The Martial Unity

The Divine Mothers hadn’t anticipated that the World Serpent would wake up. The serpent had simply been serving as a silent, revolving planetary fortress around Gaia Prime for more than thirteen years. The Divine Mothers had collected intelligence on it, but its inactivity had caused them to not regard it as much of a threat, not that they thought much about it even if it were active. Size alone wouldn’t be enough to contend with a Divine Mother.

And yet, when they felt the tremendous surge of power from within Jormungandr, they paused.

RUMBLE!!!!!

The World Serpent wasn’t an ordinary creature. Not only did it possess a truly mind-boggling scale, but the quality of its vast body was extremely high. It was filled to the brim with high-grade esoteric matter that gave it all manner of power.

RUMBLE!!!!!

The Divine Mothers sharpened their eyes as they felt a powerful surge of gravity converge upon them, threatening to squash them like insects. It forced them to redirect their Webverses for defense. Their passive defenses alone would not be able to let them withstand such a powerful attack.

It was an attack that was born from the fact that the esoteric substance that accounted for much of the serpent’s esoteric biochemistry was actually a special substance that was known as resonating gravitational condensate that could be leveraged to produce gravity, the way that negatron matter produced anti-gravity.

By subjecting the matter within his body to a certain amount of heat and pressure, he could induce gravitational waves that could be directed and focused upon a small target like the Divine Mothers.

The serpent hadn’t used this ability against the Gargantian that it had subjugated more than thirteen years ago, but that was because the target was large enough such that the serpent could directly use its body to attack. But the Divine Mothers were too small for him to attack in a similar manner, so he needed to convert his power into gravity that could be focused at any scale.

RUMBLE!!!!!

The Divine Mothers were hardly pleased with the last-minute interference that occurred just before they could scan Argenton’s memories, but the attack was too powerful for them to ignore.

”Primitive. Long-bodied. Creature...” The Mindstitch growled. ”You. Could. Have. Gone. To. Live. Another. Day. If. You. Had. Just. Remained. Asleep!”

She raised her hand at him, making a crushing gesture at his head. She exerted her Webverse to destroy his mind web and the integrated information that it contained.

RUMBLE!!!!!

Flashes of pain and disorientation appeared in the depths of the serpent’s eyes. He did not possess a Verse, so he could not defend himself. Ordinarily, the absence of a Verse would mean that the destruction of the mind should have been instantaneous. Without a Verse or flowing wisdom armor technology, a person was entirely helpless to an enemy’s Verse. Their information was completely at the mercy of any Transcendent.

And yet, the serpent persisted.

”Tsk... What. A. Stupidly. Giant. Mind. Web!” The Mindstitch gritted her teeth.

An Administrator’s power was consumed proportional to the information volume of the target, not mass or energy or durability or those kinds of material parameters, but rather the volume of information.

The brain of the World Serpent was truly enormous. The creature itself was as large as a giant planet, and its brain was as large as a small-to-medium-sized planet. That meant that it was orders of magnitude more taxing to destroy the mind web of the Transcendent-grade creature than an ordinary human-sized brain’s mind web.

In the meantime, the World Serpent simply pushed through, exerting itself to the very limit to crush the Divine Mothers with the weight of its gravitational power. It didn’t seem to care that it was rapidly having its integrated information disintegrated by the Divine Mother. The serpent simply fought with the intent of forcing the Mindstitch to exert herself.

Jormungandr knew that he couldn’t defeat a Transcendent by himself. The truth was that he was a Transcendent-grade monster, which technically meant that a Transcendent was enough to handle the creature.

If his opponents had been more average Transcendent beings, then perhaps he could have aimed for victory, but he could sense from the sheer intensity of their Webverses that they were not ordinary. These Divine Mothers were chosen because they were strong.

At most, he could only hope to engage and keep them busy for a period of time, and that was already pushing the limits for him.

His power couldn’t be mobilized as fluidly and freely as those of the Verses of Transcendents, who could isolate their targets much better. The World Serpent also had to be careful about Gaia, which it was fighting to protect.

”ENOUGH!” The Shredder grew frustrated at the annoying interference from the titanic serpent, weaving her sharp shredding nets, before swinging them at the Transcendent-grade monster.

Had her target been a planet, it would have instantly been sliced and diced into little cubes. But when her string struck the Transcendent-grade beast, they merely pierced his scales halfway, not even so much as reaching its flesh.

BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!!!

”What?!” The Divine Mother grew stunned at the fact that she couldn’t even reach the flesh of the serpent, let alone kill it in one go.

She had underestimated the unfathomable durability of the World Serpent. The creature’s greatest asset was its nigh-invincible defensive fortitude. Normally, creatures of this scale would collapse under their own weight. After all, material tensile strength didn’t increase the bigger a creature got, and at some point, the weight of a creature would exceed the tensile strength of the materials that made up its body.

This was a problem that was extremely difficult to overcome, and only advanced civilizations like the Laminars and the countless worldships they had that were of a similar scale had managed to solve the engineering problem.

Jormungandr was an example of this problem being solved with extravagant resources. The countless tons of esoteric matter that laced his cells increased the integrity of his body to such a degree that it could easily handle his own power, which was in the Transcendent Realm, without any damage.

Not even Divine Mothers could chisel the body of the World Serpent in a short amount of time.