but also transformed Moon Splitter into a bow.

While the railgun bolts charged, she drew back the string of pure energy and generated an arrow from her bloodline power, aiming it directly at the vulnerability of the core.

Then, when the converging rays of the Titanic Conqueror’s Obliteration were only moments from colliding and generating an explosion that would further infuse the vortex that began to form, she released all of her projectiles at the same time. All of the railgun bolts shot out, crossing the gap between them in a flash, and so did the arrow that she had readied, with every single one of the projectiles being infused using her Astral Scars to guarantee their power and success.

One of the Great Leech replicas was instantly slain by the barrage, due to some failure on his part to put up the core and endure as few plasma blasts as possible, but the other six either had better luck or better skill.

The moment that the barrage was done, and the railgun fire from Yi Shi Ming and the two railgun walkers had not yet begun, they retrieved their cores and fired out as many point beams as they were able to, striking the hexagonal shields of the automatons and being absorbed by the barriers easily enough. Of course, with their concentrated power, a few of the automatons were struck and even damaged once they breached the hexagonal shields, but the total losses were the arm of one of the elite infantry and the machine gun arm of a centaur that had not had the opportunity to make use of it yet.

Naturally, the remaining seven centaurs did not waste the opportunity to attack with their machine guns while they still had them, barraging the cores of the six replicas while they regrouped and attempted to find a different avenue of attack. They had little time to do this before the second threat came, and did so with far greater speed than the plasma projectiles.

Twenty railgun bolts were manifested from raw energy by Yi Shi Ming, and two more came from the railguns of the walkers, which were shot out from different distances but reached their targets at the exact same time, for Yi Shi Ming’s bolts were slower but more numerous and contained great quantities of energy within their structure that the physical bolts of the two railgun walkers could not contain without the assistance of a master inscriber or blacksmith, or a significant improvement to the now-destroyed factories for the automatons.

The impacts of the physical bolts were plain and natural, only creating clouds of dust and dirt upon the collision. Meanwhile, the energy-based projectiles shattered into raw planar energy that acted together with the incredible physical force contained within them to inflict two separate types of damage at the same time to the cores of the six. Although faint, the wondrous sound of cracking and fracturing could be heard all the way from the walls.

It was then that Luo Na, the Luo District’s Matriarch, made her way onto the top of the walls, numerous talismans in a bag that was attached by way of a strap going over the neck and resting by the waist.

“I see that the lot of you are doing well. Meanwhile, she is throwing around even more things for no good reason. Simply focusing her energy on one or two methods should be significantly more efficient,” the Luo Matriarch said, her false vibrant green eyes glancing across the battlefield and her finger pointing to five of the figures closer to them, “Those ones are still fine, the other one has a half-broken core. Target these later, and we will be able to avoid wasting our energy by trying to take them all down at the same time. Understand?”

“Please, we’re not stupid,” Long Huang muttered, “Can you not do that every time we meet?”

“In comparison to Wei Yi’s faults of being a little too showy in her techniques, yours are generally significantly larger. If I had not come at the right time, you may have killed yourself with your attempts to improve that cultivation method of yours. Had you called me first, you wouldn’t have had a chance to die at all, since my eyes would have seen through the mistakes you were about to make.”

“Fuck you.”

“The Ascendant might.”

“Not interested.”

“Neither am I.”

The others couldn’t help but look at this and shake their heads, even though they were in the middle of a battle – mostly due to them being in the middle of a battle. Such a disruption was entirely unnecessary, and yet entirely expected from the two. Their personalities clashed like that often.

“It would be best if you focused on the battle at hand, and handle your disputes at a later time,” Yi Shi Ming interrupted their dispute and brought out two dozen more railgun bolts, “Luo Na, please assist us with your talismans in whatever ways you can, or else I predict that at least two of the replicas will be able to damage your district’s walls.”

That got her attention, and prompted the throwing of six talismans at the sixth Great Leech replica, the one with the cracked core.

In an instant, their numbers were reduced once more.

On the distant part of the battlefield that the others only dared to look upon with great care, as to avoid hurting their eyes and confusing their perception through the sheer madness of the types of techniques that the Ascendant attempted to use regularly.

Throwing together so many disparate types of energy, including all five elements and all five variants of planar energy, not to mention manifestations of Dao and greater powers than even the combined elements that she also had plenty of, was in no way ordinary or expected. Most had no clue how to handle such things beyond simply throwing more of their own power into either defending or attacking in hopes of ceasing the onslaught before it could kill them in much the same way. From her experiences so far, there were none that succeeded entirely, and only Ning Huang had managed to damage her permanently in such a manner.

Now, she was hoping to damage him just as much, although she was not going to risk using Touch the Heavens unless there was no other choice.

Her Arm was indeed functional in almost every regard, but before it attained full constancy and stability, trying to use something like that technique would just scatter it and leave her with a weakened version of the technique with the potential to injure her as much as it would injure an opponent. The only positive thing was that she could invoke more strength from Touch the Heavens and not care about injuring herself, meaning that the power might be balanced out somewhat.

Nonetheless, she wouldn’t risk it yet.

The Obliteration beams converged, railgun bolts hit, the Elder Watcher and Conqueror’s Eye took effect, and Moon Splitter was readied to execute any methods that she wished to make use of on top of those things.

She heard a crack, but what followed was the sudden ignition of a dozen searing marks followed with the eruption of six flaming hands that caught the incoming projectiles and blocked them all, flying out wildly. They first gained some distance from him, and then turned to fly towards the Ascendant, each one of the flaming hands gaining luminance with every moment as their power was rapidly expended.

“You force me to do this, young girl! If you will not fall to us, then to keep the seal intact, you must be severed!”

Her plans were thrown out of the window right away, for the very word carried with it a great deal of risk. The moment that the Great Leech was prepared to make use of Reality Severance, all of that deliberation needed to be ignored in place of ensuring that another use of that technique could not possibly occur. Whether it hit her or someone else, it would permanently mar the world even further, something she did not wish to see no matter what.

Hence, she released the railgun bolts right away and brought her energy into the Arm of Slaughtering Shadow, while her mind thought back to the first and last time she made use of the full state of Touch the Heavens. With little of her previous slowness, she reached out with one finger towards the sky.

An incredible light appeared atop the point of her claw while the bolts collided with the hands and tore them all into a few parts, with two outright dispersing from the impact and the Obliteration energy that followed. Opposite her, Ning Huang also followed the same actions that he had performed last time, and the power that gathered around him matched as well, making it plain that he hadn’t simply been taunting her.

“Do you still dare to reach towards the heavens?” he exclaimed.

“I will do far more! If I must, I shall pull them down to our level!” came her reply, the light brightening as the point of her claw seemed to latch onto the heavens and the sky, gaining the faint shadow of chains that seemed to originate from nowhere.

Just as the first time, they brought down their attacks at the same time, with the same exclamations, and with the same hopes and intent.

“Reality Severance!”

“Touch the Heavens!”

A single smooth light travelled towards the absolute and overwhelming light of the heavens bursting out of the smoke of her Arm and consuming it completely, the former creating an obvious and permanent mark within the air while the latter cracked each and every part of the world it touched into tiny, insignificant pieces. Within each one, the Laws distorted and broke apart, reforming and transforming to an extent that even the Ascendant’s current grasp could not inform her of in full. These powers met within the middle, and the earth trembled upon their collision.

The cut split away so many of the cracks in space, but with each one, the slash faded just a little. Slowly, both lights dimmed, but the physical force that they released only seemed to expand with every moment, splitting apart into the ground and air in equal quantities.

For a moment, the Ascendant was brought back to the time that she unleashed her bloodline power for the first time, both in the range of destruction and the way in which two powers slowly devoured one another. She hoped beyond all reason that it would be her light that would crush the Reality Severance cut this time, but that was not to be.

Instead, in one final moment of their existence, they pulsed with boundless physical force and simply faded, neither one being able to make a mark upon their intended target – not directly.

Wei Yi managed to raise a barrier to prevent all of that force from striking her and all of the forces behind her, but likely due to the use of Reality Severance, Ning Huang did not appear to be able to do much. His core was still up, and it bore the brunt of the physical energy, the cracks upon it rapidly expanding until…

The sound of shattering glass made its way past the barrier and into the Ascendant’s ear, while the Great Leech was thrown back and out of view, far too quickly for her to reconsider her approach and try to apprehend him.

She managed to ward off one of the first generation members of the Great Ning family.