Shielding his eyes with spiritual energy as he weathered the bombarding winds, Jason stared into the apocalyptic mushroom cloud that all but dwarfed the previous one, focusing on a specific area of the roiling dust and debris despite not being able to see through the dark, swirling veil.
Conjuring another small hand with which to launch himself toward his enemy, Jason activated the attack arrayment that he’d managed to preserve after being pushed back by the fallout of Elisa and Great Elder Germiel’s martial skills and then zeroed in on his opponent. Thousands of solid, metal like discs appeared in the air around him like a massive swarm of locusts, each disc about one metre in diameter and as thin as a credit card. Throwing out an arm, he initiated a large-scale barrage that peppered the massive cloud of smoke with his army of dangerous projectiles, which cut through the volatile winds as they followed seamless trajectories toward the one they were meant to harm.
The great elder didn’t bother to flee, instead conjuring two large hands that he willed to clasp around him in a firm shield of dark red energies, as if he were a grasshopper that had just been covered by the eager hands of an excitable child. Seeing that his discs only penetrated about halfway into the man’s impromptu shield, Jason catapulted himself toward the elder with a flick of the hand that he currently stood upon, appearing in the air above the great elder a brief moment later. Conjuring his own Crippling Blood Palm that was about the size of an average home, he quickly formed it into a fist that punched downward at the elder’s shield with an immense amount of force. With the amount of inner essence he’d invested into the martial skill, he could have created a rendition that was at least three kilometres long, though condensed as it was he was able to unleash an incredible amount of isolated, contained force.
The great elder, along with the two hands that had been protecting him, disappeared the moment that Jason’s attack landed, for he was almost immediately smashed into the ground below after plummeting three kilometres in a couple of seconds.
Perfect, was Jason’s only thought as he saw that the man had landed nearby to where his obscured arrayment diagrams remained hidden beneath the dirt that marked the site of the former town. Seeing that the man’s protective shell was still intact despite having punched a crater about twenty metres deep and three times as wide into the ravaged soil where he’d landed, Jason knew that he had to act fast.
Using a great deal of his remaining energy reserves, he summoned a dozen fifty-metre serpents and sent them slithering toward the man’s barrier—which he still hadn’t dismissed or emerged from—with the intention of corralling him toward the trap that he’d laid earlier on, but unfortunately for Jason things weren’t so simple. As soon as the snakes drew neat to the improvised barrier, the hands that covered the man suddenly grew in size and then crushed the oncoming serpents into nothingness when the great elder clapped them together between the giant palms.
Without much inner essence left to him, Jason knew that he had to use his dantian’s reserves sparingly. Still, he couldn’t afford to let the great elder leave the vicinity of the former town after he’d expended so much effort to direct him there.
Tossing some energy-replenishing medicinal pellets into his mouth, Jason invested nearly all of his remaining inner essence into the most powerful version of the Life-Severing Spear that he could currently conjure and then abruptly appeared a few hundred metres to the east of the man. Digging his legs into the dirt, he willed the spear in his hand to grow from a few metres to over a kilometre in length, the massive weapon hovering two kilometres above his opponent. Naturally, the man fled westward as he prepared another technique with which to meet Jason’s.
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Jason activated the gravity-altering arrayment that sat hidden about two hundred metres from where Great Elder Germiel had just relocated, the man immediately falling to one knee with a sudden look of alarm as he struggled beneath an unexpected wave of physical suppression. As soon as the gravity around him had been intensified by over a hundred times the normal amount, Jason activated the second of the hidden diagrams with a rising sense of anticipation.
Twenty small spheres of golden light suddenly sprang to life a short way’s away from the great elder, who had begun to dash in the opposite direction of the first arrayment’s focal point. Even with gravity multiplied by a hundred times, the man still moved as fast as someone in the late levels of Profound Entry, which was very fast by Earth’s standards. Unfortunately, this was Venara and his opponent was an angry, bloodthirsty Jason, who wasn’t one to let his targets escape.
The spheres of golden light flashed through the air and appeared around the man, encircling him rapidly for several seconds before forming a circular perimeter around him and coming to a standstill. The moment they stopped moving, each globe subsequently lit up and gave rise to a massive pillar of blinding light that shot high enough into the sky that it penetrated what little of the low-riding cloud cover that hadn’t been displaced by the collision of Elisa’s and Great Elder Germiel’s martial skills. At the centre of the gigantic pillar stood the great elder, who was destined to be disintegrated by the incredibly hot energy that the arrayment was giving off, which was similar to the heat produced by a magnifying glass beneath a strong ray of sunlight but only on a much greater scale.
It would’ve been cool to enslave him, thought Jason as he created a bit of distance between him and the pillar, which didn’t give rise to any winds or external bursts of energy. But to hell with him. I mean, he broke both of my arms.
Jason instinctually dashed to the side, or at least tried to. Frozen in place by shock and a screaming sense of danger, he felt a searing pain in the small of his back where a hand had just plunged wrist-deep into his torso, fingernails tickling the lining of his stomach at the front.
Next came an entirely new sensation of anguish—the feeling of being refined at another’s hand. The vibrant pillar abruptly flashed out of existence, revealing nothing inside. This would normally have been expected, only, a half-naked Great Elder Germiel stood at his back with an angry curl to his lips, his fiery goatee completely singed off, his robes charred and smoking where they were still intact.
Indignant, Jason reached behind his back even as he felt the energies within him rapidly begin to coalesce around the invasive hand, at which point he grabbed hold of the man’s forearm with a weakening grip.
“I’ll admit that you put up a much better fight than I’d expected.” Silver eyes lighting up in satisfaction, a sick smile spread across his lips. “For someone at the seventh level of Integration, your energies are so…delectable.”
“How did you…?”
“Why would I bother explaining?”
He must have used an artifact or some sort of treasure, realized Jason. Did it allow him to relocate at the last minute?
“That’s fair,” he wheezed, the strength of his grip failing. “But I’m also curious…about how your energies will taste.” Activating a hidden talisman he’d attached to his palm weeks earlier, a single disc of energy shot out of his hand and completely severed everything below the halfway mark of the great elder’s forearm. Leaping forward with decisive steps, he immediately stemmed his bleeding as best he could with the energies available to him and pulled the severed forearm from his back like an arrow from a wound, willing any of the leaking blood to gather beside it within a small globe of spiritual energy.
Elisa… Drive him off, now…
The red-eyed woman appeared to intercept an angry response from Great Elder Germiel, Jason summoning a scarlet serpent and flying off on its back as he coughed up a mouthful of blood and swallowed it back down. While Elisa held off her former colleague with all her might in order to prevent him from seeing to his wound, Jason drew out the diagram for the same healing arrayment that he’d been relying on as of late and quickly repaired his injured torso. While he might have been able to fight toe-to-toe with cultivators at the Genesis stage, he couldn’t make use of the trademark abilities that came with that realm of cultivation, things like flying or regenerating injured cells and even entire limbs.