Beyond the Bloodline-Chapter 384: Ashes and Shadows
|There you are, lizard.|
Miranda muttered the words, but since she spoke in her True Voice, they echoed across space, reaching the ears of everyone aboard all 24 battleships.
She slowly floated up above the flagship as magic power erupted from her body, dominating everything within several million light-years, entire galaxies included.
As she locked the entire region down, the woman sighed and spoke again.
|I have been waiting. Thinking of the perfect opportunity where I could take my time to deal with you properly without interference.|
Her feet touched down atop the battleship, and immediately, the last of the ship’s defensive shields crumbled into faint flickers of light.
|You insignificant lizard have slipped from my grasp all this time, collaborating and aiding the resurrection of the organisation created by the bastard who nearly destroyed my home, even daring to hide in my own backyard.|
Miranda took another step forward that disabled the ship’s weapon systems as she continued.
|This ends today.|
She looked down, right through the ship, her eyes locking onto Ikerth, who stood frozen in shock at the centre of the bridge, utterly dumbfounded, for never in his life had he expected Miranda to appear in Luabos of all places.
With a calm voice, she spoke.
|Get out of the ship, Ikerth.|
Silence followed, but Miranda was unfazed as she repeated herself.
|Get out of the ship.|
Miranda unleashed an overwhelming pressure from her body, and instantly, every dragon across the fleet collapsed to their knees, choking and struggling for breath.
|Or I’ll burn every one of your precious subordinates until nothing remains but ash.|
The pressure intensified, and Ikerth looked around in shock, watching his closest subordinates scream for help while the other non-dragons desperately tried to assist them to no avail.
"W-wait...!" Ikerth finally managed to force out, but Miranda had no intention of listening as she cut him off immediately.
|Get out of the ship.|
|Stop this!|
|You’re not going to like what happens to you and the entirety of the Xagem Clan of dragons if you make me come get you.|
Just as she spoke, several ships in the fleet redirected their weapons towards her, charging them with full power, and sensing this, Ikerth quickly shouted.
|NO!|
But it was too late.
The weapon systems had locked onto Miranda, and without hesitation for the risk of hitting their own allies, they opened fire. 𝕗𝐫𝚎𝗲𝘄𝐞𝕓𝐧𝕠𝘃𝕖𝐥.𝐜𝚘𝚖
Eight ships unleashed their fire upon her, each one filled with Salenor’s subordinates who had no true grasp of the terror that ’Zanerth Hybrids’ like Ikerth knew.
And all Miranda did was cast her gaze upon them—
**KABOOOMM!!!!!
—and they all went up in flames, torn apart and reduced to fragments scattered across the vacuum, joining the endless dust of space, with everyone aboard, from the weakest Half-Deity to the strongest Primogenials annihilated without exception.
Miranda then slowly shifted her gaze back to Ikerth and muttered.
|You have lived more than enough, Ikerth, so don’t make me repeat myself...|
Then, Miranda’s voice rang out again, commanding him to step forward with his own two legs and walk to his death.
|Get out of the ship...now.|
Ikerth, gritting his teeth, spun around and dashed deeper into the ship, ignoring the cries of the wailing dragons as he rushed towards his chambers.
But Miranda paid no attention to his intentions as she stretched out her hand, magic power forming around his body, and with a pull, she dragged him upwards, tearing him through several floors of the ship, through fallen dragons whose bodies were blasted apart and whose remains coated him, until he was yanked straight through the hull of the ship and brought to her eye level.
|I warned you, didn’t I?|
"Gurkghh...!"
Miranda slowly began to close her fist, and the magic power gripping Ikerth started crushing his body, gurgling groans of pain escaping his lips as his bones creaked under the pressure.
At the sight of their Dragon King being so easily manhandled, some of the battlecruisers immediately engaged their backup engines and attempted to turn around in retreat, but the moment those backup engines came to life, something unexpected occurred.
|GruaRGH!!!!|
Ikerth screamed with all his might, his dragon heart igniting in a blaze as cosmic energy erupted from his chest, eliciting a look of genuine shock from Miranda.
The eruption shattered the magic power restraining him, and as Miranda immediately pulled back from the hostile cosmic energy, a voice echoed within Ikerth’s head.
[Now then, Ikerth. You shall test the effectiveness for me as we agreed on.]
The instant THEIR voice resounded in his head, the Dragon King roared and transformed into his half-draconic form, his skin sheathing itself in reddish brown scales, brown horns curling upward from the top of his head, six pairs of leather wings tearing out from his back, and his long, spiked tail unfurling behind him.
|Sacrifice yourselves to me!|
The cosmic energy radiating from him spread across the fleet in an instant, enveloping the bodies of all those who still lived as he bellowed.
|Absorption!|
Immediately, the millions of dragons scattered throughout the spaceships went limp as their souls were forcefully extracted from their bodies and drawn to Ikerth, who instantly converted them into pure energy and absorbed them into himself, shattering the final barrier of power before him and stepping into the Sub-Cosmic Realms of power.
The ship beneath Ikerth disintegrated beneath the crushing weight of the cosmic energy radiating from him, and as Miranda watched curiously, her eyes widened once more at the sight unfolding before her.
|This...!|
Grey fog erupted from Ikerth’s body, consuming the space around him as it pushed back against the ’existence’ it constituted, fuelled by the cosmic energy he released to feed on the ambient universal laws.
Ikerth was a ’Herald’ of the Neo-Extinction Legion, the same as Deryn and Salenor, though he was far weaker than they were and had only secured his position through the importance of the Ruindeum he supplied.
In other words, he was among the few who possessed direct access to THEM, and with that access came this power of limited pseudo-nonexistence control.
’Those two would likely have it as well...’
With that thought, Miranda drew back the cosmic energy she had gathered to reflexively erase Ikerth from existence and shifted her focus instead to running tests to measure how effective this power would be in battle.
How much control did Ikerth have? How much of it did the Neo-Extinction Legion’s Heralds have, and how much of it could they effectively use before being inevitably burnt out?
She decided to let him continue until it began to consume his existence, and then she would tear his soul from his body and scour his memories.
Naturally, she had no intention of fighting him herself. Not when she had the perfect tools for the task.
|Second Concretization: Aspect Forging|
In summary, this Concretization’s purpose was to forge one’s ’Manifested’ Aspect into power or tools for offensive focus.
The keywords here being offensive focus.
It did not always mean weapons.
It could also mean an army of billions of armoured humanoid flame constructs, each wielding weapons of all forms and sent toward a single target like a blazing tide.
Miranda distorted space with her innate higher-level control born of her Higher Dimensional nature, and with a silent Domain Declaration, she transformed the entire region into a volcanic planetoid, where seas and rivers of purple lava flowed freely and fissures erupted with streams of purple fire.
|!|
Ikerth glanced around in shock at the immediate transformation of his surroundings, but within moments, he sensed eyes on him and lifted his eyes to see Miranda far above in the ashen skies, watching him with a calm gaze.
To Ikerth, however, that calmness was nothing more than her looking down on him, dismissing him as an insect that was no threat to her, even after he had unleashed the power of pseudo-nonexistence, an incomplete version of the power once wielded by the one who had nearly ended her immortal life.
Then again, that much was expected, since even with all that power, even after consuming millions of souls, Ikerth was still only a Primogenial making use of borrowed Cosmic Authority.
With a roar of rage and defiance, Ikerth rushed at her, conjuring a massive sword wreathed in grey fog that burned off the blade like fire, and he swung it at the advancing waves of flaming golems.
|DECONSTRUCTION OF FLAMESSSSS!!!!|
The shouted words made Miranda narrow her eyes slightly, and with a swing of his sword at faster-than-light speed, he cut down thousands of her flaming golems in less than a second.
Miranda’s finger twitched, and the shapes of the golems started to change, their features refining as they took on the forms of various races.
Centaurs, Serpents, Gryphons, Werewolves, and finally, Dragons.
Not just any random dragons, but specifically the dragons whose souls Ikerth had just absorbed to empower himself.
He hurled himself forward, charging headlong into the endless waves of flame-forged constructs that barred his path to Miranda.
His sword swept in wide arcs, the grey fog clinging to its edges like fire as each swing tore through lines of blazing centaurs and fanged serpents, cutting them into fragments of burning ash.
The force of his strikes ripped apart the terrain, sending cracks racing through the volcanic terrain as rivers of purple flame spilt from the wounds in the ground.
His chest swelled before he unleashed a deafening roar, a torrent of cosmic energy blasting out from his throat in a breath that obliterated scores of flame constructs at once, their bodies erupting into cinders as the shockwave tore through the ranks.
Each exhalation ripped apart space, leaving nothing but molten ground and shattered stone in its wake.
