Axel surrounded himself with a sphere of electricity while the others moved to capture Degritone. With the cloak out of the way, Degritone was forced to use movement constructs to lessen the blows as he looked for a way to easily take the two out. Mimika managed to get through his wall of force and rip an arm off with her teeth while The One seemed to be unaffected by the wall entirely.
He moved in while transforming his arms, making them grey with very tight skin, with claws coming out his finger tips. He jabbed so his fingers would pierce Degritone in the chest, and Degritone felt pulled toward the claws. He flashed out of the way of The One's attack and above the back of the cat girl, punching down into her spine with the assistance of movement Stavch while sending a jet of ectoplasm at her.
The cat girl dodged out of the way, making Degritone miss, and he repeated the feat while she was mid-air. Before the attack could hit, Axel burst out of the sphere, lightning crackling off his entire person as he cut Degritone's arm off and threw him to the ground so hard it exploded. Degritone was almost blinded by the future Swordsman's Territory was showing him that Axel would do, even after it was nerfed by the emergency update making it 3 seconds of subjective time instead of absolute time.
Axel flashed to Degritone and cut him into 18 pieces before he could flash away. Axel immediately responded by stabbing a new lightning sword into the ground and following the flash. They repeatedly flashed away and to each other as Axel left sword after sword in the ground. Degritone made the mistake of flashing too close to one of the swords and he was reduced to small shards of pure Stavch as thousands of electric Axels overlaid on top of each other burst from the sword and cut him into pieces.
He reformed enough of his body before the System could take his soul, presumably to act as a battery to outsource the Stavch corruption onto something outside itself, and burst out as the Immortal Troll. Axel was already where he reformed with a stab directly into his soul, cutting through his Immortal Troll body like it was wet toilet paper.
As the blow passed through where Degritone's soul was, he found himself torn away from his Immortal Troll body and returned to a normal human body attached to the end of the sword. He flashed away, but Axel predicted where and when he would do so and followed before cutting him in two. As one half reformed into the full body of Degritone, Mimika caught it in her mouth and ripped his head off.
She pulped his brain and kept her teeth there, making it very hard for Degritone to do anything but keep himself alive. It took him a few seconds due to the reduced mental capacity, but he was able to replace his brain with pure Stavch, removing his need for it to think properly, and realized how stupid he was for not just flashing out of the grab. He did so, and made sure his body regenerated as pure Stavch instead of the flesh of humanity.
Degritone's hand whipped out and grabbed Axel by the throat as he flashed into melee range again, and squeezed. Degritone withstood all attacks for the seconds required for Axel to lose all his Health from Withering before flashing him out of the arena, where the other Degritones tended to him, before moving on to the other two.
Degritone was pulled toward The One again, and he flashed behind him. Before he could grab his neck, he turned to mist and moved a few feet away before reforming. Mimika thrust a paw through Degritone's back and crushed his bottom half into the ground before he teleported above her. She dropped below the blow he sent toward her spine and rolled onto her back, ripping him in half with her back legs and teeth.
He punched her in the throat before being pinned to the ground by an arrow. The One's daggers pierced the ground where Degritone was as he flashed away before throwing Mimika out of the arena with movement Stavch. Other Degritones cleansed her of Withering and got her back to full Health. The One's left hand started glowing blue as its dagger disappeared before shooting lightning at Degritone.
Degritone got hit right in the head before he flashed below The One's vision, attacking with an upward thrust of his sword. The One turned to mist and moved a few feet away before reforming drawing a bow, which he released almost instantly. Its target caught it with movement Stavch before flashing above The One, who reacted by sending a dagger directly into Degritone's throat, paralyzing him.
Degritone was pulled toward another clawed hand, flashing away before it could land. A lightning bolt met his left eye as The One zoomed in close with a Shout. Degritone's neck was cut half way through before he flashed away. A fist caught his chin and ripped his head off his body before another slammed it into the ground. Degritone directed his body to regenerate so he was already punching The One.
After flying back a few feet from the force of the punch, The One pulled out a red flask and downed its contents, immediately ending the Withering effect. Degritone mentally sighed and tried to crush The One to the ground with movement Stavch. He staggered slightly before being clad in ethereal armor, then charged Degritone. Degritone flashed into slashing position behind The One, who immediately turned, caught his arm, and removed the sword from Degritone's hand while sticking 3 daggers in Degritone's chest.
He flashed away as he became paralyzed, and a massive sphere of nothingness erupted from the ground behind Degritone. It barely touched him before he flashed away, getting a good view of the complete and utter nothingness fly into the sky, pulling in air like it were a black hole.
Axel, minus Degritone's cloak, appeared at the lip of the hole and looked at Degritone, who met his gaze. "Dang it," Axel rasped out. He rubbed his forehead while wincing.
"How can you do that at your power level? You're not even a timeline hopper yet, right?" Degritone asked. "That should be late-mid multiverse hopper stuff, if even that early. Memory's kinda fuzzy."
When Axel didn't respond, too busy trying to at least lower his headache, he looked down at where his body was slowly disappearing from the initial contact. The pure Stavch making up his body was slowly unraveling, completely negating his regeneration. His attempts to manually replace his body using Stavch constructs had no result.
"Yeah, this is definitely that. How..." Degritone's eyes began quickly flicking all over the place as he rapidly went through the possibilities, dismissing them one by one.
The One walked over to Axel and said, "Wow, that's some really high DPS to overcome his regeneration. He was acting like my blows didn't even exist. How does that work?"
"He used some construct to create an effect that should have insane drawbacks for people literally infinitely more powerful than we are. He shouldn't be alive after using that at his level," Degritone said, missing his entire left side from the neck down. "Let alone the Stavch corruption involved that Raijingeki didn't have. That should have turned him to nothing but corruption tissue."
The dissolving reached the opposite side of his torso, making his upper half fall to the ground. "He's completely fine and not made of pure Stavch, so he must have some way to offload the Stavch corruption, if not the who- wait, that's what the System does."
Royal Road is the home of this novel. Visit there to read the original and support the author.
"Dang it. I told you he'd figure it out if he saw it. And not a second too late for himself, either," Axel said through grit teeth. "GG, slash D, we lose."
"Want to fill me in on what you're talking about?" The One asked.
----------------------------------------
How had we not thought of this? Degritone thought to himself. While it won't be useful later and I don't know its limitations, it's brilliant, for someone still under timeline hopper level. Maybe the System was trying to prevent this information from becoming known by preventing timelines from splitting. We'll see. The question is still how the Realm Eater was used this far down, then documented for system use.
Instead of thinking of the structures needed to counter this effect, as he didn't know them, he thought of the flow the Stavch would need to have to negate the Realm Eater, the Realm Eater itself, targeted at the Realm Eater flows that already existed, and sent them to the System like he would when materializing an object or the Immortal Troll.
The parts of his body that had been touched by the all-deleting Stavch flow somehow became more black than they already were before returning to normal. The System took over and regenerated his missing body parts once the Realm Eater wasn't preventing his existence. He ate up the bottom half of The One's body with a black hole before flashing him out to the other Degritones while erasing the black hole.
His cloak replaced itself as he turned to Axel. "You not going to get a cloak of your own?"
"I don't know the flows for its material. It's one of the few things that's changed from Raijingeki, down this low."
"Oh? What else have you found that different?"
"Weapon worlds don't exist; as far as I could tell, an alternate control method doesn't exist, either, just imagining the flow itself; the drawback is a headache that eventually leads to a blackout instead of having to survive channeling all used power through your throat; most flows only last as long as you're thinking about them; stuff like Fourth's armor can't work, for some reason; and I can't seem to make the lightning out of pure energy like it actually was."
"Actually, controlling it by imagining the flow required is a hack that will only work while inside the system - and actually probably explains a bit of weirdness we encountered a while back, but blah - the actual control method is physical structures. That also explains their temporary nature and the differing drawbacks, as I've run into both using the image system. The other differences may not actually be differences, just lacking knowledge in the part of the System that materializes images. I'd have to ask an Architect how it works to know why that is."
"I'm surprised you didn't immediately kill me for attempting to kill you."
"Eh, it was never going to work. Like I said, I've been outside the multiverse. I know the MC of this multiverse is me, specifically this timeline, as the system makes it easy to tell the differences by putting coordinates to our original timeline in our heads. Like, physically, not mentally. As the MC, I'm guaranteed to become the first multiverse hopper. I literally can't die until then."
"So, we're going to have to deal with an evil version of you at some point? That's going to be really annoying."
"Yeah, but it shouldn't be evil Axel levels of annoying. Raijingeki was significantly more convenient to control than Stavch is, making the race for power much more rapid and deadly than I expect this one to be. Going from multiverse hopper to omniverse hopper might actually take a while, rather than what was like, what, 4, 5 fights? Especially since it's not clear how to construct previously unseen Stavch flows, unlike with Raijingeki. Anyway," Degritone did the same to Axel as he did to The One.
He looked around the crowed, some of which were cheering, more of which were booing, and most of which sat numbly looking at the person who just one-shot The One, before saying, "Well, I'll see you during the war, if you come join."
He then flashed back to Melena.
----------------------------------------
"You sure this is a good idea? We literally saw him summon black holes. Yes, I don't agree with the worst of his future laws, but he has less restrictive laws overall than those of the US."
"Honestly, no. But it's not our job to question orders, just follow them-"
"That's what the nazis said!" Someone yelled yelled from afar. They were hidden behind tanks made of mana.
"-but at the very least, no one will die fighting this battle. I doubt it results in the world actually unifying like he said it would."
"I dunno, have you seen those golems that police that one city he took over as a test? There's a reason Chicago hasn't been taken over by the surrounding warlords, despite their armies' average levels being over 30 higher than the highest in Chicago."
"Didn't someone say they heard him say he couldn't make more? That shouldn't be a problem."
"It seemed like he got a big power up from the fight he just had. If he could have used black h-"
A siren blared and everyone jumped into their tanks.
----------------------------------------
Degritone prime flew above the battlefield, watching the opposing army approach. A few tank shells bounced off his cloak as it automatically flashed into place to block the attacks. He hummed disappointedly at the low number of unique individuals in view, almost all tanks and infantrymen. He spotted the brother of the loli he fought in the tournament down there, though, which was nice to see.
One of the other Degritones got close enough for him to use a gap closer on, rushing forward faster than the rest of the army. They moved off, away from the front lines so the boy could get his frustrations out. Jason? Was that his name? He shrugged as a plane almost crashed into him, letting Degritone win the game of chicken he didn't know he was playing, just assuming it was even more gunfire.
The sledgehammer woman from the original city takeover jumped up and slammed into the cloak below him, the strength of her blow sending her back down into the ground. A large explosion destroyed an entire square mile of the battlefield, entirely on the opposing army's side. Degritone prime frowned and looked over as a few Degritones were already reviving all those hit.
Using the remaining Stavch ripples from the attack, he reversed their flow in a small simulation of the battlefield to find where the attacker was. He couldn't see who it was, since they weren't there anymore and almost all Stavch flows didn't cause residual ripples, but he threw up a scanning barrier over the opposing army to find any similar attacks going through them and mark the originator before negating the attack.
A Degritone flashed behind Degritone prime and attempted to stab him, but was stopped by his cloak. He noted that they need better mental protection that they currently have. Only illusions were possible in the RP's world, so he had no idea how to properly deal with all the mind altering stuff possible with Stavch. For now, he just blasted the Degritone with the mental image of Midna and shortly afterward, his head rippled. He nodded and disappeared.
A few spectators flew by, taking shots of him flying there without any visible care in the world as an army tried to take him out. A stray tank shell would have hit one of them in the shoulder, but he silently adjusted its course with movement Stavch so it his his cloak, instead.
One of him used the realm eater to erase all the spent projectiles piling up on the ground below Degritone prime, starting it in a very specific pattern of spirals that would result in it eating itself instead of spreading out infinitely, similar to how he assumed Axel had done to make an always forward moving sphere of realm eater. I should probably deal with that, now that I think of it, he thought. He sent a probe rocketing off after the orb that would ping him when it got destroyed.
The barrier pinged Degritone and he projected his voice to the offender, a morbidly obese man wearing super edgy robes, enchanted to obscure his face, "As was stated in the rules, no helping my side. This is supposed to be a demonstration of the fruitlessness of trying to stop me, not a slaughter. Let alone a call to arms for the lolicons of the world."
"Shut up! I just want to have sex with-" Degritone cut him off by flashing him into a cloakium room near the event horizon of the super massive black hole in the center of the milky way galaxy. He'd investigate the obviously not a lolicon later to find if any lolis would be sad at the loss of his life. If so, he'd let him go and he'd think a second, at most, had passed. If not, he'd erase him, just like all the others who harm - or intend to harm - a loli and have no lolis vouching for them.
Then someone made the mistake of using an attack that blanketed the area in raining lava. His head instantly became a metal dodecahedron and his arm reverted to its unfolding form.
"Primal reversion," he heard a Degritone say from below. A few Degritones intercepted the arm rocketing off to meet the originator of the lava rain. His arm found purchase on Melena's chest as he was flashed to her garden. He reverted back to normal almost instantly and he spent a few minutes crying into her lap as she stroked his head.