Chapter 159: Ryan Angrily Slays the Priest!
Chapter 159: Ryan Angrily Slays the Priest!
Ryan's left hand locked around the clone's throat. The dark purple scales caught the harsh light and gleamed like metal.
The clone's arms thrashed wildly, what was left of its violet-gold energy hammering Ryan's forearm like a hailstorm.
"You really want to move, wearing that face?" The look in Ryan's eyes was pure, bone-chilling murder.
His fingers crushed inward.
Crack. The clone's neck vertebrae snapped under the pressure.
A torrent of savage dark-purple Dao energy surged from Ryan's palm and poured without mercy into the clone's carotid arteries, like a dam giving way all at once.
That energy carried an absolute will to destroy and purge. Everywhere it touched, the pure-blood gene sequences belonging to Ella were ripped away by force.
They had used Ella's blood for experiments.
They had used Ella as a flesh-and-blood key to open the gateway.
These arrogant alien insects had crossed the one line Ryan would never, under any circumstances, allow anyone to cross.
"AHHH——!"
The clone let out a wretched scream. The supposedly indestructible violet-gold battle armor covering its body cracked apart inch by inch under the wash of dark-purple energy, crumbling to dust.
The face — the face that had made Ryan hesitate — began to warp and dissolve rapidly.
Ryan watched it collapse piece by piece. There was nothing left in him now. No hesitation. Only revulsion and rage.
"Stuff that belongs to my daughter — you filthy insects crawling around in the gutter think you're even worthy of touching it?!"
The dark-purple energy tore straight through the clone's entire body.
Boom.
No blood. No scattered limbs.
The clone's body exploded under the incineration of Dao fire, reduced to a pool of thick violet-gold liquid.
Then that liquid vaporized instantly in the vacuum — not a single cell, not one trace, left behind in this world.
Up in the main hall, mid-air.
Saren's face — dry and cracked as dead bark — was twitching violently, his dull yellow eyes fixed on what lay below.
His greatest masterpiece. His proudest creation. A perfect weapon fusing the Hunter civilization's most advanced high-dimensional technology with pure Earth-blood genetics.
Crushed. With one hand. By this primitive.
"Impossible! This is absolutely impossible!" Saren's shriek carried none of the lofty composure from before. What replaced it was fear he couldn't hide. "How did your energy frequency jump like that?! A carbon-based body cannot survive a dimensional leap at this level! You should have blown yourself apart!"
Ryan shook his left hand and cleared the last wisp of violet-gold mist from his fingertips.
He raised his head slowly. Those vertical pupils, now deep purple, locked onto Saren in the air above.
No words.
The high-dimensional alloy floor under Ryan's feet vaporized on the spot, leaving a smoldering crater where he had been standing.
Then he was simply gone.
This wasn't speed leaving an afterimage. It was pure dimensional dominance — he had cut the physical distance of space itself using dark-purple Dao energy.
The hair on Saren's scalp stood on end. A shadow of death he had never felt in thousands of years of living crashed over him all at once. Survival instinct drove his hands into a frenzy, swinging the skull-topped staff.
"Space fold! Absolute defense!"
Hum. Hum. Hum.
Over a hundred transparent spatial barriers stacked up in front of him, each one compressed with enormous spatial curvature, more than enough to tank a direct broadside from a starship's secondary cannons.
But —
Crack.
A quiet, brittle sound broke the air right beside Saren's ear.
Not from the front.
From behind him.
Ryan materialized directly at Saren's back. The broken meteoric iron sword swept out in a flat, clean arc, dragging a dark-purple ribbon of torn dimensional fabric behind it. No flourish. Just the cut.
Shiick——
The skull-topped staff — along with the warped spatial rules surrounding it — was sliced cleanly in two.
The skull tumbled and rolled away. The violet-gold blood that had been flowing through its eye sockets dried instantly to black ash.
The moment the staff was gone, every one of Saren's hundred layers of spatial shielding shattered like glass — bursting into scattered flecks of light that filled the air.
"You——"
Saren had barely choked out the word when Ryan's left hand — rough dragon scales covering every inch of it — clamped around the back of his neck like a steel vice.
Crack! The sheer force crushed Saren's cervical vertebrae outright.
"High-dimensional god, are you? Get down here."
The muscles in Ryan's arm stood out in sharp relief as he lifted Saren by the neck with one hand and drove him straight down into the floor.
BOOM.
Saren's frail body slammed into the massive dark-gold control panel next to the gateway with full force.
The supposedly indestructible high-dimensional metal panel caved in on impact, leaving a deep human-shaped crater. Precision data lines and high-dimensional energy crystals exploded in every direction. Blue-white electrical sparks sprayed everywhere with a piercing, crackling roar.
Ghhk——
Thick green blood erupted from every opening in Saren's face.
The control console's alarms screamed to life. The entire hall strobed red under the warning lights, like the inside of a blood-soaked hell.
Ryan planted one foot on Saren's chest and drove it down until the ribs snapped one by one. He pressed the broken sword directly against the center of Saren's deeply wrinkled forehead.
The dark-purple Dao fire at the tip of the blade seared Saren's skin with an audible sizzle.
"You just said you were going to drain my blood and go to Earth to take my daughter." Ryan's voice was quiet. It still made the air around him vibrate.
Saren coughed up mouthfuls of green blood laced with fragments of his own organs, his body seizing like he had been electrocuted.
He stared up at the man standing over him — body wrapped in dark-purple dragon scales, a walking god of slaughter — and felt something his soul, arrogant for thousands of years, had never once known.
Genuine, bone-deep terror.
This was no primitive.
This was a cosmic predator wearing human skin. A true destroyer capable of ripping dimensions apart.
But Saren knew clearly. He was not walking away from today.
"Ha... haha... cough cough... So what if you win?!"
Saren's bony fingers — stained green with his own blood — closed around a red crystal buried in the rubble beneath him, blinking rapidly. "I die, and all you primitives die with me!!"
He squeezed out the last of his strength and crushed the crystal.
Beep——
"I've activated the forced overload self-destruct on the hyperspace channel!" Saren's laugh broke into something hysterical. "The Reaper's reactor, stuck in that gateway, will detonate instantly! The entire far side of the Moon will be blown to cosmic dust!"
"Without the Moon's gravitational pull, tidal waves and magnitude-ten earthquakes will tear every city on your planet apart! Your homeworld will be turned into hell itself!"
"You all die! Every last one of you dies!!"
Ryan looked down at him and watched him bark. His face didn't move. "Done?"
The laughter died in Saren's throat. His pupils snapped shut.
Ryan's right hand drove the broken sword down without a moment's hesitation.
Thunk.
The dark-purple blade punched through Saren's skull like it was paper and pinned him into the crater of the control panel.
Savage Dao energy detonated inside the cranial cavity.
Flesh, spirit, genetics, consciousness — ground down to nothing.
Saren's headless body shuddered twice, then went completely still in the wreckage.
"Commander! We have to go! NOW!" Nicholas scrambled out from behind a support pillar in the distance, clutching the silver briefcase, half-crawling and half-running, voice cracking raw. The detector screen in his hand had gone full red, every data bar buried past the maximum threshold, the casing smoking black. "That old bastard wasn't lying! The channel is going to blow! The reactor just crossed critical!"
Ryan yanked the broken sword free and turned to look at the massive gateway at the center of the main hall.
The soft blue vortex had turned a dangerous, deep crimson.
Inside the warship, the supposedly indestructible degenerate-state armor was being shredded apart by spatial energy pushed beyond any limit it was built for.
Green radioactive fluid poured from the ruptures in waterfalls, hitting the floor and eating through the heavy alloy plating instantly, leaving deep, bottomless holes where it touched.
The crimson vortex was expanding at a rate visible to the naked eye.
1,500 feet.
2,400 feet.
3,000 feet.
The surrounding space collapsed entirely. Black spatial fractures spread in dense spider-web patterns across the fortress dome, shredding everything they touched into nothing.
RRRUMBLE——
Outside the fortress, the metallic surface of Mare Tranquillitatis began caving in across a massive stretch of ground.
The energy towers — three thousand feet tall — were swallowed by the spatial fractures, sliced into countless fragments in an instant, and pulled into dimensions unknown.