Reincarnated Hero System - Chapter 1201 - 1201: Shadow in the Hood

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The moment the Dimensional Lockdown was lifted and the surrounding area was confirmed clear of immediate threats, the first thing Mallory did was try to sense Kirone’s location.

When she did, the result was precise, accurate down to the finest spatial coordinates. She sensed that Kirone was already moving, heading toward a place they both knew well.

‘Oh, she’s already back in Orithyia. And that direction… Aidos?’

After confirming this, Mallory decided to go straight to Kirone’s location herself. She tried to send a telepathic message, but a faint layer of static still interfered with the connection.

Rather than waste time on it, she chose to move directly.

She had just made that decision and was in the middle of activating the dimensional gate within her personal dimension, the one that led straight to Aidos, when she sensed an immense concentration of law energy gathering in the space above her dimension’s entrance.

Just as she turned her gaze toward it, the compressed energy detonated, the explosion obliterating everything in the surrounding space and, through the existing opening serving as the dimension’s entrance, blasting open an even larger breach.

The barrier of that region crumbled, forming a massive gap through which an army of automations poured in.

Mallory’s subordinates, still on high alert since only minutes had passed since the lockdown was lifted, reacted instantly, and a battle erupted immediately.

One particularly powerful automation shot through the horde, heading straight for Mallory’s position as she moved toward the entrance to assess the damage and eliminate the intruders.

The automation unleashed an immense amount of law energy, its arm splitting apart, and with a small burst of spatial energy, quickly became a massive spinning drill that thrust directly toward Mallory.

Even weakened by the loss of her evolution-acquired powers, with several of her formerly amplified innate abilities now below their original level, Mallory was far from defenceless.

‘Tempest Avatar.’

She clenched her fist, and lightning law energy instantly condensed around her, forming a colossal half-humanoid avatar made entirely of lightning that mirrored her movements.

As she threw her fist forward, the avatar did the same, its massive fist colliding with the incoming drill and shattering it instantly. Lightning crackled from the Tempest Avatar into the automation’s body, racing through its systems, short-circuiting them and causing its head to explode in a burst of golden lightning.

After destroying it, Mallory had the avatar seize the automation’s remains and pull them closer. She then thrust her hand into its chest, searching before grabbing and ripping out its core.

Recognition flashed in her eyes at the sight of the runes and glyphs etched into it, runes she knew well from recently working on automations bearing the same markings.

“This…! The Machine god’s!”

She immediately identified this particular automation that had come straight for her as an authentic remnant from the Machine god’s army.

Before she could dwell on that realisation, another massive explosion erupted, this time from within her dimension.

It came from the restricted access area, the same place where she had spent the past few days repairing her Evolution Origin Core and simulating variations of the anti-evolution virus to develop countermeasures. It was also where her vault was located, holding all her valuables, since she hadn’t yet recreated her pocket dimension to store them properly.

Mallory rushed toward the vault, arriving just in time to see a hole torn into the side of the dome-shaped structure. She immediately extinguished the flames raging around it and hurried inside, her pupils scanning rapidly as she searched the entire area for the intruder.

But aside from faint spatial distortions indicating teleportation or another spatial movement technique, she found nothing.

A few seconds later, Aphine arrived, entering the vault through the same breach.

“Lady Artemi—!”

Her words cut off as Mallory raised a hand, signalling her to stay silent.

Mallory’s eyes moved rapidly across the vault as her mind assessed the situation, trying to determine why the vault had been targeted, whether something had been stolen or if this was merely a diversion to draw her attention while something else occurred elsewhere.

Every item in Mallory’s vault had been marked using a skill of hers called Track Down. The skill placed an energy mark on objects, allowing her to track their location at any time. Simple, yet highly effective.

The skill was strong on its own, so Mallory never modified it, meaning it wasn’t weakened like many of her altered abilities.

She quickly ran through the indexed list of marked items, sorted by priority from the most important and dangerous downward, and within seconds found what was missing.

“My amulet…!”

Without a word to Aphine, Mallory immediately activated the skill to track its location, elementalized her body into pure lightning, and zapped out of the vault, exiting her dimension in pursuit of the thief.

Aphine instantly understood that something critical had been stolen and that Mallory had gone after it alone.

She hurried back to the dimension’s entrance, where the remaining automations had already been rounded up and neutralised, assigned several individuals to oversee clean-up operations, and ordered the activation of the highest security protocols.

Then, she selected a small team to follow her in pursuit of Mallory.

In Mallory’s current weakened state, Aphine didn’t want her facing a situation where that weakness could be exposed to the rest of the intergalactic stage.

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As Mallory pursued the thief, she suddenly sensed an immense wave of energy fluctuations originating from a corner of the galaxy, and her attention was drawn there momentarily, since that was the same direction where Kirone was currently located.

‘What’s happening there?!’

She felt both curiosity and concern, but she trusted Kirone to handle it and instead concentrated on chasing the thief, who she finally had in her sights.

The figure zigzagging through space, opening spatial tunnels through celestial bodies to evade her, was completely clad in black.

When Mallory zoomed in and attempted to probe them, she discovered that the cloak they wore blocked recognition and analysis, preventing her Appraisal Skill and other analysis spells and techniques from working.

All she could determine was that the figure was humanoid, possessed power on par with a High Tier Deity, wore a black hood, and carried her stolen amulet.

That amulet was one of Mallory’s most treasured artifacts and her strongest defensive tool.

By combining her magic power, divinity, ambient cosmic energy, along with her soul power and the power of her Authorities, the artifact generated a barrier around her capable of defending against physical, energy-based, spiritual, mental, and other forms of attack.

Any kinetic force hitting the barrier was dispersed into energy waves, which were stored within it, with the storage capacity growing along with the barrier’s surface area. Energy and law-based attacks were absorbed as well, and once the storage limit was reached, the barrier expelled everything by reversing itself, though doing so disengaged it and required a charging and cooldown period before it could be used again.

It was an artifact that had saved Mallory’s life multiple times before she gained her Immortality, and even afterwards, it had helped conceal that immortality from others until the Divine Civil War, when its existence finally became public.

It was a trump card artifact, and of course, the only person who knew of it was Kirone.

Mallory had revealed the artifact’s existence to Kirone during the Great Valmone War, when the two of them had faced an especially troublesome group of Elf Kings.

She had planned to act as bait to draw out their opponents, and Kirone had been understandably worried about her safety.

To reassure her, Mallory had explained the artifact’s defensive capabilities, though she hadn’t gone into full detail, not because of a lack of time, but because Kirone herself had stopped her.

One of the Elf Kings had a mind-reading ability, and Kirone wasn’t confident her own mental defences could completely block the Olden Elf King’s powers, so she hadn’t wanted to know the full nature of Mallory’s trump card, ensuring that even if her mind was read, the secret would remain safe.

Because of that, as far as Kirone was concerned, the barrier was just one of Mallory’s evolution-acquired abilities, not the function of a soul-bonded artifact.

And since Mallory had expelled all soul-bound attachments while purging her evolution modifications, that artifact was currently unbound.

In other words, the artifact could currently be used by anyone.