Chapter 1077 Karmic Reprisal
She landed softly on the arena, looking forward at the place John had been attacked. The explosion was still quite thick and had yet to fade away, obscuring her vision of him. She looked upwards and noticed the chain from the Seraph was still extending outwards towards John's location, causing her gaze to snap onto his location with haste.
Eyes narrowed, they grew wide as the fading explosion revealed John standing there in his original location. His body was covered in wounds, mostly on his arms which had been used to block the attack. Those wounds cut deep, although they were quickly mending at a visible rate. By the time the explosion fully faded, the wounds had fully mended, leaving only the blood on his body as an indication that he had taken any damage at all.
John shook his arms in an unconcerned manner, then nodded his head with a flair of satisfaction.
"Wow, so that is what it's like to be attacked with a portion of my power huh? No wonder everyone gets overwhelmed the second I get serious," he said in a self-satisfied manner.
"What…how?" Ishnai muttered, eyes wide as she stared at John. "You were drained of almost all your Qi, and I unleashed an attack using all of it combined with the power of Karma as well. How are you still standing?" "Drained of almost all my Qi?" John said, tiling his head to the side in confusion. "You might want to look again," he said, telling her to check his armband.
Ishnai sent out her divine sense, eyes growing wide like saucers as she read his combat values. "What! Your Qi reserves are still at ninety percent!? Impossible! I absorbed so much. It's impossible that what absorbed was only ten percent!" she exclaimed, completely shocked by what she was seeing.
When she had absorbed his Qi through her Mage Art, she had become enthralled by the feeling of his power, of the pure might of it all. She naturally considered it to be a great portion of his Qi, and in her euphoric state of power, had not checked his stats to be sure. Now that she was seeing the truth, she was almost unable to comprehend it.
"Impossible!" she muttered again. "The Seraph absorbed all there was to absorb from your Karma of Death! That should have drained you of all of your Qi!"
"Well, I'm not sure what happened, but it didn't, so…" John shrugged.
Ishnai frowned, an uncertain look appearing on her face. The Seraph behind her selected between the Karma of Righteousness and Karma of Death, always picking the more potent of the two based on her opponent. These two aspects almost always consisted of at least half of her opponent's Karma, resulting in them being drained of a majority of their power. In that state, with her empowered and her opponent weakened, a single attack should be able to finish the battle.
And yet it hadn't. "The Seraph is never wrong! It chose Death, and that…unless…but that's impossible!" she started muttering to herself.
"Are you going to do something, or should I take action now?" John asked, his question a complete insult as if he wasn't even concerned about this battle at all.
Ishnai frowned, her gaze locked onto his. She then flared with power once more, although different in nature from before. A moment later, her forehead began to glow brightly, runic patterns moving around to form a circle that rotated to the left. As the runes rotated, an eye made of arcane energy materialized, then snapped open.
As it did so, John felt as though he was being stared at not by Ishnai, but some other creature or force of nature. It felt unnerving, although there was no danger coming from it.
"This…how is this possible," she muttered softly, staring at something around John unseen to others. "The Seraph is never wrong…but the truth is clear before me."
While she rambled to herself, John started impatiently tapping his right foot. He could have ended this battle a dozen times by now, but was taking his time, trying to learn more about the Dao of Karma. Unfortunately, he had learned almost nothing, as this Mage Art was too complex to understand from just a glance.
"So that's how it is," Ishnai muttered, then smiled lightly. "You might have managed to obscure the Seraphs' initial judgment of your Karma, but with my Third Eye of Karmic Truth, you cannot hide the truth from me."
"The truth? What truth?" John asked, confused by what was going on. He had done nothing, nor had he hidden anything from her.
Ishnai smirked, as if she was seeing through his lies, then made a quick series of hand seals. Her scepter began to glow brilliantly a moment later, her power linking with the Seraph behind her. A moment later, the third eye on the Seraphs forehead began to glow, then snapped open.
A thunderclap filled the arena as the eye opened and a beam of brilliant white light pierced out, landing on John before he could even react. He felt another link form between him and the seraph, far more potent than the chains that had bound him before. The beam of light locked him in place, making movement difficult. While he could break free, he decided to play along for now until his instincts warned him to take action.
"What is this?" John asked, feeling a growing dread similar to the one he had felt when his father had shown him his threads of Karma all those years ago. "The Seraph should have chosen the most potent of the Three Karmas, but for some reason had not," Ishnai said.
"Three Karmas?" John asked curiously. He knew of two, but not the third. "What's the Third Karma?"
"The Karma of Fate," Ishnai said, smirking with confidence. "I was blind to it before, as it was hidden from me by you. I have no idea how you did that, but now that I've opened my third eye, I can see the cloud of Fate Karma surrounding you. Your Karma of Death is insignificant compared to your Karma of Fate."
"Karma of Fate?" John repeated, slightly taken aback. He had a bad feeling grow within, and hastily spoke out once more. "If I was you, I would stop what you're doing right now. My Fate Karma is not something you can withstand."
From what Ishnai had said, the stronger the Karma, the stronger the Seraph grew feeding off that Karma, and the stronger Ishnai grew feeding off his own Qi. Earlier, she had reveled in the Qi she had absorbed from him, acting as if it was the ultimate power she had ever felt. That had only been ten percent of his Qi, and to be more accurate, ten percent of his Essence Qi.
If she tried to absorb more of his power…
"Stop?" Ishnai scoffed. "I'm only getting started. Now show to me the truth, Karma of Fate!"
Boom!
The Seraph exploded with incredible power, far greater than before. It was as if a true angelic being had descended onto the world, a god amongst men. Many in the crowd shuddered and recoiled from the blinding power, feeling as though they needed to prostrate before the figure.
At the same time, John felt the power binding him intensify, and the Qi draining from him hasten. "Hahahaha!" Ishnai started laughing maniacally as she felt the power of John's Fate Karma and his own Qi empower the Seraph and herself respectively. "This power! It's…I need more!"
As Ishnai continued to laugh, John felt his Qi continue to drain. It hit eighty percent, then seventy percent. As his Qi drained, the aura coming from both Ishnai and the Seraph intensified, growing from a tempest to a cataclysmic storm of power. "Hahaha! So this is your fate! The immensity of it! Its unlike anything I've ever seen! So much Karma. So much power!" Ishnai said as slivers of Karmic memories flashed in her mind. The stronger the threads of Karma, the more Qi she was able to siphon from John.
Memories of John's homeworld. Memories of Laia, Lilian, and the Astral Emperor. Memories of the Jade Dragons. Memories of the Asura. The Asura memories caused her to shudder with instinctual fear the moment it appeared in her mind, the horror of the Asura's piercing through time and space.
As the memory of the Asura flashed, the Seraph behind her grew so bright and powerful that it began to shake and shimmer, as if it were growing too powerful to contain it's own power. An instability formed in the Seraph, followed by a visible crack forming on its body, going from skirt to shoulder. Light leaked out of the crack, blinding the arena in its brilliance.
Ishnai was unable to react in time. Unable to stop the process as the crack grew. Lastly, a memory flashed past through her mind, so brief that it was only for an instant. A memory of a soul taken human form. A memory of John's father, and the Karma tied to it. As the memory flashed, John felt a great deal of Qi siphoned from his body, taking his reserves from seventy percent to forty percent due to the immensity of the Karmic thread.
"Hahaha....Ahhhhhhhh!" Ishnai's laughs of euphoria immediately turned into cries of horrified pain as the surge of power overwhelmed her. Behind her, the Seraph opened its mouth for the first time and screeched with what sounded like agony. Then without warning, it exploded, unable to withstand the Karmic power surging through it.
Boom!
The seraphs explosion bathed the arena in cataclysmic power, drowning out all sound and thought.
"Ishnai!" the Mage-Sovereign cried out in sudden panic, her figure vanishing as she moved towards the arena. She arrived a moment too late. The Mage-Sovereign appeared before her, arms reaching towards her pinnacle genius. Ishnai looked at her master, a look of agony on her face, unable to withstand the buildup of Qi she had absorbed from John. Then, like a balloon filled with too much air, her body suddenly exploded, drowning the arena in an explosion of Qi, blood, and bone.
