I Arrived At Wizard World While Cultivating Immortality Chapter 756: The Tide of Battle

The eight eighth-level octopus-men spread slowly apart, the distance between each of them judged to within a hair, and in the space of a blink they had locked into a tight encirclement formation.

The expressions on their faces were graver than they had ever been, their tendrils drawn faintly taut, and even the air seemed to sink a little under the weight of that suppressed killing intent.

Viola’s fight with the eight eighth-level octopus-men had broken out at almost the same instant that a pack of seventh-level octopus-men forced Jie Ming to “withdraw from the battlefield.”

The eight of them had clearly finished coordinating their tactics during that brief standoff a moment earlier.

The next second, blinding energy light flared in all eight directions at once.

Energy beams, spatial cutting, gravitational collapse, high-energy particle streams, law oscillation, mental tearing, dense particle bursts, annihilation pulses… eight completely different types of attack roared out from eight directions simultaneously, interlocking and meshing with one another. Far from interfering, they actually amplified each other, and in the same motion they sealed off every escape route Viola could possibly have taken.

The backwash alone from eight eighth-level beings striking together, the shock of it simply spreading outward, wrenched the surrounding spatial structure into a violent distortion. The air at the center of the battlefield was ionized into plasma in an instant, bursting into a searing blue-white radiance that washed the outlines of even the distant fleet pale.

But Viola did not so much as put away that habitual little smile at the corner of her mouth.

The gray-white law halo beneath her feet abruptly expanded. The Law Solidification Domain, which had covered only her own body, spread in a single instant into a whole sheet of gray-white domain blanketing the space around her.

Inside the domain, law runes spun and interwove like living things, layer upon layer, weaving a law shield around her body that looked gossamer-thin and yet was astonishingly tough.

The eight attacks slammed into the shield almost together.

The moment any of that energy touched the gray-white light, it was as though an invisible hand took it apart on the spot, scattering it into the most primitive elemental fluctuations. Those fluctuations were then swallowed whole by the Pain Law, converted and absorbed without a sound.

Viola did not even furrow her brow.

It was the eight eighth-level octopus-men whose tendrils all snapped rigid in the same instant.

They could feel it with perfect clarity: after devouring their attacks, the presence of that female Apostle of the End across from them had grown a measure stronger instead! It ran entirely outside anything they understood about how a fight was supposed to work.

The lead eighth-level octopus-man let out a low growl, and the eight of them shifted formation in an instant. Four kept up the attack, while the energy coating on the armor of the other four switched from deep blue to dark red, plainly preparing to launch some kind of high-level joint attack that required a coordinated charge.

Viola was not in the habit of letting an enemy charge anything. Her figure vanished from where she stood.

The next instant, she was already standing behind one of the eighth-level octopus-men.

A gray-white spear condensed into shape in her hand, a weapon built out of pain itself.

When that spear thrust out, the octopus-man marked as its target felt no energy impact whatsoever, and yet every nerve in its body erupted at once with a signal of heart-rending agony.

Armor protection, energy shields, law resistance… every one of them meant nothing in the face of that thrust.

Because pain is not an attack.

Pain is simply pain itself.

The octopus-man tore out a shrill, wretched scream, its whole body locking rigid in place on the spot, without even time to struggle once. The faces of the other few octopus-men changed as one. They abandoned the charge at once and lunged at Viola together.

But the gray-white domain expanded a second time and swallowed every one of them inside it.

Watching helplessly as the gray-white domain closed over him, the octopus-man commander found the tendrils on his face had already gone white nearly to the point of transparency.

He could sense it clearly, that familiar pressure pouring off the enemy without pause, and the pain beginning to spread through his own body.

But set beside the pain of the flesh, what tormented him more was a fear carved into his marrow.

A despair he had spent tens of thousands of years trying to forget and had never once managed to shake off.

He had fought the Apostles of the End before.

He had not been commander then, only the deputy commanding officer of a mid-sized support fleet, responsible for providing covering fire on the flank of the main force. He had seen with his own eyes the tribe’s ninth-level ancestor, that supreme existence the whole octopus-man civilization had once regarded as its guardian god, surrounded by seven or eight Apostles of the End who were only eighth-level.

In that moment, he had thought he was about to watch a one-sided slaughter.

He had been right, and he had also been wrong.

The battlefield was indeed one-sided. It was simply the reverse of what he had expected.

The ninth-level ancestor’s power was enough to shake the void, enough to make anything he conceived of come true at will.

And yet those Apostles of the End, by a method that made no sense at all, stripped the ancestor’s power away and took it apart layer by layer.

He remembered still, to this day, the sight of the ancestor being captured and dragged off by the Apostles of the End.

That body, once so majestic, looking down on all living things like a god, had been like a dead dog with its spine broken, hauled off toward the depths of the void by seven or eight elemental chains.

The terrifying presence of a ninth-level existence, ground utterly to dust.

From that day on the octopus-man civilization had no ninth-level combat power, and its standing within the Multiracial Alliance slid steadily downward until it fell quickly to the margins. Yet the octopus-man commander had always privately felt this was, if anything, a good thing.

At least they would never again have to meet those monsters on an open battlefield.

Holding down a few uncivilized natives in the rear, collecting a few resources of no consequence, hearing the other races sneer “softshells” at them a couple of times, none of that mattered. It beat going out to die.

But now the nightmare that had once kept him from sleeping had descended all over again.

And it was standing directly above his flagship.

With an air of complete nonchalance, holding down eight of his eighth-level kin by itself, as though the old nightmare were being replayed in the flesh. From Viola’s side, by contrast, the fight felt a good deal easier than she had expected.

At the start she had reckoned that these were, after all, eight eighth-level beings, and while the peculiar nature of the Pain Law meant she was in little danger of being killed outright, actually putting them down one by one was going to take some effort.

But the moment the fighting started, she found she had been worrying over nothing.

The concentration of negative emotion pouring off the leader across from her ran far beyond her estimates.

Fear, despair, tens of thousands of years of suppressed post-traumatic stress… these emotions were like a volcano erupting all at once, pouring endlessly into her Pain Law.

Every wave she absorbed shot her power up another notch.

The longer she fought the stronger she got, and the stronger she got the easier it became.

Before long the eight eighth-level octopus-men were finding it difficult even to strike back.

Every attack of theirs was dispersed by the Pain Law with almost casual ease, while every counterstrike of Viola’s left one octopus-man in such agony that it lost the ability to fight for a short while.

And on the other side of the battlefield, the fight between the Nest and the Black Giant legion and the octopus-men’s main force was raging just as fiercely.

With the Return to Ruins Armor and the Trigram Fire Annihilation Divine Light they had been issued, the Black Giant legion held an overwhelming advantage in the sixth-level exchanges. The Return to Ruins Armor absorbed energy attacks and converted them into stored energy, and the Trigram Fire Annihilation Divine Light hurled that stored energy back in an extremely high-density form. This all-in-one mode of attack and defense put the octopus-men’s sixth-level units through misery.

The Nest, meanwhile, lay like an impassable blue chasm, planted firmly between the octopus-men’s main force and Jie Ming.

Countless attacks landed on it and vanished like a clay ox walking into the sea. Not only did they fail to do any damage, they only made it grow larger the more it was hit.

With an absolute advantage in both numbers and equipment, the Black Giant legion soon had the greater part of the octopus-men pinned down.

As for Jie Ming…

Jie Ming was running for his life.

High in the sky, a streak of dark golden light flickered wildly between the cloud layers at a speed approaching that of light.

With the Light God Transformation unfolded, every flicker Jie Ming made came with a faint tremor in the structure of space, like a golden bolt of lightning leaping over and over. And behind him, more than fifty seventh-level octopus-men gave chase without letting up.

The vents on their armor spat dazzling exhaust flame without pause, and the energy coating on the surface of that armor scraped a searing white light out of the air as they flew. The fifty-odd seventh-level octopus-men had split into several pursuit formations, flanking and blocking from different directions, trying to force Jie Ming into a dead corner.

Jie Ming did not so much as look back. He raised a hand and flung out a beam of Trigram Fire Annihilation Divine Light.

The dark golden beam roared toward the nearest squad of octopus-men behind him, but that squad reacted with extreme speed, the joint shield on their armor activating in an instant as several layers of energy barrier on different frequency bands unfolded together.

The beam punched through the first two layers of shielding, but spent the last of its energy against the third and finally dissipated into the air.

The octopus-men did not slow their pursuit in the slightest. If anything they used the opening to loose dozens of energy beams at him.

Jie Ming used the Great Void Step to flicker again and again through the air, avoiding most of the attacks by the barest margin, but a few of the beams still grazed him. A handful of small sparks burst across the surface of the Return to Ruins Armor, his figure staggered in midair, then steadied itself again and swept onward. Dodging yet another squad trying to cut him off, Jie Ming looked back at the seventh-level octopus-men still doggedly on his tail, and his face darkened.

Truth be told, these octopus-men really were strong. All told, considerably stronger than ordinary seventh-level beings of the same level.

And on top of that, they seemed to possess certain special techniques that let them stack their strength together.

At his own standard, Jie Ming reckoned he could handle seven or eight of them at most in a head-on fight.

But what he was facing now was not seven or eight.

It was more than fifty.

Fortunately, the Black Giant legion and the Nest had already given everything they had to intercept nearly half the seventh-level octopus-men for him.

The fifty-odd that remained were still far beyond what he could deal with, but at least it had not reached the point where he could not maneuver at all.

More importantly, when the body forging method had been taking a full fleet salvo head-on earlier, it had already raised his resistance to octopus-man energy weapons to a considerable degree. Energy beams capable of vaporizing a star slammed into him and had most of their force absorbed and converted by the Return to Ruins Armor, and what remained then passed through the body forging method’s adaptive defense and could no longer do him much harm.

Which made the scene an extremely strange one.

He ran, and he took hits.

And once he had taken the hits, he could go on running faster than before.

So the two sides settled into a deadlock high in the air. Jie Ming could not shake off the octopus-men, and the octopus-men could not kill Jie Ming.

The whole chase drew an unbroken trail across the sky, tens of thousands of kilometers from end to end, dark gold woven together with the color of metal.

Seen from a distance, it looked as though someone had opened a steadily widening wound across the vault of heaven with a knife.