Free Tier - Accidental Champion (Book 9) - Chapter 27 - Something Destructive

Xavier stood in the middle of the square outside Queen Aecia’s palace, thousands of dead B Grades around him. Queen Aecia was on the ground, wounded, attended by one of her A Grades. Yalia—who’d been slammed into a faraway building—was halfway into making it back to the square. Brarri, his silver spikes hovering in the air, was dealing with the remaining B Grades with the rest of Queen Aecia’s entourage.

Chronomantic Mindforge was a spell Xavier hadn’t needed to utilise in some time, and he hadn’t been sure if it would have any effect against an enemy as powerful as this one. Still, Xavier had been pushing his body, mind, and soul to their limits. The refined Celestial Energy he’d been using to transform his body most recently had made it far more powerful than when he’d faced Arrack.

If he hadn’t made all those changes, he had a sneaking suspicion that the A Grade captain’s fist hitting the back of his head would have been a killing blow.

With the spell cast, Xavier could no longer move. Perhaps it was a risk, using a time distortion spell while altering the fabric of time in such a large area, but he was more than 99 percent certain this wouldn’t have any effect on the System timer.

Xavier wasn’t the only one who couldn’t move. Everyone around him was essentially frozen in time, but unlike them his mind could still move in the previous time stream’s speed. Most A Grades and even many B Grades had the ability to speed up their minds so they could perceive what was going on while they were stuck outside a time dilation field, but this was different.

Freezing time for all but his mind wasn’t the only thing Chronomantic Mindforge did. It also gave him the ability to invade an enemy’s mind. It was considerably easier to get past a mental barrier when his mind was far faster than that of his enemy. While Xavier couldn’t take control of the A Grade captain’s mind using Chronomantic Mindforge, if the spell worked as intended, he would be able to steal the stone man’s energy straight from his cores.

And the spell had grown in power so much that he could choose which cores he drained. The enemy’s cores were even easier to target now he had access to the Immortal Soul lens, making his spiritual sense incredibly powerful.

Xavier seized his enemy’s mind within his grip, the mental barriers were there, but he found it easier than expected to break through them. They were nowhere near as tough as the man’s skin. He pinpointed the man’s Toughness Core and drew out every drop of energy he could. The spell turned the Toughness Energy into raw Celestial Energy. Xavier cultivated that energy into his own body, cycling it around his energy channels.

When he’d cast this spell, he’d thought he would only have the opportunity to drain a limited amount of the A Grade’s energy from his cores. Yet now that he’d gotten started, he could barely feel the A Grade fighting against him.

The way was clear.

Xavier was confident he could keep pumping energy out of the man’s cores until he’d drained them dry. His own cores were strong, but they weren’t quite powerful enough for him to hold onto all the energy from an A Grade’s cores.

He’d have to siphon the energy out into the air…

Wait…

Why siphon it out, when he could take advantage of it? He might not be able to cultivate it, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t utilise it…

His body frozen in time as it was, he couldn’t do what he needed for the next part of this new plan, which meant he had to deactivate Chronomantic Mindforge before his enemy’s cores became depleted. The spell went into cooldown—but wasn’t a problem for Xavier.

Cooldowns hadn’t been an issue for him in a long time.

The A Grade captain looked as dazed as Xavier had when he’d been hit in the back of the head. The tough, stone skin that made him almost impenetrable to attacks disappeared, turning his skin to normal, human flesh.

So he isn’t made of stone after all. It was just a spell…

His skin wasn’t the only thing that changed.

The man shrunk.

The A Grade captain wasn’t ten-feet tall. In fact, when he shrunk back to what must have been his normal, unenhanced size without his spells active, he wasn’t even as tall as Xavier—actually, he was shorter by at least a head.

Xavier looked down on the man. The A Grade captain had just enough time to growl—this one didn’t sound near as deep as the last—and propel himself forward as Xavier manifested two more spell patterns, activating them simultaneously.

The second of those patterns was Chronomantic Mindforge.

Xavier, the A Grade captain, and the rest of those in the square were once again frozen.

But that wasn’t all that happened.

Energy wove itself inside Xavier’s body and pocket space appeared.

Xavier once again invaded his enemy’s mind and drained the A Grade’s cores of their energy. The energy made its way into his body, flooding his channels.

Instead of siphoning the excess energy out of him, he directed it toward the pocket space—a pocket space created by Energy Transference.

The last time Xavier had used Energy Transference, it had been when he’d drawn upon the energy of two galaxies—his own Silver River, and Silver River Prime. He’d been benefiting from Territory Defence and Unity Defence. He’d also needed to use Energy Funnel in order to draw that energy into his body.

This time, he wasn’t empowered by his Defender spells, and he didn’t need to use Energy Transference as the A Grade’s energy was coming into him anyway.

He was simply able to direct that energy into the pocket space.

The pocket space didn’t merely store the energy. It was transforming it into something powerful. Something destructive.

Xavier didn’t know how well this would work. It wasn’t the same as when he’d used it against the World Destroyer. This was on a much smaller scale.

When he’d drained the last bit of energy from his enemy, Xavier cut off Chronomantic Mindforge. A dozen spell patterns were ready for him to activate. Four Spirit Breaks. Four Willpower Infusion spells. Four Core Burn spells. The A Grade captain was weak enough now that he might have been susceptible to those attacks.

Xavier didn’t activate any of them.

Instead, he did exactly what he said he wouldn’t do. He reverted to a melee strike. He flung Bones into his other hand, worried the soul bound weapon wouldn’t be powerful enough to take on this much energy, and he unleashed the energy inside the pocket space. It buzzed along his arm and pooled in his hand, which began to glow a fierce red.

Xavier curled his fingers into a fist. His wings flapped, bringing him up, then he launched himself downward at his enemy.

The A Grade captain, his cores drained, his tough stone skin disabled, raised his arms to block the strike.

Xavier slammed his fists straight through the man’s arms, blood and bits of bones scattering around, then crashed his fist into the top of the man’s head.

The man’s skull concaved as Xavier’s strike crumpled his brain.

A kill notification popped up.

The A Grade was dead.

Xavier looked at his hand, expecting it to be gone—it wasn’t.

All the skin and muscle had been burned away, revealing nothing more than the bones beneath, which had been blackened by the destructive energy.

“Huh,” Xavier said, looking at his bones. “That hurts.”

~

The corpses around Xavier glowed as they were teleported away. Xavier watched as the A Grade captain, half his head crushed inward, disappeared in a flash of light. There was a timer in the corner of his vision.

That fight had felt like it had taken a long time, but the A Grade had gone down in less than two minutes—he hadn’t received the wave reward of 5x Mastery Points, but he had gotten the 2x Mastery Points that would extend to the next wave. He’d also gained back 25 percent of his health, though it had been ticking back up on its own he was still grateful for the boost.

His hand was healing rapidly, and that health boost had only helped make that faster, though he wasn’t sure if it would be fully healed by the time the next wave arrived.

Xavier released a breath and looked over at Queen Aecia. The woman nodded back at him.

“Well,” Brarri said, gripping his staff and looking around the now-empty square. “That was a mess.”

“Only 2,998,999 more waves to go,” Xavier said in as cheery a voice as he could manage.

Brarri gave him a blank look.

Yalia clapped Xavier on the shoulder and looked at his hand. “So, why didn’t you use your sword?” She glanced at Bones. “Or… scythe?”

Xavier looked down at Bones. The soul bound weapon needed Mastery Points to advance. It hadn’t been able to keep pace with Xavier’s own strength. He had the same problem with his armour. As a C Grade, even with attributes as high as his, he couldn’t wear B or A Grade armour, or wield a weapon of a higher grade than his own

This severely limited his options.

He’d been worried for a little while now that Bones wasn’t as powerful as he needed it to be. He’d wondered, more than once, whether he’d outgrown the weapon. Even if he advanced the weapon to B Grade, A Grade, even S Grade—if such a thing existed—would that be enough when it came time to face the Interdimensional Dragon?

There were other solutions. Spells that would allow him to create weapons. The others had experimented with such spells in the past, though Xavier—having a soul bound weapon—never had.

He wondered if perhaps it was time…

“We need to prepare for the next wave,” Xavier said, changing the subject. “That was far messier than it should have been.” He cracked his neck. “We can’t be scrambling like that.”

Xavier watched the countdown. Five minutes until the next wave. As the seconds ticked away and the wheels in his mind turned, he thought about just how long he would be at this, without any opportunity for a true break.

Fifty-seven years…

He’d been excited for the challenge. Still was. But the weight of that much time and that many waves was settling onto his shoulders.

A part of his mind retreated into a mind space. Though he couldn’t change the time stream, he could make the mind space move far faster than the world around him, giving him time to think, to strategise, to run simulations. He hadn’t done this when the first wave of live enemies had arrived, but he should have.

He didn’t need time to be frozen for others to take advantage of speed of thought. All he needed was make sure he could juggle the two parts of his mind and allow one to smoothly influence the other.

The next few hundred waves went far better than that first.

Every single wave seemed to take advantage of the same shielding technology. It was a good strategy, but Xavier, Queen Aecia, and her people quickly learnt ways to efficiently take down the shields.

Xavier had expected the waves to become increasingly stronger each time, like the waves of the Endless Horde had back on the fifth floor. But that wasn’t how these waves worked. The strength of the hundred thousand B Grades seemed fairly uniform, though those B Grades varied in their classes and the strategies they chose.

What varied the most were the A Grades.

Some of the A Grades had been incredibly powerful. There was one A Grade who’d managed to push Xavier to his limit, getting him down to less than 5 percent health before Xavier had finally defeated them.

That had been close. He’d been seconds away from casting Summon Otherworldly Spirit and bringing the Spirit of Time into the mix.

But in the end, that hadn’t been necessary.

There were also some A Grades that went down like they were nothing more than peak B Grades. The fastest he’d taken an A Grade captain out during those first 500 live waves was in less than ten seconds.

The challenge was still there for him. The waves were varied enough that he couldn’t always use the same approach against each of them. Some of the A Grades were susceptible to Chronomantic Mindforge, while some of them were not. There were even some A Grades that had almost been strong enough to take over the minds of Queen Aecia and her entourage, to the point where they’d been disabled from fighting in those waves.

One A Grade captain had been close to taking over Xavier’s mind.

That hadn’t gone well for them in the end.

Though the waves weren’t getting stronger linearly, he did notice a shift once he hit the 2,000th wave—which to him, was technically the 1,000th wave, as he’d taken care of the first 1,000 in space above Galadsea.

The shift wasn’t what he’d been expecting—he’d thought one of the enemy Champions would finally join the match, but that hadn’t been the case.

What had happened instead was that the wave appeared somewhere completely different… all the way on the other side of Galadsea.

The System—traitorous thing that it was—hadn’t even announced this change. The normal notification had popped up:

The 1,000th wave of the Empire of Servitude’s army has arrived.

Yet the square had remained completely empty.

It wasn’t until Xavier felt a flare in his spiritual sense from the other side of the planet that he realised what was going on. He’d been about to open a portal when two notifications popped up in swift succession.

A Portal Lock has been activated for the entire world of Galadsea. This lock will be in place for 60 minutes and affect anyone at A Grade or below.

A Teleportation Lock has been activated for the entire world of Galadsea. This lock will be in place for 60 minutes and affect anyone at A Grade or below.

Xavier swore, turning to Queen Aecia. “They’re on the other side of the planet.”