Chapter 4675: Severing Light

Runark stared at her with a stunned expression. The gravitational field that she had created to trap the Lance of Light was truly smooth. Her mastery over space was profound considering how recently she had begun to tap into it.

"Did you know? Dominoes of light are the simplest of them all," she remarked, pointing at him.

"Light attacks are the easiest to commandeer."

Immediately, the beam of light that had been revolving around her was launched at Runark. Except, she split the beam through gravitational refraction into the colors of the rainbow, spreading them across a large amount of area to ensure he couldn’t evade them.

Runark’s eyes sharpened as he charged straight towards the incoming beams of light.

WHOOSH

They simply melted into his body, as if sucked into it by force. He had absorbed a drop of the Blood of Solaris, courtesy of his generous godfather. It allowed him to absorb light with a rather extraordinary efficiency.

He could fuel his own power with the power of ambient light, drastically increasing his stamina. Ria’s eyes widened with surprise as he smoothly absorbed all of the attacks arriving before her. He gazed into her eyes deeply.

Not because he found her eyes to be beautiful, which he did.

But because the technique he had activated targeted his opponent’s eyes.

A simple blinding flare. His eyes shined with an intensity greater than that of the sun for just a moment, stunning her vision momentarily as her movements were destabilized. A single opening was all it should have taken, but Ria was not as reliant on her vision as many other Martial Artists.

In fact, when she closed her eyes, it remained closed for the rest of the fight. Against Runark, eyes were liabilities. She would rely on her corporeal senses, feeling his presence through dozens and dozens of means. He could not fool or blind all of those senses with light, try as he might. He attacked her nonetheless, using a combination of light-charged maneuvering and thrusting light beam attacks to try and harm her with her vision gone.

But it simply didn’t work. Ria didn’t need eyes to follow light. She could sense his mind, and she could sense where and how he intended to attack her. That was all she needed.

That was all she needed to push the dominoes within her reach.

Every time they made physical contact, she was exposed to the dominoes in his body. She knew if she did this, then she could stress a region of his body that had an abnormally high number of microscopic mechanical strain fractures. She knew that if she hit him with enough force in another part of his body, she could cause his blood vessel to overload at that moment, causing some hemorrhaging.

Every time Runark struck, he was the one taking damage. Ria remained planted in one place, battering his body with each attack he made. His expression grew frustrated, but in truth, she was impressed that he could force her into passivity.

His Lumina Godspeed was extremely impressive. Because his body relied on light propulsion to thrust him forward, his body moved with an unnaturally uniform velocity all over. That, paired with the streamlined energy manipulation operations, made him virtually untouchable.

Teleportation worked once, but once Runark realized how easily she could use it, he never stopped moving at top speed and never maintained a linear trajectory, the only time she knew where his exact position would be was when his attack reached her, making teleportation redundant.

Even with her prediction, he eluded her, forcing her to rely on a passive counter-offensive retaliatory defense strategy to hurt him. She couldn’t touch him, but as long as he chose to touch her, she could do much to hurt him. Strictly speaking, Runark could force a draw if he wanted by simply staying away from her. With the stamina that the Blood of Solaris provided him, he could maintain this dance virtually indefinitely, but he rejected such a cowardly outcome.

He didn’t want to run away from Ria.

He wanted to face her directly and head-on.

It was frustrating to see the trump cards he had worked on in the past few years to be dismantled this firmly, but he expected nothing less of Ria.

That was why he didn’t hesitate to use his ultimate and final trump card. He began moving faster and faster, accelerating to his top speed and then some. He pushed his body to the very limit as he charged towards Ria.

He concentrated every ounce of light within his body into a sharp microscopic two-dimensional field, as if it was a razor. Ria was prepared for yet another attack, her firm stance never once budging when Runark reached her. A beam of light or a razor of light; it mattered not; she would dismantle the dominoes of their existence and harness them against him.

Or so she thought.

She thought wrong, for the razor was not meant to cut her.

No, it was meant to chisel at the connection between the Higgs field and the particles of her body that he touched, forcefully converting a tiny portion of her body into light.

"Unilumina."

TAP

His finger pressed against her chest, tapping her sternum. A meaningless attack, Ria frowned as she proceeded to tense her chest muscles to crush his finger like a twig. Yet, the razor of light struck the Higgs field before she could. Her sternum began to shine with blinding brightness as Runark grinned.

He had succeeded.

BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!!!

The attack bypassed her active defenses, forcing her to rely on her raw constitution and her extraordinary manipulation of energy to prevent herself from dying. Unilumina was an attack that Runark had created, inspired by the magnificent Omnilumina that Bodhisattva Maitreyi had used to impact an entire war between civilizations.

An explosion of light engulfed them both as a piece of Ria’s chest effectively turned into an antimatter bomb, ravaging her body inside-out while Runark’s body was flung back from the powerful concussive force.

BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!!!