Space burned as my hammer connected. The flame and gravity fed off each other, melding into a complementary force that ground into Lauren after the initial explosion.
She fought back hard, her entire body practically screaming, muscles straining like it was about to burst. Her swing came out of nowhere.
My Shield barely came up in time and warped from the impact.
It was powerful enough to burn through most of the enchantments I had running on my shield and send me flying thousands of kilometers away, through the Anathema fire I'd discharged in the initial strike. I drew the flames to myself instinctively and trapped them in arcanite spheres marked with explosive runes.
They went off as she teleported in, but that didn't stop the onslaught of quickly fading ceroes and slashes. In fact, the explosions slid off her pristine black cloak, along with a reddish film of manipulated reality. Her blades glowed the same mild red, mirroring the glow of the infinity stone placed right above her heart.
She swung her soul sword at me again.
I dodged, but her blade crashed into my armor's runic shields anyway. It had grown and warped to reach me.
I was forced to riposte with the blade at the point of contact. But then she did something I've never quite seen her manage before. She parried my parry.
A touch of anathema fire absorbed the incoming shockwave of energy, and it washed over me, filling up my stores. My immediate instinct was True Form, my combined trigger form, but I had a sinking feeling she'd be able to eat or counter it too.
She had my number. I could tell she knew she did from the look in her eyes.
"What was inside of that syringe?" I asked.
"Let me show you."
Darkness and power from the infinity stone twisted out of her floating form in small arcs, merging into a pair of pistols. Her blades vanished, and her hands wrapped firmly around the guns. Thousands of dark and reality-touched ceros rushed out of the barrels, the muzzles flashing nonstop. Each bullet behaved differently. Some teleported, a few let out an unnatural chill, some were all but invisible to my senses, and a few were mysteries altogether.
It was a dizzying sight to behold, but I tracked each and every single one of the bullets easily with the runes both etched on my armor and my body.
Slow Personal Time.
Activating one of the enchantments on my armor, I drastically slowed down my personal time, enveloping me in a time bubble. In the split second it bought me, I drew an obscene amount of energy from the phoenix and created thousands of runed-covered spears that surged out to meet the bullets, each bearing a different set of enchantments.
I wasn't the least bit surprised when her ceroes dodged. My spears twisted, detonating early, taking out thousands of projectiles. What surprised me was the sheer number that survived.
Hundreds teleported, some evaded, and a few even tanked my shot, shedding a layer of shimmering reality like Lauren had.
The ceros accelerated, and I reacted, slashing out with a fully charged Kurogiri. The regular ceroes converged on the teleporters, and together they vanished out of reality and popped back in just after the storm of slashes passed.
A multi-layered shield covered in Defensive runes and Anathema fire came up, and her ceroes hit the surface and shattered, breaking into thousands of lethal orbs that shredded through the second and third layers of the shielding.
I parried the ceroes that made it all the way through with my telekinesis while I simultaneously generated an army of arcanite orbs.
A massive empowered Slow Personal Time rune activated, buying me nearly five whole seconds. In that time, I inscribed all of those orbs with runes, packed them with energy, and fitted them with stealth enchantments before sending them to the corner of the solar system.
Lauren absorbed the ceros that came flying back her way with a self-satisfied look on her face while I slipped into an Iai stance, stowing away Crusher and thumbing the handle of Kurogiri II
"Really, a third time?"
"You know what they say about threes."
"Haven't you been paying attention? It doesn't matter what attack you pull out next—"
Again, one of the runes on my chest piece glowed green and activated. Slowed Personal Time.
Drawing heavily on my new tattoos for energy transference and channeling, I fed dual streams of energy into my Kurogiri. It was equal parts dimensional and anathema flame.
The bubble collapsed abruptly, and Kurogiri came out of its sheath. The attack leaped across space faster than any teleport or dimensional slash I'd ever unleashed, but Lauren didn't look worried.
Until my runed objects activated.
A combination of energies washed over the solar system. The first was time magic, grinding her personal time to a halt. Then it was a spatial lock so that she wouldn't be able to teleport away. The last, and by far the most effective, was an avalanche of psychic pain.
After my upgrades, my telepathy was as almost strong as Anathema fire. Pair that with the bio-enchantments I got from Jean and the ridiculous number of stats and runes, and it was all but guaranteed to lobotomize her. At least momentarily.
I poured in every last memory of soul-shattering pain I'd experienced since she'd dragged me to this hell of a universe into those mind runes and amplified it thousands of times with precision and Staggered Carnage runes.
It was an assault I wasn't even sure Jean could handle without the Phoenix's help.
Lauren's eyes were glazed over when my slash reached her. Instinctively, she twisted, trying to dodge at the very last moment, but it was too late.
The left side of her body simply vanished—shoulder, torso, several vital organs, and a leg—while the rest of her was on fire. This time, she didn't have a layer of reality to protect her. Anathama fire dug in deep, and it burned her relentlessly.
I closed the distance with a teleport as I activated the mental runes again, striking her with enough psychic force to kill a whole planet while I swiped my blade at her bare throat.
"Bankai."
The words escaped her lips like a whisper and echoed through space.
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