Weapons of Mass Destruction-Chapter 582: Absolute Candidate

Ruby is just as I remember her. She looks barely over twenty, with long red hair and yellow eyes marked by a strange sort of complex pattern. Her skin is slightly paler than the average person, and she wears clothing similar to the sort of things Absolute Lissandra of the 2nd floor used to wear, sleek, suit-like attire more suited to men than women. Like all the avatars I've seen, she shows no emotion. There's simply no life behind those eyes.

The moment both of us appear, my eyes flare into full activation, and I trigger all my passives and prepare my defenses against someone 50 levels lower than me.

Absolute Candidate Ruby moves first, even as I set up my defenses. She manipulates her mana with seemingly incredible ease, and her skill activates before I can grasp its structure, seemingly further powering the domain she’s deployed. That domain presses in against me, greedily enveloping my mana and stealing it away.

It only stops when my own [Mana Domain] seeps past the borders of my skin and Mana Wavelength Tyrant activates, claiming the surrounding mana for myself. But the pull remains, ready to take my mana the moment my concentration slips.

My mana surges as an unseen attack hits my barrier, shattering it in an instant. It slices into the side of my neck, nearly severing my head.

Ruby herself vanishes from where she stood.

I track the leftover mana to locate her and succeed in following its trail. However, she isn’t there. It’s a fake signature meant to confuse me, and so are the other’s she’s created.

Without any warning, something hits me from the left, breaking through my layered barriers and sending me rolling across the ground.

I use Wraith Step a few times and try to rely on my mana senses again, but I quickly realize a field surrounds me, spreading a jamming effect meant to throw them off. It feels like trying to find a feather lost in a hurricane.

Switching to kinetic and thermal senses, I move across the battleground, doing my best to dodge her attacks until I finally pinpoint her location. My Ley Lines spread through the area, and [Eclipse] erupts, pushing against the field and draining the color from everything nearby. I reach out to teleport to her, but all of my Ley Lines fray into nothingness as if they were fuses bursting into flame.

Ruby, standing a mile away at the top of a hill, creates a huge number of mana projectiles and sends them flying out in front of her. The air itself in front of them weaves and twists, and the projectiles teleport through and re-materialize about an arm’s length in front of me.

[Eclipse] hums with the mana powering it, and I barely manage to tear through the swarm of projectiles. With great effort, I expand it as far as I can, finally breaking the field surrounding the area.

I boost myself high into the air and then further boost myself to fly toward where Ruby is.

She takes a step and disappears, reappearing two miles away.

I locate her immediately because she has a huge amount of mana gathering over a lifted hand. Flying in that direction, I observe the structure and prepare my countermeasures. Instead of Ley Lines, I create a set of marks on my mana projectiles and launch them in all directions.

But even now, I don’t have enough time. Ruby finishes her attack at blinding speed and waves her hand.

And nothing happens for a few seconds.

During that pause, I reach her and she doesn’t move away, likely to avoid overusing her skill and preventing me from understanding her methods.

I radiate more mana from my body as Mana Wavelength Tyrant presses against the area, bending the mana particles within to my will. My heart thumps, strengthening my body and gathering kinetic energy for a possible escape.

I weave an [Empyrean Lance] and shoot it ahead while deploying [Eclipse] in her direction.

Even so, she allows it to proceed.

Just before my lance would pierce her head, she activates her skill; the space in front of her wavers, and my lance appears at my back, flying at the same speed, nearly piercing me with my own attack.

I barely dodge it, and then the skill she used earlier reactivates. The remnants of her field in the distance change and implode in on themselves, creating an audible pop followed by an immense pull that uproots trees, destroys the nearby hill, and still manages to have an effect on the two of us from a mile away and warping our surroundings.

It creates a small dark center around which the space itself seems unstable.

With all my strength, I push against it and teleport away, but the process gets disrupted as the landing point is forced into the center of the collapsed field.

I force my mind into overdrive, and my mana bursts out. At the cost of damage to my heart and brain, I manage to shift the direction of the teleport mid-cast.

Even then, Ruby is already there, waiting for me.

Up close, a barrage of projectiles slams into my barrier, dissolving into mana particles as I disrupt them.

She gathers the particles and moves them like drifting sand caught in a storm, sending them crashing against my barrier in steady waves. They swirl and grind away at it until I release a powerful burst of kinetic energy to force them back.

I charge at her, but she teleports away again, and I track her more quickly than before, covering the remaining distance with Wraith Dance. I launch a barrage of projectiles in her direction along with two tricolored orbs, yet once again, the air in front of her wavers, and all of them reappear at my back. Even now, I cannot grasp the structure of the skill she’s employed.

Protected by my barrier, I launch myself away from the explosion and soar high into the air. As I rise, I extend more Ley Lines throughout the area, firing projectiles marked for teleportation.

For a moment, I look toward the area where she collapsed her field. A mile wide patch of forest has been totally destroyed, with no tree left standing and no hill untouched.

Ruby gives me no time to rest, keeping up the pressure with skills that activate almost in an instant, paired with the constant, shifting flow of her mana. Her eyes study me just as I study her, and she counters with an ease that can only come from many thousands of hours of practice.

Her projectiles shatter my barrier, a wave of disruption hits me, and I am certain that without my passives and skills, she would have completely disrupted my mana or stolen it all away.

Each attack is fast, precise, and hits with force. No matter how much mana I pour into defense, she keeps pushing me back, causing serious problems, all while using only a fraction of what I'm spending.

I pull all my mana back into my body and send some of it through my heart to convert it into kinetic energy. At the same time, I allow the seal around the Ignition Heart to lift slightly, and golden flames begin to surround me. They crash out from my body, from the exhaust nodes on my palms, the soles of my feet, and the one on my back. These flames gather under my control, forming a circle of rotating fire behind me.

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Ruby moves again to put distance between us, but I continue to track her even as she sets up fake signatures to misdirect me. She weaves them in a second, yet each of these signatures is more accurate than anything the twins together could hope to perform.

I catch up to her, launching a laser-thin stream of flames in her direction.

A single pale blue barrier forms in front of her, and the flame stream strains against it. I maintain the flame and continue to increase its output; the point of contact causes the barrier to heat up, taking the color from pale blue to light red as the heat spreads outward. Yet, the feeble looking barrier still holds.

I let the mana in my crown destabilize, and a disruptive attack explodes through the area, breaking the barrier as the stream of flames continues toward her head. But once the main force of the disruptive attack fades, she weaves another barrier that stops the flame in the same manner.

I repeat the process, and so does she. A few barriers finally break, even as she continues to refine them as I focus on my own disruption, until the flame lies stopped, just a hand’s breadth away from the center of her forehead. Nevertheless, she continues building up another skill in the background, and so do I.

This time, though, I don’t bother to disrupt the barrier. Instead, I release all the flames I had been collecting and move them around me as they pulse out in waves toward her, turning trees to ash and the ground to lava.

Ruby then disappears through her teleportation, but this time I’m successful in tracking it and look up, finding her standing high up in the air.

After all that preparation, a single mana projectile floats over the palm of her hand as she lifts it high. A transparent, pale blue lance shoots toward me. It glitters in the air as it heads down, gradually increasing in speed.

The mana I had gathered inside my body compresses and seeps out, touching my [Mana Crown], which turns black and immediately demands all my focus to maintain control. I shape more of that mana into a black orb and send it flying out ahead, along the path of the pale blue lance.

The world quiets, and the colors lose their vibrancy as the lance reaches the orb.

The lance cuts through it with ease at first. It nearly escapes the pull of the orb before the orb begins to tear apart. But the black mana left behind swirls and consumes. It spins, and its pull drags on the pale blue lance, slowing it down until it stops completely. Blue particles peel away, drawn into the orb until the lance breaks apart entirely.

The black orb expands, growing to the size of my fist, constantly compressing and expanding as if it were fighting to devour the mana around it.

Behind me, Ruby appears, and the palm of her hand moves to strike my back.

Tearing my muscles to move faster, I react by coating the palm of my hand with black mana to meet her blow. That black mana absorbs the deadly attack she hurls at me, but even so, the bones in my hand crack, and some of the attack pierces into my body.

She tries to teleport away, but I empower [Eclipse] with black mana, fully draining the colors from the area in an instant.

For the first time, her teleportation fails. Using kinetic energy, I launch an attack at a speed I’m sure would’ve even caught Tacita off guard.

But Ruby reacts in time and ducks with a swiftness I never thought she could possess. She uses her mana to strengthen her body with such precision that I start to wonder if facing her at close range was the more dangerous option. But I can see the cost, the tears in her skin, and the twitching of torn muscles.

Her red hair floats through the air as she dodges my series of attacks, only to be caught off guard by Needle Point piercing her foot and causing her to stagger.

Even though my [Eclipse], powered by black mana, disrupts all mana outside her body, that monster still manages to form a skin-tight barrier just in time. It holds against the full force of my golden flames and the blast of kinetic energy that rips through the forest like a living thing.

Trees are torn from the ground and flung aside like broken spears, their trunks split and scattered through the winds. The blast churns up the soil, carving deep gouges into the earth, sending shattered roots and debris flying in every direction. The heat rolls out in waves, warping the air and reducing everything in its path to scorched ruin.

And still, at the heart of it, she stands untouched.

Her body isn’t even damaged, nor has she been moved so much as an inch, and she moves with incredible speed once more, tearing more of her muscles in the process. She touches my hand before I can react, and a pulse travels through my body, disrupting my mana and deactivating all my skills for a moment.

She uses that moment to teleport away, leaving behind a tricolored orb on the verge of destabilization and ready to explode. And I note that she managed to recreate it after seeing me use it just once.

I know that if I let her escape now, things will only grow more dangerous. I am certain she will deploy countermeasures to prevent me from closing in again.

My Mana Wavelength Iris activates to the highest degree. One of my eyes almost popping like a squeezed grape as I read the remnants of her teleport and all the countermeasures or traps she left behind.

I resonate with it and pull as much mana into my body as I can. I break through some of the traps while ignoring others, trusting that I will survive their impact.

I follow through and appear on the other side, the black mana I sent ahead absorbing Ruby's attack. Still, a few projectiles slip through before the black mana can consume them, piercing my body as if my defenses, combined with Mana Wavelength Tyrant and disruption, weren’t even there.

Regardless, I strengthen my body, even as blood spurts from my torn chest and back. I grab the black mana in front of me and form it into a dagger. With all my effort, I stop another attempt at teleportation. Even with a 50-level advantage, I have to use the full force of my mana to pull it off.

Then, I drive the black dagger into her arm.

Up close, the pattern in her yellow eyes glows as her face moves slightly closer to mine.

Feeling a sharp pain, I glance down and see her hand coated in pale blue mana piercing through my chest and exiting on the other side. In that same hand, she holds my Ignition Heart, its heat burning her hand until only the bones of her fingers remain.

But she sends a pulse of mana into the heart and squeezes. It destabilizes as the seals unravel beneath her mana, and a moment later, the heart explodes.

As if in slow motion, I watch the flames surge toward me. A roaring mass of heat and fury, intense enough to erase everything in its path. A force neither of us can survive.

She tries to teleport away, pushing against the black mana to some extent. She nearly activates her skill until I add disruption to the mix, barely managing to stop her.

I strengthen my body with that same black mana, lean back, and then swing forward to smash my forehead against hers, literally exploding her head.

I can only breathe out slowly, feeling my skull crack and blood flow down my forehead as I reach toward the flames erupting from the heart. Even though I know I don’t have a single chance of stopping them, I attempt to do so. With my eyes wide open, I watch as parts of my body gradually vanish in the heat. It doesn’t even burn; there are no ashes left in its wake. Anything it touches is simply gone.

The flames burn so intensely that they melt mana itself.

My [Focus] consolidates and nothing else matters with all my attention driven to that single task.

And for the briefest split of a second, I succeed. The heat and the flames slow down for the shortest moment, and notifications ring in my head just as they did during the fight. For that short, beautiful moment, I can think of nothing but that huge ball of thermal energy.

But then the moment is gone, and the flames surge to devour me.

"Stop." A single word sounds, and the flames halt.

A field forms around me, and the sensation of being completely cut off from the outside world sinks in. Then, in a blink, my body is fully restored. The sealed Ignition Heart is back in my chest, my mana returns, and the area around me repairs itself.

And yet I'm also cut off from the tournament floor, and I’m certain now that no one is watching my challenge anymore.

Ruby’s avatar body, which should have disintegrated into particles the moment I defeated her, stands back up despite its headless state. Her head regenerates, just as my body did, and the avatar stands a few steps away.

And that same avatar, meant only to defeat me and never show emotion, smiles. ƒreewebɳovel.com

Then she says, "It’s quite rude to headbutt a lady, Nathaniel."