After handing the man over to the other General, meditating as best he could while watching the prisoner, and only really making progress when he was sedated for surgery, he placed a phone call to a man at the pentagon. He had barely managed to fully restore his qi, and was prepared to return to the fight, having mostly depleted in in the previous battle. “This is Adams.” he said. “Security code Baker-6274. I need a situation report.” With Lindstrom indisposed at the moment, he was the only Nascent soul they could send.
The man checked that the voice matched Adam’s voice, the phone number matched Adam’s cell number, and that the code was valid before continuing, as the information was still classified. “The US is now free of level 5 enemies. Juno was the last place with one, but Tsiolkovsky flew over and turned them into a human pancake. The Edison was badly damaged while defending Dallas, so it’s out, but the Hephaestus's shield blocked everything and the Hawking and Einstein are only lightly damaged, so they are heading to Ontario to help the locals. You should probably head to Mexico City, then Rio de Janeiro. That will clear the Americas of level five threats and let every country handle the other threats themselves.”
“What about Buenos Aires?” Adams asked. “I heard they have a level six. Are we going to orbital strike them? Or are we teaming up with the other nations to send in the fleet?” The US currently had nineteen Einstein class vessels, including the class’s namesake, and the newest Hephaestus Class supercarrier, Prometheus, could be pressed into service if they needed it, as the core of the ship and battle systems were finished but it still lacked some of the amenities that would allow it to function as a mobile space base for the rest of the fleet. With that much firepower, Adams was at least 60% certain they could take an initial level 6, or 30% certain of taking an early level six. Past that, they wouldn’t be able to do much, and the odds dropped to the low single digits, and would need every Nascent Soul fighter on the planet to have even a 10% chance against a middle level 6 fighter. In order to have a good shot at defeating them it would require every Nascent level ship on Earth as well.
“We received word that the Argentinian government has agreed to his demands instead of fighting him.” Adams could see how that was the only realistic option for them. It was possible that was only a delaying tactic, however, and that they were hoping for the others to come save them.
“Any idea what those demands are?” he asked.
“According to an official press release, they wanted permission to build sect bases in the country which would have extraterritorial status, like embassies. They also wanted permission to carry out assassinations within the country as long as there was a specific contract on the person. The Argentinian government is currently negotiating on how much such a contract should cost at a minimum, and what reasons are valid reasons for taking out a contract. The Visitor doesn’t want any reason restriction, but the government wants to limit it to people who have committed capital offenses, or at least felony level crimes. It will probably take them a while to work out the details.”
Adams nodded in thought. “Any idea why they would ask for that provision?”
The contact giggled. “Sure. They are an assassin sect. The Visitor is one of the High Elders of the Purple Corpse Viper sect, and, upon hearing of our world, he decided to set up a branch here. There isn’t any room to expand on their world any more. Only the poles have too little of a population to be able to support branch offices, so they are the only places which lack them.”
Adams nodded. “In that case, this sect may be an asset in the future. At least, assuming they are willing to work as mercenaries to defend the nations that hire them.”
“Like the guy you recruited?” the contact asked.
“Sure,” Adams said. “Though I doubt the guy in Argentina will be willing to work for us for a mere two million stones of energy a month.” He sighed. “Well, I’d better go help our allies. Heading south now.” With the conversation’s abrupt end, the contact said goodbye and hung up.
Adams reached out with his senses, now able to almost reach the moon with enough resolution to see something the size of a person, and found Mexico city. He sent a piece of his soul over just to make sure, and sensed at least a dozen injured people at level four fighting a mostly healthy person at level five. This likely meant that they had used items to injure the invader, though it could mean that they had gone with the same strategy as the men in Utah but simply not performed as well.
With part of his soul now in the other place it was trivial to create a portal between the two sections and step through, reabsorbing the small piece once he arrived. The Level five fighter was a woman that looked to be middle aged, perhaps in her early fifties, and was in the middle of the level. She only had some minor bruising and small to medium cuts. While he couldn’t be sure without examining the damage, he guessed that the cuts were from the Level five sword that a team from Mexico had managed to buy off of one of the traders in the other world. It was pretty big news when they found it, but after further analysis it was found to be a defective product. The weapon could only really withstand level four densities of qi being sent through it, but could reinforce its edge with a sharp level five barrier, something the locals called ‘sword qi’, thus damaging level five opponents.
Looking around he saw that one of the level fours, a seriously wounded general in their army, was wearing a cracked sword on his back. It was likely that he had used the sword to attack her as much as he could, then pulled back so that the weapon wouldn’t be destroyed. While the cracks could probably be mended with materials capable of withstanding those densities of qi, The Mexican government had no way of crafting physical weapons of that level, mostly due to a severe shortage of the needed material and no domestic source of the alloy. After this they would likely built a place to make the alloy, as well as create such weapons for their high ranking officers. The United States and several other nations were already greatly increasing the production of level four and five metals, so it wouldn’t be surprising if Mexico did as well.
Adams flew over to the General, greeting him in Spanish. “Good to see you, General. I’m General Adams, USAF. I take it you are the city’s protector?” Most developed nations had followed the US’s model and posted at least one level four cultivator in every major city.
“Yes.” he said. “I’m glad a Nascent finally showed up. Any chance you’re here to help us out?” Just as the general asked that one of the level four fighters was slapped by a giant glowing hand hard enough that he flew over a dozen kilometers at almost the speed of sound before hitting the ground and bouncing several times before stopping. Without a level five fighter Mexico had done the next best thing and equipped all of their protectors with Nascent level barrier belts. While anyone, including civilians, could buy the belts, at between ten and fifty million dollars each there hadn’t been many sales outside of the militaries of various nations.
“Yep, that’s why I’m here. If you could order your men to fall back so that I don’t vaporize them, that would be appreciated.” Adams held out his hand and a black sphere, like a void, appeared in the palm of his hand, growing as it drew in more and more qi from the air. In previous experiments Adams had tried to further amplify the attack by exploding the qi within it, but that usually resulted in a net decrease in the amount of energy the attack could direct at an opponent, as the energy from the exploded qi was hard to manipulate. A few seconds later all of the Mexican troops backed off and the woman paused, surprised by their actions. Adams raised his hand at her and she looked over, noticing just a bit to late what he had prepared for her. “Singularity.” he said, and the ball shot out at over mach two.
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She managed to move slightly to the side out of reflex and it impacted her shoulder. The intense gravitational force quickly tore the bone and muscle in her shoulder apart, and her arm fell off, leaving a giant bleeding wound when it disappeared and could no longer draw in the blood. The attack was capable of shifting matter outside of normal three dimensional space, much like the Portal technique, but in a far less controlled manner, so he had no idea where the missing body part went.
She screamed in pain and stuck her hand over the wound, but the blood continued to flow. “You Bastard.” she screamed. “How dare you!”
“How dare you come to my world and start killing people!” Adams countered, surprised that she also spoke the Black Dragon Mountain dialect.
“You think your pathetic little realm can stop us?” she asked. “You don’t even have a single level six fighter. There are over a hundred of them on Ilarya. You are lucky that the one to the south merely wanted to open up a branch office. If he had wanted to, he could conquer your entire world.”
“Him, sure. But not you. And not any of the other level fives that decided to come and attack us either. So now you have a choice. Join us, and we either fix your arm or give you a new body, or you can die right here.” The last man had the options of running or being a prisoner, but he hadn’t killed civilians the way this woman had.
“What makes you think I would be interested in joining a pathetic group like you? Kill me if you want, but when I return, I will make all of you beg for death.”
“What makes you think we’ll let you go?” asked Adams, raising his finger and pointing at her. A tiny blue light glowed on the end of it.
“How can you stop me, when none of you are left alive?” Adams felt a spike of energy coming from her core, and knew that she had decided to go with that option. While the core of a level five cultivator only contained qi at level five levels of pressure, it could be rapidly refilled by the soul, allowing it to release more than a core worth of energy in less than a second. While doing this too quickly could damage the core, the limit was quite high. If, however, one were to try and shift all of their soul’s qi into the core, the core would be unable to contain it all, thus vaporizing, releasing the core’s and the soul’s energy in one massive burst that was the equivalent of a Nascent Soul attack several stages higher than the user. All matter within several dozen meters would be vaporized, creating an explosion comparable to a several kiloton nuclear bomb. While the user’s soul would survive, as well as the soul of anyone that was level five or above, that only applied to her and Adams, not the hundreds of troops in the area, or the people of the nearby city.
Adams had no choice and immediately released the attack he had prepared. “Particle Cannon.” he said. A blindingly bright light shot from his finger, traveling to her head at over half the speed of light. The shear amount of heat it produced upon impact turned her brain into superheated plasma and her body exploded, leaving only the lower half of her legs intact. That attack had burned through about 20% of Adam’s energy, but it was the fastest way to stop her.
Without a body, the invader’s perspective was suddenly shifted to something similar to a deep meditation, where all that she was was contained within the core and the soul. She was in shock for a second before realizing that Adams must have killed her with some sort of fast attack before she could finish her own. The image of herself within her mind smiled. Such an attack was meaningless. She could still activate her attack. She once again tried to use it, but found that the core was unable to accept more than initial level four levels of energy. Furthermore, when she attempted to force it in, it was like she was pushing against a solid wall. She tried to extend her senses outside of the core, but found that there was a wall of thick fog which prevented her from doing so. She cursed. How could these backwater bumpkins have sealing techniques of this level?
Adams added a third talisman to the surface of the core, further sealing its energy, and nodded. “Good thing the Monk gave these out at our last meeting.” he said to himself. These were essentially the same as the ones that the monk had used to seal Blood Red Scorpion’s soul almost a year ago, but simplified for use by those that were neither Buddhist nor talisman masters.
Not wanting to waste any time, he put the now sealed core in his storage ring, nodded to the Mexican General, and sent a piece of his soul over to Brazil. He saw the man attacking what few level four fighters were left with Earth qi blasts. In most cases their shields barely withstood the attacks. The government here had taken the same strategy as Mexico in buying their people barrier belts, and they had used the Utah tactic of hitting back with exploding qi, but it didn’t seem to be enough. Only five of them were left, and those five people’s shields were almost exhausted. They could take one or two more attacks at best before collapsing, leaving the wearer in several pieces at best. The ground below was littered with the bodies and pieces of bodies of the three dozen level four warriors that had already met that fate.
Seeing this, as well as the large circular areas of the city below which were completely destroyed, Adams decided not to waste time in an actual fight. He quickly charged another Particle Beam and, seeing that everyone else was at least forty meters away trying their best to dodge the man’s attacks, stepped through the portal. As he stepped out the other side he aimed at the man’s center and fired. The man instantly exploded. The beam even hit his core, causing a piece to be blown off of it. Adams quickly caught the missing piece, stuck it back into place as best he could, and stuck a talisman over it to hold it there. All of the blood and other tissue had been vaporized when the attack hit, so he had no issue attaching two more over cracks in the crystal, no doubt forming because of the attack which hit it.
“DO you guys require medical assistance?” Adams asked, and the locals just stared at him. He put the second, badly damaged, core in his ring and asked again.
This time one of them shook his head. “General Adams?” the man asked, a bit confused. “No, not any more. Those of us that were hit… well, they need a priest, not a doctor.”
Adams nodded his head. “In that case, I’ll see about getting you some relief supplies.” He pulled out his cell phone and took several pictures of the aftermath of the fight. Most cities had managed to lure their opponents outside the city to minimize the damage. Apparently here they couldn’t do that. Most likely the invader had opened the battle by taking out several city blocks worth of civilians.
Now that he had his evidence, Adams nodded to the exhausted men. They had just watched dozens of their comrades die in a single battle. Adams knew how that felt, but unfortunately he didn’t know what to say other than “I’m sorry for your loss.”
The Lieutenant, the highest ranked officer that was left here, nodded. “They were good men.”
“They died protecting the people of this city from a terrorist.” answered Adams. “They were heroes.” The other man nodded, deep in thought. “Listen, I’ve got to go right now, in case there are any more invaders that need killing, but I’ll talk to my people about sending relief supplies.” The Lieutenant nodded and Adams opened up a portal back to his office in Junction City.
When he poured himself a drink then sat down at his desk. He had no idea how high the death toll would be today, but estimated at least a few million worldwide. Over a hundred thousand had likely died just in Rio. Downing the drink in one breath, he sat his glass down and picked up the desk phone, calling his contact at the pentagon once again. “This is Adams.” he said. The phone had far more security features than his cell phone, including checking his qi signature, so he didn’t need the code for three factor authentication this time. “Are there any level fives left on Earth?”
It took him about ten minutes to completely refill his qi reserves, then less than one to finish off the Capetown and Helsinki invaders, adding their cores to his ring as well. He had only been given ten talismans by the Apprentice, so the Helsinki one kept telepathically yelling at him until he placed it in there. He would need some more talismans to fully seal her soon, otherwise she might learn to use an ability other than telepathy, or learn to use a strong enough version of telepathy to mind control someone into releasing her. Thankfully, the ring had the ability to seal qi emissions, as that kept items from returning to full size, so it had completely silenced her shrieking.
