A massive amount of destructive Honkai energy gathered in the chest of the synthetic Honkai Beast. It plunged both arms into the ground, and a shockwave erupted from beneath its hooves, sweeping across the area like a storm. Lin and Ato dodged in opposite directions as the gravitational impact flipped the very soil of the earth. Underground wires and water pipes burst, with electrical sparks flickering and darting like luminous snakes.
After a brief pause, the Honkai Beast fixed its target on Ato, who posed the greater threat. A pitch-black gravity ray flickered unstably, appearing to swallow all light and drenching the surroundings in darkness.
*Zheng!*
At that moment, a lance transformed into a javelin, streaking through the rainy night like a white meteor. Before the Honkai Beast could even react, the spear pierced its chest. The gathered energy instantly became turbulent, and a massive amount of Honkai energy poured out in an irregular torrent.
A ghostly shadow charged against the wind, spinning the bladed edge at the end of his chain. The collapsing gravity spheres were deflected by his Soulium armor before they could even get close.
Because gravity damage differs from ordinary elemental abilities, only Soulium can deflect such attacks with relative ease. Furthermore, once these gravity spheres explode within a certain distance, even blocking them with a weapon results in a kinetic shock.
Yet, those rain-like gravity spheres were deflected one by one by the ghost. Using his weapons, he seemed to carve a dry, rainless sanctuary out of the torrential downpour.
Before he could fully close in on the Honkai Beast, another gravity wave swept forth, forcing him to halt his advance.
Ato seized this opportunity to ambush the beast from its flank. He swung his double-edged sword, cleaving through an incoming black sphere. With a cold flash in his eyes, he targeted the **Abyss Flower** already embedded in the beast's chest and threw his own weapon like a spear!
At that moment, an attack from the sky arrived again. Lin didn't look up, but it was as if he had eyes in the back of his head. He kicked off a nearby ruined wall, leaping dozens of meters away. A massive gravity sphere smashed into his path, following him closely; the ground it struck bulged strangely toward the center, as if attracted by an immense inward force.
The Herrscher was becoming increasingly proficient in controlling her abilities. Initially, she could only consume large amounts of Honkai energy for gravitational crushing; now, she could fire gravity as bullets. Given this density... the total Honkai energy in the Ninth Herrscher's core was likely higher than that of a standard Herrscher, though it had not yet reached the level of the Seventh.
Lin analyzed the situation silently. He was unnervingly calm. Even during the period between the Third and Fifth Honkai, he had rarely been this composed. There was no sense of tension or extraneous emotion in his heart; he was simply executing the commands he had set for himself.
Attack, defend, evade—every movement was seamless.
Currently, he resembled a computer program more than a human being.
Exactly 0.5 seconds after Ato threw his double-edged sword, Lin threw Delta deep pink greatsword. Ato's weapon struck the hilt of the Abyss Flower, driving the lance another half-length deeper into the beast's core. The deep pink greatsword followed immediately, striking the hilt of the double-edged sword.
*Zheng!*
The Abyss Flower was driven completely into the Honkai Beast's hideous, deformed, half-mechanical, half-flesh body, piercing its core entirely.
"Howl..."
Without even a dying shriek, the already weakened Honkai Beast collapsed. Without pausing, Lin—still dodging gravity spheres—pulled the Abyss Flower from the corpse, scooped up the deep pink greatsword, and performed a side-leap to dodge an attack that tried to predict his path.
The gravity sphere struck the corpse of the Honkai Beast. Half of the massive body vanished instantly, as if evaporated into water vapor.
After Lin evaded the attack unscathed, the brown light in the Ninth Herrscher's eyes intensified. Lin turned in mid-air and fired a shot at the Herrscher through the slit in the sphere, but the bullet was easily caught by gravity and fell powerlessly to the ground.
Lin watched this silently. Immediately following was a more frantic barrage of gravity rays, falling as densely as raindrops, covering the area around Lin and Ato so they had nowhere to hide.
At this moment, Ato reached out, and a bright wave of energy shot from his hand toward the Ninth Herrscher.
The gravity ray bombardment lasted only half a second before stopping. The Ninth Herrscher used Honkai energy to block the attack, which could not be forced down by gravity.
This action caused Lin and Ato to exchange a glance across the distance.
Perhaps because she hadn't completed her Emergence, or perhaps due to her inherent nature, it seemed the Ninth Herrscher could not simultaneously utilize her authority to attack while maintaining a gravitational shield around herself.
Whether it was Lin bullets, Ato's energy attack, or... Delta final strike, she had stopped her ongoing offensive to defend.
No communication was necessary. In an instant, Lin and Ato had decided on a battle plan.
Lin leaped into the air, running across the ruins of collapsed skyscrapers. His movement, which ignored traditional planes, defied all logic. It took 0.3 seconds for her pupils to focus, capture Lin, and control his gravity, but Lin constant shifting and leaping meant he never stayed on her retina long enough to be targeted. This forced the Ninth Herrscher to use large-scale gravitational control to attack him.
This time, within a radius of a thousand meters, a "thing" that made the heart feel heavy and oppressed was about to descend, intending to destroy everything in the vicinity.
But Lin swapped places with Ato at that moment. Ato stepped on Lin shoulder and leaped upward.
The Ninth Herrscher hesitated.
Through observation, Lin and Ato had discovered that her gravitational control and attacks were roughly divided into two types.
One was planar heavy pressure—the type of attack that destroyed the Tenth Branch and Atra, and killed Delta. It used gravity to crush organisms and matter.
The other utilized the properties of gravity to form a singularity—a collapse that produced terrifying attraction. Nearby matter would be pulled in, a process very similar to the formation of a black hole, though these gravity spheres and rays created by authority could not reach the infinite collapse of a true black hole.
The first type of attack had a specific characteristic: it was fixed within a certain space.
Height, area, and volume were all predefined, as if the Ninth Herrscher had created a transparent object with a mass higher than anything else to crush whatever she desired.
Therefore, when the height Ato reached exceeded the height she had set for that attack, she wavered.
Especially since Ato had raised his weapon to launch an attack without hesitation, she was forced to abandon her attack on Lin and instead create a large gravity sphere. Ato was unexpectedly pulled toward it as the Ninth Herrscher shifted her target to him.
*Hua!*
This allowed Lin to streak in from the side like a brilliant meteor. His rainbow pupils tore through the rain as he held the black spear, thrusting it straight into the giant sphere.
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