Cleaver Of Sin

Chapter 853: Genesis Archive

Arianna could be seen running from one building to another, leaping between them like an agile cat as her weaker teammate followed closely behind her with a frown on his face. No one needed to tell him he was dead weight. Although he loved the feeling of being carried by one of the strongest people in this Inter-Empire Competition, and automatically qualifying for the next round, it didn’t sit well with him.

Make no mistake, if there weren’t any sort of cameras or whatever was broadcasting this moment to the entire world, he would have simply enjoyed being carried with a huge smile on his face. After all, who would be upset about having an advantage over everyone else?

But the whole world was watching him be a burden. What if no one decided to support or sponsor him after this because they all saw him as dead weight? But his thoughts didn’t matter because of the reality of the situation.

Everyone was suffering under the pressure of the second wave, constantly being attacked by Grave-class Monsters. How could he possibly join such a battle when he couldn’t even handle a single Grave-class Monster on his own?

Arianna wore an expressionless gaze as she moved. She didn’t comment on her teammate holding her back, nor did she speak to him about it. She simply accepted reality for what it was.

"Are we heading toward one of those Crown-class birds?" the boy asked as he looked in the direction they were traveling.

"We are," Arianna Haellight replied without missing a beat.

The boy felt numb. He knew Arianna was strong, he didn’t need anyone to lecture him about that, but actively seeking out a Crown-class Monster, a Rank 7 existence, was sheer madness to him. Besides, there were three of them. He couldn’t help but think Arianna had gone crazy for wanting to take on three Crown-class Monsters.

As they moved, a sea of flames closed the distance with sizzling madness. But Arianna merely glanced at it, and the next moment a cascading torrent of ice erupted outward with chilling force, freezing the flames where they were.

Arianna’s head snapped upward to see a beam of fiery energy shooting toward her from the bird’s eyes, but she simply teleported out of the way. The moment she disappeared, two students appeared in her former location. Before they could even understand where they were, the beams slammed into their chests, instantly scorching away whatever Vitality Points they had left. In a flash of white light, they vanished from where they stood, disqualified.

Arianna and her teammate appeared atop another building. The instant they arrived, the Grave-class Monster unleashed another wave of flames that consumed the entire building. But Arianna and her teammate were already gone. She had merely baited the bird into attacking the structure because she knew another team was hiding there, recovering.

And just like that, another team was eliminated before they could even understand what had happened.

Arianna appeared in midair, her foot snapping outward as her toes connected with the head of the Grave-class Monster. Like a falling meteor, it shot downward with incomprehensible speed. With a deafening boom, it crashed into a building, destroying everything in its path.

But the Monster didn’t die as Arianna had deliberately held back. She had a greater purpose.

The bird staggered as it attempted to rise back to its feet. The nearby students immediately rushed in for the kill. To them, this was no different from free Points being delivered directly to their doorstep.

But Arianna simply remained floating in the air, flames erupting within her hands as she formed a bow made entirely of pure fire. An arrow of condensed flames materialized upon the bowstring as she calmly aimed at the Monster. Without missing a beat, she released the string, and the flaming arrow shot forward like a blazing solar ray.

With ruinous, city-shaking force, a landscape-altering explosion erupted outward as the arrow connected with the Monster’s neck. A massive dome of blazing orange flames, encircled by expanding rings of compressed wind, surged outward with rising intensity, erasing everything in its path. The nearby students were completely consumed as three entire teams were wiped out in a single explosion that would have overwhelmed them even if they had attempted to defend. The sheer potency behind the attack rendered resistance utterly meaningless.

Arianna sending the Monster crashing into their direction from the sky had merely been a trap. She knew they would greedily attempt to steal her Points and rush toward the weakened Monster. So she simply followed up with an area-of-effect attack powerful enough to kill both the Monster and every student surrounding it.

She hadn’t attacked them, she had attacked the Monster, so she had broken no rules. They were merely standing within her line of fire. That was all.

Her teammate, who floated behind her under her precise control, could only marvel at what exactly Arianna’s ability truly was. He had watched her manipulate virtually every affinity imaginable, from flames, to space, to ice. Name it, and he had probably seen her use it already.

Arianna’s head snapped sideways as a plasma beam closed the distance, threatening to erase her from the sky. But she simply opened a strange barrier that wasn’t made from Astra energy itself but was merely powered by it. The plasma beam crashed into the barrier with maddening destructive force. The barrier trembled violently as the plasma beam fragmented into numerous smaller rays upon impact, raining downward and causing even greater devastation below.

’She even has an ability that can create barriers,’ the boy thought to himself as he simply watched in stunned silence.

As one of the Crown-class birds finished unleashing its plasma attack, it became Arianna’s turn. She merely extended her palm outward as though she were about to unleash an attack of her own.

But the exact opposite happened.

The next moment, one of the enormous Crown-class Monsters shot violently toward her as she manipulated gravity itself, more specifically, attraction.

The bird was completely stunned by the feat Arianna had just performed. Arianna, however, wasn’t. She calmly compressed gravity into a single point in space before collapsing that concentrated force directly against the Crown-class Monster’s body with effortless precision.

With explosive force, the bird shot backward, tearing through the sky at a speed greater than anything it had ever been capable of achieving naturally. Blood trailed behind its body as Arianna had cleanly torn off one of its wings with a single attack.

Arianna’s ability was called Genesis Archive.

And just as the rumors suggested, her ability was indeed linked to her eyes, with her left and right eyes each possessing completely different functions that perfectly complemented one another.

Her left eye possessed the ability known as Archive, which allowed her to record and permanently archive every skill she had ever witnessed while also understanding its mechanism and underlying principles.

Her right eye possessed the ability known as Genesis, which allowed her to recreate every skill she fully understood, manifesting them into reality as though they had always belonged to her.

For example, if she witnessed someone using a Fireball Skill, her left eye would automatically analyze it, permanently recording it within her Archive. Then, through her right eye, she could recreate that very same Fireball Skill. She could create one fireball, two fireballs, or even a hundred. She could make them burn hotter, enlarge their size, alter their speed, and improve various aspects of the skill, so long as everything remained within the inherent framework of a Fireball Skill.

However, Genesis Archive didn’t allow her to step beyond those limitations. For example, stealing a Fireball Skill didn’t suddenly grant her access to every flame-based attack in existence. No. If the skill wasn’t a Fireball, then she couldn’t reproduce it, limiting her to the original structure and nature of the analyzed skill.

Furthermore, the more complex the skill being analyzed, the greater the Astra energy and time required to successfully archive it. She also couldn’t actively or passively analyze her opponents’ skills during combat through her left eye, the Eye of Archive.

All in all, she analyzed the skill, not the ability behind it. She couldn’t watch Isaac create new limbs or organs and then suddenly replicate that feat herself. That wasn’t a skill, it was his innate ability. Likewise, she didn’t suddenly gain a Fire Affinity simply because she could recreate previously analyzed fire-based skills.

Just as William’s Copy ability stipulated that he could only copy the abilities of people within his own age group, Arianna’s ability carried its own restriction.

She could only analyze the skills of people older than herself.

Now came the best and simultaneously the worst part of her ability.

A Fireball Skill she had copied back when she was at the Kindlestar Life Rank should obviously be useless in a battle on this scale, right?

Wrong.

With every increase in her own strength and power, half of the skills she had previously analyzed automatically scaled alongside her own growth. One didn’t need to think very hard to understand that this single aspect of her ability made it absurdly overpowered. At the same time, however, she still had to personally train the remaining half herself, almost as though the world itself was attempting to balance such an outrageously broken ability.

Now, with such an ability, one could only imagine... how many skills had Arianna analyzed and archived over the years?

How many Sword Techniques, Healing Techniques, Body Techniques, Movement Techniques, and countless other techniques had she already stored within her Archive?

And with her ridiculous Astra energy reserves that perfectly matched such an ability, Arianna Haellight was nothing less than a walking vault of endless unpredictability.