Tier 3+ - Accidental Champion (Book 10) - Chapter 8 - The Grandest Army in the Multiverse

That’s it?

The thought permeated through all two thousand minds of the currently connected entity that was Xavier 1 through Xavier 2,000.

The lure had worked. Jhanku had taken the bait. Actually, he’d taken it a hell of a lot easier than Xavier had expected him too. It was incredibly obvious that they were leading the S Grade demonkin into a trap, and yet the billions of years old leader of ten thousand sectors had smiled as he accepted the challenge, then floated straight through the portal seemingly without a worry in the universe.

Though the Xaviers had felt a slight, inexplicable hint of fear from the demonkin, something that had disappeared just as fast as it had come.

When Jhanku had arrived in the outskirts of Xavier’s ten-sector wide empire, he’d found himself stuck outside Xavier’s time dilation field. The Xaviers could have struck then. They’d had ample opportunity. But they could feel something moving inside the S Grade. A spell of some kind, one they didn’t recognise.

And they were curious.

They wanted to see the spell form. There was something familiar about it, even though it was one they didn’t recognise. The energy that made it felt almost like… a song. It was similar to a song he’d heard before—the song the System sang when he’d advanced. The song that controlled the very universe itself.

Except this one hadn’t been near as strong as that song. How could it be?

Still, the similarities were enough to spark their curiosity, so the Xaviers had tilted their heads and, with the use of their Immortal Soul lens amplified two-thousand-times, they examined the spell as its energies took form. It was foolish to let a powerful enemy continue casting a spell when you had the opportunity to interrupt them, but gathered together as they were, with the power of all their sectors behind them, this simply didn’t feel foolish at all.

Even Roln didn’t warn them against doing this. The mental construct apparently didn’t see the harm.

In the time the spell formed, the Xaviers took precautions. Each of them summoned two thousand drones, expanding the time dilation field to fit all of them. Four million drones hovered there, flapping their wings. The Xaviers surveyed them.

We’re an army all by ourselves. The grandest army in the multiverse.

When the spell had formed, and they’d learnt as much as they wanted from it, they had the drones—all acting perfectly in sync with the connected Xaviers minds—scatter the spell’s energy. The Xaviers had worried that wouldn’t be enough, or thought maybe that the drones would need to use their entire Soul Energy reserves to accomplish such a thing. But they hadn’t needed to worry. It was enough. More than enough. Each of the many drones only used up a fraction of their Soul Energy to accomplish the task.

They could scatter the S Grade’s spells a hundred times over. Actually, they could scatter them almost indefinitely, as they could always summon more drones. They hadn’t even needed to draw upon the power of their empires to accomplish what they’d just done… but if they did, that would only make it easier.

And they’d learnt a thing or two about how the spell worked when it formed. Using their combined intellect coupled with their combined mental constructs’ help, the Xaviers were able to decipher exactly what the spell did.

The spell, like all spells, was able to alter reality, but this one would have taken a more direct approach. The Xaviers had learnt a lot about how spell worked. That spells used the language of the universe—runes—to alter reality. They’d learnt to create spell patterns with a stylus a long time ago, and now they could manifest spell patterns in an instant without the use of a stylus, creating them inside their bodies rapidly, effectively enabling them to cast any spell they wished. Not only that, the Xaviers had learnt how to alter and create spell patterns on the fly, which meant they could basically make anything they wished happen.

But there was something different about this spell. The spell the S Grade had cast.

The Xaviers weren’t exactly sure what that difference was, but they wanted to find out. The mental construct, despite having vast amounts of knowledge from many, many universes, hadn’t encountered this particular type of spell before, and though the construct was well-versed in runes, the dead Wanderer had never had as strong an interest in them as Xavier.

Thus, this was something new to both of them. The more they examined it, the more they realised if they’d let the spell play out it would have torn their incredibly powerful time dilation field to shreds.

The Xaviers smiled.

This fight, this move against Jhanku, wasn’t happening how they’d imagined it would. In their minds, they’d expected an epic battle. They’d expected the S Grade ruler of ten thousand sectors, one of the ten most powerful beings in this universe, to be… more.

And yet outside their time dilation field the man’s body was completely frozen, and the one spell he had managed to get off—a spell they’d allowed him to cast, waiting several hours to do so—had been completely ineffectual.

The danger they’d imagined coming from this encounter had been just that, imagined.

Even knowing how far they’d come, even knowing all they’d managed to do, it was hard to believe.

Of course, just because the S Grade demonkin wasn’t posing a threat to them in this moment didn’t mean he wouldn’t. It would be foolish to count this as a victory while the man still lived.

But instead of an epic battle, the Xaviers found something else—a puzzle.

How were they going to extract the spell patterns out of the S Grade’s mind, so they could learn more about these strange spellsongs the man was capable of casting?

There was a part of the Xaviers that wondered if he should leave the S Grade demonkin alive. Xavier was, after all, trying to unite the universe for the greater good. And if he left the demonkin alive, he might be able to learn from him, but it was only a very small part that thought this way.

The Xaviers together might be incredibly powerful, but each Xavier alone… they wouldn’t be able to enforce their rule over an S Grade once the others had returned to their own universes, let alone one of the ten most powerful beings in their universe. Not yet, anyway.

And what, would they start teaching this demonkin how to use their abilities, just as they taught every other citizen in their empire?

It would be far too dangerous. We’re not ready to have people this strong join our empire—not until we’re A Grade, or even S Grade ourselves.

Not only that, they’d promised himself—and others—that they’d get revenge against Jhanku for Palini’s death. Leaving the man alive... that simply wasn’t an option.

We have left murderers alive. We have forgiven the actions of many who’ve done terrible things when they’ve entered our empires, absolved them of their past. Does killing this man make us a hypocrite?

Perhaps it did, but if they were honest, the Xaviers didn’t much care about that.

The Xaviers, already confident that they’d won this fight, confident they’d be able to kill the S Grade demonkin when the time came, decided it was time to see just how powerful they were.

They pulled on a fraction of the power from the combined twenty thousand sectors they ruled, throwing it all into a single spell, just as they’d done with the time dilation field.

This time, however, the spell they chose was Willpower Infusion.

Powerful purple energy thrust outward from Xavier 1. Willpower Energy usually came out in thin strands. The energy from this spell flowed out in thickly woven ropes that swam through space, reaching right up to the edge of the time dilation field where it was stopped, unable to continue into normal space.

Xavier expanded the time dilation field, inch by inch, until it was almost touching the S Grade. Then, he created a secondary time dilation field, one that he pushed to encompass the S Grade. This one was only a fraction of the speed as the one he was inside, but it would mean he’d only have to wait roughly a week or so for the Willpower Energy to touch the S Grade, rather than an eternity.

There was, of course, a faster way that he could have done this, but as powerful as the Xaviers were feeling, there was no way they were going to risk letting the S Grade enter into their time dilation field. They hadn’t done that while they’d been hovering over Dostril, either, it had only appeared that way to Jhanku.

Back then, they’d used a drone as the lure, a drone in a slower, secondary time dilation field to the main, more powerful one. There had never been any true risk to their own lives in that gambit, as they’d been hidden away and totally concealed from detection.

The Xaviers were well aware that though they were powerful as an interconnected entity and safe within their time dilation field, Jhanku’s scattered spellsong had been more than strong enough to shatter their time dilation field. And if he could shatter that, he could likely kill them just as easily.

Though if he had shattered that time dilation field, we could have had another one spring up in an instant…

Still, the Xaviers weren’t totally insane. There were some risks they would take, and some risks they weren’t fool enough to even consider.

The week passed slowly. At first, all the Xaviers felt was an intense amount of anticipation. As the time ticked by, and kept ticking by, with nothing happening, that anticipation waned until it was barely a part of their consciousness. As they hovered there, what they were doing—what they were able to do—continued to sink in.

They’d entered this battle with one of the most powerful beings in the universe knowing they would win—or at least being 99.99 percent confident of that fact—as they wouldn’t have done it, otherwise. And yet, it still felt like an incredible surprise just how effective they were, and just how little of a threat this Jhanku really was to them now.

They remembered the fear they’d felt after they’d challenged the rest of the universe, after they’d defeated the World Destroyer in a single punch. And yet doing so had been wholly justified, hadn’t it?

The Xaviers hadn’t even needed to push to A Grade to do what they were about to do.

Eventually, the week passed, and the thick ropes of Willpower Energy had, agonisingly slowly, pushed through Jhanku’s nose, his ears, his eyes, his mouth, breaking its way through the man’s skull and into his brain, until it came up against the strongest mental barrier the Xaviers had ever encountered. A mental barrier that Xavier could never have hoped to break through.

But Xavier wasn’t alone.

With the psychic link he shared with the nineteen-hundred-and-ninety-nine other versions of him, he combined the power of their minds to not only knock on the doors of the S Grade Jhanku’s mind, but to break those doors down and walk straight through them.

It was time to see what kind of secrets were held in the demonkin’s head.