There was nothing but a void of silence. The way Leonel stood, it looked like he was still infuriated, tossing aside Kron's corpse as though he was dissatisfied that there was no one left to vent his fury on.
Indeed, Kron had managed to figure it out at the last moment. His shock and awe had nothing to do with Leonel's Divine Armor. As he watched his fellow family members die one after another, suffering horrible, cruel deaths, all he could think about was what could have possibly led things to come to this point... and in the end, as he breathed his last, he finally grasped it.
But even then, he found it hard to believe... hard to believe that such a Crafter could exist in the younger generation because it was hard to believe that such an existence could even exist amongst the older generation. It felt that none of it made any sense.
Everything hinged on one matter: the protective formation itself.
When one thought about it, what did it mean for a Starship to be able to defend itself and attack at the same time? How could it both stop Leonel from approaching, while also attacking Leonel? It seemed that the only way for that to be possible would be for the canons to be outside of the formation, but in that case, the canons would be too easily targeted.
Of all the blind spots that Leonel had risked his life to calculate, there existed some that even toddlers would be able to figure out was a safe region, and that was the location of the barrels themselves. If the canons had been located on the outside, it would be easy for Leonel to protect himself.
However, there would never be such an obvious design flaw. The formations of the Starship were designed to allow one-way pass through, to block from one direction, but allow easy access from another direction. It was like this the ship was able to both protect itself and attack at the same time.
It didn't need to be an example just how difficult doing such a thing was. The level of Force Art mastery that was required was on a completely different level. It was one thing for it to be a simple pass through, or to maybe allow a person or two through, but to maintain its integrity while powerful cannons like those lasers were firing, it was almost impossible.
It could be said that the greatest feat of engineering on the Starships was this formation that could block Eighth Dimensional existences from one side and kill them from the other. To Leonel, however...
This was nothing more than a flaw to exploit.
The weakness of such a Force Art was that the amount it could let through at once was limited. Kron wasn't a fool, he was well aware of this. As for the Protective Force Art, it was designed to be just fine even if all the cannons fired at once at 100%. If it could do this, it wouldn't be a feat of engineering.
Even so, there were still flaws, and it had only taken Leonel a moment to find them.
During his approach to the Starship, Leonel had already been targeting one region in particular. However, those that were intelligent would see that there was a problem with all of this.
The cannons, fired at 50%, had lasers so thick that they covered the entire range of Leonel's escape options. How could Leonel target a single flaw if the lasers spanned hundreds of meters? And if the flaw spanned hundreds of meters itself, it wouldn't have even been a feat for Leonel to succeed because the Force Art would have long since collapsed.
But once again, the Starship was designed to take the cannons fired at 100%, even all at the same time, so something wasn't adding up.
Originally, Kron had thought of this possibility, and simply threw it to the back of his mind. It wasn't until his final breath that he remembered what Leonel had done right at the beginning of the battle and it all clicked for him at once.
In order to survive the first strike of lasers and save Aina, Leonel had redirected the lasers, using his Gravity Field, Light Force, and Spatial Force to bend light as though he was a crystal prism.
This time, Leonel did it once again, but on a far larger scale.
He had realized that the protective Force Art was no different from a polarized lens. It allowed objects to pass through from one direction, but didn't from another. So long as he got close to this lens, he could tweak it just the slightest bit.
On his own, Leonel could only shift the laser's light a few centimeters...
With the help of the Protective Force Art, he forced the lasers that spanned hundreds of meters in thickness to concentrate onto a single point, targeting the weakness of the Force Art.
ραΠdαsΝοvel.cοm While passing through the Force Art, the lasers immediately overloaded the protective formation. The formation was rated to handle 100% canon fire with ease, but after Leonel took action, it was as though the power of the cannons had increased a thousandfold, shooting far past what the Force Art could handle and shattering it.
At the same time, because the laser was concentrated into a single point chosen by Leonel's manipulation of the Protective Force Art, he knew exactly where to stand to avoid being hit.
As though this wasn't terrible foresight enough, because the lasers had to be filtered through the Force Art first before their beams could be shrunk, from Kron's perspective, it looked as though everything had gone perfectly because all he and the rest of them could see was a blinding flash of light that enveloped everything ahead.
Leonel controlled it all perfectly. He overloaded the Force Art just enough that it only shattered after all the light had passed through. Then, he calmly stepped forward through the now shattered Force Art, and before it could even be reported that the Protective Force Art had issues... He landed on the desk of the Starship.
Now, he stood alone and it all began to sink in for the spectators.
These Heir Wars were over, and the number one genius of the younger generation had been crowned.
His name was Leonel Morales.
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