Chapter 905 - Against three Champions

There are currently six Champion-grade beings here on this floor.

Thylarin.

Hydra.

Falcon.

Human.

Skeleton.

Mage.

The two I wouldn't want to meet, and one I especially want to avoid for now. I have information on every single one of them, though I have yet to find out how and when they will replenish back to ten Champions on this floor.

I hear subsequent booms as the falcon, whom I've yet to see as anything more than a speedy blur, draws closer again.

I teleport with Regalia, appearing in the sky directly above the fighting hydra and thylarin. The thylarin is out of the circle, holding the hydra, which continues to try to escape the grasp of the ice arms while being frozen solid.

With a boost, I push myself down and dropkick the thylarin. Regalia's legs begin to cover in ice at the merest touch, and as we slam against the ground, the ice spreads outward in waves, growing into crystals that reach toward the sky.

The hydra's lightning attack hits the back of my armor as I punch the thylarin with Regalia's remaining arm. His body is burned from the hydra's attack, he is missing two left arms, and out of the remaining two, one remains broken.

My hand closes around his body as I begin to squeeze, and the temperature drops rapidly. The frost reaches deeper into Regalia, even freezing through several layers of mana. All around us, ice crystals explode through the ground as the thylarin thrashes, yet his efforts lack power. With a part of his torso and two arms missing, his circuits are damaged, making it far more difficult for him to reroute his mana than it is for me. After all, I have much more experience with that.

Regalia continues to endure. The thick plating of heavy, dense, manifested, and tempered mana deflects weaker attacks, while the more powerful ones only slowly push through. Parts of my back sizzle up, scar, twist, and begin to crack, but the armor I made holds. And Adaptive Defense supports it all.

I use [Selective Adaptation] to further adapt to the cold, and the skill applies even to my mana that I see as part of me. The active skill gradually gathers more data, adapts further, and lessens the cold's effect on me. The cold begins to spread more slowly and doesn't reach as deep.

[Selective Adaptation - lvl 49 > Selective Adaptation - lvl 50]

I attune myself to the area around us, to every floating particle of mana and every disruption, stretching the effect as far as I can.

When I hear the thunder, I react immediately, ordering Regalia to let go of the thylarin and moving my arm just as the falcon crashes against me.

[Redistribution] activates at full force for a brief moment, forcing the falcon to slow down. Finally, I get a clear look at this plane-sized monster, its white belly, brown wings with blue accents, and its unblinking yellow eyes.

Before my hold slips, Regalia grabs its neck, and I eject myself. In the next moment, with a sonic boom, both the falcon and Regalia are gone. The impact tempers the armor, and its sheer weight pulls the falcon down as they crash against the ground in the distance.

The thylarin uses the opportunity to stand up and attack.

[Empyrean Lance] forms and shatters in the palm of my hand as I cover my fist in Empyrean mana, dodging the near clumsy attack from the thylarin's single remaining arm. My punch hits his chest as I attempt to damage his heart, but his glowing, vein-like tattoos shimmer, weakening the strike and absorbing some of the impact.

I feed more Empyrean mana into my fist and form it into a lance, shooting it toward the hydra so that it pierces through the beast. Once again, I am aiming to damage the area where I sense its beating heart, a spot the monster has a much harder time fully regenerating. It is already damaged from my earlier attacks, limiting the creature.

Yet it is still able to teleport to the top of one of the mountains nearby.

Right after, one of its heads shoots lightning while another fires a red laser from its eyes. I move behind the thylarin, who takes on both attacks and is blasted away, shattering through one of his own ice crystals.

Snow already covers the ground, and the snowfall continues to grow denser. I walk through it as it reaches up to my ankles, hearing hypersonic booms as the falcon returns and crashes into the hydra.

The hydra falls back, missing one of its heads that the falcon tore clean off. I watch the falcon flap its wings and land on the side of a nearby mountain, where it spreads its wings victoriously and shakes the snow off them before biting into the neck of the severed head.

From between the ice crystals, the thylarin walks out again. With each step, the ice crackles, the crystals around grow taller, and the temperature around them drops drastically. Even one of the lightning strikes that the hydra shoots at the thylarin freezes in midair, and when it crashes against him, it shatters into particles of ice.

I reach toward Regalia, which the falcon had thrown away, and teleport it in front of me just as the bird charges again after a wild launch that destroys the mountain it rested on.

Regalia is thrown across the landscape, bouncing off the earth and breaking through trees, as the falcon spins around and, with multiple sounding booms, charges me once more. At the same time, two of the hydra's heads explode to disrupt my teleportation.

I barely eject myself from the smaller armor and use Wraith Dance, which I couldn't use in the heavy suit, to move away. The falcon flies off with the armor in its claws while lightning from the hydra tracks me, forcing me to move continuously to avoid it.

The armor held by the falcon destabilizes and explodes, but the monster notices just in time, letting go and flying out of the blast at incredible speed.

I get a moment of breathing room as the thylarin crashes into the hydra. I trigger the lance stabbed through the hydra to explode between the two of them, but I almost want to chuckle as I watch most of the explosion literally freeze.

Of course, I know that as a Champion, the thylarin has the second stage of attribute upgrade, suspected in his case to be potency, with the second stage being dynamic mana. But this is straight up ridiculous.

Still, there is an error in the way the thylarin moves his mana, and the hydra exploits it, overclocking three of its heads and teleporting the thylarin somewhere far into the distance. The moment I locate where he lands, I know it isn't good.

My Regalia appears in front of me again just in time to block another lightning barrage from the hydra. However, the lightning now moves like a living snake, passing around the huge armor and striking against the woven skin tight mana suit I am wearing.

Even now, I do not use black mana or my ichor.

The second arm of Regalia falls to the ground and then disappears as I teleport it away along with the fragment of the Nameless Tree from my left hand. Far in the distance, one of the inscriptions activates, and the tree begins to grow rapidly, fueled by the immense amount of mana contained within that arm.

The falcon returns. This time it doesn't even aim for me, it hits Regalia away, tearing off the helmet and throwing it far into the distance before it can explode. Supersonic booms sound one after another as the falcon circles back, taking another piece of Regalia with each pass.

My focus remains on fighting the hydra. I continuously break apart its mana based attacks and disrupt them however I can. It tries to teleport me away, tries to break through my natural barrier and armor, and tries to use my own mana against me.

[Focus - lvl 87 > Focus - lvl 88]

Far in the distance, I notice a huge pillar of ice piercing the sky, and another presence shakes the area.

The wind begins to pick up, and blue lightning starts to crackle between dark clouds as the hydra gathers its attack. The falcon rushes toward Regalia once again.

Then, someone flips a switch, and everything turns black and white.

[Eclipse - lvl 79 > Eclipse - lvl 80]

I spot a lapse in control within the hydra's skill due to its damaged heart, and I take over its mana.

All of the lightning gathers and strikes down in a single beam aimed straight at the monster.

At the same time, the front side of Regalia shifts, and a spike instantly grows from it, timed perfectly to match the falcon's speed, which I observed using one of my subminds running deep thought acceleration.

Unable to stop its flight, the falcon desperately flaps its wings to redirect itself, causing the spike to stab through one of its legs instead.

Nearly the entire hydra is burned to a crisp from the lightning, but all four remaining heads pop, and in a desperate attempt, one of the heads teleports far away despite my efforts to stop it.

From Regalia's back, arms made of mana sprout as the armor shrinks and loses some of its density. The arms reach toward the falcon, which flaps its wings and flies backward, pulling the spike out of its leg. The monster crashes to the ground and rolls. My projectiles follow it, tempering upon impact and piercing holes through its body. The falcon screeches and twists before gaining height and flying high into the air.

I teleport using the mark one of those projectiles placed on the falcon, while the destabilized remains of Regalia teleport through the teleportation the hydra uses while escaping.

A lance forms and breaks in my hand as I turn it into a spear with a core of golden and white mana, appearing right on the back of the flying falcon.

It spins around, trying to dislodge me as we fly at incredible speed. I detonate the lance, tearing a hole into the side of the monster and damaging part of its wing.

Like a falling plane, we head toward the ground as another lance manifests in my hand, and I ignore the damage to my armor caused by the explosion. I look into the distance where Regalia went and watch the mushroom cloud of an explosion forming. A shockwave spreads through the fifth floor, and with lance ready to stab at the falcon's head, I wait for the notification.

It doesn't come.

Instead of falling down, the falcon remains in the air, picks up even more speed, and then crashes against the ice pillar with full force.

It almost doesn't damage the bird, but I fail to fully absorb the immense kinetic impact, and even as the mana skinsuit tempers, my ten constitution body shakes inside of it, breaking dozens of bones as I slide across the side of the ice pillar and crash against the ground.

[Selective Adaptation - lvl 50 > Selective Adaptation - lvl 51]

For a few moments, I lie there in the snow that almost entirely buries me. The woven skinsuit mana armor around me unravels, and I activate one of my stored arrays to manifest it into an incredibly durable Zweihander.

Even with [Selective Adaptation] active, the cold is immense, and I feel it against my skin and in the air, so I raise thermal energy inside of my body, letting it power a healing passive that near-instantly snaps my bones back into place.

I concentrate further, and because empyrean ichor contains a high density of mana, I force its movement through my body as I circulate it faster and faster. The sheer movement of that hyper condensed mana generates a disruptive field around me, breaking any attempts to mess with my mana better than most of my active defenses.

Then I push my blood a bit faster and cause two streams to clash and slide against each other as the liquid flows. A white and golden flash sparks at the impact, and I fan it, generating the same mana that forms inside of [Empyrean Lance].

The sword I hold crackles and its edges glow a little as it oscillates, and through the threads that compose it, that white and golden spark flows, lighting up its core.

I push myself back onto my feet. Standing there in just casual clothes, I watch in the distance as the thylarin fights against a human man who is surrounded by dozens of rock golems of many shapes, some as big as a dog, others like a building.

Plan A has failed, but it's not like I didn't expect it to happen. It is never that simple, yet my preparations have borne their fruit. The thylarin has a huge weakness in his missing circuits that I can exploit before he adapts. The hydra regenerated the entirety of its body, meaning that it will take a while before its heart is back to full power. And the falcon is wounded as well, as well as having many marks that I have placed on it.

And my fragment so far continues to grow uninterrupted in the distance.

I quickly activate dormant subminds and put others to sleep, and I change the way I use Mana Cycling, letting some mana seep out and beyond my body until I pull it closer to rest on my skin as an invisible defensive layer.

Then I use one of the marks placed on the falcon to teleport to it just as the hypersonic booms sound and the bird almost grabs me in its claws. Without hesitation, I stab the sword downward and carve a deep wound through its body and feathers, and then I am flung off as the monster spins.

Falling through the air, I close my eyes and listen until that hypersonic boom sounds again, and then I teleport to another mark on the falcon and stab my sword through it again. The mana it consists of oscillates as the golden and white light crackles wildly, and the weapon pierces through its incredibly durable body.

This time I jump off on my own and boost myself multiple times, aiming directly at the human Champion.

Multiple golems move swiftly, a building sized snake, a drake made of white stone, and even a huge humanoid golem.

I weave in between them, cutting through the limbs reaching for me and jumping off their bodies to land in front of the human. My sword moves in a flash as I stab it toward him and pierce his chest.

Yet, it is as the information said. The moment my sword pierces through, the human turns to stone, and one of the many golems crackles, and from inside of it, that human steps out unwounded.

I look around at the sheer number of the golems, many currently fighting the thylarin, and I take note of the movements of the mana and wavelengths of it in the air as that skill activated. I pull some of that mana from the area and spin it over my head, pulling it into the shape of a halo that spins again and begins to pull more and more of the ambient mana.

Before the golems crash against me, I teleport away.

The human connects what remains of my teleportation path, and one of the lion-like golems passes through and jumps against me, only to be held in midair by my kinetic absorption. My hearts beat, and the air shakes, leaving a high pitched noise, and then the stone lion explodes into tiny pieces.

I erase traces of my teleportation so it cannot be followed through and modify my technique so it won't happen again, and then I use Wraith Dance multiple times, heading toward where the hydra escaped.

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