"How did—"
Kenji's eyes were wide. For a fraction of a second, genuine disbelief cracked through the battlefield haze. He did not expect that, he had gotten so used to the idea that LAW was absolute when he used it that it seemed he forgot that it was a power just like all his other ones and could be canceled out.
Then he shook it off. The mental shock was a luxury he couldn't afford in a battle of this scale, hesitation was just another word for a death warrant.
Barbara was down, panting on her knees, her breath coming in ragged, wet hitches. It seemed even with her rapidly rising power, she was still somewhat mortal in certain regards, but he had a feeling that was fading fast, she was gaining power at a rapid rate.
A normal high class shouldn't have been able to hold out like this, but the combination of reducing his power and the shards' bullshit, he had not been able to finish her off, and now she was already an ultimate class nearing satan class, if they didn't end this soon...
He focused. LAW had failed, the Shard had reached out and stopped it, but the opportunity remained.
He vanished forward, a blur of motion fueled by a need to end this. His boots barely touched the pavement as he used gravity to lessen his weight to increase his speed.
"Enough!"
Barbara screamed as a blast tore apart the ground, uprooting the foundations of the street and hurling concrete splinters into the air. Kenji, caught mid-dash, instinctively threw up a mana shield before purple lightning hit the shield. He felt the barrier crack instantly, sending him tumbling back through the debris until he slammed into a rusted bus.
"You insolent pests!" she yelled, her voice vibrating with a thousand voices.
She rose slowly as her body healed, her silhouette wreathed in purple lightning. It moved around her body like it was alive, writhing and snaking through the air.
The bolts shot out like hungry serpents, latching onto everything and everyone. They sank even into the very earth as it began to drain everything it touched.
Screams tore across the ruined city as the bolts siphoned the very life force from the living and the dead alike. It was a feast as they hauled power back toward Barbara. Kenji forced himself up, his mana shield flaring and sparking as a bolt struck him. He could feel the drain, it felt like his blood was turning to sand, his very marrow being pulled toward the surface of his skin.
Van took to the sky, his flesh distorting into wings to evade the strikes. Erza, clad in her Adamantine Armor, crossed her shields and endured head-on. The metal glowed white-hot under the assault, her teeth gritted so hard they threatened to shatter.
After what felt like an eternity of holding, the strikes finally stopped.
Silence fell. Dust filled the air.
Kenji waited for several seconds, his heart hammering against his broken ribs. He listened. Nothing.
His sensory field swept outward, finding almost nothing but a few around.
He lifted a hand and gave a sharp flick. A gust of wind howled outward in a circular burst, clearing the dust and revealing the full magnitude of the horror.
Everyone was dead. The resistance fighters who had been fighting the vampires so bravely, the vampire thralls who had served their masters, all of them had been reduced to desiccated remains. There were fewer than ten presences left alive in the entire sector.
Kenji, Erza, and Van were the only ones still standing in the inner circle. Not far away, he could see the battered form of Mary Marvel, lying unconscious amidst a pile of rubble. Supergirl was not too far from her, but she looked dangerously weak. Beside them, the spectral, flickering form of John Constantine maintained a desperate, glowing shielding spell. Martian Manhunter lay still, his green skin turned a sickly, translucent grey. Dead.
Nearby, Vampire Miss Martian floated, her eyes glowed with the same solid, rhythmic purple as Barbara's.
To Kenji, however, the heroes werent the priority. He turned back to the center of the ruin.
Barbara stood there, radiant and terrible. A purple aura bled from her skin into the sky, turning the clouds into bruised, swirling vortices that seemed to mirror her fractured psyche. Her eyes were no longer eyes, they were solid voids of violet light.
"You are nothing but insects beneath my heels," she spoke, and her voice echoed with a thousand discordant tones speaking in harmony. "So why won't you submit and die like the mongrels you are?"
Kenji felt a chill. He had a feeling that he wasnt talking to Barbara anymore. He watched as she took a few steps towards him.
"I don't know what you are… but you are delicious," she said, her tongue sliding across her lips with a slow, deliberate motion. She breathed in deeply, sniffing the air. "Oh, your life force is so delectable. It has a flavor I've only had a few times... perhaps I should keep you to feed off as a pet."
She stepped forward, stumbling slightly, then growled when she noticed it was the wound caused by Yamato's previous strike. Her body was still knitting together from the spatial wounds. She growled, looking down at her regenerating limbs with a look of pure, unadulterated loathing.
"Or maybe I should just suck you dry right now and be done with it."
Kenji downed another high-tier potion. He briefly checked his inventory. He had been burning through his stock since arriving in this world, he had only a few high-tier vials left. Mid and low-tier potions were functionally useless in a fight of this magnitude.
'I don't want to start spending points unless it's for a killing blow,' he thought, his mind racing through tactical permutations. 'This ends now. We can't keep going like this'.
"Sorry," he spat out a glob of blood and smirked, a jagged, defiant expression. "But only one woman is allowed to suck me off. And you're way too much of a 'Gollum' for my taste."
He had already sent the message through the group chat. They had a plan, or something close at least.
Barbara's face paused for a second, the crude joke momentarily stopping her. Then, rage twisted her features.
Kenji raised the Yamato, summoning every spirit he had left. Wind, Fire, Water, and Lightning manifested behind him.
"Eighth Stance… Hell's Descent!"
Her eyes widened as she jumped back, crossing her arms to block. Kenji vanished. The strike came from the lower side, an upward arc of sheer compressed gravity. The blade bit deep into her forearms, the force launching her dozens of feet into the air.
As she reached the apex of her flight, three massive sword strikes slammed down on her from above. The hits were slower than his other strikes, but they were far heavier, they sent her down back into the earth.
Before she could even gasp for air, a rain of swords descended from the sky. Erza, appearing in her Heaven's Wheel armor, looked like a Valkyrie. Blades pinned Barbara's limbs to the ground.
Then came Vandalieu.
His flesh had twisted into something grotesque, bones protruded from his back like a halo of thorns, and his right side had morphed into a writhing organic mass of muscle and maws. A barrel formed from his own muscle and bone, the air around it shimmering with a dark, suffocating pressure.
Kenji recognized the signature. Van was using the fragments of the Demon King Guduranis from his world.
Van fired. A horn-shaped projectile impaled Barbara through the torso, then another. He peppered her with the fragments, turning the crater into a zone of absolute destruction. But Kenji knew it wasn't the end. The Shard wouldn't let its host die so easily.
Sure enough, Barbara's body seemed to melt into the earth, slipping through the gaps in the rubble like liquid. She materialized meters away, injured around her body and gasping, raising the Shard high above her head.
Baam.
The buildings, the debris, the very ground around her simply vanished into dust. They exploded into dust. Kenji watched in horror as entire blocks were reduced to fine, grey powder in a heartbeat and started swirling around her.
'Was she manipulating matter?' Kenji thought, his frustration mounting to a fever pitch. 'Pick a single power, you god damn shard,' he nearly screamed out.
The dust swirled, caught in a massive vortex, condensing into thousands of blades, axes, and hammers. A storm of constructed weapons launched at them with the speed of railgun slugs. Kenji threw up a gravity wall, but the weapons passed through it as if it were a mere suggestion. His mana wall shattered instantly upon contact.
The Shard was learning his powers and patterns, adapting to bypass his defenses. If they didn't finish this soon, she would become untouchable.
Van slammed his palms into the ground, causing the earth to rise in a towering bulwark of black stone that absorbed the initial storm. The wall then shifted, its surface rippling as it formed into a giant golem of rubble, with dozens of smaller constructs flanking it as they charged Barbara.
They exploded the moment they reached her aura.
"Well, it was better than nothing," Kenji muttered, his eyes darting for an opening.
His spirits lunged, but they were annihilated by a single pulse of violet light. Suddenly, his Danger Sense flared. He spun around just as his own shadow rose from the ground and stabbed into his side.
He grunted in pain. He looked over to see Erza and Van similarly struggling with their own shadows.
"Stick to one power, god damn it!" he finally snapped, casting a high-output fire spell that filled the area with a blinding, artificial noon, dispersing the shadow constructs back into the darkness.
'If I survive this, I'm learning some new tricks. I'm tired of being countered by this glowing rock.'
The fight devolved into a desperate dance of attrition. They kept going for a while before Kenji decided to pull back a little.
Kenji intentionally made it look like he was failing, letting his guard slip and taking hits he could have dodged. He drew Barbara's focus entirely onto him.
Just as she moved in for the kill, Van's flesh-constructs burst from the ground like hungry vines. They wrapped around her like a web, pulling her down toward the earth.
"Van, watch out!" Kenji yelled as he saw the flicker of a smirk on Barbara's face.
Too late. Shadows and purple energy hardened around her hand, forming a blade. In a single swipe, she cut through the flesh and Van clean in half. The force of the strike blasted his upper torso away into the ruins, leaving his lower half to collapse into the dirt.
Erza screamed, a sound fury, and charged. But Barbara had seen her coming, the rubble around her feet turned into a giant fist that came down on the Titania, smashing her into the ground with a sickening crunch of armor.
Kenji rushed in to save her, only to be blasted by the siphoning lightning once more. The bolts gripped him, lifting him off the ground. He found himself suspended in the air, gripped by an invisible force that was slowly crushing his lungs and ribs as he felt himself being drained.
"I'll make sure to take my time as I drain everything from you," she whispered, pulling him closer until he could see what looked like swirling galaxies in her eyes. "I'll make it as painful as I can. I want to hear the sound you'll make as I kill you as slowly as possible."
"I'll… I'll have to decline, thanks," Kenji grit out, his voice a rasping whisper. He looked over her shoulder, his eyes locking onto a distant rooftop. "NOW!"
He forced his arms to move through the telekinetic grip, the effort causing his skin to tear. He grabbed her head, his fingers digging into her scalp, and pinned her in place with intense gravity control to stay exactly where she was.
The Shard began to glow when an arrow pierced through Barbara's chest from behind.
Blue light exploded from the impact point, spreading like frost across her vampiric skin.
"Wha… what?" she croaked, her power sputtering. "Whe... where did that come from?"
Kenji chuckled weakly, blood leaking from his mouth. "Nice shot, Sora."
Days after his talk with Sora, when he came back to life, he and Sora spoke. The boy had been set with a grim resolve. The boy was tired of being the 'protected' one and said that he wanted to be useful, and said that even if he wouldn't be able to buy a ticket for his sister anytime soon, he wanted to help.
So they had browsed the multiversal shop together, searching for a way for a non-combatant like him to be useful.
Sora had invested his points into Emiya Archer's Sight, enhanced physical stats to handle the recoil, and a specialized, high-tension bow. Most importantly, he had purchased two limited quivers, Holy and Demonic. The quivers had 5 arrows each, holy arrows that seal and do damage and poison to demonic energy, and the reverse for the other.
He had wanted the whole Emiya Shiro template, but Kenji had been able to talk him out of it and stop him from spending all his points when he didn't need to and should just buy the sight and strength.
The Holy Arrow, currently buried in Barbara's chest, was burning her from the inside out, acting as poison.
She roared in pain, her power failing her as she reached for the arrow. It scorched her hand on contact, preventing her from pulling it out, proving that the power she had was somewhat demonic in power, and thank the gods for that.
Then, a whip-like blade burst from the ground, Van, his halves already re-knitting with the monstrous speed.
The blade sliced through her wrist.
The hand holding the Shard fell away, tumoring through the air toward the blood-stained asphalt.
Barbara was stunned, staring at her stump, then roared as she reached out with the stump, as the arm that was cut off froze mid air and seemed to start flying back to her to get reattached.
Kenji was already in the air after the arm, as Barbara tried to lung for it with her remaining hand, a spear, thrown by Erza, who had risen from the rubble, impaled her through the chest, pinning her back against a ruined pillar.
Kenji grabbed the arm. The moment he held it, pain assaulted him, he could feel something stabbing at his insides.
Barbara roared, removing the spear as she lunged at Kenji, only for a giant rubble golem grab her, smashing her into the ground. Van jumped onto her as his hands turned translucent and entered her body, which made her roar even louder.
She trashed around as van gripped something in her, and then the shard in his hand glowed, making Kenji feel greater pain before van seemed to pull at something in her body, before purple light burst from her and sent him flying off her.
Barbara stood still before falling down.
The effect was immediate and jarring. The shard seemed to stop glowing. The purple mist across the battlefield vanished in an instant. The siphoning lightning died, the energy dissipating into harmless sparks.
She fell to her knees, blood flowing freely from her wounds now that the Shard's unnatural regeneration was gone. She reached out a trembling, weak hand toward the spot where the artifact had been, a look of profound loss on her face. Then, her arm went limp. The light left her eyes, leaving them dull and grey.
Silence returned to the broken city, a heavy, mournful peace.
Kenji stood there, holding the shard in his hand, his chest heaving, what remained of his clothes in tatters. He looked at Erza, who was leaning against her sword for support, and at Van, who was slowly reforming into his human shape.
He looked at the shard in his hand.
[Gamer's Mind has blocked 'Mind Hex']
[Gamer's Mind has blocked 'Mind Hex']
[Gamer's Mind has blocked 'Mind Hex']
[Gamer's Mind has blocked 'Mind Hex']
[Gamer's Mind has blocked 'Mind Hex']
[Gamer's Mind has blocked 'Mind Hex']
Notifications kept coming in. It seems the shard was trying to control him.
He shoved it into his inventory.
"We won," he said quietly. Finally relieved.
Another notification came in.
[Qesut complete'].
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