Reincarnated Hero System - Chapter 1204 - 1204: Absolute Zero [Monthly Bonus 1]

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As the spear of brown light pierced the right side of the hooded figure’s torso, golden blood spilt out, and Kirone, seeing it, raised an eyebrow.

“You’re a god?”

The golden blood was the unmistakable mark of pure-blooded members of the god race.

Seeing it, Kirone naturally concluded that the opponent before her was indeed a god, not an automation as she had briefly suspected.

The force of the attack sent them tumbling through space, the golden liquid drifting in the vacuum, spraying outward as their body rotated.

They clutched their side, groaning in pain, but Kirone didn’t allow them a moment to recover or heal.

She immediately charged forward, summoning her physical spear back into her right hand and gripping it with both hands.

“Your race matters not. Death is the only thing awaiting you.”

With that declaration, Kirone infused her divinity into the spear, extending it to thousands of kilometres in length. The shaft naturally widened as it grew, divinity swirling along its entire length.

Hundreds of portals opened in the surrounding space, and as she swung the spear down toward the hooded figure, each portal released a beam of brown divinity, spatiotemporal beams that phased through every barrier the hooded figure had conjured at accelerated speed, reaching them the instant Kirone’s elongated spear connected with their side.

What followed the impact of Kirone’s spear and the beams was a cataclysmic explosion that shook the entire galaxy, sending ripples through stars and planets, bending space and distorting the fabric of spacetime.

Expectations screamed that the blast would consume everything in its path, annihilating all within its radius, but instead of spreading outward, the energy rapidly concentrated around the hooded figure, forming a radiant sphere of cosmic energy and divinity nearly the size of a star.

The blinding light and immense energy collapsed inward with violent intensity, as if pulled into a single point, and when the brilliance finally vanished, the hooded figure’s unscathed body was revealed for all to see.

Kirone was stunned.

Her subordinates were equally taken aback.

They had all seen Kirone’s attack, felt the power behind it, and they knew with absolute certainty that if any one of them had been in its path, they would be on the way to the afterlife by now.

The mere shockwaves of her attack had obliterated a significant portion of the automation army they’d been fighting and the fleet accompanying them.

Some had even been forced to divert their energy to protect the spacecraft housing Kirone’s parents, fearing that the attack might accidentally destroy the ship and harm its occupants.

And yet, when the blinding light of the attack finally dimmed, what remained was not the charred remains that everyone had expected, but the completely unscathed figure of the one responsible for the attack on Aidos and the abduction of the Xagna family.

Golden polygons of light began to manifest across the surface of the hooded figure’s body, appearing and expanding in rhythmic patterns like ripples across water. Layer by layer, they enveloped the figure, coalescing into a force field of pure light, charged with energy equal to that of the devastating attack Kirone had just unleashed.

It went without saying that the New gods were all stunned by the potency of the barrier that had completely absorbed Kirone’s attack.

Kirone herself was shocked too, though her astonishment stemmed from an entirely different cause.

As she observed the expanding polygons and the quivering force field holding the immense energy, her jaw dropped, and her eyes widened in disbelief.

“Those patterns…that cosmic energy lattice…” she muttered unconsciously, the recognition in her voice betraying her thoughts.

She recognised the lattice structure of the threads of cosmic energy woven together to block her attack.

How could she not, when she had been protected by that exact type of barrier multiple times before, and had even attempted to replicate it herself?

Its design and root structure were etched into her memory.

She had experienced both sides of a similar barrier, and now, faced with this one before her, she couldn’t hide her shock.

The feedback from her Chrono Space Dominion, dominating the surrounding space, confirmed what her eyes already told her: the structure of this barrier matched the one she remembered down to the minutest detail.

“That’s…Mallory’s…barrier?” The words slipped from her lips without conscious thought.

At that moment, the speed at which the golden polygons appeared accelerated, and the brightness of each polygon intensified.

Kirone’s eyes widened further as the realisation of what was coming dawned on her, but before she could sound a single warning to her subordinates, the barrier shattered, the energy contained within it erupting outward in a violent explosion.

The blast sent vast waves of power rolling outward, tearing through the fabric of spacetime itself and ripping open enormous fractures that spread in every direction.

Kirone and all of her subordinates were caught in those waves and hurled away like debris, their bodies flung across incomprehensible distances, with several dragged into the gaping tears in spacetime and expelled far into distant regions, some even cast beyond the bounds of the galaxy itself as space folded and collapsed behind them.

The automation army was erased almost instantly, their mechanical bodies breaking apart under the pressure of the energy until nothing recognizable remained, while the spacecraft carrying the Xagna family was torn apart as well, its structure failing as the blast tore through it and violently threw everyone inside into the vacuum of space, many of them sustaining injuries far worse than those they had already suffered.

Rilene and her husband, already badly wounded, were rendered unconscious by the sheer force of the blast, their bodies tumbling helplessly through space, and Mei was not spared either, as she had not yet completed her fusion with her soul fragment and was hit by the residual energy, worsening her condition.

Kirone’s attack, reflected and further amplified by cosmic energy, should have carved a far greater wound into the galaxy than the several light-year-wide void it left behind, but most of its power had been forced into damaging the bodies of multiple High-Tier Deities, leaving comparatively little to manifest as collateral destruction.

This was fortunate for the galaxy at large, but utterly disastrous for the Xagnas caught at the centre of it all.

Even Kirone herself did not escape unscathed, as the violent explosion shattered her Chrono Space Dominion.

This didn’t surprise her since she knew the power behind her attack, but it filled her with dread because she knew the power behind her attack, and she knew all too well that the barrier she had placed around the ship containing her parents was nowhere near strong enough to withstand it.

She forced a teleport through the unstable space, emerging at the blast’s ground zero seconds later, just in time to witness a strange phenomenon already unfolding.

All the magic within the hooded figure’s body, the magic they hadn’t used against Kirone, was consumed and combined with ambient cosmic energy and the power of the law of water to create a wave of black ice that expanded in every direction.

The ambient temperature that had soared from the earlier blast fell catastrophically, not through displacement or transfer, but through erasure, as heat itself vanished from the region, energy stripped of motion and vibration while space dimmed under the sudden absence of thermal activity.

Kirone arrived and collided with this wave of black ice mid-expansion, her body knocked back with frost covering all points of contact, her senses momentarily misfiring under the abrupt denial of heat and energy.

She shook her head and regained her balance, the frost melting away as she looked up to see the fully expanded wave of black ice that had frozen everything, from residual radiation to drifting planetary fragments, spacecraft, and automations.

All matter was reduced to inert fragments as atomic motion ceased entirely, cohesion failing not through force but through the simple impossibility of continued existence at minus 273 degrees Celsius, Absolute Zero.

Light itself vanished upon contact with the expanding ice, swallowed and nullified as propagation became impossible, and within moments the region compacted into a colossal construct, a star-sized mass of black ice suspended in space, within which no signal travelled, no energy circulated, and no life endured, the wounded, barely conscious Deity Level existences trapped inside managing only brief moments of resistance with their Authorities as cracks appeared across the black ice before sealing shut once more.

Then the black ice fractured.

The cracks spread instantly across the frozen mass, and the entire construct shattered into fine dust and frozen particles, dispersing outward and fading into inert remnants, leaving behind an empty vacuum where the battlefield had been, with no trace of wreckage, debris, or structure remaining.

Only one thing remained.

A single humanoid body drifted in the vacuum of space, ravaged by black frost and locked in near stillness, alive solely because an Authority over Ice allowed endurance under absolute zero, suspended there as the lone remnant of everything that had been erased.

“…eh?”

Kirone couldn’t believe her eyes.

She couldn’t believe the information her brain was processing.

And she couldn’t believe the feedback from her god Queen Authority, indicating that several ‘god Lords’ and ‘god King/Queen’ Authorities had been deactivated and returned to the Universe.

She couldn’t and refused to accept it.

After all, that could only occur if the individuals holding those Authorities relinquished them… or died.

The goddess desperately tried to deny reality as she rushed toward Mei’s half-frozen, drifting body, expanding her Chrono-Space Dominion to search for any others, but detected nothing besides Mei and the hooded figure responsible for this.

All of their magic power had been consumed to enact Absolute Zero, sustained and amplified with cosmic energy and an Authority equal in rank to the Authorities of the Deities targeted.

The Authorities of those Deities allowed resistance, but did not guarantee victory, since Authority Rank only determined the right to contest, not the outcome, which was dictated by the nature of the laws involved and the conditions under which they were exercised.

Most of the Deities targeted were already wounded, some unconscious, and even those still aware could not operate at full capacity, managing only brief resistance as cracks spread through the black ice before it re-solidified and sealed them completely.

The only reason Mei’s body remained intact, not reduced to fine dust and frozen particles, was her Authority over Ice, an alignment that made her naturally resistant and allowed her to endure where all others could not.

Kirone, however, wasn’t in the state of mind for that kind of analysis.

She summoned her spear without hesitation, charging straight at the exhausted figure without a word and swinging it down, aiming to cleave them in two.

They raised their hands, catching the spear in their palms and instantly releasing a burst of energy that sent Kirone back before she could overpower them physically and slice the spear through their hands.

Quickly, they dashed toward one of the nearest tears in space created by the earlier blast, and before leaving, their voice echoed across the vacuum in a discordant tone.

[yOuR peRSiStEnCE mAde thEM uSeLEsS As hOsTaGeS. yOu’Re tHe oNe PuShED mE tHiS fAr. rEGReT iT!]

With those words, they jumped into the tear a mere nano-second before it, and everything around it was carved out of the fabric of space by a violent mass of divinity ejected from Kirone’s hands.