Chapter 386 The Muscular Domain
POV Vesuvius:
Abruptly bright lights flashed in the sky as if stars came out during the daylight. They were quickly brightening and catching everyone's attention.
The aliens shook in panic while the dragon turned his head to observe the lights. Before he could even blink, rays of plasma descended on the desert. The air shivered around them from all the heat as they burned through the atmosphere.
'Is this the legendary orbital bombardment? Are they actually smart to keep their forces on the safety of the orbit?'
Vesuvius flexed his domain, and the air around him moved and rearranged all its molecules concentrating and compressing into a giant bubble filled with a vacuum.
The sand raised from the dunes and joined the barrier as if an oversized vacuum cleaner sucked it. Instantly the night covered the desert as the dome of ash, sand, compressed air, and smoke hid the sun.
The time slowly trickled as the dragon waited for the impact. His keen senses already felt the incoming energy wave as it approached.
'Not too threatening to me. Nevertheless, it would be devastating for my country. They could just blow cities from the orbit and I would be unable to shield them all.'
The next moment the energy beams struck the barrier, the bright light passing even through its dark walls. Vesuvius's mind slightly moved and forcibly held all the barrier molecules in its place.
The rays kept flashing, and the ground was quivering and trembling. More and more impacts pulverized against the barrier, and then even more as if it would never stop.
Vesuvius refocused, and even more, mana poured into the barrier, reinforcing and keeping it in place. It held like a dam against a flood wave, deflecting all the energy away, while the vacuum perfectly isolated the heat.
The light was getting brighter and brighter as more of the sand in the barrier disintegrated into nothingness, revealing the burning aurora of energy blazing around.
Just as he started to worry it finally stopped, leaving only silence and the damaged, wildly shifting dome as the reminder.
The dragon waved his claw, and the barrier vanished, and the air rushed back in.
Everything was destroyed, and the desert turned into a lake of lava or glass all the way to the horizon. The smoldering heat bathed over his armor, making him feel in his element.
'Such a powerful attack and I just flung it away with my domain as if it was nothing.' Only now did he recognize how much he had changed. If his domain was previously like an additional arm, now that arm has beefed up with muscles.
He could resist such an attack even before, but he would have to tank it with his tanky body. Now it didn't even come close to touching him.
The small and tiny aliens lay in the sand, their bodies visibly paralyzed with sheer terror.
'How could I tolerate getting attacked without retaliating!'
He didn't even need to know what he was shooting at as he already got approximate locations of enemies based on the ballistic of the attacks.
POV ???:
'It is too late. They have arrived... we are dead. On top of that, this monster is...' The madness and despair gorged all his clarity as he observed the desert burn and melted all around him while he forfeited all his hope.
Cogged with envy, his mind stayed stuck on that thing as if it broke, 'A giant and perfect body. It is intelligent, and now it can even control reality just with its mind. It also came out of a wormhole, so it can likely travel across the universe with its own power.'
He felt like the universe wasn't fair. His people were dying while having to rely on the tools and technology they had developed over many generations. Even now, death approached them, yet he couldn't even help himself.
On the other hand, the cosmic, deity-like being could surpass them alone.
'Were we wrong? Is technology really so inferior when compared to natural evolution?' Their entire civilization was defeated and assimilated by highly evolved, parasitic creatures, and now he witnessed a beast even more evolved and frightening.
'How many of them even exist?" Glowing tattoos decorated the beast's body, and together with the existence of a language, it meant only one thing: civilization.
The giant reptile raised its clawed hand and thrust it in a single circular motion. The space ruptured, and a golden tear formed in reality, exposing a world of ebony stone, gold, and magma on its other side.
He fell on his knees and started to laugh like a madman, his last strands of self-confidence and sanity slipping away into the abyss, 'Hahaha, all our technology. All the energy and machines needed to open a wormhole. Yet just a fling of its claw is enough to do the same.'
An invisible force lifted his body from the ground, making him levitate while still laughing like a maniac.
It grabbed him like an invisible hand and dragged him toward the gaping crack in reality. He could only flail his limbs while the soldiers around him panicked.
"Let go of me!"
"I am going to be eaten!"
His rationality returned, and he shrieked in hysteria as he recalled the plight of the people relying on his return, "No, not this! My people! There are still my people waiting for us to save them!"
The monster just stared at him with its golden moons without any response.
"Do you hear me? No, let me go! My people need me!" His desperation grew as his body moved without control, like a puppet controlled by the armored colossus.
The lights of plasma launchers flashed in the sky again, "No! They will get simply annihilated! Please!!!"
The fiery world got closer and closer as the force pulled them into the golden maw of the wormhole.
The monster couldn't understand him, and he felt it would ignore him even if it could, 'Who would listen to a bug or food.'