She wasn't caught off guard, though. She retaliated with a red beam of spiritual energy. The two attacks clashed with each other.
There was no explosion. The two attacks simply eroded each other. The lance of plasma has the advantage in quality and power. After all, the soul is weak to lightning. But it couldn't overcome the beam of spiritual energy easily because the red beam is not purely spiritual energy.
It is the flames of rebirth of the phoenix race created with divinity, so it had some resistance to lightning, and it was quickly replenished by the great mother, so it wasn't extinguished by the dragon breath.
Legion-unity didn't let up either. They continued to produce more dragon breath and attack her from various directions. But she could always resist the attacks with the armor of red flames around her.
The two fighters exchanged attacks back and forth, with no clear winner. However, it is clear that Legion-unity had the upper hand since they were pressuring the great mother while she was only on the defensive. Even so, the great mother could still gloat.
She said confidently, "You can't beat me, immortal one. I can do this forever."
She can truly do so forever. An entire race of billions of individuals is feeding her with energy, so Legion-unity is not fighting a single entity. She is like them that way. And more than that, she has an advantage over them in that aspect. There are only nine of them in Legion, but she is an entire race.
As if to emphasize just how carefree she was, she created a red beam of spiritual energy that shot toward them. The attack didn't hit them, though. It veered away from them.
It is the advantage of a domain that enables its user to wield cosmic force. They can manipulate space and time in ways that do not conform to laws. If not for the threat of backlash that might cripple them, they would have rewinded time to render the attack non-existent.
All her attacks missed them. Meanwhile, they were shrinking the domain, so the space they could fight was getting smaller and smaller. They did this as they tried to approach her.
She noticed their actions and did everything she could to stop them. Her soul fragments tried to trap them, and her powerful attacks tried to strike them, but they all failed. They all veered off course, and nothing could touch Legion-unity.
She may have the support of millions of other individuals, but none of them has a domain. So she can not maintain the surerity of her actions. Even if they do, none of them have superior domains like those of dragons and world beasts.
Straight beams of Phoenix fire became curved as they veered away from them. It happened several times, so she realized the problem quickly. If there is something that she has in abundance other than her supply of energy, it is mental prowess.
The minds of a billion entities working together is probably something unique in all of the void universe. With it, she was able to identify the problem and use her immense mental prowess to create a solution for it immediately.
Red fire exploded outward from her form into the surroundings. She turned her armor of flames of rebirth into a domain. It is an attempt to keep him away from her.
She has replaced the absent nether water with her energy, so he would have to go through it to get to her. It is a waste of energy, but energy is the one thing she doesn't lack.
Unfortunately for her, it was a false domain. A mass of energy doesn't make a domain. What she has created will be able to contend with the domains of transcendents and mana entities. But his's is an Origin god's and a superior one at that.
Legion-unity continued moving closer to her, so they met with the false domain. But the flames of rebirth couldn't harm them because they couldn't touch them. There seemed to be an infinite chasm of extended space between their body and the flames, so they weren't harmed. They couldn't to move closer to her through the sea of fire.
The great mother wasn't daunted by her failure, though. She doubled down on it instead. She didn't create beams that could be dodged anymore. Instead, she focused on using her vast pool of flames to drape a dense armor around her. It encapsulated her completely and turned her into a red sun.
If he tries to get close to her, then he will need to push her thickened and heavy domain away from himself. It will surely cost him a lot of energy to do so, considering the high density of the armor-like domain.
And if he tries to push her amour apart again, she can concentrate the full force of her armor on him. It would be like a mountain crushing him on all sides. So in a way, she has turned the fight into a competition of energy, which is a field she has an advantage in.
"Admirable," they said to themselves.
"She doesn't have a domain. But she made one."
Maybe she knew, or maybe she didn't know, that their use of cosmic force comes at a cost other than energy.
They can surely accommodate the price to bypass her domain in terms of cosmic energy because they have a lot of it at their disposal. But the backlash needed to push aside her armor is not something that they can tolerate. Not when they can see that what she has laid for them is not a defensive measure, but a trap for them.
Fortunately, pushing and pulling are not the only things they can do. They willed it, and Cosmic force rioted.
The world fragmented and cracked like a mirror. Reality within the domain became fragmented, including the great mother. Her form was sliced and forced to shift apart.