Chapter 4002 The Power of a God
In the Battle between Gods and Heroes, ordinary soldiers didn't even qualify as cannon fodder.
No amount of attacks from mechs or even warships for that matter could possibly make a difference against those who wielded Saint Kingdoms and even stronger domain fields.
The very space around the powerful entities turned into impassable regions. Nothing could get past these powerful fields so long as their sources did not allow for it. Just this defensive measure alone was enough to make many mortals give up their futile thoughts of defeating their opposing gods!
Even expert pilots such as Venerable Dorsa Avinx found herself unqualified to join the ranks of the heroes that fought at this crucial level.
She had only tried to attack the Cold One once with her submachine gun before she personally felt how the dark god easily crushed her resonance-empowered attacks without conscious effort!
That brief moment of contact caused the Hexer expert pilot's hardened will to almost get frozen by the Cold One's unimaginably powerful domain!
"How can I possibly help the Superior Mother fend off these dark gods?" Venerable Avinx murmured.
Given her low qualifications, she had no choice but to turn her Valkyrie Reaper's death-seeking spear against the more mundane forces of the Oblivion Empire.
"All we can do is spread more death!"
As the Valkyrie Reaper and many other mechs of the Oblivion Army resisted the advance of the Abyssal Army, the battle taking place far above continued to shake and warp the surrounding space to a concerning degree!
The fabric of spacetime was already significantly weaker in the Nyxian Gap. The anomalous region made it easier for entities such as the Oblivion Empress and the dark gods to exert their respective powers, but it also posed greater hazards to the surrounding mortal forces!
Normally, Lady Nyx and the dark gods would put some effort into taming the instability of the surrounding space in order to protect their subordinates.
Neither side had the luxury to care about that right now as they focused all of their power and concentration on defeating their current opposition!
Cynthia Larkinson did not make it easy for her two powerful opponents to gain the upper hand.
When her power alone failed to shake the combined efforts of the Patient One and the Massive One, she began to harness the power and authority that she had partially wrested from the Nyxian Gap!
"This region has a far greater history than humanity in this galaxy! Let me introduce to you the ghosts that haunt the Gap!"
The Lady of the Night seemed to meld with the local space. Slowly but surely, a huge swirl of shackled and tortured apparitions came into form!
These horrible alien souls uttered silent screams as their trapped forms sought freedom that was never attainable.
Even though they had never been able to extricate themselves from their eternal predicament, that did not mean they were unable to inflict harm.
As soon as Cynthia summoned the ghosts, they pelted and ravaged the invisible fields surrounding the dark gods!
It was a pity that the effect was not as powerful as he hoped.
The Massive One's immensely powerful gravity force went beyond the physical and was able to crush intangible entities with just as much ease!
Meanwhile, the Patient One was even more direct in his successful attempt to fend off the large amount of ghosts. The sage-like man used one of his long nails to trace a circle.
As soon as he did so, the flow of ghosts heading into his direction slowed down until it practically froze!
While this did not cause the ghosts to disappear, their snail pace meant that they no longer actively battered against the defenses of the dark gods.
"You do not control that power. It is useless for you to direct such pathetic means against a god." The Patient One contemptuously said.
"You are not gods." Cynthia scoffed as she prepared her next attack.
"No, but we are the closest to them. Let us show you how true power should be wielded!"
The large, black orb that represented the Massive One uttered a soundless but painful roar as a fragment of its spherical form suddenly tore away on its own accord!
The long and thin shard of the Massive One's body oriented one of its sharp points towards the Oblivion Empress.
As soon as it locked onto its target, the Massive One exerted his gravity power to repel the shard, causing it to shoot forward at great speed!
Cynthia already knew that she was unable to dodge the attack, so she raised a hand and formed a more solid energy shield in an attempt to block or at least weaken the incoming blow.
Yet before the shard of the Massive One was able to arrive, the Patient One pointed his finger at the projectile, causing two more shards to appear from slightly different timelines!
The Lady of the Night was barely able to reinforce the power of her shield as the three powerful shards struck in quick succession!
Several explosions of light and energy temporarily blocked the view of the soldiers fighting below.
When the interference disappeared, everyone tried to see whether the Oblivion Empress had suffered serious harm.
The threat and power exuded by the shards of the Massive One had been formidable!
There was no way an attack that prompted one of the dark gods to sacrifice a part of his own body was weak!
Yet much to everyone's amazement, the Lady of the Night managed to avoid getting impaled by the three shards!
The reason for that wasn't because Cynthia had been able to summon enough power to repel the triple strikes by herself.
It turned out that another god-like entity had arrived to reinforce Lady Nyx's defenses at the last instant!
Many mech pilots and soldiers, particularly those that had joined the side of the Oblivion Empire, stalled for a moment.
"THE SUPERIOR MOTHER IS HERE!"
"Witness our courage, Supreme!"
"We shall smite your enemies on your behalf!"
Every former member of the Hex Army became invigorated as the Superior Mother personally manifested on this battlefield!
As soon as they regained their wits, they fought with greater motivation than ever before!
The Valkyrie mechs fighting against the Abyss troops even showed greater power as their glows received a substantial boost in their power!
The dark gods didn't care about all of that. Mortals were completely dispensable in their eyes. What mattered more was that another powerful entity had joined the Battle of Gods and Heroes!
In contrast to the dark and ominous form of the Oblivion Empress, the Superior Mother radiated power in a much more overt manner!
Though she actually harnessed multiple attributes at once, at this time her death aspect had become abnormally strong.
The Superior Mother had always been gathering the power of death ever since the Hexers started to fight and kill in her name!
Each Valkyrie mech that slaughtered an enemy and each of their mech pilots that fell in battle inevitably enriched the Superior Mother's aspect step by step.
Though the death of a single ordinary soldier was trivial to the Supreme, the accumulated deaths of billions of soldiers and civilians all added up to a frightening amount of accumulation!
Not only that, but all of the fighting that took place in the Nyxian Gap also fueled her death aspect even further.
This was because the Cynthia Larkinson and the Superior Mother shared an unbreakable bond!
From the moment of her emergence, the Superior Mother had turned into Lady Nyx's incarnation by accident.
While both intangible women mostly kept to themselves most of the time, when they truly needed to, they were able to call upon each other's help and combine each other's power!
Right now, the Oblivion Empress and the Superior Mother formed a united front. Two different women stood against the dark gods that sought to crush one of the apostates that had eluded their pursuit for a long time.
While the Massive One expended a large amount of energy to heal his broken form, the Patient One sneered while stroking his long beard.
"The appearance of a false god shall not avail you, apostate. This 'Superior Mother' that we have heard so much about is a disappointment. Her elements are grossly out of harmony."
Cynthia raised her fist, causing the space around the two dark gods to turn turbulent!
"You stand no chance against the killer weapons that I have prepared against you parasites!"
While the Lady of the Night used her partial control over the Nyxian Gap to inhibit the movements of the dark gods, the Superior Mother finished charging up her attack and unleashed a powerful ray of death!
The ancestral spirit of the Hexer people had already turned gray and black after she had started to channel her immense accumulation of death energy.
The massive death ray she had unleashed was powerful enough to snuff out the spirits of almost every soldier on the battlefield without getting hindered by any energy shield or armor!
When the Superior Mother fired it at the Massive One in a concentrated form, there was no chance for the dark gods to evade or block the incoming death energy beam.
The Patient One tried to slow the passage of time in the space traversed by the beam, but the death energy was so corrosive that it killed the dark god's extension of his power!
As for the Massive One, the heaviest dark god attempted to take away the Lady of the Night's control of the surrounding space by increasing his mass to a terrifying degree.
The Massive One formed a gravity well that was so powerful that it almost turned into a singularity!
The space around the giant black sphere curved so much that it was almost able to bend the passage of the death energy beam!
Yet even in this case, the Superior Mother's death energy beam still retained so much power that it literally killed the opposing gravity forces that attempted to divert the incoming attack!
A fluctuation ran through the Massive One's body as the death energy beam struck the dark god without any hindrance!
The Massive One immediately experienced a loss of vitality. Part of his spherical body grew gray and lifeless.
When the Superior Mother finally couldn't sustain the beam anymore, over half of the Massive One's body had lost any signs of life!
"Did you think that would change the results of this battle? You are too naive. A false god does not have that power." The Patient One taunted!
As Cynthia continued to attack and constrain her two opponents, she became dismayed when she saw the Massive One recover from the Superior Mother's powerful strike!
The dark god had indeed suffered a lot of damage, but he simply commanded his dead portions to crumble away before drawing a massive amount of energy from his reserves to form a complete body again!
Though Cynthia was happy to have forced the Massive One to squander his energy, she was less pleased to see that the Superior Mother's best efforts failed to inflict any lasting damage!
She knew extremely well that if this battle came down to a contest between energy reserves, her side would definitely lose!
"It's time, Superior Mother."
Cynthia directed a glance full of meaning towards her own incarnation.
The silent personification of the six aspects of hexism did not need to issue her own response.
She had been preparing for this moment for over nine months.
While the Patient One and the Massive One began to grow suspicious at what this supposed 'false god' would do next, the Superior Mother began to channel more death energy than ever before!
This time, the spiritual entity did not gather all of that energy onto her hand in an attempt to unleash another beam attack.
Instead, the Superior Mother resolutely channeled all of her accumulated death energy into her abdomen, or more precisely the place where her womb should be located if she was a regular woman!
The sight completely stumped the dark gods. Neither the Patient One nor the Massive One understood the significance of this action.
That didn't stop them from intensifying their attacks in order to stop whatever the Superior Mother was doing!
"Never stand in the way of a mother!" Cynthia roared as she did not hesitate to drain her reserves to shield her powerful incarnation from incoming attacks!
Try as they might, neither the Patient One nor the Massive One possessed enough of an advantage to overcome Lady Nyx's blockade, at least in a short period of time!
Cynthia bought plenty of time for the Superior Mother to prepare for one of the most important moments of her spiritual existence!
Every nearby Hexer began to feel a special calling. The soldiers unreservedly worshiped the Superior Mother while passing along whatever they could give to their object of worship!
Not just the mech pilots, but also the living mechs offered their tribute! The Valkyrie mechs piloted by the Wrathful Doves that had been able to survive up to this day had harvested many lives throughout their time in service.
Each of them grew lighter and less ominous as they all passed on the remnants of their harvests to their all-powerful design spirit.
This phenomena did not just take place in the vicinity of Shardeen Fortress.
Beyond the boundaries of the Nyxian Gap and many light-years away, the surviving Valkyrie mechs and mech pilots each froze whenever possible and donated as much death energy and spiritual feedback as they could provide!
In fact, they didn't have too much to give because they already passed on much of their harvest in previous instances!
Whatever the case, the Superior Mother separated all of the excess death energy that she was able to gather and concentrated it into one of the most remarkable babies to have ever taken shape!
Motherly smiles appeared on the faces of the Oblivion Empress and the Superior Mother. They gazed at the forming spiritual fetus.
However, the concentration of so much death energy did not achieve the desired result!
Despite the fact that the Superior Mother had channeled some of her life energy into the fetus, her baby had yet to move!
The Oblivion Empress took the initiative to donate her own life energy to the silent fetus, but that made no difference.
Cynthia wasn't too upset about this sight. She had already expected that they might encounter this result.
"You know what to do." She softly communicated to her incarnation.
The Superior Mother diverted a fraction of her attention and cast her gaze and consciousness hundreds of thousands light-years away. She stopped extending her awareness as soon as she reached a particular location in the Red Ocean Dwarf Galaxy.
Inside a capital ship parked in high orbit of Davute VII, a certain mech designer was dead asleep as he lay next to his wife.
A giant feminine hand suddenly manifested above his body and reached straight into his head!
"Whu!"
The hand held the shape of a purple spiritual cat in its grasp!
As the Superior Mother's intangible hand shook and squeezed, Blinky unconsciously vomited out a spray of life-attributed energy that was unique to Ves!
The Superior Mother's limb dropped Blinky back into Ves' mind before ingesting Ves' energy.
As it disappeared, the main manifestation of the Supreme shone her eyes as she channeled the siphoned energy into her womb!
It was as if she introduced light in the midst of darkness.
After the baby made out of almost pure concentrated death energy obtained the spark of life, the Superior Mother's spiritual offspring finally came to life!
Try as they might, the dark gods were unable to stop the Superior Mother from doing something that gave them a faint sense of crisis.
Even as Cynthia herself suffered increasingly more severe wounds that she could not easily heal, her bloodied face displayed an increasingly more gleeful grin.
"Helena, come to life so that you may bring death to your enemies!"
Naturally, the Superior Mother did not undergo a normal process of childbirth. As a powerful spiritual entity who was giving birth to another spiritual energy, her process was a lot more direct and accelerated!
Fueled by the charm of Ves' life energy, the fetus of the Superior Mother's firstborn daughter emerged from the womb and ballooned into a powerful gray spiritual entity that was almost as large as her mother!
Every Hexer observing this magical process of childbirth became absolutely feverish at the sight!
The Superior Mother had given birth!
Not only that, but her child had become the purest embodiment of death!
A name seemed to descend in their minds. Each of them silently congratulated the Supreme for gaining a powerful daughter!
Already, the collective imagination of the Hexers came up with a range of monikers!
"Helena, the Daughter of Death!"
"Helena, the Vengeance of the Hexers!"
"Helena, the Eldest Sister!"
As soon as the short but exceptional process of childbirth and growth had run its course, the giant manifestation of a grey-robed girl had fully taken shape!
Appearing as a teenager who was around 18 to 20 years old, the young woman looked both youthful while at the same time radiating so much restrained death that many people seemed to foresee their own demise if they looked too closely at the newborn spirit!
An impudent smirk appeared on her smooth and lovely face. She seemed to see everyone and everything around her as amusing toys.
The only exceptions were the Superior Mother and the Oblivion Empress.
The Daughter of Death showed genuine love when she directed her gaze towards her mothers.
Helena finally started to make her first move.
Just because she was barely a minute young didn't mean she was as ignorant as an actual baby!
Both of her hands began to glow in ominous gray as Helena gathered concentrated death energy of a considerable higher quality than harnessed by the Superior Mother!
As a spiritual entity that was solely based around the power of death, Helena's mastery of this aspect surpassed that of her mother!
The Patient One and the Massive One didn't remain still.
They attempted to interrupt whatever the Daughter of Death was doing, but now that the Superior Mother had joined the injured Oblivion Empress' side, the dark gods became less able to overcome the blockade!
Once Helena finished gathering all of the concentrated death energy that she was able to collect, she opened her mouth and soundlessly conveyed her first words to every god, hero and mortal on the battlefield.
"No one can escape death."
Soon after that, the concentrated power of death exploded from her hands!
An expanding sphere of grayish energy expanded from her position and washed over everyone and everything on the battlefield!
Whenever it passed through the bodies of the soldiers of the Oblivion Army, the potent death energy passed them by without inflicting any harm.
The same could not be said for the soldiers of the Abyssal Army. The followers of the dark gods found that their patrons did not avail them as the expanding death energy snuffed out their spirits without resistance!
Tens of thousands of active mechs and thousands of scattered ships all lost control as soon as the astonishing death sphere passed through their forms without obstruction!
Not even the gods and heroes on the side of the Abyssal Empire remained unscathed!
The expert pilots fighting on the side of the dark gods suffered greatly as the Daughter of Death's discharge of excess energy overwhelmed their powerful wills!
In the end, the only enemies to have retained their lives were the dark gods themselves, but none of them had been able to remain unscathed!
The Cold One fared best out of the three present on this battlefield. She was located further away and only got struck by Helena's first ever outburst when it was already dilated over a wider distance.
The Patient One and the Massive One were less fortunate, however!
Not only were they much closer to the Daughter of Death when she unleashed her initial attack, Helena also made sure to direct a lot more death energy in the direction of her main opponents!
The Patient One and the Massive One had combined their forces in order to form a united defense.
Yet when Helena's stupendously powerful energy attack proved too much to bear, the Patient One instantly repositioned himself behind the Massive One's body!
The Massive One, who had already expended much of his energy during this battle, found that the death energy was so powerful and so concentrated that his entire black body perished within an instant!
By the time the expanding sphere of death energy finally faded in the distance, no one made any overt moves.
The lifeless body of the Massive One no longer restored to life.
Instead, it crumbled entirely, showing that each and every trace of the dark god had died in truth!
The heavily-injured Patient One looked horrified as he cradled his necrotic arm. The surviving dark god was unable to imagine how an entity with so much death was able to come to life! The existence of Helena was a living contradiction!
"H-How?"
The Superior Mother's daughter playfully smirked. "Death has no need to explain herself."
The Daughter of Death had spoken!