The Martial Unity

Chapter 4400: A Lesser Victory

BOOOOOOOOOOOOM!!!

The sheer amount of force that Ria unleashed with each strike sent fissures across the land, spreading far and deep. Even though she had permeated most of the power that she had unleashed. The pressures she generated caused the bonds of matter to collapse, leading to widespread mass destruction.

RUMBLE!!!!!

A single blow shattered a tectonic plate.

And she dealt more than a single blow. She honed her senses on large collections of deep biosphere macrobes, targeting them with her as she manually exterminated them with raw power. The death of millions of macrobes affected the virus greatly, since their size meant that this branch of the virus didn’t have the massive numbers that the deep biosphere would normally have.

She wasn’t concerned about the potential damage that the turbulence her power was causing could bring to her friends. The manifold tree had proven to be extremely durable to external forces. She had barely felt a thing until she stepped out of the tree.

She was enough of a menace that it forced the virus to divert some of its reality-warping defensive measures towards her. It altered the information dimension to reduce the seismic conductance of the land of Planet Pinky. Essentially making it impossible to project power through the ground over such vast distances efficiently.

Instead, much of the power that she outputted was now spread across a large area, causing even more seismic radiation to shake the lands with an unimaginable violence.

RUMBLE!!!!!

However, the moment the virus shifted some of its reality-warping capital away from Ria, the Tide of Samsara immediately pounced at the first opportunity, using it to attack with extreme pressure. The Anicca current became more powerful and effective.

The Tide of Samsara pushed forward, spreading across the entire planet the way it was originally intended to. It rapidly swept the entire manifold, consuming the virus at an incredible rate. Ria never let up, forcing the virus to defend itself against her targeted long-range attacks so that it would never be able to fight the Tide of Samsara with everything that it had.

The Tide spread like it was nobody’s business. It never once let up, going all out with its adaptive evolution, overcoming every single hurdle that it ran into. Without the full weight of reality warping itself, the deep biosphere bacteria simply couldn’t hold a candle to the Tide of Samsara.

Ria forced the deep biosphere to spend too much energy on her, lest it risk catastrophic destruction to the macrobes that composed its body. The Tide of Samsara rapidly divided and spread, growing stronger and stronger as it rapidly disinfected the manifold’s land of the virus.

Together, they proved to be an unstoppable duo. The deep biosphere tried all the tricks that it could, but they were old news to the Tide of Samsara; it instantly dismantled them with prejudice.

It was overwhelming.

The color of the land changed as it did when the Tide of Samsara successfully swept the entire planet, until there was only a small pocket of remaining deep biosphere macrobes left.

And then it was time.

On the verge of death, the branch of the virus predictably took its final action. It shouted for help, sending an SOS through the information dimension.

RUMBLE!!!!!

The Tide of Samsara was prepared for this, having encountered exactly this action many times in the past. It wasn’t an exaggeration to say that the whole reason that the Emperor of Water allowed people to use limited versions of the Tide of Samsara was precisely to prevent this from happening.

It intercepted the SOS, just as it always did, immediately jumping to scramble it as it always did.

Yet, this time, it was only partially successful.

This particular branch of the virus had the ability to directly intervene in the information dimension, after all. When it came to battles within the information dimension, the Tide of Samsara was not equipped to decisively emerge victorious in its ability to completely snuff the SOS, not without Rui present.

The Tide of Samsara, however, couldn’t afford to let the signal go. If it did, then Ria would be in danger from the incoming nebular invasion, as would the friends that she clearly cared about. Not to mention, the virus had learned extremely... sensitive information about Ria. There was absolutely no way the virus could let the message go untouched.

Thus, it chose a lesser victory.

It didn’t scramble the SOS itself, but rather chose to obfuscate the origin by stretching out the SOS signal. Doing so would drastically increase the margin of error for where the signal emerged from.

So much so that people outside it would only know that the SOS emerged from somewhere within the Orion Star Strand, but not where within it. People within the Orion Star Strand would detect it everywhere across the entire star system.

RUMBLE!!!!!

A garbled, stretched-out wave emerged from Planet Pinky, spreading through the information dimension. The message manifested in the forms of changes in the real world, changes in mass, volume, composition and so on and so forth, that radiated outwards like a wave at extraordinary speeds. The Tide of Samsara rushed forth to finish the job before the virus could disappear, paying the price of changing the information of the information dimension. If it didn’t, then the deep biosphere macrobes would return alive eventually with the crucial information that the Tide didn’t want spread.

RUMBLE...

Eventually, silence befell the entire manifold as the tremors finally stopped.

At the edge of the horizon, the blue sun slowly emerged, cracking at the darkness of the night sky with its bright light. The winds blew, blowing dust from the massive damage done to the bedrock, while a faint silence hung in the air.

The silence of death.

There were only four living beings in the entire manifold.

Every other lifeform had been utterly annihilated by the combined destruction that Ria and the Tide of Samsara had mounted across a truly vast portion of the surface of the planet.

"Huff... huff..." Ria breathed heavily, wiping sweat from her forehead, before immediately turning around to the manifold tree with sharpened eyes.