Dimensional Descent

The skies split open and the world overturned. For a moment, the Inbetween World gained light. Violet rained down, and the flames that smoldered at the end of all things made themselves known. An enormous portal took shape, and a spirit on the other side began to struggle. Leonel was already raining down arrows as though he didn’t care whether the Weapon Spirit listened to him or not. However, slowly but surely, with every pluck of the bowstring, a resounding TWANG! echoed, and the Weapon Spirit was pulled closer and closer. In truth, this wasn’t fake. Leonel didn’t care very much about the Weapon Spirit. As far as he was concerned, he and his wife could create a stronger weapon given enough time and the proper resources. Though, the latter would be harder to find than he gave it credit for. However, it was also because of this that he wanted this Weapon Spirit now as a stopgap measure. It had been a long time since he had wielded a truly powerful bow. Remembering how it had felt to use the White Lion Bow initially, he felt his blood boil. He wanted that feeling again. He had always had the greatest affinity for Bow Force, even above that of his Spear Force, despite the fact he had only been born with a Lineage Factor for the latter but not the former. However, now he felt like he truly understood why that was. Or… maybe he always had, in a way. The answer had always been on the tip of his tongue. Control. There was no other weapon that could control a battlefield to the same level as a bow. He found that he didn’t even prefer a gun nearly as much. One might think that a gun was superior… but he had never agreed with that either. There was a reason he had stopped crafting sniper rifles. It wasn’t as though he lost the skill to do so along the way. There was a certain flexibility and added control that came with using a bow and arrow that he simply couldn’t replicate with a gun. Even if he could add a bit of crafting magic to replicate that sort of control, it would never be the same… because whatever he could add to a sniper rifle, he could add to a bow and bolster the control he already had over it even further. About the only thing that was superior to a bow was the overt and oppressive power a gun could unveil in a single brief instant. However, in exchange for control… Leonel would trade that away ten out of ten times. The bow was the ultimate form of who he was. A person who wanted to not just control his own body perfectly, but even the world around him. When his Dream World bloomed and covered the battlefield in full force, the Weapon Spirit finally couldn’t seem to protect itself any longer. It was ripped away from its location and tore a path through time and space, drilling into the beautiful golden bow. ROAR! The roar peeled through the skies like a clap of thunder. All of a sudden, the bow blazed with life. Leonel, who had already become what looked like a twelve-pointed star in the skies, became even larger as though a true sun was descending from above. He didn’t even need to prep himself or take a breath, almost as though he had been waiting for this exact moment his entire life. The world overturned, and the rain of arrows accelerated. A profound understanding overwhelmed Leonel, and he realized just how much power this bow had. The theory of relativity was complex. It could be explained simply enough on its surface, but the deeper you went, the more of a genius you realized Einstein was. Every day, you could learn tidbits about the spacetime continuum through this theory that could shake you to the core. And one of those things for Leonel was a secret of photons of light. The simple fact of it was that light was constant in its speed. The closer you got to the speed of light, the heavier you became, and the slower time moved for you in relation to everything else. Of course, as Leonel moved into wider existence, he had learned many ways of bending and breaking the laws of special relativity. But what he had learned nonetheless was just how close to the truth Einstein had been… at least when you weren’t using your Force to forcefully rewrite those laws and shatter them. When the world was intact… special relativity was correct. And that meant, when you took it to its logical extreme, it held up as well. What did it really mean that you approached infinite mass when you closed in on the speed of light? What did it really mean that time became infinitely slower in relation to everything around you as you approached the speed of light? The logical conclusion, and something that had excited young Leonel, was a simple thought… The thought that photons of light were the only things in existence that never aged. Even further, that photons of light were in the very same state they had been since the beginning of time, from the instant they had been created. And even further than that, that photons of light were trapped in a single instant of time. Leonel had already deduced this long ago. It wasn’t like he was the first, but he had at least come to realize it without reading it in a book first, extrapolating the obvious conclusion from the information in front of him. This memory came bubbling up the moment the World Spirit entered the bow because he understood what it could do… and he understood even further just how much it would bolster his strength. If one listened to the twang of the bowstring, they would come to notice something shocking. An arrow would leave and strike its target all before the sound even echoed. In fact, there was seemingly no lag between the disappearance of the arrow and the death of an unfortunate foe. Not a single bit of time passed. It was instantaneous. One shot. One kill. And his targets didn’t even have the right to ready themselves. The Laevis members in the army felt their hearts leap into their throats. They understood exactly what this was. This was the absolute highest state one could reach with their Heirloom, a state that hadn’t been reached in countless generations, one that hadn’t even appeared since the fall of the Creation Beasts. The reason they allowed their youth to try out the bow in turns was because they were trying to train this level of mastery to appear again. What none of them could have ever expected was that an outsider would grasp it… Timeless Radiance. Run. There was nothing else to do. Such a person appearing on a battlefield meant death for them all. However… BOOM! An arrow landed and exploded an entire island. Despair colored the expressions of the Laevis family members. The others of the Four Great Families seemed to pick up on what was happening late, but when they did, their despair was no less. Infinite Radiance. To think that an outsider would comprehend not just one, but both of their greatest states. Not only was he using them, but he was using them continuously as though they didn’t mean much to him at all. Timeless Radiance was able to strike with an instantaneous arrow. There was no lag between the pluck of the bowstring and the death of the target. It was faster—faster than even the laws of the world themselves—so much so that they didn’t have the speed to act on the arrow. But even so, that was only the first of their two shocking abilities. Infinite Radiance was a strike that carried infinite mass. No matter what it crashed into, it would be heavier, denser, more destructive. It was even more shocking than Timeless Radiance because light shouldn’t have any mass. It represented a level of law-breaking that exceeded Timeless Radiance by a step. The bow seemed born to be in Leonel’s hands. He was killing so fast that the Fawkes warriors found themselves standing around without enemies to face off against. The Third Imperial Prince stood gasping for breath, a hint of paleness on his face from the earlier injury. He realized that if the elder who sneak-attacked him had such an ability, let alone standing here trying to catch his breath, he would be a dead man. He couldn’t even track the arrows at all. The only saving grace was that the Timeless Radiance arrows didn’t carry enough punch to rip through his defenses… But what about Infinite Radiance? It seemed that Infinite Radiance was at least slow enough for him to react to, but… Something told him that Leonel was still holding back. To him, this was only the beginning.