Free Tier - Accidental Champion (Book 9) - Chapter 51 - Corrupt Power Source

Xavier hovered in the vacuum of space, surrounded by four thousand C Grade drones. Though those drones weren’t as powerful as Xavier had been when he’d reached the peak of C Grade, they were getting closer.

Ten, maybe even as few as five, of the drones would be strong enough to take on a single A Grade.

And the drones were more than powerful enough to take down the enemy spaceship’s shields.

But Xavier didn’t need them to take down the spaceship’s shields. In fact, right now, he didn’t really need them for anything. They were simply there for insurance. In case what he did next failed.

He was facing the armada. To gain B Grade, he’d taken down hundreds of thousands of those ships. And, honestly, he’d lost count along the way. But at least two million of those ships remained. Taking them down would gain him a considerable amount of Mastery Points, but he was already well aware that even doing that wouldn’t get him even halfway to A Grade.

Which he thought was immensely disappointing.

Still, he couldn’t expect to rocket straight to A Grade just after he’d reached B Grade. And he certainly couldn’t expect to gain two advancements on a single floor of the Tower of Champions. Even if it was a floor as crazy as this one was.

Xavier released a long breath inside his Force Armour. He rolled his head around his shoulders, cracking his neck, readying his mind for what he was about to do.

Up until now, the only way he’d taken down one of these ships was by making a hole in their shielding, slipping through, and taking out the crew in that massive room they huddled in.

Now he was B Grade, he wanted to speed up the process.

He just had to test if it would actually work.

As Xavier had taken his time to train and get used to his new advancement, he’d also been further refining his use of spell patterns. Up until now, his method of taking out the spaceship’s powerful shields had required the use of a large amount of Soul Energy and his Immortal Soul lens, which allowed him to manipulate energy outside himself at the smallest of levels. He could simply scatter the energy that made up the shield, creating a hole in it that his time dilation field prevented the rest of the shield’s energy from filling fast enough.

While that method was incredibly effective, he’d been trying to come up with a different way to deal with the shields. Something that would short-circuit them without having to use Soul Energy at all. Soul Energy took a good while to replenish, and while that wasn’t much of a concern when it came to his drones, he was hoping he could find a more straightforward method of breaking these shields down.

He called the spell he’d come up with to deal with this problem Battering Ram. He was sure there would be other spells that had already gained that name but frankly he didn’t much care.

Battering Ram worked in almost the exact same way as how he’d been taking the shields out in the first place. He’d used the frameworks of several different spells to make this one work—and, well, he didn’t actually know yet if it did work. So far, he’d only tested it in simulations within his mind.

There, of course, it had worked perfectly.

“Now comes the moment of truth,” Xavier muttered.

He manifested the spell pattern and cast Battering Ram. Energy coalesced in the vacuum in front of him. When he’d created the spell, he’d realised he could make the energy that appeared look like anything he wished. Normally, all he’d really focus on was the function of a spell and not how the spell looked. He didn’t tend to be one for the theatrical.

But something had taken over him as he’d created this spell, and he couldn’t help himself.

The energy that coalesced took the form of a massive dragon. He grinned as the dragon took shape. It was as large as the ships themselves, and it was made from pure Celestial Energy.

It needed to be, if it was going to cancel out the energy within those shields.

Xavier’s grin widened as the dragon flew through the vacuum of space and slammed into the first shield. The “dragon” had its own time dilation field as part of the spell, which meant it functioned on an entirely different time stream to the rest of the universe. This allowed it to move faster than should have been possible.

It was the first time he’d thought to incorporate a time distortion in a spell he’d created, even though he’d seen it done before in spells like Chronomantic Mindforge.

The dragon didn’t slam through the shield so much as flow through it. It reminded him very much of the first time he’d used Soul Strike against those Dark Wyverns all the way back on one of the first Tower of Champion floors.

God, he remembered just how powerful he’d felt back then.

He had been nothing compared to what he was now.

Every part of the shield the dragon touched disintegrated. The dragon flowed through the ship, not harming the physical structure in any way, and came out the other side, disintegrating the rest of the shield on its way.

The Battering Ram spell continued to flow through space, cutting through ten ships before it finally fizzled out. When it had, Xavier clapped his hands together and laughed delightedly.

Then, he manifested more Battering Ram spells.

Xavier watched in awe of himself as in mere moments the shields that had protected well over a million of the remaining Empire of Servitude’s spaceships were disabled. Such a feat would have been impossible when he was C Grade.

I wonder what else I’m capable of now…

He rubbed his hands together, then spread his arms wide as he manifested another spell he’d created for the purpose of taking out these ships. He’d spent a good little while studying these ships, considering how many he’d boarded since he’d returned to space after those four dragonkin had completed their transformation into the S Grade True Dragon. Each ship had what he’d come to think of as a “core,” a place where they stored all their energy, and just like any other core he was sure he could come up with a way to manipulate it.

Xavier already had a spell called Core Burn, one he’d gained long ago as a boon from the System. Technically the ships’ cores weren’t cores in the same sense as the ones that Denizens and other beings held. They were nowhere near as sophisticated as the natural Denizen cores or the artificial cores Xavier had created.

But they were still incredibly complex power sources.

All he needed to do was corrupt that power…

He smiled as he cast the spell he’d created. Still not being terribly good at naming things, he’d called the spell Corrupt Power Source. This corruption could work in a small way, if he wished. For instance, it could prevent the ship’s core from powering its shield, making it remain defenceless even if Xavier’s time dilation field became inactive. This, he theorised, could come in handy in a multitude of ways.

But that wasn’t the way he intended to use it today.

Energy coalesced in the vacuum of space, taking the form of several dozen spikes. These spikes shot forth, each hurtling toward a different one of the enemy’s spaceships. The spikes froze along their way as they reached the very edges of his time dilation field. Xavier expanded his time dilation field, pushing it toward one of the enemy ships. The closest one.

To test if this spell worked, he would need to bring the enemy ship into his time dilation field too. With time moving forward again for the ship, its shields could be reactivated—but not before the spike reached the ship’s core.

He focused on the spike heading toward the nearest ship, expanding his time dilation field incrementally, and watched as it phased through the ship’s hull, then through several different compartments and hallways, until it finally came to the ship’s centre and slammed into its core.

The energy within the ship’s core was instantly destabilised. The complex equilibrium that had been struck faltered in the smallest of ways, setting off a cascading event.

Just as the time dilation field expanded enough to envelope the entirety of the ship, making the crew inside that ship aware of surrounding events, the ship core’s energy exploded. In that instant, every single Denizen—the A Grade captain along with all one-hundred-thousand B Grade Denizens—aboard the Empire of Servitude’s ship were connected to the ship’s core, funnelling their energy toward it so they could power its shield.

And not only its shield, but the ship’s beam weapon—that was why those beams were so damned powerful.

But, as Xavier has suspected, with the power inside their ship’s core corrupted, they weren’t able to fire the beam in the fraction of a second before the core’s explosion engulfed the ship in its entirety.

Xavier titled his head to one side as he watched the ship explode. The smile he’d been wearing as the spell’s energy coalesced in the air only widened as he reaped the souls of those who’d been on board. Countless kill notifications assailed his vision, and he let them come before finally disabling notifications.

The explosion was moving fast. Really fast. Fast enough that he had to contract his time dilation field back around himself so the explosion’s wave wouldn’t stretch toward him.

That was something he’d been wary about. He knew just how much damage an A Grade Denizen’s core could make when it exploded, and these ship cores held far more energy that those. If he wasn’t careful, he’d get himself killed by exploding these ship cores.

Inside his Force Armour, hovering there in space, Xavier released a long breath.

He would need to execute a degree of caution for this next step.

He glanced over his shoulder, down at the planet Galadsea, and wondered just how far these explosions would spread. Would they be large enough to reach the shields? Even if they were, Xavier doubted those shields could be taken out by the explosion’s force…

Slowly flapping his wings, he made sure he wasn’t going to take that on faith. The beam weapons might not have been strong enough to take down the shields, but these explosions were a different animal.

Xavier created a second time dilation field, one that functioned significantly slower than the one he currently inhabited. This way he would be able to watch in the safety of his own field as the events played out and could easily disable the second field if something went wrong.

It also meant he wouldn’t have to wait centuries inside his time dilation field to see what happened.

Xavier manifested more Corrupt Power Source spell patterns inside himself. As many as he was able to. Spikes coalesced in the vacuum all around him, each shooting toward a different ship, each causing that ship’s core to explode in a brilliant display of light.

Souls were reaped, over and over. Every time more souls entered his reserve, he extinguished them by casting Soul Harden, strengthening his Living Soul as much as he could now that he’d reached B Grade. Though he’d used Refined Celestial Energy toward this end already, there were aspects of his soul that could only be strengthened either by Soul Energy—which took time to replenish—or by reaped souls.

Eventually, Xavier hoped he would be able to tap into the raw foreign Soul Energy held in the souls he reaped. The things he could do with that…

But that was a project for another time.

Xavier soon discovered that he didn’t need to use Corrupt Power Source on every ship. In fact, with the ships’ shields already down, all he really needed to do was allow the explosion from one ship to reach another. This was more than enough to destroy that ship and explode its core—even if that secondary explosion wasn’t quite as powerful of an explosion as his spell would have caused.

Those secondary explosions slammed into other ships, causing those ships to explode in turn, and all he really needed to do was hover there in the vacuum of space and continue to expand that second time dilation field of his toward the rest of the ships and watch as they were all destroyed, one after another.

As the last ship exploded, Xavier released a long breath. He had defeated the Empire of Servitude’s armada, but the seven-hundred-and-fiftieth floor of the Tower of Champions wasn’t over yet.

There was still one wave back on the planet he needed to deal with… a wave that happened to have an S Grade True Dragon in its ranks.