There were barely over ten seconds left. She truly couldn't afford to dally any longer.
Although Sylvia could hold her own, and was confident she could prevent the aftershocks of their battle from blasting a hole straight through the Space Station before time ran out, trying to tame the thing was an entirely different story. That was simply an impossible task.
Wanting to have her cake and eat it too was always a troublesome proposition.
Fortunately, Sylvia had an incredibly powerful existence by her side, allowing her the luxury of pursuing those impossible desires.
And so—
"Mei—save me—!"
Sylvia cried out Mei's name without a single shred of shame. She even used the intimate nickname they reserved strictly for private moments.
Standing high above, Acheron smiled helplessly.
Sylvia was doing perfectly fine down there, showing absolutely no signs of being at a disadvantage.
Acheron could easily guess why she was being summoned downstairs. It was likely that strange hoarding habit of hers acting up again.
With that thought, a smile lingered on Acheron's face as she took a step forward, completely vanishing from the spectator stands.
The moment she materialized by Sylvia's side, her long blade cleared its scabbard by a mere fraction, and her elegant hair turned a stark, deathly white. Her crimson eyes locked onto the massive Swarm King charging directly toward them.
A silent flash of blade-light bloomed within the dim, obscured cabin.
Of course, Acheron held back an immense amount of her strength.
Otherwise, a single strike from her would have completely erased not just the Swarm King, but the entire Space Station and even The Blue in one clean sweep.
A bleak, ash-gray hue engulfed the Swarm King.
It had been quite a while since Sylvia last witnessed Acheron's blade-light from the perspective of an ally. After all, lately, every single one of their meetings resulted in her being teased and handled by Acheron, to the point where tasting the edge of that blade was fast becoming a regular routine.
The blade-light sank deep into the Swarm King's flesh. The massive, perfect gash tore straight through its frame, pinning the behemoth mid-air. As if it had instantly perished, all movement ceased.
Furthermore, not a single shred of stray energy spilled into the surroundings, nor did the strike kill the creature outright.
Such precise, absolute control was utterly ridiculous.
Sylvia clicked her tongue in sheer admiration. In a flash, she darted forward and landed squarely atop the Swarm King's massive head.
Threads bound the creature layer upon layer, and immediately following that, a surging, torrential power of the Path began to violently flood into its body.
[Mount EX] activated!
Because its capacity to think had been thoroughly stripped away by the Nihility, even its raw instincts were stolen along with it. This time, Sylvia's erosion faced absolutely no resistance.
An endless, unyielding stream of power was forcibly extracted from the bodies of the Ambrosial Arbor and Phantylia, then funneled straight into the Swarm King.
Usually, when she seized control of creatures, they would be filled to the brim in no time, falling completely into depravity to become her mounts.
But this time...
Sylvia felt as though the Swarm King beneath her feet was nothing less than a bottomless pit. She had been pouring energy into it for ages, yet she had no inkling of just how much of it had actually been filled.
"Ten seconds left..."
Acheron had already sheathed her blade. Standing alongside Sylvia, she cast a curious glance at the current situation, quietly reminding her of the remaining time.
"Tsk—I'm afraid we won't make it."
Sylvia realized she might have taken things for granted this time. While she couldn't pinpoint exactly where the issue lay, it was highly likely due to the nature of an Emanator.
With only ten seconds on the clock, the Swarm King continued to swallow the energy like a void without an end in sight.
The wait wasn't long.
It wasn't just Acheron who harbored curiosity; even Ruan Mei, who was silently monitoring the scene from afar, felt a spark of intrigue. She wanted to see exactly how far Sylvia could push her limits.
"Three seconds left—"
"No good, the first attempt is a failure—"
"Two... one..."
The moment of death calculated by Ruan Mei arrived.
However, the Swarm King beneath Sylvia's feet showed absolutely no signs of immediately perishing.
No, that wasn't entirely true either.
At the very least, within Sylvia's perception, the Path energy she had forced into its body began to unravel uncontrollably, leaking outward and subsequently being reabsorbed by the Herrscher Core.
The Swarm King's vitality was rapidly fading, and its physical form was beginning to disintegrate.
Yet, as the massive surge of Abundance energy forced in by the [Mount EX] skill bled out, it seemed to produce a slight stabilizing effect, managing to prolong the Swarm King's life by a fraction.
But the creature's heavily restricted lifespan was like a shattered water bottle. The speed at which Sylvia could patch the leaks was nowhere near fast enough to match the rate of the spill.
Monitoring the scene from a distance, Ruan Mei had originally intended to cut the feed. But upon realizing that the countdown had concluded and the Swarm King had failed to turn to ash, her eyes suddenly widened.
"No, what happened? The calculation results are wrong... No, it's what Sylvia did at the very last second."
It was rare for Ruan Mei to be surprised by experimental results, and a failed experiment alone wasn't enough to startle her. But the fact that a completely controllable outcome had inexplicably deviated from her data caused her breath to catch in her throat.
If merely utilizing the power of the Ambrosial Arbor could extend the Swarm King's life, then that would be vastly underestimating Ruan Mei's technological prowess.
If it were an Emanator of Abundance doing the healing, it might be a different story, but the raw power of the Ambrosial Arbor alone was explicitly insufficient.
In Ruan Mei's eyes, what Sylvia had executed at the very end was absolutely not as simple as merely pumping in Path energy.
"To think there would be a time when my own eyes deceived me. Heh... how long has it been since I last felt this way?"
Ruan Mei smiled at Sylvia's figure on the screen. The gentle, elegant smile, however, carried not an ounce of human warmth.
It was the pure curiosity directed toward the unknown, the sheer desire for an experimental subject.
Though she had known for a while that Sylvia possessed some bizarre capabilities, Ruan Mei hadn't anticipated that those powers could be fascinating to such a degree.
--+--
Back at the battlefield—
"..."
Sylvia loosened her grip on the threads, letting the [Mount EX] skill fade away. The endlessly bleeding energy was reabsorbed by the Herrscher Core, further accelerating the Swarm King's demise.
Acheron watched the creature enter its slow, agonizing death spiral, a hint of surprise in her eyes. "Did the Genius's prediction actually fail?"
"Well... I guess so."
Sylvia shrugged. Grabbing Acheron's hand, she leapt down from the Swarm King as it gradually dissolved into ash.
Following the creature's death, Sylvia lingered in place for a brief moment, ensuring she reabsorbed every last bit of the energy she had unleashed.
"Who knows what kind of dirty tricks Ruan Mei played on this thing. It's completely beyond saving," Sylvia sighed helplessly.
She then swept her gaze across the ruined room, where there was barely any solid ground left to stand on, and looked at the walls that had been torn to shreds.
Suddenly, her expression shifted drastically.
"Holy crap, the Cat Cakes!!"
The containment room housing the Cat Cakes wasn't particularly close to this location. But damn it, such a massive containment zone, along with all the adjacent sectors, had been utterly demolished by her own hands.
Heaven only knew if the aftershocks of the battle had rippled out into that area.
Without another word, Sylvia yanked Acheron by the hand and bolted toward the corridor.
When she caught sight of the metallic walls lining the hallway, scorched to the point of near-melting, her heart sank like a stone.
The aftershocks had actually managed to spread all the way out here?!
"We're doomed—my Cat Cakes—! I was planning on raising a bunch of them back on the Express! You guys better have held on!"
"What in the world is a Cat Cake?"
Drawn in by Sylvia's tragic wails, Acheron couldn't help but feel incredibly curious about what exactly this "Cat Cake" creature could be.
--+--
T/N: If you want advance chapters, you can find it at [email protected]/AspenTL