In a way, the spherical Death Star resembled the form Profound Toxin had taken during A Greeting and All Right, Come Back Here For A Second in the sense that it glowed so strongly that it was difficult to look directly at it.

  It spun gently around its own axis as it hung suspended in mid-air above his open, upturned palm. Despite its small size and admittedly not very intimidating appearance, nobody had any inclination to snicker any longer. At this point, it was frighteningly clear just how powerful Eik had become. Especially considering the fact that he was holding back his power.

  Eik regarded the spinning globe, shifting its position to hover above his pointing index finger. The depths of power contained within its tiny boundary was perhaps the most potent he had ever felt from one of his own skills.

  To be completely honest, even Eik himself was a little apprehensive about testing the destructive capabilities of such an obviously offensively oriented skill in front of relatively low-ranked spectators among whom his friends stood, even if it did look more or less harmless.

  But surely it would be fine, no? After all, it had been pretty all right until then. Even the enormous chain explosion of the more than a million Living Manifestations, while causing destructive shock waves and sending people flying off their feet, hadn’t actually killed anyone outright.

  And it wasn’t like he wouldn’t be holding back on the power of the Death Star as well. Yeah, it would definitely be all right.

  In preparation for the launch of the Death Star, Eik set it into motion, upping the velocity of the rotation a thousand times over. And then another. The unimaginably dense sphere of energy shrieked horrifically as it spun so rapidly that it almost seemed to be threatening to tear itself apart under the force of the revolution. Even with his X-ranked control over his abilities, it took him a few moments to get a proper grip on the suddenly ferocious substance.

  It sent waves through air that seemed to warp space. Such was the power, that when those same wave reached the spectators, the weakest among them instantly collapsed to their knees and emptied the contents of their stomach onto the ground, even with several layers of protective barriers between them and Eik.

  Eik saw both Heath and Michael go down with the others and felt a panic take a hold of him. Unused to handling the Death Star, he didn’t have the time to even contemplate diminishing the sphere and instead opted for the much simpler solution of hurling it away like a scalding baked potato.

  Propelled forward by the revolution at absolutely extreme speeds, it soared through the air and struck the already crumbled rock face of the furthest mountain on the opposite side of the valley. The moment it left the vicinity, their symptoms of sickness quickly improved but Eik released Panacean Quintessence to flow in to treat the downed spectators just to be safe.

  As far as Eik could tell, they hadn’t been affected the usual poisonous effects of Profound Toxin, but rather by some other ailment, perhaps related to the way the Death Star’s activity had warped the air.

  Eik felt the Death Star sitting on the mountain as the afflicted got to their feet, his eyes picking up the slight glint of its form in the distance. It was reaching a breaking point now that it was out of his hands, so to speak.

  It was going to blow.

  “Wh-What the fuck was that?” shouted one of the onlookers who had been brought to his knees by the proximity of the Death Star. It was funny how fear could sometimes make people forget or ignore the fact that they were speaking to someone who was so powerful that the literal pressure of his anger could kill. “What are you trying to do to us, huh?”

  Eik turned to him with an arched brow. “I think the question you should be asking is, what did I just save you from getting vaporized by?” he replied and pointed to the mountain upon which the terrifyingly volatile Death Star rested.

  The man followed his finger with a frown of confusion, having missed the initial launch since his eyes had been on the ground. “How about you speak plai—”

  A soundless flash of azure lit up the horizon like an earthborn sun. Eik sensed it the moment it erupted.

  This thing was more powerful than he had expected by several magnitudes.

  Like an ever-growing dome of pure plasma, the blast obliterated absolutely everything in its path. With his reaction speed, Eik managed to just barely catch a glimpse as it swallowed each and every single one of the most distant mountains in its path toward them.

  He had made a fatal error in the calculation of his own might. What a blunder of an underestimation. Quicker than the blink of an eye, he was by the others and weaving his hands in complicated patterns to assist his mind as it thought up and constructed the dome of meter-thick reinforced crystal that would hopefully save them from certain annihilation.

  This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.

  Surprising even himself, the dome was finished before the primary wave of the Death Star detonation struck. Or rather, while it appeared to be a dome, it was actually a sphere of crystal with roots reaching hundreds of meters into the earth below.

  Touching Toxic Liquefaction for a moment, Eik transferred his body outside of the dome where Chop the Blade was already waiting for him, old and rusted blade drawn and held before him as he faced the blast. It struck Eik that it was the first time he had seen the old man facing a threat with such a serious expression on his wrinkled face.

  Like fuel poured on an ember, Backflow and True Toxic Harmony flooded Eik’s system and filled him with energy as a katana appeared in his hand. Taking up position by Chop’s side, he prepared to meet the surge of death.

  How fucking dumb was it to be forced to destroy your own attack because you didn’t even know how strong you were?

  “You had better give it more than what you showed last time!” Eik shouted as he raised his own sword. His movements were clumsy and amateurish compared to the god-like smoothness with which the old man’s blade seemed to cleave reality before he had even initiated the actual attack.

  “Earnest overhead slash!” the geezer shouted as his weapon descended like a world-cleaving axe.

  Eik did his best to imitate him, but the whole thing oozed of incompetence so he summoned Spaghetti Jones whose titanic head plunged through the clouds above like a bestial herald of the end. “Sic that explosion, boy!” he shouted as he sent hundreds of spears into the blast, accelerated into motion by a mental flex.

  Each of them erupted into counter blasts that seemed to take a bit of the oomph out of the Death Star but he didn’t dare supply too much power this close to the others, so they were not enough to matter on the overall ruin the catastrophic impact would cause. Luckily, Chop’s toolkit suited the task perfectly, and he had probably been expecting this crap to go wrong from the get-go, the jerk.

  His first earnest overhead slash sliced into the energy wave as if it was made of marshmallow, cleaving it down the middle and diverting the split around them and the dome. Dozens of additional slashes peeled away at the Death Star that just kept coming.

  Spaghetti Jones practically crashed into the ground, thrashing bodily against the pulse of destruction and deflecting the energy up and away. Damn, that boy was durable.

  Chunks of its thick membrane were torn off by the force, but just as when Eik himself had attempted to dismantle the serpentine beast on Toxin, even horrendous damage didn’t amount to anything crucial enough to make a difference. Sheer size allowed Spaghetti Jones to tank the blast.

  After another handful of seconds, the fatal bath of energy passed. What was left behind was nothing short of a smoldering wasteland. The mountains had been all but wiped off the face of the earth, leaving the topography altered to the point of being unrecognizable. What remained in the place they had stood just moments before was now little more than a few, smoking hills.

  The site of the most distant of them, the epicenter of the Death Star was a hole in the ground in the most literal sense. In the near future, what had been an enormous mountain valley would become a nice, quaint lake.

  Well, it might, once the vegetation eventually returned. If it ever did. This was a thorough eradication of life.

  Slowly, Eik let the protective layers of crystal melt away to let the couple of thousand spectators take a breath of the dusty air. They stumbled around in confusion, seemingly unable to fit together the sight of the wasteland with the otherwise lush landscape that they had been standing in the middle of just seconds earlier.

  “Wha… What in the world…?” someone muttered. Spaghetti Jones’ head and Chop the Blade’s counter attacks had blocked and deflected the blast to such a degree that a small island of relatively intact landscape remained, although both vegetation and any projecting rocks and other debris had been cleared away completely, the ground stood at nearly the level it had done before the blast, unlike the surroundings which had been shaved down considerably, even this far from the epicenter.

  “What happened here?” Andihar asked weakly, his eyes seeking Eik.

  “Goodness!” somebody else shrieked, stumbling backward and landing on their ass the moment they noticed Spaghetti Jones regarding them, his head tilted to side with curiosity. He was looking at them upside down, everything but his head still somewhere above the clouds. “What the fuck is that thing?”

  Similar reactions broke out throughout the crowd as the attention of the discombobulated people was drawn by the outburst. Immediately, attacks rained down upon Spaghetti Jones’ giant snout.

  The serpentine titan simply stared at the perpetrators, its slitted pupils briefly flitting to Eik, just to check if any of them were on his kill list. A total of twenty six Gohkamorians were among the attendees of his demonstration but even they weren’t worth it right now. They were more valuable as messengers to deliver anxious diarrhea to every leader of Gohkamoria anyway.

  Had this been a video game, Spaghetti Jones would not even have lost a single point of health from a health pool exceeding a billion.

  A sharp crack of a clap echoed, startling everybody. “All right, how about we leave by poor boy alone. He protected you, and this is how you repay him? For shame!” Eik shouted.

  “You tried to kill us!” someone shouted.

  “Incorrect!” Eik corrected with a raised finger. “I almost killed you by accident. But I saved you on purpose!”

  “You’re insane!” Many angry voices backed that statement, the brush with death riling up the crowd like a trampled anthill.

  “Hey, hey, now! None of you bastards were invited. You just turned up to my semi-private event without asking. Are you also going to complain when you’re drowning in a wad of quicksand you jumped into yourself, huh?”

  That shut them up and judging by the yelps and gasps of fright, if it hadn’t, Spaghetti Jones’ hurricane-like snort would have.

  “Well, one good thing came out of this, at least.”

  “What?” Heath asked with a concerned frown.

  “Now I know what these do!” Eik said with a shit-eating grin as another Death Star manifested in his palm.

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