Son of the Hero King

Chapter 773: Lilith vs Euphoria

For all her bravado and giddiness at obtaining some new training material for herself, Lilith had to admit that the goddess, Euphoria’s ⦗All-Encompassing Hatred⦘ was an utterly problematic concept to be pitted against. It was a pain in the ass and a half to deal with for just about anyone at their level.

Lilith’s boots dug into the vitrified earth as another quake rippled beneath her. The tremors were not random any longer. The land quaked in anticipation of her each movement, each quake a carefully curated pulse by the very world itself to misalign her footing before every strike.

Above, the once molten clouds reformed into ominous hues and thickened unnaturally, casting odd shadows that flickered and shifted like living things. The light turned traitorous. Blades and motes of sunlight concentrated only on their eyes to impair their vision. The wind screamed in reverse, carrying back their sounds… making it harder for them to even speak or cast.

They were not just fighting against Euphoria but against the very world itself as it did its utmost to serve and protect the infuriating goddess. It started with just mana and light. However, the power gradually increased, and its effects became more diverse.

Gravity kept increasing with each passing second to slow them further.

The earth kept quaking whenever they made even a hint of movement. Vitrified sand billowed out unnaturally and did its best to blast on their eyes to obscure their vision, to hurt their senses.

The air became scarce, then poisonous.

With each passing moment, the world turned more hostile to a point where Lilith was seriously starting to wonder in morbid fascination just how far it could go to oppose them and support the goddess. Every element of reality twisted to inconvenience them, hinder them, break them— to protect and cradle the goddess.

Lilith clicked her tongue, eyes narrowing into slits. “I’ve had enough.”

She slammed her sword into the ground, and for a moment, the world itself seemed to flinch from that strike. The rhythm of the battlefield skipped. Like record experiencing an unexpected stutter.

Her sword and her will flowing through it resisted the world itself. Nay… she did not just stop there, she denied its very will. Sol’s Dragon Scales, embedded with the power of a Concept, refused to be bound by any artificial laws imposed upon the world to make it do the Concept wielder’s bidding.

A crimson-gold wave of malevolent aura rippled and spread outward. Where it passed, the lies of the world peeled back like being scraped by the edge of a sword— little by agonizing little. Just enough for Lilith to breathe properly once more. Enough for Ambrosia to light a spark without hemorrhaging her mana and destroying her very insides.

“I can’t do this more than once,” Lilith said. “But it gives us a small window of reprieve… to act and retaliate.”

While she spoke, the molten gold bleeding into her eyes continued to grow in both spread and radiance. She was getting more and more attuned with Sol’s power. The power of the End.

In normal circumstances, sharing the concept of the End was nothing short of an impossibility. However, making the impossible possible was becoming something of a new norm for her after her nephew, Sol, came into his power.

Her current inclination and growing command over the power Sol commanded was the result of multiple coincidences. Her Concept of Absolute Severance fits very well with the End. Sol’s blood flowed in her veins, and she was even holding a sword made from his body parts. To hit the nail on the coffin, she had even been meditating in Sol’s dimension after she had gotten her new power, adjusted to the King realm once more, and then… ascended to her Demigodhood. She even planned to make her Territory at Sol’s dimension. And this dimension was the very place where DEUS manifested into existence. The place most closely tied to Sol’s True Name.

Due to all these connections, she had grasped many small insights over her stay at the realm, and this fight with a true goddess was helping those insights coalesce into something greater, something with more substance and form than the abstract vagueness she was grasping at through her bouts of enlightenment.

And yet…

“I was only able to create a dome of 10 meters in diameter— a free zone where her powers won’t reach us.”

“That is more than enough.” Ambrosia did not need any explanation from Lilith about how she was able to conjure this space for them. What mattered to him was that it let her use her spells again against the infuriating goddess.

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A miniature sun formed in her palm once more— smaller, compact, more unstable, but far hotter than before. She was burning the very blood flowing through her veins as fuel to empower her flames and spell.

Euphoria narrowed her eyes as these events transpired before her very eyes. Her expression was back to divine serenity, but her aura trembled ever so slightly at how her opponents were now able to operate against her once more.

“Even now… You fight,” she spoke with a quiet, cold wrath, stepping forward. Her crimson aura crackled, distorting reality wherever she walked. “Why struggle so much? What would you gain even if you won?”

She could not understand their intentions. There was quite literally no logical reason for them to fight against her, to oppose her. It was not like they could truly make her perish even if they somehow defeated her. As a goddess, nothing but the End could cease her existence.

This entire fight was completely and utterly futile in her eyes.

“You could not understand even if we tried to explain.”

“Is that so?” Those words muttered, all emotions drained from Euphoria’s face and eyes. “Then let us continue.”

“I will give you an occasion.” Ambrosia launched the miniature nuclear bomb in the form of a railgun. The light reached Euphoria before she could even properly react. Since it was all focused on one point, the ray immediately pierced through her shield and blasted her shoulder in one blazing motion and a trail of annihilation in its path.

Euphoria grunted more out of outrage than pain. Yet, the onslaught was far from over as Lilith was already upon her. She had used the moment of destruction to sever the conceptual distance separating them by using one of the techniques her daughter, Lili,n favored and excelled at.

Then once she was in the right range,

｢ God Slaying Sword -::- Crescent Moon ｣

Lilith fully infused all the insight she had acquired throughout her fight in her sword, compressing them in a single gleam of her blade’s razor-sharp edge, and… slashed.

It was too late for Euphoria to fully dodge, and she could only watch as the beautiful trajectory of the sword cut down from the right side of her face to her chest, drawing an arc of blood.

Then, for the first time since the start of the battle, true agony ravaged her very soul as the attack hit true.

Euphoria screamed in a shriek, and the world screamed alongside her, heartbroken at its darling’s pain. Until now, Lilith had been careful in using her concept so that Euphoria would not be on guard, and the tactic seemed to have paid off as she delivered a devastating blow to the goddess.

She wanted to immediately follow up with another slash or thrust of her blade… but Euphoria instinctively switched to ⦗All Encompassing Love⦘, which caused her to miss at the very last moment, and Euphoria immediately distanced herself, blinking into the air as golden blood scattered unbidden from her wounds into the world.

The pain never left her ravaged soul, no matter where she went, where she glided, or flew. It was a soul-tearing pain of the sort she had only ever felt once in her entire life. Her mind became even more chaotic when she realized that no matter how much of her Divinity she poured into the wound, the dastardly slash refused to close and heal, golden blood oozing out in droves from the slash.

With great concentration and a boatload of her divine power… she was barely able to stop the blood from leaking.

“Miserable wench!”

She touched her now barely disfigured face, and her expression morphed hideously to mirror that of a devil.

She understood. In that one instance, if Lilith had squeezed out just a bit more power, she would have been cleaved in two and might have been forced to fall into limbo for a few decades at least, and a few thousand at worst.

A goddess dying to someone who was not even full full-fledged Demigod yet? An ascendant who had not even claimed and built her territory? It was blasphemy at its greatest form.

“Don’t joke with me!! I am going to kill you!” Euphoria shrieked and screeched, the world folding in itself to mirror her emotions, as utter rage consumed her very mind.

Her aura intensified further, billowing out even more of her Divinity than what could be deemed reasonable, and the world wailed in agony as a result. All along, she had been holding back a part of her power out of fear of irreversibly affecting the world and in extensio,n the Mortal Realm itself. If she did, she would become an enemy of the world and would lose the free access she had managed to get through the long years she resided inside it.

Furthermore, she had been sure that just a small part of her divine powers would be enough to keep Lilith and even Ambrosia in check if necessary.

But now?

Her eyes deepened and darkened, mirroring an abyss of horrors, as a consuming rage and hatred were replaced by an eerie calmness.

They should just all die. She thought as she brought up all the hatred she felt for the pair of blasphemous beings before her and called out to the sky.

* * *

While the fight between the three women raged, and Euphoria was on the verge of literally snapping because of the pair of women’s stubborn and relentless onslaught of attacks, Hypnos was not having the best time of his life either.

⦗Elysium⦘

The realm was the work of his life. The peak of his art. The strongest technique born from his Divine Authority.

That power could trap someone in a prison that was the creation of their own minds, making them live through a dream world created based on absolute real probability.

What made those dreams so realistic was that they were not just dreams but rather a glimpse at another reality itself. A parallel universe or a timeline that could have truly existed had the dies of probability rolled just right enough for them to be made into reality.

A dream grounded in reality.

That was the sole reason this realm was so insidious. His world did not project mere impossible dreams but real possibilities as illusions, and because of that, they were all that much harder to leave.

Once the prey was twisted and their narrative assimilated, then modified, they would lose their power or might even go berserk and die because of the incongruity between their minds and the Truth they realized through their original experiences.

Hypnos sighed as he observed Echidna. Though she was not in her true body and was not even a true demigod at the moment, her presence demanded respect, even from a former god such as himself.

She was standing leisurely in the void of the dream world. No matter how many possibilities he tried to subject her mind to, all were denied and then devoured before they could even properly form.

It was as if she were rejecting all possibilities for an alternate future. As if her very core could not even accept the existence of a different possibility.

Or rather—

It felt as if there existed no other reality but the one we live in where her dream could be realized.