The Last Paragon in the Apocalypse

Klaus had always wanted to create smaller teams within the Seven Star Paragon Force…

They always had their strengths, which he monitored through their combat from the Ant Kingdom up to the Moon.

Each of them had something to offer, but his ambition was to create elites who, when they met on the battlefield, would create exceptional chaos.

Of course, he knew that wasn’t going to be easy. However, Klaus had seen enough to know that some were compatible. He didn’t want to make it a class-specific team-up.

He didn’t want all swordsmen to be in one group while assassins remained in another. No, Klaus wanted to ensure the classes varied — the only way he could truly see versatility in them.

He wanted to see a swordsman and an assassin complement each other perfectly, or a mage and an archer work hand in hand to handle their opponent.

Naturally, he had already seen that in Lulu and Kay.

Lulu is a spirit master; she controls weapons with her mind. At first, she could only control her own weapons, which was good. She had hundreds of weapons at her disposal back then.

However, after she awakened her bloodline, she gained more flexibility in her class, which pushed her to start exerting more influence on other people’s weapons — but it went beyond that.

She can tap into the skills of others when they use them. It was a defensive-type skill that she could use to lower the speed, damage output, and sheer power of an attack.

It was meant to be used against attacks aimed at her life. However, Klaus saw potential in those skills. Instead of seeing a defensive-type skill, he saw a killing-type skill.

Of course, he knew there was a limit to how much she could control people’s attacks, especially when it came to defending against them.

Klaus is a spirit master; he has used his class’s power to handle countless attacks. It had saved his life many times. So he knew it was not easy to handle attacks like that.

Every attack contains the attacker’s intent to kill. In most terms, it can be said to include the person’s will. That is what drives attacks, making them nearly impossible to defend against.

However, what if the person wanted you to take control of their attack? What if the person intended to kill, but they wanted you to manipulate their attack toward the person they wanted to kill?

That was where the line became thin for Kay and Lulu.

Kay wants Lulu to take hold of his attacks, and Lulu wants to take control of Kay’s attacks… so it was a matter of when Kay shoots an arrow and where Lulu wants it to go.

And since Kay also has his will in the attacks, Lulu would only need to speed it up with little to no effort of her own.

The only thing she modifies is the speed, and if she has some form of augmentation, she can add to it, making the skills even more powerful.

Aside from that, she basically spends little to no mental energy handling the arrows coming from Kay… which, in this instance, makes her much more terrifying.

Klaus has many skills he would want both of them to learn, but for now, he wants to see how they fare in combat with the skills they possess now.

When Kay managed to break through the attacks from the Tier 11 zombies he was facing, that chance presented itself.

He tapped into one of his many arrow-disbursement-type skills and unleashed it. Safe to say, the moment Lulu saw the attacks calling to her, she smiled and tapped into the 167 arrows released, making sure every last one found its mark.

A Tier 10 Zombie aiming for Lucy’s head couldn’t release its attack before a flaming arrow passed through its skull.

An assassin-type zombie, with deep black skin and crimson red eyes, was moving through the shadows toward Yasmi, one of the healers on Klaus’s team, when a flaming arrow incinerated its existence.

A brute zombie, with arms like a truck, was lunging toward Daniel, who was locked in with two other Tier 11 brutes—one a zombie, the other a variant of a Brute Elephant called Metal Brute Elephant—when the arrow exploded on its chest, creating a gaping hole through it.

Its heart was incinerated, and it fell, creating a deep thud.

When it did, its soul—or more like its spirit—flew out and moved across the battlefield, entering a pot-like lantern sitting in front of Nadia.

Nadia was sitting on some kind of stool, two terrifying hands hovering behind her. Each hand had seven fingers, and strings came from each finger, attaching themselves to Nadia’s own fingers.

All 14 fingers had strings latched onto Nadia’s fingers. A single movement of her finger contained hundreds of instructions for her seven Tier 11 dolls fighting on the battlefield.

All seven were female-type dolls. Three were using long swords, one wielded two short swords, and the remaining three were wielding daggers.

Their movements were fluid, their strikes precise, and their coordination flawless. They fought like trained soldiers, and looking at the bodies they left in their wake, it was safe to say Nadia was more terrifying than she let on.

She was the only Transcendent among her sisters, but her fighting power had already reached the Void stage… which showed the power of the Obsidian String Demon Puppet.

Klaus, who was watching Nadia with one part of his 63 minds spread all over the battlefield, could tell the souls she was collecting now weren’t just from her kills.

At first, she could only collect the souls from those she killed, but now, she was collecting the kills of her friends too.

Of course, someone like Kilian, whose sword needs the souls of those he slays, wasn’t contributing to Nadia’s quest to collect enough souls for her demon spirit summoning ritual.

But those who didn’t need the souls were contributing to her. Those who gained nothing from the souls of their kills were giving her more than she could take…

That was especially true for the two troublemakers who were spraying fire everywhere.

Nirvana and her brother Fury were part of the outliers that the Elusive Battle Manipulator was struggling to handle… in fact, she was having no success in trying to control them.