Chapter 165: Chapter ??? : Star (Part 4)

Swoosh!

Astra zoomed to Ares’ front and punched out. Her gold-clad right fist struck true and sent his airborne figure hurling back. She wasn’t done though. Following the punch, she teleported to his backside and struck again. This pattern repeated itself dozens of times over the next few seconds, treating the Demon Lord as a living pinball.

*Bam* *Bam* Bam*...

He was knocked back and forth helplessly; all attempts at counter-attacking or defending himself ended in failure, causing Ares’ face to twist into an indignant scowl. Still, while it looked bad, his golden barrier remained perfectly intact.

Seeing this, Astra narrowed her eyes. ‘Guess I need something more potent to deal with you. Let’s try that…’ Thinking this, she dove back in.

This time, instead of striking, she grabbed hold of Ares’ arm.

Void Step!

Activating her teleportation technique, the scenery around the two switched to that of a great forest. Ares’ eyes lost focus at the change of location. Noting this, Astra knew her idea had worked.

‘Ha, looks like you can’t stomach teleportation too well. Let’s continue then.’

With this intention, Astra activated Void Step one after the other in quick succession.

High in the clouds, atop an active volcano, in the depths of the ocean, above a cityscape of confused onlookers, amidst a monster-filled forest, above ancient ruins…

‘Hm, he’s getting used to it, ha, so annoying, guess I have to go all out,’ she thought then used her full power to teleport them away again.

Where the other locations were easy on the eyes, the reddish-brown sands and rocks of the current location weren’t too appealing. Still, where it lacked in visuals, it made up for in rarity.

‘This is…’ Ares’ eyes widened at the familiar sight. ‘...Mars.’

His bedazzlement at the discovery slowed his thinking somewhat. He sent an absentminded punch which Astra easily avoided. As she did, she grabbed hold of his wrist and then did a spin at ungodly speeds. Ares’ figure was forced to spin with her and using the colossal momentum, she threw him towards the red planet.

Many rings of shockwaves accompanied the throw and air ignited along his journey downwards. Still out of it, and moving far beyond his usual speeds, Ares was helpless to stop what happened next. His figure crashed through a dozen rock towers before finally stopping at a rocky hillside. He had tunnelled several metres into the rock before his momentum died down completely, leaving a comical humanoid-shaped gap on the hill’s surface in the process.

‘Now to end ya.’

Astra teleported to Ares’s position. Her hand disappeared into her stomach as she retrieved a grendo bomb from Endless Expanse. While placing it at her feet, she had a circular spatial rift drop grendo bombs, one at a time, until a hundred-metre-wide circle was made around Ares’ position. Then, she teleported to the top of a distant mountain top.

A small spatial rift appeared beside her. From it, a remote bearing a single red button dropped down. Landing in her palm, Astra’s thumb moved over it. ‘Bye-bye.’ Thinking with a smirk, she clicked and watched as the bombs collectively exploded.

The landscape was devastated as a several-kilometre-wide sphere of yellow light materialised in a flash and ate up everything within. Things outside it fared better, but not by much. Piercing light lit up the world and powerful shockwaves resounded out, splitting earth and toppling rock formations. Even ten kilometres away, Astra could feel the dreadful effects.

‘And that wraps things u- ah, oh, he actually survived that,’ Astra realised as she looked to the inferno. At the edge of the smoking fireball, a humanoid silhouette could be seen moving toward her. It was unsteady, and yet gave off a sense of unfaltering spirit.

Astra’s eyes sparkled with admiration and then seriousness. ‘Okay, you’ve earned it, mister Demon Lord. I’ll give you my all.’ Void Stepping, Astra vanished then reappeared high in the martian skies. She conjured a circular spatial rift pointing towards Ares before teleporting again, this time to outer space.

You are reading story The Silver Path at novel35.com

Floating in the cold empty space, she faced the red planet with an apologetic look before delivering her ultimate attack.

She connected a spatial rift in her Endless Expanse to the spatial rift in the martian skies. Connected, the space served as a bridge, which a certain object used to escape Endless Expanse’s prison. Three metres wide in diameter, the sphere of solid greyline stone zoomed forth at half the speed of light. Making its exit, the sphere immediately lit up in dazzling lights as it set everything around it ablaze. Appearing no different than a laser, it raced towards Ares’ position in a flash and then…

*BOOOOM*

Astra could hear no sound from space, but she could see it clearly. The rapidly expanding ball of white grew to hundreds of kilometres in width, destroying everything without discrimination. The nearby clouds were swallowed up by the flames while those further, were ripped to shreds by intense shockwaves, which travelled around the globe spreading destruction everywhere. The planet rumbled and cracked into deep fissures, exposing magma and setting off volcanoes in mass. From said volcanoes and cracks, lava spurted high into the skies, as though it were the planet’s blood.

Astra observed the aftermath with a carefree attitude, not bothered at having changed the planet’s landscape so drastically. Instead of such concerns, another occupied her; she moved to confirm that her target was dead. She twisted her left hand into an ‘ok’ sign and looked through the ‘o’. Doing so for a few seconds, she smiled a satisfied smile.

‘You lasted longer than most, but you were never my match. Back to hell, you go, dear Demon Lord.’

Having the thought, Astra turned away and then zoomed off into the darkness of space, towards the next fool or batch of fools who dared challenge her supremacy.

***

‘It’s perfect.’

Seated on a couch in a darkened room, Astra wore a dazzling smile. The final version of her battle versus Ares had just finished streaming through her head, leaving her completely satisfied. The shots, the accompanying soundtracks, the voiceovers, the synching and the special effects; everything had met her standards - no, even surpassed them.

Smitten at the final product, she requested a replay and got it. Rewatching the battle, her mind recalled the unique filming process.

Astra, Choi and the team had gone to great lengths to heighten the flashiness of the battle. In trying, they had created two hours of high-quality battle footage content, which in the end, was condensed to a five-minute video, composed of both fictional and non-fictional parts.

Astra wanted to be authentic as possible, but there were a few stretches here and there and even some outright fakery. Watching the video, her mind locked onto these points.

Grabbing Ares and forcefully teleporting him around was a big one. While she could teleport others and objects with her, she couldn’t do so with a resisting opponent on or near Ares’ level. Relatedly, teleporting, while jarring, never induced a significant mental or psychic effect on people, human or otherwise. Teleporting via Void Step was harmless.

Importantly, it could only take Astra so far, and definitely not directly to Mars. In the video, she was shown to teleport to the planet in one bound, but in reality, it would take more than two hundred jumps at this time of year given her roughly three-hundred-thousand-kilometre teleportation limit. She covered half the distance with Void Steps and the other half by flying, after speeding herself up to around ninety percent the speed of light.

The trip to Mars became an expedition of sorts. They had prepared space suits, oxygen tanks, potions…everything for the trip. Astra stuffed Choi, Ares, Sigurd and the rest in Endless Expanse’s confines and made the trip over. After hours of exploring the alien planet and discovering no aliens or any life to speak of, filming got started, and the ending sequence came about.

Watching Astra’s final attack devastate Mars forever to come from the safety of outer space, Choi and the rest all seemed to age ten years out of sheer terror, and rightly so. A dozen of those could eradicate Inis in its entirety after all. Floating in their spacesuits, they thanked all the Gods that Astra was the way she was, and not how the rumours portrayed her as.

Astra found their reactions funny, especially when she mentioned that the final attack was her holding back. Indeed, if she wanted to, she could have accelerated the greyline sphere to ninety-nine percent the speed of light before stuffing it in her Endless Expanse and having it Nascar race around a circular spatial track. Had she done that, the effects would be significantly more destructive. But of course, that wasn’t her aim.

‘Flashy and harmless is best.’ Nodding at her words, Astra got up. She oriented herself westward before teleporting away.

When colour returned to her world, she found herself before Choi, Ares, Sigurd and the rest of the filming crew. She gave the waiting Choi a thumbs up and thanked Ares and the crew for their contribution to the project. A short celebration ensued at the successful filming before Choi and the rest of the crew called it a night. They would need the rest, for tomorrow, another intense session of filming awaited them.

Ares, Sigurd and Astra pushed deeper into the night, only parting at midnight. Sigurd and Ares were teleported back to Popleigh, where they would spend the night. The pair would be picked up again only ten hours later though; the Ascendants had become quite invested in Astra’s film and would continue to follow its progress all the way to the end - well…until it reached the Shadow Raven section.

You can find story with these keywords: The Silver Path, Read The Silver Path, The Silver Path novel, The Silver Path book, The Silver Path story, The Silver Path full, The Silver Path Latest Chapter