Chapter 95: Annihilation Incarnate (1/2)
Aidan turned from the settling ash of seven dead Tears and looked at what remained.
Three Divine-rank wounds still bled violet light into the sky, and beneath them, thirty Final Stage Terrors had finished organizing while he was busy elsewhere. Ninety lesser Tears ringed the horizon beyond that, spitting out smaller horrors by the dozen, and all of it was now looking straight at him.
Behind him, across the ruined courtyard, Jovan had already closed the distance on the corrupted branch master, black-gold power coiling loose and eager around both of them.
"Keep him breathing," Aidan called back.
[Jovan: I intend to. This is an excellent opportunity to practice.]
’Good. That’s his problem now.’ Aidan rolled his neck and faced the remaining thirty. ’These thirty are mine.’
He didn’t wait for them to reach him.
Wind gathered under his boots and he crossed the shattered ground in a blur, Blazing Point Rifle already unfolding into his grip with flame and pierce braided into a single screaming round.
The first Terror in his path took the shot through its chest and simply kept coming, wound cauterized shut by its own corrupted vitality before the smoke cleared.
’Tougher than the seventy.’ Aidan’s eyes narrowed. ’Fresh. Undamaged. Organized.’
’Fine.’
He switched weapons mid-stride, Thunder Blitz Lord crackling to life across both forearms. Electromagnetism read the whole battlefield at once, and every Terror’s position lit up in his senses like a hundred small suns.
Lightning arced out in six directions simultaneously, not to kill, but to blind their coordination for the half second he needed.
It bought him exactly that.
Six Terrors staggered, and Aidan closed on the nearest with the Spiral Fan Blade already spinning, wind aspect howling as the weapon carved a horizontal arc wide enough to open three throats in a single pass.
A fourth Terror lunged from his blind side, claws already extended. Aidan let the Netheraxin Blood Hunter Knuckle Dusters answer that one, twin blades of dark, corrosive Blood and Nether sinking into its chest.
They drank the vitality straight out of its corrupted core, and the creature crumpled into ash before it finished its own attack.
Three Terrors dropped from the fan blade, one more from the knuckle dusters, and twenty-six remained. They had learned something already from watching four of their kin die to four different weapons in the space of ten seconds.
They stopped advancing individually and closed together instead, wings interlocking into a wall of horn and spectral muscle twenty-six bodies thick, and the combined pressure that rolled off them staggered even Aidan’s stride for the first time all night.
’They’re adapting fast.’ He planted his feet against the pressure. ’Divine-rank instinct, even corrupted. Can’t blame them for it.’
The wall surged, and it surged as one single, coordinated mass, horns and claws and spectral fire arriving from every angle at once with nowhere left for him to dodge cleanly.
Aidan met the first wave head on, and for the first time since the outbreak began, he actually took a hit that mattered.
A horned skull caught him under the ribs hard enough to crack the Argon Exo-Armor’s plating, and three more strikes landed in the same breath. They drove him backward through broken stone in a spray of dust and shattered rock.
He came up on one knee, one hand pressed to his side, blood in his mouth and a genuine grin spreading across his face anyway.
"Alright." He spat, and rolled his shoulders, and something old and vast stirred behind his ribs, patient and enormous and finally interested. "That one earned itself first place."
He stood, and the ground cracked beneath his boots as he did.
He didn’t reach for a single bond this time. He reached for all of them at once.
Lightning and metal surged up one arm while flame and pierce answered on the other, wind spiraling around both in a howling cocoon, and Aidan strode straight back into the wall of Terrors like the crack in his armor had never happened at all.
’Fourfold.’ The thought arrived whole, the way techniques always did once the door stopped being locked. ’Not four separate weapons. One weapon, wearing four faces.’
He drove both fists into the wall’s center, and the four aspects didn’t fight each other the way lesser wielders would have expected.
They folded together instead, lightning riding the metal’s edge and flame riding the pierce’s point, wind carrying all of it forward in one compounding burst that cost a fraction of what casting each aspect separately would have.
[Conceptual Technique comprehended: Fourfold Cataclysm.]
[Power Rating: 94,610.]
The wall of Terrors didn’t survive being a wall anymore.
The burst tore through six bodies in a single continuous line, cauterizing and electrocuting and shredding in the same motion, wind carrying the wreckage outward in a widening cone that caught two more Terrors trying to flee the initial blast.
Eight down. Eighteen left, and every one of them now genuinely afraid of him for the first time.
’Efficient.’ Aidan flexed his fingers, watching the technique’s cost register in his reserves, a fraction of what he’d expected to pay. ’Very efficient. I like this new trick.’
The remaining eighteen scattered wide instead of clustering, forcing him to hunt them individually across the broken terrain, and Aidan let them, because hunting individually meant he finally got to use the weapon he’d been saving.
The Duskrend Scythe unfolded into his grip, and its four aspects settled into place with the eager, familiar weight of an old argument finally getting to finish itself.
The first isolated Terror never saw him arrive.
Silence swallowed his approach entirely, and Shadowfrost met the creature before its senses could register a threat existed, cold and dark folding around it in a single, unhurried arc.
It didn’t scream. It didn’t even finish turning. It simply stopped, frozen through in the specific way that meant nothing beneath the frost would ever move again.
One strike. One Terror, Final Stage and Divine-rank, gone.
[Conceptual Technique comprehended: Shadowfrost Oblivion.]
[Power Rating: 118,340.]
Aidan looked at the scythe in his hands, then at the frozen wreckage crumbling to motes at his feet, and let out a low, delighted whistle.
’That’s a one-shot kill on something that shrugged off a rifle round to the chest.’ He rolled the scythe once, testing its new weight. ’Frost that doesn’t just kill the body. It kills the will to keep fighting the cold. Nobody outruns that.’
He hunted the next seventeen with the same economy, moving through the ruined battlefield like something the night itself had decided to sharpen.
A Terror trying to flank him from above lost its wings to a Silence-wrapped slash before it finished the thought. Two working together to pin him between them found Gravity answering first, their combined charge folding inward hard enough to crush both flat.
A lone survivor tried pleading in a language Aidan didn’t recognize and wouldn’t have listened to regardless. The scythe ended the conversation before it properly began.
Six more fell the same way in the minutes after, one after another, until only seven remained. Those seven finally broke and ran.
Aidan let two of them go, since chasing them across a planet already sealed by Jovan and Finn’s domains felt like wasted effort when the planet itself would do the chasing for him eventually.
The other five he caught within a hundred meters. Wind carried him faster than fear could carry them, and the scythe closed each distance with the same patient, silent efficiency.
[Conceptual Technique refined: Shadowfrost Oblivion. Energy cost reduced by 31%.]
’Getting cheaper the more I use it.’ Aidan wiped a smear of frost off the blade, breathing easy despite the cracked plating still smoking faintly along his ribs. ’Mastery earns its keep.’
Thirty Final Stage Divine-rank Terrors lay reduced to drifting motes and refreezing wreckage across the canyon floor, and behind him, the ninety lesser Tears kept spitting out smaller horrors that scattered the moment they felt what had just finished happening to their older siblings.
Across the courtyard, black-gold light flared once, twice, and Jovan’s voice arrived through the summon-bond sounding thoroughly pleased with himself.
[Jovan: Stable at nine percent, and rising. He is proving to be an excellent training partner. Rather bad conversationalist, though.]
’Keep him alive a little longer.’ Aidan turned toward the last three untouched Tears, cracking his neck, the scythe still humming faint and satisfied in his grip. ’I’ve got ninety smaller problems to clean up, and a very hungry technique waiting for its first real meal.’