Chapter 397

Chapter 398: Irene Fully Charged

Foxy shifted into her true form, and the huge Nine-Tailed Fox shot howling into the sky as Fox Fire poured out in barrages that almost ripped the clouds apart, while each Fox Tail Missile rocked the low cloud deck with booming blasts.

Luna flashed through wind, rain, and Thunder, cutting down the raging beasts; phantoms of a Knight Order flickered beside her within her Illusion Arts and, whenever an opening appeared, dragged nearby black-robed cultivators into a battlefield of death and souls.

Yu Sheng and Irene kept their eyes on the white-robed, grim-faced Hermitage Order priest.

Irene leaned close to Yu Sheng’s ear and muttered: “Hey, Yu Sheng, after all this noise, nobody else has shown up.”

Yu Sheng frowned and scanned the area.

The sky still looked like a shattered mirror collapsing in on itself. The whole space felt misaligned. Under the tilted, broken canopy, everything doubled and blurred. Buildings on the ground kept turning strange and see-through, and whenever lightning flashed, the glare seemed to pierce the earth and reveal a jagged, primeval landscape below the city.

With this weird effect growing stronger, the feeling that two spaces were overlapping became impossible to ignore.

At the same time, Yu Sheng noticed that the white-robed priest still hadn’t pressed an attack. Even though he owned the field and had the numbers, and even with a rogue artificial saintess nearby poking his nerves again and again, he kept a careful distance from the center of the fight, as if he could neither act freely nor wander far from where he stood. [He has to stay put for a reason.]

Yu Sheng remembered the first time he found that Holy Revere Hermitage “Black Megatower.”

He grinned and whispered to Irene: “Looks like that shove I gave him wasn’t enough. He’s hiding something behind him. I need to get around his back. You keep him busy.”

“Got it,” Irene shot back at once: “But this body is almost out of power, so do not take too long.”

Yu Sheng nodded, said nothing more, then kicked off along Foxy’s tail and slanted upward into the clouds, racing toward a point behind the white-robed priest.

The priest reacted the instant he saw Yu Sheng move. His face changed, and with a sharp sweep of his hand, Thunder gathered again from all around, massing above Yu Sheng’s head.

But at that same moment, broad swaths of black threads spilled into the air around the priest. The threads wove themselves into nets as if alive, spreading in every direction. A bone-stabbing cold seeped from the spiderweb, like frost reaching for the soul. Then several scorching light beams ripped the dark, sweeping the sky.

Tiny arcs danced in the air, tracing the spiderweb’s forming lines. Sensing the danger in the spider silk and the beams, the white-robed priest had to drop his control over Thunder and twist through the tight space, dodging the silk and the sweeping rays. In that heartbeat, Yu Sheng was already at his flank.

Yu Sheng smiled the next second, because it was just as he expected: the Hermitage Order priest could dodge fast, but his range was tiny, no more than a hundred meters. Not because he lacked mobility, but because he had to stand right there to brace that cracked mirror of a sky, or the barrier would fall apart.

“You dare.”

The white-robed priest roared. He finally shook off the last spider silk with a flurry of small bolts and blew it away, then turned, lifted his right hand, and pointed at Yu Sheng. Thick lightning formed at his fingertip almost instantly and came crashing down.

The protective spiritual aura around Foxy’s tail flickered and slammed against the bolt. After a single violent blast, the aura gave out completely.

Yu Sheng snatched Irene off his shoulder and set her on the fox tail. Then he staggered upright and dove forward from midair toward a hazy, unreal crack he had glimpsed in the rain the moment the lightning flared.

He thrust out both hands as if grabbing something invisible and tore outward.

“Found you.”

A shriek like tearing glass and the boom of a collapsing barrier ripped across the warped battlefield. The already broken sky bloomed with huge, half-transparent lines. Another rain-lashed wilderness rushed in to replace the edge of Ink City. With the scene swapping like two layers of time and space, everyone finally saw what had been hiding in that other space:

The grand ancient Refining Tower was gone. In its place yawned a giant black rift spearing from ground to sky. The Rift punched through the clouds and atmosphere, pointing far into deep space.

Ink City’s buildings had become a rocky wildland cut by ravines. In the ravines, countless glimmering light rivers surged and boiled. Streams of light rose from the earth into the heavens and vanished into a mechanical megastructure stretching across the sky like an orbital track. In the distance, a mountain lay shattered, its broken mass floating in midair as if gravity had failed. Something had been built inside that mountain. Huge man-made structures jutted from the torn ridge.

Yu Sheng had no time to study the details.

Not far away, the white-robed priest went pale at the sight of that “brute” ripping a space barrier with his bare hands. He ignored the spiderweb reappearing around him, flung his arm wide, and pulled Thunder from every side. Bolts shot past rampaging beasts and black-robed cultivators, past the shield Foxy threw up and Luna’s Knight Order phantoms, and fell in an instant on Yu Sheng’s head.

Yu Sheng only had time to glance up and blurt, “Oh crap.”

Then he exploded.

The collapse stopped at once. The shattered sky knit itself back together in a blink.

A heartbeat later, spider silk sank into the Hermitage Order priest’s body. An icy pain that seemed to freeze his soul made him grunt. He strained against the silk binding him and, while he fought, he looked toward the fox tail still hanging in midair, where two strange dolls clung.

The next instant, he realized the two dolls showed no grief or panic at their companion’s “death.”

In truth, the dolls were panicking, but about something else.

“Ahhh, help,” the two Irenes yelled from the fox tail: “Yu Sheng, you never told me how to drive this thing. Foxy, how do you and Yu Sheng even talk through the tail like this. I want to go home.”

The uncontrolled fox tail zigzagged in the sky. One doll got flung at once, the rebar-bodied one, while the other locked both hands around a tuft of fur and looked up to find the Hermitage Order priest right in front of her.

The priest’s face shifted from shock to anger, then to killing intent.

“You ruined the Sage’s plan. Pay the price.”

He pointed.

A thunderbolt smashed down, blew apart the fox tail under Irene, and blasted the little doll into the air.

Tumbling end over end, Irene raised a hand at the enemy, but only a few weak sparks jumped from her fingertip.

“Great, I am out of power.”

“Ridiculous,” the white-robed priest snapped as his hand closed in the air. Wind and rain bucked and twisted. A crushing force pressed in from every direction and locked the flailing doll in place. “You will all die.”

The small doll creaked under the unseen bind. The next moment, Thunder roared.

Blinding bolts split the sky, slamming into Irene again and again in a storm.

The white-robed priest stood in midair, summoning Thunder and pounding the half-meter-tall doll that gave him such a strange sense of danger.

Though the foe looked small, he used his full strength without mercy, because a crawling fear had been running wild in his chest since a moment ago, and it only grew worse with each passing breath. [When did this start? When that freakish Human tore open space? When my perfect hiding place got seen through? Or when these weird strangers showed up?]

Thunder boomed, but the unease did not fade. It spiked so hard that alarms screamed in his mind. He cut the lightning off in a rush.

No. The feel is wrong.

He scattered the Thunder and looked at the doll that should have been ash.

For a moment, it felt like he was staring into the sun.

Irene hovered there, a strong electric field holding up her 66.6 centimeter-tall body, with streams of energy flowing around her.

She had charged to full.

The white-robed priest stared, stunned and horrified. An absurd, cruel sense of fate’s mockery crashed through him. He seemed to understand, but only managed to squeeze out a few words: “What on earth are you…”

Irene lifted her hand.

A scorching torrent, thicker than the priest himself, tore the sky open.