Lars" eyes shot wide open as he saw the Sun Lord in his s.h.i.+ning divinity plunge a cruel claw right through Luca"s chest.What Divine Sun Lord was this? Asking his devoted believers to be human sacrifices, then mercilessly slaughtering them like cattle?
"Luca… She… You… How could you die so cheaply… All the rest of Fetch homestead… You were slain cruelly by the enemy… But Luca you – you were betrayed by your own G.o.d!!! Is this what a G.o.d, a divine being is like?!?"
"Luca! I barely knew you but… But…!!! Regret, my heart is filled with regret!! I"ll kill you, Sun Lord – no, I""LL *EAT* YOU!!!"
He watched in anguish as Luca took a ragged breath and choked as she no longer had a heart or lungs to breathe with. Even in her moments of death, her face was beautiful, pristine. Luca looked like a statue of a G.o.ddess as she struggled but could not take that next breath.
Weakening by the second, shocked as she was, she could only stare in disbelief at her "G.o.d" who had heinously taken her life. Then, helplessness, unwillingness and vengeance marred her beautiful face and she turned her head to face Lars, tears in her eyes.
Then she mouthed the words, "Help" before her eyelids fluttered and she fell to the ground, motionless as the Sun Lord withdrew his arm from the hole in her chest.
Lars burned with impatience for the teleportation formation to trigger. He clenched his fists tight in rage, his eyes turning bloodshot with unwillingness. He could feel another node of Prime Evil pulsating as he had to forcefully swallow a belly of fire. He had to put this aside – he couldn"t afford to lose his head to Wrath and foolhardily rush headlong at the Sun Lord…!
He was unable to stop it for it had already happened before he could even react, and even if he could have reacted in time, he lacked the power to confront the Sun Lord"s conscient in a head-on conflict.
To save her, to slay both these evil G.o.ds conscients… He needed a surprise attack.
Gritting his teeth and swearing b.l.o.o.d.y revenge, Lars didn"t notice that the irises of his eyes had already turned a beautiful crimson. He forced himself to calm down as he channelled his Earth Pulse and Divine Light while the teleportation formation took effect. He had to be calm and cool if he wanted to rescue the dying Luca.
"Hurry up, hurry up! I must hurry and save her!!" Lars stared daggers into the back of the Sun Lord who dashed towards the Truthstone as he set his own plans into action.
He would save her and have his revenge on not just the Sun Lord, not just this Belic Wildwood, but all the high-and-mighty, b.l.o.o.d.y "G.o.ds" who dared to take away anyone from his side!
Teleportation could be done via many methods. One approach was translocation – breaking down a person or object into magic particles, then "cutting" from the origin point and "pasting" to the destination coordinates. Another was forming a dimensional doorway – similar to the scientific theory of a wormhole.
The method used by the Sun Lord was the simplest and with the lowest energy consumption – transmission. This method was also by breaking down the traveller"s body into magic particles but then instead of "cut" and "paste", it worked by sending those particles to the destination at super-high speed. The low cost was offset by the vulnerability to obstructions and interception, however, this approach was also the easiest for Lars to counter.
In Lars" perception, time was broken down to tiny units. He counted the microseconds as the transmission triggered. He a.n.a.lysed the speed of progress as his body was transformed into magic particles (though perhaps in this world a better term could be Divine Light particles?).
"Based on the speed of the process and the energy injected by the Sun Lord, the destination is roughly 438.722736 kilometres away to the south-south-west and the travel time will be 7.891313 seconds…"
"My initial plan was to travel further, about 50 kilometres away… Then I"d time my return for just before their battle ends in mutual destruction… But with Luca"s life fading quick, I need to revise my arrangements…"
"Instead, I"ll stop 10 kilometres away, I"ll have to time it just after 179870.2 microseconds pa.s.s… That will give me enough distance to elude their senses and still allow me to return fast enough…"
Lars made full use of his unique capabilities that exceeded even the Sun Lord"s divine consciousness and managed innumerable calculations within the split seconds of the teleportation. He even managed to allot time to review his plan of action, and revise it based on the situation he faced – all in the microseconds before the teleportation began.
"Alright… Ready…"
"GO!"
He sensed as more and more of his body was turned to light particles, then detected a change in the energy signature – it was starting.
Lars silently weaved the counter formations, keeping the runes hidden from sight by forming them within his body. He then checked and rechecked his stealth runes and, a.s.sured that these were well in place, he prepared for the right moment.
A split second later, the transmission fired and he felt his body moving at blinding speed.
"179851 microseconds… 179858… 179866, almost…"
"179869 – NOW!!"
All this took a while to explain, but happened in a little more than the time needed for one to blink their eyes. At just the right moment, Lars powered up the counter-formation to prematurely terminate the transmission and felt his body begin to rematerialize.
To an observer, it would have seemed that one moment, there was just empty s.p.a.ce and the next, a golden haired, red-eyed heroic teenager had appeared from thin air.
Lars popped out suspended half a kilometre in the air above a tiny hill. He was glad there were no birds to startle, lest they drop their "payloads" in their fright – they had all been scattered or slain long ago from the aftermath of the apocalyptic battles.
"I can maintain super speed for a short burst all the way to Fetch homestead, but it"ll still take 1 minute and 12 seconds… Luca, please hold on!"
Wasting no time, Lars sped to the ground and then bounded off back towards where Luca lay dying while the two monsters clashed.
* * * * *
The seeds of the rotten ancient tree grew into saplings and the saplings grew into young vines which congregated together into a ma.s.s of writhing dark roots to revive Belic Wildwood"s Terra Root body.
While this was happening, the Sun Lord was in the middle of an incantation that sounded like ten thousand voices speaking in a discordant cacophony set to a mess of off-key chords in diminished minor.
Then upon the completion of his chant, the Truthstone let loose a great cracking sound as it dislodged itself from the copper/ golden stand on which it was fixed. The Truthstone began to rotate slowly at first, then quicker and quicker until it turned into a beam of light that shot at the Sun Lord with a ear-piercing boom.
A great cloud of distorted air burst forth, a product of the immediate high temperatures caused by the Truthstone. The stones nearby and the ground were all turned to slag, the impurities vaporising while the trace metals found within were liquefied by the heat.
When the air cleared, the Truthstone had shrunk to one-tenth the original size and was embedded in the Sun Lord forehead. It was set like a diamond shape surrounded by the rays of the sun in the shape of the numbers of a clock.
Smiling and turning to face Belic Wildwood, he waited as dark-purple energy began to crackle around the Terra Root – the sign that his opponent, too, was finally getting serious.
He took one last glance at the still-warm body of Luca that lay in one corner of what had been the Truthstone hall and then examined the throbbing power of the Truthstone. What should have been a peak-Spirit (Mythical) artefact was now pulsing with power well in the semi-divine realm, power on par with what his fragmented conscient could bring to bear.
"However useless that mother-daughter pair were, they at least did one thing well… By placing the Truthstone here in a danger zone where lives are lost daily, they"ve unwittingly fed it with the blood and souls of countless powerhouses… The power within is now exquisite, far more than I expected! Truly commendable…!" The Sun Lord"s expression remained impa.s.sive even as his heartless and cruel thoughts would cause one"s heart to turn to ice.
[22 seconds left to Lars" arrival]