Chapter 2362: Great Equalizer

As Mira cast her elemental expansion for the first time, Arad’s eyes opened wide. He had just seen what she didn’t, and he immediately yelled at her. "Turn it off!" His scream came right alongside Isabelle, who also yelled, "Shut it down!"

But they were both a bit too late, and Mira’s elemental expansion expanded rapidly, growing to full size before anyone could stop it. It was an extremely simple expansion, but that was the reason it was so dangerous now, and extremely lethal for none other than Mira herself.

Under the golden spark of greed, the golden aura of Mira’s divine magic engulfed Arad in a fraction of a second, and for a moment, nothing happened, until the expansion’s rule kicked in.

It gave value to the power of everyone inside it, and then tried to equalize them to the same level. So for now, the elemental expansion took Arad’s power, and then Mira’s power, and tried to balance them to be equal. But that was the lethal part, as the elemental expansion was dumb and not that well-tuned, so it tried to match the full power of Arad’s Nymph.

There was no way Mira’s elemental expansion, no matter how powerful it was, could manage to equalize power with Arad in the equation. Arad was just that far stronger than her that just the mere number was enough to crash it all, and Mira felt it. It was like a massive boulder had just spawned in her chest, pulling her down with an infinite weight.

Mira knew this feeling well, like hitting a nail in a piece of wood while trying to saw it, or when you try to hammer a stake into the ground, but instead miss and hit a stone, almost breaking your wrists.

The elemental expansion had been conjured by a Demigoddess wielding primordial concept as a weapon, so it was tenacious and stubborn. It saw Arad’s Nymph, sensed the power that could even match Amaterasu in potential, and just said, "I’ll give it a try."

The expansion’s divine energy requirements ballooned out of proportion, and the universe just laughed at it, as it was akin to a bubble trying to contain the entire ocean. Mira’s entire reserve of divine magic was drained in an instant, and so was Isabelle’s reserve, which acted as her backup.

Arad could see it, like an electric short happening in real time. Mira’s expansion was growing, overheating, and destroying itself from the inside out, but then, if that kept going, it would kill her from exhaustion.

Arad rushed in; trying to contain his power would be useless, as the elemental expansion was already trying to digest it. It was much faster and easier to just destroy the expansion and pull Mira out, so he did that, unleashing every last drop of power he had.

His darkness engulfed the entire expansion in the blink of an eye, but the moment he tried to destroy it, something even stranger happened.

The elemental expansion stabilized, and its power started growing rapidly, even though Mira and Isabelle were both out of divine magic. Something else was fueling it, and this something was an even bigger monster than those two combined. Arad could sense it, a near-endless well of divine magic, power, and otherworldly arrogance. But behind all of that, there was just a simple, primal instinct kicking in to survive, and one that was powerful enough to bend the universe to its will.

It was coming from inside Mira, from the depth of her soul; the unborn child was fighting back for its mother’s life, using its own divine energy to fuel the expansion, and as a pure-blooded divine being, it had far more divine power than Mira, who only inherited divinity through a portfolio.

"Little rascal! Not even out of the womb and you’re trying to fight back against me?" Arad smiled as he tightened his grip on the elemental expansion. "It’s not the running out of energy that would kill your mother. It’s trying to shove a power equal to mine into her flesh."

As expected, the child fueling the elemental expansion was backfiring on Mira immediately, as her entire body and soul were almost being torn apart by her increasing power.

Arad growled with a grin as his darkness swallowed the entire expansion whole, and he tried to destroy it with almost double the effort. He didn’t want to use too much power, as he might end up hitting Mira herself. But then, just like his father’s tenacity, the unborn child almost opened his eyes in the womb, releasing far more divine power than Arad expected.

At first, the baby was giving out almost four times Mira and Isabelle’s combined divine magic, but the moment it sensed Arad using more force, its output skyrocketed to match Isdis’s divine magic.

But then, the moment Arad was about to use even more force and try to break the expansion before the unborn child could pull out something else, something dark stabbed Mira in the back, and the entire expansion shattered. Arad landed and he could see the maid standing behind Mira and carrying a thin black shiv made of shadows.

"Don’t bite me; I just knocked them out." The maid spoke in a monotone voice, and Arad sighed. "What are you doing here?" She was the Mother of All Life.

The maid looked at him with her dark purple eyes in silence for a second, and then looked down at the unconscious Mira. "Pure-blooded gods are never born under normal circumstances. Take Kali, for example: her mother died giving birth to her, and her father died soon after while transferring his power to her. Her father had a similar situation, as he crawled out of his mother’s corpse."

Arad waved his hand for Camilla so she could get the other paladins’ help while he dealt with the Mother of All Life. "So? What are you saying is?"

"I didn’t let you into the kingdom before because we needed to wait for this, the destined moment in fate when the child was supposed to be born. I bet the fates had it so this child would be forced to be born out of his mother to fight you back." She threw a quick glance at Mira. "That’s just how they operate. But now that I managed to catch the moment, I could interfere."

"So... you’re saying..."Arad looked at her in silence, and she finally smiled. "Yes, it’s about to be born. So we’re heading out now." She looked up, "Linda, want to come as well? I’ll need you around to protect and keep an eye on Arad."