Road to Mastery: A LitRPG Apocalypse

Chapter 457: Destroying the Animal Kingdom

Jack broke into the mass of enemies. His Dao spread out, forming the shape of a large fist around him which came crashing down like a meteor. The colosseum spectators cried out. The enemies groaned.

But they were not defenseless. Every Elder of the Kingdom activated their powers. So did the two remaining Ancestors. The Emberheart Supreme Ancestor roared, his body flickering with crimson lightning—his wrinkled skin tensed up, muscles stuck out of his scrawny arms, and his white mane stood up like rods. Though nowhere near his peak, he remained a supremely powerful individual.

The Supreme Ancestor, already using the Thunder Body battle transformation, clashed head-on with Jack’s attack. The white-cloaked man assisted him, using time and space to dissolve some of Jack’s momentum.

A tremendous shockwave spread from the point of impact. The two late B-Grades managed to stop Jack’s assault, but the remaining force tossed the Elders behind them away like ragdolls.

Jack roared. He smashed another fist at the Supreme Ancestor, but the man was no slouch—he crossed his arms to defend, then exchanged a few strikes with Jack. His speed and strength belied his age. This was a martial arts master.

“AGAIN!” the Supreme Ancestor roared, but it was a fake. Eva Solvig appeared behind Jack, slamming down a white palm. The space behind him turned barren. He sensed lifelessness heading for his back. He barely managed to teleport away, watching the area an entire mile around his previous location turn…not dead, but something even worse, something beyond the scope of his many Daos.

Pure—in a terrible, terrible way.

A shiver ran down his back, accompanied by excitement. Three late B-Grades besieged him, flanked by two early B-Grades and over a dozen C-Grades. What a line-up…

The Supreme Ancestor led the charge. Eva Solvig followed, ready to attack Jack a beat later and disorient him, while the white-cloaked man floated far away, constricting spacetime around Jack from a distance. None of them were simple opponents. At the same time, the early B-Grade Ancestors led the Elders to barrage him with attacks from afar.

His form flickered. He used a thought to shatter the white-cloaked man’s grip on spacetime, then he warped it until it seemed like there were twelve Jacks, not just one. All twelve charged up a Supernova.

Eva snorted. A white field spread around her, annihilating everything—even spacetime and the fake Jacks. Twelve disappeared—none were left.

“What!?” was all she had time to cry out before a thirteenth Jack appeared behind her, smashing a punch into her lower back and sending her flying. The Supreme Ancestor flashed over, planting a knee in his chest. Jack’s breath was cut short. He was sent flying, his regeneration already working to fix his ribcage, but found everything accelerating around him.

No, they weren’t accelerating—he was the slow one. Time stagnated around him.

Jack tried to break the hold, but he was more proficient in space than time. He needed a moment—but that wasn’t time he’d be allowed. The Supreme Ancestor flashed before him, suddenly much faster than before. His limbs turned into blurs. Fists and feet and elbows and knees rained on Jack.

The Emberheart family used a full-body martial style, but this Supreme Ancestor took it a step further. In his movements, Jack could see a shadow of the sharkens’ unpredictability, the canines’ ferocity, the eagler’s speed. He was a force of nature barraging Jack with dozens of strikes every instant, and though he tried to defend, there was only so much he could do when slowed down.

A few strikes got through. His knee bent backward, a chop bruised his neck. Each of the Supreme Ancestor’s strikes were aimed at a vital spot, and each could fell a mountain range. Jack spat out blood, rapidly retreating, only to be met with a terrible heat at his back.

The Elders, who had been throwing attacks all this time, finally got him. A green fireball exploded behind him, searing his back and destroying half his cloak. Just as the shockwave pushed him forward, the Supreme Ancestor was there again, his limbs flowing in a bloody dance.

Jack didn’t even consider defending. He let a palm land on his chest to forcefully teleport away, barely dodging a white beam released by Eva Solvig. He coughed out blood. The moment he appeared, he saw that the white-cloaked man had read his movement and teleported at the same spot before him, meeting his arrival with a spatial blade aimed at his heart. Jack twisted out of the way, letting it slice through his ribs, then threw a punch in the same movement. The white-cloaked man flew away with minor wounds.

This is impossible, Jack thought as he kept getting mobbed. I can’t take them all at once! Not like this!

He’d expected things to go this way. He knew it would be a hard battle, but this was just too much! How could he fight when besieged from every direction?

Activating the Thunder Body would certainly help, but he saved that as his last resort. He hadn’t mastered it yet, so it consumed way too much energy. Wasting it here would be unwise.

But then, what?

Jack gritted his teeth. Brutalizing Aura spread around him, snaring his opponents and clipping their wings, slowing them down just a bit. Jack used that time to break the spacetime shackles around him and teleport a dozen miles to the side, directly into the middle of the gathered Elders.

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“Stop!” the early B-Grade Ancestors shouted. An army of divine soldiers attacked Jack from all sides while the Elders retreated, but he only snorted. Spacetime rippled around him—the fluctuations surrounded the body of each Elder, slowing them down before freezing them completely.

In his last battle, Jack had used this technique to imprison twelve phantoms with the strength of an early B-Grade each. Now that he was even stronger, trapping all these C-Grade Elders was child’s play.

“Not on my watch!” the white-cloaked man shouted. Ripples spread from him as well, countering Jack’s and breaking the Elders out of their time prison, but Jack didn’t mind. He never planned to hold them anyway. All he needed was to delay them a bit so they couldn’t run away.

The early B-Grade’s divine soldiers stabbed him with their spears, but Jack didn’t bother defending. They could only inflict flesh wounds. Power flowed into his limbs. He shot forward like a cannonball, arriving before a sharken Elder who’d just escaped the time prison. The Elder’s eyes widened—he tried to run away, but in the face of Jack, he might as well be standing still.

Jack’s Meteor Punch smashed into the Elder’s body, shattering all his internal organs. The fist carried on, pushing the dead Elder into two more and killing them as well. Only the fourth Elder managed to escape death, though with heavy injuries.

Only now did the Supreme Ancestor manage to catch up. Seeing the Elders of his Kingdom massacred, he trembled with rage. “How dare you!?” he shouted. He fell on Jack like a wild animal, his aged body exhibiting unmatched ferocity. Jack defended calmly, laughing.

“You dare laugh!?” the Supreme Ancestor roared. “You dare bully the weak? Is that the honor of a great warrior!?”

“You aren’t only doomed, but also a fool!” Jack shouted back, not explaining himself further. Mentally, however, he commanded: System, allocate all points into Physical!

The many Elders of the Animal Kingdom had arrived en masse to demonstrate the might of their faction. They hadn’t been afraid that Jack would kill them—even though he could, it just wasn’t worth it. The impact they had on the battle was minimal. He wouldn’t risk turning his back to the real enemies just to deal with them out of spite.

However, there was something they’d failed to account for—the fact that they could give Jack levels.

In most situations, background characters weren’t enough to level up anyone. Simply put, easy battles were never worth fighting. It was this eternal rule which made all the Elders miscalculate here, and even the B-Grades had missed this fact.

Jack was so strong that it was easy to forget he was still a late C-Grade. The Elders had joined the battle to show unity and bravado, but all they had achieved was to deliver themselves to Jack on a silver platter. To him, they were juicy bags of levels.

Everyone realized that at the same time. “Scatter!” the Lonihor Ancestor shouted. All Elders ran off in random directions, but they were standing on sand, and they could see colosseum walls around them. “It’s an illusion!” someone shouted. “Break through!”

They smashed into the walls head-first. They may have been illusions, but they hid real spatial barriers underneath. Breaking through wasn’t easy. Even if the late B-Grades were the ones to try, it would still take some time.

Jack broke off from the Supreme Ancestor and teleported to the middle of the colosseum. “Where do you think you’re going?” he asked, his smile tainted by blood. “From the moment you decided to fight me, you lost your right to escape. It’s victory or death.”

“VICTORY OR DEATH!” the audience chanted after him, and Jack laughed.

“Get him!” Eva shouted, suddenly feeling an intense sense of crisis, but her attacks landed on nothing. Jack had already teleported away. His form flickered across the colosseum like a specter of death.

Back before he entered the Black Hole World, Jack had already been able to match Eva’s speed. Now, he was easily twice as fast. Even in the enclosed space of his colosseum which not even he could escape, even with the white-cloaked man working hard to limit his movements, Jack was the fastest cultivator present. Maybe he couldn’t harm the late B-Grades like this, but they also couldn’t catch him.

Suddenly, Jack was everywhere. The late B-Grades ran after him but missed him. Wild attacks filled the arena as everyone tried to stop him. The Elders panicked and ran around like headless chickens, but it was useless.

Jack was a Gladiator Titan. Placed in this group of weaklings, he was like a wolf amongst sheep. The rushing Elders might as well be sitting still. He flashed to their sides, casually severed their lives, then teleported away again. Between teleportations, he flew at speeds untraceable by the naked eye.

Five Elders died within two seconds.

“To me!” the Supreme Ancestor shouted, incensed. The Elders rushed over—the smart ones were already there—but it was useless. Jack intercepted them midway and flitted around like a deadly butterfly, easily killing them all. Of course, the more the Elders gathered, the easier it was for the late B-Grades to catch Jack. Some attacks connected, shaking him and making him spit out blood, but he ignored them. His body was ridiculously sturdy, and his regeneration was godly. He could take it.

Notifications rang continuously in Jack’s ears. He usually ignored them until the battle was over, but he now paid attention, telling the System to keep investing everything into Physical. His power grew. He became stronger and faster with every passing second, terrifying the late B-Grades. For someone to advance like this mid-battle was unthinkable.

When he arrived at Animal Planet, Jack had been Level 363. Over the course of killing these Elders, he’d reached 378, a difference of fifteen levels and three hundred stat points. That wasn’t a minor increase.

The Animal Kingdom possessed thirty-two Elders, all at the middle C-Grade or above. Two had been killed by Jack before this battle, so thirty remained. That was their main force, the core of their faction. Every single Elder was of paramount importance.

In normal times, even the worst faction-destroying disasters couldn’t get too many of those Elders because they were spread across the constellation. Now, however, the Hand of God had ordered them all to gather at Animal Planet, and they’d all rushed out together to face Jack, foolishly emboldened by their numbers.

That was their doom.

The cornerstones of the Animal Kingdom fell like flies. Within a single minute, all thirty of them were killed. The Grand Elder had also fallen. The Kingdom lost all of its Elders. Even one of the two Ancestors, the one from the Emberheart family, had been caught off guard and slain—his strength had been lacking to begin with.

Even if Jack died right now, the Kingdom couldn’t continue existing as a major faction in this galaxy. They only had a single Ancestor remaining, alongside the Supreme Ancestor who was just too old. Everyone else was at the early C-Grade or below.

It could be said that, right now, Jack had already destroyed the Animal Kingdom—and he wasn’t even done yet!

All around the galaxy, every spectator drew cold breaths. They were witnessing the fall of a giant. The million year-long reign of the Animal Kingdom…ended today!

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