The trip back home was short, but he intentionally lengthened it by taking a few flights around the Dragonlands. By now the veil which covered him disappeared and he fed mana into his wings to quell the air as they flapped with great force.
“Why is it still so hard to accept? I can move on… I have the answers I need. I don’t resent her, and yet I’m stuck. It seems my guess was wrong,” he spoke to himself in a lonely melancholy, words carried away by the sheer winds.
He thought after the loss he experienced with Rebecca, it’d prepare him better for anything similar in the future.
From Mala, he avoided chaining himself to that old past, but rather than run away without closure, like Korridan, he took a chance with his father. That experience taught him that he should stay somewhere between both options, as though on a spectrum, and he believed that grief was overcome through that careful positioning.
And yet, he did not move on.
Instead he was stuck in a no man’s land between two extremes as he couldn’t articulate his emotions once more. Thinking on his own achieved nothing though, and the loneliness of flight only worsened his thought process. Just a few wingbeats later, and he descended back to his party’s cave.
When Akevorax finally re-entered, it was a slight surprise to see Raccelline as the only person back already. Though she quickly explained that the elders supplied the others with some time in one of the clan’s more valuable training spots. These completely closed off sub-realms with arrays formed of intricately carved crystals were often used by the younger master tier dragons that began their transformation from flesh and blood to a crystal body.
Specifically, these arrays only aided in Elemental Bodies. No force on the eight planets could possibly afford an all-purpose array which produced all types of Runic bodies. A handful of specialised types existed, but more often than not a dragon had to complete the process themselves.
Things changed significantly when accounting for his friends. Humans followed a different evolution method, and so these arrays were still of use to the group. Although, only Korridan actually used this array to its full effect, as his evolution to Starlite rank required an Elemental Body in the first place. But everyone else simply accelerated their training tens of times over through this array’s use. Quite impressively, it automatically scanned a body constantly and monitored any sedimentation of further particles, literally creating more as necessary and compressing them into that point. However, it should be said that these rooms were always in high-demand because of a significant flaw in the Beastial Evolution Path.
Unlike humans who gradually sedimented elements and mana into their body… All beasts had to complete the crystal body transformation in a single go! This often meant arrays were occupied for months or years at a time! More so out of inexperience as all the top dragons of a generation completed their transformations in one to two months.
Thankfully, as elders, they could reserve several rooms for a month without any trouble.
Given that depositing elements and mana were the biggest hurdles for evolution prior to Starlite rank, he was thankful that the three of them reached this watershed moment alongside him.
As for Raccelline… She was less fortunate in that regard. As her age directly determined the level of base power, at least until she reached 25 years of age, she could only improve herself through the use of skills, techniques, and items. Not to say any of these were mediocre.
She’d only just finished explaining the situation which left her alone before growing an adorable smile and asking, “Icy, can we go test my Flash Strike again? I think I got it this time!”
“Sure. Will you teleport there or–” Her figure already disappeared into a spatial tunnel, and almost immediately he wrapped the tear around him and passed through it moments later. The two appeared in the central mountain, and used its teleporter to access a master tier battlefield, just to make sure no consequential damage occurred.
“I haven’t really been keeping track, but is there a reason you’re sticking to Flash Strike over the better teleportation skills? Surely it’d be better to at least use better methods whilst you’re trying to reproduce that power,” he spoke seriously, but held back any judgement as she put in an uncanny amount of effort compared to most children her age. Since he didn’t fear an imminent demise in her stars, it ought to be fine if she spent some amount of time on questionable decisions. He certainly knew that failure and danger were great motivators.
“It only works with this one! I tried a lot of them, but it was even more wrong than before. Pritaslo said it might be specific to each skill or spell,” her voice seemed a bit annoyed mentioning those facts, although for a moment it seemed like she just didn’t want to explain at all. He expected there to be some complexity involved with replicating that incomprehensible speed with a different teleportation method, but this was the first he heard about it being a very specialised technique.
Ignore the fact no one actually knew the technique’s specific effect.
Rather easy to spot, her first attempt stood out like a sore thumb to him. In the past he struggled to read changes in a sub-realm’s spatial fabric but the Spatial Deconstruction evolution trivialised that now.
In his mind, besides the barren black lands of this sub-realm, countless lines of endless magnitude spanned in Cartesian directions. At first, it appeared like a grid overlaid with reality, but on close-up it was possible to see that the lines at some spots bent inwards or outwards, as though random places repelled or attracted them like magnets. But at a distance, as the lines approached the world’s boundaries, all semblance of consistency fell apart. Everything tossed and turned, shifting about like a thrown bit of fabric instead of the taut fibres beside him.
This was how he now saw space, no longer a complex fabric but purely defined by this mathematical model. It was not perfect though, a cost-saving measure to reduce his mana expenditure as well as reduce calculation times.
In this time, he didn’t actually calculate anything though, just watching as the lines to his side warped rapidly like pieces of rubber stretched to dangerous lengths. But this all made sense, otherwise, why would they have ever said she ‘ripped’ space to teleport all this time? Dozens of lines snapped apart, reeling a short distance as a spot of distorted light and colour appeared at the centre of all that damage.
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And from it, in little more than a second since she even vanished, out popped the girl who already knew she’d been caught.
“Again!” Leaping off the ground in black flat-heeled shoes, she activated the skill once more and disappeared in mid-air as the lines around her snapped once more. Not even a tenth of a second later, space behind him tore open, and his tail swept up to lie directly in her path.
With an unexpected crash, Raccelline slammed into the thick rod of ice cream and wafer biscuits, cracking them slightly in the process. They healed near-instantly, like all his minor wounds.
And once more, she leapt into the air and shouted, “Again!” Failures followed in troves as she simply could not travel faster than his senses noticed the breaking of space beside him. In such a vast but empty place, only a single sound carried through.
“Again!” “Again!” “Again!” Not just a few tries later… But almost after 20 consecutive uses of Flash Strike she still pushed on and repeated the preceding actions once more. The mana within her body, already spinning around her navel to conserve momentum, completely redirected into an alternate pathway which precisely followed specific blood vessels, passed down lymph nodes and nerve cells, not to forget crossing over specific muscles, things like this were the reason he never even tried to cast skills.
The entire system of casting relied on using specific, notable body parts. Things he very specifically lacked…
And sure, most general-use skills could be reproduced by all races by just following the movements even without those body parts, but that was like asking a normal person to draw a circle freehand.
Skills still didn’t even activate for him though, just like how body enhancement spells failed on his ice cream claws to this day… That reminded him that he really needed to mutate some more beasts to resolve that external flaw. A mutation for upgraded scales also sounded great, or even upgraded wings. But where could he just drop off so many of his limbs without worry?
This wasn’t the Evelard range where he could–
Pain shot through his body, and for a brief moment both shock and reflex conflicted within him before the natural response won by a landslide. He lifted off with his feet and launched to the left as his head turned to see half of his right wing gone!
Through the missing piece, he saw Raccelline on one knee with her fist smashed against the ground. Except it wasn’t just his wing which she destroyed as she sat in a small crater.
A crater formed not from explosion, but pure reduction to nothing.
While a few inches deep at most, the fact she managed to completely obliterate this substance forced a heavy gulp down his throat. Compared to the black earth with master tier durability, his scales barely held up against a gold tier dragon. His wing vanished under such an attack regardless of what defences he activated.
However, Akevorax didn’t stand in furthered silence as the girl in front remained on her knee with heavy breaths. Even if she didn’t show it, he understood her well enough to give an expected reaction. Smiles, cheers, and immediate celebrations as she succeeded. This did not happen though. He ignored the tendrils of ice cream which grew from his destroyed wing and rapidly reformed into a fully intact segment, an automatic regrowth, and carefully descended his tail to rest right in front of her. Perfectly placed to catch her still small frame when she fell forward.
Unconscious from an unbearable overexertion. He collapsed not so differently after first using the divinity against Lostradus too, but even then he remained strong enough to make it back home before darkness took over.
She clearly fought that exhaustion too, but how could a partial godhood ever compare to the ability of an Exeter?
His tail lifted Raccelline onto his back, and he looked up at the torn region of space left by today’s final activation of Flash Strike. He not only looked with both eyes and generic senses though, instead releasing every single detection method available to even understand a hint of what happened.
Dozens of dimensions instantly overlapped with his own, the mess of colours and images disoriented him but failed to block his view. Nothing appeared real anymore, as the world no longer appeared as physical objects but rather an accumulated projection of every single dimension onto the main universe.
In simpler terms, he couldn’t see shit.
And yet it did nothing to unveil what happened to the torn region of space above… Actually, for some reason several seconds passed and the obvious hole in reality remained. On impulse, he asked, “Nexus, shouldn’t that be mended by now?”
[How would a normal body like it if a limb was cut off and you just tried to graft some stranger’s limb onto it? Do you think it would heal the connection and function as usual?]
The question itself was quite arbitrary, but from the snark received he kind of understood what happened a bit better. And just as a possibility, he activated the one final sight enhancement left out due to its outrageous costs. Eye of Truth, one of the few bloodlines he possessed that received copious records throughout all of history. Even the Nexus’ description of this bloodline remarked on its importance in the eight worlds’ history.
[Eye of Truth Ice-cream: Elders, as suggested by their namesake, were the strongest beasts in a primordial time. However, reality has shown that powers above them always existed, and so their reign came to an end. Yet, their Eye of Truth always remained a famed ability, achieving an overbearing visionary effect which granted the Elders their continued survival in the far past. With a few exceptions related to supreme tier illusions, darkness, and fate, the Eye of Truth fulfils its namesake, capable of seeing truth in all parts of the universe... Provided you can feed it]
When mana rushed to his eyes once more, it was not just the gaseous form stored in his body, but condensed mana from within his palace, several streams of blue fluid equalling his head in volume all disappeared instantly upon contact with his ruby eyes.
A blinding searchlight emitted from them, spread far and wide into the sky, fully encapsulating his whole range of view. Such far-reaching beams continued upwards endlessly, only halted as what appeared to be a great wall impeded their momentum. Where that light shone, the world quickly morphed once more, the mixes of colours separated into clear and concise layers, and even some new ones appeared.
To say that intersecting three dimensional spaces could be ‘layered’ was rather funny to imagine, but at will he flipped back and forth through the vibrant existences to greater and greater displeasure.
With half a second already gone by, he hurriedly activated the pocket watch.
And extra 30 seconds in the next half sounded like enough to figure out what just happened. And so, he continued flipping through the layers, most of them were just regular colours as expected of their corresponding magics, but a few appeared as regions of moving fog. Another was completely empty with the exception of a spider web of thin lines spread through space.
While he wasn’t viewing the dimensions themselves, these representations usually came about from physical properties… And some were just really strange in how they functioned.
But what really kept his attention was the hole in front of him. The tunnel in space formed by Raccelline’s skill, still unhealed as he better understood the Nexus’ analogy from earlier.
No matter the dimension; No matter how strange or unworldly it appeared. That hole penetrated all of them. And yet…
There wasn’t actually a hole.