Chapter 517: The Weightless City

I had not stayed in one place before because I wished to, this entire place had been stopping me from leaving the ground, but the presence of the Moon Fox had changed all of that, and suddenly the Sovereign had other things to concern himself with and not me.

I ascended a few hundred feet and slapped aside a cobblestone the size of a wagon that was turning slowly in front of my face. Ahead of me, a whole burning street had come loose and folded in the air like a ribbon, and further out the river of fire that ran through the lower district had broken apart into spheres, thousands of them, each one holding its own small current inside it, drifting apart from each other as if the city had decided to become a sky.

It was one of the most chaotic and beautiful sights I had ever seen in my life.

I closed my eyes to stop myself from being distracted by the visual noise and my perception spread through the weightless city and I felt a point in the distance that was hot and paradoxically cold... my eyes flashed open, this was the core of the damned city of fire.

My eyes tracked what my senses had showed me, and I saw that it was a burning hill about twenty miles out, and the hill had torn free of whatever it had been standing on, so the whole thing was rising now, slowly.

I saw that it was not just a hill, a walled castle had been built upon it and all of it was being dragged into the sky.

’The core,’ Hollow said.

I did not answer. I was already gone.

I came back into the world four thousand metres ahead, inside a cloud of broken masonry, and the air detonated around me with a resounding crack. I frowned, with Lightning Form I should have easily crossed the twenty miles that separated me from my target, but it would seem that inside this place, space did not obey the same rules, and it would be faster if I flew towards my target instead.

Pulling my domain to surround me for a hundred metres I tore into the air, dodging the debris of the rising city. A loud crash made me look behind me and I saw a flaming army pursuing me.

The lack of weight had not inconvenienced them for long, which I should have expected, since their horses had wings and they were all made of Flame Essence. They came in a wedge a mile wide, a hundred thousand of them at least, white-gold and silent, lances down, riding up through the floating ruin of their master’s city without once looking at it.

Every obstruction in their path turned to ash, and I decided not to engage them as I went after my target.

Suddenly it was as if the entire air in this space had been sucked into the sky and a resounding explosion occurred that resounded all through the city.

"Fwoosh... Boom!"

I looked up and saw Sovereign Caldus in the sky, a massive sun behind him that he had just created. He threw out both arms, and his voice came up through the floating city.

"Rule of the Hearth. In my house, weight is mine to give."

The Grimoire answered him. I felt a pressure that came from everywhere at once and nowhere I could point at, and in a sphere perhaps three miles across the city stopped drifting and fell.

Towers came down on towers. The spheres of burning river burst against the streets. Ten thousand tons of masonry that had been turning gently in the air a moment ago dropped at once and the sound of it was a single long note.

The Sovereign was fighting against the influence of the Heavenly Beast, but this space was hundreds of miles wide, what would three miles do?

The eyes above blinked, and I swear I could see a bit of Aurora craftiness inside it, and the area that had fallen under the influence of the Sovereign began to rise once more.

There was a loud shriek and the Grimoire beside him suddenly shuddered and a page fell from it.

The world seemed to freeze as Caldus looked at his damaged Grimoire and his sight found me, and his gaze traced my path and then fell on my destination, and I understood that he knew where I was going.

His red hair suddenly turned bright white, "You... parasite. I shall annihilate you!"

∞

Chains of flame came at me from six directions and froze at the boundary of my domain and hung there like dead snakes. A spear of white fire thirty metres long arrived and stopped and turned over slowly in the air beside my head, close enough that I could see the writing crawling along its shaft.

"You may have two Apex Laws, but your domain is still not complete."

A flaming brand suddenly appeared in front of my face, somehow passing through all my defenses, and before my domain could rotate, the brand touched my jaws taking the image of the head of a screaming Caldus and it exploded.

The impact sent me through three burning houses and a court of flame before I hit something solid. A palace wall. It shattered around me, and I kept going, tumbling through the collapsing city, gravity forgotten, stones and flames and fragments of burning law swirling around me like debris in a hurricane.

I caught myself on a floating slab of cobblestone and looked up, and Caldus was already there, inside my domain.

His Grimoire hovered beside him like a wounded sun, its golden light flickering. His red eyes were fixed on my face. His expression was cold.

"I have spent three thousand years building this Grimoire," he said. "Perfecting every law, every flame, every spirit. And you....a thing I do not even have a name for... have brought it to the edge of collapse."

He raised his hand. "I am going to enjoy killing you."

His body became consumed by fire, and he grinned before exploding. I could not help but scream in pain as the flames white hot and carrying his laws of eradication cut through my domain, washing across my body and hurling me through the city.

My body slammed into the ground that was going into the sky and I bounced into the air, and as I was falling again towards the sky, I landed on my feet and punched the wall beside me, crushing it to nothing. "Fuck this!"

My second law Armor gathered the damage that I had been absorbing and when I came to my feet, my eyes found the Sovereign, and my domain shrank around my body before I pushed it forward, not allowing it to spread all around me but focusing it on a single direction.

Sovereign Caldus was almost eight thousand metres away, and logically he should be out of the range of my domain, but when I focused it in a single direction, my domain could travel much farther than two thousand metres. I had figured out I could manipulate my domain in this manner a while ago.

My domain covered the Sovereign, and Caldus’s eyes went wide.

"What..."

I did not give him time to finish. I moved, not using my Lightning Form, just my sheer body strength and speed. A body that could withstand the weight of a million suns.

I crossed the distance between us in a single heartbeat, and my fist connected with his chest.

"Boom!"

The impact sent him through a burning palace, through a court of flame, through a wall of golden fire. He tumbled through the collapsing city, his body crossing through miles and I followed.

He caught himself on a floating slab, his Grimoire pulsing beside him, his eyes burning with rage.

"You..."

I hit him again. This time, I conjured Heaven’s Tribunal and wrapped it around my hand, so it was as if my entire fist had transformed into a gigantic golden spear of lightning, and I drove it toward his heart.

He blocked it with his forearm, but the spear shredded his arm to nothing and my fist burst out of his back, he screamed in pain and fear and I felt him about to take his fiery form and I surrounded my palm with Lightning Edict and a hundred Scripts of anchor and I seized his neck, holding him in place.

The sky above broke open as the tip of a gigantic pyramid began to peek through... more of me was coming through.