Ryu felt as though his head was being pounded by a continuous string of hammers. Even so, his gaze was entirely focused on the matrix before him.
Flying through the void without access to his usual level of Spacetime affinity was like blazing through a belt of asteroids at full speed with your eyes blindfolded. Even when he took out his matrix, the only difference was that while he was still blindfolded, he could barely hear the whistling of the asteroids... from within the cockpit of his ship.
It was truly not the best of situations, and if he ever failed to remain within the void and stepped out of an inappropriate location, he could very well find himself impaled by even the most mundane of materials. Losing his life to a stray and wandering leaf, or a bird's shit falling from the skies, wasn't on the top list of his priorities for the day, but given his situation, both were equally likely to happen.
If his body was suddenly superimposed with something it shouldn't be, death would be near immediate depending on which body part it was, and his life might be at risk even if it was a relatively less important body part.
On top of this, there was another worry that was creeping up in the back of his mind, and that was the situation of the Heavenly Path. The moment he had entered, he had been attacked, so he had no method of trying to figure out exactly what sort of land he was within right now, and what sort of challenges he might face. For all he knew, Pierthorn was his "task".
The Incomplete and Complete Heavenly Paths should be different in the way they functioned. The Incomplete Path was split into stages, and it granted opportunity to most. But the Complete Heavenly Path had already undergone a significant change by even allowing those with Sky God aspects to enter in the first place. There was no telling exactly what might be going on, and he didn't like the fact that he was wasting so much time without being able to lock in and figure things out as quickly as possible.
His gaze flashed with a cold light that was disrupted by yet another pang of pain. He wasn't even allowed to be angry anymore, what a terrible deck of cards he was dealt. If he didn't make Primus' life a living hell for this, his name wouldn't be Ryu Tatsuya.
The distance between Ryu and Pierthorn now was several thousand kilometers. But this was the trouble with dealing with a Mental Realm Sky God. The range of their Spiritual Sense was infuriating.
This Heavenly Path had about the same suppression as the Seventh Heaven, though maybe a sliver or two weaker. Even so, the range of a Fragmented Sky God's Spiritual Sense was easily tens of thousands of kilometers. For a specialist like Pierthorn, it was even more exaggerated. Ryu wouldn't be surprised if it was approaching 100 000.
This was a distance it would take a Sky God an hour or two to cross, and it was probably better to measure things in this way rather than deal with the exaggerated numbers.
Thankfully, because he was in the void, the range through which his opponent could sense him was far shorter than just that. He just needed to...
"..."
Ryu's thoughts came to a pause.
Up ahead, there was a barrier, a very thick and strong barrier, one that was absolutely impossible for him to cross even from within the void. That was because this barrier signified the end of a world, there was no void to continue in, no space to speak of.
He wanted to curse. It seemed that he didn't have to spend time thinking about exactly what was happening here because it had slapped him in the face before he could even get a chance to do much else but run.
He was stuck, likely in an combat zone of sort, one where he was forced to face off against Pierthorn. It was an agonizing realization, but one he felt was true nonetheless.
There really was no fairness in this damned world. He, a World Sea Realm expert, was not only tossed into the same combat zone as a Sky God, but the arena itself was also so small that said Sky God could cover a large majority of its range with his Spiritual Sense. On top of that, he had even been sneak attacked the moment he entered, it was a perfect trifecta of absolute bullshit.
Even if he managed to hide from Pierthorn now, it wouldn't even take the latter an hour to find him unless this space was much larger going the other way. However, judging by the curve of the barrier, and assuming a perfect semi sphere, Ryu already calculated that it wasn't.
If he wanted to hide from Pierthorn, he would need to set up a concealment formation strong enough to hide from Soul Quintessence Realm expert. But how would he do that?
That state of his soul was terrible, and even if he was in top condition, it would take a great deal of luck and effort to pull it off. To make matters worse, as though they needed to be, he didn't have the time or the bandwidth left to deal with this.
If he wanted to pull it off, he would have to stay within the void, and staying within the void would necessitate him using his Matrix. Usually, he would still have enough endurance remaining to divide and deal with this matter as well, but right now he couldn't afford such a thing.n((o(-v)-e--l()B-.I-)n
'Run, I have to keep running until my life force energy recovers enough to heal my body at least!'
While he was so concentrated on the state of his mind and soul, his body felt as though it was falling apart. Taking a hit from a Sky God while in such terrible condition already was practically a death sentence for anyone but him...
But even he was reaching his limits.
