Chapter 133: Convergent 3
Francis held the lock for exactly as long as he needed to study them.
Up close — the tendrils were even less natural than they had appeared from a distance.
He released the lock.
The tendrils resumed their strike, the suspended momentum returning all at once, and he was already moving before they completed the motion — sidestepping through space itself .
He wanted to test something first.
Up until now, nothing had truly posed a threat to him. He decided to use this unknown substance as a way to train and refine his newly acquired abilities.
He slowly raised his right hand.
The lightning came much easily now, converging in his palm with little effort. But he was not satisfied.
He increased its intensity and used Lugar's spatial ability to confine it within a sphere. The bolts struck each other repeatedly, building heat with every collision. Slowly, the sphere turned white-hot, its form lost beneath the blinding light.
CRACK!
It struck.
White light tore down through the air and detonated against the surface, the impact point flashing into something close to plasma for a fraction of a second — heat and ionization and destructive force compressed into a wave that kept going, vaporizing everything on site.
What followed was a large hole, so clean it looked as if a portion of the geography had simply been erased.
Then it filled back in, closing the gap the way water closes around a thrown stone, except faster.
Within ten second, the hole was gone.
Francis narrowed all six eyes.
So a single strike, however concentrated, meant nothing to something at this scale. The destruction was real. The recovery was just faster.
Fine.
He raised his hand again, and this time he didn't stop at a single bolt.
The sky above him — clear seconds ago, the calm blue of open weather — began to change.
The storm announced itself with a single peal of thunder that shook the ground.
Then it opened up.
Lightning fell in a continuous barrage. Each strike carried the full weight of his power crashing into the silver target below without pause or separation.
Steam exploded upward in walls, the liquid boiling instantly wherever the strikes connected, visibility collapsing.
Francis stood at the center of it, both arms raised now, feeding more and more of his reserve. He wasn't holding back. There was no reason to hold back. This was a test, and a test only meant something if it pushed the limits of what he was testing.
The barrage continued.
A full minute.
Sixty seconds of continuous, overlapping lightning strikes, each one carrying enough force to have erased everything.
When it stopped, the silence afterward felt enormous.
The clouds thinned, dispersing as quickly as they had formed. Steam still rose in columns from the scorched ground.
The silver came back again.
His second attack failed.
Francis lowered his arms. He didn't feel frustration.
Instead, his mind was already moving through the next steps. To him, the silver substance was not a threat, but a puzzle he needed to solve.
The conclusion was simple enough to state and complicated enough to actually internalize.
Whatever this substance was, it didn't operate on a logic where destructive output mattered. He could pour the entire force of Rynik's lightning into it for an hour instead of a minute, and the outcome would likely be the same — devastation, recovery, devastation, recovery, an equation that never resolved in his favor ,
He thought of Glakor's ability to slow down atoms, bringing matter close to sub-zero temperatures.
Francis exhaled.
The breath left him visibly — a plume of white vapor in air that had been warm seconds before — and the temperature around him began to fall.
Within three seconds, frost spread across the clouds, branching outward, unnatural patterns.
By five, the moisture in the air collapsed into snow mid-descent, turning the lingering spray from his earlier attack into a sudden whiteout.
What had been rising steam died off, replaced by a dense, swirling snowfall that thickened with each passing second. The air cooled rapidly as the scene shifted into a full blizzard, wind driving the snow in violent sheets that erased everything beyond a short distance.
He wasn't done yet. As the blizzard grew stronger, a burst of cold gas fell from the sky and froze the silver substance. It tried to fight back by absorbing the ice, but Francis kept lowering the temperature until it started to weaken.
Then silver tendrils shot upward, moving on their own and aiming straight for him.
"STOP."
He used his time ability again to freeze them for one second, then used spatial displacement to move away quickly.
But the tendrils did not stop. They changed direction and followed him like guided missiles. More and more kept coming until the sky was filled with them.
Francis flew higher to create distance. He threw a punch into the air, creating a shockwave that destroyed many of the tendrils.
But even more rose from the pool of silver below.
It didn't end.
At this point, even he began to wonder if there was any way to stop it—or if he should simply escape. It wasn't as if he cared much about what would happen to this world anyway.
He kept rising, putting distance between himself and the swarm below, the tendrils thinning out the higher he climbed as whatever guided them lost momentum.
The atmosphere thinned around him. The blue of the sky deepened toward black at the edges of his vision, the curve of the world beginning to assert itself the higher he went.
And then he saw it.
The silver substance was everywhere.
Dozens of sites.
Possibly more, concealed beyond the horizon's edge or hidden under cloud cover his eyes couldn't penetrate from this height.
He turned slowly in the air, all six eyes working independently, each one fixing on a different stretch of land, cataloguing what he saw.
Coastlines eaten away in long silver tongues. Inland basins filled like reservoirs. A mountain range with veins of it running down through the valleys like something had been poured from the peaks and allowed to find its own path downward.
It wasn't spreading from a single point.
It was already a network.
Francis was taken by surprise.
Destroying the patch below him would have meant nothing. One wound closed on a body with dozens of others already open, all of them feeding from something deeper than any single location.
He could spend the rest of his existence freezing seas and scorching coastlines and the result would be the same as pouring water into the ocean. A correction so small it wouldn't even register against the scale of the actual problem.
This wasn't a creature he could fight piece by piece.
This was a virus the entire world had already contracted.
And when a virus this deadly was already unleashed, the best option was to isolate it—or stay as far away from it as possible.
He chose the latter and turned his attention upward.
The dark line where the atmosphere gave way to vacuum was now visible above him, a thin band of deepening color He could see the restriction clearly now with his six eyes.
The barrier.
Francis gathered everything at once.
Not lightning this time, not the focused destructive output he'd wasted before.
This was not going to be one ability layered thinly over another. This was going to be everything, compressed into a single intention.
All six, at once, as a single weapon.
He started with Verak.
The raw kinetic force formed first, the simplest kind of power he could summon. It gathered in his palm.
He didn't let it go.
He added Rynik's lightning next, not as a separate attack, but woven directly into the kinetic force. Charged particles threaded through the compressed energy, strengthening it from within.
Then came Glakor's ability. This part required control. He locked the entire attack in stasis, holding every particle in place so nothing could escape as heat or shockwave. It became a storm frozen at the edge of release.
Beneath it all, Enfero's conversion drove the process forward, accelerating atomic motion and pushing the entire structure toward higher energy states.
It became so unstable that Francis had to summon more hands—twelve in total—to keep it under control. When even that was no longer enough, he used the next king's ability.
Space folded into the attack, compressing it further until distance itself disappeared. The four forces stopped being separate. For a moment, they became one point—no space between them, no gaps left to break.
And finally, Eerak's ability.
Time inside it slowed. Every microsecond of formation stretched out, refined, and sharpened.
Then, finally, it stopped completely. But the energy was still so violent that even in its paused state it continued to move. It had already reached a level beyond full atomic suspension—where even time-freeze could not fully hold it still.
Six abilities. Six Kings. One attack.
"Convergent Unleash!" He released it all into a single direction.
Up