By the time Elder Bowa reacted to the oppressive aura, it was already over. The roof completely shattered, revealing the auction house below littered with corpses caused by the falling rubble.
At that moment, Elder Bowa's expression was incomparably ugly. He had made so many confident deductions in the last 5 minutes, yet each was more wrong than the last. Or so he thought…
The array was completely gone now, but it hadn't been destroyed like Elder Bowa thought. Instead, it had been transferred into a large training room within the Demon Sage Tower that was currently in its smallest state, hovering outside the barrier that protected the auction house from the vacuum of space.
Although the process seemed simple, Dyon used every bit of the information he garnered while studying the array for the last hour. One had to remember that this array had a mechanism within that could obliterate a planet to ashes, let alone an asteroid.
The concept of obliterating a planet versus reducing it to ashes were so vastly different from one another than they might as well be unrelated. To reduce anything to ashes took an inconceivably and exponentially larger amount of energy than what was required to just destroy it.
Simply put, it could kill Dyon without leaving even a corpse to bury. For this reason, the array was built with durability comparable to that of a treasured weapon of the Spiritual level. Even if Dyon was a hundred times more powerful, he wouldn't be able to shatter a Spiritual weapon. Even breaking a grandmaster level weapon would push him to his absolute limits, even then, he might still fail.
The good news was that Elder Bowa understood none of this. He just believed that the array was more brittle than he assumed, but that just made him angrier.
His attendants panicked when they thought the protective shield was gone, stumbling in the air and almost falling despite being saints themselves. It was only afterward that they managed to recollect themselves.
It might seem odd that they were worried considering saints could survive in space as well, however, it followed the same concept as flying. Essence gatherers could fly, but they had severe limits in terms of speed and stamina. This was why most battles are still fought on the ground at that level.
In this same way, saints can survive in space, but it was a heavy burden to them. Considering how far they were from Planet Cathedral, it would take months of flying at top speed for even a celestial to make it back, maybe years. How could they as saints make it? That kind of journey would kill them, while for a celestial, it would push them to their absolute limits.
This was yet another thing Dyon was betting on. Dyon was certain that Elder Bowa wouldn't dare to destroy the protection around the asteroid, so this was why Dyon had his master slightly modify the protection to block communication and foreign energies.
The Demon Sage Tower was floating outside of this protection so that even if Elder Bowa wanted to trigger the fail safe, the newly modified barrier would interfere with the signal and disallow it. This also accounted for the possibility of the barrier interfering with teleportation as well. Dyon had thought of everything.
Now, Dyon could fight to his heart's content. All he had to do was stall, as long as he lasted long enough for all of the soul slaves to be teleported, he would win.
'Dyon, you need to be careful,' The 25th White Mother suddenly spoke. 'In order to modify the barrier, I used a combination of the defensive and concealment arrays you held in your red plaques, but that has its own downsides.
'For one, although the defensive array was created to block the attacks of a first-grade celestial for ten minutes before collapsing, that was reliant on it keeping a small scale. Now that it's been expanded to cover an entire asteroid, even though your opponent is a fifth-grade celestial, it wouldn't survive more than five to ten attacks.
'Secondly, the concealment array was originally meant to last three days, but that was also based on scale as well. It will last a few hours at most now.
'Also, don't underestimate your opponents. From what I can tell, there are more than 300 saints at this location, they wouldn't have died from a simple collapsed roof.'
Dyon took in a sharp breath. '300? Plus a fifth grade celestial? They really didn't want to make this easy on me… I have to protect the barrier from taking blows too? Fuck me.'
The concealment array was another problem. Dyon only had 10 plaques to begin with… He used two during his fight in the valley, he had used another when he escaped his cage, now he had given two more to his master. That meant there were only five left. One of them were attack arrays he couldn't bring himself to use because it was only useful for a single attack. Two were defensive arrays and the last two were concealment arrays.
The problem was that the signal blocking array would only work with the combination of both concealment and defensive arrays. This was because the signal blocking array was formed with the core symbols of both arrays.
'Master, how long would it take you to draw a signal blocking array from scratch, without the red plaques?'
'To cover an entire asteroid? It would take weeks.'
Dyon sighed. He had expected this, but hearing it still pained him. For obvious reasons, drawing a signal blocking array around the Demon Sage Tower was a no go, or else teleportation wouldn't work.
At that moment, Dyon appeared before the stunned eyes of Elder Bowa, his battle intent piercing through the skies.
'Master, prepare a small scale signal blocking array to cover the Demon Sage Tower. The moment anything goes wrong or the teleportations are complete, activate it.
'It's time I blow off some steam.' For the humiliation he faced just a few days prior, he'd make sure to pay them back in full.
"You…" Elder Bowa looked stunned when he saw Dyon not because of any spectacular reason, but purely because he not only did not know who this young man was, he also sensed that Dyon was a mere 1st stage essence gatherer. He didn't even know how to properly react to this information.
It wasn't a surprise that he didn't recognize Dyon, after all, he was at Soul Market when the central bell was rung. Plus, although The Cathedral had a meeting pertaining to Dyon and his reveal as a member of the Jafari family, he hadn't taken part in that either.
That was when a sudden realization came over Elder Bowa. 'He must be one of the Lower Blossom stage innate soul, soul slaves?'
He questioned this thought, though, mostly because Dyon was dressed too oddly.
Since the day he was taken in, Dyon's clothes hadn't changed. In fact, the massive stain of blood around his crotch was still there along with the numerous knife wounds. If his eyes weren't so sharp and his aura wasn't so imposing, many might think that he was half dead.
'Wait, those are Soul Rending Peak disciple robes!' Elder Bowa's eyes widened. He almost didn't recognize them because of the state they were in, but when he realized this, he became completely certain.
"You're Dyon Jafari." Elder Bowa regained his calm as rubble began to roll below. Those who survived were slowly beginning to dig their way up.
"It's good you know so there's no confusion when I'm venting my rage."
Elder Bowa, a usually stoic and silent man couldn't help but burst into laughter when he heard this. "Do you believe that you've accomplished something? What does destroying the teleportation do for you? Even if you somehow manage to kill me by some stroke of luck, everything will continue as though you've done nothing." His laughter grew. "The best part is that you know that you have no chance of killing me."
He patted his chest, trying to catch his breath.
Dyon sneered. "You're confident because you believe that I don't know about the smaller scale teleportation formation here? Well let me ask you something, how did I get here without you detecting it?"
Elder Bowa's smile froze.
By now, numerous saints and essence gatherers were pulling themselves out of the rubble. Due to the violent fall of the roof, only the relatively stronger essence gatherers were in good shape while the others were either severely injured or dead. The saints, however, were completely fine.
Dyon calmly watching as the numbers began to steadily grow, taking in the hundreds of gazes filled with hostility.
"Kill him!" Elder Bowa roared.
The various attendants who had been preparing the auction house surged forward, looking to take Dyon out in the shortest time possible.
Dyon stretched out, sending a piercing gaze forward, prepared to shatter their battle spirit with his Presence. Let alone a few hundred enemies, the only reason Dyon survived the third trial was because he could completely collapse the battle will of thousand of beasts at once. What a joke it was for these people to attack him like this when he could incapacitate them in an instant.
However, Dyon stopped just as he was about to do so. 'If I end this battle too quickly, I won't be able to stall for time… No, it doesn't matter. If I kill them all, then I'll have no worries to begin with.'
'Don't do it.' Dyon's master's voice suddenly rung in his ears.
