Beyond the Bloodline

Chapter 430: Soulless Instincts

The strikes were fast.

Raw cosmic energy, curled and sharpened into ribbon-like nails designed to pierce defensive barriers.

But these attacks had to travel through the fabric of space, from Point A to Point B.

For that reason, they couldn’t reach Jamie.

He easily teleported out of range, appearing where Angela was and reaching out to grab her astral body with a hand coated in cosmic energy. However, noticing this, Angela simply dispersed her astral body, then warped her soul to a different location before completely concealing it from reality itself.

Jamie’s eyes flashed with light as his Imperial Privileges activated instantly, and a second later, he turned in the direction Angela had gone. Still, he couldn’t act as another ribbon-like nail of cosmic energy shot toward his head from behind.

Turning around, he raised a hand to catch it, and as he crushed it in his fingers, a dozen spears appeared around him and fired toward him again.

’This again? I knew its arsenal would be limited without her soul, but I’ve already blocked this bef—!’

Jamie’s thoughts were cut short as he teleported instantly, only to see half of the ribbon spears he’d just avoided warp alongside him, his expression contorting at the sight.

’As I thought! The damn thing is adapting!’

He stopped teleporting and instead flew through space, regenerating his barrier even as the ribbon spears cracked and shattered it.

Angela’s body, without her soul, was operating purely on ’instinct’, and Jamie knew better than anyone that Angela had an ’instinct’ that had long since gone past the point of being reasonable.

The ribbon spears tore through the space Jamie had occupied mere seconds earlier, piercing through the static planets and stars scattered across the alternate space.

As he moved, the ribbon spears tore through the celestial bodies, obliterating them in massive eruptions of cosmic energy, and the energy released from their destruction was absorbed by the spears themselves, increasing their speed as they accelerated to match Jamie’s movement.

They flashed around him while he continued flying without teleporting, expanding his spatial perception in an attempt to locate where Angela’s body was hidden within the space.

He knew the position of Angela’s soul, but not the body that was attacking him, and the thought that the real Angela might be interfering with his senses using her cosmic magic to prevent him from finding it crossed his mind, prompting him to turn toward her direction.

Just as he did, a heavy thumping sounded behind him, and he snapped his head back in time to see Angela’s soulless body slam its hands flat against the spherical surface of his barrier, several cosmic spell circles with dozens of rings and runes appearing instantly in the micrometre gap between her palms and the barrier itself.

’Analysis magic?!’

Before Jamie could act to stop Angela’s body, it physically pushed the barrier away, knocking both it and him backwards, and a spluttering sound followed as a ribbon spear erupted from Jamie’s heart.

"!"

Jamie’s eyes widened in shock at the sudden appearance of the spear that bypassed his barrier, and in the seconds it took for his shock to register, six more spears pierced through his body—two in his head, two in his hands, and two in his legs—all ignoring his barrier.

His body immediately went limp, floating through space, blood drifting alongside it, followed by the sound of a calm and emotionless voice.

His body instantly went limp and floated through space, blood drifting alongside it, followed by the sound of a calm and emotionless voice.

"Target elimina—!"

**SWOOOSH!

The voice was cut off as Jamie’s limp body suddenly vanished.

Angela’s body disappeared too, just a split second before a blade coated in dark blue energy tore through the space it had occupied.

Wielding the sword was a hand with steam rising from it as the hole borne in it closed, and as the rest of Jamie’s injuries regenerated, he calmly pulled back the sword, raising his brows.

"Oh, you dodged that one," he said.

As Angela’s body reappeared several metres away, hands raised with multiple spell circles flashing, he chuckled and added,

"But this sword of mine cuts through dimensions, you know?"

The sound of his words hadn’t even finished travelling when all the spell circles Angela’s body had constructed split in two, and the slash she had physically avoided tore a diagonal gash across her torso, blood spilling out.

Still, just like the way the wounds her black ribbon spears had inflicted on Jamie healed, the damage from the slash mended in seconds.

Jamie wasn’t fazed by this. He simply turned toward the direction of Angela’s soul and said,

"Cut the bullshit, Angela. Or you’re not going to like what happens to your body."

Of course, the only response was Angela’s body attacking him again, so he casually teleported to dodge the ribbon spears, then swung his blade to split the ones that followed him through space in two.

Without her soul within it, Angela’s body could only wield her cosmic energy reserves and a few spells and techniques she’d inscribed into it.

Its arsenal was limited, but it was still the physical body of an Ultimate Realm Existence.

Even that limited arsenal was enough to pose a serious threat to Jamie because of the sheer damage each attack could deal.

He may be unkillable, but he was certainly not undefeatable.

Jamie blitzed through static galaxies at FTL speeds, not hesitating for a single moment to phase through planets and galaxies as the ribbon spears Angela’s body fired chased him.

Just as he emerged from the end of one elliptical galaxy, Angela’s body appeared before him, hands raised with six flashing spell circles hovering around her.

Immediately, mandalas formed, each sending at least 50 ribbon spears spinning through space like discuses as they closed in on Jamie, who teleported to avoid the first two, crushed his fist to collapse space and destroy the next three, then swung the galaxy sword once to shatter the last into pieces.

As he did that, a strange wave of cosmic energy washed over the surroundings, phasing through both his barrier and his body.

Immediately, Jamie’s heart stopped beating, his eyes going blank for a split second before he regained clarity and unleashed a burst of cosmic energy that forced the black wave out of his body.

’Did she just...warp reality?’

Jamie could warp reality himself through his Imperial Privileges and his Dictum’s Sub-Edict, but that was only possible because he had a ’will’.

’Warping’ of any kind relied on a force of will, something Angela’s soulless body shouldn’t have, yet it had just manipulated the fundamental forces of reality to temporarily stop Jamie’s heart with the intent to kill him.

In the seconds he was immobilised, several dozen ribbon spears shot toward him from all directions, bypassing his multi-layered barrier, but Jamie teleported before they could reach him.

Instead of rushing through space again, he appeared behind Angela’s body, left hand extended as his Azure Flame Authority activated, a spiral of blue fire erupting from his palm and engulfing half the alternate space in flames.

Angela’s body escaped the blaze faster than it could spread, but Jamie didn’t mind, since mixed in with the fire was his cosmic spatial energy, which thoroughly scrambled and distorted the fabric of space-time across dimensions, blocking any form of detection.

And just as he expected, when Angela’s body dove into the blaze with several cosmic magic spell circles flashing around it, it couldn’t fire a single one because it couldn’t locate Jamie anywhere.

That situation only lasted for a second, not because it managed to overcome the detection scrambling and find Jamie, but because it suddenly detected Jamie everywhere.

Literally everywhere.

Erupting from the lingering blue embers of Jamie’s flames were thousands of blood clones he’d created, every one of them carrying the same energy signature and presence, making them impossible to distinguish from one another.

Angela’s body unleashed all its magic, but all the Jamies merely waved their hands, carving out the space the projectiles occupied and erasing them from reality, before swinging their swords downward.

|Dimensional Severance: Thousandfold.|

The entire alternate space drained into monochrome as its spatial fabric was torn apart like paper against scissors, with the laws of time collapsing under the sheer scale of destruction.

Angela’s body was cut again and again, the blade ignoring her defences as it struck across every spatial dimension her body occupied.

This was an attack it could’ve avoided completely, and it chose not to, for a reason that became clear with its next move.

Despite the dimensional severing slashes that split even its eyes apart, the body turned its head toward a specific direction, and as steam rose from its healing wounds, it vanished and reappeared directly in front of one of the thousand Jamies, the one holding the real Galaxy Sword.