The Strongest Student of the Weakest Academy-Chapter 453: The Beginning Of The End [CXV]

’And now increase the intensity of the technique a little...’

『 ✯ Authority of Karma ✯ 』

SPLURT...

SPLURT.

SPLURT.

SPLURT.

SPLURT.

SPLURT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The Authority of Karma detonated through every open wound simultaneously, and it did not simply widen them.

It multiplied them.

Every cut, every fracture, every hairline crack in every divine body within range became a hundred cuts... and then slowly multiplied into more.

The Bleed ability, fed by the full strength of Authority Karma rather than its usual application, didn’t give the gods time to register what was happening to them.

One moment, they were charging, and the next one, they simply came apart.

Gold-blooded chunks of what had been gods rained downward in a wide radius, pattering against the frozen ground below with a sound that was almost mundane against the scale of the carnage.

Limbs.

Wings, still twitching.

Pieces of granite skin from the earth gods, cracked open and emptied.

A fire god’s torso, his flames guttered completely, hitting the ground and rolling to a stop three meters away from the rest of him.

The gravity gods at the top of the formation lasted a half-second longer than the others.

Then they came apart, too.

"GHAAAAH! WHAT IS...!!!!"

"WHAT IS HAPPENING TO MY—"

The scream cut off mid-sentence.

SPLURT.

The air smelled of gold and iron, the specific scent of divine essence being forcibly returned to nothing.

The frozen battlefield below was no longer white.

It was painted in broad, ugly strokes of gold and dark red, chunks of former gods scattered across it in every direction like something had simply decided they were done existing.

More than two-hundred gods...

Gone in under two seconds.

Aestrea lowered his hand slowly.

His fingers were trembling slightly, as the full Karma authority costs something every time. He filed the trembling away and straightened his grip on both blades.

’...The ones who were further back survived it. The authority thins at range.’

’Still roughly a hundred and seventy left.’

He looked up.

The surviving gods had stopped moving.

For exactly three seconds, the entire remaining army simply stared at what had just happened to their companions.

"...He just..."

"They’re... they turned into pieces!""

"WHAT DID HE DO! WHAT WAS THAT?!""

"HE DIDN’T EVEN MOVE!" a storm god screamed, his voice cracking completely. "HE JUST SNAPPED HIS FINGERS AND THEY JUST... THEY JUST—"

"—STOP LOOKING AT THEM!" a voice from the upper formation bellowed.

A fire god, ranking officer by the gold trim on his armor, his voice ragged but forcing itself into authority.

"STOP LOOKING AND MOVE!!! IF YOU STOP MOVING, HE DOES IT AGAIN!!! SO, JUST GO, AND FUCKING GO ALREADY!!!"

The paralysis broke.

FWOOOOOOSH!!!

Pure screaming mass, a hundred and seventy gods descending from every angle simultaneously with the specific, mindless fury of people who had just watched their companions turned into scattered pieces.

’...They got taken over by the madness, huh?’ His eyes narrowed slighly.

This was simply fucking great for him.

A fire god arrived first, both fists wrapped in columns of divine flame twenty feet long, swinging a horizontal arc at Aestrea’s midsection with enough force to vaporize stone.

FWOOOOOOM!

Aestrea ducked under it.

The heat scraped across the top of his skull hard enough to singe the ends of his hair.

He drove upward immediately, Midnight finding the inside of the fire god’s guard in the same motion, the blade dragging across his ribs.

SHING!

"Gughk!!!"

The Heavenly Swallowing Sword followed the same line, pressing against the wound.

The fire god’s flames vanished instantly, like someone had simply removed the concept of combustion from his body.

He looked down at his own hands, at the place where divine fire had lived for however many millennia, and his face went through something that no longer had anything to do with battle.

"...My fire," he whispered.

"Y-you... you took my f-fire..."

KOOM!

Aestrea’s knee drove up into the god’s stomach, folding him forward, and then the pommel of Midnight came down across the back of his skull.

KRAK!

"AGHHJK!"

He hit the ground and stayed there.

Two wind gods materialized on either side of Aestrea before the fire god had finished falling, their bodies half-dissolved into compressed current, twin vortexes of razor wind converging on him from left and right simultaneously.

’They’re timing it so I can’t dodge both. The left one is slightly faster. If I move right, the left one clips me. If I move left, I run into both.’

He went straight up, causing both vortexes to collide where he’d been standing.

KRRROOOOOM!!!

The resulting shockwave of two divine wind authorities meeting head-on cratered the frozen ground in a ten-meter radius, sending gold-stained ice fragments spraying outward in every direction.

"WHERE DID HE GO?!"

"ABOVE! HE’S ABOVE!"

Mid-air, two earth gods converged on him from opposing angles, their granite bodies trailing cracked stone in their wake, both of them driving forward with shoulder strikes designed to simply crush him between them.

’...That’s a simple yet effective move. If both connect simultaneously, I don’t walk away from that cleanly.’

He read the trajectories and calculated the gap between them.

It was barely half a meter wide, so he folded himself through it anyway.

BOOOOOM!

The two earth gods connected with each other instead.

The sound of two divine-ranked granite bodies colliding at full charge was not subtle. Cracks spider-webbed across both of their forms simultaneously, gold bleeding through the fractures.

"GHAAAAH"

"YOU IDIOT! WATCH WHERE YOU’RE GOING!""

"IT’S NOT MY FAULT HE... WHERE IS HE!?" WHERE DID HE GO!?!!?""

"RIGHT THERE! HE’S RIGHT THERE!"

Aestrea was already somewhere else.

CRACCKLEEE!

A storm god swung a black-thunderhead-wrapped fist directly at his face from the right, the divine lightning inside it jumping and crackling with enough voltage to atomize flesh.

’He telegraphed the shoulder rotation two feet early... that’s a mistake!’

Aestrea slipped inside the arc.

The fist went past his ear.

He was already inside the god’s guard, too close for any of his ranged authority to matter, and he drove the Heavenly Swallowing Sword forward in a short, efficient thrust that connected with the god’s sternum.

Fwip!

The storm authority died.

The thunderhead around his fist evaporated.

The god looked down at his own chest with the hollow, devastated expression that Aestrea had now seen on a dozen different faces today.

"...You took it," the storm god said quietly.

"My storm. You just... took it."

"Cool," Aestrea shrugged flatly.

Then he drove Midnight across the god’s temple.

SPLURT!

"DON’T LET HIM BREATHE!" the ranking fire officer was screaming from somewhere above.

"DON’T GIVE HIM A SINGLE SECOND! KEEP PRESSING! ALL OF YOU!!!"

They listened.

A water god flooded the entire space around Aestrea in pressurized divine water, dense and crushing, rising from every direction at once, trying to fill every pocket of air, remove every lane of movement.

’Again with the water? They’re coordinating it this time... this is a little bit easier to me since they don’t seem to have rare-type gods.’ 𝐟𝗿𝐞𝚎𝚠𝐞𝚋𝕟𝐨𝚟𝐞𝕝.𝕔𝕠𝚖

’Three water gods in a triangular position, huh? They learned from the last time.’

Chill...!

The Authority of Ice pulsed outward from his feet in targeted crystallizing lines, freezing lanes through the water, footholds cracking into existence beneath him.

He moved across them at a dead sprint, heading toward the closest water god before the other two could adjust their pressure angles.

"HE’S COMING STRAIGHT AT ME!"

The water god threw everything he had forward in a single concentrated mass, a wall of divine water compressed to near-solid density.

FWOOOOOM!

It hit Aestrea in the chest and staggered him.

Genuinely staggered him.

He slid backward three meters across his own frozen lane, boots grinding against the ice, before he caught himself.

’...That one landed... my ribs hurt a little.’

The water god blinked. Then, seeing Aestrea still standing, something in his expression cracked around the edges.

"...WHY ARE YOU STILL..." His voice rose into something that was no longer commanding.

"WHY ARE YOU STILL STANDING!?"

Aestrea crossed the remaining distance in two steps.

Fwip!

The Swallowing Sword stripped, and Midnight followed right after.

SPLURT!

"HE’S TOO FAST!"

"THERE ARE TOO MANY OF US!!! HOW IS HE HANDLING ALL OF US!?"

"GRAVITY GODS, LOCK HIM DOWN NOW!!!"

THRUUUUUUUUUUUUUM!

Four gravity gods above him dropped their full combined authority simultaneously, pressing downward in layered stacks.

The weight is multiplied in real time as Aestrea’s next step landed heavier than it should have.

His knees registered the pressure, and his boots left deep impressions in the frozen ground beneath him.

’Four stacking. Roughly twenty times standard divine gravity. Fuck... this is a little bit bad for me, although I can still move.’

"IT’S WORKING!" one of the gravity gods shouted.

"HE’S SLOWING! EVERYONE HIT HIM NOW WHILE HE’S SLOWER!!!"

The remaining gods converged on the slowed target like a tide finding a gap in a wall.

Fire came from the left, a continuous column of divine flame. Wind compressed into a solid battering ram from the right.

Two earth gods rose up from below, the ground splitting apart beneath Aestrea’s feet as granite hands reached upward to close around his ankles.

’Left fire. Right wind. Below earth. Above, more gravity.’

’...Coordinated. They finally coordinated.’

The fire was connected to his left side.

FWOOOOM!

The wind connected with his right simultaneously.

KRRROOM!

The impact was not something he could redirect or slip through.

Both hit cleanly, and the combined force drove him downward, the granite hands below closing around one ankle before he could clear them.

KRAK!!!

He hit the frozen ground on one knee, the gold-stained ice cracking outward from the impact point.

His left side was burning.

His right arm had gone partially numb from the wind strike.

The granite hand around his ankle tightened.

For one moment, he was down.

"HE’S DOWN!!!" The roar that went through the remaining gods was immediate and enormous.

"FINISH HIM NOW!!!"

They screamed toward him from every direction.

A fire god, descending from directly above, both fists raised, a column of divine flame coalescing between his hands into a single condensed point aimed directly at the top of Aestrea’s skull.

"DIEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!"

Aestrea looked up at him from one knee.

His white eye burned.

His free hand found the frozen ground.

The Authority of Ice detonated directly upward from his palm in a single, focused spike rather than a radius, a column of absolute-zero crystalline force that erupted skyward at a speed that didn’t belong to ice.

KRRRSSSSSSHHHH!

It caught the descending fire god directly through his guard and kept going, passing cleanly through him and continuing upward for sixty meters before dispersing.

SPLURT!

The fire god came down in pieces.

The gold that had been his divine blood rained across the battlefield in a wide arc, pattering against the frozen ground, against the wings of nearby gods, against the visors of the ones still descending.

Everyone who had been screaming finish him went quiet.

Aestrea pulled his ankle free of the granite hand with one sharp motion, the ice he’d simultaneously pushed through the earth god’s arm doing its work from the inside, and stood back up.

Slowly.

His left side was still burning. His right arm was coming back, and his knee had a new opinion about weight-bearing that he chose to ignore.

He straightened completely and then rolled his shoulder.

Then, he finally looked at what was left of them as the silver marks across his body slowly dissipated away, causing his expression to change slightly.

"...He just," a wind god said from somewhere in the upper formation.

His voice had lost everything authoritative about it.

"He just stood back up."

"He took all of that," another said.

"All of it and he just..."

"STOP TALKING," the ranking officer snarled.

"STOP TALKING AND KILL HIM ALREADY!"

At those words, Aestrea raised both of his swords.

’About ninety left,’ he noted internally.

’...I’m reaching my limits here. And the Moon Mark is now gone...’

He bit his lower lip tightly, almost to the point of drawing blood.

’...Olivia, you’d better arrive before I really use my race’s power.’

His shadow suddenly extended by hundreds of meters, as he finally decided to use one of his trump cards.

His own killing intent.