Infinity Is My Affinity?!?-Chapter 162: What even Is That Freak Of Nature?
*/ Third-Person Narration/*
The basin had gone quiet with that deep, particular quiet of things that had collectively decided they did not want to be noticed.
The Outsiders had stopped moving entirely, hundreds of those massive pulsating, invisible bodies standing completely motionless across the freezing basin with their tentacles slack and their shrieking cut off, forming a wide instinctive ring around the living quarters and the man standing in front of it as though something in their collective, unknowable intelligence had arrived at the same conclusion all at once-
Do not approach.
While Kaius stood fifty meters across the basin with his sword raised at the carpet of red-shimmering swords that had covered the sky.
Thousands phantom blades hanging in perfect, terrible stillness above the mine bolting out the moon above, all aimed at the man who just stood there in front of barricade with one arm, one good leg and the other made out of ice, and his strange Soul Armament leaning on his shoulder, wearing that same arrogant grin on his face as if he knew the punchline of the joke that had been this fight.
And Kaius hated it.
"DIE!"
-CRACK-!-CRACK-!-CRACK-!-CRACK-!-CRACK-!-CRACK-!
Thousands of phantom blades dropped from the sky in a single coordinated descent, each one breaking the sound barrier within the first meter of its fall while the combined sonic pressure erupted from above in a cascading wall of concussion that shook the frozen ground beneath Kaius’s feet from fifty meters away, and every single blade carried a full Tier 9 Eldritch curse.
And the very next second, the knights moved.
Every single one of them abandoned whatever engagement they were in and converged from every direction at once, collapsing inward onto the man at the barricade in a single coordinated surge, covering him, stacking body over body with those ten-foot greatswords angled outward in an interlocking shell of armored mass that buried the man underneath entirely in under two seconds and sealed shut from above in a solid dome. 𝒇𝙧𝙚𝓮𝔀𝓮𝒃𝙣𝓸𝒗𝒆𝒍.𝙘𝒐𝒎
And then-
-KRAOOM-!
The shockwave rolled outward from the dome’s position in a visible ring that cracked the ground, sending a massive spray of debris, and rain of thousands of supersonic blades was a force Kaius felt in his back teeth even from fifty meters away while standing on solid ground, and the phantom blades punching through the dome’s outer layer simply erased what they hit, shredding through each unit like paper.
But new ones materialized immediately from the gold orbs blooming at the dome’s base and pressing upward into the gaps, each one snapping into formation and taking the next wave while Kaius watched and kept dropping swords.
He burned through his reserves at a rate that made him grit his teeth; the Third Sequence’s sustained output was pulling hard on his mana pool with every passing second.
The Way of the Sword was the most efficient cultivation technique in the world, and the fact that he could feel it pulling this hard was a feeling he had long forgotten.
"What even is that freak of nature?"
His voice had found its calm again, that patient softness returning now that the chaos of the rooftop was behind him and the situation had simplified into a clean equation of sustained overwhelming firepower against a stationary target.
"No matter..." he said, watching the continuous wave of blades punch through the knights in a cascade of collapsing gold light. "He will perish all the same."
The dome rebuilt itself, and kept rebuilding, and a minute passed while Kaius kept his face still and his sword steady and said nothing, and somewhere in the back of his mind behind the professional calm a quiet thing observed that no mana pool could sustained that man was sustaining, but the dome kept rebuilding anyway, every gap the blades tore open was filled within fractions of a second at a rate that matched his own output with an almost mechanical, almost insulting precision.
By the third minute, his reserves dipped below sixty percent, and then, slowly, the production rate of his enemy began to drop, taking just a fraction of a second longer between materializations, gaps staying open half a beat before filling.
Kaius could see the outer shell thinning just perceptibly under the barrage as the relentless rain of phantom blades began finding more purchase with each passing second, and Kaius felt that tension loosen in his chest as the gaps kept widening.
And not long after, the knights stopped appearing at the top of the dome entirely, and the blades falling on the upper hemisphere began punching clean through.
Then the sides began to fail as well, unit by unit the outer shell stopping its rebuilding while the structure compressed inward and grew smaller and denser as production dropped toward zero, and the blades fell through the widening gaps into whatever remained underneath while the dirt and debris erupted across the impact zone in thick churning clouds that swallowed the dome’s position entirely in a rolling wall.
Kaius took one slow breath and kept the swords falling through the cloud.
[I must make certain,] he told himself, because he had watched that man spend more raw mana within few minutes than Kaius had witnessed expended in entire campaigns, he had watched him run multiple full-powered spell streams simultaneously while missing two limbs and being under a Tier 9 curse, he had watched him conjure an infinite army from nothing and restructure his reinforcement’s architecture mid-combat and build a functioning prosthetic from ice on a live battlefield, all while laughing.
And after everything he had witnessed tonight, he did not dare be so careless.
The swords continued falling, and no new conjurations materialized from the cloud, and no response came from within it at all, and after another long moment Kaius exhaled slowly and directed one of the phantom blades beneath his feet and stepped onto it, letting it carry him upward in a smooth, unhurried arc until he was meters above the basin floor, looking down at the churning circle of debris and impact craters below.
[This has to be enough...]Kaius exhaled slowly as he ceased the Third Sequence, and immediately, thousands of phantom blades dissolved across the night sky above him, and his reserves settled just below sixty percent.
He looked at the cloud of dust below and did not dare approach; his decades of combat experience screamed every time he even thought about going close enough to envelop that young man within his domain.
[Who is he?] The question arrived, and with it came all the others...
[Why is he in this damn mine? Does he have knowledge of the outpost in the Nexus? Did someone know tonight’s attack was coming? If he worked for Fugen... we would know... So why does the Order have absolutely nothing on someone like this... not one report, not one whisper, across the entirety of Fugen...]
[No... I remember hearing about a new talent arriving at Shinkotsu with these exact affinities and damn Greater Dragon... Is that him?]
Just then, a high wind moved across the basin, and the dust began to thin, and Kaius found himself turning the question over in his mind while he watched the cloud disperse, because the man had spent more mana than should be possible and had not once shown signs of a pool running dry, and the thought arrived before he could stop it.
[Perhaps he cannot run out.]
He almost dismissed it, and then held it at arm’s length instead, examining it carefully before shaking his head. "Heh... not even the great spirits can do that."
But the next thought came in sharper: [Then perhaps he recovers it fast, very fast, and everything he has done tonight has been exclusively what he can sustain at the rate he regenerates and not his actual reserves at all... meaning he was never spending from his pool, just fighting entirely off his recovery, which is why everything he cast was low-Tier by classification but deployed at a rate that only makes sense he was recovering mana at the same rate.]
[Which means his actual Tier is significantly higher than anything he has shown tonight, and he has not accessed his true pool even once during this entire engagement.]
And the moment that though settled, he pulled his mana inward to defensive configuration, burning nothing further, holding everything ready, while the final gusts of wind swept the last of the dust across the ground, and something came into view.
Jet black and rising roughly three meters from the ruined earth, its surface was completely featureless, curving inward at a slight angle that resolved as the final haze dispersed into a clean, tapering cone.
Kaius sucked in a sharp breath, understanding the physics of that jet black cone made entirely of roots in the same instant he saw it clearly.
Every single phantom blade that had struck that surface met an angle precisely calculated to redirect the impact and slide it laterally.
His cursed phantom blades had skimmer off and detonated in the surrounding dirt instead of driving through, which the circular trench around that cone confirmed entirely.
A five-meter-wide trench had formed, running the full circumference of the cone, and had carved deep into the ground by three full minutes of redirected supersonic blades.
He had burned more than forty percent of his total reserves on a deflection.
Though Kaius said nothing, but his free hand closed slowly at his side, clenching into a tight fist while the cone slowly came apart, peeling back those thick smooth, jet black roots with a slow, almost contemptuous deliberateness, spreading outward and downward like blooming flower until they revealed the legs and armrests and the high broad back of a throne mad of roots.
And sitting in it with one ice leg crossed over the other’s knee was that young man. One arm, one eye, a shotgun laid across his lap, and a single brilliant gold orb pulsating at his right shoulder like a miniature sun.
He looked up at Kaius up on his flying sword with a mildly curious expression and one eyebrow raised just slightly, as though he found the whole thing mildly interesting and was still deciding whether it warranted a response.
He chuckled, reached out and picked up the shotgun in his one hand, and leveled its white-hot barrel up at Kaius with the casual one-handed gesture as though pointing at a bird on a fence.
With an arrogant smirk and a tilt of his head, while the gold orb at his shoulder pulsed wildly, he spoke–
"Huh... cool trick. You must be real popular with all the jade beauties back home~"
