'Existence?'
Damien focused most of his attention on Alexander's body when he found it.
His main body was moving with the bare minimum intelligence, using mainly its instincts to dodge and weave away from the Gods that were attacking him.
Naturally, if they challenged him in close combat, the situation would be different, but that was exactly the situation Damien was working hard to avoid.
He didn't just stay near the boundary stele.
The two Straea Gods realized their distanced attacks wouldn't hit pretty early. Once they had him cornered, the first thing they tried to do was get in close and stop him from teleporting.
However, Damien moved behind them and led the chase in a separate direction.
He needed them to keep their attention completely focused on him.
Alexander was already working through the boundary stele's mechanics to find a way past it, so his job was now to stop the two from realizing Alexander's presence.
There was no need to talk about the process.
Damien's awareness was great, and with teleportation supporting him, even Gods would be hard-pressed to catch him.
His movements had no pattern or direction, he was never inhibited by the environment, and his range wasn't something they could easily place their finger on.
Damien made sure of it. No matter how hard they tried, unless they had power so absolute he couldn't evade them, they couldn't catch him.
And from what they showed so far, he was confident they didn't.
'I'll call them low-rank Gods for now. At this level, they've pretty much just reached a point above Law, so in terms of control, they aren't nearly at the level they can express in the Heavenly God Plane.'
The Heavenly God Plane had a supportive environment that allowed a God to show anything and everything they could without restriction.
However, the real plane was different. It didn't directly restrict them, but the Heavenly Order stood above all beings and put them all under a blanket of its domain, which forced a God to do far more work to exhibit the same level of power.
Low-rank Gods couldn't overcome that domain. Perhaps it was due to the matters of soul Damien explored earlier, or perhaps it was something else, but the facts didn't change.
'As long as I don't let them hit me, they can't catch me.'
It wasn't like there was no danger. They were still Gods, at the end of the day.
Their Legends were great, their souls were great, their mana was great, and their laws were great. Damien was also great in his own way, but objectively speaking, they had more power than he did.
So he could only run and confuse them for as long as possible before they healed from their previous injuries and cornered him.
Before that happened, Alexander had to break past the boundary stele.
On that topic…
'This is…difficult.'
He was able to sense the trace almost instantly because he himself controlled Existence.
However, actually moving that trace was a different matter altogether.
What was the problem Damien was dealing with in the first place?
It was his inability to move Existence as he pleased.
So if the answer here was exactly that, what was he supposed to do?
'No matter how talented I am, it's impossible for me to find that method before my main body gets fucked.'
If so, he needed to find a workaround.
'From what I'm seeing, it's a pretty simple puzzle. More than anything else, people couldn't solve it because they tried to use brute force, but there's also the fact that they couldn't sense the presence of this puzzle in the first place.'
If someone before Damien could perceive what he was perceiving now, the boundary steles would've long been taken care of.
But since they couldn't, such a simple puzzle inhibited them for untold millennia.
'Still, is it possible to do this another way?'
He latched onto the trace of existence with his mana and tried to find a way to move it. It wasn't like an ordinary puzzle block, so this method naturally didn't work.
After that, he tried to move the environment around the trace of existence to change its relative position to the puzzle's exit point.
However, even that didn't work. Halfway through his trial, he lost control of the area and it reverted back to normal.
The third strategy he tried was the most blunt, but it also felt the most rational.
He poured Existence Law into the puzzle.
There was a route to pull the trace of existence out. When one made it to the end, the boundary stele would likely collapse and one would gain the trace of existence for themselves.
But since Damien couldn't do it, he filled the pathway with his own Existence Law, using pure quantity to overcome the puzzle mechanism.
As for its effectiveness…?
'It's definitely working.'
It didn't work immediately, but unlike his other attempts, the puzzle didn't force him to stop trying.
'Maybe because I just poured it all out, it doesn't count. If I just contain it to the pathway without letting it leak into the surrounding area…'
He worked tirelessly. The seconds passed extremely slowly, and within his mind, he saw the various changes that were taking place within the stele.
Controlling Existence. It was just as grand of a task as it sounded.
There was no way to take shortcuts to reach the final goal. Even now, as Damien used a shortcut to get past the puzzle, he still had to learn to at least somewhat bend existence to his will.
Alexander put his whole focus on the task to the point where his surroundings were drowned out. Damien, who stayed relatively in the vicinity, sent down a few clones to protect him as he maintained the attention of those two Gods.
The time had to be counted in seconds. Not even a minute had passed since they first reached the boundary stele, but each second was used to its fullest capabilities by every party involved.
'It's getting harder.'
The main reason Damien could lead them along like this was because the two Straea Gods were injured beforehand both by him and the Veritas Grand Elders.
But as the time passed, their injuries got less and less severe, and their attacks became more powerful.
'They were stalling too.'
That was why they never tried using their laws against him.
Just as he was stalling until Alexander opened the boundary stele, they were trying to get their power back before engaging in battle with an unidentified enemy.
They weren't idiots.
No matter how angry they were, they used their heads to keep themselves secure.
Damien may have appeared as a Demigod in their perception, but he was able to break through all of their protections to attack them while they were in the Heavenly God Plane.
He couldn't be as simple as he appeared.
So, instead of needlessly risking themselves, they chased him and probed him while recovering their strength.
But now they had reached that point. They no longer needed to play it safe, and they'd somewhat surmised what Damien was capable of.
Though, the timing really was perfect.
Because just as they lost the need to stall, Damien did as well.
The ground rumbled and dust rose into the skies.
"Something" was happening to the boundary steles.
