As the eye opened, instead of there being an iris and a pupil, there was only a single point in the center of the whiteness that made up the rest of it.
The purpose of this point became clear right away, when it blinked once… And then shot out a ray of pure, blinding Energy at the Hero who had just barely finished preparing to fight after throwing aside his tiredness and rallying to the cause of his family.
The simplest Paths were often the easiest to pursue, and if one had enough talent, they could even reach the very peaks of power with them. This was evident in a lot of the members of the Eskilon family, and as the Hero put up his defense, he showed that even he was a part of this group.
Layers of earth materialized out of thin air to form a barrier that was ten feet thick(3 m), and even though the attack from Xuan which was empowered by the G.o.dnet was powerful enough to cause harm to someone at his level, it was stopped in its tracks as he continued to put up more and more layers, until finally, he had built an entire fortress around him.
Seeing her attack nullified, Xuan frowned, but Eloise chuckled and said, "Couldn"t you have waited for me? Well, no matter. Let us begin now."
Raising her arms and closing her eyes, she activated her own Path, and at once, the entire being seemed to come alive.
Faxul was only containing its form. Eloise was the one in complete control of its power, and as she amplified the strength of all of her fellow sovereigns, the level of the being they had formed rose even further.
She was also the commander, so with a smile and with her eyes still closed, she said, "Let"s try this out… Five Sovereign construct, basic attack."
The Hero had been thinking that he had this fight in the bag, but as he suddenly felt danger, he looked in front of him to see what the matter was.
The large being that his opponents had formed had started to move towards him, but it was slow and almost clumsy, and seeing it, he chuckled despite his weariness.
The closer it got, though, the more the danger he felt increased, so at one point, he stopped working on the spell that he was sure would kill at least two or three of his opponents, and a.n.a.lyzed the being more carefully.
By this time, it had decreased the distance between them by half, but just as he was about to see that he had been gravely wrong… With a single flap of its gigantic wings, it disappeared.
Only a moment later, it was all over.
The woodcutter"s axe struck with the finality of one prepared to end the world if it brought them closer to the goal. All of his defenses were cut through, despite the fact that he should have been able to hold his own against multiple Eminent Heroes, even if they attacked at once.
The others knew why this had happened-the fist had grasped the handle of the axe, lending its immense power to the already devastating cutting force of its sharp blade.
And before it struck, the eye had also sent out another, even stronger beam of Energy which targeted the axe, thereby heating it to dangerous levels and giving it the ability to burn through what it couldn"t cut.
All of it happened so quickly that the Hero didn"t even have time to respond, so with his body laid bare, the wings of the Raven struck the finis.h.i.+ng blow.
Ma.s.sive black holes appeared at the ends of both of them, which met at the exact point where the Hero was.
All the barriers on his body were ground to dust due to the attractive forces from two different directions that were just too much for them to handle.
Like a surgeon peeling through all the layers of skin to get to the damaged organ, the construct finished the attack with methodic precision.
With even the barriers gone, one of the black holes deactivated, letting the other pull the Hero into it.
And so, the fight was done.
Seeing all this, the elders below could not help but look up with almost the same panic that they had gotten when they saw the Great Shark approach.
"Alright, that"s one. Who"s next?"
…
Seeing Eloise say this after the first successful reveal of the construct they had been working on, Daneel could not help but smile broadly and feel proud of the Queen without a crown, as she had often been called before in the Kingdom of Lanthanor.
He only needed to have half of his mind set on the task at hand, which had actually turned out to be quite irritating, to say the least.
Watching his band of sovereigns pick one Hero after another and carefully dispose of them without any trouble at all, he could not help but think back on the events of the past few hours while noticing just how much planning had gone into the different attacks of the five which were enough to handle their foes no matter what attack, or defense was thrown at them.
After giving his sovereigns the go-ahead, and trusting them to dispose of these last traitors in the best manner possible, he had set off to the Treasury of the G.o.ds, as it was officially called, even though he had gotten to calling it just the vault of the G.o.dbeasts.
The location was a considerable distance off the northern coast of Angaria, and because it was outside the bounds of the G.o.dnet, Daneel had had to carefully pick his way through the webs of lightning bolts that sought to burn him to a crisp before finally reaching that spot and speaking aloud the pa.s.sword given to him by the long-dead G.o.dbeast, Xandar.
The last time he had done this, he had been wracked with doubts regarding whether it would work, but this time, he had been certain that he would once again be teleported into the dark hallway which would lead him to the place where he had spoken to the bored being that managed the Treasury.