Beyond the Bloodline-Chapter 395: Cursed Death

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

Jamie’s words became reality as the white Spear of Cursed Death pierced through Miranda’s heart without any delay, the act of the spear striking Miranda already set in stone.

The instant the weapon pierced her heart, the seven barbs at the base of its tip expanded all at once, coursing through the pathways of her body until nearly every joint was filled with barbs.

Blood spurted from Miranda’s body as they tore outward, ripping through her vitals, piercing from her heart through her lungs and bursting from her shoulders, stabbing down into her liver and kidneys, tearing through her solar plexus, with one barb even rupturing out from the back of her neck, each strike hitting places that would’ve meant instant death for any normal being, but alas Miranda was immortal.

However, Gáe Bulg also wasn’t just any spear.

It was a Rule Breaker like Jamie’s Galaxy Sword, a weapon that had survived the void of nonexistence from before the current iteration of the Cosmos was created.

Rule Breaker #19: The Spear of Cursed Death: Gáe Bulg.

Its Weapon Authority had branched abilities under it, like its guaranteed hit effect, but its true power lay in its name.

Cursed Death.

Just as it guaranteed a hit the moment it was thrown, the Spear also guaranteed death.

The instant its barbs spread out, its Weapon Authority took hold, spreading through Miranda’s body and infecting her entire existence with its inescapable power of Cursed Death.

But again, Miranda was an immortal.

Angela Cathedral, using stolen Conceptual Knowledge, had succeeded in detaching Miranda from the Concept of Death, so it should’ve been impossible for her to ’die’ without the use of something like an Erasure-type ability, right?

And that’s exactly where one would be wrong.

Gáe Bulg’s Weapon Authority guaranteed Death to all who were struck unless they could resist the power of its Authority with their own.

If Miranda was unbound from the Concept of Death, then fine. It would simply imbue ’Death’ back into her existence so she could ’die’.

That was exactly what it was now trying to do to her.

White cosmic energy poured out in furious waves, easily permeating Miranda’s physical body and soul as it tried to recreate the piece of her Existence Graph, the blueprint of her Soul, which Angela had edited to remove the link to the Concept of Death.

One’s Soul was the root of their existence, and their Existence Graph was the blueprint of that Soul.

Gáe Bulg was trying to edit Miranda’s Graph, to strip away her Deathless Immortality and make her capable of dying, so its power of ’Death’ could kill her.

What’s more, trying to remove the spear during this process was almost impossible.

Leaving aside how its seven barbs had pierced out through Miranda’s body, she was still under attack from Deryn and the two unsealed Lesser Supremes, now broken free of Miranda’s Aspectual Authority as she’d turned her power inward to defend herself from Gáe Bulg.

Miranda widened the entrance to her Cosmic Hearth, unleashing all the energy she’d stored inside it over millions of years, pouring it out to form multi-layered spherical barriers to block the attacks closing in from every side.

But the barriers of flames, powered by her Third Concretization, were slowly cracking as her focus slipped further from blocking the attacks and shifted more toward her intensifying struggle against Cursed Death.

More and more of her energy was being redirected toward the spear lodged in her body as she tried to pull it out, ignoring the pain from the branching barbs trying to infect her existence.

All her Authorities and powers were flooded with her enormous reserves of magic power, so much that some of her Origin Cores began to crack under the strain.

However, Gáe Bulg wasn’t called a ’Rule Breaker’ for nothing.

As a weapon from a different iteration of all existence, it was by default more resistant to the Concepts and derived universal laws of this iteration of the Cosmos.

It was capable of exhibiting far more power in the hands of a complete Cosmic Being like the one who had thrown it, and even with all her Universal Law Authorities accumulated over hundreds of millions of years combined with her Aspects and immense soul strength, Miranda was only just managing to match its Weapon Authority as it tried to edit her Existence Graph.

Though resistant to the Concepts, Gáe Bulg could still connect to them since they governed the phenomena of the Cosmos it now existed within, and with every second that passed, its white death cosmic energy was seeping deeper into Miranda’s Existence Graph, conjuring a metaphysical link to the abstraction that was the Concept of Death.

Gáe Bulg’s power advanced steadily, its energy threading through Miranda’s Existence Graph as it started to sew the missing thread of mortality back into her existence, and for a moment it seemed certain that the reconnection to Death would succeed, but then, there was an abrupt...hiccup.

The ’Death’ Sector of the Cosmic Conceptual System had classified Miranda and the other Hybrids as ’Anomalies’.

This was something the Eternal of Death, who governed the Concept, had done over a billion years ago, shortly after Jamie attained Sub-Cosmic Superiority following his battle against the Extinction Legion’s Anti-Hybrid Soldier, SHALE.

She had labelled all of them as Anomalies to keep them from causing errors in the future because of their partial detachment from the Concept of Death when they inevitably acquired Sub-Cosmic Superiority.

As such, from the Concept of Death’s perspective, the Spear of Cursed Death was trying to link it to something it recognised as an ’error’.

It was essentially like trying to download a virus into a computer that had an extremely powerful Anti-Virus.

So to Gáe Bulg’s surprise, the Concept of Death resisted being linked to Miranda, following the commands of the Eternal who governed it.

The consciousness of the Rule Breaker was stunned by this, though only for a moment, before it started forcing the connection.

After all, Gae Bulg was ’resistant’ to the resistance of the Concept of Death.

Miranda was also resisting with everything she had. Her accumulated cosmic energy, magic power, soul power, Authorities—everything she could muster.

But proper resistance needed cosmic energy already inside her body and soul to fight against Gáe Bulg’s energy infecting her.

The time it took for cosmic energy from her Cosmic Hearth to be absorbed into her body and moved to her soul to counter Gáe Bulg’s power was only a few milliseconds.

But even that was still too long, given the current crisis.

Miranda’s existence needed cosmic energy coming from within to oppose the infectious power already inside her.

She pushed back against the power of Cursed Death with the magic power she had refined over hundreds of millions of years, her resistance catching Gáe Bulg’s consciousness off guard since it hadn’t expected this much opposition from a Quasi-Supreme.

In fact, any normal Quasi-Supreme would have been insta-killed by its Authority, and while Miranda was a special case, it still hadn’t expected to be put through this much trouble.

A storm of cosmic energy howled around Miranda as violent expulsions of power burst from her body, each wave cracking through space while she fought against Gáe Bulg’s infection.

The energy spilling from her body warped even higher dimensions, and the shockwaves from the powers clashing within her were strong enough to blast away Deryn and the Lesser Supremes, who had been trying to break her protective barrier.

Reality groaned under the strain of the Concept of Death refusing to be bound to what it regarded as an error, and Miranda’s existence strained to draw more cosmic energy from her Cosmic Hearth, knowing she needed it to stay alive.

Every thread of energy that flowed from her Hearth into her body was immediately seized and woven into her Existence Graph, patching the areas that Gáe Bulg’s power was infecting, only for those same areas to be corroded again in the next moment.

Gáe Bulg kept forcing its death-attributed cosmic energy into her body and soul, while she dragged in her own and attributed it with purple flames to burn the death away.

The clash between the violet flames and the pale white death-energy sent waves of searing heat and absolute cold rippling through her flesh, making her muscles convulse and her bones crack before reforming under the strain.

The Concept of Death’s energy already lodged in her soul writhed violently, rejecting the attempt to anchor it to her, and her skin paled and withered as the power of Cursed Death kept ’killing’ her physical body, only for it to regenerate, die again, and regenerate in a vicious cycle.

Each cycle left faint echoes of death in her cells, which she had to burn out with fresh energy from her Hearth, even as more death seeped into her soul like a poison.

All of these energy reactions were occurring inside Miranda’s body and soul.

And as these actions and reactions happened simultaneously, a cosmic spark ignited in Miranda’s soul.