DID YOU KNOW? YOU CAN NOW READ THREE TO SIX CHAPTERS AHEAD. CHECK MY PROFILE FOR THE LINK.
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Rimuru knew that Kaede was as dangerous as they came. In fact, if he had to sit down and attempt to measure the sheer extent of Kaede Honjou's power, he was almost certain he would end up overestimating her, and yet, even that dramatic overestimation would likely still fall short of the terrifying reality of what she could actually do.
And wasn't that exact scenario playing out right in front of his eyes?
He had seen Kaede fight before, albeit briefly. Her initial skirmishes with Milim had granted him a fleeting glimpse of her true capabilities, leaving a lasting impression of her overwhelming strength.
Now, however, watching her clash against what was essentially a dark, mirror duplicate of herself, Rimuru realized with a chill that he had still drastically underestimated the scale of her power.
This domain was supposed to be the Demon Realm or rather, 'Hell,' as Raphael had so politely and succinctly classified it, which meant it was fundamentally never expected to be a welcoming or comfortable environment to begin with.
Yet, as terrifying as Hell was normally depicted in legends and ancient scriptures, the landscape around them was now easily over forty times worse.
Floating high above them was the dark manifestation of the Ｈ̷̿͝Ｙ̶̎͂Ｄ̸̈́̐Ｒ̵̈́͝Ａ̷͗̒, except this time, Kaede had summoned her own colossal Hydra to match it.
As a result, the firmament above had ceased to be a normal sky entirely. It had morphed into a constantly shifting, violently churning squall of corrosive venom, hyper-dense miasma, and thousands of razor-sharp teeth, periodically raining down a lethal, indiscriminate torrent of death upon the ruined landscape below.
The serpentine constructs were so incomprehensibly massive that every single thrash of their towering bodies generated devastating atmospheric shockwaves.
Had a clash of this magnitude occurred anywhere near a large, established nation like Falmuth, the entire kingdom would have been obliterated down to atomic dust upon the very first impact.
Beneath this grotesque, malformed anomaly of a sky, the twin incarnations of the original Kaede, one radiating a blazing crimson aura of demonic power, and the other glowing with the pure, pristine white light of an angelic entity, engaged the false Kaede in a high-speed clash of pure annihilation.
They moved as blinding blurs of light, their collisions flashing across the desolate realm so rapidly that the very earth beneath them was continuously melted into molten slag, tearing open abyssal fissures from which landmasses and craggy mountains the size of entire islands violently rose and crumbled in seconds.
Colossal spheres of fiery energy expanded beyond the realm of normal perception, swelling until they consumed the entire horizon, only to be devoured into nothingness just as rapidly by the dark shield.
The twin Kaede's massive white wings, spanning the endless horizons, flapped once with a thunderous gust, summoning down blinding lances of holy light directly from stars in the sky that did not even exist in this realm.
Even the very air was in a perpetual state of self-annihilation, violently collapsing and detonating due to the volatile, non-stop reaction between the dense negative energy of Hell and the otherworldly, divine energies tearing through the atmosphere.
"This looks like the Primordial Violet's domain," Luminous remarked suddenly, hovering a short distance away from him as her eyes tracked the cataclysmic exchange. "Or rather, Wisteria's domain, as she is known now."
Rimuru remembered her instantly, the violet-haired demoness who had silently accompanied Kaede during Walpurgis.
Learning that she casually ruled over an entire section of Hell was certainly an unexpected piece of trivia to absorb given their current life-or-death situation, but he wasn't about to complain.
"Honestly, I'll take anywhere where our collateral damage won't wipe out an entire continent. I'll just make sure to send her a huge gift basket and a formal apology later."
Before Luminous could reply, the fabric of reality directly ahead of them shattered like a spiderweb, producing a resounding, deafening boom that rattled their very souls before the spatial wounds slowly knit themselves back together.
Even with all the chaos, there was still no viable opening that either he or Luminous could comfortably exploit without risking getting caught in the crossfire of those absolute defenses.
"The mirror image of Kaede seems exceptionally adept at high-level combat," Luminous noted again, her sharp gaze fixed on the blinding trails left behind by the battling trio. "She almost certainly possesses an Ultimate Skill. This battle will prove vastly more troublesome than I initially anticipated."
Rimuru turned toward her, nodding solemnly. "Yeah. But that doesn't mean we're completely helpless. Even Ultimate Skills aren't totally infallible."
He would know better than anyone, after all. He currently possessed three of them, though Raphael had already bluntly informed him that [Uriel, Lord of Vows], his supposedly impenetrable spatial defense, would be rendered completely useless against whatever logic-defying technique that shield was utilizing.
'So much for being absolute defense,' Rimuru thought with a silent, exasperated sigh.
"While that may technically be true, do not make the mistake of underestimating the sheer weight of an Ultimate Skill," Luminous warned, her voice laced with rare severity. "There are only a select few individuals in existence who possess such power, and every single one of them stands at the absolute pinnacle of this world. If this entity truly wields one of her own, then..."
Rimuru briefly tuned out her words as a sudden realization struck him. 'Wait... does Luminous not have an Ultimate Skill?'
Luminous paused mid-sentence and fixed him with a strangely flat, incredulous look. "No. I do not possess one."
"Shit, did I say that out loud?!" Rimuru let out a nervous, awkward laugh, rubbing the back of his neck.
Luminous kept her crimson eyes locked onto him in total silence, and in that exact second, Rimuru knew with absolute certainty that she had just realized the truth.
Yes, the slime floating next to her possessed an Ultimate Skill. Multiple ones, in fact.
Luminous narrowed her eyes, her lips pressing into a fine, sharp line. "You insufferable slime... How... You are hoarding capabilities far beyond what a newly crowned Demon Lord ought to possess. We will be having a long discussion about this later, assuming we survive this nightmare."
"Haha... yeah, let's definitely focus on surviving first!" Rimuru squeaked, sweating internally as he quickly redirected his focus back to the apocalyptic warzone unfolding below.
Before Luminous could press him any further, the atmosphere inside the sub-realm violently compressed.
Down in the molten valley, the dark duplicate of Kaede suddenly stopped retreating. Even as the demonic and angelic Kaedes closed in from opposing flanks, trailing devastating arcs of black-flame lightning and concentrated divine light, the imposter simply raised her left arm.
The devouring shield around her then did something that would have caused Rimuru's eyes to bleed had he been a human. The shield expanded, while folding into itself.
It resembled a grotesque inversion of a blooming flower, a dark, festering blight that assaulted sight itself.
In an instant, space itself buckled inward like a crushed metal sphere. The twin attacks launched by the dual Kaedes were forcibly twisted into violent spirals and sucked directly into the epicenter of the shield, feeding its oppressive mass until the barrier radiated a sickening, void-black luminescence.
‹Warning,› Raphael's calm, analytical voice echoed inside Rimuru's mind.
‹Individual 'False Kaede' has converted the absorbed energy into a localized mass-displacement field. High probability of an immediate large-scale directional discharge.›
"Luminous, move!" Rimuru bellowed.
A fraction of a second later, a beam of pitch-black energy, laced with the stolen crimson lightning and golden light, erupted upward, bisecting the purple sky of the Demon Realm and tearing a trench several miles wide straight through the obsidian mountain ranges in the distance.
The shockwave alone nearly threw Luminous off balance, her barrier flickering violently as she stabilized herself with her wings. "Tch! Absorbing our attacks and unleashing them back at full force... It's like fighting a sentient black hole!"
"Worse," Rimuru muttered, his golden eyes narrowing as he watched the two Kaedes gracefully land on floating platforms of compressed magicules high above the scorched earth. "I can't shake the feeling that she's toying around."
Down below, the angelic Kaede flapped her four massive wings, sending a cascade of brilliant white feathers drifting through the dark air. Each feather transformed into a glowing rune, hovering in complex geometric formations around the dark mirror image.
"Demonic side, buy me three seconds," the angelic Kaede commanded, her voice echoing with dual-layered, celestial authority.
"Don't tell me what to do, light-freak," the demonic Kaede spat back, a dark smirk playing on her lips despite her harsh tone.
In a flash of blinding crimson speed, the demonic Kaede vanished, reappearing directly in front of the imposter. Her dark horns flared with dense, highly compressed negative energy as she swung her red-hot blade in a ruthless, triple-strike combination, not aiming to breach the shield, but to physically lock the imposter in place through sheer, relentless kinetic force.
The sky roared as the two forces collided once more, the air popping with continuous sonic booms that shook the very foundations of Hell itself.
Rimuru gripped his sword hilt tightly, his mind working at maximum capacity alongside Raphael. "We can't just stand here watching, Raphael. Find me a breach. Even a millisecond opening in that shield is all we need to slip a spatial attack through!"
‹Understood. Commencing deep-structural analysis of the target's barrier logic. Time remaining until solution: 12 seconds.›
"Luminous," Rimuru called out, his tone dropping all previous playfulness. "Get ready. When I give the signal, we're going all-in."
Luminous glanced at him, sensing the sudden shift in his aura, and a ruthless, noble smile touched her lips. "Very well, slime. Show me what that Ultimate Skill of yours can truly accomplish."