The monster grinned, her obsidian armor flaring as she did so. The resulting chasm formed by her mouth could have swallowed a cruise ship. The heat redoubled, but Sam’s thresholds allowed him to resist. He landed on the monster’s obsidian gorget, and stood there for a moment, taking in the creature’s mountainous head. All the Titans had a core somewhere, and usually it was in the head of the more humanoid ones.
He leaped forwards, but was battered out of the air by what felt like a lance of pure gravity, altering his trajectory as it passed. He bounced off the stone of Gaea’s armor with the force of a falling meteor, groaning as bones fractured. Using his Dao, he shattered the elemental effect and stood, limning himself in a layer of Dao energy.
This time when he attacked, he was able to resist the pressure. Expanding his hammer to its largest size, he filled it with as much energy as he could, waiting until the last moment to release it. Gaea roared and whipped up her hands, trying to swat him out of the air. However, that would prove to be a mistake on her part. The motion exacerbated the damage dealt to her arm by Kane and the Overlord, and it shattered, falling apart into chunks of stone as its weight took effect. The sea below trembled as the massive boulders impacted it. A wave hundreds of feet high raced towards the shore. Once the arm had been disconnected from the Titan’s elemental power, it was simply rock once more.
Gaea roared in pain, and in that instant, Sam struck. A mushroom cloud of atomized rock and power erupted upwards as he brought the weapon down upon the Titan’s brow, smiting the rock like a demigod. Even though he was barely a speck beside her, his attack was not. She staggered backwards, her rocky form rippling as shockwaves raced up and down. Sam had grown greatly since he had first challenged the Titans, and for the first time, he was confident that he could actually defeat a low E Ranker on his own. Even though he was only a few levels from the peak of F Rank, that should have been impossible.
Sam raised his hammer again and slammed it down, sending another shockwave across the Titan’s form. He dimly noticed the attacks of the others, far below, but it was hardly relevant to what he was doing. All of his enhancements were flared, and his body was filled with such power that he felt as if he could break a mountain with a single blow. And perhaps, with the addition of his energy, he could.
Tapping into his weapon mastery and new stat, he burned his Karma to empower his movements. A single point vanished from his total, and he felt one with the universe. Threads of golden light connected him with everything around him, some thicker than others. There was a massive one running between him and the planet beneath, and an even larger set running to his allies. However, he focused on the threads connecting him to the Titan before him, and realized that he could read the incoming attacks before they actually happened. He only had a few minutes of this, but he was going to make this count.
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He felt like he was in the eye of a storm, and every incoming attack was like a thread of fluff, drifting in the wind. He was at once in tune with everything, and above it. He weaved his way towards the Titan, avoiding every last scrap of power that was thrown his way. Bolts of searing heat, volcanic streams of superheated water, and lances of gravitational force all were of no consequence. He could see the rage heating up within the Titan as he danced around her attacks. Then he landed a solid hit right into the crater that his previous attack had left. With the residue of crackling Dao energy playing across it, the wound had proved stubbornly resistant to Gaea’s attempts at healing.
“Enough! I will show you why your kind worshiped me as a goddess in times long past.”
The ocean began to bubble, and the world shook as something took place deep beneath them. A thunderous crack ripped through the air as the volcano nearby cracked in half, before gushing out a titanic geyser of molten rock. It streamed upwards for miles, propelled by pure pressure.
The wound in the world expanded in a line towards the horizon, and the ground buckled. A line of fire traced across the sky as the world vented its lifeblood into the air. As the lava rose into the sky, it condensed into a massive lance, as long as a small country. Gaea reached out and gripped it, before slamming it down into the sea before her. As the tip ripped into outer space itself, a shockwave rippled across the sea, completely erasing all of the water for a few dozen miles. It was so large that Sam could not keep its entirety within his vision at once. A line of heat waited at the edges of the crater, preventing it from returning.
Sam and the others were catapulted backwards at many times the speed of sound, bones breaking and flesh tearing. Luckily, none of them died. With the Titan suddenly revealed in full, her true size was visible. Gaea was larger than the other Titans had been, a mountainous existence easily seven or eight miles tall.
“You will bow before my might!” Gaea declared.
After that display, she hardly sounded arrogant at all. However, size and spectacle did not indicate might. The only reason she had been able to do any of that was because of her size, and her connection to the Earth.