Chapter 26: Distant Light Galaxy Chase Battle (Part 1)
A fist that had crossed space struck the mother beast's tentacles at a speed so high that even the highest-precision observation instruments could not accurately measure it. Terrifying explosions and shockwaves, carrying the intense light of the sun's core, spread rapidly outward from the point where Joshua's fist landed. At the location where the void mother beast had climbed into the Distant Light Galaxy, hundreds of thousands of massive tentacles and its main body erupted in a gigantic fleshy tsunami. Cracks and wounds several kilometers long immediately appeared on its colossal body and limbs, and countless streams of deep green ichor sprayed out, only to be burned into nothingness by the light of nuclear fusion.
One ten-thousandth of a second after the first punch landed, the second, third, and even hundreds of heavy blows fell in rapid succession. In the vacuum, Joshua roared, swinging all four of his arms with full force, like the most frenzied pile driver, bombarding the void mother beast at the other end of spacetime. The incandescent white gas he expelled to accelerate had already formed a cloud in the cosmos, but it was dispersed by the violent impact of his punches. Facing an unprecedented powerful enemy, the warrior's mind was blank, filled with only a single thought!
Forget about everything else, just greet it with a few tens of thousands of punches first!
At that moment, in the Poseidon Star Fortress Shipyard, located in the middle orbit of the Distant Light Galaxy, the shipboard radars of the First and Second Fleets, which had just returned from a jump and were undergoing high-speed wartime repairs, suddenly detected an ultra-high-energy psionic reaction and high-energy burst erupting at the edge of the star domain. Red alert-level messages were relayed layer by layer, finally reaching the commanders of the First and Second Fleets, who were in the middle of an emergency wartime meeting.
"Is the mother beast jumping here so soon?" The commander of the First Fleet, a red-haired commander, slammed the meeting table in frustration, gritting his teeth and saying, "I knew the jump trap couldn't stop it! What a pity. The Third Fleet must have been completely annihilated."
The commander of the Second Fleet and the other officers present nodded, beginning a moment of silence for their comrades who had sacrificed themselves to cover their retreat. But before the brief moment of silence was over, a strong jump reaction occurred in the psionic guidance field of the Poseidon Star Fortress's exclusive jump arrival zone. The rapidly fluctuating psionic energy made all the officers present turn their heads in shock.
"Psionic jump?! Could the void monsters have caught up so quickly?!"
"Enemy? No, this reaction is—"
Because the speed of a psionic jump arrival was far faster than its initiation, before everyone could even stand up from their seats and run to the holographic display screens, hundreds of silver-blue psionic vortices simultaneously unfolded. Led by the flagship 'Shatterer', the battered Third Fleet appeared within the protective range of the Poseidon Star Fortress.
"The Third Fleet? What's going on here!" Seeing their supposedly annihilated allies survive, both fleet commanders were thrown into great shock. Although they were delighted that most of their comrades had returned safely, a strong sense of confusion filled their hearts. Logically speaking, facing the encirclement of two million monster clusters and the void mother beast's main body, even if they had the Central Fleet with them, they could only retreat in a painful emergency. A nearly unscathed survival was almost impossible.
"What exactly happened?" The commander of the First Fleet was a decisive and resolute man. He immediately closed his eyes, using his own psionic energy to access the Third Fleet's main control channel, urgently communicating with Third Fleet Commander Xina using his authority. After a moment, he opened his eyes wide and said in an incredulous tone, "Reinforcements from void creatures from the homeworld?! How is this possible..."
Despite his words, he immediately ordered his crew to adjust the control room's permissions, then activated the psionic detection devices they had left behind at the other end of the Distant Light Galaxy. The images from the other end of spacetime crossed the endless distance and were projected onto the large holographic screen in the meeting room. As the long-range psionic detection instruments activated, the image of the battlefield at the edge of the Distant Light Star Domain once again appeared before the eyes of these Midgardians.
And all they could see were flashes of light like the sun, and beneath those flashes, violent explosions that felt suffocating even when viewed through a screen.
At the other end of spacetime, Joshua roared, clenching his right fist in the air. Endless energy converged, and even space began to deform under the immense energy fluctuations. Without any delay, he rapidly twisted his fist and punched. A terrifying spiral-like piercing punch, propelled by nuclear fusion, crossed space and directly struck the body of the void mother beast!
At this moment, in his full-power state, Joshua's punch speed had reached about one-tenth the speed of light. With each punch, the impact force was thirty thousand kilometers per second. Coupled with his own mass of over several million tons in his psionic ascension state, the power of each punch was unimaginably terrifying! Carrying such an inconceivable speed and force, his punch was like a hydrogen bomb, planting countless fleshy mushrooms and giant craters on the mother beast's body. Countless fluids and flesh, under the effects of ultra-high temperature and shockwaves, had already turned into deep green mist covering most of the psionic vortex channel, spreading with the energy fluctuations.
The old mage also laughed heartily, freely shifting the spacetime cracks near the void mother beast. Joshua was responsible for throwing the punches, while he, Nostradamus, was responsible for where those punches landed. Relying on his legendary mage's mental power, sensitive to the nanometer level, he keenly judged every weak point and energy node on the void mother beast's tentacles, then controlled the spacetime cracks to pour the warrior's heavy punches onto them!
Joshua silently threw another full-power punch. Heat and impact that made spacetime tremble slammed into one of the void mother beast's giant tentacles. Instantly, the tough, gelatinous tentacle, about twenty kilometers long and over three kilometers thick, snapped with a sound. Large patches of deep green blood mist and shattered carapace fragments erupted, forming cosmic fireworks. The semi-transparent hurricane formed by the energy aftermath spread into the cosmic void at a terrifying speed of several thousand kilometers per hour. If it encountered any wandering comets, it would directly incinerate them.
Back at the Poseidon Star Fortress, the three fleet commanders, including Xina, who were watching this scene, had also joined the meeting. They all opened their mouths wide, revealing looks of disbelief.
"The tentacles... all of the mother beast's tentacles have been broken off!"
That was indeed the case. During Joshua's brief initial exchange with the void mother beast, with Nostradamus's help, he had cleanly thrown countless punches, forcefully breaking off all the tentacles that the mother beast had extended to the edge of the Distant Light Galaxy. Even the main body, which was just passing through the psionic vortex and had only shown its head in this star domain, had a layer of its flesh completely shaved off by the aftermath!
The void mother beast had almost been knocked back through its teleportation by the warrior's continuous combo, forced to return to the other side of spacetime. The reason it was 'almost' was because the endless horde of small void monsters that had been lurking in psionic space had already sprung from their ambush, beginning to aggressively surround Joshua and Nostradamus.
In that instant, even the observation lenses of the Poseidon Star Fortress could only see a pitch-black void. Millions of void monsters continuously opened psionic vortices, bursting out from subspace to surround the warrior and the old mage. This nearly endless army obscured the stars and the cosmos. Their dark carapaces absorbed light, plunging the entire edge of the Distant Light Star Domain into darkness.
After Joshua stopped, Nostradamus immediately opened a deep blue spacetime gate, quickly jumping with the warrior outside the encirclement of the void monsters. At that moment, the endless horde of monsters began to release psionic energy from their entire bodies, once again unfolding the psionic cage that had nearly trapped Joshua earlier. This made the old mage nervously exhale.
Unlike Joshua, who was thick-skinned and could even reverse-erode, he had no way to break free from a psionic cage when spacetime was sealed. If he were actually trapped, it would be troublesome.
Sensing that their prey, which they had prepared to ambush and surround, had escaped, the countless void monsters that had been gathering changed like flowing water. From a spherical encirclement, they transformed into a long, black tidal wave, surging wildly towards the space where the two were located. At the same time, the mother beast, which had just had most of its tentacles severed, locked its terrifying will across the void onto the space surrounding the two.
This meant that even if Nostradamus could perform another short-range teleportation, the energy required would be dozens of times greater, making it completely not worth it. But this situation had already been considered during the time the two had stared at the psionic vortex earlier, and the countermeasure was undoubtedly already prepared.
"Suspend 'Bombardment Operation'! Initiate 'Cleansing Plan!'"
In their mental link, Nostradamus laughed heartily. "Are you ready, Joshua?"
"Stop talking nonsense, hurry up!"
Joshua, who had just stopped throwing punches and was now cooling down his arm joints and overall body structure, said impatiently, "It's not like you're the one doing the work. Alright, give me the buff!" As he spoke, he unconsciously revealed a cruel and ferocious grin. This grin even startled the Divine Mechanism and the Light Orb, who were watching from the mental space.
But Nostradamus didn't mind. He had seen countless faces on the battlefield excited by slaughter and battle, and Joshua was simply the most terrifying and ferocious among them. He summoned his artifact, 'Moment', from somewhere. Countless profound three-dimensional runes, and even four-dimensional runes that vaguely extended into the realm of time, flew out from this ancient-looking grimoire, which actually recorded the lifetime of learning of a legendary mage and was second only to divine artifacts. They formed a set of illusory, cyan-gold gauntlets that enveloped Joshua's four fists. The moment the gauntlets were fully secured, Joshua clenched his fists tightly. This small action caused an extremely intense spacetime fluctuation, tearing large patches of space into fragmented traces.
[Ability Grant: Void Resonance]!
This was one of the cooperative methods the two legendary experts had discussed long ago. Joshua had originally wanted to name it 'Berserker's Fist', based on a piece of equipment he knew from his past, but the old mage, who didn't understand the reference in that name, insisted on using his own name, 'Void Fist'. The two compromised, resulting in this somewhat strange name.
During the time of their cooperation, the horde of void monsters, which had obscured the stars and surged like a tsunami, had already charged in the silence of the vacuum at a speed of three-thousandths the speed of light. This ferocious chaotic army seemed capable of crushing everything, as if even if a planet stood in their way, they could ram through it with brute force!
And what greeted them were four silent, serious punches from Joshua!
Four arms, four fists, like a Gatling gun, wildly and ferociously punching across space. The weight and ferocity of the force were like entire mountain ranges crashing down and grinding. And in reality...
The attack range of this punch was even wider than a mountain range!
Boom!!!!
In the vacuum, centered on the warrior's heavy fists, within a vast cosmic space of dozens of kilometers in every direction, black cracks of spacetime shattering appeared everywhere! Joshua's single punch seemed to strike every point within these thousands of cubic kilometers simultaneously! The tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of monsters at the forefront didn't even have time to scream before they were turned into endless meat paste in the tide-like rolling spacetime cracks, completely annihilated! The observers at the Poseidon Star Fortress, from all three fleets, couldn't understand what was happening, but it was happening!
Nostradamus, whose energy was almost depleted, was panting heavily, watching Joshua, like a bulldozer, cleanly shattering and clearing away the tide-like void monsters, circle after circle. He coughed and laughed with satisfaction. He reached for his chin, but forgot that he was in his spatial avatar state and had no beard. His humanoid form, which had become middle-aged, also had no beard. But this little interlude didn't affect his excitement at all.
The old mage's ability, 'Void Resonance', lived up to its name. It could completely spread the power of the recipient to the surrounding space. If used by a Silver-rank spacetime mage, the resonance range would probably be a few meters, just a high-level cleave. But at Gold-rank, it could reach nearly a hundred meters, a true battlefield harvester. At the Ultimate-rank, it was even more terrifying, allowing the user to become an invincible warrior who could fight ten thousand alone. But at the Legendary-rank, especially with the cooperation of two legends, combined with Joshua's psionic ascension state, the resonance range reached an unbelievable level—a circle spanning over ten kilometers in diameter, with an actual volume of over a thousand cubic kilometers!
What did this mean? It meant that one punch from Joshua could blow up a city! It was a surface destroyer, a continent-destroying level technique!
Using this ability himself was meaningless for Nostradamus; he didn't have that much power. But giving it to the warrior was different. In the old mage's view, a warrior who had broken through to Legendary with the Ultimate Essence of Force, receiving this buff that consumed all his energy, was a multiplicative enhancement!
In no time, the seemingly surging tide of monsters retreated in a panic, like beaten dogs, urgently recalled by the mother beast. In just over ten seconds, they had lost nearly a quarter of their number, essentially charging full speed into a meat grinder and committing suicide!
Seeing that the void monsters weren't coming to die, Joshua stopped attacking, taking a few heavy breaths and expelling incandescent white mist. The cyan-gold spacetime gauntlets on his arms shattered, turning into countless thin spatial fragments. The warrior, who had expended most of his energy, activated the Fusion Core Heart in his chest. An energy tornado swirled towards the countless void monster meat scraps and blood mist he had just created, compressing and condensing them into fuel for his furnace.
But at that moment, thanks to the delay caused by the void monster horde, the distant void mother beast finally fully passed through the spacetime channel. It saw Joshua, who was absorbing large amounts of matter to replenish his losses, and Nostradamus, who was in wartime meditation, recovering his mana and mental power. It immediately began a furious counterattack.
The mother beast's appearance was like a sea urchin covered in soft tentacles, but billions of times larger. Long cracks, like smiling gashes, continuously spewed out various juvenile void monsters. These were its mountain-like giant reproductive cavities. On the front of the mother beast's body were countless severed tentacles that were rapidly regenerating, and a giant black spot that resembled an eye. This chaotic observation organ, like a compound insect eye, firmly locked onto Joshua and Nostradamus, radiating an endless, icy malice.
As spacetime bent into an arc, the mother beast, whose size alone was nearly a million meters—a satellite-level creature nearly a thousand kilometers across—dragged its massive body, like a super-giant cosmic ship, spewing a long, hundreds-of-kilometers-long deep green psionic flame. With a psionic shield several kilometers thick, it simply charged straight at the warrior and the others. At that moment, not only Nostradamus, but even Joshua's expression changed. This was different from the scattered void monster horde before. A nearly thousand-kilometer-class mother beast charging at full speed could knock a planet out of its orbit and cause a continent to sink!
And unlike before, when it was crossing spacetime, this mother beast now had a shield shell several kilometers thick! Neither Joshua nor Nostradamus thought that the nuclear fusion light-speed punches and spatial resonance they had used against the void monsters would have any effect on this incredibly tough gravity-psionic shield.
So, having recovered some energy, Nostradamus grabbed Joshua's shoulder and once again opened a deep blue spacetime gate, moving to the other side of the mother beast's charging direction. But the mother beast seemed to be able to sense spacetime fluctuations. With a rapid turn that was completely unlike a thousand-kilometer-class behemoth, it continued to charge at the two. At the same time, it once again used spacetime anchoring, preparing to bind Nostradamus's teleportation. The old mage once again urgently opened a spacetime gate, dodging this attack.
Thus, the three super lifeforms began a rapid and intense chase in cosmic space. Unconsciously, their battlefield began to shift towards the interior of the Distant Light Galaxy, immediately turning into a hyper-speed mobile battle heading towards the Distant Light Galaxy's sun!
At the Poseidon Star Fortress.
"They are rapidly approaching the inner system!"
"Orbit correction! Orbit correction again! Commander, it can be confirmed that they are moving in our direction!"
"Those void lifeforms that came to support from the homeworld seem to be able to sense the direction of the Poseidon Star Fortress! They are rapidly approaching us on a sixty-seven-degree oblique trajectory!"
"My god, this speed!"
In the fortress meeting room, tense and chaotic communications occupied every psionic channel. But neither the commander of the First Fleet nor the commanders of the Second and Third Fleets paid attention to these things. They stared wide-eyed, unblinkingly, at the unclear images transmitted in real-time by the Midgardian psionic particle sensors.
In the image, during the hyper-speed chase, the giant void mother beast actually caught up with the seemingly agile pair of legendary experts. Instantly, a mountain-like tentacle lashed out. Dozens of kilometers long, several kilometers thick—this was a mountain made of flesh! The chaotic monster's tough body, capable of crossing the turbulent spacetime currents of the multiverse, could fully support this inconceivable level of physical movement. Not to mention the psionic chaos covering it, just the mass impact of this strike on a planet would be a super earthquake capable of shaking half a continent!
At the other end of spacetime, facing this terrifying blow, neither Joshua nor Nostradamus dodged. The warrior even sneered, simply allowing the attack to strike his body. To everyone's astonishment, this massive tentacle strike 'lightly' passed through the warrior and the old mage, as if it had hit nothing.
"Missed?!"
"No, it really passed through!"
A fountain of green blood erupted from the giant tentacle the void mother beast had just swung. A gruesome wound, several kilometers wide, almost severing the tentacle entirely, appeared in the center of the mother beast's tentacle. Everyone immediately understood what had just happened. Facing the mountain-like fleshy tentacle crashing down, the two legends didn't dodge or evade. Relying on their superior physical defense, they used the enemy's own force to pierce through its tentacle with their own bodies!
"Ridiculous. Joshua, your physical defense is the toughest I've ever seen, incomparable even to the dwarven secret alloy of Orichalcum and Adamantite."
Still in rapid motion, Nostradamus shook his head and laughed in the mental space. "And I have no physical form. As long as I neutralize that layer of psionic shield, its physical attacks are completely useless!"
Joshua didn't respond to the old mage's words. He was rapidly calculating his own trajectory and the void mother beast's speed. Dozens of seconds later, the corner of his mouth twitched, revealing a faint smile. "Position reached."
In reality, even without the mother beast revealing its trump cards, the purely attritional tentacle attacks were starting to annoy the warrior. Although these attacks were meaningless for the two of them, for the mother beast, it was like blowing a breath of air. This could go on forever. So, from the very beginning, he had prepared a place to serve as the formal battlefield against the mother beast.
Unaware of Joshua and the others' thoughts, the void mother beast swung another giant tentacle, consuming the warrior and the old mage's stamina and energy. Joshua didn't look back. The second pair of arms on his shoulders twisted in a direction without turning his body, then manifested a silver-white greatsword and a black giant axe. Using the Steel Sword and spacetime cracks, he tore through the mother beast's tentacle, causing a limb measured in kilometers to fall off. But the mother beast's other tentacles caught its severed limb and reattached it to the wound. In just over ten seconds, it healed again!
However, this was useless, because Nostradamus also launched a counterattack at the same time. While the mother beast was healing its wound, he accumulated energy during the high-speed movement, then calmly aimed at the enemy's energy node and fired a high-energy lightning bolt. Instantly, a clearly visible scorch mark appeared on the newly healed wound, and it fell off again. This time, the mother beast couldn't regenerate again. It had permanently lost that part of its limb.
But the most terrifying thing was not this. The endless small void monsters that had been following closely behind the void mother beast, using its ejected energy flow as propulsion, seeing that they couldn't pose a real threat to the two legends, began to flicker with psionic light under their mother's command, burning their life essence, and started to merge!
At the Poseidon Star Fortress, in the blurry images transmitted by the psionic particle sensors, the commanders of the three fleets watched this scene with bated breath. This endless horde of void monsters displayed an energy they had never shown before! Thousands of teardrop-shaped scout-level monsters merged into an oval-shaped large main-force unit, and dozens of main-force units fused into a spindle-shaped kilometer-class unit. Then, nearly ten kilometer-class units began to merge into a super-individual shaped like a disc!
"They can merge!?"
Sensing the massive anomaly behind him, Joshua, without turning his head, cursed as if he had seen it with his own eyes. "I can't even do that! How can these monsters do it?!"
Who is the super robot here, them or me?!
Thus, the two arms on the warrior's back swung out in anger, and Nostradamus cooperated by opening spacetime cracks. Instantly, four nuclear fusion light-speed punches slammed into the distant super-monster individual that was in the process of merging. The rapidly striking explosive heavy punches were like super nuclear bombs, generating millions of degrees or even higher temperatures and explosions upon impact. The giant monster individual had no resistance, being burned, shattered, and crushed into countless pieces of flesh and debris. Joshua even threw a few punches at the void mother beast's main body, but the effect was unsatisfactory. With a strong flash, a huge dent suddenly appeared on the mother beast's main body's several-kilometer-thick psionic gravity shield. Concentric circular ripples, like waves, propagated to every part of the shield, like the roar of an ocean.
But no matter how visually stunning the effect was, in the end, it still hadn't penetrated the mother beast's surface defense.
Moreover, due to the delay caused by the attack, Joshua and Nostradamus's speed slowed by a fraction. But in a hyper-speed chase based on thousandths of the speed of light, a fraction meant a gap of hundreds of kilometers being closed. In an instant, the two were caught up by countless large monsters and super-individuals that had completed their merging. These densely packed plague minions, cosmic viruses, swarmed over them like a group of ants and bees seeing a delicious meal of pollen and nectar!