The Ogre Strength Fairy and the Eldest 'Son'-Chapter 336 - Death Of A Ritual And The Frustrated Bump

Chapter 336: Chapter 336 - Death Of A Ritual And The Frustrated Bump

Sigils cracked and shattered as the rebounding leader’s attack overloaded essence containment patterns. Cascading failures rippled through the entire ritual and, this time, the interference that struck the whole area directly targeted the spirit-sensing arrays that formed the core of the research apparatus. Master Jevri and Wohjat both watched helplessly as delicate instruments flickered and died.

"No! The data! We’re losing everything!"

His cried words were like music to the Voidling leader as it unleashed another, stronger pulse of spiritual energy meant to gain control of the battlefield. Lesser entities surged in greater mass toward the weakest points. Identified much quicker than the Intermediates were capable of.

The defensive formations as a whole strained as cultivators fought to hold them back. Like watching children cutting at a surging tide of black water... a tide that slung arms too long with barbed tips that ripped through most things too easily. In the midst of this apparent disaster there was one cultivator who remained almost satisfied.

Her mint eyes had never left Qatrand as a second large eldritch creature tried its tactics on her. Finding itself fighting a warrior that seemed to know its movements like it had done this before... yet the Hivemind had no knowledge of the anomalous cultivator. with the annoying Physique, ever having fought anything but its foot soldiers.

The Yecine exploded into motion off of the ruined essence control point. Her form charged directly at the leader as the nearby spurting and failing Gravity was bent closer toward her will. Six limbs capable of shredding stone flailed in her direction only to slam downwards into the earth prematurely.

Qat weaved between the unwieldy attacks with grace. A normal cultivator might be overwhelmed up close by those white fire-orbs for eyes that seemed to be trying to burn her soul from within. Or more simply by the blaring spiritual oppression... or even by the alien nature of the enemy.

’All of these... things my mint-eyed wife does much better!’

Her blade took two tentacles apart as the creature sacrificed them to retreat. From the unwieldy and unstable essence that was hard for the Void to guard against. While their forms looked highly chaotic, from a human perspective, they were very much creatures of ’order’.

Nothingness was a singular concept in the first place... and their bodies were built on very specific principles and thoughts. That was why elementalists that were adept at inflicting lots of ’change’ for Voidlings to adapt to were always in high demand, in the past.

A favoritism that had fallen off in favor of more physical pursuits on the Continent. The reincarnator also thought that the lack of higher realm cultivators interacting with these Enchanters and Primalists made them only see the value in longevity from physical energy cultivation... and underestimate the benefits of the other two because of how ’conceptual’ they were.

"The central array is collapsing! Everyone clear the area!"

Researchers and support personnel scrambled to evacuate as the final containment fields began to fail catastrophically. No longer properly suppressed despite being activated, the gravity anomaly at the center started to pulse even more erratically.

Waves of distorted space-time rippled outward. It began to drag at the amorphous forms of the enemy and ally alike. The closest of which locked arms and held on to what they could.

The Steelbound Tempest Brotherhood valiantly tried to maintain a perimeter, but the combined stress of the leader’s presence and the collapsing array made their task nearly impossible. Lessers slipped through gaps in their formation and attempted to pull fighters along with them. Forcing the cultivators to fall back to secondary positions outside of the trap area.

Through it all, Elua er Goltbred stood ’calmly’ at her control node. Seemingly oblivious to the danger as other researchers crawled and fled from the forces around them. Pressing on sigils and applying untraceable amounts of essence at opportune times to further orchestrate her plan.

With her husband-wife in the center of the collapsing array, there were no thoughts of saving herself.

The leader suddenly paused while its little fighters moved to grapple with the heavy blade wielder. Its attention had been drawn to something else. Its many eyes swiveled toward a pillar next to the heiress, sensing something that triggered its survival instincts.

With surprising speed, it lunged toward what looked like the brunette herself - but the reborn cultivator didn’t bother to pretend to flinch. Only when it was mere feet away did she look up at its path with a smirk. Mint eyes meeting the single firepoint locked onto her without fear.

’You should have kept one of those on the one you were fighting.’

Qatrand er Yecine had seen her wife in what looked like apparent danger from an enemy she had not kept in check. Whether it was something she could manage or not, whether the cute girl was stronger than the swordswoman or not, failed to matter. A net of crisscrossing spiritual tendrils wrapped around the Voidling leader as quick as lightning.

Gravity essence from the ritual zone they streaked through intensified the local pull on the leader class by five, slamming it into the ground mid-leap. The earth cracked beneath the impact, fracturing along the very lines that Elua had prepared before the trap was sprung. Both to make it more impressive looking... and to completely destroy the silly little experiment they had going at this site.

The core sigils of the array groaned with a sound like reality tearing. Like a Voidling’s screech, the entire alien ritual failed catastrophically. A blinding flash of light erupted from the center of the anomaly as years of accumulated essence discharged at once.

A singularity at the center formed rapidly and picked up the two Intermediate-class that had moved closer. The call to assist in the fight against Qat was expected, just as most of the event had been. Copper canisters filled with concentrated oxygen were ’picked up’ and tumbled nearby the eldritch humanoids.

When they passed through the alternating magnetic field being generated by the phenomena, the gas inside ionized and sparked into plasma. A scheming cultivator’s little situational bombs turned into hot green lances of high energy that melted the cores of the two enemies before little, hidden adjustments with her Element slung them towards the other critical components.

When the light faded and the essence dispersed into the upper atmosphere like a groundborne pulsar blast... the area lay in ruins. The elaborate foreign sigil array lay shattered, its essence pathways broken beyond repair to those who did not understand a tenth of it in the first place. Only a key few sigils remained.

The singularity itself had collapsed without the controls and energy to maintain itself. With those certain sigils directing things to its conclusion.

’Primitive Gravity sigils scripted by a silly cultivator more savant than sigilist. Now, its wild fluctuations finally stabilized through hopeful destruction rather than hopeful containment. Rather poetic, if I do say so~’

Cultivators and researchers emerged cautiously from the shelter they’d taken behind trees, rocks, or anything they could grab hold of. Including piles of each other. They stared in awe at how the area they’d been in for weeks had been turned to a warzone of legends.

The Voidling leader lay motionless at the center of the devastation, its core pierced by a large heavy blade. But the Yecine responsible had left that tool behind... so very unlike their kind. Where a raven-haired, dark clothed cultivator ’should’ be, cleaning their weapon and looking stern... was no one.

Squeezing a small brunette hanging off the ground to her chest as they took slow, awkward steps back to her gifted blade was instead a blonde-haired youth. Tall and muscular, with a look that could either be relief or anger depending on the angle witnessed. Because it fell somewhere in between.

"Are you alright, my love?"

Qatrand nodded while pulling her blade free from the dissolving form of the greater Voidling as one hand remained clutching the other girl. The reincarnated illusionist who wanted to hold back on... but felt kind of unsure.

"I am."

"Because you don’t feel like you are."

"Because I’m not."

The spiritualist could tell that much, with those Primalist tendrils of her husband-wife staying very much far away from their physical forms. A lot of ’frustration’ roiled from the fragment in Elua’s chest. Her facade quickly peeled back as her monotone took the stage.

"Did I go too far?"

"No."

"...Not far enough?"

Slowly and gently, the heiress was sat to the ground. The taller girl kneeled as pigeon blues squinted. As her face pressed close, it moved rapidly back and bumped her forehead into the other girl with some force.

"Ow."

A pair of lips kissed the already reddening spot before a calloused thumb rubbed over it.

"Why’d you pull your energy away before I did that?"

"Because I thought you’d be less upset this way."

Qat sighed loudly as her free hand’s fingers moved to tuck strands of brunette hair behind her wife’s ear. The gesture was gentle, despite the storm of emotions churning inside her. Even as her other hand clutched very tightly on the hilt of her blade.

"Not upset at you, exactly. Never at you entirely. You don’t have to worry, mint-drop. If I were... I would tell you."

The slightly throbbing spot on the reincarnator’s skull made Elua worry how that ’telling’ might be delivered!

New novel 𝓬hapters are published on (f)re𝒆web(n)ovel.com