"That pesky lich!" I muttered.
His voice was still rattling around in my head. "If you want to pass this palace, you'll have to do what we did and defeat us…" Smug. Rehearsed. Like he'd been saving that line for a thousand years.
Which, actually — yeah. That's exactly what happened.
"Kind of forgot, teehee~! My memories are hazy after a millennium!"
What kind of bullshit was that?! He basically handed me a side quest with no waypoint and then shrugged about it! And now here I am, flying around this godforsaken capital at the speed of sound for thirty minutes looking for something that probably doesn't exist.
"I should've known better," I muttered.
Not a single signal. Not even a flicker from [Foresight]. [Avid] was dead silent too — and that only happened when the thing I was looking for genuinely wasn't there.
"I'm wasting my time here!" I yelled at the clouds.
Very productive. Ten out of ten. Would yell at clouds again.
Hovering above the old capital, the only thing looking back at me was a calm blanket of stars and the moon, all bright and peaceful like it had absolutely nothing to do with the mess I was in.
"Beautiful," I said flatly. "Great timing."
And then something clicked.
Wait. Why was I even stuck on finding that mark? Why was my first instinct, when all this started, to try and bring things back to normal?
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"You're thinking like Yoo-ra," Trynda's voice echoed. "Not Josephine."
I hung there in the air for a second.
...Was I really obsessing over this mark because it was what Josephine would want? Or because I was still running on Yoo-ra's instincts — find the right path, follow the process, don't break the rules you don't have to?
Idiot.
I was already strong enough to level half the world if I felt like it. Even if the entire planet rose up against me — or Yoora or even Adele's whole fishery empire — we could crush every last one of them.
[Xipe: ...Let's crush them all.]
I couldn't help it. I smirked.
"Oh, Xipe." I spread my arms wide and looked up at the heavens. "Your lamb is in great need of your blessings. Something a little extra this time, maybe?"
Xipe probably rolled their eyes.
My body started to glow anyway.
Rainbow light bled out from my skin and lit up the sky. The clouds parted like they'd decided they had somewhere else to be. It felt incredible. Forget skills, forget techniques, forget control — who needed any of that?
Everything I had — divine power, mana, aura, ki, chi, whatever else was floating around in this body — I gathered it all. Fused it into one thing. One enormous, stupid, beautiful thing.
Elaborate schemes? Careful planning? Not today.
All you needed was raw, unfiltered, completely unreasonable power.
I pushed it all into my right fist. The air around it distorted. The sky was afraid of me. Good.
[Warning! You are exceeding the limit you set for yourself!]
"Oh, screw you, system! Screw all of you!" I grinned like a madwoman.
"Fuck the tear, and fuck you, lich, for dragging me into your mess!"
The moon flickered. Went blue at the edges, then violet. My cloak whipped around me. The ground far below cracked just from the pressure of what I was holding.
Stars pulsed.
"Galaxy Impact!"
My fist exploded forward.
The shockwave didn't look like a punch. It looked like the end of something. A wall of rainbow light tore through the atmosphere, warping space on its way out, the sound arriving half a second after the flash because the flash was faster than anything had a right to be. Buildings disintegrated. The ground split. The stars blinked.
The light expanded across the entire horizon in every direction, a kaleidoscope of color spreading like wildfire, and anything caught in it — well. It wasn't anymore.
When the dust started to settle, I was still hovering there. Fist still raised. The last wisps of rainbow light trailing off my knuckles.
The capital was very quiet.
"That's how you deal with bullshit," I muttered, smirking at nothing in particular.
