Universe's End

Chapter 239: Shield Versus Shield

“You know,” Zoey muttered as she shot forward, blackened fist rebounding off the oversized bone crest of the Iaslisk she’d suddenly found herself battling. “I like the cut of your gib.”

The Iaslisk didn’t seem as enthusiastic to have met a fellow shield enthusiast, roaring out and slamming two of its six legs down upon the earth as bone spikes shot from the ground and attempted to skewer her.

“Rather rude,” Zoey muttered as she slammed her fist into the ground, the shockwave blowing apart the small forest of bone spikes. “And here I thought we would have a bonding moment.”

Her rather clever comment apparently wasn’t appreciated as the Iaslisk whipped around, its heavily armored tail thwacking into her with force that could shatter mountains, launching her with so much force she left a trail of destruction three-quarters of a mile long from where she smashed through trees, boulders, and even one unfortunate monster.

“Alright, ow,” Zoey groaned as she pulled herself out of the wreckage of her final crash site. “And how do I always end up covered in monster sludge of some sort?”

As much as Zoey made it sound like she was annoyed, a part of her was beginning to feel fired up. The last several years had been quite a change of pace as she’d finally returned to her people.

And oh boy, had things changed there, but that was a topic for when she wasn’t in the middle of battling the mutated wave boss of the final hundredth siege wave.

What mattered was that after quite a few years of essentially lazing about, her blood was beginning to feel fired up once more.

Hah, I guess we really did have some things in common.

In fairness, her love for a good fight developed far more recently than her younger sister’s willingness to fight just about anything and everything, from girls at school she didn’t like, to a literal bear after one chance encounter.

An eight-year-old girl ready to throw down with a bear. Wasn’t that a sight?

Putting the thought aside, Zoey took a moment to grab her shoulder, rolling the joint in its socket. The entire time, she felt the tremor in the ground growing stronger by the second as the Iasilisk predictably came charging after her, well aware she hadn’t died after one solid hit.

“Can’t let you have all the fun,” Zoey said as she shot forward, colliding with the six-legged, feathered, triceratops-lizard-thing.

Unsurprisingly to anyone who knew the least about physics, Zoey was the one sent flying. Considering that, even soaking wet, she wasn’t even a hundred pounds –ignoring the weight of her armor– and she’d collided with a monster that must have weighed at least ten or fifteen tons, the size of two or threeelephants and far more heavily armored, it was no surprise she’d come up short on that mathematical equation.

“Misjudged that one,” Zoey rubbed her back as she stood back up after being launched like a rocket once more, taking a sumo-like stance as she did. “Again!”

When the Iasilisk came stampeding toward her for the second time, Zoey tweaked her timing just a tad; instead of crashing directly against its crest, she dipped just below before springing upward, striking into the Iasilisk with enough force to launch it upward fifteen feet before it slammed flat on its back.

“Durability, baby, who needs strength?” Zoey snorted. Her amusement lasted only a moment before she frowned as the Iasilisk bent its legs backward, its joints apparently capable of bending either way, flipping back upright.

Little freaky looking, won’t lie.

After having been knocked flat on its back, the Iasilisk apparently had grown tired of its game, as the rainbow-colored feathers adorning its body all shot outward before chasing after Zoey.

Feeling confident, Zoey crossed her arms, ready to take the attack.

That was until the same feathers suddenly calcified into bone spears.

Oh, now that’s just cheating.

Swapping back into purely defensive attributes, the bone feathers struck her, managing to pin into her armor like a rather odd-looking pincushion but otherwise leaving her unharmed.

Just in time for an entire bone pillar to erupt from beneath her and launch her skyward.

“Smarter than ya’ look,” Zoey said midair, watching as the feathers regrew instantly.

If it were Rory, about now he’d be concocting some plan for dealing with the heavily armored monster, figuring out the best form of attack to break it down.

Zoey, in contrast, had only one real, solid plan.

I’mma punch it… A lot.

Kicking off from a conjured air shield, Zoey came flying downward, her fist blackened, as she struck the bony crest of the Iasilisk. Unannounced, the Seismic Impact carried less ‘weight’ to it, which the Iasilisk further reduced by turning its head slightly.

Preparing for a second strike, Zoey was forced to dodge out of the way as the feathers exploded out from its body once again, chasing after her before turning into bone feathers that promised real danger.

See, unlike many times she’d fought strong opponents, Zoey was starting from a disadvantaged position, though the Iaslisk wouldn’t have known.

The reason for this was actually rather simple: she’d already been forced to burn up her damage nullification in the process of teleporting from where her people lived back to the Reverse Mountains.

Well, I was warned it wasn’t quite ready.

With her damage nullification skill, the option for an all-out reckless assault was always on the table, but not in this case.

The Iasilisk was, in truth, probably the strongest monster she’d fought solo since tier eight, aside from maybe the zombie Khan, but that had been a rather unique set of circumstances to begin with. As a level eighty-one alpha variant, trying to beat down the Iasilisk was like trying to face down a level eighty-four or eighty-five normal monster, almost a full two-rung punch up.

Which wasn’t easy, as much as the accomplishments of people like herself or Rory often made it seem. But that also didn’t mean it was anywhere close to impossible.

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It just meant she had to put her back into it.

Now, what’s the best way to punch it REALLY hard?

Seismic Impact was her bread and butter, but the Iasilisk was tough; that much she could tell after a single Seismic Impact only rattled it. She could keep aiming for a strike at the exact same spot, and, given time, she was confident it would probably prove a successful plan.

But.

But battles like these were perfect opportunities to evolve. Why take the easy solution?

Putting as much thought as she could afford into hashing out the predicament, Zoey continued crashing and colliding against the Iasilisk in the meantime.

During that time, at one point, when the feathers were once more expunged from its body, Zoey expected the usual feather-to-bone attack. What she hadn’t expected was for the feathers to float upward, before tethering to one another like some glowing web that captured the sunlight as it shone down upon them.

They continued to collect sunlight, but before she could attempt to figure out what exactly the purpose was, the Iasilisk charged her, each heavy footfall driving a thicket of bone spears toward her.

Dodging or otherwise simply punching through the bones, Zoey suddenly found herself tripped up as several inconspicuous bones had interlocked around her ankle.

Realizing she wasn’t going to be fast enough to avoid the charge, Zoey hefted her shield, only to find the Iasilisk had aborted the attack. Instead, it raised its head skyward before releasing an ear-shattering screech that sounded almost like a bird’s caw.

What the- oh.

The feathers floating overhead had apparently finished doing whatever they were doing.

Which, as it turned out, was charging up a god damn orbital laser.

Firing down upon Zoey, a prismatic laser washed away all color from her world, the brilliant energy searing at her with the strength of, well, an orbital laser.

Nearly thirty seconds passed before the laser faded, as the Iasilisk sniffed once at the air, waiting to see the result.

“Really,” Zoey sighed, revealing her standing in the same place. Her metal body was molten, and her red armor glowed merrily. “A little laser like that has never killed anyone.”

Mostly because no one had ever been directly fired upon by an orbital laser before, but hey, semantics.

Her molten body began to resolidify as Zoey grinned at the monster.

“World Ichor affinity, I can turn my body all goey and magma-y. To borrow a word from Rory, nifty, right? Anyway, it’s going to take a lot more heat than that to put me down.”

Behind her grin, Zoey felt a sense of relief for her tier eight skill selection, where she’d decided upon the skill that had earned her the affinity.

Who knew that when you spend over a century in a volcanic wasteland and then a decent amount of time around a World Ichor elemental, the first of its kind as both an elemental AND just as the first elemental ever, and tadah, you’re eligible for such an affinity.

For the first time, the Iasilisk seemed at least somewhat tired, as if the skill had taken quite a bit out of it.

“Now, I could use that as a sign to beat you through outlasting you,” Zoey said, her own body aching somewhat after being struck enough times. “But where is the fun in that?”

Plus, she was beginning to piece together an idea, one she wanted to test.

That Flair guy had a skill that could take bites straight out of something's resistance to fire… So why can’t I?

Focusing on her fist in the same way she did when activating Seismic Impact, rather than concentrating her durability as a mass of ridiculous density, she inverted the durability in the same fashion as when she inverted her own attributes.

Ding. New skill. Call me a genius.

The Iasilisk had charged her once more, and crashing against it with a flurried storm of strikes, she suddenly changed course as Zoey jumped. Grabbing onto its horns, the Iasilisk suddenly found itself the very reluctant steed of a rather amused Vanguard.

“Now, time to see how this works.”

Pressing her palm against the bone crest of the Iasilisk, Zoey inhaled sharply as an extremely uncomfortable feeling, like something slimy slithering through her insides, filled her.

At the same time, the bone crest seemed to yellow, turning brittle a moment after.

Well, it looks like it works.

Cancelling the new skill, her fist turned dark as she struck with a rather rushed seismic impact straight into the bone crest. Such a hurried seismic impact wouldn’t even have rattled the monster before.

But this time, it punched straight through.

“Hah, it really works,” Zoey grinned with delight. “Even if it feels awful.”

What she had done was surprisingly straightforward. She’d harnessed the conceptual weight of her own durability and inverted it into a form of-

Anti-durability?

-a form of ‘anti-durability’ capable of corroding the natural defenses of another.

Now, the downside was that Zoey could instantly tell she’d decreased her own durability, burning it up to weaponize it.

That’s going to need a bit of rest and recovery.

It was a fun little invention, but Zoey wasn’t sure if she was done with discovery yet.

After all, she still had a healthy –mostly healthy— test subject at her disposal.

In fact, I have another idea.

Rory’s strongest attack, his strongest regular attack, was his ability to harness a point of conceptually infinite mass and collide it with a point of conceptual zero, resulting in the birth of Oblivion energy from the resulting paradox.

So…. What if I do that? Seismic Impact represents density, and this anti-durability could be interpreted as its opposite.

After all, what was the worst that could happen?

Perhaps the Iasilisk sensed something from the look in her eyes, or perhaps it just had better instincts than most, but it suddenly went on the offensive, almost as if it were desperate to put Zoey down.

Cute, but if there was one person who couldn’t be ‘put down’ quickly, it was Zoey.

You know, a chant might be necessary here.

Zoey wasn’t typically a fan of chants, but the act of speaking held significance; words carried power and meaning that reality seemed to respond to.

Or so she recalled from one of many lectures Rory loved to give during their downtime, the man just loved the sound of his own voice.

“Huh, I don’t even have a chant of my own,” Zoey muttered, speaking out loud, the Iasilisk now coming after Zoey with everything it had, the bone spikes unending, and the feathers expunged the moment they regrew, even beams of prismatic energy were fired off.

Well, that’s where a bit of inspired plagiarism comes into play.

“Ring the bells, Falling Petals,”

The Iasilisk opened its mouth, feathers circling as energy began to build.

Oh, a beam attack, how original.

“Cliffs that repel the sea.”

The energy that had built up felt unnatural, drawn from the mutated source forced to blossom within its body.

“Waves which erode mountains eternally.”

Exploding outward, a blast of energy encompassing not just excessive amounts of pneuma but even the vital energies of the Iasilisk shot toward Zoey.

“Perpetual Impermanence and Everlasting Evanescence,”

Her fist glowed, and for a moment, everything around Zoey seemed bleached of all color, existence split into shades of black and white.

“Requiem for the final jamboree!”

Bits and pieces stolen from poems and songs she’d heard over the years, it sounded good to Zoey, and most importantly, they resounded throughout reality, for a moment, her fist a perfect paradox.

The Iasilisk’s ray was only a moment from washing over her, as Zoey charged toward the beam before flipping over it and skating across it, using her fist containing the strength of a paradox like a perfect barrier.

While the Iasilisk had likely been ready for a lot of things, Zoey skating across its beam attack probably wasn’t one of those things. Flinching, it wasn’t enough as Zoey found herself grabbing the horns of its crest, her paradox fist still glowing with power, though her control was quickly fading.

“This won’t be fun… For you.”

Driving her fist through the hole she’d punched in its crest, Zoey finally relinquished her sense of control over the energies within her fist as a ball of null light detonated, the explosion of oblivion energy swallowing up everything behind the Iasilisk’s crest as well as launching Zoey away.

When the light null light faded, what remained was the Iasilisk’s head, gapping like a fish out of water as its skeleton, all flesh and scale gone, collapsed a moment later.

“Not bad,” Zoey grinned, before glancing at her hands.

Or lack of a hand.

“Always the god damn hands.”

And then she collapsed onto her ass.

Oh, wow, that DOES take a lot out of you.

Her head was a mess; her thoughts splintered apart as one of the worst cases of pneuma-wracked ever besieged her.

And to make things worse, she’d cannibalized a metric shit ton of her durability as fuel for the paradox strike, the source of the density and zero-point.

With the last few coherent thoughts she had remaining, Zoey found herself looking upward, noticing the Bird and Rory clashing.

Huh, he’s definitely going to want to hear the details of how I did this.

Probably not the most pressing thought given everything, but with her rapidly fading lucidity, there wasn’t much choice.

I see why he uses gems for this.

And with that, everything went dark.