BXBX NOVEL Chapter 107: Chapter 107:Faster and Harder [1]
Unable to reply to her with any expression or signal, my body slowly started to crumple up, falling to the ground as I didn't even have the energy to stand up straight anymore.
Nine seconds left for my cooldown and one second until Liana would reach her predicted location.
Well, with my jar already thrown into play, the predicted location was probably a bit off...
By now, everyone else's perception of time had caught up to the present. Lily was staring at my mask with a confused and anxious expression, and Liam and Kevin were staring at the jar in the air.
Albert and Alya focused on the sparks of lightning on the ground, knowing it was a sign of their mother arriving. Finally, Irene and Kevin stared dumbfounded at Ruby's figure, which had disappeared right before them and appeared right before me.
Holding my breath, I watched as the jar tipped downwards, finally causing some particles to fall out and head towards Ruby.
Looking at the ground, which was the only thing I could see now as my head could no longer tilt upwards, I used the sparks on the ground to predict Liana's new location.
Eight seconds.
With the jar now in play, Liana prioritizes destroying the particles and ignores me. This also causes her to slow down and reassess the situation, noticing Ruby's figure blocking her current path.
Then, Liana would undoubtedly recognize Ruby as one of the people helping her and alter her path to exclude Ruby's figure in front of her and then include destroying all the particles with her beams of lightning.
But then, what would happen to me after Liana destroyed all the particles..?
Well, my dash cooldown should have regenerated by that time... right?
Calculating the distance between the lightning sparks on the ground and the rate at which they were appearing, I was able to get an approximation of Liana's current path...
There was just one problem...
Liana's path had changed a single bit.
Seven seconds.
The next second, a lightning spark appeared right in front of Ruby, and the jar I had thrown continued tilting downwards, letting my particles out.
Did she not see Ruby's figure? Was she prioritizing killing me over destroying all the particles and saving the World Tree? Did she believe she could do both?
As soon as that lightning spark appeared, I dispersed the jar, allowing every particle inside it to escape and scatter around the area in front of Ruby.
The jar simply disappeared mid-air, returning my corruption to me and causing all the particles inside to roam free in the cave.
I had already gone this far, so there was no point in stopping now.
As the particles surrounded Ruby and the lightning-sparked around her, I continued by manifesting another smoke-emitting device with the corruption I had gotten back.
Surely, she would slow down or change her path if another device appeared and a bunch more particles were heading for the tree.
Six seconds.
As I threw my new smoke-emitting device right at Ruby's figure and the surrounding lightning sparks, I watched as the entire area turned into a dark cloud of smoke.
The particles from the original jar combined with the output of my new smoke-emitting device, which had its output ramped up to the maximum, all accumulated together.
Inside the dark cloud of smoke, countless lighting sparks appeared, causing a part of the cloud of smoke to glow a dark purple.
If I hadn't created the cloud, I would have thought it was a thunderstorm; the dark-black cloud of smoke combined with the lightning sparks created an exact replica of how a thunderstorm looked.
Using my eyes, I peered into the smoke, immediately sighing upon seeing Liana's figure in front of Ruby, inside the smoke.
If Liana had slowed down to the point where I could see her even though I was a D-rank, she must have noticed Ruby.
Though Liana had considerably slowed down, she still had no stopped completely as she ran through the cloud of smoke, her expression still somehow indifferent.
Wait, why was she not panicked or anxious...? The spirit of the World Tree would be completely corrupted if she didn't do anything in the next ten seconds...
5 seconds.
In the next moment, Liana was right in front of Ruby, only a couple of centimeters apart, but she still had not stopped moving.
*BZZT*
The next second, a purple flash exploded inside the smoke, overpowering the black cloud completely and turning it into a dark purple cloud.
When I reopened my eyes, I watched in shock as Liana ran right through Ruby as if Ruby were a hologram.
She had phased through a person.
Liana had become the fastest person in the entire world, including demons.
She had achieved the state of intangibility.
The state at which you move so fast that her state turned from physical to non-physical, making it possible for her to phase through physical objects.
Quantum Tunnelling was the ability's name.
A phenomenon where particles can pass through potential barriers that they classically shouldn't be able to at the quantum level of particles.
In the book's story, she had never achieved this level of speed... and no one else in the entire world had achieved this level of speed.
She had changed states: physical to non-physical.
An ability that was so strong that it was incomparable to teleportation.
Looking at her figure as she passed right through Ruby's body, I immediately noticed her change in state with my eyes as she was nothing...
Her body was made of pure lightning.
She had no physical body.
Her entire body was shining a dark purple as her body was literally created out of lightning.
Sparks of lightning flew off her body as she moved, covering the entire cave, not just the floor anymore.
4 seconds.
The entire cave, now doused in lightning, uncannily reassembled my shadow cage, but instead of corruption making the cage, it was pure and powerful lightning.
The only downside to this new ability was that she was now completely visible even when running at maximum speed due to her body of lightning.
3 seconds.
The next second, she had covered the distance Ruby and I, her lightning body only a few meters in front of me...