Jade pointed his pinky finger toward the descending tentacle and an array of energy runes formed on his finger and coated it. When the tentacle touched the finger a transparent crystalline substance rapidly spread from Jade’s finger and coated the tentacle.
The crystal swiftly spread toward the other parts of the tentacles but the armor tore itself from the affected parts and floated away. For the first time, it had moved. Jade smiled and said with a psychic message “Finally”.
The tentacles that had touched the crystal remained frozen in the air. The armor could not make any connection to it. The rage in the armor boiled but it could not overcome the reality that it was weak. It had no proper contingency against spatial manipulation and when Jade started bringing out the big stuff it was helpless.
The aura of rage intensified and reached its peak and the armor snapped again. Feeling the full brunt of the rage aura Jade could sense the parts of the monster that still remained in its tentacles. Jade could sense its attachment to the body part, the rage of loss and the rage the monster felt at the fact that it was turned into a weapon to empower those that killed it.
The tentacles on the armor writhed, liquefied and formed the image of the monster Cthullu out of its tissue. Red and black colored straight patterned aura coated the tentacles and merged with it.
The armor launched toward Jade and lashed its tentacles toward Jade after enlargening them. Jade thought ‘Smart, the aura would protect it from the spell by taking the hit. But…’ Jade waved his hand and multiple spatial slashes cut through the tentacles that were coming for him.
He snapped his fingers and energy runes appeared out of empty water and latched onto the severed tentacles that were already growing branches. Transparent crystals swiftly covered the tentacles and stopped their growth, freezing them in place.
The armor split apart some of its tentacles which floated in the air and branched out. The floating tentacles liquefied and formed the image of Cthullu, the original monster they came from. 13 Tentacle Cthullus now stood before Jade and they split their tentacles to create more before spreading their hands forward and releasing a deluge of liquid tentacles toward Jade, covering him on all sides.
Jade summoned the runes he had hidden in the water and they combined to form vortexes around Jade that sucked the liquid tentacles. The armor tried to consume the absorbed tentacles but found that they had been crystallized inside the space they were absorbed to even though they were supposed to be protected by its aura.
The crystals that froze the tentacles were a result of the spell, Spacetime Freeze. The spell did as its name said; it froze space and time for the space that the runes touched. Jade’s runes could ignore the aura since they were made of Cosmic Energy which couldn’t be repelled by normal energy. If it was pure black aura the tentacles might have had a chance since that aura repelled all energy including Cosmic.
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Jade saw that the armor had multiplied to about a hundred within a few moments behind the wave of tentacles. He thought ‘So much vitality but as expected, armor is nothing without the person wearing it. It can’t properly resist space manipulation and time manipulation is an absolute weak point for it even though it has a strong soul. Time to end this’.
Jade teleported to the original armor which had tried to hide itself among its copies. The armor was easily distinguished by Jade even though his IP didn’t denote it as a Tier 4 Armament when it had made some distance. The soul of the armor was in all its tentacles and its replicas but the soul glyphs were only on the original. And also only its soul had a rocky texture, the others had sandy textures.
Jade teleported the vortexes around him and even made more to protect himself from the surge of liquid tentacles tissue that the replicas sent to him. He used his Soul Hunter’s Perception to see the name of the Mandala of the armor, it was [Increase].
Runes appeared from empty water to touch the armor and transparent crystals spread on the armor, covering it up. The replicas and the other tentacles still remained active even after Jade had captured the original. Jade thought ‘That’s a very interesting Mandala. I also have a Mandala too’.
Jade’s soul elastically extended out of his body toward his palms and formed blades. He used the dread smith glyph to enhance the weapon he made out of his soul and he swung the blades toward the replicas.
Flying slashes made of grey light shot out of the blades and hit the tentacles and replicas. The moment they were hit the souls in them disintegrated immediately. This was expected since the souls were still in a sandy form, only the soul in the actual weapon was in a rocky form but it still was no match for Jade.
Unlike in the empty soul realm, attacking in the Astral Plane caused Jade to directly absorb the parts that made up the souls he destroyed; he had to digest the memories immediately. All that was in the souls of the replicas was boundless rage and the dark imaginations of the things the armor would do to the merfolk and every living thing when it was free.
With their souls destroyed the replicas and tentacles became lifeless and fell to the floor. Jade looked at the frozen armor and thought ‘Undying Hate huh? For me to make you better your hate has to die. It’s too bad you met the one person that could kill it’.
Jade felt fear and pity for the armor. Fear at the things he could do to the armor without it being able to resist and pity for the fate that was certainly ahead of it. The moment the monster had died was the moment its fate was sealed. Even if he didn’t come along Eye would have found a way later.
Jade thought ‘I need to do my best work and for that I should probably get some magic from Core 2’ Jade sighed and thought ‘Considering that their Spirit Magic is considered a prized knowledge that is even more vital than Reality Forging I probably can’t buy it, not after selling rune technology’.
Jade’s thoughts were silent for a while before he thought ‘Doing things alone is really not the best. I need more than business partners, I need allies. But for now I should just buy any other magic that they have’.
Jade floated out of the room door and saw Eye waiting for him. Jade said “I’ve frozen it but I want to buy magic from Core 2 first”. Eye said “Good idea”. He sent some psychic messages to what seemed like the empty environment before he said “I will escort you”.
Jade said “Isn’t this too much?” Eye said “Someone important wants to meet you and I want to be there to see the meeting”. Jade asked “Who is it?” Eye said “Ocean”.