Right around the time he happened to be tearing through the front lines, carving a bloody path through the Tacet Discord Tide to expand his Echo army and setting his sights on an Overlord Class target...
She wasn't sitting idle either.
"Echo, resonate with me!!"
An ultimate move identical to his. The Tacet Discords in front of her vanished in an instant, and ten swords flew out in rapid succession, erasing ten of the weakest Common Class Discords in the time it took to blink.
Then she plucked another sword from the slack grip of a stunned Ranger beside her and went in dual-wielding, same as him. Pure carnage.
"Rover is... incredible."
"Yangyang, where did you find this monster?"
"She's a one-woman army!!"
"This humble taoist's training is clearly far from sufficient."
Everyone stared, slack-jawed, as she mowed through everything in sight.
Not long before, she and Yangyang had helped Jianxin track down the person they were looking for. After some... vigorous persuasion (of the physical variety), the target agreed to return to Jinzhou voluntarily. The three of them had then headed to the military camp to lend a hand.
The Midnight Rangers were elite Resonator soldiers to a man, but even they couldn't escape casualties against the sheer volume of Discords swarming the front lines.
Wounded fighters had been evacuated to the rear camp for emergency treatment. Then, mid-triage, a Tacet Field materialized nearby.
The injured Rangers prepared to drag themselves back into battle without hesitation.
Every one of them had already made peace with dying.
"From this point forward, this battlefield is mine."
One sentence. That was all it took.
The atmosphere flipped completely. Every soldier gaped at this second coming of a Tacet Discord killing machine and felt profoundly foolish about the noble, tragic resolve they'd been nursing moments ago. More than a few glanced down at the farewell letters they'd scrawled, then promptly ate them.
One second ago: The Discords are here. Probably going to die. But I'll take some with me!
The next: Hell yes! Rover's here! The Discords are dead!
Even mid-combat, she didn't waste a thing.
"Abby, dinner time!"
"On it!!"
Abby shot from the Tacet Mark on the back of her hand, diving into the fray to devour the defeated enemies' lingering Frequencies.
"Hmm, my strength is increasing, but nowhere near as much as when I absorbed the Crownless. Still, no matter! If quality won't cut it, quantity will."
She cleaved through an Elite Class Discord, murmuring to herself as she felt the faint but real surge of power.
This was exactly why he'd left Abby with her. Unlike him, with his preference for converting Discords into Echoes to serve as reinforcements, she leaned toward absorbing their Frequencies directly, making herself stronger. Abby was a natural fit at her side.
With every Discord she cut down, Abby consumed the chaotic Frequencies left behind, feeding the results back to her. She was leveling up in real time.
As the power flowed in, the picture became clearer.
"So that's how it works. Abby devours the chaotic Frequencies from the Discords and converts them into stable ones, which then become our strength."
It sounded like Abby deserved all the credit.
In reality, anyone else paired with Abby wouldn't see results like this. Every person's Frequency was fixed, fundamentally incompatible with outside sources.
This was a privilege reserved for the two of them alone, the Vessels of Sound. They were built to contain every Frequency in existence.
And because that container was stable enough to hold anything the world could throw at it, they were likely the only two Resonators alive who would never experience overclocking.
Better still, the Frequencies flooding into her body weren't strengthening her alone. Across the battlefield, he was growing stronger in perfect sync.
The two of them were terrifying.
One walked the path of beast mastery... Echo mastery, rather.
The other refined her body into a weapon.
Together, they were determined to max out both numerical advantage and individual combat power, leaving zero exploitable weaknesses. Anyone destined to stand against them in the future could start despairing right now.
And in fact, at this very moment, on the other side of the field...
The Impermanence Heron fighting him had lost its mind.
Impermanence Heron: (Fam, something is WRONG with this human!!)
As an Overlord Class Tacet Discord, it had held its own at first, leveraging aerial superiority to trade blows evenly. Even if it couldn't win, it had felt confident it could disengage whenever it pleased.
Then, mid-fight, something stopped adding up.
Why does he keep getting stronger?!
At the start, he'd needed that azure dragon knight fighting alongside him. Now he was generating lethal threat all on his own.
"Lucky, bite it down!!"
"GRAAAH!!"
At the command, the Lightcrusher roared in answer, crouching low. The next instant, it launched skyward with Rover on its back, bounding through open air dozens of feet above the ground.
There was a reason it was called a Lightcrusher.
It could run on light itself.
Luminous energy condensed beneath its paws, carrying him on a brief sprint across the sky. Behind it, countless golden bolts of light coalesced, and one sweep of its massive tail sent them screaming toward the Heron.
The attack caught it completely off guard.
Wings beat frantically as it tried to flee, but three heads and zero coordination made for a poor escape plan. Unlike the two Rovers, who could pilot Gipsy Danger in perfect sync, the Heron's three heads couldn't fly their own Crimson Typhoon. The one controlling the left wing and the one steering the right pulled opposite ways, and the Overlord Class Discord squandered its last window to run. By the time all three skulls finally synced up...
"Echo, resonate with me!!"
The frozen instant turned them into a sitting target in the sky.
The Lightcrusher seized the opening, pouncing like a starving predator and slamming the Heron to the earth.
"GRAAAH!!"
Golden light gathered at its claws and came crashing down.
"SHRIEEE!!"
The moment the time-stop lifted, the Heron screamed.
Those proud wings, shredded in an instant beneath the weight of golden claws.
But it wasn't over. Rover leaped from the Lightcrusher's back, soaring high.
Resonance energy had dyed the Originite: Type II a brilliant gold. Those cat's-eye irises narrowed to slits.
Sword held horizontal. Aimed at three necks.
"It's over. Now... drop... the... Echo!"
An executioner's strike, falling from the heavens.
Three necks severed in a single slash.
As the Overlord Class Discord's life hit zero, its body dissolved into a shimmering golden phantom, hovering where it fell.
"YES!!"
He couldn't hold back a shout.
Their first Overlord Class Echo. Get!
He flicked out his Pangu Terminal to absorb it, and the memory of how his strength had surged throughout the fight clicked into place. He understood now.
Across the battlefield at the same moment, she had just cut down the last Tacet Discord in the Tacet Field. A notification pulsed on her Terminal's Data Dock, alerting her to a new Echo acquisition. Surprise flickered across her face.
Then, from two different battlefields, two voices spoke in unison.
"As expected of her/him!"
Miles apart.
And yet fighting side by side all along.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Note: Extra chapter!
Keep the Powerstones coming and I'll sacrifice my sleep…
Read 20 chapters ahead and more soon at Patreon.com/NiaXD