Soul of Searing Steel

When Joshua and Nostradamus began another pursuit against the Void Mother in the Beam System, a tense atmosphere was spreading amidst the Midgardian Fleet Command Center in the Sixth Trail of the Sea God Star Fortress after they had lost most of their psionic sensors along the way and hence was left in the dark.

"Hurry up. Aren't the calibrations ready?" The Commander of the First Fleet was pacing around irritably in the meeting room. From time to time, he would level an angry glare at the blank screen, look up into the distant space or sigh heavily. Even so, the most the middle-aged Midgardian could do was ask after the technical department with an urgent tone.

Having heard the inquiry from a commanding officer, a calm, feminine voice responded from the other end of the communications tool.

"Sir! The emergency assembly is unfinished, but the technical department is understaffed—"

"Almost every surviving elite engineer from two different star systems are under your disposal!" The Commander retorted with a tinge of unreasonable demeanor, cutting the other person short. "Deal with it! I want to hear that your department has accomplished your task!"

"…Yes, Sir!"

Having heard the exchange, the Commanders of the Second and Third Fleets shook their heads slightly. Be that as it may, the Commander of the First Fleet understood that he had been behaving unreasonably. He certainly knew what labor was required for 'that'—something like completing their task in three hours was nothing less than a blind order.

Even so, the Midgardians no longer any time for delays. The Void Mother and countless Void aberrations had arrived at their system, and were undergoing a battle that exceeds several astronomical units. To utterly wipe out those pestilences of the universe, the Midgardians could not sit idly by and watch as those two sides fought their own battles—they must join the fight.

"Those monsters… Even the Main Fleet had trouble dealing with them, and yet they were as trivial as dust to those two Beings…" The First Fleet Commander calmed himself, suppressing the terror in his heart. "Still, at least they're at least. And if 'that' is completed, we would at least have some countermeasures be it Void Mother or Void Being."

There was a nervously-charge atmosphere around the entire Sea God Star Fortress. The three fleets were now undergoing extra repairs and temporary strengthening, with every Midgardian engineer virtually ignoring all matters related to price-quality ratio. They had moved all external attachments and sensors from the fortress to all remaining warships and starfighters, for everyone knew that if they lose this one battle, this planetary region had no future to speak of—it was far better to squander all funds and resources now than to have it all be destroyed by the Void aberrations.

It was at that moment that an emergency transmission arrived at the command center.

"Gravity shift detected! The distortion of dimensional pathways is pointing to the Void Mother's imminent approach to the Ambroya Asteroid Belt—toward us!"

"Why?!"

Everyone in the command center paused at once, but being handpicked cream of the crop, all of them swiftly recovered.

"Could it be," one of them, a Midgardian whose chest was decorated full of honor medals, conjectured gloomily, "that the Void Mother had gotten rid of the two Void Beings from the Mother Planet?"

The overtly-pessimistic opinion was synchronously disregarded by everyone present. Adjusting the screen, the Third Fleet Commander displayed the detected gravity trail, calmly analyzing even as his cheek muscles tightened. "Incorrect. The Void Mother's change of direction was too sudden—instead of saying that it was naturally coming to wipe us out after it had gotten rid of its opponents, it would a better guess that it was changing paths urgently after being dealt a certain blow!"

In other words, it was running away after being beaten. Everyone knew what the Third Fleet Commander was saying, but none dared to agree with his notion since it was much more unbelievable than that pessimistic conjecture before. It was not as if they had not seen the Void Mother's psionic gravity shield—the Void Saint be praised, it was a defense that was barely penetrated by countless simultaneously unleashed luminous lances! Unless those two Void Beings could move a dozen-kilometer class meteor to strike it at terminal velocity, even Sina could not come up with any way to break the Void Mother's psionic shield.

Indeed, the commander's guess was not wrong. The Void Mother had certainly turned away haggardly after being pounded by a gigantic asteroid that was accelerated to unimaginable speeds.

Still, the damage it received was not as serious as it had been on the surface.

The colossal Void Mother was still moving swiftly amidst the vacuum of the universe. The dimensional distortion it wrought with psionic energies, combined with its voluminous mass, had pulverized every aberration and small asteroids, while the sporadic injuries over its body were quickly regenerating to its original state at a visible speed.

Green blood flowed backward, returning into its body as if alive, while charred and severed muscles curled, reattaching themselves into a complete part. Its thick and sturdy chitin shells and its assorted tumorous organs grew like mushrooms after rain, multiplying and regenerating over both inside and outside of the Void Mother. As Joshua and Nostradamus frowned at it while trying to keep up, it incessantly absorbed Void aberrations as nutrients, speedily regenerating its own power to its peak.

The old mage even suspected that it would soon abruptly stop, turn around and launch a counter-offensive. If that was the case, he and Joshua would have to turn as well and make evasive maneuvers despite their thrilling pursuit now.

"It won't turn back."

Suddenly, Joshua was speaking into the spiritual link as if he could discern Nostradamus's worries. "It now knows that our power is capable of injuring it—that is why before it could attain sufficient inorganic matter to regenerate and repair its psionic shield organ, it would never risk attacking us again."

The warrior's words were so assuring that it calmed the old mage considerably. Even so, Joshua went on, his tone abruptly changing. "Regardless, it is ultimately a lifeform of Chaos, nor could I ascertain if it would play its cards according to logic—"

"Then why are you chasing after it so tightly?!" At those worlds, Nostradamus almost did not stop the teleportation spell he was casting, and quickly pressed on. "If we're too close when it turns back to attack us, we can't just evade it—we'd have to fight it head on!"

At the moment, the two Legendary champions were just two hundred kilometers away from the Void Mother—with their respective speeds, it would not take a second for them to run into each other. Still, Joshua's gaze appeared to be deep as he shook his head in response to Nostradamus's doubts. "We don't have any other chance," he said with a low voice. "There's this one opening at least for the moment."

"If the Void Mother recovers its psionic shield, it would be almost impossible for us to deal a blow on it like before with its wariness now. It would hence be horrendously difficult to kill it, which is why we must deal an irreversible blow on it in a single breath."

"We can't let any chance go if we don't want to chase that monster for months across this system!"

Nostradamus could understand the reason behind those words—and Joshua was not wrong. The setback just now was but a moment of carelessness for the colossal Chaos minion. If it had indeed fought seriously from the start, it is their duo who would be at a disadvantage. And if both sides could not find a meaningful edge over each other, the planetary system as their battlefield, they would have to turn their tactics from a brief sniper warfare into an extended and mobile one, and who knows how long that would last.

If Joshua was alone and the old mage did not come, it would have been genuine attritional combat. Until now, the Void Mother never revealed any blows that could cut through Joshua's defense, while Joshua would in turn had no way of vanquishing the infinite aberrations or swiftly punch through its psionic shields—the difficulty of the labor would have increased over ten times.

"Could you hurry?" Joshua asked, discontinuing the topic at hand while the old mage sent him through multiple short-distance teleportations. "This distance is still a little far, my attacks can't reach the Void Mother."

"It's not that I can't, but you're too heavy—you mass is affecting the opening of portals, and I can't guarantee teleportation precision if we go any faster."

"…"

While they were discussing further the ensuing battle, both men noticed that the Void Mother was rapidly changing its form after most recovering from its injury.

A layer of protective shell that glinted in dark, cold light now covered its dark green body of flesh, while a thin layer of transparent crystal substance was now shrouded over its weak compound at its front end. Its dozens of mountainous reproductive tracts were completely sealed and enveloped by heavy shielding, while the Void Mother's own spherical form had elongated into an ellipsis similar to a spindle.

Beyond that, the Void Mother's incalculable tentacles were hurriedly degenerating along with incredible lifeforce conversion, finally turning into bone spines that were short but sharp and covering its ellipsis body. Unlike the 'fortress mothership' form it used against the Midgardians and the Folbians, the Void Mother has completely changed into a combat form specialized against superior beings!

Though Legendary Chaos minions lack in intelligence, they have combat instincts and ultimately know how to tailor their evolution and shift in accordance with the enemy. In the brief second that its new form was completed, the endless bone spines degenerated from tentacles shot out at once from its body—dense and as numerous as the stars, the black bone spines shot towards both Nostradamus and Joshua like cannonballs, flickering in dark green psionic light!

Such a pure physical attack would have been fine against a Midgardian warship fleet formation, but frivolous to the warrior. Joshua merely had to assemble his Steel Sword out of the Void to distort the trajectory bone spine smiles through profound gravity shift, catching the Void Mother in the shockwave and utterly shattering huge layers of shell over its body. However, the Void Mother was unperturbed, and merely grew another cluster of spines over its body and released them again. This time, the spines could shift their trackway through psionic energy, an ability similar to torpedoes.

The pursuit and counterattack within the inner reaches of the system had exceeded astronomical distances, but with both sides unable to do anything to each other, they all hence arrived at the asteroid belt.

The Ambroya Asteroid Belt was hypothesized to be the remains of a super-meteor wandering outside the system. The lengthy debris zone and multitudinous metal stone pieces orbited around the path of the original planet, staying there quietly for millions of years in that planetary region—apart from the few uninvited guests at present.

Twisting the dimensions, the Void Mother drove itself forward with psionic energy and hurried towards a location where the asteroid cluster was denser. Its lamprey-like mandibles slowly opened at the fore, revealing its infinite, sharp and tightly arranged 'teeth' within, tools that could directly shatter ten-kilometer class asteroids into shards—it even appeared impatient to fulfill its purpose and attain diverse minerals its body needed.

But would Joshua and Nostradamus sit and watch idly by as their opponent recovered its ability? At that moment, the old mage activated the special circle he had constructed in the pursuit just now, and so a dozen layers of colossal halos of lightning appeared in the vacuum, with Joshua's giant form standing by at its tip while sensing the powerful electromagnetism and accelerations surrounding himself. Then, as Nostradamus enlivened the formation in its entirety, the warrior's body shout out like a missile accelerated to maximum velocity, instantly passing through the dozens of electromagnetic accelerating tracks and crashed towards the Void Mother head on!

The Void Mother's back was armed with over hundreds of enormous psionic flows, with each capable of blowing away an entire city. It was also why the pair did not catch up to it for so long—it was interfering greatly with their teleportation. But with Joshua's current physical endurance and speed, the little flow would not affect him, and within seconds, the warrior almost struck the Void Mother due to a variance in speed.

The keyword being almost, because the Void Mother had changed its heading to evade Joshua, preventing that troublesome foe from arriving onto its body, allowing Joshua to overshoot and arrive before it. However, that was exactly what Nostradamus and the warrior wanted—by arriving before the Void Mother to that dense asteroid belt, Joshua swept his gaze around before rapidly firing up the Nuclear Heart Furnace before his chest. As his Steel Strength activated, every matter that was correlated to regenerating its psionic shield crystals were entirely absorbed by the warrior, whereas any that he could not assimilate was destroyed to the point that the Void Mother would need a few days to use it after it absorbed the debris.

You wanted this? There's no way I'm giving it to you!

It was a strategy with the least guile. If the Void Mother did not evade, Joshua would have arrived over its body, coming in contact with it at zero distance—or perhaps negative distance—when that time comes, the minion serving the Evil God of Pestilence would approximately experience the sensation once felt by the broken bodies of the minions loyal to the Evil Gods of Famine and Calamity, as well as the Evil God of Air. But if it did, the Void Mother would definitely slow down when it changed its path and allow Joshua to pass by it, whereby Joshua would use his Steel Strength at full tilt to collect the microscopic precious resources it needed, reducing its efforts to abject failure.

 Nonetheless, the Void Mother did not throw a fit or hesitate. Having seen that all the resources it needed had been plundered and destroyed, it turned away post-haste and headed for another region filled with asteroids. As a creature of Chaos, it could not be described as having no feelings—it simply did not fuss too much about it, for if this region was useless, it could just move to the next. When it came to an attritional standoff, it did not feel that it could lose.

Still, if the beast could conclude as such, would two Legendary champions be unable to? All of it was a mere trap set by the duo for the Void Mother—Nostradamus had been staying immobile since he catapulted Joshua with electromagnetic acceleration when it changed its bearings towards another resource zone. Both his hands were raised high over his head, with familiar yet profound dimensional undulation gathering over his palms.

—Target locked.

—Trajectory estimations complete.

—Acceleration commenced, counting down to impact in 10, 9…

Apart from that robust shield, the Void Mother had the bothersome aspect of its speed which completely did not match its size. Just as Joshua had mentioned the four suggestions during his exchange with the Mother Tree in the Midgardian home planet, the Void Mother would never be struck by asteroids given its speed—that previous hit had been due to the opportunity presented when the monster itself being briefly paused by Joshua's full-power blow. Now that the Void Mother beginning to moving away whenever the two approached, the method before is definitely useless.

That being said, would such evasiveness prove a challenge for Nostradamus? If the enemy would not stand still and obediently take his blows, then it should be allowed to deliberately move to where he wants to land his offensive!

The first asteroid belt that the Void Mother had chosen was difficult, but the second was much easier. Thus, having completed his procedure, Joshua pre-emptively stole to that particular resource zone—if the Void Mother opted to struggle for dominance there, Nostradamus would have an opening to guide another asteroid towards it. If it moved towards other asteroid zones, the elderly mage who had already guessed where it would go could continue to strike it with asteroids after calculating the prerequisites!

In the very next instant, as pale-blue fissures tore space apart and devoured light, an asteroid that was much larger than the one before and moved as fast as a giant planet hence shot towards the Void Mother that was heading towards another layer of asteroid zone under Nostradamus's guidance! With the gap between the two, the Void Mother which trajectory had been calculated had completely no chance of evading!

Boom!

As the Void Mother's efforts to evade turned out for naught when the asteroid collided on its body at full-speed, a terrible explosion that throbs the heart emanated within the Beam System once again.

Endless shockwaves promptly crushed the flesh on the Void Mother's flanks, sending organic blood vapors up to hundreds of kilometers away. Searing heat over ten million turned all of those living matter to ash, with the toughest of shell and spines melted by the raging blaze.

The shockwave turned into majestic cascading, its violent electromagnetic radiation spreading over across the Beam System and other regions. In months, the fortresses built by the Midgardians some distance away would lose all communications and observational capacity due to the latent brush, but now, the only one suffering any effects was the Void Mother which was struck directly—the huge Chaos being's compound eye had burst apart from the monumental force that could crush a continental frame, its entire ellipsis form now twisted into an elongated concave form.

"It worked!"

The elderly mage showed a confident smile. Against such a giant foe, even Nostradamus did not have a solution with his war spell fundamentals. If Joshua did not keep going up to the Void Mother and run interference, it would have been such a frightening and hassling foe for them individually. But now, with their combined chain of attacks that kept maiming it, it was truly the power of intelligence and partnership!

Despite that, Joshua suddenly paused while flying around the Void Mother's location, before forcing him to stop. He furrowed his brow first, looking solemnly towards the spot where the asteroid hit but was now covered in flames, shockwaves, energy radiation, and debris, before his expression promptly changed, with the warrior beginning to scream loudly at the old mage through their spiritual link.

"Move!"

"What?!"

While not quite understanding what was happening, Nostradamus's quick reflexes quickly responded to the warrior's tensed warning and swiftly split apart the dimensions and revealed a pale-blue portal and stepped within. However, before the portal could close, a powerful light akin to a supernova exploded out from where the debris shrouded the Void Mother in the very next instantly!

—Bzzt—!!!

An immeasurably vast incandescent ray split apart the dark space of the universe—a white line that could divide the galaxy in two hence shot at the old mage's previous location at almost a speed of three hundred thousand kilometer per second. The powerful energy even kicked up ion clouds, endless agitated plasma and blue bolts across the Void that fluctuated and vanished into vacuum, dissecting all matter into the most basic of particles!

And within the incandescent ray were three hundred million degrees heat that could destroy all things. Though it disappeared after on flash and never lasted for more than a second, it was sufficient to wipe out all things int eh mortal realm. And as its radiance vanished, the Void Mother's twisted but colossal form appeared before Joshua.

The elliptic body of the Chaos minion was dented by the asteroid Nostradamus summoned. It was not killed despite the severity of its injuries, however, but neither did it lose its ability to fight back. The warrior could see that innumerable flesh tentacles and tubular appendages had simply covered over the shattered meteor—even stabbing into it.

The Void Mother was not using its powerful psionic energies to tear apart the asteroid that had heavily injured it, instead using its ability to devour and assimilate to convert it into revitalizing resources!

Where the compound eye of the Void Mother had been, huge sheets of primordial mineral crystals were forming. Those were organic constructs temporarily produced to undergo laser resonance, with powerful psionic energies mixing with dark Chaos powers as it spread over it. It was a weapon and one of the Void Mother's trump cards, an anti-world weapon that could destroy the surface of planetary bodies.

The beam dispersed, and there was nothing left where Nostradamus had been.