The air above the Umbral Ridge was still superheated.
Lucifer stood behind the massive, golden wall of the one thousand Paladin-Mechs.
The twenty-meter-tall machines stood perfectly rigid, their aether-cannons cooling down.
Behind them, the thirteen million mortal soldiers.
The Star-Shatter Cannon fired. The Doomsday Pearl, amplified a million times by the system glitch, vaporized the central peak of the mountain range.
The sheer volume of displaced rock and unrefined Umbral Ore had settled into a dust storm that hung heavily in the zero gravity dimension.
High Ranger Celeste rode her armored dire wolf back from the edge of the blast zone. She pulled up sharply in front of Lucifer, her scarred face tight with sudden, intense alarm.
"Grand Marshal," Celeste reported, her voice breathless. "My scouts reached the epicenter. The mountain is gone, but the entity inside it... it is not dead."
