The carbon plains had an austere beauty to them, especially at night. They were a place of solitude, the aftermath of that last great battle between the demonic cultivators and alliance of righteous cultivators. The layered sheets of graphite were unofficially considered to be a neutral ground where no combat would take place.
At least, until now.
Kash stood surrounded on all sides by Knife Clones closing in on him. In the distance, Knife Guy was dead silent as he watched the action.
Kash experimentally blasted the Knife Clone nearest to him, enhancing the bolt with the Red Dragon’s speed. The clone couldn’t dodge in time and was noticeably burned. It took more damage than the original clone did when subjected to similar attacks. It appeared that some Knife Clones were weaker than others. Placing them based on just their Hibiscan energy output, the weakest were Aunty Ifeoma rank and the strongest were Eugene rank, with most being Jajas. The first Knife Clone had been a Eugene in terms of power.
But the Knife Clones were not true cultivators. Rather, they were each multiple corpses stuffed and molded together into a knife-shaped box. Kash could tell because of the post-death soul emanations. The souls of the corpses had long since departed, but their afterimages remained.
There was much energy loss when a cultivator died. The soul flew to the heavens and the Hibiscan energy drained away. Ordinarily, the energy would leak out at a rate of half of it gone every hour until it was noticeable. With the most advanced storage mechanisms, the corpses would lose half of their Hibiscan energy every ten years. However, this corpse fusing method looked like it preserved the Hibiscan energy by balancing the corpse after-souls against each other and keeping them in a metal shell.
The Umbra Crimers must have gotten their hands on a massive corpse trove. Because to have 53 Knife Clones required a minimum of hundreds of powerful Hibiscan corpses. At a maximum it could be over ten thousand. Kash shuddered to think how they went about acquiring them with no one noticing.
Knife Guy, floating in air, spun up and towards Kash, cackling all the way. A portal opened up for every Knife Clone. Each one pulled a tube from the portal and drank from it, before putting them back in. The portals fizzled out.
“You know what that was?” asked Knife Guy.
A massive portal opened up behind Kash, who whirled around to see it. A thick white substance poured from it, vanishing partway through the air. The meat worm must be drinking it!
“You want some?”
Kash refused to dignify that with a response.
“I guess you don’t know that it’s milk from the creature.”
What creature?
The Knife Clones rippled and engorged, growing larger. Their spines extended, metal plates bulged outwards, and their knives fully emerged. Their Hibiscan energy flared with strength.
“This, this is the power of the creature!” declared Knife Guy.
Kash gritted his teeth. This was going to be difficult. But he had a plan. The Knife Clones and the meat worm were nothing but a distraction. The Knife Clones likely would be weakened or completely cease to function if Knife Guy died. All he had to do was destroy the sentient Hibiscan artifact. Easier said than done, though.
The meat worm whipped Kash with its tail, and he was sent flying, barely twisting out of the way in time to avoid multiple Knife Clones lunging at him. They were fast, much more so than before. He started charging up ball lightning, and at the same time, split 5% of his Hibiscan energy into a lightning clone. It instantly phased underground, moving towards Knife Guy. His hope was that the electrical emanations from splitting himself off would be disguised by the ambient effects of the ball lightning being formed.
Most of the Knife Clones dashed forwards and lunged at Kash, a few staying behind to guard Knife Guy. Kash’s clone had reached him now and was lurking below in the carbon. The main Kash body released a fully charged orb of lightning, blasting away the Knife Clones hundreds of feet and scorching off a layer of skin from the meat worm. They weren’t sent that far away because the ball didn’t directly hit them. Kash subsumed himself into an electrical arc, near-instantaneously arriving next to Knife Guy and firing multiple bolts at him. Knife Guy flipped out of the way, dodging all of them.
Just then, the lightning clone burst out of the ground and Kash transferred the Red Dragon to that body. It had been charging ball lighting this entire time, and infused it with strength to blast Knife Guy away. The knife was sent careening off in the distance.
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The Knife Clones looked to be riding on air towards him. They all jumped off from what must have been the meat worm and scrambled towards Kash.
Kash blasted them away with dozens of precise lightning strikes, each imbued with speed. The Knife Guys were sent flying back. Kash twirled in the air, firing lightning around him in a circle until a bolt hit the meat worm. It screeched and shedded another layer of meat-skin.
Knife Guy himself zipped towards Kash, floating in the air.
“That didn’t harm me, you know. My exoskeleton is far too durable.”
Kash glared at Knife Guy. “This fight has gotten tiresome. The pawns of the Tortoise need to do better if they truly want to be rid of me.”
“Dimension Displacement: Boundless Revolving Tesseract of Lightning.”
Sections of ground and sky shifted in and out of reality. Rotating cubes of lightning burst forth from Kash until there were hundreds of them, merging together and splitting apart endlessly. Lightning crackled down from coalescing clouds, bolt after bolt striking the carbon. The roaring cracks of lightning and noxious ozone odor filled Kash with joy.
On instinct, Knife Guy swung himself around, desperately trying to cut open the dimension.
“There is no barrier to cut,” Kash said. “I did separate this space from our reality, but not by means of a sealed boundary.”
“I have fundamentally altered the dimensional nature of this space and therefore cut it off from physical contact with the rest of the universe. We now exist in four spatial dimensions, with the fourth only being temporary. It is entirely composed of my Hibiscan lightning. This is what allows me to safely ascend to the true lightning form.”
Knife Guy could only look on in horror.
“Manifold Radial Lightning Beast.”
Kash began to transform. His form of pure electricity changed itself, purifying, becoming more potent. Kash extended the body into the fourth dimension, knitting bands of coursing lightning together to create a heightened state of being for himself.
Knife Guy opened a small portal, confirming that it still worked, and reached into it to pull out a tube. While slurping milk from it he turned and looked in horror at Kash.
Kash was a rotationally symmetrical monstrosity of a dozen faces, 24 flailing tentacle-arms channeling lightning, 48 scrambling legs of varying length, and wings of sharp lightning sprouting from every corner of the body.
He floated up in the sky and assembled a throne of thousands of lightning cubes to recline on. Thousands more rotated around him, electricity arcing between the cubes and himself.
Kash was awash in a state of heightened sensory awareness and cognitive power. He could see the every move of Knife Guy, the Knife Clones, and even the meat worm. He looked deeply into Knife Guy. The exterior metal of the knife disguised a fleshy interior. Knife Guy on the inside was a brain within a sac of flesh and skin. An eye and a mouth popped out from the metal through narrow holes.
Knife Guy was calling the meat worm to him. It slithered over and extended several tendrils from holes in its forehead. Knife Guy propelled himself into the air and was tightly grasped by them. Every Knife Clone dashed towards the meat worm and wrapped themselves around it, forming an interlocking metal carapace. The meat worm and its newfound exoskeleton morphed itself into the shape of a knife. Knife Guy himself became the barely exposed tip of the new knife.
“Ultimate Form: Knife Amalgamation,” Knife Guy said, and swung himself at Kash.
Kash bolted out of the way the instant Knife Guy started moving, the slash missing him. Knife Guy moved quicker than Kash expected, striking again, and Kash this time blocked with a shield of lightning cubes. Each one was deeply cut into but none broke.
“Weak,” said Kash in a booming, distorted voice. “Pitifully weak.”
His vision showed an interesting phenomena in the Knife Amalgamation. The flesh of the meat worm and the metal of the Knife Clones was merging into a cohesive whole. The integration of organic and inorganic materials greatly strengthened it. The internal components of the Knife Amalgamation were suffused with milk from the creature, with it acting as an equivalent of blood.
Kash threw a hundred charged lightning cubes at the Knife Amalgamation. It knew it was too slow to properly dodge, instead twisting and molding its shape to let the cubes pass it by. The dozen or so that did hit coursed electricity through the entire thing. But the attack was weakened substantially by the Knife Amalgamation’s defenses. Much of the electricity was prevented from conducting through it by the insulating effect of the flesh, while any that did get through was channeled and harmlessly dispensed by the metal.
Kash tore off a large chunk of the cube throne and hurled it towards the Knife Amalgamation, charging every cube with the Red Dragon’s speed. It didn’t have any time to react, instead facing the full offensive brunt of the attack.
The Knife Amalgamation convulsed with electricity. The meat worm cried out in agony and several Knife Clones were forcibly split off from the whole. Milk from the creature spilled out. Using his new vision, Kash could see that the interior of the Knife Amalgamation was severely damaged and barely functional.
He completely dismantled the cubes that made up the throne and sent them after Knife Guy, each one striking the Knife Amalgamation and sending it speeding off into the distance.
The abomination was barely visible, having been thrust miles away. The displaced dimension served as its own plane. When the Knife Amalgamation hit the border, it emerged from the opposite edge. Careening towards Kash, it moved in the air to swing at Kash. He formed a thick shield composed of the remaining lightning cubes.
All of the cubes in the slash’s path were severed. Kash was cut in half, lightning spewing from the wound. The dimension itself broke in half. Kash tugged at the cubes to come to him but they were already dissipating, their lightning fading.
“It’s over,” declared Knife Guy.