Strongest Nova: Path of Vengeance

Chapter 338: Underground Battle

Stella was surprised when the power went out. Darkness enveloped them for a few moments before dull white light came back on.

"What happened?" she couldn’t help but ask.

Mona, one of The 5, stood next to her with her bright blue hair and long, nearly unnatural, eyelashes. Her forearms were covered in crystalline quartz, only her palms not covered by them. She looked around, similarly confused as well.

"The power is gone," Mona said. "They didn’t tell us what was happening. I think the shields are down too. We’ll have to stop our training here for today."

Stella nodded. They had no choice.

Suddenly, small flickers of light flashed around them in the empty room as people began appearing one after another. The sudden teleportation confused them at first and then worried them.

"Ohoho!" an older man said in surprise. "What do we have here? Two ladies, all by themselves."

Mona frowned, looking at the man’s clothing. That was not AAA’s uniform at all. Had someone else come in?

"Who are you?" Stella asked curiously. She looked around at the others too, not sure why they had suddenly come into the room. She was quite new to the AAA, so she didn’t immediately think anything more than that the situation was a little weird.

"You shall know that infiltrating the AAA will cost you dearly," Mona said, quickly realizing the situation. "Make yourself known or you shall be apprehended immediately.

A bunch of laughter surrounded them all at once, some from men and some from women. They turned around, slowly realizing that there were over 50 people in the room already. Such a large number of people was not something something she had expected to fight.

"Enough talk!" a female voice shouted from far in the back toward the wall. "Kill them so we can move on."

Everyone immediately pulled out guns and started shooting.

Mona quickly ran toward Stella and clapped. Immediately, large spikes of quartz crystals jutted out from the ground, all around them, protecting them from the attack.

"We are being invaded. We need to let the others know," Mona said quickly, ignoring the gunshots outside of the crystals that were slowly breaking off chunks of them at a time.

They got closer and closer to breaking through from all around, at which point Stella quickly turned them all into a thick steel wall. Those walls could no longer be destroyed by the bullets.

"I can’t communicate with anyone," Mona said. "They must’ve jammed our communications somehow."

"What do we do?" Stella asked.

"Only thing we can do," Mona said. "We kill them."

She quickly heard someone trying to climb up the steel spikes that were covering them and clapped to create a spike pillar beneath her that sent her upward.

As soon as she was above, she clapped again, making the steel spikes grow crystal spikes sideways that immediately punched through the shield, not just destroying it but also the people behind it.

The speed at which she could create the spikes was fast enough for her to overwhelm any human-sized shield with its speed and strength.

Someone shot at her at the same time, and Mona clapped to create a crystal armor over herself. The bullet struck her in the chest and she fell backward.

Stella caught her before she landed hard on the ground.

"Are you okay?" she asked.

"Yes, but my rib might not be," she said slowly. "I killed a few, but there are still many."

Stella placed her palm on Mona’s chest and healed her. It was less healing and more just remaking her body to what she understood it to be.

To anyone who didn’t understand her power to create and transform, it was no different from healing.

"Cover up everything including the ceiling," Stella told Mona. "I will prepare to kill them all at once."

Stella turned her skin into an adamantine-tungsten alloy that she knew to be the strongest metal currently available and then turned the pillar next to her into the air. She then created another hole in the wall next to her and poked her hands out of it.

People shot at her, but not a single hit that landed on her arm did more than nudge her around. There was no pain.

Killing was not something she thought she could do just yet, but the situation demanded her to do something.

Stella had learned a lot of things after coming to AAA, most taught to her by Mona and Amy. She didn’t have many lessons from Amy, but what she had had been incredible.

She had taught her just how many different ways she could use her powers, almost as though she had the same powers herself.

This was not something she had taught at all. It was something she had thought of herself.

Stella felt someone grab onto her hand, but at the very next moment, they let go, screaming. Stella pulled her hands back next, believing it was all done.

"Close this gap!" Stella said immediately and Mona clapped, closing it all at once. Stella then turned everything into the same adamantine-tungsten alloy to defend herself from the attacks outside.

The sound was distant, but they began hearing screams.

"What... what happened?" Mona asked, confused. She hadn’t seen anything at all.

"Poison," Stella said. "I turned the air into deadly poison."

Mona gasped, clasping her mouth and nose.

"No need," Stella said. "The air here is clean and I am constantly cleaning it in case there is a leak."

Mona remained wide-eyed, thinking about the horrifying situation outside. The screams lasted for a while before they all died.

"Should we... go out?" Mona asked with a whimper.

"I hope you would," a voice said from the outside as two hands dug into their cover, tearing it apart effortlessly.

Stella could not believe such a thing was even possible.

A beautiful woman in her late 20s with brown hair and green eyes looked in, seemingly unbothered by the poison. She smiled.

"Congratulations," she said. "You killed everyone. Now, would you like to kill yourself too, or should I do the honors?"