The core members by the side shook their heads. In their minds, it was all over. Krona himself stood atop his manifested Leviathan with a calm look, his hands folded behind his back. He gazed at the water where Kiran had landed with a strange light in his eyes.
Before Misery exclaimed his shock and awe, Krona’s expression changed. While the core members had ruled out Kiran long ago, he alone sensed something occurring beneath the waters that shook him deeply.
Soon, the core members had their brows furrow as they could hear a strange sound at the edge of their hearing, as if someone was shouting from a far distance. However, with each second that passed, the voice became louder and louder until their faces changed because they could actually hear it normally now.
“Haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhh!!!!”
BOOM!
The water exploded, turning into mist instantly rather than spreading around as droplets. The cloud above the sea began to swirl and focus on a certain area, like the center of the world existed there.
In this artificial hole, there stood Kiran at the base, who was partially hunched over. His face was ferocious as blood leaked down the side of his lips, but his aura had almost doubled in size and ferocity.
Even more terrifying was the fact that lightning coursed through his aura occasionally, flashing and coiling around him as if to express the level of his current power. Kiran’s robes had long ripped open at the top due to his now bulging muscles.
The spiky red hair that stood up had also increased in length and new strands had appeared, not to mention two curled down to form bangs on his forehead. His aura was so potent that any water that tried to naturally occupy the space he stood in ended up evaporated instantly.
.me.
The longer he charged, the more the clouds above swirled, and their speed increased with every rotation, as if about to form a cyclone just by being focused by Kiran.
Kiran then seemed to stabilize his aura somewhat and shot out of the hole, becoming airborne once more as he hovered in the sky calmly.
Super Warrior 2!
If before, his aura could be said to be slightly less than Krona, enough to put up a fight but not enough to clinch victory, then now his aura was in an entirely different league. A non serious Essence would be the closest comparison, which was a shocking thing to acknowledge.
Meanwhile, Misery was about malding!
He turned to Sublime and glared at the Lolitician who was smirking calmly all this while.
“How long did you know about this?”
Sublime lazily picked her ear. “Hmph, since the moment he unlocked this form in the Inter Player Competition.”
Misery’s face changed. “That long ago?! And you didn’t tell me all this while?!”
Sublime stubbornly looked away. “Hmph, you would just bully him for it and why should I let you worry my brother?”
Misery pointed to Sublime with indignation on his face. “You… you…Blergh!”
He coughed out a thick wad of blood in shock, not believing that the Little Princess he had used to pamper so much in her early childhood would betray him in order to protect her little lover. Even worse, this little lover was his direct blood related nephew, a fact that she herself recognized!
‘Woman, at least have the decency to point out that he is your half-sibling, or pretend that he is just your step-brother!!!’
Seeing Misery cough blood, Sublime was a bit ashamed, but humphed internally.
‘That’s for separating me and Kiran.’ She thought to herself, trying to stifle her discomfort at making her beloved uncle unhappy.
Misery could only sigh and pinch his nose. As for why he reacted so strongly, it should be obvious enough. He had heard from Sublime that Kiran had forcibly unlocked his Knight Inheritance during the previous game event through some form or the other.
So upon meeting him, he had noticed that Kiran’s Knight Energy and Inheritance powers had been all messed up. If one were to compare the typical system to what Kiran had, it was like comparing a well organized city to a ramshackle slum area.
As such, Misery had spent so much time training Kiran and helping him reset the mistake he had made so that his foundation wouldn’t be crippled.
When Kiran forcibly broke through, he reached 2nd Order and stopped there. If not for Misery, Kiran would never have passed that level in his life.
After training with Misery and learning the ropes of the bloodline, Kiran had ascended to a 4th Order peak of the Knight Inheritance, just one inch away from 5th Order. This gave him almost four times his previous power in this inheritance, and far more versatility and control.
However, as Misery had taught Kiran and as Kiran himself had shown, the routes of ‘meridians’ in the body that the Knight Energy passed were not the same as say, his Noble Energy. So if he passed Buddha Lineage bloodline through the same route, he would only suffer internal injuries and rupture his vessels slightly.
Just as one could not put jet fuel in a normal car, one could not combine nor interchange such things.
However, right now, after achieving his Super Warrior Form 2, Misery could sense that Kiran was easily allowing all those different types of energy, be it Internal Force, Noble Energy or Gate Force, they all flowed through the Merlin Lineage route without causing any harm.
In fact, they were docile and strongly helped reinforce his Knight Inheritance’s passive powers while greatly making his base power increase.
However, as he just said, this should be impossible!
Bloodlines simply didn’t work like this!
Otherwise, every single Lineage member would start emulating the routes from others and steal their powers to manifest them in their own bloodlines.
This would naturally ruin he Lineages, but because this was biologically impossible, the Lineage fellows could breathe a sigh of relief. Unfortunately for them, Kiran existed and seemed to break this taboo, at least on the surface.
Misery picked up his drink and held it tightly while watching his nephew like a hawk. He looked at the boy as if he was seeing him for the first time, and his lips couldn’t help but continually twitch.
Kiran in the air glared at Krona, who was also frowning. The double Lineage member gritted his teeth and began charging an energy wave while in mid air, pulling the ambient Worldly Energy between his palms into a ball that grew rapidly.
Krona’s eyebrows rose. This time, he directly burned Bloodline Energy and made Leviathan raise its head up. Its large mouth opened and revealed a small gap the size of a large building. The behemoth then released a huge flow of high pressure water that zipped towards Kiran’s area.
It was so large that if he was hit by this, he would likely be sent into outer space. Kiran ignored the danger and charged his energy to the max before firing out an orange beam of energy that was three times larger than his best attack during the Inter Player Competition.
The energy wave collided head on with the jet of water and both sides began a furious clash. The energy wave would sometimes push the jet of water back, and sometimes the jet of water would push the energy wave backwards.
Krona and Kiran could almost stare at each other through their attacks, and both were gritting their teeth due to the sheer force. Krona was continually burning bloodline to maintain this attack, while Kiran was burning a bit of his, but mostly used ambient Worldly Energy.
Due to this, Krona felt pressure. At the same time, he also knew that this was his advantage, as he burned a huge amount of Bloodline Energy at once to increase the power of the jet from Leviathan.
The high pressure water wave seemed to be doubled and received a huge bump from its source that climbed up slowly and reached the point of the clash. Immediately, the energy wave was pushed back with ease, jumping back towards Kiran slowly but surely.
The Martial Artist who was in his Super Warrior 2 Form knew that things were dire, but there was nothing he could do apart from rely on Worldly Energy. If he dared to inject his own Qi into it, he would shorten the duration of his transformation greatly, which would spell defeat anyway.
He could only roar and inject ‘willpower’ into the beam, which was naturally worth… nothing. This wasn’t an anime, but Boundless World, a game that boasted its realism. You would be better off begging your opponent for mercy than hope that yelling louder would result in some sort of miracle.
The water jet pushed all the way until it was inches from Kiran face, having fully suppressed the energy beam. Krona sighed internally, having burned almost 30% of his Bloodline Energy just suppressing this troublesome fellow, which was amazing.
At this time, even Sublime’s smirk began to waver a little, as she wasn’t understanding what was going on. Kiran had confided his changes in her and she knew he could access greater power at a severe cost, so why wasn’t he using it?
Misery’s eyes narrowed as he calmed down. After watching Kiran expend his energy, he finally understood that his worries were not relevant. What the lad did was not simulating the flow of other energies.
Rather, all his energies that he used while in this form were combined and passed the same route in his body depending on his transformation.
In Base Warrior form when Noble Energy, Knight Energy and Internal Force were combined, each of them passed their own routes, which was why Misery had not reacted back then. It was also why Kiran’s aura, while looking somewhat merged, remained somewhat distinct in that you could see the different colors layer over each other.
However, when entering Super Warrior 1, when Gate Force was released and added to the equation, this new but special energy would grab the other energies and actually, genuinely, perfectly merge them into itself, making Gate Force the premier energy.
This was why Kiran’s hair had turned red, same with his eyes and aura. In this mode, Buddha Lineage Energy acted as the foundation, the Gate Force traveled in Kiran’s body using the routes that his Noble Energy traversed, which was once again why Misery had not been triggered.
However, his Super Warrior 2 form was based on his Knight Energy, which was why he had to forcibly unlock it back then to use it. Now that he had perfectly integrated it and raised its quality, his Super Warrior 2 form was more powerful than in the competition back then, by far.
So when this foreign energy called Noble Knight’s Gate Force passed through the route of Knight Energy for his Super Warrior 2 form, Misery was triggered. He believed that this was a foreign energy mimicking the route of the knight inheritance and succeeding, but he learned this was not the case.
It was just multiple energies that had genuine Knight Energy mixed in, so it could naturally pass the route without causing damage. Gate Force was also a human force released by opening seals in the human body, so it had a special right unlike other types.
Still, in the minds of Misery and co, Kiran was finished. He did well to discover such a clever usage of his dual bloodlines, and even opened up paths for other dual inheritors shunned by the Lineages to find a way forward.
The jet of water buttressed this by breaking Kiran’s offensive and swallowing him in one go. The jet continued into the sky and truly went out of the planet’s atmosphere, still supported by the pressure from Leviathan below, to strike the moon and pierce through it.
Krona sighed, switched off his bloodline and switched to controlling the water with mana using his class. The powers and control weakened greatly compared to using Bloodline Energy, but it was far more stable and cost-effective.
Just as he was about to exit the stage, he felt a huge suction of energy behind him. Krona turned with alarm and covered his body in a water shield made of bloodline energy, but was still shocked by what he saw.
Kiran appeared behind him, standing on Leviathan’s back, with a bloody and battered body, still smiling victoriously as he hands contained a charging energy wave with all his Qi put inside.
“Finally got you to lower your guard somewhat.” Kiran laughed as he spat blood.
He then thrust his hands forward and released all the energy he had saved up, a combination of Noble Energy, Knight Energy, Gate Force and Internal Force as well as little bits of Worldly Energy.
“Warp Energy Wave!” Kiran roared as he fired the beam point-blank, engulfing Krona.
