95. Killing Mort

Killing Mort

The bastard was right.

Sweat was already rolling down my skin, and I could not see any way to escape with Ye Lin.

If only I had some kind of ranged attack that would not be stopped by… ice.

Wait.

That might work.

But I would have only one chance, so I had better make it count.

With effort, the world around me froze again.

I did not even lower the weight in my hands before I began constructing the force fields I needed.

The fields were not meant to support the ceiling long enough for us to escape. That would take too much time, assuming Mort could not simply repair the ice wall if he saw me damaging it.

Since that assumption was stupid, I used Advanced Nearby Object Manipulation to form two cylinders as thin as I could make them, projecting from my eyes.

I designed the fields to seize photons.

Only relatively few at a time, and the total force they could apply would be spread across those photons.

Photons, of course, could be affected by force. If photons were not affected by force, black holes would not be black.

You just needed tremendous gravity to do it, because photons barely responded to gravity.

But my Advanced Nearby Object Manipulation did not care about that.

The photons were there. They could be affected by force. And I could imagine the effect I wanted.

Just as the strange rules of acting during time-stop still allowed me to move through air, breathe, hear sound, and see, my ability could affect those things while time was stopped.

A relatively small number of photons were redirected and pushed out.

I had no idea whether this worked the way I thought it did, but my nearby-object manipulation was applying force—energy—to objects within a certain range.

That energy manifested as two continuous beams of light aimed wherever I looked.

During the first few seconds I maintained time-stop, the beams drilled narrow holes through the ice wall.

Then they struck the target I had aimed for.

Mort’s throat.

Three seconds.

Six.

Nine.

Twelve.

Fifteen.

Eighteen.

Twenty-one.

This time-stop lasted longer than any I had ever maintained before, because I poured nearly all of my remaining stamina into sustaining it.

There was no point saving strength for later.

If this did not work, there would be no later.

When time resumed, an impact like a grenade blast shook Mort’s throne.

At the same time, the suspended ceiling’s weight crushed down onto my exhausted body.

Behind the pierced curtain of ice, the evil sorcerer staggered from his throne, both hands clamped around his ruined throat.

Slowly—so very slowly—his head tipped backward.

His charred spine snapped like chalk.

Head and headless body alike collapsed onto the iron floor.

As the great villain died, a powerful and exhilarating wave of strength surged through my entire body.

I kept supporting the heavy mass above me and turned my new eye-rays on the ice wall.

Ten seconds later, half the ice curtain collapsed, and the iron cylinder I had been holding tipped over to one side.

Once it was no longer hanging above us, ready to crush us both, I gathered the terrified Ye Lin into my arms and flew out of the trap.

Behind me, Mort’s body shone with deep crimson light and sublimated into a cloud of glowing mist.

The mist was drawn into the similarly glowing sphere wrapped among the branches of the thorn tree.

For an instant, the radiance formed a perfect globe.

Then tiny mouths opened on the branches.

They sucked in the red light that I was fairly certain was being emitted by many corpses, and the iron tree bore fruit.

And the fruit had eyes.

We got out of there fast.

I flew downward with Ye Lin as quickly as I could while avoiding acceleration and air resistance that might injure my sister.

With every passing second, the tower shook more violently. Vast sections began to rust and rot away, while the parts that remained sprouted more and more eyes.

I kept telling Ye Lin to keep her eyes shut.

Ten seconds later, we were out.

As a shock wave made the ground heave like a storm-tossed sea, Chi Li flew toward us over a vast heap of rubble.

Somehow, she had found her staff.

She was also extremely angry.

More worrying was the fact that the sky above the tower had been torn open, opening a window into somewhere else.

A place with almost nothing worth visiting and far too many spiked mountains covered in glaring eyes.

Among that countless range of peaks, one mass of land had clearly come from the other side of the immense portal.

It began to fall straight toward us.

At last, the elements began to take effect.

This was a place saturated with power, built from steel shaped by the will and magic of their servant, raised upon the slaughter of innocents and rebels.

Through the adherence of local mortals to their doctrines and their belief in their methods, different realms had been aligned.

And upon the altar of their greatest failure, a powerful being had been brutally sacrificed.

The Lords of Mavis enacted a ritual older than the foundations of the world that was about to bear it.

If everything happened within the ritual’s bounds, why would they care that the sacrificed power had belonged to one of their own servants?

If it granted them a foothold in the new world, what did it matter if the one who completed the ritual had done so by accident?

The first lord tore open and widened a portal from Earth to Mavis within the Great Realm.

The second lord plucked a seed from the forest of spikes at the heart of their domain.

And the third lord’s invisible hand carried that hill-sized seed of adamantine thorns and dark magic into the new world and planted it.

An earthquake like the one that had accompanied the rise of the enormous tower struck the region.

It ripped the ground apart, swallowed the now-useless structure into a vast abyss of fire, and received the seed into an embrace of molten rock.

Adamantine roots as thick as apartment buildings drove themselves into the red-hot lava, drinking in physical heat along with the anger and violence saturating the area.

Then the seed began to grow.

In the low-lying regions of Sanguang City, the torrential rain that had begun with the ritual showed no sign of weakening.

When most people thought of natural violence, they thought of earthquakes, volcanoes, and hurricanes.

The flash of lightning and the roar of thunder. The massive force of a tsunami. The spread of wildfire.

Yet simple rainfall contained power every bit as great as those phenomena. If properly harnessed, it could drown towns, erode roads, swallow farmland, and strangle traffic and life.

It was neither glamorous nor fierce, but it was just as destructive—and in the end, more thorough.

This servant’s final great work was not the most violent rain this new world had ever seen. By the standards of the Great Realm, it barely qualified as a decent weather weapon.

But it could still pour ten centimeters of rain in an hour, and it had maintained that intensity ever since.

Over two days, it had dropped almost a decade’s worth of rain on the city.

The floods trapped more than a million people on roads and in evacuation camps as they fled the towns and cities around Sanguang City.

Panic had already spread through much of the region and far beyond it after the devastating defeat suffered by the military only days earlier.

Emergency responders, National Guard forces, and army units from beyond neighboring cities had arrived in time—only to run directly into this new disaster.

The upper levels of command had prepared themselves to face more monsters.

Instead, all their efforts and strength were obstructed by something they could not fight.

For refugees exhausted by sudden evacuation and exposed in the open, the consequences of cold and flooding were predictable.

Before the seed arrived, nearly two hundred thousand people had already died.

Those deaths nourished the seed and allowed it to grow roots.

Every new death, every injury, every sickness and disaster made it stronger. The anger and fear those events caused in the outside world accelerated its growth.

The first launch of nuclear missiles in a true war contributed even more to the seed’s power than the servants of the lords had expected, as militaries across the world went to red alert and hundreds of millions of people fell into panic.

Twelve nations declared martial law. Riots, looting, and widespread unrest broke out in more than twenty others.

Outside Huaxia, people still did not understand exactly what had happened, but even without a clear account, fragmented reports, videos, and leaks painted a chaotic and horrifying picture.

Attempts to censor or even shut down the media only made matters worse. Panic and unrest bred violence, and that violence nourished the seed.

Thirty-six hours after the ritual began—six hours after the servant became a sacrifice and the seed entered this world—it sprouted and bore fruit.

And the fruit took its first step.