Strongest Nova: Path of Vengeance

Chapter 310: Stella

The very first power Stella received was something she gained on the day she woke up on the island. Her powers had evolved to a point where she could make inorganic matter as well, albeit at a minute amount.

She could create a whole chuck of rock or a large knife, but the amount of energy she would have to use up for them was way too absurd for her to ever do it unless absolutely necessary. She could, however, create some salt, and some minerals directly with the organic matter without spending too much energy, all of which proved handy when it came to making foods.

Her powers continued to fester for the next few days until she gained another power just earlier this morning, where she gained the power to convert matter itself.

Then, after she was sent into the video game, she did well in the dancing game and extremely well in the racing one. She did however do poorly in the fighting one, causing her to lose her first ability to create things for several days.

But the other two changes she had received were good enough that she had overall received a positive change.

The lower of the two rewards was her ability to now create objects at a distance. She no longer had to create things right in her hands. It could be further away from her.

And the better of the two rewards was something completely incredible.

She hadn’t had the time to think much about her new powers and lack of one when they had been attacked. Immediately, the roots strangled her, threatening to crush her.

Stella had been thinking of how she was going to use her new powers for a while and finally, she had the chance to do so. She turned the outer skin around her body into steel, making her impossible to crush any further.

She survived it, but the roots were still wrapped around her and some of them were around her mouth and nose, making it impossible for her to breathe. Slowly, she could feel carbon dioxide building up in her bloodstream and filling up her lungs.

The feeling of suffocation was too much for her to handle. So, she did the only thing she could at the moment.

She turned the carbon dioxide inside of her body into oxygen. She overdid it at first, realized the issue herself, and quickly fixed it. As a nurse, she knew how much she much oxygen one’s lungs needed before they suffered oxygen poisoning.

With her full lungs now constantly filled with oxygen every time she needed to breathe and her entire body covered in a layer of steel, she was no longer in threat of dying.

However, that still got her nowhere. She was still stuck in the root, unable to do anything at all. She could only listen to the people talk outside, helplessly.

She thought of a lot of things she could do. She could create explosives, acids, or even just knockout gas, but none of them would help her get out of these roots. She needed to do something else entirely. As for what that was, she could not think at the moment.

Just then, she felt the roots around her move. She thought she was being constricted harder but instead, the roots loosened, moving away from her.

She didn’t understand what was happening at first, but then she heard the commotion and turned to see that it was the young man who had done something.

Not all roots had withdrawn from her, so she remained hidden within them, looking at what was happening. She saw the dark-skinned man arrive with his wolves. She remembered those wolves.

It had been the one that had attacked her and the others by the river. She saw the three make plans to kill the young man that dangled from the roots.

She could see his situation clearly now. All of his body was free, except for his dead arm which he could do nothing about. She thought of changing the arm into something else that easily slipped through the roots, but even if she did that, he would probably be captured in the roots once again.

No, she needed to give him something. Something else, something powerful.

And with her powers where she could not create ordinary things, she could only create that which could not exist. And to create those, she had to give up things that she found valuable.

That was the main reward she had received from the game. The power to create things that weren’t real. To make fantastical things that normally broke physics.

And that was exactly what she needed to make this time.

’He needs a weapon,’ she thought and remembered their small talk from earlier when the young man told her about the weapon he used.

’A sword,’ she thought. ’A heavy one.’

Heavy swords were real and existed. She could not make that. At the moment she could only make things that could not exist.

’A heavy sword... that is light,’ she thought. She reached out her hand, her metallic skin glistening lustrously in the afternoon light. She concentrated all of what she had into creating this one sword.

A sword that was both heavy and light. A sword that was impossible to destroy. Swords that could cut through things were real, so she needed to create swords so that one could decide when it cut things and when it didn’t.

Swords were of one size, so she had to create a sword that changed sizes.

Swords were almost always made of materials that existed on the planet. She made the sword with matter that could not be found anywhere. Even she did not know what it would be made of.

With all the requirements in her mind, she willed the sword into existence. Bright light shined before the young man as it took on the shape of a sword.

As it formed, her power demanded the price for its usage. The energy she used up was just a requirement to activate the power. The real price was something else.

The price had to be something non-physical too. Like her emotions, her talent, her memories, or her experience in things. Stella decided that the best one she could go for was the years of her life and everything that came with it.

She did not give up the years of her remaining life, but rather she gave up the years she had already lived. In a way, she turned back time on herself, becoming younger by the second.

Her power accepted her price and flowed through her as the sword in the distance became more and more solid as time went on. What Stella gave up for the sword was taken out of her.

And because this was the first time Stella ever used her powers, she had made a small mistake. She had underestimated how much of herself she was going to have to give up for this one sword.

She had only intended to lose a few years, but...

’Oh...’ she thought as she began losing the years of her life and all the memories along with it. ’I messed up.’