"What a pity. If he'd kept pressing just a little longer, I could have dissected more of his psychic traits and shortened the time it will take to find a way to counter him."
With genuine regret, Roya dispersed the great web of spirit threads—just in time to sense the Silent King's vast warp-projection beginning to boil.
It was like a dormant volcano erupting in an instant. Within that colossal projection, a storm of raging power brewed and clashed, restrained by invisible bonds. The entire spirit-form, half the size of Pirate Star itself, became like an overclocked combustion engine, ceaselessly building up terrifying momentum and destructive force.
In the material realm, the seemingly empty void at the heart of the desolate system began to twist. Dark-green psychic haze seeped forth from nothingness.
Those mists of energy scraped against each other, discharging blinding bolts of lightning. The suffocating aura of annihilation they carried left no doubt: some dreadful presence was about to burst through the veils, dragging obliteration into realspace.
Even the lowest-ranked warriors, those who had not yet awakened their psychic sense, felt the crushing weight of it deep within their bones.
Cold sweat poured down their backs. A primal terror of death and extinction gnawed at their reason.
If not for the counterbalancing presence of Roya's spiritual domain, they would already have broken—mindless lambs waiting for slaughter beneath fear's dominion.
Roya knew he could disperse the Silent King's oppressive aura with a pulse of psychic resonance. But here, within the shielding of his domain, the pressure was already too diminished to cause real harm. Better, in fact, to leave it be—to force the soldiers to resist with their full awareness. Some of them might even awaken psychic power under such strain.
"Hold fast, brothers! That bastard's getting desperate!"
"Yeah, hold the line! Cut down these metal skeletons and drive him mad!"
"Don't lose heart! No matter how strong that dog is, could he ever be stronger than Lord Roya? If he dares touch us, Lord Roya will kill him for sure!"
The warriors shouted encouragement to one another. Far from dampening their morale, the pressure rebounded into greater resolve. Their pace in cleansing the six pyramid warships quickened yet again.
Beyond the Hades, Kaido and the Mythic Squad's assault on the six Necrons-class foes had reached a fever pitch.
With Kaido's brute ferocity and the Squad's seamless coordination, they were already pushing the enemy into retreat.
But as the suffocating aura descended, Kaido stiffened. His instincts screamed—the Silent King himself was about to act.
Nuwa realized it too. Through the psychic link, she barked:
"Thor, Mars—area attacks to pin them! Everyone else, link the cannons—overload barrage!"
Information through the link moved faster than any tongue could speak.
The moment her thought reached them, the Squad had already acted.
Thor hurled Mjolnir with all his might, not at a foe, but to meet the strike of Mars's spear, Calamity of the Firstborn.
Blue lightning and crimson radiance collided, detonating into a focused shockwave of staggering brilliance and destructive force.
The fan-shaped wave of crackling energy engulfed all six deathlords at once.
Forced to scatter, the deathlords faltered—giving Nuwa, Odin, and Athena room to pull back and align. The shoulder-mounted warp cannons on their powered suits linked together, humming as one.
Three condensed beams of pure immaterium—emerald, blue-white, and pale gold—locked onto their targets under their guidance.
In the next instant, they fired.
The flare of their cannons burned their suits dry—their mechs went dark, overloaded into shutdown.
But the shots struck true.
Each beam speared through one target and, without slowing, drove into a second before erupting in cataclysmic explosions.
Every blast carried the force of a double kill.
Kaido gaped. Only now did he realize: aboard the Hades, from battle-chiefs down to common troopers, everyone was advancing at breakneck speed.
The Mythic Squad's sudden eruption—the flawless precision of their barrage—was staggering. Against such strikes, even with all the Beasts Regiment shielding him, Kaido doubted he himself could have evaded.
Though Nuwa, Odin, and Athena's suits were left powerless, three of the deathlords were already unraveling—countdown to death begun.
Where they had been pierced, their living-metal bodies rapidly disintegrated into nothing. Warp-laced beams had shattered them down to base particles of matter—irreversible destruction.
In less than half a minute, their forms would be completely gone.
The higher intelligences bound within their metal husks would perish too, devoured and dissolved by the warp. Body and soul alike erased.
The other three, blasted apart at the center of warp-fueled detonations, fared even worse. They were annihilated in the very moment of impact. What fragments of consciousness remained were dragged whole into the maelstrom of the immaterium.
The strange explosions collapsed into whirling vortices—warp rifts that no being of matter could approach.
Thor and Mars had already recalled their weapons with psychic command, pulling back to catch the powerless Odin and Athena.
Kaido, still reeling from awe, nevertheless moved swiftly—sweeping Nuwa into his protection, boosting his thrusters, and leading the retreat toward the Hades.
First, because the expanding rift was still growing, with no telling when it might collapse.
Second, because in a battlefield this intense, even fifteen minutes of power loss was far too dangerous. Should any more deathlord-class foes emerge, the powerless trio would be helpless prey.
All of this unfolded in but a heartbeat. The annihilation of the six deathlords was over in an instant.
And in that instant, at the heart of the desolate system, the volcano of wrath that was the Silent King's warp-projection seemed to pause—hesitation for a single beat.
Then, dark-green haze surged outward again, boiling even more violently than before.
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