Infinite Ascension: 100,000x Amplified-Chapter 44: Clash of Monsters

The clone was losing.

Not badly, but still losing.

Kaelith had moved first. She spoke a single word — her personal trigger for Time Law — and the fractional delays began stacking. The clone’s strikes landed half a beat late. His reads on her position were slightly off. Small margins and accumulating fast.

She flew low across the volcanic rock at speeds that made her form blur into a streak of white and silver, changing direction mid-flight with Space Law bending the distance between coordinates so the path she took bore no relationship to the path she appeared to take. The clone tracked her with his senses but his predictions were wrong every time, his combat experience insufficient against someone who had spent decades learning exactly how to fight with these tools.

She came in from his left at roughly 15% light speed, Ice Law already active, the temperature around her fist dropping to absolute zero before impact. She hit him square in the ribs.

The pain was immediate and total — a cold that went past sensation into structural damage, the ice element trying to freeze his Chaotic Origin energy at the cellular level. He flew backward through the air, crashed into a volcanic formation, and the whole volcano disintegrated around him on impact.

He was on his feet in under a second. His energy lifeform physiology was already purging the ice damage, the Chaotic Origin Flame burning through the attempted cellular freeze and converting it to fuel. The pain vanished. But the hit had happened and she was already repositioning.

She came from above next, Time Law adding a delay to his perception so her descent registered in his awareness a fraction of a second after it should have. He raised his arm to block. The impact drove him straight down into the already disintegrated volcanic floor. A crater opened around him. Rock collapsed inward. And lava started gushing out with vehemently destroying miles of land, and insane earthquakes crumbled mountains and land for miles.

The destruction had no description. [AN: Wow such a cool line.]

But it had no effect on him.

He pushed out of it, fired himself back into the air with Space Law, bought himself two seconds of distance.

She was already waiting where he was going to be.

His Ice Law at 5% was nowhere near her effective utilization. His Time Law at 4% could not counter her fractional delays. His Space Law at 5% was slower and less precise than hers. He was fighting someone with superior tools and superior experience with those tools, and every exchange confirmed both gaps.

He took another hit — Death Law this time, a suppressive force pressed against his energy output that dimmed his Chaotic Origin Flame temporarily and made his limbs feel like they were moving through resistance. Pain spiked through his entire body for two full seconds before the ancient soul’s depth burned through the suppression and cleared it.

She was toying with him, with all these little strikes.

Nova made the decision.

Shadow Exchange.

The clone dissolved into darkness. Nova’s main body stepped through a spatial fold and arrived in the clone’s exact position.

Kaelith stopped.

She hovered twenty meters away, flying motionless in the gray air, and looked at him. Her sensitivity to laws and energy — calibrated across decades of a previous life — registered the shift immediately. The energy signature was different. Denser. The Ancient Chaotic Origin Qi carried a fundamental quality that the clone’s diluted version had not possessed.

"Oh," she said. "Looks like this is your real body."

Nova went still.

He looked at her. "You’re definitely not a high schooler if you can sense that. Who are you truly?"

Her expression carried something older than her face. "You’ll have to beat it out of me. But you don’t have the power to do so."

[AN: Poor FL doesn’t know she is battling the MC.]

Both of them deployed domain barriers in the same instant — not offensive, it was containment.

Just the initial exchange had destroyed miles of land and space cracks opening in different regions, due to the instability of space because of their attacks.

The barriers expanded outward to seal the space between them and hold the aftermath of what was about to happen inside a bounded region. Neither explained it to the other. Both simply understood. They don’t want to destroy this dungeon, as it will ’affect other warriors’ in the dungeon.

The barriers locked.

Then they began.

Nova went in first.

He kicked off the air and accelerated through Space Law, covering two hundred meters in under a tenth of a second. At 20% light speed his form became a golden-black streak across the contained space, the air displaced by his passage creating a visible wake of compressed atmosphere.

Kaelith was already moving. She had read his trajectory through Time Law’s fractional perception advantage and angled herself sideways at 15% light speed, her form a white-silver blur that cut across his path rather than retreating from it, basically she dodged. She came at him from his right side with Ice Law active, the temperature around her fist at absolute zero, Space Law folding the last ten meters between them to zero so the strike arrived before his defenses could fully close.

It hit his shoulder.

Pain detonated through his right side — the cold trying to freeze his cellular structure, the impact force driving him sideways through the air at speed. He spun with it rather than fighting it, converted the momentum through Motion Law, redirected himself upward and came back down at her from above at 25% light speed, both fists wreathed in Vibrational Force carrying Plasma Law and Fire Law behind it. 𝗳𝚛𝗲𝕖𝚠𝚎𝚋𝗻𝗼𝕧𝗲𝐥.𝚌𝚘𝐦

She was not where she had been. Space Law had moved her.

His strike hit empty air.

The energy released anyway — a column of heat and plasma that drove down into the volcanic floor and turned a hundred meters of rock into molten glass in under a second. The contained barrier absorbed the residual shockwave but the floor of their enclosed space cracked wide open and magma began rising through the gaps.

Back at home, the clones began multiplying. Two. Four. Eight. Sixteen shadow clones dropped into lotus position simultaneously, all of them connected to his awareness.

Absolute Insight was activated and the joint comprehension push began. All of Nova’s consciousness directed at the same walls — Space Law, Time Law, Ice Law, Death Law. Multiple awareness pushing from multiple angles at once.

His Space Law began to climbed. 5% to 15%.

Kaelith accelerated to 30% light speed in a straight line, then bent her trajectory through Space Law into a curve that physics had no name for, arriving at Nova’s position from the direction opposite to where she had started. She hit him twice in rapid succession — ribs, then jaw. Both strikes carried Ice Law and Death Law combined, the suppressive death energy layered beneath the structural ice damage.

The pain was extraordinary. His jaw registered the impact as something between breaking and dissolving, the Death Law suppression making his energy lifeform physiology work three times harder to clear the damage. His Chaotic Origin Flame flared and burned through it in under a second, the cells reconstructing, the suppression purging.

But she was already gone, repositioning at speeds he could not fully track.

His Time Law hit 20% through the clone network. He started reading her delay patterns — not perfectly, but enough that he dodged the next strike instead of taking it.

She shifted entirely to Ice Law and Life Law combined — Life Law to track his energy signature through the enclosed space regardless of where he moved, Ice Law to build environmental constructs that cut off his angles. She flew above him and directed massive ice formations to erupt from the enclosed floor, each one kilometers in height relative to the contained space, cutting off movement corridors and forcing him into positions she had already calculated.

Nova flew upward, reversed through Space Law, came at her from behind at 35% light speed.

She was already facing him. Time Law had given her the read before he arrived.

She hit him in the chest with Death Law at her current full effective output of 40% comprehension, the principle of endings pressed directly against his energy lifeform structure. The pain was total. His Chaotic Origin Flame guttered. His body went cold from the inside, every cell temporarily suspended between existing and not existing.

He fell forty meters before the ancient soul’s depth burned through it and the flame reignited.

He pulled himself upright mid-air and forced himself back into the fight.

He was comprehending as he was fighting.

His Space Law hit 30%. His Ice Law hit 28%. His Time Law hit 25%.

The gaps were closing. Not fast enough yet. But closing.

Kaelith had to end this fight fast so that she can teach this brat a lesson. So she launched her domain.

Ice God Domain — eight laws synchronized, the pinnacle of everything she had learned across a previous lifetime. She flew to the center of the enclosed space and opened it outward. The temperature inside their barrier dropped to absolute zero. Ice formations erupted from every surface simultaneously, each one alive with coordinated intelligence. Time slowed to 5% normal flow. Space locked — his teleportation met active resistance. Gravity multiplied toward her position.

The impacts began.

They were continuous. Ice constructs striking from every angle at once, each one carrying her law authority behind it. The pain was layered — cold, then suppression, then the crushing weight of multiplied gravity, then the temporal distortion making his responses arrive wrong. His body was taking damage faster than his energy lifeform physiology could fully clear it, the regeneration running at maximum and barely keeping pace.

He flew through the construct formations, punching through them rather than dodging — each shattered construct reformed in seconds but the path bought him movement. Fire Law and Plasma Law burned out of him in raw waves, melting ice faster than she could create it in the immediate vicinity of his body. He pushed his speed to 40% light speed inside the domain’s locked space, the resistance fighting him every meter but not stopping him entirely.

His Space Law hit 38%. His Ice Law hit 40%. His Time Law hit 40%.

His effective output was at her ceiling now.

He could sense that she only had 40% comprehension of her laws. What he didn’t know was that Kaelith was still holding back because if she used above 40% of her laws, it would affect her cultivation and soul.

The domain’s Time Law lock on his teleportation broke — his Space Law at 38% was strong enough to force through it. He disappeared from her constructs’ tracking and reappeared directly in front of her face.

She had half a second to react.

She used it. Death Law projected outward in a cone that hit him at point-blank range. The pain was catastrophic — total suppression, his energy lifeform structure momentarily losing coherence, the Chaotic Origin Flame almost extinguished. He fell backward through the air.

But he had been this close to her before. He had seen every law she was using at maximum effective utilization. Absolute Insight had been running continuously throughout and had catalogued the complete structural architecture of the Ice God Domain — not just what it did but exactly how and why.

His Space Law hit 45%.

He stopped falling. Held himself in the air. Extended his awareness through all sixteen laws simultaneously — not balanced, not organized, directed. All of them informed by the complete structural understanding Absolute Insight had built across the entire fight.

The Primordial Chaos Domain opened.

It did not expand gradually. It detonated outward through the enclosed space instantly, sixteen laws performing their cosmic interaction, contradiction becoming synergy, the space between them filled with something reality had no stable category for.

The Ice God Domain made contact with it.

For five seconds the two domains pressed against each other — her eight laws at 40% effective output against his sixteen laws at 40% to 45% with no effective ceiling blocking him. The ice constructs hit the chaos and their state cascaded — solid to liquid to gas to plasma to quantum probability to nothing. The time lock was overwritten by temporal chaos that moved in all directions simultaneously. The space lock was unwound by spatial law that recognized no restrictions.

The Ice God Domain dissolved.

Not destroyed. Unmade at the structural level, the chaos absorbing its principles and improving them.

Kaelith stood at the center of the dissolved domain. Blood was running from her nose, her ears, her eyes — her meridians burned from pushing past her 40% effective ceiling in the domain’s final moments, trying to force what her current soul strength could not support.

Several stray attacks leaked through the domain barriers at the peak of the exchange.

The rift outside their sealed space became something else entirely. Space cracks split the gray sky in every direction, black fractures spreading across hundreds of kilometers. The sky lit on fire — not from flame but from raw elemental law energy released uncontained, burning the atmosphere itself. The land for miles in every direction froze solid in seconds as Ice Law residuals dispersed outward, then shattered as Fire Law contradicted it, then froze again. The volcanic formations that had stood for centuries collapsed and dissolved. The entire rift’s terrain was altered in under a minute.

At the entrance fifty kilometers away, garrison monitors screamed.

Nova walked through the chaos toward her, the Primordial Chaos Domain parting around him. He stopped ten meters away.

"This battle is over," he said. "You’ve lost."

The words — delivered without cruelty — hit harder than any strike had.

Kaelith’s legs gave out. Not from physical damage — from the collapse of a certainty that had organized her entire existence across two lifetimes. Her meridians were burned. Her spirit was spent. Her mind chose oblivion over processing the impossible truth.

She fell forward.

Nova caught her. Her slight weight settled against his chest, her blood-stained face peaceful in unconsciousness.

He adjusted her onto his back and began walking. Behind him the contained space exhaled its destruction in controlled waves as both domain barriers released. Space fractures visible as black lines in the air. Temperature swinging between stellar heat and absolute zero in adjacent zones. The rift’s terrain reshaped across dozens of kilometers, scarred but not permanently broken.

"You really couldn’t handle losing," he said quietly.

No response.

He carried her toward the rift exit through a landscape that no longer resembled what they had walked into.

Rift Entrance — Garrison Command

"FULL EVACUATION! ALL PERSONNEL RETREAT IMMEDIATELY!"

The garrison commander was running. Seismic monitors showed 9.0. Dimensional stability at 23% and falling. Spatial fractures propagating across the entire rift faster than the monitoring systems could track.

Hunters abandoned equipment and ran without looking back.

"Tier 8 entities — at minimum!"

"The whole rift is reshaping! Space is breaking outside the central zone!"

"Sky is on fire! The land is frozen for miles and then shattered!"

"FORBIDDEN ZONE! THE ENTIRE RIFT IS BECOMING A FORBIDDEN ZONE!"

Nobody stayed. Everyone ran.

Tales spread that evening of two entities of incomprehensible power whose clash had scarred the dimensional fabric of an entire rift, had set the sky on fire, had frozen and shattered miles of terrain, had left space fractures visible to the naked eye across hundreds of kilometers.

None of them would ever believe the truth.

That the two entities were high school students on their first official dungeon registration dive.

One of whom was now unconscious on the other’s back, having learned the cruelest lesson a regressor could learn —

That in some timelines, anomalies existed so profound they rendered even a previous lifetime of cultivation simply insufficient.