Reincarnated Hero System - Chapter 1203 - 1203: Mallory's Shock

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Mallory moved at a speed that made it difficult to tell whether the goddess was truly weakened or simply pretending. Her elementalized body streaked through space even faster than the phenomenon she’d turned herself into.

Erratic bursts of light flashed across space as she pursued the thief who’d stolen her amulet, closing the distance and summoning her Tempest Avatar to attack without hesitation.

Mallory didn’t bother exchanging words with them. She intended to kill first and question their dead soul afterward.

The Tempest Avatar’s fist descended at FTL speed, immense force and energy packed behind it, but just before impact, the thief turned around, a multi-coloured sheath of energy wrapping their fist as they met its blow.

The collision of her Avatar’s fist with the thief’s unleashed a shockwave so powerful it destabilised the orbits of every star system within a thousand light-years.

Mallory’s frown deepened as her senses instantly registered what had just occurred.

‘Cosmic energy.’

The thief had blocked her attack with cosmic energy, something she recognised because she too could manipulate it.

Only Cosmic Superiors could perceive and control cosmic energy, with Sub-Cosmic superiors like Mallory and Kirone only being able to manipulate ambient cosmic energy, while Complete cosmic superiors could generate cosmic energy internally.

From that single clash, Mallory couldn’t determine exactly which type the thief was, but she immediately raised her guard, knowing the difficulty of the battle could shift depending on this.

Full cosmic superiors could dominate ambient cosmic energy, blocking sub-cosmic manipulation, and could not be killed without the use of cosmic energy, their souls having been transformed by it.

The size of her Tempest Avatar shrank to roughly a quarter of its original massive size, becoming more compact while its energy grew denser.

Lightning arced across Mallory’s body and the sword she summoned, her golden eyes glowing as she wrapped cosmic energy around herself and her weapon, then charged at her opponent.

The hooded figure mirrored her actions, coating their fists in cosmic energy as they rushed forward, their fists meeting her sword in a clash of multi-coloured light.

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The fabric of space-time groaned under the force of the explosion of multi-coloured light, throwing both Kirone and her opponent backwards.

The two had long since left the neutron star system as they fought and were deep in interstellar space, so there were no nearby celestial bodies caught up as collateral damage.

Kirone maintained a frowning expression as she coiled her divinity around her spear, studying her foe.

She could sense that they possessed an enormous reserve of magic power, comparable to her own, but in the battle so far, not a single trace of it had been used.

They had fought relying solely on ambient cosmic and law energy manipulation, a strategy Kirone couldn’t understand.

‘Are they planning something else with that magic? Or holding back? Why?’

Questions like these ran through her mind as she shot forward, swinging her staff to intercept their fists in FTL clashes, each strike sending shockwaves across the surrounding space.

While the total amount of energy didn’t automatically determine the outcome of a fight, it heavily influenced the result.

Kirone, using cosmic energy, magic power, and divinity, naturally possessed greater attack potency than her opponent, who, for some reason, was refraining from using their magic.

As a result, it didn’t take her long to begin to dominate the battle.

Still, she didn’t get complacent as she couldn’t figure out what her opponent was planning or why they were holding back, and she wasn’t about to allow whatever scheme they had to succeed.

‘It’s a bit far, but I’ll end it now!’

With that thought, Kirone immediately raised her hand, and a blade extended from the flat end of her staff, transforming it into a spear. She pulled her hand back and, almost instantly, hurled the spear with full force, sending it speeding through the vacuum, reaching her opponent in a second.

Even so, that second was enough for them to condense cosmic energy into a dense shield within their palms, barely fifty centimetres wide, and use it to block her spear.

The shield had rubbery properties, stretching backwards as the spear pressed forward, and their hands trembled under the force. A small grunt escaped them, drowned out by the sound of the crackling energy along the spear as they struggled to hold it back.

While they fought to maintain the shield, Kirone absorbed cosmic energy into her arm, expelling it almost instantly alongside her divinity and magic power.

In her open palm, a brown light condensed, forming a spear similar to the one she had just thrown.

Sensing the release of energy, her subordinates recognised that she was preparing a big move and hurried to put as much distance between themselves and the fight as possible, moving even further than they already had.

All of that caution was unnecessary because Kirone’s attack wasn’t a flashy, wide-area strike.

The colours of the vacuum of space momentarily turned monochrome as she pulled back the brown spear of light.

Her opponent hurriedly detonated the cosmic energy within their shield to knock away her physical spear and scrambled to condense another cosmic barrier to stop the incoming attack, which was clearly far more dangerous than the first.

But it was futile.

The instant Kirone released the energy spear in her hand, it skipped through time and space, and within a blink, it tore through the hastily raised barrier and pierced straight through the hooded figure’s torso.

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Mallory’s Tempest Avatar expanded to immense proportions, its height reaching half the diameter of the nearest star as it raised both hands to condense a colossal spear of golden lightning and divinity. Without hesitation, it thrust the sphere downward toward the planet where Mallory had just sent her opponent crashing.

The black-hooded figure scrambled to flee from the attack, but a ring of lightning formed around their body, snapping tightly and constricting their movements.

They managed to shatter it with a burst of cosmic energy, but by then the enormous spear from the Tempest Avatar had already pierced the planet’s atmosphere.

With no other options, they gathered as much ambient cosmic energy as they could and created a shield to block the impact.

The resulting explosion was cataclysmic.

A blinding flash of golden light outshone even the nearby star for a moment as the entire planet was blasted to bits, its fragments hurled into interstellar space.

The spear hit the thief who’d stolen her amulet, sending them flying alongside the debris and out of the system.

Mallory immediately charged her sword with the power of multiple elemental laws and blitzed through the vacuum straight toward the thief, but just before she could swing it, her Track Down skill refreshed and updated the location of her stolen artifact.

The signal no longer came from the thief she was about to attack, but from a distant region in the Orithyia Galaxy.

‘They sent it somewhere else!’

Even so, she didn’t stop her attack, swinging her sword as planned, intent on killing the thief before reclaiming her amulet.

At that moment, the thief’s body erupted with immense cosmic energy as they flipped through space, lifting their hands and slamming them together above their head, catching Mallory’s descending blade between their palms.

The collision released a powerful burst of law energy that hurled them backwards faster than Mallory could reach out and grab them with her free hand, and using that momentum, they recovered their balance and shot away, forcing Mallory to give chase.

They sped into another star system, curving around the central star and emerging from the opposite side with their body coated in a dense layer of cosmic energy.

Mallory, expecting an attack from that direction, had already turned to meet them, her sword crackling with golden lightning as she swung it.

Her first diagonal upward slash was evaded, but she didn’t care, pouring energy into the blade again and bringing it down in a vertical strike that cleaved through the cosmic energy blasts sent toward her.

The thief immediately pivoted and fled again, and Mallory continued the chase, however, the thief didn’t get far before suddenly stopping and turning back.

For the first time, Mallory noticed a faint light glimmering within the darkness of their hood as they prepared to attack.

She planned to retaliate, but the instant her senses registered the energy they were channelling, her body froze.

“!!”

Her stoic expression broke, and her eyes widened in genuine shock.

Mallory was a paragon of composure, able to maintain it even under the most absurd and extreme circumstances.

Even with her most powerful defensive artifact stolen, she didn’t lose herself to anger and pursued the thief with calm intent.

Even after the artifact had been sent to another location, she didn’t divert to chase it, having already considered that if she did so before restraining the thief, it could simply be teleported away again, so she chose to subdue the thief first before retrieving the artifact.

But even Mallory couldn’t remain composed when her eyes caught the flash of brown light erupting from the thief’s hand.

Even Mallory couldn’t remain composed when her senses detected that familiar signature of divinity and magic swirling from the thief’s hands.

And she most certainly couldn’t remain composed as she felt the laws and fabric of space and time bending in a way she recognised, under the influence of a familiar Authority.

In the moment Mallory froze at the recognition of these phenomena, the brown light in the thief’s hand shot forward like a spear, skipping through time and space and piercing into the right side of her torso.