"Namu, Tenman Daijizaiten—"
The voice was low and vast, and it cut through every other sound on the field, echoing clear above the battle.
The Nio Guardian King, that thing which seemed to have no physical body at all, moved. [Remember this site's domain — for idle reading pick Tiantian Novels, ttks.tw, pure comfort]
Its blurred face turned toward the helicopters circling overhead, the red glare of its burning eyes swelling brighter, and its four arms raised the phantom outlines of enormous blades.
The apparition sharpened until it was unbearably distinct — eyes glaring wide, four arms spread. It had not yet swung, and still that coiled, waiting posture seemed ready to split the entire sky open, radiating a pressure that made the soul shudder.
"That's… what is that thing?"
High above, a pilot shouted the words like a man who had lost the ability to understand what he saw.
Across the whole battlefield — the routed soldiers, the officers inside the command vehicle, even the crews in the helicopters — every heart felt as though a mountain had been set down on top of it, and a terror rooted in pure animal instinct swallowed them whole.
"—Cut down their momentum with sword-qi…!"
The Nio Guardian King moved with the words. Four hands gripped the phantom of that blood-colored greatsword the way a man lifts a crushing weight, its immense frame settling into the stance of a gathering strike.
Momentum, wound to its absolute limit, detonated.
The blood mist hanging in the air dropped all at once. Everyone inside that field of pressure heard the same droning roar go off inside their skulls, and their vision filled with an all-drowning crimson sword-light.
It was not light the eyes could see. It was the aftermath of consciousness being forcibly flooded.
Bearing that formless, substanceless yet crushing pressure, the pilot in the lead helicopter felt his head about to split and his heart stutter toward a stop. The view ahead warped, the feel of the aircraft drained out of his hands, and the helicopter began to buck violently.
"This single stroke is my Way of the Void, my whole life! Ishana, Great Celestial Phenomenon—!!!"
The Nio Guardian King loosed a soundless roar, and the blood-red greatsword — killing intent and life force condensed into steel — came down at the sky.
What it swung was not a single blade of sword-qi. It was a phenomenon of heaven itself.
A torrent of slaughter woven from endless crimson sword-pressure, dense enough to devour light.
The lead pilot saw only red, filling his entire field of vision, rushing at his face. The next instant the airframe and every scrap of his awareness were swallowed whole by that annihilating pressure.
A roar tore the air apart.
A gorgeous, cruel flower of blood-colored fire bloomed in the sky.
The other two helicopters hauled desperately for altitude, and it was already far too late. Before the light of the first blast had faded, the Nio's four arms had swung around, and the blood-red greatsword swept across the sky at a speed that had no business belonging to something that size, streaking toward the second helicopter as it clawed for height.
"No—!"
The scream was cut off by red light.
Steel shrieked, then thunder.
Tough alloy fuselage, spinning rotors, thick armored glass — where that crimson sword-light passed, they parted like butter under a heated knife, sliced smoothly in two, collapsing into a second swelling fireball that fell out of the sky.
The pilot of the third helicopter, terror shredding him from the inside, shoved the stick to its stop. It made no difference. The Sword Force came down heavy as a mountain range collapsing, sealing off every direction he might have turned to escape.
In an instant a thicker, denser bloom of blood-red light burst in the air and wrapped the helicopter completely. When the glare thinned, only burning fragments remained, drifting down like rain.
From the Nio Guardian King taking shape to three helicopters becoming wreckage: one breath.
Beside the command vehicle, the savage grin on the Superintendent-General's face had not finished setting before it froze into something dead.
His mouth hung open and nothing came out of it. Blank eyes stared up at that guardian figure, his slack face as expressionless as a dead fish.
"Run! Run, now!"
The Deputy Superintendent-General reacted first, because the Nio Guardian King had already lifted a fourth blade.
He hauled hard at the Superintendent-General's arm. The Superintendent-General, hollowed out and stumbling, caught one foot against the other and went down on the ground. The Deputy Superintendent-General did not look back. He abandoned his superior and ran for his life.
"No use… it's no use…"
The Superintendent-General came back to himself, looked up at that enormous sword aimed straight at heaven, and a wretched smile spread over his face.
Then the blade fell.
The will to annihilate pressed down like something solid. Wherever the greatsword of blood mist passed, the air let out a low rumbling boom as it was crushed and burst layer by layer. Sword-pressure and Sword Force together — before the edge had even reached the command vehicle, every person in that area felt the illusion of their own soul being squeezed bodily out of them by the weight.
No one could move. No one could breathe. Nothing could be done. Even the Deputy Superintendent-General, who had run a step earlier than the rest, stood rooted where he was like a wooden puppet.
The next moment, the sword arrived.
A boom beyond anything before it split the night, and the earth convulsed.
With the command vehicle at its center, ten meters of ground in every direction caved and burst as though struck by a meteor. Steel, glass, human bodies, mud and broken stone were ground together by a force nothing could resist and blown out into a dust storm mixed with blood mist.
Four blades fallen, the Nio Guardian King's vast body blurred. The blood mist that composed it drifted apart bit by bit and finally vanished into the thickening dark and the reek of blood, as if it had never been there at all.
All that remained was ruin, wreckage, and blood, spread from end to end.
Swordmaster Tomie lay on the blood-soaked broken soil.
Her condition was, admittedly, not great.
Autocannon fire had torn a huge gap through her from left shoulder to right flank, organs faintly visible inside it. Her right leg was bent backward below the knee with white bone jutting out. Her right arm had been reduced to pulp, and her tachi was broken into several pieces.
The damage was closing, though — like time running backward, the ruined flesh regenerating at tremendous speed.
In moments Swordmaster Tomie was whole again. Only her clothes were beyond saving, so she pulled a coat off one of the corpses and put it on.
Autocannons really were over the line. The shells had come close to shredding her outright.
But before her body was torn apart, Swordmaster Tomie had used the environment she herself had created to reproduce Miyamoto Musashi's Noble Phantasm — Six Realms Five Rings: Kurikara Celestial Phenomenon.
The life force a Soul Reviver summons is, in essence, the unspent remainder of a lifespan released by a human or an animal or a plant at the moment of death.
And the soldiers Swordmaster Tomie had cut down were men in their prime, strong and healthy, with sixty or seventy years still owed to each of them.
The life force left behind after their deaths, drawn out and given physical form by Swordmaster Tomie through the Soul Reviver's Sword and the Breathing Method, then fused with her Sword Force, had been forged into a single Nio Guardian King.
A Nio Guardian King built from several thousand years of stolen lifespan surpassed Swordmaster Tomie's own body by an enormous margin, in sheer presence and in raw output alike. It was her ultimate technique, and where purely physical destruction was concerned, it fell not one bit short of the current Ultraseven.
She swept her gaze around in a full circle. As far as she could see, no one was still standing.
All dead?
Swordmaster Tomie considered the question for about a second, then let it go.
The objective was achieved. Even if a few had fled or were playing dead, they weren't worth hunting down.
Swordmaster Tomie set off, stepping over the wreckage that covered the ground, walking toward the main hall.
____
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