Chapter 904 - Against two Champions

The hydra is just as the information stated. It has five heads, stands about the height of my Regalia, and, among other things, is taking a while to awaken fully.

My fist lands down, smashing one of its heads against the floor and drawing blood. Another head of the hydra moves and bites into my arm with its teeth, failing to pierce through.

I recognize the structure of a skill as the hydra begins to channel a sort of body reinforcement.

With my eyes, I find a weakness and break through it.

Two more heads bite me, trying to throw me away, while the third one moves in front of the head of Regalia, launching a lightning beam against it that deflects off the helmet and tears a big circular hole through the cavern wall.

The monster begins to cast body reinforcement again, in a way that might bypass my disruption, but I channel my mana, adding more oomph to my eyes, and disrupt it again through my gaze alone.

This time with more power, I slam my fist against the head, causing it to explode into gore and toxic blood that lands on my arms and sizzles across the surface layer. I move just as the head that shot lightning at me is about to shoot again, but I grab it, tearing it off the body and squishing the skull between my hands until it pops.

Meanwhile, the other three heads continue to attack me. One of them bites, the second one shoots a concentrated laser beam of red color from its eyes, and the third one begins to cast reinforcement for the third time.

Instead of disruption, I punch that third head, causing it to shake, break its casting, and then I move slightly to the side.

Like an enormous pillar coming from orbit, my [Empyrean Lance] comes down, stretching as it flies.

Just as the first two heads regenerate, the lance breaks through the ceiling and stabs through the hydra, with the body of the monster absorbing most of the impact, creating a crater of flesh and bone.

The lance pins the monster to the ground, and I eject myself out of Regalia. One of my subminds takes over instead, further pinning the monster down while the structure of Regalia begins to destabilize to take the monster out in the most powerful explosion I could set up.

Landing on the ground, I begin to walk slowly. Beneath my outer layer, there is a skinsuit woven of mana, and on it sits another armor that seems like a smaller version of the one that holds the hydra.

I locate the quickly approaching presence, and for a few moments, my heart turns all generated mana into kinetic energy. Taking another step, I slam my fist a few times against my chest, releasing all that kinetic energy there to further temper the armor. It compresses, becoming thinner as the plating shifts to still allow me free movement. It ends up as a barely pinkie-thick layer of dark blue mana with purple and light blue streaks when the second Champion reaches me.

I take a step back and let the armor absorb the power of the attack that, with a deep, long thud, tempers my armor further, and then I boost myself forward, delivering an uppercut on a thylarin with four arms facing me.

He sways back but picks up his bearing again, and his tattoos, which create lines akin to veins over the entirety of his body, glow vivid yellow on his blue skin.

His punch misses me, and I pull him off-balance and deliver another punch aided by my mana and kinetic reinforcement, as well as mana disruption to push against his skill. Before he can attack me again, I move to step on his foot and then punch the side of his belly.

One of his four hands turns to a blur and slams against the side of my head, breaking upon impact. The second one moves slower and comes to a full stop against my chest as I absorb all of its kinetic energy.

I use that kinetic energy to speed up my movement and punch his ribs with my left hand, then hook the left side of his face with my other hand. Both of the punches leave bruises, and the dim glow of his yellow tattoos weakens.

His orange eyes have that empty look akin to an avatar's, and over them a circular tattoo of piercingly blue color glows as the temperature in the mile-wide area begins to drop. Frost covers everything, the walls, both the hydra and Regalia, and me as well.

Through the sheer force circulating through my armor, I break through, the frost layers on my armor cracking as I avoid a barrage of punches, deflect one, and then send the thylarin staggering back after another punch into his head.

The temperature drops even further, and steam starts rising out of me as I fan the flames inside, the fire angering the thylarin, whose muscles bulge while his tattoos glow brightly like sunlight running through those veins.

His slam against the ground blows the entire cavern away, as well as pushing the hydra rolling together with the lance stabbed through it and Regalia holding it down.

In the middle of the explosion, the entirety of the exploded mountain halts mid-air, and even as the thylarin uses all four arms to block, my fist slams against his forearms as I release a cascading attack. Ripples of disruption weaken his reinforcement, and all the kinetic energy I have gathered in multiple quickly released waves that bounce off each other and stack up.

One of his arms explodes as he is launched into the air, coming to a stop only against another mountain a mile away. That mountain's side shatters under the impact, and frost begins to cover it immediately after, spreading through the valley below and freezing the forest there.

Keeping an eye on him, I lift my arm to the side and create a barrier in front of my palm that blocks the lightning attack from the hydra. It zaps around like plasma, with its lashes melting through the rock and the surroundings. The beam itself also passes around my barrier and zigzags through the landscape while carving canyons of molten stone.

I need to kill both the hydra and the thylarin as close to each other as possible. The best would be within one second, as I worry the system might not count it toward the achievements for my primary class if there is too big of a time difference.

In the distance, the thylarin begins to stand up when I swing my hand, and the lance stabbed through the hydra dislodges. With ten stacks of boosts I add to it, it thunders and draws a straight line through the air and pins the thylarin to the mountain instead. The force of the impact tempers the lance further as the effect of my passive kicks in, and it doesn't break.

Yet the thylarin redirects it slightly, so instead of nearly killing him, it explodes his left side and both of the arms there.

With slight annoyance, I fling my hand and deflect another barrage of lightning from the hydra, and with the same pull, bring the lance back and stab it through the hydra, sending it stumbling away from Regalia.

Jumping in and taking over Regalia, I stabilize it through my sheer will as I endure the backlash.

All five heads roar, and the hydra disappears in a teleport to appear high in the sky, wings of mana spreading far and wide from it. Instantly, clouds begin to gather around as powerful wind picks up. The entire time, it has my lance stabbed through it, even as one of the heads attempts to pull it out.

A few projectiles made of ice slam against the hydra, which creates some sort of barrier to defend. I notice it is done by the same head that did that mana based reinforcement and teleported.

The thylarin grows in size again as he pushes off of the mountain. Behind him, there are four additional arms made of ice floating, none of them directly connected to him.

Then three of the hydra's heads explode as the monster overclocks its minds to cast an attack.

A silence fills the area for a moment, broken only by the cracking of the ice as the frost continues to expand further and further. And after that mere moment, the silence is gone as the storm around the hydra spins faster and the air roars as it presses down.

Hundreds of lightning strikes rain over an area that gets bigger and bigger, now covering the size of some of Earth's biggest cities. These lightning bolts zap across the sky and to the ground, all of them blue and entirely destroying anything they hit. Entire mountains disappear, forests cease to exist, and deep craters destroy the ground.

Regalia is almost akin to a lightning rod as dozens of them crash against it, entirely annihilating the zone around me.

I stand there observing it all. Each impact rings against the extremely thick and heavy plating of Regalia, and each impact further tempers it, pushing my new passive closer and closer to its limit.

That hellish view of dark clouds, the hydra with mana wings floating behind it, and the hundreds of lightning strikes gets pierced through by five pairs of red lasers.

By this time, the hydra already has its heads back, and red lasers shoot from all its eyes, sweeping across the decimated terrain, uninterrupted beams of red multiple miles long sweeping across the area and drawing an enormous circle on the ground that surrounds me, creating inscriptions there.

I watch it all happen, standing with Regalia entirely covered in ice as the inscriptions begin to light up and hold me within it. Furthermore, the blue mana wings grow, and in quick succession three heads explode, powering the circle and lighting it up with the same red light of the beams shot from its eyes.

More and more, that red light becomes denser inside of the circle, generating heat, radiation, and some light-based attack. The surface of Regalia begins to sizzle just as all of the ice evaporates away.

Then I trigger a design left in the center of the lance stabbed through the hydra. The monster constantly, even now, blocks all signals, but doesn't notice this one. After all, it is partially based on a Scalar Beacon.

A huge explosion covers the hydra, and the lightning attacks stop instantly while the storm weakens. My mind goes into overdrive as I break apart the structure and take over the circle drawn around me, feeding it with my own mana while making changes to it.

The red light increases, damaging the surface of Regalia further as the heat rises rapidly along with the radiation. After finding the right switch and swiftly fine-tuning it, I tilt it and narrow it, hitting the thylarin running at me.

That Champion slows down as the four floating arms made of ice grow in size, each of them the size of the arms of my Regalia, and they cross in front of the thylarin to block the red beam. His yellow tattoos hum with a deep glow, and the same veins spread through the arms made of ice as the Champion pushes and begins to walk toward me. He pushes against the beam that melts the arms and then passes through.

The red beam creates a circle as big as a building that shoots nearly as far as I can see with my non-strengthened sight, for a moment stopping against the mountains, but gradually melting their surface and shooting through.

Then the power is gone and the beam flickers and disappears as the thylarin charges at me. The ice arms grow even further in size, with two grabbing Regalia and two punching against me. Each contact pulls all heat from the air, causing more and more frost to gather. It is so cold that from the dark clouds from which the lightning strikes were raining down, it now begins to heavily snow.

A loud roar sounds from the sky again as, from within the explosion the lance caused, the hydra pushes through, just one head surviving after being shielded by the other one that is now just bone and bits of flesh.

That head bites into the stump where one of the other heads was and pulls, dragging out the head and causing it to regenerate faster. As it grows covered in slime and blood, it shakes off. That regrown head then bites against the head that pulled it out and then looks down at us while the other head explodes.

Instantly, the circle that was dead activates again, and like a huge pillar of red light, that beam surrounds me and the thylarin and shoots high into the sky.

Using a chunk of my mana and one of the markers I have placed, I teleport out of it even as the hydra tries to stop me and appear floating high in the air near it. Regalia is missing an arm as it lies within the circle, connected to it and strengthening it even further to damage the thylarin, whose ice begins to melt and who finds himself unable to move due to the circle’s effect.

I watch his life tick down as I destabilize Regalia and boost myself toward the hydra. A part of my mind touches another mark I have placed further away, and I continue to gather more and more mana.

The hydra tries to teleport away, but I break the structure. Under my gaze, the wings made of mana behind it move and coil around the monster to tie it down.

While it begins to fall from the air, one of the heads explodes, and it tries to free itself, but I push further to stop it, feeling blood running down my nose.

Another head explodes, and a ringing pain sounds in my head.

When the third one explodes, my control almost slips, but I am already almost crashing against the falling monster. Regalia shines bright white as I make a check on the thylarin as well.

Then a third presence enters my detection.

With the speed of a hypersonic jet, it passes through the air that crackles in multiple subsequent booms and crashes against the side of Regalia, which begins to spin, missing the hydra that has its fourth head explode as it destroys the wings trapping it. Just before the monster falls to the ground, it teleports away.

With those subsequent booms crackling once again, that third presence returns, crashing against me at an incredible speed I can barely track even in my thought acceleration.

It hits me head-on, carving ridges into the chest of Regalia while the power of impact tempers it like I haven't seen yet and launches me in the opposite direction.

With the speed of a falling meteor, I am launched multiple miles away, crashing through the mountain, rolling through the ground, and bouncing off the surface of the lake until I come to a stop against another mountain that I almost entirely break.

Boosting Regalia to its feet, I stand up against the rain of the stone avalanche that threatens to bury me, and it stops, halting in the air while I shoot back in the direction I flew from.

Three it is, then.

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