Beyond the Bloodline-Chapter 392: Fatal Fangs

Every Aspect and Dictum Ronric possessed was activated, their energies poured into the shield to strengthen it enough to hold back Miranda’s attack, yet cracks still spiderwebbed across the layers.

Her flames burned through the interwoven cosmic energy that formed the shield, and the backlash slammed into Ronric, pushing his hands back and destabilising his Third Concretization as even the armour covering his body began flickering dangerously.

Miranda widened the entrance to her Cosmic Hearth, pouring more cosmic energy into her blade in a final burst that shattered Ronric’s shield.

The torrent of flames crashed directly into him, forcing him to spread his wings into a desperate dome to cover both himself and Salenor as the flames washed over them, burning his feathers, cracking the bones they were attached to, and charring the flesh beneath.

The force of the blast eventually knocked Ronric to the ground, but he’d managed to prevent a single flicker of Miranda’s flames from reaching Salenor.

The moment Ronric hit the ground, Salenor’s eyes locked onto Miranda, whose sword still hovered in mid-air, and he muttered a single word.

|Discharge.|

Reality itself couldn’t keep up with what followed, so it just stopped, everything halting as Salenor shot forward, reaching Miranda faster than she could even raise her hands to block.

|!|

His legs collided with her hastily formed guard, cracking the bones in her arms instantly. He raised his right leg and stomped down on her arm, lightning crackling along his black-and-white boots like jet boosters propelling him forward, shoving her backwards.

With his legs still planted, he pushed her through the domain, driving her back until she slammed against the dimensional wall, causing cracks to splinter across it.

Reality finally caught up with his movements as the space he’d dashed through distorted and ruptured, but by then, Salenor had already raised his left leg and stomped down again, cosmic energy doubling the impact and widening the cracks across Miranda’s domain.

Black lightning crackled along his limbs as all sorts of debuffs, from curses to paralysis, poisons, and petrification, hit Miranda all at once.

Salenor raised his right leg again, stomping down a third time, but in the split second before his foot connected, Miranda’s domain was deactivated, though it seemed as if the force of his third stomp had broken the domain and forced her out.

The two shot through space as streaks of light, blasting through planets, piercing the hearts of galaxies, and tearing across multiple realms.

Stars shattered and planets ruptured beneath their momentum as Salenor’s charged legs drove them onward, until the energy propelling him finally ran out.

Miranda’s body, still reeling from the force, smashed through hundreds more planets before finally coming to a stop, crashing through a volcanic mountain and landing on the ground of a random Apex World in an unknown galaxy.

She vomited blackened blood, the bones in her hands audibly cracking as they tried to realign and regenerate, but the power of Salenor’s Dictum and the black cosmic lightning slowed her recovery.

Seconds stretched into minutes as she lay on the floor, drawing as much energy as she could from her Cosmic Hearth to violently expel the foreign cosmic energy within her body, pushing out every spark of lightning and burning every debuff remnant with her flames.

As Miranda silently struggled to recover, the already fractured atmosphere of the planet tore apart even further, and Ronric charged in with bloodied, completely unusable wings, raising his sword high and screaming,

|Templar! Archangel’s War Sword!|

He brought the blade down onto the seemingly immobile Miranda, the cosmic light coating it ripping through her Blazing Rampart, losing only a fraction of its power before piercing through her heart, striking the ground beneath her, and obliterating the planet beneath them.

Ronric’s eyes met Miranda’s in the midst of the blast, and contrary to expectations, she showed no sign of alarm or concern, seemingly unfazed despite taking attacks that should have taken even her time to recover from.

Ronric didn’t have the time to wonder why, however, as the words that echoed in his ears the next instant sent a chill down his spine.

"Got you."

|!!| 𝗳𝚛𝗲𝕖𝕨𝕖𝗯𝚗𝚘𝕧𝕖𝗹.𝗰𝗼𝕞

The moment those words reached his ears, he immediately let go of his sword and tried to back away, but Miranda’s Cosmic Hearth expanded even further, two massive arms of flaming cosmic energy bursting out to grab the wounded Ronric faster than he could react, squeezing his body in an unyielding grip.

A third hand formed, yanking his sword out of her chest, and even as blood spurted, Miranda drew in a deep breath, inhaling so deeply her torso visibly contracted.

Cosmic energy poured from her Cosmic Hearth into her body, flowing up to her throat before being unleashed in a shout that raked through the fabric of spacetime.

|HAAAAATT!!!!|

***BOOOOM!!!

Though sound required a medium and the vacuum of space offered very little, Miranda wasn’t bound by mundane physics, so her scream weaponised vibration itself, compressing cosmic energy into a focused, unstoppable pulse.

The wave struck Ronric’s unguarded body at point-blank range, leaving no room to disperse as it bypassed his durability and destabilised the atoms that composed his physical body.

The compressed vibrational force attacked the cohesion of the atoms and molecules that made up the physical matter of Ronric’s body, and with that single pulse, his head and shoulders were obliterated, scattering like glass struck at its perfect resonant pitch, only scaled up to a level that could break universes.

"Urg—Gohok!"

Miranda coughed heavily as her Cosmic Flame Avatar’s hands tossed the rest of Ronric’s corpse aside. Breathing heavily, she pressed a hand to the hole in her chest and clicked her tongue in annoyance.

’I took more damage than I expected...’

Ronric’s last attack, the one that stabbed straight through her chest, hadn’t been part of her calculations, and now her regeneration time had been extended.

The problem was she couldn’t afford to waste that extra time now.

She forced out the residual energy from Ronric’s sword, her pierced heart slowly healing as she reoriented her body and scanned the universe to locate Salenor.

It didn’t take long to find him, especially since he was trying to escape the universe and regroup with the other Supremes outside.

Naturally, Miranda wasn’t about to let that happen.

She raised her hand to her hair, channelling cosmic energy into the Nexus Fascinator, and in the blink of an eye, she transferred through space, appearing directly behind Salenor.

Miranda grabbed him by the back of his neck, yanking his body, which was already halfway out of the universal barrier, back into the universe, and flung him toward a random galaxy.

Salenor wasn’t in any better shape than Miranda. In fact, he was worse off since, unlike her, he didn’t have her immortality or regenerative ability.

His legs were practically dead, and the only reason he could still move was that he wasn’t ’walking’ but floating through space.

Locking onto Miranda, his eyes widened, and though he wanted to attack and force his way out of Uetera, he couldn’t as his cosmic energy had bottomed out after his last attack, which, by all rights, should have killed her if she weren’t an immortal partially unbound to the Concepts of life and death.

Miranda dashed toward him, her fists charged with magic power as she threw a punch aimed straight at his face.

He dodged, reaching to grab her right arm, but she yanked it back instantly, sending her other hand forward in a punch that struck him in the stomach.

The condensed magic around her fist permeated through his body, striking his internal organs, and as his head dropped from the impact, she followed up with a knee kick.

Her right hand grabbed his hair after the kick, yanking his head down to meet her knee again, each impact reverberating with immense force.

Immediately after, Miranda charged toward a nearby galaxy, aiming to bash him straight through its core.

Salenor fought back, releasing small blasts of magic as he struggled to wrench his head free from her grip, eventually managing to break free before dashing away, trying to escape.

At this, Miranda transformed into a humanoid wolf form, her body doubling in size and becoming more muscular while keeping a basic human structure, her head that of a wolf and her body covered in silver fur.

She lunged at Salenor from behind, grabbing him and sinking her fangs into his neck as she began draining his blood.

He struggled and tried to fight back, but Miranda held tight, draining every last drop of blood until he was reduced to a frail husk, and only then did she release him.

Then she casually rotated his neck a full 360 degrees, instantly ending his life, before letting his lifeless body drift in the vacuum of space.