Beyond the Bloodline-Chapter 394: Unerring Path

The female Supreme quickly flew aside to evade the thrown spear, but Miranda snapped her fingers, and the cosmic energy coating the spear still lodged in her left shoulder detonated, tearing flesh and bone apart as the blast nearly crippled her arm.

She cried out in rage and pain as she grabbed at the spear to rip it free, but Miranda never allowed her that chance.

A pair of nunchakus appeared in her hands, their chain silently whistling through space as she spun them with vicious speed, cracking them against the Supreme’s ribs before following with a second strike that smacked across her temple, disorienting her.

Miranda immediately discarded the nunchaku, her hands now gripping a baseball bat wreathed in the same purple glow, and she swung it low, the weapon smashing into the female Supreme’s knee with enough force to crack it despite her durability.

The moment the pain registered in the woman’s body, Miranda switched again, this time bringing a crowbar down like a hammer, the curved edge slamming against her collarbone.

It has already been established that Miranda had a habit of using unorthodox objects as combat weapons, and though she usually preferred actual weapons when she was being ’serious’, she slipped back into doing this when she got ’too serious’, the constant switching often throwing off opponents who had no idea what she was going to summon next.

Each strike was unpredictable, conventional weapons flowing into improvised tools, all of them glowing faintly with her Aspect Armament’s purple aura.

The Supreme tried to gather her darkness for a counterattack, but Miranda was one weapon ahead, already moving into the next attack before the last had even fully landed.

Her rake turned back into a sword, and she slashed at the female Supreme, wisps of purple flames trailing from its edge.

Before the blow could connect, the other Supreme rushed in from her flank, cosmic energy crackling around his body as he prepared to strike.

Without sparing him a glance, Miranda commanded the two enthralled Lesser Supremes to lunge at him, and that they did.

Clicking his tongue in frustration, the male Supreme unleashed a pulse of energy that blasted them away like broken dolls, a move that should have ended their interference in an instant, but in that fraction of a second that he diverted his focus, Miranda vanished from her position.

She reappeared at his side, her hands already gripping the long handle of a massive sledgehammer glowing with her Aspect Armament.

With a full-body swing, she smashed it into the side of his head.

The impact resounded like a thunderclap, the weapon breaking straight through his own Aspect Armament, burning his flesh and cracking his skull open.

The space-breaking force sent him spinning away, his body crashing through chunks of space debris and fragments of the shattered space drifting away.

While his body spun uncontrollably, Miranda dashed back to the female Supreme, appearing behind her. She dropkicked the woman’s wounded shoulder, eliciting a scream from her as the limb was nearly torn apart from the compounded damage.

Miranda’s body then erupted into a pillar of flames, vanishing and reappearing in the flight path of the male Supreme, who was still tumbling through the vacuum, her Cosmic Hearth opening to summon her Flame Avatar’s arm.

The colossal hand of cosmic energy clenched into a fist and came crashing down, the punch landing with catastrophic force and smashing the Supreme through the fabric of space and into higher dimensions.

His body spiralled downwards, tearing through the boundaries of Sonerth and bashing straight through the universal barrier with a detonation that shook the entire universe.

Miranda wasted no time shooting after him, flames blazing around her body as she followed him into the wounded universe, piercing the breach like a comet.

Meanwhile, the female Supreme outside found herself accosted by the enthralled Lesser Supremes acting on Miranda’s orders, attacking without care for their own lives and forcing her to divide her focus between healing and keeping them at bay.

Just then, a familiar voice echoed in her head.

[Ignore those two and focus on the Hybrid. I need—]

"Deryn!?"

She cut the voice off, shouting aloud in shock, glancing around hurriedly as she tried to find the source.

"Where the hell are you?!"

The answer came immediately.

[Waiting for an opening. I need you to hold her down so I can use that thing.]

Her eyes widened again in shock, and her face contorted as she barked back, "Hold her down? How the hell are we supposed to hold that monster down?!"

[I don’t care how you do it, just hold her down for at least three seconds.]

At this, the woman’s expression turned incredulous.

"Three seconds?!"

The words came out half as a question and half as disbelief.

Miranda had a reaction speed at least 200 times that of light, and her movement speed trailed only slightly behind that.

Telling a Supreme who was already struggling just to defend herself to hold Miranda down for three whole seconds was no different from telling some random teenager to pin a master-class bodybuilder for three hours straight.

It was absurd to even consider.

But Deryn stood by his command.

[If I attack now, Providence says she’ll be able to counter me. I need you to hold her down long enough so I can use that thing. It’s our only shot at winning.]

Her teeth ground together, and after a moment of silent fury, she roared aloud, part rage and part desperate resolve, forcing strength back into her body.

Her darkness exploded outward, engulfing the two enthralled Lesser Supremes completely and sealing their bodies within it.

She then turned and shot toward Sonerth, heading in the direction Miranda had hurled her colleague.

However, she didn’t need to go far.

Before she could even close the distance to the universe, Miranda had already beaten the man right back out of it.

Miranda, holding him by his dangling leg, spun him round and round before flinging him straight at the female Supreme.

|!|

She didn’t spare a thought for her colleague, instantly swerving aside to avoid his flying body.

At the same time, she poured every shred of cosmic energy out of her body, forcing it into her Dictum and unleashing it all in one attack.

|Purgatory Bird!|

A massive bird of darkness formed before her, its body shifting between liquid shadows and black flames. With wings spread wide, it cawed and shot toward Miranda at faster-than-light speed.

Miranda instantly summoned her sword, its spikes drinking her blood as the cosmic flames erupting from its blade were stained red.

Swinging it down, she unleashed the same attack that had broken even Ronric’s strongest shield.

|Bloodfire Descent.|

Her slash cleaved the black bird cleanly in two, and the wave of power kept going, crashing into the woman who had launched it. Purple flames devoured her flesh, burning deep enough to expose bone and sear her organs.

Before the Supreme could even try to recover, Miranda was already upon her, her flaming sword piercing straight through the other woman’s body.

The female Supreme hurriedly shifted her upper body at the last possible microsecond, barely enough to avoid having her heart struck.

Even so, the strike pierced through her torso, the Authority imbued in it depleting her vitality to dangerous levels.

In desperation, she wrapped her arms around Miranda and screamed, |You’re going down with me!!|

Her soul ignited with cosmic energy, the protective shields around it collapsing as she began burning her soul for a final burst of power.

But just as she did that, Miranda, meeting her desperate eyes with calm ones, muttered,

|Aspect of the Wolf: Soul-Devouring Jaws.|

From above, an enormous purple illusory wolf burst into existence from the entrance to Miranda’s Cosmic Hearth, fangs of cosmic energy clamping down on the Supreme’s upper body. Its bite tore through charred skin, shattered bone, and crushed her heart from front and back, as though intent on ripping off her torso entirely.

Because the woman had already stripped away the barriers around her own soul, nothing remained to shield her from the Wolf’s Soul-Devouring bite, and her life ended in an instant.

But even in death, she had accomplished her task.

By holding Miranda fast in her grasp for more than three seconds, she had given Deryn exactly what he needed, enough time to ’lock onto’ Miranda’s existence.

Deryn immediately leapt out of Chalrouwei, having silently crossed universes after leaving behind an echo of his presence in Luabos to trick Miranda into thinking he was still there, dealing with the Proelium Tower.

His hand rose, cosmic energy rapidly gathering and elongating until, with a blinding flash, a pristine white spear with seven barbs below its tip appeared.

The glowing white spear looked almost holy, but beneath that light radiated an overwhelming aura of negativity and death, something Miranda instantly sensed.

’What in the hell?!’

Her eyes snapped toward Deryn as she tried to push the corpse of the dead Supreme off her, but to her surprise, the woman had used the last of her strength to fuse her arms together around Miranda.

Miranda’s first push failed to break free, forcing her to exert more strength to snap the bind, cracking the corpse’s fingers apart before shoving it away and whipping her body toward Deryn.

By then, Deryn had already pulled the spear back, pouring an egregious amount of cosmic energy into it, so much that his body was under immense strain, blood dripping from his eyes, but he held fast and roared with all his might,

|Gáe —!|

The spear blazed with a white, flame-like light, and at that sight, Miranda’s eyes peering through space widened in recognition.

’That spear...!’

She recognised it because Jamie had told her about it and shown her a picture of this exact same spear long, long ago, millions of years in the past.

It was one of many things Jamie had told her, but she remembered this particular one not because of exceptional memory or anything like that, but because of the context in which Jamie had told her about it.

Because it was one of the few weapons in the entirety of the Cosmos capable of posing an existential threat to the otherwise Immortal Hybrids.

The spear’s power of cursed death burst outward, filling the expanse as Deryn hurled it forward with everything he had, shouting,

|—Bulg!|

The moment it left his hand, Jamie’s words to Miranda echoed in her mind.

’The spear guarantees a hit by tampering with causality. If you can see it being thrown at you, then you’ve already been hit.’

The instant Deryn’s fingers released their grip, the white Spear of Cursed Death ignored the light-years of distance between them, and in the blink of an eye, it was already there, piercing straight through Miranda’s heart.