UGB Chapter 408: A Domain Beyond Measure
Chapter 408: A Domain Beyond Measure
Bruce didn’t have those limitations anymore. But this his current method was more difficult and requires more strength to pull through..
The difficult part was precision. The heal had to move through the domain touching everything without simply touching everything equally. The inhabitants of Velmora were underneath it too, their souls present in their bodies the way they were supposed to be. The possessed were different. A foreign soul sitting inside a body it didn’t belong to had a particular quality to it, a wrongness that his perception could identify clearly at this level. Two things occupying a space designed for one.
The signature was unmistakable once you knew what to feel for.
He had to separate them. Reach past the inhabitants, find only the invading souls, and shatter them cleanly without the energy crossing into the real inhabitant soul the invaders were suppressing inside.
Before, he had done this by pressing his palm directly against the body, containing the soul shatter to a precise physical location. Up close. Controlled. Safe. This was one at a time so it had lower risk, and requires less the precision needed for what he was trying to do right now...
Unlike that safe one person method, the current style he was going for is wider. Much wider.
The margin for error existed even if it was small, and Bruce acknowledged it without letting it stop him. His aura had reached a level where a million times the density of steel was a casual description of what he could produce. The intricacy required for this was well within what he was capable of now. He knew that clearly.
He took a breath anyway. Old habit.
And then he began.
---
The effect moved through Velmora like something passing through water. Invisible to most. The possessed didn’t feel it coming. There was no warning, no buildup, nothing to react to. One moment the invading souls were present in their stolen bodies and the next they simply weren’t.
Shattered cleanly, precisely, each one located and unmade in the same extended moment as Bruce’s heal swept through the domain with surgical focus. Thousands of them across every kingdom, every settlement, every shadow they had hidden themselves in.
It took less time than it should have.
When it was done Bruce held the domain steady for a moment longer, checking. Running his perception across Velmora one more time the way you run your hand across a surface to check for what the eye might have missed.
’Clean.’
He let the breath out and pulled the domain back.
---
Back then when he released his domain, unlike Earth, the inhabitants of Velmora reacted different and a bit more sharply.
The SSS Ranked beings of Velmora felt it first and reacted the fastest, because unlike Earth’s strongest who had never encountered a domain and had no frame of reference, Velmora’s powerhouses knew exactly what a domain was.
They had seen them. Some had their own. They understood the concept and they understood what it meant when one arrived.
What they did not understand was this one.
In the city of Valkrin, one of the SSS Ranked members of the Headboard Adventure Guild stopped mid conversation and went completely still.
’A domain?!’ He was alarmed as he extended his own perception outward, feeling for the domain’s edges the way you probe the walls of a room in the dark. His perception stretched. And stretched. And found nothing. No edge. No boundary. No end
Just the domain continuing beyond anything his senses could reach.
He stood there with his perception fully extended and his face doing something complicated. How can a domain be this strong and spread so wide that he couldn’t sense it’s end with his aura...
"This is a domain," he said slowly, to the person he had been talking to. "That is definitely a domain."
The other person said nothing. They were doing the same thing he was, reaching outward, finding the same absence of an ending.
"How," he said. Not a question he expected an answer to.
Across the city, in a different building entirely, another SSS Ranked fighter felt it land and immediately released his own domain as a reflex to protect himself...
The small sphere of his domain pressed outward and met Bruce’s and stopped there, the way a candle flame exists inside a lit room. Contained. Entirely outmatched. He stood inside his own domain and understood within seconds that it was providing him nothing. That the thing surrounding it was so far beyond his own that the comparison barely registered, Bruce’s domain casually overwhelmed his, but under Bruce will he didn’t destroy the domain instead he just let the effect sink in after all this guy was possessed by an invader...
The invader possessing the body was alarmed, the domain didn’t feel hostile but the moment the moment Bruce’s heal: Soul shatter effect seeped in the invading soul was immediately attacked and shattered that instant...
---
In a quieter part of the city, in a courtyard full of the particular organised chaos that comes with planning an event of significant scale, Bane stopped walking mid stride.
He stood with a list in one hand and the beginnings of a logistical problem in his head and he simply stopped, because the aura threading through the domain that had just settled over all of Velmora was not a stranger’s aura.
He knew it.
He had known it before it was this large. He had known it when it was considerably smaller, when it had belonged to a man he had assessed carefully and decided was worth allowing near his daughter. He had watched it grow.
Had tracked its development with the particular attention a man pays to someone who matters to his family.
But this.
He let out a long slow breath that was more sigh than exhale.
"It’s him," he said quietly, to no one. "He’s already SSS Ranked, but how can his domain be this big..."
He was quiet for a moment. Doing the mental arithmetic of how long Bruce had been gone and how much had apparently happened in that time.
"He’s fast," Bane said finally. There was something in the word that wasn’t quite complaint and wasn’t quite admiration. Somewhere between the two. The feeling of a man who had spent his life being strong and had watched the generation beneath him find speeds he hadn’t known were available.
He thought about Sophie. SS Rank now, one step behind Bruce. The two of them moving at a pace that made his own career look like it had been conducted in slow motion.
His expression settled into something complicated and quiet.
He would have looked considerably more complicated if he had known Bruce was currently asking Akashic for ways to get stronger even faster.
He would have been something else entirely if he had known Bruce could hold a direct conversation with Akashic at all. That had never happened. Not once in the entire history of Velmora.
Nobody spoke with Akashic the way you speak with a person. Nobody exchanged words with it the way Bruce did, casually, back and forth, the way you talk to someone who has simply always been there.
Bane didn’t know any of that.
He just stood in his courtyard with his list and his sigh and went back to the wedding preparations, because the wedding was still happening regardless.
---
Sophie felt it from where she was, which was in the middle of a training session that she had pushed harder than usual, working through something her body had found at the edge of SS Rank that she hadn’t fully mapped yet. She stopped when the domain arrived, not because it alarmed her but because she recognised it immediately.
She had grown up around Bane’s domain. Had felt it close at hand enough times that she understood the particular texture of a domain the way some people understand a voice. This was bigger than her father’s. Much bigger. The size of it wasn’t even something she tried to measure. She could feel that it had no end within her perception and she noted that and moved on.
She smiled.
It was a quiet smile. The kind that happens before the person is done thinking.
"My love always likes to show off, and he’s always grand about it," she said with a warm smile.
She looked up at the sky even though there was nothing to see there directly, just the golden quality the air had taken on under the domain’s presence.
"Do what you have to do," she said. Quieter this time. More to herself than to him, knowing he couldn’t hear it. "And come back."
She lowered her gaze and rolled her shoulders and went back to training.
"I’ll get stronger and definitely keep up with you Bruce..."
No way she’s letting him leave her behind...
Duke received the news the way Duke received most things, which was sitting down, with a cup of something warm, in a room filled with milfs, having fun like he always does...