Infinity Is My Affinity?!?-Chapter 158: Just A Few More Seconds!

I lay flat on the floorboards amidst the splintered remains of the massive center table while a high-pitched ringing pierced straight through my skull, drowning out the shrieks permeating the mess hall.

Through sheer will, I blinked my eyes hard, forcing the dark spots out of my vision as I struggled to pull a breath into my concussed lungs while my brain instantly went to work processing the chaotic debris scattered around me.

I stared at what remained of the main doors; the thick reinforced doors were blown entirely inward, scattering shrapnel across the room.

[Gimme a break!] I pulled a sharp breath through my nose, instantly catching the distinct stench lingering heavily in the freezing air, while my instincts screamed The Outsiders did not break the barrier.

Someone had intentionally fired a spell from the outside of the living quarters, perfectly satisfying the required conditions for a threshold breach.

"I swear to god, I am going to rip his spine out and beat those monsters with it!" I growled, pushing myself up to my elbows while my head throbbed in protest.

The temperature inside the room plummeted to sub-zero in an absolute instant while a thick, unnatural white fog rolled rapidly through the shattered doorway, creeping over the floorboards like a living, breathing entity.

The monsters themselves remained completely invisible to the naked eye. But their physical presence felt both massive and overwhelming as their messy flurry of heavy, wet thuds slapping against the ground rippled through the mess hall, sounding exactly like massive tentacles violently beating against the floorboards, dragging and launching their bodies forward, leaving behind a trail of black goo.

And that the goo, though it only burned a little on bare skin, was poisonous if it entered the bloodstream through the slashes of their serrated tentacles.

I reached out and grabbed the shotgun off the debris in a frenzied scramble just as the invisible vanguard officially crossed the threshold before scrambling to get back to my feet, planting my boots firmly on the wood amid the dizzying vision, and marched directly toward the shattered doorway, raising the stock right to my shoulder.

I held a weapon currently charged with four hundred grams of Virtual Mass. I quickly ran the math in my head. Every single one of those nine individual pellets carried 6.7 kilojoules of sheer power.

[Right...] I realized, tightening my grip on the shotgun as relief washed over me. [They already used their trick on me.]

The Outsiders could only successfully mind-control a person once per full moon cycle. I was officially immune to their worst psychological weapon, just like how Garek was, thanks to him outclassing them by a Tier.

I did not even bother trying to aim into the thick white fog; I simply pointed the white-hot barrel straight into the center of the shattered doorway and let loose.

-BOOM-!-BOOM-!-BOOM-!-BOOM-!-BOOM-!-BOOM-!

-Click!

Dumping the entire six-round tube in pure blind fire, I closed the distance to the gaping maw that was once a door.

The massive kinetic force violently shredded the invisible monsters, erupting out thick black blood along with shrieks so piercing that they drowned out all my senses, while the gore painted the freezing air, completely covering the front-line monsters in their own fluids.

The extreme physical trauma briefly turned off their invisibility, and their true, horrifying bodies finally revealed themselves in the dim light for a few agonizing seconds as they died.

Giant, pulsating balls of black meat covered entirely in eight-meter serrated tentacles, dripping constantly with that poisonous black goo.

Shredded to pieces, they withered violently for a brief second before disintegrating into fine black dust, vanishing completely, and returning straight to the Nexus to form a new body and rejoin the siege.

Though the dead ones turned to dust, the endless horde kept pushing forward through the fog, and I did not stop moving.

I stepped right up to the shattered threshold, mentally reaching into my personal inventory and pulling out fresh Mythril shells directly into my open hand in a soft blue shimmer in a perfectly aligned quad-reload grip between my fingers.

But that shotgun alone will not be enough.

I seamlessly booted up the Spell Splicing architecture to handle the incoming wave.

I dropped exactly 2MP/s into Precognition, instantly stretching my perception two seconds into the immediate future, then trickled another 1Mp/s into my Domain, extending a ten-meter spatial radar that bloomed outward, perfectly mapping the invisible masses actively slamming those serrated tentacles onto the ground, launching themselves towards me.

Finally, I routed 2 MP/s straight into my brainstem via Ice Reinforcement, locking myself a heightened cognitive processing speed.

With the 5MP/s background spells running steady, the chaotic, screaming battlefield instantly sharpened to a razor’s edge in my mind, perfectly organizing the sensory overload into clean tactical data.

I needed both my hands to actually load the shotgun, so I Spell Spliced 60 MP/s into pure, unadulterated offense.

Six Fragmentation Pebbles materialized in the freezing air around my shoulders, hovering just inside my active Domain like the floating barrels of a magical Gatling gun, and guided by my Precognition and domain, I unleashed the meat grinder.

-TA-!-TA-!-TA-!-TA-!-TA-!-TA-!-TA-!-TA-!...

-BOOM-!-BOOM-!-BOOM-!-BOOM-!-BOOM-!-BOOM-! 𝙛𝒓𝓮𝙚𝔀𝒆𝒃𝓷𝒐𝓿𝙚𝓵.𝙘𝒐𝒎

The six streams of fist-sized Fragmentation Pebbles ripped through the air at supersonic speeds, slamming into the invisible horde before detonating like a supersonic, low-yield grenade upon impact.

Though the impact more than stumbled them, the shrapnels were unable to dig deep.

My domain confirmed it took tens of Fragmentation Pebbles to completely kill just one of those monsters. But the sheer, relentless firing rate of explosive impacts more than made up for it, completely stalling their momentum and keeping them from flooding the mess hall.

They came at me from every direction, screeching and hissing as they jumped from above, snapped from left and right, but my streams guided by Precognition kept them at bay... barely.

And within seconds, I quad reloaded the shotgun, fumbling and dropping the shells only once, before finally sliding the last set of Mythril shells into the tube, with held breath and trembling hands.

The exact second the charging handle clicked, I spliced the magic between a 60 MP/s Ice Reinforcement and 40 MP/s for the shotgun’s upkeep, and six 10 MP Fragmentation Pebbles.

Enhancing myself physiologically and cognitively, turning my entire body into a highly conductive medium for Ice magic, I stood right at the shattered threshold, letting loose both shells and shrapnels, shredding the eldritch monsters into bits as they withered and disintegrated.

I was slowly beginning to gain ground, physically forcing the invisible horde backward alone, stepping past the shattered door frame and out into the freezing night under the relentless barrage.

Yet the second Mitsuki’s shrill scream cut through the eldritch shrieks, my blood froze. I couldn’t even imagine what these things must be doing to her, if her screams were cutting through these abomination’s ear spliting shries.

[Fuck!] I gritted my teeth, refusing to let the sweat stinging my eyes shut them down even for a blink.

I could only actively spell-splice between three major streams at any given time. If I fully left the mess hall to go save the priestess, the doorway would be left completely unguarded, and the horde would immediately flood the living quarters and slaughter the one hundred and thirty-seven people inside.

So, I made a hard tactical pivot, instantly cutting the 40 Mp/s supply that was powering the shotgun before slinging it over my shoulders.

Instead, I slammed my active Ice Reinforcement from 20 MP/s up to a full-powered 60.

The physical manifestation hit immediately. Thick, dense armor of solid ice rapidly crystallized over my arms and crawled rapidly up to my calves while my eyes began to glow with a harsh, radiant blue light.

Keeping the six Gatling streams of Fragmentation Pebbles, I spliced the bandwidth back and forth in microseconds, seamlessly maintaining the suppressing fire without breaking my physical enhancement.

And then I brought in the third stream, splicing it all with Dominium Radicis.

Thick, thorny roots violently erupted straight out of the ground behind my back, rapidly weaving together, surging upward and outward, and completely sealing the blown-out doorway behind my back.

[Just a few more seconds!] I gritted my teeth, holding my ground at the threshold for twenty agonizing seconds while continuously jugglling the three full-powered spell streams, firing explosive ice at the raging horde while aggressively pushing roots over the door, packing the roots together with a cumulative dump of 1200 MP worth of pure reinforcement directly into the roots.

Those thorns and roots visibly shifted under the reinforcement, turning completely jet black as they hardened into a steel-like density.

[Done!]

With the black roots fully locked into place, completely sealing the massive breach, the mess hall was officially secured from the inside.

I instantly cut the MP feed into the roots spell splicing, and shot off straight at the crossroads, keeping my barrage of fragmentation Pebbles spread, covering all directions.

Knowing that cultist is also out there, I didn’t dare use Temporal Step.

[Please tell me you’ve been counting!] I asked internally, keeping my glowing blue eyes locked on the dark basin ahead. [How much time does Mitsuki have?]

-Ding!

{30 seconds.}