Infinity Is My Affinity?!?-Chapter 159: Now… Let’s Party!

Mitsuki’s scream ripped through the eldritch shrieks a second time, and something primal in my chest detonated alongside it.

[Move. Move. Move!]

I cut the shotgun’s MP supply completely, slung the weapon over my left shoulder, and sprinted headfirst into the rolling sub-zero fog with every ounce of strength Ice Reinforcement could muster.

The thick crystalline armor crawling over my forearms and legs caught the dim moonlight as I ran, glowing faintly blue against the oppressive dark of the basin.

The invisible horde closed in from every direction, and I could feel their physical mass through my Domain, those bloated, tentacled bodies slamming against the dirt, launching themselves at me in a chaotic, frothing wave.

But I didn’t stop. I didn’t slow down. I couldn’t... I planted my boot and dumped mana directly into Dominium Radicis like I was trying to drain myself actually dry.

And the very next second, the earth answered violently.

Massive, tree-trunk-sized roots exploded out of the ground on both sides of me in a thunderous eruption, showering frozen dirt and gravel across the fog.

They weren’t elegant or precise. Each one was a knuckled, wicked thing draped entirely in hooked thorns the length of my forearm, bursting upward and immediately thrashing wildly against the ground on either side of my path.

The sound alone was brutal. A relentless, hammering chaos of splintering wood and wet, meaty impacts as the roots beat and whipped and swatted at the invisible ocean of black flesh trying to swallow me whole.

[A corridor...] I thought, panting hard as I sprinted through the gap. [Just keep them off the path!]

All the while, the six Fragmentation Pebble streams orbiting my shoulders kept firing without pause, guided entirely by Precognition and my bloomed Domain, detonating on contact in sharp, supersonic cracks, each explosion stumbling the nearest Outsider just enough to keep the corridor from collapsing on itself.

But the black goo was everywhere.

It splattered against my face and ice armor in hot, stinging bursts every time a root crushed one of those things into the dirt, burning like pressing a lit cigarette against bare skin.

My neck caught the worst of it, but I gritted my teeth against the sensation, refusing to even so much as flinch.

[She’s been out here alone this entire time!]

That thought hit considerably harder than the goo.

I pushed harder, boots hammering the ground, while the thrashing corridor of roots barely held on both sides as the horde piled against them.

Tentacles the length of suspension cables slammed into the wood, and the entire makeshift structure shuddered under the assault. I reinforced on the move, spiking raw mana into the roots without ceremony, watching them darken under the pressure.

[Just hold together! Twenty more meters!]

And they held... albeit barely.

Then the fog thinned just slightly ahead of me, and through the pale grey curtain, I saw white cloth.

And her on the ground.

Mitsuki’s pristine robes were shredded beyond recognition, soaked a deep, saturated red from collar to hem.

Her hair was matted against her face. Her body showed the evidence of wounds that had already closed, fresh skin stretched over trauma that the Grade-2 capsules had erased over and over again, the same damage being inflicted and healed in a brutal, grinding loop while she lay there and endured it.

[The things that must’ve been done to her...]

My stomach turned as the realization landed with the weight of a collapsing structure.

"Mitsuki!" screamed with everything I had, as the invisible horde once again surged over her in a single, suffocating mass.

And just as it did, the world went white.

A massive, blinding golden explosion detonated directly from Mitsuki’s body with a concussive force that rattled my teeth and threw the fog apart in every direction.

The shockwave of pure faith rolled outward in a near fifty-meter radius, and every single Outsider it touched simply ceased to exist.

No shrieks or death throes, just instant disintegration into fine black dust catching the golden light for a single, breathless second.

And then, the wave reached me.

Before I could even process that instant wave of instant death, it washed over my skin like stepping through a doorway into full summer sunlight.

Warm, absolute, and completely without hostility, it simply passed through me while clearing every Outsider around a 50-meter radius of Mitsuki.

I covered the remaining distance in three strides before skidding to my knees beside her.

Her whole body flinched violently, arms coming up in pure reflex.

"It’s me!" I grabbed her by the shoulders, firm but careful. "Mitsuki. It’s Nico. Look at me!"

Her eyes found my face through the chaos. She was shaking hard enough that I could feel it through my palms, and her breathing came in ragged, shallow pulls.

But the panic behind her eyes settled the moment she actually registered who was holding her.

And the breath she let out sounded like something physically releasing.

"You’re-" she started, before choking on the blood flooding her throat.

-Cough-!-Cough-!-Cough-!-Ack-!

"Hey, easy there, it’s okay, I’m here..." I tried to soothe her, but she gripped my collar, pulling me closer.

"You’re late!"

"Yeah," I said. "Working on the apology... but it’s partly your husband’s fault too."

I slid my arms under her and stood, pulling her up into a full carry, and her body felt limp.

That alone told me everything about how much the capsules had mentally cost her just to keep her breathing through the last few minutes.

"Can you hold on?"

Her bloodied fingers never let go of the collar of my jacket. "Yes."

"Good. Now, don’t let go."

I turned back and dashed toward the living quarters.

The root corridor was deteriorating fast. Sections had been beaten flat by the time I hit the entry point, the thrashing wood reduced to splinters under the relentless pile-on from the horde.

I erupted new growth on the move, violently spiking fresh roots from the ground ahead of me and reinforcing them mid-stride with all the bandwidth I could carve out between the Pebble streams and Ice Reinforcement.

But the horde was everywhere. My Domain screamed with overlapping mass in every direction as the invisible ocean closed in, and the corridor shrank tighter with every meter.

[I’m losing ground...]

The entrance to the living quarters was forty meters ahead. I had maybe fifteen meters of functioning corridor left.

[Forty meters... The math ain’t mathing...]

But didn’t stop running while a new idea formed in my head.

I slammed a violent burst of mana into Dominium Radicis, and directly beneath my next step, a massive root erupted from the earth at a sharp angle, curving upward into a broad, arching platform right under my boots, tight in tension like a catapult.

And the second it formed –

-Twish-!

The ground dropped away fast as I soared upward, the sub-zero air screaming past my face while I caught a fraction of a second’s view of the basin, an absolute sea of dirt being slammed by invisible shapes in every direction as I arced towards the living quarters.

Those forty meters closed in less than two seconds.

I redirected all six Fragmentation Pebble streams mid-fall, aiming them at the mass slamming against the living quarter’s front entrance, and unleashed it all.

The supersonic impacts and the shrapnel tore through the cluster in a chain of staggering explosions, scattering the nearest bodies and clearing just enough of the approach that I wasn’t landing inside a meat grinder

And the very next second, I crashed on the ground, and the crack of impact shuddered outward through the dirt in a visible shockwave, dust and frost erupting in a ring around my feet.

My knees screamed in protest, and I even felt a few pops, but I absorbed the landing through sheer reinforcement and kept moving.

The black root barricade was right in front of me.

I hit it hard, commanding the thorned wood apart, and shoved Mitsuki through the gap with as much care as the situation allowed, which admittedly wasn’t much.

"Sorry," I said, without fully meaning it, because the alternative was worse.

Garek immediately caught her on the other side, but she turned back toward the gap and reached for me.

"Lady, your husband’s over there!"

"Shut up!" She spat back as her palm found the side of my face, cold and shaking, and a warmth that had absolutely nothing to do with temperature sank directly through my skull and settled somewhere deep inside me.

It didn’t feel like a spell. It felt like standing in a quiet room after a very long time spent somewhere loud.

She smiled through lips stained red. "You should be able to see them now."

-Ding!

{Amaterasu’s Blessing Received!

Perception of Evil active.}

I stared at her for exactly one second.

Then I gave a single nod, sealed the barricade shut before sending another reinforcement dump that repaired and further reinforced the wood jet black within seconds.

As I turned around, the basin had transformed completely.

Every single Outsider glowed in a deep, smoldering gold, outlining each invisible body in perfect, damning clarity.

The entire basin was packed with them, hundreds of those massive, pulsating shapes shimmering in the dark, serrated tentacles trailing black goo across the ground, and every single one of them was now completely visible to me.

I stood there for a moment and just looked at the army while a slow grin split across my face.

"Now... let’s party!"

And the very next second, a massive root erupted directly beneath my boots, thick and broad and absolutely covered in thorns, surging upward and lifting me twenty meters into the freezing air on a spiked tower of black-reinforced wood.

The horde below swarmed against its base immediately, tentacles slamming into the bark, making the entire structure shudder under the combined assault.

But I didn’t care.

I looked down at the golden sea of glowing monsters and systematically collapsed all six individual Fragmentation Pebble streams down into a single, unified channel.

60 MP/s of pure, consolidated offense materialized in front of me as one continuous stream of boulder-sized ice missiles, each one a catastrophic, compressed payload of shrapnel and kinetic force.

The first one left my hand at supersonic speed and detonated on a cluster of six glowing bodies twenty meters out before –

-BOOOM-!

And the shrieks that erupted were absolutely deafening... and like music to my ears.

I poured round after round into the glowing horde below with a focused, almost mechanical efficiency, targeting the densest concentrations, detonating through groups of five and six at a time.

The explosions lit the basin in strobing flashes of brilliant white and deep gold as the combined light of my ice magic and Mitsuki’s blessing turned the battlefield into something that looked considerably less like a siege and considerably more like a very one-sided massacre.

Black dust erupted in clouds across the ground while the golden outlines winked out one after another in rapid succession.

[This is absurd!] I thought, watching another cluster disintegrate. [I’m actually taking on an army! And I’m winning!]

For the first time since the doors blew inward, something adjacent to genuine relief crept into my chest.

And as if the universe itself took offence, my Precognition screamed like alarm that overrode every other sensory input simultaneously and flooded my brain with a single, crystalline projection of the immediate future.

Five slashes, landing in two seconds, and carving me into 5 individual pieces right where I stood.

Through sheer instinct alone, I threw myself back off before the thought fully finished forming.

And yet, it wasn’t enough.

Three of the five impacts found me anyway, and I felt something leave my body before I understood what it was.

The agony that followed was not something I had a prepared reference for.

It bypassed pain tolerance and Ice Reinforcement and every cognitive buffer I had running and detonated directly through my soul like pure voltage.

My vision strobed, my grip on every active spell stream collapsed instantly, all three major channels dropping to zero in a single involuntary cutoff as I slammed onto my back.

Through the white noise shorting out my brain, I registered a figure standing where I had been standing half a second ago, draped in a black cloak, clutching a black sword, dripping with a cursed red shimmer as though something deeply, fundamentally wrong had been done to the blade.

The man looked down at me as he stepped forward before driving a kick into my side, sending me flying through open air in a long, weightless arc, and I had just enough enhanced cognition left to register exactly how wrong my body just before the roof of the living quarters came up to meet me face-first.

I hit the wood hard enough to crack it as I skidded ten meters across the rooftop on momentum alone, leaving a trail of blood before finally coming to rest against the low barrier at the far edge.

And all I felt was silence. The siege was still raging below. I could hear it distantly, the shrieks and impacts filtered through what felt like a very thick ball of cotton stuffed into my ears.

[Fuck... I had almost forgotten...] I raised my left arm, ready to fire a stream at the man, but only a bloody stump answered me, ending cleanly just below the elbow, gushing steadily across my chest in a warm spread that was already going cold in the night air.

I instinctively looked down, my vision felt halved while a hot wetness enveloped my head, and I found my right leg, too, was gone from below the knee.

-Ding!

{Status: Critical! Rapid blood loss and limb amputation detected!

Alert! Host is infected with a Tier 9 Eldritch Curse!

Inflicted areas: Left arm, Right leg, Left eye.}

I could feel the cold setting in fast, creeping inward from the stumps in a way that had nothing to do with the temperature and everything to do with the infection spreading through whatever that damn blade had been coated in.

[Don’t let go... There are one hundred and thirty-seven people...] I reminded myself, staring at the sky. [Get up!]

I could feel the infected eye going cold in a slow crawl... could feel something start to wither inside.

And from the other eye, I saw the man jump down, blade still shimmering in his hand, and eyes that glowed red in even sicker red than the blade itself.