Jeffrey and Talnor advanced, and both attacked at once, Jeffrey sending a spray of powerful energy bullets towards the E Rank invader. Meanwhile, Talnor’s sword hissed through the air, and a tapestry of lightning cascaded across the divide.
Jeffrey took the opportunity to scan his opponent, but all he found was a name and a level, which didn’t really tell him much about his enemy.
“Falaron Tyndor,” he called out as he approached. “What, is the Athari sect so impoverished in terms of power that they must send their bastards after us?”
Falaron’s face twisted in rage. “What did you just say?”
“You heard me,” Jeffrey replied. “Bastard.”
Falaron’s sword of energy carved through the air, whistling like it was cutting through the fabric of reality itself. It tugged through the strands of golden lightning, cutting them like they were strands of silk. The E Ranker convulsed as the electric charge coursed through his body, but without muscles to contract, the effect was purely conceptual, and he remained standing.
Jeffrey’s bullets hammered into him, tearing holes through his flesh. In the end, though, they lacked enough stopping power to do more than that. He sighed. He had reached the end of his natural power. It seemed that it was time to reveal his trump card.
Jeffrey dropped to one knee, and braced his gun with both hands, pointing it at Falaron’s head. Then he let out a scream of agony as almost all of his health and mana pools vanished into the weapon. It glowed with a vibrant white light, burning his flesh where it touched it. His Dao hummed to life in the fullest expression of its glory, and the gun almost came apart in his hands. His newest Mythical skill was called Final Strike. It was a basic enough name, but that said nothing about its power. It almost touched upon being an Ancient skill, but because of its extremely detrimental effects, it was downgraded.
Jeffrey roared in rage, and then pulled the trigger. The world before him vanished into a sea of pure whiteness as a tiny speck of energy instantly turned the air to plasma. Winds powerful enough to scour a town to the dirt rippled across the city, but his control over them was high enough to keep them focused on his true target.
The attack moved faster than even an E Ranker could react, and before Falaron could do more than form the ghost of a grimace, the bullet struck his head. The man was torn from his feet and sent hurtling into the sky, straight through the hole in the force field. His body burned away as Jeffrey’s attack released its anger on the world. A charred meteor crossed the skies, traveling so quickly that it reached the horizon in a matter of seconds.
Jeffrey tried to rise, but found his strength deserting him. Only when the final essence notification reached him did he finally let the darkness claim him.
In the Tower
The Overlord’s journey through the remainder of the third tower segment had been one far more difficult than anything he had encountered before. Finding himself in the midst of a war between two planetary neighbors, he had been forced to use his extreme potency to head off thousands of E Rankers before he could finally pick a side. Eventually, he had joined the Nathraxians, a race of mammalians that looked somewhat like bipedal rabbits. Their foe was a different race, one they only referred to as the Despoilers. They were a brutish species of quadrupedal reptilians that nevertheless had the capacity to wield weaponry through the addition of arms jutting from their torsos. They were essentially centaurs, but if their bodies were all reptile, and no human.
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Neither mattered much to him, but to finish the floor, he had to contribute to the victory of his allies. For the first time in the Tower, he was finally being challenged. His Dao had begun to increase in power once more, as he finally was able to use it against enemies whose strength mattered in the grand scheme of things. His path was a narrow one, but one that could prove incredibly rewarding if he was able to fight the right kind of enemy. In other words, one strong enough to challenge him, but weak enough that he could eventually win. Naturally, finding such a foe was more difficult than the actual process of Dao cultivation.
As he led his army across the plains of the desert planet he had chosen as his ally, his body crackled with rampant power. Pillars of scarlet light shot down from the heavens before him, crushing his foes to power. He was currently on the seventh level of the floor, which required him to personally kill a hundred thousand foes. It sounded like a monumental task, but when his enemies were, for the most part, weaker than he was, it was quite easy. Every time he progressed to the next task, the number of enemies he had to defeat increased by a factor of ten. Presumably, when the floor finally ended, he would have to fight the leader of the enemy coalition. So far, he had only been forced to fight with at most, a few officers, which were each in charge of entire legions of soldiers. They had been more of a challenge, and he had actually taken a few injuries from those fights.
In the end though, his destiny was far beyond any of these peons that he fought alongside. He did not begrudge them for their weakness, but he pitied them for it. Knowing that the vast majority of the Multiverse lived like this, mortals with a vague hope at Enlightenment, was quite saddening. Even though most of those here were E Rankers, their strength was lacking. If Jacob had to guess, none of them possessed any titles beyond the most basic types. They most likely had Tower titles, but he seriously doubted that any of them had crossed past the tenth or fifteenth floor. Then again, he was in another Multiverse, so perhaps there was no Tower here.
The Overlord charged, the nexus point of the world around him, and so powerful was his charge that the air before him burst into flame.
He spotted a few of the enemy officers standing amidst their soldiers, vast hulks of reptilian flesh and scales that seemed equipped to batter apart a mountain with their sheer strength alone. All of them carried weapons calibrated to their immense strength, from maces the size of telephone poles to hammers more befitting a demigod of smithing than anyone else. The one weakness their race had was a lack of magical prowess. As far as Jacob could tell, none of them could use anything beyond the Dao and internal elemental enhancements. Even the few projectiles that they did form from their Daos were generally made to empower their physical weapons.
One of them leaped over the heads of his fellows, and pawed at the ground with his forelegs, hefting a pair of maces so large that they should have tugged him to the ground. Instead, he waved them around as if they were toothpicks.
Before the alien could do anything but posture, the Overlord’s fist had buried itself in his sternum. Most of the reptilian centaurs weren’t E Rank, but a good portion of them were, once you considered just how many Jacob had to fight. Instead of turning the alien’s entire skeletal structure into dust, a hole was blasted out the back of his humanoid torso, and the body soon followed, hurtling up into the air.
With a roar, the Overlord teleported into the sky above his foe, and brought his fists down at the same time, a hammerblow with the power to level towns pulverizing the centaur’s entire upper body. Essence swirled into him, but the slaughter had only just begun.