Behind him, his two companions gathered their own reserves of power, and released their most powerful strikes. A lion of lightning appeared before the mage, her face twisted in concentration as she marshaled surging rivers of electricity, powerful enough to tear apart countries with ease. The lion roared its displeasure at Granthar, and bounded towards him, each step shaking the firmament.
Meanwhile, a orrery of celestial threads swirled around the diviner, her eyes glowing pure white as she gazed into a realm beyond mortal comprehension. Her mouth opened, and one word came forth with the power of a bomb. “Strike.”
The melee fighter’s body exploded in strength, a halo of Fate aligned energy appearing on his brow, and a cloak of the same elemental flapping majestically behind him. With a discharge that sounded like thunder pealing across the heavens, he slammed his fist into King Granthar’s stomach. The other man laughed, a portal appearing before him, opening to swallow the martial artist’s hand whole. Instead of faltering, the man simply pushed through, and as his fist entered the portal, the sheath of light surrounding it peeled off, and surged around the sides of the aperture like a wave, crashing into Granthar.
“Do not watch my fist, for I am the fist!” The cultivator bellowed, just as an ephemeral copy of his body appeared above Granthar, wrought from the cascading brilliance he had summoned to his hand. Suddenly, his body disappeared as if it had never been there, revealing the clone to be his real form all along.
As Granthar reeled from the initial blow, a fist hammered into the side of his head, sending blood shooting out of his mouth and nose. He snarled, and raked his hands across the air, furrows carving themselves into the man’s flesh. With a bellow of pain, the cultivator retreated, his robes flapping as blood streamed freely from his wounds.
Granthar’s entire body lit up, and an avatar of darkest night formed around him, made up of what looked like the interstellar void, briefly punctuated by small pinpricks of light. The man slammed his palms together, and a disc of pure spatial rending erupted out, the air itself sliced in half before it. A rift into another dimension formed wherever it touched, strange energies and creatures escaping into the real world. A massive hydra with tentacles instead of heads plummeted to the ground, only for wings of wriggling worms to explode out of its body, and bear it aloft. It was instantly slain by a single technique of the D Rank mage, her hand sending a shaft of condensed starlight through its head. However, its arrival foreshadowed more, and an apocalyptic howl tore through the air as the rift surged open.
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A clawed hand the size of a building forced its way through, its claws tearing through the edges of the spatial rift. Granthar smirked and backed away, covering miles in the blink of an eye. “My family might have been abandoned here like you said, but we were still left with a protector.”
As the man spoke, the rift widened to almost five hundred feet in diameter, and an eye peered through, glaring at the trio of rebels who had dared to challenge the king. The hand dug into the air somehow, its claws anchoring themselves into reality itself, and with a mighty heave that broke the rift open fully, a titan pulled itself from the void. Easily half a mile in height, it looked like a fusion between a black dragon and a giant. Scales covered its form, and its head had a long, reptilian snout and the eyes of a snake. Flames billowed from the sides of its mouth, illuminating fangs as long as small trees.
One hand flickered through the air, a wave of flame traveling before it as the sheer force caused the air to fuse. All of the Darkan family cultivators teleported out of the way, but the shockwave continued across the sky. Below, skyscrapers tumbled, just the backwash of the attack shattering glass and bending metal.
Granthar laughed out loud as he saw his foes scattering, only to falter as a ray of crimson light impacted him from orbit. His flesh baked beneath the strike, and he turned, seeing a massive starship hovering in the air a few dozen miles above him. A cyclopean cannon winked at him as the afterglow of its shot dissipated, and a rumbling noise in the bowels of the vessel indicated that it was starting up once more.
With a snap of his fingers, a tidal wave of spatial aberrations tore through the air, rippling towards the ship. The martial artist D Ranker appeared before it, the air flickering around him as he went. With a shout and a powerful punch, he blasted the attack apart, although not without the skin on his hand being carved off.
The other two attacked the titanic dragon-man directly, combining their strikes to hammer deep into the beast’s flesh. Even though it was a D Ranker, naturally, its larger size meant less of an impact from its Resilience stat. Therefore, each strike from the female mage sank deep into its flesh, sending torrents of blood spurting out. The creature responded with a wave of white hot flames from its maw, washing over the places where the fighters had been. They teleported out of the way, but as the flames cleared, a landscape of devastation was revealed, melted glass and metal mixed with the ash of those living in the city. Granthar only cared about his citizens as far as they could serve him. If it came down to his life against theirs, he would always put himself first.
