Endless Journey: Infinite Realms

Chapter 46 630 Trillion

"You know that even if you try to stop me now, I will still have enough time to reach your friends…" Aleksei said as his afro hair started to sway freely in the air. "I can just defeat you right now, and then I will just proceed to follow them."

"You could have the strength to defeat me…" Clint started to smile as he spread both of his arms to his side. "But do you have the TIME to catch up to them?"

"Time? What do you mean by that?" Aleksei frowned as he suddenly felt that something was wrong around him.

A few seconds passed by, and the frown on Aleksei's face turned into a snarl as he realized what was happening.

"You bastard! Are you dilating the time in our area right now?" Aleksei rarely looked angry, but this time, his rage was quite apparent. "Are you out of your mind? You really dared to dilate the time here just to let Lord Ergo get away?"

"What if I did?" Clint looked a little pale, but he still stood upright as he gave Aleksei a sleazy grin. "I just did what I think is for the best!"

"You bastard!"

Aleksei had the every right to be angry as what Clint did was really irritating.

Using his control over gravitational force, Clint increased the local gravity in the area around him and Aleksei.

By doing this, the spacetime in their area became so bent that the time inside that area started to slow down compared to the time that Alex and Alina experiences.

This phenomenon is called Gravitational Time Dilation, one of the consequences of the General Theory of Relativity.

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In order to understand this phenomenon well, one must understand a consequence of the General Theory of Relativity.

And that is that the speed of light is always be constant to any observers, no matter what happens to the environment around light.

Let's say there are two points in space, point A and point B.

If light travels from point A to point B in normal conditions, the light will travel in a straight path, ensuring no problems with time.

However, in an area with strong gravity, spacetime will be curved.

Light passing through this curved spacetime will have to move a longer distance in order to travel from point A to point B.

But since the speed of light is the same, the time traveled by the light must also be longer in order to match the longer distance traveled by the light.

This compensation naturally results in the slowing down of time in that area.

**************

"I thought that you are just a musclehead… I never expected you to form an idea like this." Aleksei said as he rotated his limbs.

"You are impressive too." Clint replied as he gazed at Aleksei intently.

"This gravity field that I created, not only is this meant to slow down our time inside this field, this is also meant to crush you into a paste. However…" Clint narrowed his eyes as he glared at Aleksei. "It seems like you are unaffected even by the strong gravity in here."

"Oh, so you noticed that huh." Aleksei seems to be unperturbed by Clint's revelation as his eyes turned scarlet. "It seems like I cannot hide my real power from you anymore."

"You… you really did fuse with the World Diagram!" Clint declared as he observed Aleksei's body. Aleksei's body looked extremely fit, as if it had been imbued by the essence of the world.

Aleksei also looked like he had a subtle control of things around him, something that had Clint feeling wary.

Now, Clint could feel power welling out from Aleksei, which started to interfere with his own gravity field.

From the looks of it, Aleksei's body became so powerful that it was able to resist the strong gravity that should have been crushing him already.

"How… could you have survived fusing your mind with the World Diagram?" Clint asked as he saw Aleksei slowly approaching him. "That should have been extremely difficult to do!"

"Fuse my mind with the World Diagram? Are you kidding? I am not that idiotic!!" Aleksei said as he clothes slowly disintegrated slowly, showing his perfectly lean muscular body.

"Even a mind of a Star Esper would be not able to handle the strain of fusing the mind with the World Diagram. Even I would not attempt to do that."

"But then how did you fuse with the World Diagram? Clint inquired as he saw Aleksei's rippling body.

It took Clint only a second to realize the answer.

"You did not fuse the World Diagram with your mind… you fused it with your body!"

"You are right!" Aleksei declared as he showed off his powerful body "Since a mind fusion is dangerous for obvious reasons, I decided to just use my body as the fusion material with World Diagram."

"…" Clint was silent and horrified as he tried to imagine how desperate Aleksei could be that he was forced to do something like this.

"It was… painful at first." Aleksei wistfully said as he seemed to remember some memories. "It took me some tries to fit it all inside me, but in the end, I managed to fit them all inside my body. Good times indeed."

"Good times huh." Clint tried to ignore the way that Aleksei's statement had sounded as he knew that his fight will be much harder than before.

Clint was not sure on how Aleksei was able to fuse his body with the half of the World Diagram, but he can basically see that it was the truth.

"This will be really bad…" Clint muttered to himself as he prepared himself for a large fight.

Aside from locally strengthening the gravity around them, Clint also started to generate trillions of volts of electricity as he pocketed out some hollow metal spheres that he always carried with him.

Clint weakly applied his ability on the hollow metal spheres, causing them to glow, indicating that they are seconds away from actually activating.

Clint allowed Aleksei to see his set-up before freely taunting him.

"If you really want to be free, then you need my permission to leave… But since I would never allow that to happen, then you should do your best to defeat me!"

"Defeat you? Heh, I will do more than that!" This is Aleksei's reply to Clint as his body began to glow white.

Clint started to tense as he knew that the fight starts now.

"Boom!" Aleksei accelerated towards Clint as his body started to reach speeds that should not be reached by any kind of bodies before.

Clint could barely believe it as he saw Aleksei's glowing body almost in front of him already.

Aleksei's fist shot towards Clint, and the only thing that Clint could do was to use on of his metal sphers to block it.

"Kaboom!"

The hollow metal sphere that he used contained concentrated amounts of hydrogen inside it, and all that Clint did was to use weak and strong nuclear force to activate it.

By using the Strong Nuclear Force, Clint was able to force the hydrogen atoms to smash together with each other, producing large amounts of unstable Helium atoms.

As this process created an overabundance of protons, Clint then was able to use the Weak Nuclear Force to initiate beta decay on these unstable Helium atoms.

With this beta decay, the unstable Helium atoms became stabilized.

And in the process of doing this, massive amounts of energy and heat were produced, creating an explosion of energy that blasted in front of Aleksei.

This process was basically a simplified version of the thermonuclear fusion, a process which powered the stars in space.

Clint used its miniaturized version, as he knew that using the full version will be enough to destroy this world.

There is a kilogram of hydrogen inside Clint's metal sphere, which meant that the conversion from hydrogen to helium will produce around 630 trillion joules of energy, which Clint all purposely concentrated to explode on Aleksei.

"Let's see if you can survive that." Clint thought to himself as he saw Aleksei being covered with pure heat from the explosion.

"Bzzt!" Clint then bombarded the area in front of him with countless lightning bolts just to make sure that Aleksei will be down.

After seeing that he had bombarded the possibly dead Aleksei with enough lightning bolts to power the entire world for a month, Clint stopped as he waited to see Aleksei's dead body.

Clint's attacks covered the whole area with smoke, something that Clint usually hated to see.

With Clint's scans covering the whole area, he could detect that there are no living beings near him, which could indicate that Alelksei was dead.

But Clint knew how slimy Aleksei could be, so he thought that maybe Aleksei was just faking it.

So, Clint had no choice but to use his vision in order to see where Aleksei was.

However, the smoke that he created were interfering with his ability to look around him.

"Damn smoke…" As such, Clint has no choice but to wait for the smoke to clear out before he can freely look around him.

But Clint did not have to wait that long as a glowing hand suddenly reached out from the smoke, plunging itself on Clint's left lung.

"Pfft!" Clint let out a strangled cry as he felt his left lung deflating as a large hole appeared on it.

Clint jumped backwards, allowing the glowing hand to slide off his chest.

"Hah, hah, hah." Clint let out a wheeze as his left lung fully collapsed, only leaving his right lung functional.

"Tsk, I tried to aim for the heart, but it seems like your damage to my body jarred my aim off." Clint heard these words as the owner of the glowing hand walked out of the smoke.

The speaker was no other than Aleksei, and he looked very much alive.

There are countless injuries on Aleksei's body, with numerous gouges and deep wounds on his body, courtesy of the attacks that Clint placed on him.

But even with these injuries, Aleksei seemed to be fine, evidenced by the way his body moved.

This realization just served to make Clint more dismayed as he realized that he must use greater firepower in order to win against Aleksei.

"You must be wondering on how I survived that attack, right?" Aleksei mused as he let out a deep breath. "I'm sorry, but I won't tell it to you. However, if you managed to damage me more later, then you will probably find it out for yourself."

"In that case, I will just damage you more!"

Clint then let out a shout as he used his power to gather all the hydrogen in that the could muster inside his Range.

Clint was a 25 Star Esper, meaning that his Range covers the area 25 kilometers around him. That area was already enough for Alex to gather enough hydrogen to initiate a much powerful thermonuclear fusion.

Aleksei seems to have sensed what Clint was doing, as all that he did was to spread his arms while saying,

"Hahahaha! Come hit me more with your blasts! Let us see which one is stronger! My body or your attacks! Hahahaha! This really is fun!"

"If you can learn to shut your mouth for a minute, then maybe you will have some friends." Clint then reached deep into his power, and after confirming that he had everything under control, he activated the fusion.

"Booom!" The resulting explosion covered the sky with a glow so bright, anyone who saw it from below were temporarily blinded.

Clint felt the superheated winds buffeting all around him as he watched for any signs of a sneak attack approaching him.

"If you are still alive, then I dare you to come and approach me."

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While Clint was having his fated match with Aleksei, Alex and Alina were having their own dilemma.

Lord Ergo already arrived on his/her destination, with him/her setting down Alina and Alex on top of a small island located at the middle of the ocean.

Lord Ergo then laid down on the ground as he/she looked at Alex quietly, as if he/she was saying,

"Here, come heal me now before the crazy Lord Ergo comes out. If you don't he will surely kill you."

Of course Alex would gladly attempt to use the computer virus ball on Lord Ergo right now, but there was one thing that was bothering him.

And that was the airship that was still following them earlier.

With his scans, Alex knew that there is only one person inside the ship, and that person was Lord Gallius.

"Tsk, and I thought this guy is on our side."

Even though Alex was not sure what prompted Lord Gallius to ally with the afro guy, he knew that Lord Gallius must not be allowed to get near them as the process starts.

Nothing must go wrong in the process, and someone following them with ill intentions was obviously one of the objects that must stay far away.

"..."

It did not take Alex that long to come to a decision, and frankly speaking, this decision is something that Alex was perfectly fine on doing.

"Sorry Lord Gallius, but it seems like we have to chase a nuisance away." Alex said as he and Alina stood up, with their sights concentrated on the incoming airship. "Of course if the nuisance tries to fight back, then we will have no choice but to erase it."

"After all, the usual solution to a problem is to make the problem disappear."