Hundreds of palm strikes poured down like an overwhelming tidal wave.
They shrieked through the air, carrying a rotten, nauseating stench as they bore down on Mahoraga.
Even Mahoraga's enormous frame seemed as small as duckweed tossed by a storm in that torrent of palm strikes, his pale body flickering in and out of sight between the black palms.
The Three-Phase Buddha waved his hands ceaselessly before him. With every sweep, new palm strikes condensed out of the void and joined the black torrent.
"Be crushed to pieces!" His shrill, deranged voice echoed through the domain.
Amid the torrent of palm strikes, Mahoraga suddenly drew in a breath.
His chest swelled like a balloon, growing larger and larger. His ribs expanded, his chest muscles bulged, and his entire torso stretched outward from within.
Then he roared with all his might.
"ROOOAAAR!!"
An almost tangible sound wave erupted from his throat and surged forward.
Wherever it passed, the bluestone paving cracked, shattered, and scattered. Broken Buddhist steles turned to powder in the sound wave, toppled golden statues broke into fragments, and desolate lotus pedestals crumbled to dust.
Then the sound wave met the palm strikes.
The first palm strike dispersed the instant it touched the sound wave. The second, the third, the fourth-the palm strikes were peeled away layer by layer, dissolving like a wall being knocked down, collapsing inward bit by bit from its outermost edge.
Ten, twenty, fifty, a hundred.
The sound wave neither stopped nor weakened. Instead, it grew stronger and faster, an unstoppable torrent driving back toward the Three-Phase Buddha.
Why hadn't that white thing fallen yet?
He watched the nearly tangible wall of sound surge toward him, watched his palm strikes dissolve layer by layer within it, watched his attacks be completely overwhelmed, watched his last