At that moment, just before she released her technique, Karmesin felt the overpowering sensation that she would be torn limb from limb at any moment, much like one would feel when facing down a predatory beast ready to pounce.

Thus, for the first time in a very long while, Karmesin acted on pure instinct and set the beam loose. A screaming ray of northlight ripped forth towards her foe, carving a swath through the earth and turning the air around its edges to chittering plasma not through brute force of heat energy or fulgur, but through the world trying to snap back into place in its wake.

It was a near-instant attack, the beam itself faster than lightning.

CRITICALITY SIGN

SUBCORE EMBODIMENT

CRIMSON COMMAND: MASTER SPARK

And yet, Zelsys slammed her blade down into the ground head-first, crouching behind it. It ignited into a screaming wedge of lightning, the beam was parted.

It fell silent, and when vision returned to the both of them, the Newman Elder rose up, her weapon wreathed in an aura of northlight-coloured lightning, for a swath of the beam's power had been torn from it as it passed over the blade.

"But that's... Not physically possible," the Lady in Red uttered, rearranging her subcores back into the usual setup of four Flying Eight-trigram Reactors. It wasn't disbelief that she felt, but a mixture of surprise and confusion. She genuinely did not know how mere lightning had split her attack, one which, by all accounts, harnessed a higher-order energy, one powerful enough to suppress even a dragon's magic.

"Did you not feel it? C'mon, I saw it in your eyes. I don't have Sword Qi... Because I have this. You must've felt it even back in the dungeon, when I went for weak points that even you didn't know you had. Even I didn't know what exactly it was, but at the end of the day, putting a name to it changes nothing of the truth that I've been cultivating it all along, this Predator Qi of mine..."

Zelsys tore her blade out of the ground, splitting away its extra segments to form a pair of False Fang Rippers, which took with them that rainbow lightning as she sicced them upon Karmesin.

"...And there is nothing my fangs cannot tear into. You, of all people, should be aware; you helped forge them."

----------------------------------------

Two of those death-discs were a pain, but they weren't a major threat. Sure, with that coating of lightning mixed with her own stolen power, they could go straight through blackstone like butter, but Karmesin still had enough material reinforced with Black Rod Trigrams to entomb them and make them run themselves ragged. Even that was tricky, those rippers maneuvered in cleverer ways than they had any right to when Zelsys wasn't controlling them. It was mere seconds between when they had been sent out and when Karmesin entombed them, of course, but seconds meant a great deal more when both combatants could think five or ten times faster than a baseline human. Mind games and complex tactics could be executed on the scale of fractions of a second... Even if they rarely were.

Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

She didn't have a retort to what Zelsys had said regarding this "Predator Qi", because she was entirely right. Now that she knew what she was looking for, she could sense it clearly. That was why her eyes were like that, why her face seemed to change structure when she grimaced, why she exuded that languid, yet vaguely dangerous aura even when she was calm. Newman was as much as cultivator-beast as she was a human cultivator.

At this point, Karmesin was fairly certain this fight couldn't be brought to a conclusive end with anything short of a miracle, and if she just kept up this way, she was utterly certain Zelsys would manage to exhaust her two remaining uses for Recreation of Past Self. Karmesin brought out an attack which she had conceived of specifically to defeat Zelsys. It was imperfect as of yet, but it would nonetheless be her trump card. She’d prepared the formation's markers over the course of their fight, intending to set it off right after the Rain of One Thousand Spiders. They were still just about within the formation's boundaries.

Karmesin screamed. Her horns rang. The world around the two of them shuddered, bent, and fell away. In its stead, a realm of blackstone and ominous pillars, surrounded by the void of nothingness. A tiny platform floating atop the Sea of Fog, its mercurial waters up to ankle-height from the very start. This unstable pseudo-dungeon would sink in minutes, but that was longer than it needed to last.

Four more subcores took shape by her side, now arrayed in a circular formation, each holding within it one of the eight trigrams. That was the purpose of this realm, to let Red stretch her power twice as far and even beyond that; it gathered power from the Sea of Fog and funneled it to her much in the same way a real dungeon funneled power to its Dungeon Core. The Black Rod Trigrams which she had made part of the structure also acted to curtail the possibility of her opponent deriving benefit from merely being in the Sea of Fog.

Karga shone in the far distance, and Red couldn't help but feel she was being watched by two sets of eyes... Though they were neither the Revenant King nor the Divine Emperor. The feeling abruptly vanished when she noticed it, and she returned her focus to her formation. Newman was clearly doing something of her own, and Red wasn't about to give her more time to pull another new technique out of nowhere.

Eight subcores multiplied by eight thrice over; to the power of four. Four-thousand ninety-six subcores. Four-thousand ninety-six Flying Eight-trigram Reactors. Only eight were real, but that made no difference. Her power was spread so thin that each could only fire once, but that made no difference either. The power of this formation was to defy causality itself. To deceive the laws of the world. If the beam from any one of her Flying Eight-trigram Reactors happened to strike Zelsys, it would retroactively become one of the eight real ones.

In a way, she had hoped exactly for what she'd gotten, and doing this was her tacitly saying she was ready to move on regardless of the result, even if Newman were to survive it. Not to move on from her desire to strike Zelsys down, but from this particular fight.

MULTIPLICATION SIGN

SPLINTERING EIGHT TRIGRAM FORMATION

CRIMSON COMMAND: 8x8x8x8 BLACK BLOSSOMS

"TELL A LIE ENOUGH TIMES, AND IT BECOMES TRUTH"