Chapter 205: Everyone’s Enemy (4)
The Milky Way was Keter’s signature move. At first glance, it seemed to be nothing more than a majestic explosion with no special properties, but it was exactly that; the Milky Way was a technique focused solely on explosion.
The logic behind the explosion was the caster’s will. Others might be able to wield aura, but they couldn’t make it explode like Keter. Even if someone could, they could never match the destructive force of the Milky Way because they lacked an understanding of its principles.
But Keter was different. He was a student of Ragnon the Bomber and had experience crafting explosives through gunpowder. He understood, on a technical level, how an explosion occurred and how to make it stronger.
The secret lay in fission. He gave aura, which was intangible, a mass and formed it into a core. Then, he split this core: one core became two, two became four, and so on. Repeated over and over, the cores shrank to a size that no longer yielded to willpower.
Though from this point, he didn’t even need to force the split, as the cores divided on their own. From a single nucleus of aura, he created dozens, then hundreds. Those multiplied further, until thousands of miniature cores pressed against one another in the confined space of the arrow. It took less than a second for one aura core to become thousands. The heat and friction born of that collapse was the explosion itself.
Had this happened in an open space, nothing would have happened. However, all of this was occurring inside a small confined space: the Milky Way, an arrow with layers and layers of aura and mana.
The beginning of the explosion began as soon as the Milky Way’s form took shape, independent of Keter’s control. This was because the fission started when the outer shell compressed the aura core. The decisive chain of explosion began the instant the bowstring was released, and the strength of the Milky Way’s blast depended entirely on how many cores Keter had compressed into it.
Keter’s first demonstration of the Milky Way had been in Sefira, when he shot Burgundy. He had used it a few times in Eslow’s fief, but never in a way that fully revealed its destructive potential. The sight of an arrow turning into a starry carpet of explosions had left witnesses spellbound.
Yet he had never decisively crushed an enemy with it. This was inevitable, as there were always allies nearby. Other times, the targets weren’t worth killing, or there were facilities that couldn’t be destroyed. But here, in Liqueur, on the roof of Infinite Bank, they were surrounded only by enemies. There was nothing to hold him back.
“Milky Way.”
The first arrow against Burgundy had carried a hundred cores. The one he fired in the tournament contained three hundred. And now, the Milky Way nocked on at Amaranth contained...
Rumble...