Dimensional Descent

Leonel didn’t respond. Or rather, he didn’t respond with his words.

Three laser beams shot out at once, their speed so great that the echo of the older woman’s voice hadn’t even faded before they appeared around her, pincering her in from all directions.

The Half Spiritual Overlord was taken off guard. She had been ready for the strikes, and she had been perfectly ready to dodge using a method not too dissimilar from Maxx’s efforts earlier. But seeing them coming, and barely registering their speed at that, she realized that all of her efforts at dodging would be in vain. All of the angles she could use were cut off. Or more accurately, the ones that she could use with great enough speed were.

Her gaze turned serious, and a pendant on her chest danced as though a rush of wind had just passed by. The rising winds of Force echoed across the chain of ringed planets as the Force Art lit up, an overwhelming strength descending and forming a shield around the woman.

BANG! BANG! BANG!

The shield of Force shuddered for only a brief moment. It showed no hints of cracking and it was sturdy to the point that even if Leonel concentrated the beams any more than he already had, it wouldn’t make much of a difference at all.

The Spirituals Religion had managed to gather strength beyond that of the Tier 2 modified starships, and even the strongest Tier 1 starships in their home. In the whole of the Human Domain, they might truly have the most impenetrable walls.

The Half Spiritual Overlord took a step forward, and her hands caused the arrays around her to light up. The runes that were once invisible to the naked eye, only displayed before Leonel when he used the vision of the Dream Plane, solidified and became corporeal.

She looked gorgeous as she stepped forward, the laws of the world rotating around her like a second flowing dress.

This time, she struck out with a palm, and the energies of the world seemed to resonate, forming a half dozen palms that descended from the skies above.

BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!

Leonel could only watch as his starships were crushed to pieces, killing the several million on board.

He had modified the starships personally. Their defenses and their attack strength was only marginally weaker than a full-fledged Tier 1 starship. But they had been crushed like tissue paper, leaving no chance for those on board.

His expression became cold. He managed to follow the pathways of the descending palms and moved his starship out of the way, but he was only fast enough to calculate one trajectory and dodging path. While it was the case that entering the Dream Plane was a great boon to his senses, it also occupied much more of his minds and the effort in making use of his advantage in thinking speed was also strained.

He needed to form a better balance, one between the quantity of thought and another for quality. At the same time, he also came to understand that the strongest beings of Existence probably didn’t just endlessly increase their number of split minds. They would gain access to the Dream Plane as well, and they would likely begin to tend toward quality as well.

He still remembered that lesson Wise Star Order had taught him when they first met. Wise Star Order only had one mind but Leonel already had thousands back then. He thought that he could hide his thoughts from Wise Star Order by jumbling up his minds and hiding his intentions in only one, but Wise Star Order had blown him out of the water.

His one mind back then was worth far more than thousands of Leonel’s because the quality of his one was impossibly far beyond Leonel’s at the time. He couldn’t help but wonder if Wise Star Order had touched upon the Dream Plane as well, but now wasn’t the time to think about such things. This was the greatest loss he had suffered since his campaign had begun, and he couldn’t take it lying down.

He gave over 90% of his minds over to the Dream Plane, reading and analyzing everything happening in his surroundings. There was no longer a need to deploy his Dream World because it was completely and wholly inferior to what access to the Dream Plane gave him.

He needed to grasp the strengths and weaknesses of the Force Art ahead, target the latter, and avoid the former. Then, he needed to find an opportunity to shatter it.

The Segmented Cube was quickly deployed, and its various jigsaw puzzles fanned out and enveloped the starship. Then, the starship began to rapidly shrink, from a few kilometers in diameter to no more than a few meters.

This was a trump card he hadn’t used just yet. The Segmented Cube wasn’t a fortress, and it couldn’t be used to attack either. But that didn’t mean that he couldn’t use Anastasia to integrate into his other creations, fusing the benefits of both into one.

One of Anastasia’s fundamental abilities, and one that he often neglected because of how much of an open secret it was, was the ability to take large items and put them into a very small space…

So why not use that for his starship?

Suddenly, the speed of the starship blazed, and it became even faster. Leonel took manual control and whizzed by the attacks of the Overlord, inching closer until he suddenly vanished, appearing to her back.

A second one of Anastasia’s fundamental abilities was control over time. Whether it was the suspended reality of the snow globes, the dilated inner world of the incubators, or even her ability to peer through the stream of time and even pluck out lives to resurrect, all of them relied on Time Force and Spatial Force.

Together, they were devastating.

Leonel shot through a weak point of the Force Art like a speeding light beam of his own. It was so fast that the Overlord couldn’t even react, the long-standing Force Art of the Spiritual Religion crumbling right before their eyes.