Xavier didn’t wait for Queen Aecia’s response.
He leapt upward, wings flapping, and flew toward where the enemies had appeared. Already, he could see the havoc they were wreaking on the other side of the planet.
Thousands of civilians were being slaughtered in seconds.
And that damned voice—the voice that hadn’t sounded in his mind since he came back under Galadsea’s shields—sounded in his mind.
SURRENDER OR DIE.
It wasn’t only sounding in his mind. It was sounding in the minds of everyone on the planet. With The All-Seeing Eye, he spotted Denizens falling to their knees, putting their hands together as though in prayer. These weren’t a powerful people compared to the empire. Though many were B Grade, they couldn’t take on the A Grade captain in their midst.
Despite the Teleportation Lock and the Portal Lock, Xavier manifested several different spells and tried to somehow circumvent the locks—but it wasn’t to be.
Perhaps he could figure it out in time, but time was no longer on his side.
Thousands were dying and the only way he could get to them was by flying. Even as he flew, he infused his body with as much Speed Energy as he could take. Reality Energy already cycled through his channels, but he drew more from that core and burned it, giving his body a temporary boost that shot him around the planet.
He could have burned more, but that would have been a mistake. The Portal Lock and the Teleportation Lock would last for 60 minutes. Through the next five waves, each of which could very well turn up on opposite sides of the planet.
Xavier needed to pace himself.
This is how they’re going to do it. This is how they’re going to have multiple waves active on the planet at once. They’re going to spread them out…
Xavier was fast. Incredibly so. But Galadsea was massive—a much larger planet than even post-integration Earth. It took him five minutes to make his way to where the 2,000th Empire of Servitude wave had arrived. But he hadn’t been idle while he’d flown. The majority of his spells had an incredibly large range.
The problem was, most of those spells didn’t move all that much faster than him. The Soul Apparitions that had taken flight when he’d cast Soul Strike only outpaced him by a minute or so. Still, those had been enough to take down at least half of the one-hundred-thousand B Grade soldiers that had been tearing through the civilians in the area, killing without discrimination and performing other unspeakable acts—acts that made him wish he could kill them twice.
Xavier had pinpointed the A Grade captain.
The woman was a red-skinned demonkin with horns that had been filed down to sharp points and enchanted piercings covering almost every inch of her face. She had a flail in one hand and an axe in the other. The flail had the ability to extend a great distance, and she swung it about her, cutting entire building in half, killing anyone too weak to survive such a thing.
Xavier had sent spells after that woman, but none of them had gotten past the purple, glowing personal shield that stuck to her like a second skin.
Soul Strike wasn’t what it used to be.
The woman was laughing as the screams around her sounded. She didn’t seem to care when someone shouted their surrender. If they were in her way, they died as swift a death as those that had been running away or ineffectually fighting back.
Five minutes was a frighteningly long time to take to reach the wave. By the time he got there, a portion of the area that must have been as large as New York City had been reduced to a smouldering mass of destroyed building and dead bodies. The wave was scattered all over the place, hunting down civilians as though it was some kind of sport.
As soon as Xavier got close, he cast Chronomantic Mindforge.
He needed to take care of this woman as fast as he could.
And that wasn’t the only spell he’d cast. He’d also activated a variant of Chronomantic Mindforge that he’d designed himself. Something he’d come up with while fighting the last few hundred waves.
Xavier had been developing his skills over the last nine-hundred-and-ninety-nine waves. Without the ability to lock himself in his own time stream and effectively freeze his enemies, he’d needed to reacquaint himself with combat.
He’d needed to revolutionise the way he fought.
Otherwise, when those parties of enemy A Grade champions started to enter the mix, he might very well not be strong enough to take them down.
On his way here, Xavier had taken down roughly half of the B Grade soldiers in the wave. Fifty thousand remained. His Soul Strike spell, and his ability to cast it over and over without consequence, was powerful enough that he could have taken out every single one of them—the B Grades in the waves simply weren’t an obstacle for him.
Xavier had deliberately held himself back. People had died because of that.
But he’d had his reasons.
When he’d homed in on the A Grade captain, looking past her veil with his Immortal Soul lens, he’d found that she was the most powerful of all the A Grades he’d faced. He couldn’t tell much more about her, or what her spells were, other than by simply observing her, but seeing how strong she was he knew he needed to use every advantage he could.
The original Chronomantic Mindforge only worked against a single enemy.
The spell he’d adapted worked on multiple enemies—as many as he could target, as long as they were in range.
And Xavier’s range on this new spell extended to the entire planet.
The only limiting factor on how many enemies he’d could target was how powerful he was. And after all the modifications he’d made to his body, mind, and soul, he was powerful enough for this.
Xavier, a few hundred metres from his enemy now, was frozen in time. Everyone on the entire planet was. His mind still worked, and the energy he pulled at wasn’t restricted by the time distortion. He targeted all fifty thousand of the remaining B Grade soldiers with the altered Chronomantic Mindforge spell.
With the original Chronomantic Mindforge spell, he targeted the A Grade captain.
He shoved past the protections of fifty thousand different minds and pulled the energy from every one of their cores. The energy flowed through the air, shooting toward him from every angle, like thousands of spokes with him at the centre.
The A Grade captain’s mind was the only one that resisted.
If Xavier could have moved, he would have gritted his teeth, even though he’d expected the woman to be able to resist this spell, considering how powerful she’d felt. That was why he’d left half her B Grade soldiers alive in the first place.
The energy from those fifty thousand B Grades made its way into the pocket space inside him, a pocket space created by the other spell he’d cast—Energy Transference.
When every last ounce of energy he could take from his enemies had reached him, Xavier was ready.
Xavier deactivated the altered version of Chronomantic Mindforge. The energy bubbled up inside him, begging to be released from the pocket space. The hunger that had risen within him when he’d defeated the first crew of enemies back in space had never left.
The two impulses swirled around inside him.
He wanted to bring death upon this woman, and upon every invader from the Empire of Servitude. He wanted to launch himself right up into space and explode their ships. He wanted to travel to wherever the empire’s home world was and take out whatever emperor or empress ruled such a terrible place.
Most of all, in that moment, he hungered for the destruction of the System.
If not for the System, the people of Galadsea would have been safe. Their entire world had been hidden from enemies. It had been the System who’d ratted out their location to the Empire of Servitude. But even having their location, the empire’s armada should never have been able to make it through their shielding.
Every death wasn’t merely on the soldiers, or the commanders who’d given them the order.
It was on the System.
And now the System was allowing the invaders’ waves to turn up anywhere on the planet?
All this conflict, all this death, and in billions upon billions of different iterations, none of it amounts to what you want.
Time flowed forward.
Before Xavier had gotten too close to the A Grade captain, when he’d still been flying toward her, he’d made sure to manifest a few other spell patterns, weaving a concealment around himself. He may feel as though he was more than a match for any A Grade captain he faced, but that didn’t mean he needed to announce his presence to the most powerful one he’d come up against yet.
He’d needed to swallow his pride to conceal himself in this manner, but that hadn’t been too hard when he’d thought about everything that was at stake.
And so, the A Grade captain was oblivious to his presence. She continued her onslaught on the surrounding area, making her way through the streets, her extendable flail crashing through one building after another, moving faster than the civilians within them could flee—especially without the ability to teleport.
Xavier dodged the swinging flail, which happened to shoot out in his direction, flying underneath it with ease. He alighted silently on the cement-equivalent ground of the millions of years’ old city, energy begging to be released.
Once again, Bones wasn’t suitable for the task. The soul bound weapon was sheathed at his side.
Over the subsequent waves, Xavier had come up with another solution.
Bones had once made his attacks far more powerful. The weapon could even shift and graft itself inside his hand, helping to extend his dragonkin claws when he chose to fight unarmed. His ability to shift the weapon into any other he wished had been an incredible boon when he’d been fighting through the descents of that first Hell Moon.
Back then, he couldn’t use Time Alteration the way he could now—he couldn’t wrap it so tight around himself that his enemies never got so much as a chance to fight back, and back then cooldowns in time dilation fields had been a real issue for him.
Melee fighting helped him use his time dilation fields to his best advantage, not having to rely so heavily on offensive spells. That experience was perhaps why he fell back on it so often.
He’d mastered various different types of melee weapons, though he often returned to the scythe and the sword, especially these days. Perhaps he’d returned to the sword so much because of Palini’s influence.
The way that man had moved with a sword… even to this day, with as far as Xavier had come, he still saw Palini as an artist, his blade his brush.
I’m sorry I failed you.
As Xavier silently approached the A Grade captain, concealed from her senses, he raised his right arm. He’d investigated several different ways to achieve what he wished—and what he wished was the ability to create his own weapon, a weapon that would always be as powerful as he was.
Energy weapons—weapons created from a Denizen’s pure energy—had been one option. A powerful option, and with Xavier’s ability to manipulate energy, it had seemed like the best thing for him.
But Xavier had pushed his mind forward, all the way to the end of the universe, to the day when he would have to face the Interdimensional Dragon. When he’d done that, he’d quickly realised making a weapon from energy against a being whose soul purpose was to consume as much energy as possible, simply wasn’t the best plan.
He didn’t want a temporary solution. He wanted something that would grow with him, right until the end. He’d thought Bones would be that, and perhaps there were ways he could return to the soul bound weapon and bring its strength on par with his own… but he wasn’t sure that would be possible.
And he wasn’t sure that was even what he wanted anymore.
So he’d done the only thing that seemed reasonable—he’d learnt to create a weapon from his own bones.
He’d used a spell from the Transformative line of classes, coupled with another spell from the Shaper line. The Transformative line gave Denizens the ability to essentially change any aspect of themselves as long as they had the required resources—often Toughness energy—to do so.
These Denizens could shift themselves into beasts, or turn their arms into blades, or all manner of other creative things Xavier had investigated. They could elongate their bones, grow more bones. They could sharpen their teeth, extend talons, or grow wings.
The Shaper line was similar, in a way, except they had the ability to transform things outside themselves. Some of them had the ability to shape living things—alter an enemy’s structure, turn an enemy beast into an enslaved ally, and make that beast more docile or ferocious. They could alter things around them, shaping any object into any manner of thing.
With Xavier’s right arm raised, he initiated a manifested spell pattern to grow his forearm bones—the radius and the ulna. He bent his wrist back. The growing bones shot through the bottom of his palm. He grew them until they were as long as hand-and-a-half sword, then he detached the bones from his forearm and curled his fingers around them in a tight grip.
Even as he gripped the bones, he was Shaping them, turning them into the sword he envisioned, creating a cross guard, sharpening the blade.
The wound in his hand from where the bones had grown through healed swiftly.
The whole process had taken maybe half a second.
With the sword formed, he channelled the energy from the pocket space into it. The bone-sword glowed with destructive power. Had he done this with Bones, the soul bound weapon would have crumbled trying to take on so much energy. As it was, he could feel where the bones struggled to handle it, but they were as strong as any of his other bones.
And they were strong enough for this.
Xavier closed the gap and swung the bone-sword at the A Grade captain’s neck.