Free Web NovelChapter 359 (2): I Will Not Grant You Evolution
The arrow penetrated layer after layer of thought barriers, each dissolving into visible ripples. The arrow slowed with every shield it pierced, and by the time it reached Senna, it was barely crawling.
Senna extended her half-transformed hand to catch and crush the arrow of light. “Garville was worthless,” she said dismissively. “It seems that you’re no different. You only got your hands on White Night Creed not long ago and haven’t earned the right to call yourself a chosen knight.”
“You’re all talk. I’ll shoot and ruin that makeup of yours later.” Wayne turned around and patted himself on the bottom tauntingly. Then he shot a single arrow into the sky, allowing his thoughts to lead the way. He vanished into thin air.
The innuendo had gone over Senna’s head entirely, too subtle for someone with her level of real-life experience. The provocation was enough to ignite her fury, though. Draconic wings unfurled from her back, and she soared into the sky.
William moved to follow, but then the Nature mages got into a battle formation against him. He blinked innocently and lobbed a sphere of golden light at them. A golden shockwave plowed through the ground, shaking the land itself.
Without looking back, William dissolved into light and charged at Senna at accelerating speed, his spear aimed at Senna’s shapely bottom. Wayne had unlocked his true nature—not William’s preferences, but Vera’s devilish side.
Golden light pierced through Senna, shattering space like a mirror. Crystal-clear shards fell from the sky. Senna emerged from one of the fragments with a contemptuous gaze, openly mocking the Sun Knight for his dishonorable trick.
Reaching into the Void, she drew the greatsword Elemental Mantra out. Surging vitality flooded through her body and solidified into the Life Armor. There was no green to be found on the white greatsword and white armor. Clearly, the Goddess of Nature didn’t want to be a green elven goddess. The ‘life’ of the Life Alliance was what She truly strove for, and She was likely to have approached the end of the path.
In the air, the three faced one another. Senna’s presence was overwhelming; she had every right to be confident. Her reign of violence in the inner world, with not a single defeat, wasn’t built on scheming and manipulation, but on raw power that could crush anything in her path.
A mana tide rolled out in waves, forming a boundless ocean around her and blocking half of the sky. Its radiance cast the ground below in a dreamy blue, carrying the coolness of an ocean breeze.
Senna held Elemental Mantra horizontally. Earth, fire, water, and wind elements answered her call... Well, the fire elements rejected her and stubbornly rushed toward Wayne, but the other three elements fell in line at the sword’s command.
Senna glanced at Wayne in confusion. How could the Moonlight Knight have better elemental affinity for fire than the Sun Knight? She had never seen anything like that, or even heard of it happening.
Everything about Wayne was strange. Deciding not to let this drag on, Senna went straight for her ultimate attack. Her vast reservoir of mana allowed her to reshape the four elements with her thoughts, and with Elemental Mantra amplifying her thoughts, she transformed the world around her.
Magic was the projection of a mage’s thoughts, overriding the inevitability of one plus one equaling two. It manifested in different forms to rewrite the world, but not even legendary mages could truly change the world. At best, they could sculpt a false one in their vitality fields.
Elemental Mantra made the impossible possible. It drove the four elements to rebuild energy into matter, allowing Senna to influence reality with minimal investment of thoughts.
A brilliant mathematician could move the entire world with the right formula as a lever. To make an analogy, when all chosen knights were hurling bricks, Senna could make her brick fly farther by adding a twist to her wrist. If anyone could become a demigod to escape from the inner world, it would have to be her.
“What a waste,” Wayne murmured to himself. “You could have become so much stronger. If only you would let go of your hunger for power...”
He raised his hand to make a gesture at William. Conjuring a longsword of moonlight, he nocked it to his bow and aimed it at the ocean of elements.
William turned into golden light and dove into the tide. The instant he reconstituted himself, the golden miniature sun swelled into a massive sphere.
The explosion rocked the sky. At the edge of the explosion, the four elements locked together and assembled into absolute barriers to block the mushroom cloud, minimizing the damage and redirecting the golden shockwaves upward.
Even if Senna and William were evenly matched in power, Senna would be able to subdue William with more sophisticated techniques. Besides, Senna was more powerful right now.
The last time they fought, William had failed to blow through her defenses. This time...
A radiant arrow of light pierced through the elemental ocean, seizing the opening of its disturbance to shoot straight at Senna’s face. She unhurriedly raised her sword to shatter the sluggish arrow of light, but then Wayne was suddenly there, taking the arrow’s place. Wielding the longsword of moonlight, he made a horizontal swing at Senna’s pale, slender neck.
Garville’s use of White Night Creed had been rudimentary. Thus, Senna had insufficient intelligence on the weapon and had never seen the technique. Moreover, being undefeated had made her arrogant and careless. She committed the great sin of underestimating her enemy before the fight even began. She hurriedly dodged, but the blade still nicked her neck.
She was this close to losing her head.
Time seemed to slow. Senna’s eyes widened, and her pupils contracted to pinpoints slowly. The roaring elemental ocean around her gathered inward to cage Wayne. Her thoughts and Elemental Mantra had reshaped the elements into vivid dragon heads, each opening its maw to exhale a different energy. Dozens of distinct energies poured out slowly.
Midair, Wayne glanced at the dragons and memorized the different evolution paths with his thoughts.
Twisting his body, he flung his sword at Senna’s beautiful, widened eyes, nocking another arrow at the same time to swap himself with his arrow and escape the ocean before it could cage him. He grabbed William on the way out.
The passage of time reverted to normal. Facing the incoming sword, Senna closed her eyes. Dragon scales surfaced across her cheeks. She used her formidable defense to simply shatter the blade.
After the first exchange, she touched her stinging cheek. Her eyes shifted into draconic eyes with vertical slits as pupils, and she committed to a full dragon transformation.
She turned into a massive dragon that was three hundred meters long. White Life Armor draped across parts of her body, wrapping her wings and claws alike. Elemental Mantra reshaped itself into dozens of meters of white spines protruding from the great dragon’s head. The four colors of the elements flowed along the seams of the armor, making the magical creature look distinctly metallic and futuristic.
It wasn’t over yet. The great dragon flapped her wings. The elemental sea encircled her and morphed into dozens of dragon heads of different shapes, popping out from the Void. Amid symmetrical ripples, the dragon heads gathered terrible energy in their mouths, making space rumble with the sheer power.
Her defense was maximized, and her offense, too. The incredible map-clearing move drew Wayne’s eyes and inspired him. Finally, he realized the right way to utilize Senna.
Though the dragon wasn’t yet a demigod, her destructive output was no less than one. Each dragon breath carried as much raw power as William’s explosion. At full output, Senna could one-shot the Death Knight Wayne from last night.
Rooooar—
Senna threw her head back and bellowed. Every dragon head swung to aim at Wayne and William. In front of each maw, radiant, intricate magic circles emerged. The swirling orbs of different colors inside the dragons’ mouths compressed into energy beams, shooting through the magic circles and pouring down.
The sudden eruption of energy destabilized space. The sky lurched with expanding ripples. The colorful streaks dyed the entire world. Each dragon head possessed spatial power that could limit Wayne’s and William’s movements to a small range.
“Brilliant!” Wayne said, gesturing at William to hold the rear. Then he drew his bow and aimed at Senna’s massive dragon head through the cracks of dozens of intersecting rays.
Ring!!
The bowstring sang with lingering echoes. Dozens of light beams crossed and plunged through the afterimages of Wayne and William, punching through space with a sonic crack of displaced air and hammering the ground below. The flat land buckled and heaved like an ocean.
There was no explosion, but only black vortexes emerging in the aftermath of spatial collapse. The occasional flicker of leaked black ripples caused minimal collateral damage, which showed the precision of Senna’s mastery over elemental energy.
Below, crisscrossing chasms carved a complex magic circle into the ground. The dragon heads hadn’t been breathing at random, but laying the groundwork for the next wave of attacks. It would be a stronger, more destructive attack.
She was always three moves ahead. No wonder Vera couldn’t beat her, not even with her two besties.
The light beams exterminated everything in their path. Whatever they touched ceased to exist, dissolved into raw elemental energy and absorbed into the elemental ocean, reforged into weapons at Senna’s command. The more she fought, the stronger she became. The world was her power source.
William was struggling as his space shrank. All he could do was flicker in and out of light form to keep himself alive.
Meanwhile, an arrow of light had threaded through the shrinking gaps to barely reach Senna’s head. She lowered her head slightly, swinging her forty-meter sword to obliterate the arrow.
Wayne had swapped places with the arrow, and he teleported over to see a mountainous blade descending toward him, as well as the sardonic gleam in the dragon’s downcast eyes.
He raised White Night Creed to block the blade. The monstrous force sent him plunging down. Halfway through the fall, he turned and shot another arrow into Senna’s open maw. Moonlight flashed forward like lightning, followed right by Wayne. He nocked another arrow to aim at the dragon’s throat—
Suddenly, the world went dark around him. He heard a gulp before he was sliding down a warm, slick tunnel to somewhere deep inside the great dragon.
(⊙ˍ⊙)
Wayne stood on soft red flesh with White Night Creed in one hand and his other hand on his hip, staring blankly for a few seconds before his brain caught up.
“The process is all wrong, but the result is right. I managed to get in with my cunning mind.”
Wayne muttered awkwardly now that he was in the dragon’s stomach. He nocked an arrow, ready to stir up chaos from within.
Her powerful vitality blocked every single arrow, however. The few that had punched through the white energy and detonated didn’t leave lasting damage, the injuries instantly healing as if nothing had happened.
“Impressive!”
That was a problem. Wayne took Shadow Nightmare and Twilight Despair out, hesitating over which to choose. “What now? Do I use the all-consuming Darkness, or Death, Nature’s mortal enemy...”
After 0.25 seconds of pondering, he put away all three divine artifacts and transformed. His body elongated, his white flesh writhing before solidifying. His face became a blank, featureless surface covered in twisted wrinkles. Wearing a pale set of armor, his chest now featured a single large, glinting eyeball.
Pale Knight!
“Pope Senna, allow me to show you the suffering you’ve experienced in the surface world...”
The Pale Knight crossed his arms over his chest, which transformed into pale blades.
“Regrettably, I will not grant you evolution. Your era ends today.”
Swoosh!
