Wandering Knight

Chapter 474: Pure Power

Wang Yu slammed a foot into the ground. The road beneath him shattered layer by layer, and the recoil hurled him forward faster than the naked eye could follow. A sonic boom ripped through the air as he rocketed straight toward the towering spire ahead. The enemies in his path might as well not have existed at all.The Utopia clearly recognized Wang Yu as a catastrophic threat. Before he reached it, several legendary warriors and over a dozen grand knights strode forth to block his way.

Truth be told, Wang Yu had no idea where the Utopia found its soldiers. The mix of races represented was bizarre: orcs, humans, and elves. Clearly, there were many in the continent who had pledged themselves to the Utopia. Or perhaps this organization had always lurked in the shadows of history, and its membership had been just as hidden.

Racing beside him were the countless arcane longswords Avia had released from the Seed of Eden. Driven by the power of the Chariot, they shot past Wang Yu and carved through every enemy not wearing armor.

The flying swords were shockingly agile: they could bend around beams, dodge volleys of intercepting spells and missiles, and slip between every possible attack. With the Chariot's speed and Avia's flawless Perfect Fractal calculations, they danced through the sky like divine instruments of death, striking straight at the surrounding spellcasters.

But even with the best planning, Avia couldn't avoid all the attacks forever. A handful of the tens of thousands of swords were finally caught by interception spells and burst mid-air into blossoms of light.

But the very next moment, the shells of the arcane longswords fell away to reveal the true cores within: blades of pure mana that accelerated even faster than before, weaving with impossible sharpness as they continued their hunt.

The arcane longswords served as sheaths for the mana blades within. Destroy the sheaths, and the blades would be exposed, able to strike even harder.

A mana blade flashed to the first spellcaster, only to meet a shield of condensed mana. Steel and force exploded on impact, with ripples spreading across the shield's surface.

These weren't mediocre mages. Every spell they cast came from ancient archives, drawn from knowledge few possessed—and the Alliance had suffered dearly because of it. Basic magic barely worked against these higher-tier spells. The mana blades faced the same problem.

Then, a second longsword smashed directly into the first. Though it was physical in nature, it struck the mana blade like a hammer against a nail, forcing it through the shield. The blade shattered, but its fragments carved the spellcaster inside into ribbons.

The Utopia's forces had, of course, attempted to block the swords with void energy. But there was simply no time when the swords moved so quickly. Though half the longswords were destroyed, each shattered sheath simply broke apart to reveal a mana blade.

The Utopia's void defenses failed entirely against the Chariot's power, which let the longswords pierce the void as if passing through water. There was only minimal resistance. The swarm of swords broke through the Utopia's wards and ripped through its forces.

The Utopia had never imagined that its void defenses fail. That single miscalculation cost them dearly. Mana blades and arcane longswords flooded into the spellcasters' midst.

Arcane runes lit up along the swords. The varied enchantments—heat, frost, lightning, high-frequency vibration, enhanced mass—caused a storm of varied death. The mana blades dove forward with impossible speed, while the longswords smashed shields apart.

Every caster was struck by two or three blades each. Blood sprayed. Bodies came apart. Entire squads of Utopia spellcasters died where they stood.

It was as if Wang Yu and Avia had thrown out a thousand sixth-tier spell scrolls at once. The result was no less formidable than a natural disaster.

While the swords massacred the spellcasters, the source of the Chariot's power, Wang Yu himself, was like an incarnation of brute force.

A legendary knight charged him head-on, activating his potential in the process. His senses locked onto Wang Yu. Pressure filled his body; that same pressure, duplicated by his potential, locked onto Wang Yu, aiming to freeze him where he stood.

But Wang Yu didn't even twitch. He simply drove a fist into the knight's face with all the force of a mountain. The legend's skull cracked in a dozen places; dizziness and agony exploded through his mind.

His potential had failed. It affected neither Wang Yu nor its user. Wang Yu ignored it entirely, as though it were a weak spell or a child's trick, and attacked straight through it. His strength, speed, and physique utterly eclipsed his opponent.

Wang Yu punched downward, slamming the legend into the ground with terrifying force. As he stepped forward, he crushed the knight's neck with a single kick.

The head burst away from the body, which shot through the air and collided with another legend's potential. Fighting spirit erupted in mid-air as the other legend's body exploded.

Wang Yu charged forward, never stopping. He punched and punched again. With fists enclosed in the Chariot's power, he broke through the ranks of multiple legends. Every so-called killing blow simply evaporated on contact.

"Impossible..." Shock rippled through the knights' merged consciousness. Just who was this man?

Disrupting a potential by brute force was even more terrifying than tanking spells with one's body. Normally, potentials could be ignored only by those with overwhelming physical superiority. But Wang Yu wasn't ignoring them—he was destroying them outright, as if they were spells or material objects.

The awe the Alliance had felt when facing the Utopia's void technology was precisely what the Utopia now felt when facing Wang Yu.

Catching the leading legend's punch mid-charge, Wang Yu snapped his wrist, slid in close, and—with a speed the man couldn't even register—clamped a hand around his throat. His fingers tightened. A sickening crack of flesh and bone burst through the air.

His other hand rose at the same instant, fingers pressed into a blade. With the golden gleam of the Chariot's power, it flashed through the air, slicing apart every incoming ranged strike and slash of fighting spirit before they could land.

A heavy step, a drop of the shoulder, then a push—Wang Yu shot forward, body sliding like a battering ram. The power of the Chariot wrapped around his flesh as he collided with layers of defensive potentials. A silent, seismic boom tore through the air. The next legendary knight behind them took the impact full in the chest. Bones snapped. Muscles tore. He was finished in an instant.

Now deep inside their formation, Wang Yu was unstoppable. He was an anomaly that shattered everything with raw, physical might, ignoring their potentials entirely. It was like dropping a legendary warrior into a rabble of unranked fighters. He tore through them without resistance.

This power had been with him from the very beginning, ever since he first understood it: his touch. The Chariot could touch things other forces couldn't—void, matter, magic, anything. Once his body was wrapped in its power, everything became tangible and therefore breakable.

Before, his body hadn't been strong enough; crashing against their potentials head-on meant that he was the one who would break instead. Now, however, it was their potentials—and the wielders of those potentials—that broke.

He barreled forward toward the looming spire. Anyone foolish enough to stand in his path met only one fate: obliteration.

In a straight-line impact, with sonic-boom punches and kicks that swept out like blades, anything he grabbed was immediately hurled into the ground with brutal, bone-pulping force.

His sheer speed and strength ripped open the Utopia's defensive lines. The legendary knights were lucky to die whole. The grand knights were reduced to scattered pieces.

There was a blip in his senses. Someone fast, very fast, was approaching under the cover of those "fragile" grand knights. The enemy must have had a potential that boosted physical attributes. Against Wang Yu, that was indeed the right choice.

He couldn't ignore that type of inner potential. Speed and strength were real threats to him. That said...

The instant the opponent closed in, matching his own speed, Wang Yu drew his arm back. The Chariot exploded outward in full force. Everything in the area except the Utopian knights froze in place, clamped down by a crushing force. Time itself seemed to stall.

The uppercut he'd been charging detonated upward, breaking the empowered legendary knight apart. As the power of his Commander's Throne faded, Wang Yu had a clear path toward the Utopia's towering spire.

The space before him rumbled as a massive rift split the air. Yet another spire began descending from the void, trailing smaller rifts behind it. From those rifts, a flood of enemies poured forth, an ocean of bodies rushing to drown the solitary Wang Yu.

Utopia clearly understood the threat now. Even if it meant breaking the structure of their network, they would stop him. A second spire tore free of its position and dropped down beside the first, the two joining their power into a force far surpassing any single spire that bore down directly upon him.

"Avia, I need some help."

He paused for a breath, eyeing the swarming sky as he spoke to the young woman drifting in the void.

"On it!"

Avia leaned halfway out of the void and handed him a glowing orb.

Skyborne City had told him that mana creation was impossible even with Sieg's theory—there was simply no way to create a zero-magic environment. But impossible for Skyborne City did not mean impossible for Wang Yu. The Chariot was, by now, more than strong enough to carve out a manaless zone.

And if he passed that power to Avia... what surprise, exactly, would she gift their enemies?

He tossed the glowing sphere lightly toward the incoming horde: a mana-based nuclear bomb.