The Oracle Paths

Meanwhile, on the surface, the area around Celestial City was nothing but molten rock, ionized plasma and radiation. A cloud of millions, billions of Antimatter Bugs were continuously detonating in an endless and increasingly cataclysmic chain reaction.

Psykow, the teardrop-shaped alien, still levitated motionless atop his skyscraper. Although the environment was currently hostile to all lifeforms, neither heat, nor radiation, nor shock waves could harm him. The blasts hitting him would pass through his body as if it didn't exist, as if the place where it stood was just a bubble of nothingness capable of deflecting anything that came near it.

From time to time one could see the image of the alien sizzling like an unstable hologram under its force field forcing its thirteen eyes to glow, consuming prodigious amounts of energy and mental power every second. No matter how strong this Player was, it was not possible to take such antimatter blasts so close without paying a price.

Farther up on top of a futuristic steel building covered in bluish lines of light, Vhoskaud was stoically watching Vexa's futile struggle. Unlike Psykow, he was not equipped to dodge these explosions.

Instead, his technology and armor were so advanced that he was virtually immune. Compared to the inferior and fragile versions of himself that Jake and his companions had battled, Vhoskaud's main body was an entirely different beast.

A Mechanical Force of a nature difficult to fathom formed blue-golden arcs of electricity around the giant robot, its energy radiating in all directions and spreading through the air and ground as far as the eye could see. It caused no damage as it passed, but anything containing metal would come to life, forming complex robotic structures under precise electromagnetic control.

The radiation, the searing heat and the blasts of all these explosions were partially neutralized by a powerful energy shield also powered by antimatter. Some of it was absorbed by the shield to restore its energy levels while the rest lashed out at Vhoskaud's giant body.

Each time a weakened blast crashed into the titanic android, its armor would be vaporized, shattering into scraps of white-hot steel, but again the excess energy would be sucked into the network of glowing lines running through its body. This energy would then reach the huge generator replacing his heart where it would then be purified.

Vhoskaud had spent almost a millennium perfecting his technology and his current generator was an enigma of the universe, powered by his own rich spiritual energy and other consumable or inexhaustible energy only grasped by the most advanced civilizations in the Mirror Universe.

Once this energy was purified, Vhoskaud just had to open the vast secondary dimension where he stored all his summonses and all sorts of materials to replace the destroyed armor. Even so, he was actually losing very little material. The metal atomized by the explosions would recondense to reform intact armor each time his Mechanical Force flowed through it.

As Jake and his companions were buried underground by a series of explosions far more terrifying than the previous ones, Vhoskaud's defensive and regenerative abilities were also overwhelmed. At that moment, a flash of electricity flashed behind his metallic pupils and he glared in Psykow's direction.

'So you are also trying to eliminate me.' Vhoskaud thought as he realized that Anti-Life probably wanted to make his death look like an accident.

If he perished they would just have to apologize to his higher-ups with possibly some financial compensation and the matter would end there.

'Bad luck for you, I'm much more unfathomable than you think.'

When his armor was about to collapse completely, exposing the main generator housing his soul, dozens of metal boxes orbiting in space 500 million kilometers away switched to hyperdrive mode, vanishing in silent trails of light.

A heartbeat later, these dozens of gigantic containers reappeared in the air a few meters above him with surgical precision as if they had just been teleported. An almost inexhaustible stream of compressed metal poured out of them, instantly replacing the armor he had just lost, reinforcing it far beyond its initial performance.

Several of these boxes, powered by their own generators, one harnessing dark energy, a second anti-matter, and a third void energy, formed additional energy shields under the influence of Vhoskaud's Mechanical Force and the threat was momentarily subdued.

Psykow's thirteen eyes, which had been unfazed from the beginning, focused on the giant robot for a fleeting moment, their true thoughts unknown, but the alien soon lost interest in his ally and returned its focus to the fight between Neri and Vexa.

'If you couldn't survive this how would you be worthy of being our ally?' Psykow sneered inwardly.

BOOOM!

At that very moment, Neri went on the offensive, ignoring the massive explosion that had just sounded a few centimeters away from her. Vexa, who was already using all his energy to stabilize his Yellow Cube was unable to react in time. Even if he could, he would surely have ignored her.

His Yellow Cube lived up to its reputation. After stacking dozens of Yellow Cubes on top of each other with a few White Cubes in between to provide an inexhaustible stream of energy, the final combination had already reached a level of solidity such that these antimatter blasts couldn't even chip it. Its radiance was as stable as a giant block of amber fossilized for millions of years.

Yet suddenly, Neri's light-absorbing black arm effortlessly passed through his Yellow Shield as if it didn't exist. The Yellow Cube was more than ten meters across, so Vexa was unharmed, but his face contorted as the precious Cubes he had conjured by drawing on his core energy were quickly fragmented and then sucked into the black arm itself.

Conversely, dozens of Antimatter Bugs were vomited out of the arm like a swarm of frenzied beetles and soon detonated on contact with the oxygen.

BOOOOOM!

Seen from the outside, the enormous Yellow Cube swelled like a balloon and a geyser of light and gamma rays was expelled from the breach opened by Neri. The loud bangs outside never stopped, blast after blast penetrated the crack and Vexa, trapped inside, soon found himself in trouble.

"YOU'VE GONE TOO FAR ANTI-LIFE! DO YOU TRULY THINK I FEAR YOU?!" The angry voice of the Mirror Vanguard leader suddenly rang out, amplified thousands of times as he realized that someone was actually trying to murder him.

A blinding radiance radiated from the cube man's battered body and the weakened Yellow-Cube miraculously stabilized, severing Neri's arm that had so easily passed through it seconds earlier.

Inside, Vexa's naked, blood-covered chest was exposed and through transparency his cubic heart, which looked exactly like a Green Cube, began to beat at a high frequency, spreading unbelievably dense and vibrant life energy throughout his cells.

His hair suddenly scattered like a pollen wave, forming billions of Orange Cubes that shot outwards, targeting Neri. Simultaneously, a Red Cube almost as massive as the Yellow Cube encased him, basking him in a crimson light. An Orange Cube about a meter in size hovered in front of him and with no hesitation Vexa summoned his precious sword-like Silver Aether Artifact and slashed forward.

Neri, whose severed arm had already regenerated, watched the millions of microscopic Orange Cubes forming a dense fog around her with curiosity, but her attention was quickly pulled back to reality when one of them emitted an insane amount of energy of such a life-threatening nature that her non-existent hair stood on end.

A blinding flash of light momentarily outshone the antimatter blasts, and a trench several kilometers long and tens of kilometers deep split the earth in two. Psykow, who happened to be in the way, stood still for an instant, but just before impact he teleported to the roof of another building, thereby moving for the first time since the beginning of the final battle.

Kilometers beneath the ground, Lost Divinities, who were calmly proceeding toward the Celestial City, were suddenly smitten by the remnants of the slashing blast and several Players burst into a bloody pulp. Their shattered bodies did not regenerate, their Divinities shattered with them.

Ael and Felphi, aka the Nullifyer and the Disrupter, changed their expressions drastically, their gloomy, irritated gaze shifting in the direction of Vexa and Neri.

"And here I thought we could let Anti-Life, Replicators and Mirror Vanguard kill each other without suffering any casualties." Ael sighed bitterly.

"I told you it wouldn't work." Felphi derided mercilessly.