Chapter 1552: Thousand-yard Stare
"Get down! Don’t let him just pass through your void; he’ll tear it apart." Vasilissa pushed Arad down a fraction of a second before a wave of tentacles passed where his head was, saving him from getting torn in half.
Before he could fall a single meter, she pulled his back up, "You’re staying down too long, move!"
Arad struggled to keep up. Right now, he felt like a soldier crawling on the grounds with bullets flying everywhere. The whole world around him had become a deadly storm, and even with all of his harrowing power, he was almost unable to protect himself.
Fighting Nyar inside the universe was completely different from fighting him here, and what’s more, endless people hated him, even his own people, which made this avatar far more powerful than the one Arad saw last time.
What’s made this place even worse is that Arad had to worry about the stray attacks from everyone else as well. Kali and the fallen Archon, now called Baal, were still doing their best to avoid throwing hits where Arad was, but that was also giving Nyar enough opening to push them back.
Everyone else, Diana, Mathilde, and Amaterasu, threw those attacks like it was a party. One stray sun almost turned Arad into cosmic dust.
Arad’s mother, on the other hand, played mostly defensively. She approached Nyar, slowing her pace to allow Arad to keep up, and she had spared the vast majority of her power to make sure he was safe. Relatively safe. If she thought an attack was something that Arad could deal with, she would let him be the one to deal with it.
At some point, Diana seems to have been injured badly enough that she had to retreat and recover. Where did she choose to hide? Beside Arad, as that was the safest spot in the chaotic battlefield.
She landed beside him. She looked fine in her humanoid form, but that was far from the truth. A massive chunk of her true body got bitten off and consumed by Nyar, forcing her to shift back.
"Hey, soldier. Pretty lucky, aren’t you? First day in the army, fucking war against an avatar." She looked toward Nyar, "And one of the strongest avatars we’ve seen so far."
She laughed, but Vasilissa quickly smacked her on the head, "Watch your tongue around my son." She then went back, smacked the many tentacles Nyar sent toward them, and then turned back around. "If he were a normal soldier, he would’ve been ordered to retreat ages ago."
Diana nodded, "Yep, wyrms and above are the only void dragons we allow to join a fight against an avatar."
Both Diana and Arad were then forced to fly away, dodge a few stray attacks, and then keep following behind Vasilissa as she carved a path for them.
Their goal was clear. Nyar’s unfathomable body still had a core, where his humanoid vessel was, the body of Euri. They have to either destroy that or find a way to force Nyar to abandon it. Doing that would end the fight.
There was one small problem: the humanoid vessel wouldn’t be defenseless, but it would still fight back with Nyar’s full harrowing power. Not just anyone could put it down.
Amaterasu, Kali, and Vasilissa. All three of them were extremely powerful in hand-to-hand combat. No one could tell which of them punches the hardest, but many agreed they were pretty close to each other.
But in this situation, Amaterasu and Kali decided that the two of them would focus on crushing Nyar’s tentacles and thinning his endless abominable body while Vasilissa would be the one charging in to finish him off.
There were two reasons for that. The first was that Amaterasu was disgusted by Nyar and would rather not touch him; she also would do better by weeding out his tentacles with her suns.
Kali didn’t mind ripping someone in half with her bare hands; nothing disgusted her at all. But if she were the one to destroy Nyar’s vessel, there would be no corpse left to take back to Tyal.
Arad wanted to bring Euri’s head back home, at least. If he got the chance, he’ll break all of his bones and dry his dying body whole for Tyal to kill him.
With both Amaterasu and Kali being unsuited to being the one to kill Nyar’s vessel, Vasilissa was the only one left, having to do it while protecting Arad.
It only took Diana a few seconds to fully heal and join the battle. That had left Arad once again alone with his mother, following her like a little duckling and barely being able to survive in her shadow.
A couple of seconds later, they reached Nyar’s core, and the real fight started.
Nyar was tall and slender, his whole body hidden behind a yellow raincoat. Instead of legs, he had hundreds of tentacles that helped him move with a disgusting slithering sound.
In one hand, the emperor of the abominations carried a farming scythe, which he used as a weapon just for the fun of it. The scythe looked mundane, but one look was enough to make Arad notice that it was, in fact, made from bones, bones of a horror he had never seen or heard of.
One slash would cleave him in half; nothing he could do would stop that. What’s more, it was clear that Nyar could see his soul, Arad felt it, something utterly wrong gazing on his deepest parts.
This disgusting and terrifying feeling of helplessness and utter vulnerability was what every mortal felt when Arad glared at their souls, which gave Arad a clear picture of the power gap between him and Nyar.
He was a normal, mundane man running headfirst to fight himself as a powerful dragon.
"Mom, that thing can cut souls, right?" Arad asked seconds before the clash, and she laughed.
"Listen, Vorvadoss tore your human soul in half. That power came from Nyar, and he can do that much better than Vorvadoss can even dream of."
It was now clear that the scythe would slash Arad’s body and soul, kill him instantly, even if this was just an incarnation.
The moment they got close, and as Vasilissa expected, Nyar moved first. He knew that she was a problem and knew that Arad was her weakness now.
The emperor of the abominations ignored Vasilissa and attacked Arad first, swinging his scythe with enough speed that Arad only realised he was getting attacked when the tip of the spear poked into his side.
But before Nyar could slash Arad in half, Vasilissa jumped in and smacked his scythe away with her palm.
She had turned her nails into claws as long as her fingers, and that was her favorite weapon.
Arad immediately tried to take the chance and swing at Nyar’s neck, only for him to get smacked away with the butt of the scythe.
Arad landed a short distance away and saw his mother and Nyar locked in a vicious battle. He could barely see their hands moving; everything had turned into a blur.
If he doesn’t bring his best, he will remain a burden on his mother in this fight. With that thought crossing his mind, all of Arad’s other incarnations came to a halt and froze in place, all of them falling silent as all of his power got directed back to the one in the battle.
^Focus! Focus, if you can’t match their speed, then find an opening and strike.^ Arad growled internally, grinding his brain to dust as he tried to figure out a pattern. How did Nyar move? Did the attacks that Kali and everyone else are dropping on his tentacles have any effect on this vessel? Can he predict any moves?
He quickly reached an answer. It was impossible to predict Nyar’s moves at his current level of speed and intellect. He just isn’t perceptive enough, nor does he have the mental capacity to calculate anything in a short amount of time to be useful.
By the time Arad would figure out a move, Nyar would’ve already done the move and would be like fifty moves ahead.
That’s why Arad decided to try to predict someone else. It wasn’t easier; in fact, it seemed harder than predicting Nyar’s moves. But, he had a better chance at being right, and it was his mother that he tried to understand, copy, and predict.