Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse

Chapter 4251: Justiciar! V

The Justiciar was a monument of pristine, terrible white.

It stood amidst the shattered remnants of the Citadel’s great frost dome, a silent, armored titan in a garden of broken glass.

The air, once filled with the serene, crystalline hum of elemental harmony, was now a dead, cold vacuum, the silence a prelude to a symphony of slaughter!

For a moment, there was nothing. No movement, no sound. The Justiciar simply stood, its massive, white-armored form a stark, brutalist scar on the breathtaking beauty of Aeternitas Glacies.

Then, from the heart of the Citadel, the first wave of defenders came.

They were the Honored and Royal Living Elementals, beings of immense power and ancient lineage, their forms a glorious, terrible pageant of elemental fury.

Beings of living, swirling blizzard, their eyes burning with the cold light of a winter storm, unleashed torrents of soul-freezing frost!

Of Living Elementals Authority!

Others, whose bodies were forged from the very bedrock of the Fold, ripped colossal shards of crystalline glacial earth from the ground and hurled them like mountains.

From the spires of the city, Living Elementals of pure, sentient glacial lightning arced down, their forms bolts of incandescent rage.

It was a beautiful, desperate, and utterly futile assault...but they did not know this!

How could they even imagine the enemy actually had 1000 Quadrillion Purity?!

The Justiciar did not evade. It did not raise a shield. It simply moved.

It took a single, ponderous step forward, its massive, white greaves crushing the crystalline floor with a sound that was not a crack, but a dull, final thud!

A blizzard of soul-frost, a storm that could have flash-frozen a Duke’s very essence, washed over its armor.

The pristine white surface did not even frost over. A mountain of earth, a projectile carrying the weight of half a Fold, smashed against its pauldron!

The Justiciar did not even flinch. The mountain shattered into dust.

Then, it struck.

Its first target was a Royal Living Elemental of stone, a magnificent frost golem of living diamond whose complexity was in the low trillions!

It roared a challenge, its voice the grinding of tectonic plates, and brought its colossal, diamond fists down upon the intruder.

The Justiciar raised its free hand, not the one holding the great white hammer, but its open palm.

It met the descending fists, and there was no grand explosion of power. There was only the quiet, sickening crunch of diamond being turned to powder. The Justiciar’s fingers closed around the Elemental’s head, and with a single, almost casual squeeze, the ancient, thinking mountain was reduced to a cloud of glittering, lifeless dust.

HUUM!

It moved with a grace that was a horrifying contradiction to its immense size, a dancer in an abattoir.

It stepped into a storm of living lightning, its armor momentarily wreathed in a billion volts of pure, elemental fury, and it simply walked through.

It grabbed the shrieking Elemental of lightning, its gauntlet closing around the being of pure energy, and it did not crush it.

It held it, forcing the crackling, chaotic energy to ground itself through its own form, until the Elemental’s light flickered, dimmed, and was extinguished like a snuffed-out candle.

”For the Glacies!” a chorus of a thousand voices roared, a desperate, defiant cry from a legion of Ice Elementals who had formed a wall of pure, absolute-zero cold before the Justiciar.

The Justiciar responded not with a counter-spell or a blast of its own, but with its hammer.

The great white weapon, which had been held at its side, swung in a low, brutal arc!

It moved with an impossible speed, the air itself seeming to scream as it was torn apart.

The hammer connected with the wall of ice, and the wall, and the thousand beings that composed it, did not shatter. They were not broken. They were negated.

They were erased from existence in a silent, blossoming flower of pure, white flame that left not even a memory of their passing!

BOOM!

From their distant, hidden vantage point, Noah, Khor, and the holographic form of RUIN/EDEN watched in heavy silence.

|Analysis of Justiciar Combat Methodology.|

|Observation: The subject is not employing its full power. The attacks are deliberately slow, physical, and... intimate.|

|Hypothesis: The Justiciar is not seeking to simply destroy. It is seeking to cause misery. The overflow of emotions...fear, rage, despair, defiance, seems to be a desired outcome.|

|Conclusion: The purpose of this assault is not just erasure. It is a harvest.|

The prompts were a cold, clinical confirmation of the horror they were witnessing. This was not a battle. It was a culling!

”Stand down! Let the Dukes handle this!” a voice of pure, molten fury roared.

The five Dukes of Aeternitas Glacies appeared, their forms blazing with a power that dwarfed that of the Royals.

One was a being of pure, living magma, his presence a wave of incinerating heat. Another was a woman carved from a single, flawless sapphire, her authority a thing of crystalline, unyielding cold. They were the pillars of this city, the guardians of sextillions of lives!

The Justiciar saw them, and for the first time, its head tilted, a gesture of something that might have been... interest.

The Magma Duke attacked first, unleashing a river of pure, conceptual heat, a fire that could melt the very weavings of existence!

The Justiciar simply raised its hand, and the river of fire parted around it, flowing harmlessly into the void.

Then, with a speed that was a physical violation of its own mass, it was gone from where it stood and was now before the Magma Duke.

The Duke had no time to react. The Justiciar’s gauntlet, now glowing with a faint, white heat, plunged into his molten chest!

It did not burn. It did not melt. It simply... entered. The Duke let out a silent, agonized scream as the Justiciar’s hand closed around his core, the very heart of his elemental being.

The Justiciar pulled its hand back, and in its grasp was a miniature, dying sun Wheel supported by a garden!

It crushed it, and the Magma Duke’s form dissolved into a shower of cooling, black ash.

The Sapphire Duchess shrieked, a sound of pure, crystalline rage, and the very space around the Justiciar froze, locking it in a prison of diamond-hard, absolute-zero ice.

But before the prison could even fully form, the Justiciar’s hammer swung, not to break the ice, but to strike the Duchess herself. The hammer passed through the half-formed prison as if it were not there, and it connected with her sapphire form!

BOOM!

The impact was a single, beautiful, terrible chime that echoed through the void.

The Duchess, a being of 100 Trillion in complexity, shattered into a billion glittering, blue shard!

One by one, it took them. A Duke of Air was simply grabbed from the sky and crushed into a vacuum. A Duke of Earth was stomped into the ground, his very essence compacted into a single, dead stone. The last Duke, a being of pure, shimmering light, unleashed a final, desperate blast of photonic energy.

The Justiciar simply stood there, its white armor reflecting the blast in all directions, and then it walked through the light and tore the Duke in half with its bare hands!

”...”

As the last Duke fell, a new, horrifying phenomenon began. The blood, the ash, the dust, the lingering weavings of existence of every single fallen Elemental began to rise.

They were drawn into the Justiciar’s form, not with the chaotic hunger of an Inevitability, but with a strange, ordered precision.

|The authority of Emotive has been detected. It is being utilized in a unique, weaponized fashion.|

|The decimated Everythings of all collapsed entities in this location are being amplified, harvested, and collected by the Justiciar.|

...!

After the last of the fallen had been absorbed, the Justiciar rose to its full, terrifying height.

It raised its hammer high above its head, and it brought it down upon the heart of the now-defenseless, silent Citadel.

A wave of scorching white flames erupted, not with a roar, but with a profound, absolute silence.

It was a fire that did not burn with heat, but with a pure, cleansing light.

It consumed everything....the ice, the stone, the memory of the fallen. It burned, it continued to burn, and it would not stop burning until nothing, not even the sorrow of this place, remained!

Noah’s expression was heavy, his mind reeling from the sheer, brutal efficiency of the slaughter. This was a power on a scale he had only just begun to comprehend!

And it had come for him. This was a consequence of his actions.

As the white flames continued their silent work, the Justiciar began to rise, its form lifting from the heart of the inferno.

And then, horrifically, it turned its head.

Its gaze, two cold, glowing lenses in a helmet of pristine white, swept across the void and locked directly onto their hiding spot, light-years away.

The lenses seemed to focus, to analyze, to dissect Noah and Khor with a cold, detached curiosity.

It held their gaze for a single, eternal moment, a silent acknowledgment.

And then, as if it had seen all it needed to see, as if it had deemed them... insignificant and no different than those it had just killed, it continued its ascent, disappearing into the same tear in existence from which it had come!

They had been seen.

They had been judged.

And for now, they had been ignored!