Chapter 146: Finding A Way Out
"SHIT!" Nolan cursed to himself as he witnessed the third obelisk starting to light up.
Quickly, it began oozing with clouds that moved up the sky, covering the entire room.
Sparks of lightning brimmed through the area as darkness consumed the world.
CRAAACCKKKLLEE
A powerful sound of crackling lightning rang out beside Nolan's head.
He turned to his left, spotting a pillar of whitish light soaring towards him.
Instantly, Nolan flung his chained dagger to the side, digging its end into the wall, and he yanked on it with all his strength.
Instantly, his body jerked towards the wall, narrowly avoiding the lightning that slammed into the spot where he had just been.
However, Nolan wasn't unscathed; remnants of the lightning still slammed into him, enough to paralyze his muscles.
Unable to stop himself, he slammed his face into the wall, skidding painfully against it.
Successfully, though, Nolan saw he had escaped the binding of gravity.
He instantly withdrew his chains before facing away from where he had stood.
BOOOOOM
At the place where Nolan was, a pillar of flame crashed down once more, narrowly dodged by Nolan.
In the new spot Nolan stepped, the gravity instantly reduced on him, making his feet float in the air as all feeling of weight disappeared from his body.
BAAAAAM
"Arg!" A groan of pain escaped his lips as he felt a powerful bolt of lightning slam into his head.
Blood oozed from his nose, and he roughly smashed into the ground, bouncing off it a few times before coming to a stop.
Instantly, Nolan's head rose up, finding himself below a flaming portal.
Quickly, he scrambled away from it as another pillar of flame smashed down roughly into the ground.
Once more, a deep pillar of lightning crashed forward, and Nolan dodged his head to the side.
A loud crackling of lightning tore past his face, leaving a scared mark in its wake.
"ARRGGH" a groan escaped Nolan's lips as he quickly got back on the move, running around the area.
Flames crashed, lightning chased, and gravity occasionally shifted, making him as heavy as a mountain or as light as a feather.
The constant changes greatly disoriented his balance, causing him to get caught by the two remaining destructive obelisks' attacks.
Less than ten minutes had passed, but dark smoke was already rising from Nolan's body.
His hair stood on end from being struck repeatedly by lightning.
Occasionally, he dodged a flaming pillar by the skin of his teeth.
Sweat poured down his face due to the intense temperature and the heat of the battle.
It was the first time in Nolan's life that he had been faced with a battle where his opponent had no arms or legs, yet it was giving him the fight of his life.
He had tried countless times to get past the flaming obelisk to approach the shadow obelisk, but he had always failed at the last second.
To top it off, the fourth obelisk had yet to attack. The one that controlled time!
"I can't keep running around. I need to find a way out..." Nolan muttered to himself.
His dagger was in his hand, but his opponent wasn't approaching him.
It was essentially useless, save for covering up some attacks for himself.
It was obviously a physical battle, yet his strength wasn't helping him at all.
But still, after spending close to half an hour running around, Nolan was able to decipher some pretty suspicious things and understand a little about how each obelisk worked.
The first thing Nolan noticed was that every obelisk pulsed with a brilliant light before unleashing their attacks at him.
This pulse of light came from none other than the sphere embedded into their center.
In an instant, Nolan could guess how the obelisks worked!
A fundamental rule of everything in the Celestial Realm was that it always had a source.
The Celestial Heirs' source of power was their divine essence.
The Titans drew their power from their titan essence.
The nightmare creatures derived their strength from their Terror Flux.
Exhaust a Celestial Heir's divine essence, and no matter how powerful they were, they would collapse to the ground, unable to pose a threat.
The same could be said for anything else.
Right now, Nolan had deduced that the same principle applied to the obelisks.
The only reason they could unleash such devastating attacks was because of their source of power: the spheres pulsing with energy within them.
If he ripped out those cores, they would lose their source of energy.
Once their energy source was gone, they would become nothing more than stone pillars, unable to do any harm to him.
But even after half an hour, Nolan had not been able to get close to a single obelisk, so he couldn't just waltz forward and take the cores away with his dagger.
That led him to the second thing he had noticed about the obelisks.
The first one was the flame obelisk.
It slowed down Nolan at the moments he least expected it.
The truth was that Nolan found the flame obelisk to be no real threat.
The only way it could attack him was through the flaming portals floating above him.
As long as Nolan didn't stay under the portal, the flame obelisk wouldn't be able to do anything to him.
The second obelisk, the storm obelisk, was easier to deal with.
While the storm cast a deep darkness in the room, Nolan could borrow the light from the flaming runes in the air to see his way through.
The problematic part was its lightning that chased him, but Nolan had been able to sense that he could dodged the lightning, due to its loud sound that it makes as it closed in on him.
Yet even though that was the truth, right now, he had been hit by more than 30
bolts of lightning.
The problem was the third obelisk—the gravity obelisk!
It was the one Nolan hated the most and the real reason he was being beaten so pathetically!