Reincarnated Hero System

Prime Worlds were quite literally built different.

Even in Cruotis Prime's devastated state, with cosmic energies in turmoil and its laws spiralling out of control, the planet wasn't on the verge of immediate collapse.

It was heavily damaged, but it wasn't going to fall apart.

That was why Arthur was so certain that Jamie's attempt to destroy the planet had failed.

Jamie had aimed to strike with enough spatial destruction energy to pierce straight to the planet's core.

However, the Existence Realm Limitation had activated just as his energy reached the upper layer of the outer core.

The chaos—the turbulent energies, magma spewing from fissures, volcanic eruptions, cosmic energy storms, a fractured magnetosphere, and everything else—was simply the aftermath of his attack hitting the outer core.

Even with such catastrophic destruction, it wasn't enough to destroy a Prime World built to withstand Higher Existences.

Arthur activated his Cosmic Teleporter, opening a short-range cosmic gate that transported them to the ground, landing on a relatively stable section of the shattered continent.

Alvey and McEnda were still struggling with the effects of the sudden Existence Realm Limitation.

Of the three Major Aspects of one's Existence, their Body and Energy Cores had taken the brunt of it.

Their Souls, however, remained Deity Souls.

The imbalance between their intact Deity Souls and their forcibly weakened Bodies was what had made them clutch their chests in pain earlier.

But Arthur's focus wasn't on them.

He was far more concerned about Jamie.

Jamie had been mid-attack when the Limitation was enforced.

The fact that Cruotis Prime wasn't destroyed confirmed that the Limitation had indeed taken effect on him.

Barely seconds after that thought crossed Arthur's mind, space warped, forming a spatial gate through which Jamie staggered.

His appearance was a mess, but it wasn't his dishevelled hair or scorched clothing that drew Arthur's attention.

It was the cracks, the thin fissures spreading across his skin, snaking out from beneath his clothes, crawling up his neck, and marking his face.

From these fissures, cosmic energy leaked rapidly, the same energy that had condensed to give his astral vessel physical form.

There was no mistaking it. He'd been hit by the Existence Realm Limitation.

Everyone on Cruotis Prime had been forcibly reduced below the Deity Realms.

For Jamie, the Limitation hit mid-attack, worsening the damage to his already weakening vessel. This created an opening for the full effect of the Limitation to take hold, sealing his power.

'As I thought, there's no way something like a Nexus Event would be easily overcome. But for Jamie's power to be sealed…'

Arthur's gaze returned to the cracks on Jamie's face.

'And those cracks… Something's wrong with his body. No—something was wrong even before this. The Limitation just forced it to surface.

So it seems, I'd have to use that thing, in the end.'

Clicking his tongue in frustration, Arthur reached out, trying to stop the flow of leaking cosmic energy with his time laws, but Jamie lifted a hand, stopping him.

"...give me a moment. I can stabilise this. You should focus on that guy."

Arthur didn't need to ask who Jamie meant. That guy could only be Bewússtsein.

Jamie's vessel had taken heavy damage, but Bewússtsein was worse off. The damage he suffered was closer to soul damage.

To impose the Existence Realm Limitation, Bewússtsein had to strengthen his connection to Cruotis Prime, a connection he had been trying to sever.

Jamie's attack, infused with Spatial and Destruction Law energy, struck at that precise moment.

The blow wounded not just the planet but also its Consciousness.

As a result, Bewússtsein lost his Candidate Sigil and suffered severe damage.

Although he still had access to the remaining planetary energies that hadn't been drained, it didn't change the fact that his injuries were substantial.

And he was furious.

Words couldn't capture the depth of his rage. It was a seething, incoherent fury beyond articulation.

Everyone on Cruotis Prime—the seven of them—felt his wrath echoing across the battered landscape.

Bewússtsein's voice echoed across the land, his rage so overwhelming he couldn't form a coherent insult.

[YOU DAMNED—!!! GA-!! SO-!! FUCK!!!!!]

He roared, filling the air with a string of half-formed expletives that devolved into raw, unintelligible anger.

Suddenly, the space above them split apart, and a streak of light shot through the rupture, heading straight for Jamie.

Arthur reacted instantly, summoning Lostvayne and pivoting on his heel to release an upward slash.

**BOOM!!!

The clash of energies sent a shockwave through the ground beneath Arthur's feet, pressing his legs into the earth with immense force.

When the dust cleared, Arthur's eyes fell on an enraged Bewússtsein, his gaze now burning with an iridescent light.

In his blind fury, Bewússtsein had deployed his sixth body, sending it directly toward them.

[DIE, YOU MOTHERFUCKER!!]

He bellowed, his voice shaking with rage as he drew back his fist, activating his Destruction Sigil. Energy crackled violently, readying a full-powered punch.

But Evan acted first.

'Frost Thunder Guardian!'

The armoured knight construct moved at supersonic speed, its massive sword cutting through the air as it slammed into Bewússtsein's side.

The impact was deafening, sending Bewússtsein hurtling through the distance like a shooting star.

He flipped mid-air, landing on his feet before immediately ascending and raising his hands to conjure a massive sphere of destruction energy.

Before he could release it, two fists appeared in front of his face and collided with it, punching him into the destruction orb he had just formed.

The orb detonated on impact, and the blast threw his body toward the ground.

As he crashed, lightning descended from above. He raised his hand to block it, but a wormhole appeared, redirecting the strike to his side, where it struck him.

Blades of dark light rained from above, forcing him to roll to his feet and jump away to avoid them.

When he landed, his feet sank into the ground, and he looked down to see the earth beneath him transformed into a pool of corrosive darkness creeping up his legs, blackening his flesh.

He quickly released a burst of energy to dispel the corrosive darkness, and simultaneously, Alvey elementalized his body into pure light, flashing beside Bewússtsein with his sword drawn.

'Wha-?!'

Bewússtsein couldn't believe his eyes when he saw Alvey's sword, the Morphic Edge.

'ANOTHER COSMIC WEAPON?!!'

Since when did Cosmic Artifacts become so common?

Alvey responded to his internal query by infusing the blade with dense light law energy, swinging it with full force toward Bewússtsein's neck.

Bewússtsein crossed his arms to block the slash, but the impact still knocked him back. He hadn't travelled far before McEnda's staff descended from above, its tip laced with corrosive darkness, tearing through his skin and embedding in his shoulder.

The staff pinned him to the ground, and the gravity on his body instantly multiplied by a hundred.

Evan then descended from above, spinning mid-air and landing an axe kick on Bewússtsein's chest.

'Collapse!'

Prismatic flames enveloped Bewússtsein's body on impact, and with Blink, Evan warped away a moment before Arthur gathered everything in the area, the rocks, the magma spilling from the earth and even Evan's flames, into a gravitational maelstrom with Bewússtsein at the centre.

At the core of that maelstrom, Beatrix hurled a Time Bomb that exploded the instant Arthur clenched his fist and compressed the gravity.

Spears of dark light and corrosive darkness pierced into the mix, the collision of the two energies erupting in a blinding explosion that sent Bewússtsein's body crashing toward the ground.

'What the hell?! I can understand the children since they'd always been mortals. But what's with those demons?! I just imposed an Existence Realm Limitation, how are they fine already?!'

Bewússtsein couldn't grasp how Alvey and McEnda were able to attack him at this moment.

Jamie's energies had been destabilised from the sudden Limitation, and the same should have applied to the two demons.

They should've struggled to even move their now weakened bodies, but that wasn't what Bewússtsein was seeing.

But he was forgetting something critical.

Up until only a few hours ago, Alvey and McEnda had been Transcendents, so they were far more accustomed to their Transcendent-level bodies and power than to the Half-Deity-level strength they'd just acquired a few hours earlier and hadn't fully mastered.

Because of that, it was easier for them to adjust to the limitations' effects.

The two demons unleashed a downpour of light and dark arrows, but Bewússtsein defended easily, either evading or destroying the blindingly fast projectiles.

"Arthur! Evan! Hold him down!"

""No Problem!""

The two boys answered McEnda's request simultaneously, with Arthur teleporting right in front of Bewússtsein and driving a Weighted Impact punch into the man's face.

Bewússtsein tried to evade, but Artemisia dashed behind him and kicked his head into the trajectory of Arthur's punch, which broke his nose and sent him flying.

Evan teleported above, striking him with Collapse and slamming him into the ground, then froze him in ice and bound him with crimson-gold chains.

As Bewússtsein struggled, Arthur increased gravity a hundredfold, and though the Incarnation of the Planet tore through the restraints with destruction energy, Alvey and McEnda had already finished preparing their combo attack.

""Combination: Darkness Before The Dawn!!""

Alvey and McEnda's demonic energies blanketed everything in a veil of darkness, robbing Bewússtsein of vision, weighing down his body, disrupting his energy circulation, and filling his mind with endless hallucinations of being killed over and over by Jamie.

An insidious darkness seeped into his flesh, making it feel as though invisible jaws were gnawing away at his skin.

That darkness was abruptly pierced by a blinding brilliance as light condensed into a blazing mass of plasma that seemed to shine across the world.

'…the sun?'

The thought crossed Bewússtsein's mind as the blazing light crashed down with a deafening roar, engulfing thousands of miles in incandescent fury.

From within that brilliance, Arthur and Evan emerged, shielded from harm by Alvey's light as they struck him with axe kicks that drove him deeper into the ground.

He roared, his destruction sigil blazing, but before his power could erupt, Arthur warped him and Evan away. The energy burst free in a towering pillar that swirled into a vortex, but before he could even do anything with it, a cold voice echoed in his ears.

"Basic Attack Sequence #3: Carve."

A colossal wave of spatial power ripped through the area, erasing both the vortex and the space it occupied.

"…huh?"

Stunned, Bewússtsein froze in place, and crimson-gold and hazel-brown chains from Evan and Beatrix immediately bound his limbs, locking him in place.

Alvey and McEnda's spears of dark light and corrosive darkness pierced him front and back, while the ground split open, releasing a torrent of water that drenched him before golden and blue lightning from Artemisia and Evan struck with so much power that they could all see the imprint of his skeleton.

"Basic Attack Sequence #2: Cut."

Two intersecting slashes of spatial power cut through the air like scissors, and in an instant, Bewússtsein's head was sent flying, his eyes wide as his body crumpled to the ground.

'…the heck? The damage I took was that bad? What was that spatial attack?'

The answer to his final question appeared in the form of the frowning Demon King who stepped forward and clenched his fist, powerful gravity crushing Bewússtsein's body into a mangled heap of flesh.

"Let's burn it for good measure."

Evan snapped his fingers, igniting it with prismatic flames, Jamie adding azure fire until only Bewússtsein's wide-eyed head remained on the ground.

'…I planned for thousands of years. I absorbed the bodies and souls of all my billions of inhabitants. I'm so close to finally severing the last bonds that bind me to this planet.'

[MY PATH WILL NOT END HERE!!]

Bewússtsein's head screamed as the Destruction Sigil lit up on his forehead, releasing a burst of cosmic destruction energy that pushed the group back.

But three spears of energy tore through the blast, piercing his head at the same time.

A crimson-gold spear of destructive flames struck the left.

A crimson-silver spear of temporal and destruction laws pierced the right.

An azure-blue spear of spatial energy hit the centre.

All three detonated together, blowing the severed head apart and quieting the storm of energy.

But even with Bewússtsein's final body destroyed, they knew it still wasn't over.

Suddenly, the ground trembled violently, and then an arm shot up from the shattered earth, latching onto Arthur's leg.

Without hesitation, he yanked his leg free and delivered a gravity-infused kick that blasted the arm clean off the shoulder it was attached to.

Before he could catch his breath, dozens more hands erupted from the ground, clawing their way up, until within moments, the terrain was teeming with hundreds of grasping limbs.

They clawed and scraped at the soil, pulling out their full humanoid bodies, their hollow eyes empty and lifeless.

Some of them appeared fresh, save for the grime and dirt clinging to their bodies. Others were barely held together, their rotting flesh hanging in tatters, eyeballs dangling loosely, and intestines spilling out like broken cables.

"It's Zombies now?!"

Evan shouted as his flames erupted, engulfing the nearest corpses and reducing them to ash within seconds.

But even as their remains scattered, more hands tore through the ground, and in moments the terrain was swarming with thousands of walking corpses, each one staring at them with empty, soulless eyes.

At first, the group cut through the corpses with ease, their strikes overwhelming the shambling bodies. Arthur crushed them with gravity, Evan's flames burned them down in waves, and Artemisia and Beatrix ripped through them with light and lightning.

But within seconds, everything changed.

The corpses began resisting Evan's flames as ambient cosmic energy poured into them, and their vacant movements turned into coordinated attacks.

The first strike came from a massive decaying corpse, its fist infused with cosmic energy as it slammed into Arthur. He blocked the attack, but the blow sent shockwaves across the battlefield.

The rest followed immediately, wielding their newfound power with surprising skill.

Arthur summoned Celestia and cleaved the giant corpse in half, but almost immediately, he was surrounded by sword-wielding corpses.

Each blade was laced with sword law energy, cutting through the air with frightening speed.

Evan, on the other hand, was hemmed in by robed figures clutching crooked staves, and when he noticed Arthur's sudden encirclement by swordsmen, a bad feeling crept over him.

'No way… right?'

The robed figures conjured glowing blue circles, releasing spears, bullets, and torrents of pressurised water meant to drown him in the flood.

"You've gotta be fucking kidding me!"