The deepest tectonic vaults of the Borealis Dominion smelled of ozone, superheated iron, and the unmistakable, suffocating stench of a dying spatial fabric. Descending into the subterranean staging ground, Markus stood before the primary anomaly. The Red Gate no longer radiated its standard, violent crimson hue. Instead, the edges of the massive dimensional tear were curdling, bleeding an ink-black, volatile void mana that aggressively devoured the surrounding stone.
It was mutating. The core energy signature was shifting rapidly toward the catastrophic Class-V threshold—the very same black rift morphology that had just brought down Singapore and Israel.
"Sir, the structural load is off the charts!" the local Dominion detachment commander yelled over the screaming alarms, his armor rattling from the kinetic shockwaves pulsing out of the gate. "Our suppression arrays are snapping like glass! We need to deploy the full regional legion immediately!"
"Your legion would only serve as biomass to accelerate the mutation," Markus replied, his voice flat, cutting through the panicked din. He adjusted his leather gloves, his silver-blue eyes reflecting the deepening obsidian light of the rift. "Hold the perimeter line. No one steps past this threshold."
With a subtle shift in his aura, the ambient light in the vault completely died. The shadows beneath his boots surged upward like a geyser of liquid ink.
"Nagini," Markus murmured. "The cage is changing shape. Let us go inside and inspect the foundation."
Without a second glance at the trembling soldiers behind them, the duo stepped directly into the darkening vortex.
**
Crossing the threshold, Markus and Nagini did not find a cavern or a dungeon, but a staggering subterranean civilisation built inside an active magma caldera. The sky was an oppressive ceiling of churning volcanic ash, illuminated by the harsh, rhythmic flare of a thousand massive smelting towers.
This was a sovereign colony of Dwarven Blacksmiths, but they bore no resemblance to primitive miners. They were an empire of industrialised killers. Sensing the intruders, a low, mechanical klaxon echoed across the brass bridges of the city, and the rhythmic thudding of automated assembly lines instantly shifted into a terrifying march of war.
A dense detachment of dwarven shock-troopers flooded the primary obsidian causeway, blockading the path to the inner city. Standing nearly eight feet tall due to their massive, steam-hissing mechanical exosuits, they were armed to the teeth.
Their full-body armour was a masterclass in runic metallurgy, laced with heat-suppression matrices and pressurised pneumatic pistons that hummed with high-tier elemental mana.
The front line locked their heavy, tower-sized blast shields together, creating an impenetrable wall of solid brass while the rear ranks raised massive, rotary steam-cannons primed with superheated slag.
"Dismantle their forward momentum," Markus commanded softly, stepping forward without breaking his stride.
Nagini lunged. Her ink-black form expanded into a towering tidal wave of absolute shadow. The dwarves opened fire, a blinding barrage of molten metal tearing through the air, but Nagini's fluid physiology simply parted around the projectiles. She slammed into the heavy phalanx with the force of a falling mountain, her crushing weight causing the pneumatic armor of the front rank to buckle and snap.
A massive blacksmith swung a superheated magma-hammer directly at her skull. Before the blow could land, Markus flickered into the blind spot of the exo-suit. He extended a single, cold finger against the primary hydraulic valve of the dwarf's right knee.
With a localised burst of kinetic inversion, the pressurised steam inside the leg exploded outward. The massive mech collapsed into the stone. Before the pilot could eject, Markus swept his arm horizontally. A razor-sharp, invisible wire of compressed spatial mana sliced cleanly through the neck joints of three adjacent suits, decapitating the mechanical monsters in a violent spray of sparks and pressurised hydraulic fluid.
As they cut deeper into the industrial sectors, the city's defensive grid escalated. Heavy automated turrets tracking from the smelting towers locked onto Markus, while a secondary wave of elite Forge-Guards—wearing massive, multi-limbed industrial mechs designed for shaping high-tier dragon-iron—leapt down from the upper scaffolding.
The air grew thick with superheated steam as the mechs ignited their internal combustion cores, their mechanical arms spinning massive, serrated buzz-saws that vibrated at high elemental frequencies.
Three mechs coordinated a localised pincer movement, their buzz-saws carving deep trenches into the obsidian floor as they charged Markus from multiple angles.
Instead of dodging, Markus stood entirely still. Shadows violently erupted from the gashes in the floorboards.
Nagini's liquid form snaked upward, wrapping tightly around the spinning blades.
The sheer friction turned her shadow-flesh into white-hot mist, but she merely purred, her dark mana aggressively bleeding into the mechs' internal runic engines.
Markus walked through the rain of detonating machinery, his hand casually tracing the air.
Every time his fingers flicked, the ambient spatial pressure around a charging dwarf would instantly multiply tenfold, compacting the heavy mechanical armour inward like a crushed aluminium can.
The sound of tearing metal and shattering bones echoed rhythmically against the brass walls of the city. They weren't fighting a battle; they were executing a systematic structural demolition.
Within twenty minutes of absolute, unmitigated devastation, the outer industrial sectors lay completely ruined—a smoking graveyard of twisted brass, shattered pistons, and pooling hydraulic fluids.
Markus and Nagini stood at the precipice of the central plaza, where the molten magma rivers of the caldera converged into a singular, colossal vortex. Looming in the absolute centre of the dwarven metropolis was a terrifying monolithic structure: a towering, multi-tiered mechanical forge that seemed to double as a throne.
The central engine of the brass metropolis screamed. From the heart of the titanic mechanical forge, the silhouette of the Dwarven King materialized, bathed in a sickening, iridescent black miasma. He was not merely piloting an exo-suit; his flesh had fused entirely with the corrupted, rotting steel of his throne. Standing ten meters tall, the Sovereign of the Iron Engine sneered down at Markus, his eyes burning like twin dying stars.
In his massive, mechanical gauntlets, the King wielded two single-handed forging hammers. They were deceptively compact compared to his colossal frame, but the space around the twin weapons warped violently, bending the ambient volcanic light into distorted, chaotic arcs.
The left hammer, Ignis, burned with a compressed, white-hot plasma that threatened to vaporize the caldera. The right hammer, Null, pulsed with a pitch-black, high-density gravity well that aggressively dragged the surrounding obsidian floorboards toward its core.
The King did not speak. With a sudden, explosive burst of kinetic pressure that shattered the stone beneath him, he lunged.
The speed of the King's assault defied his massive structural weight. In a fraction of a millisecond, he crossed the plaza, bringing both hammers down in a terrifying, synchronised cross-strike.
The right hammer (Null) ignited its gravity matrix, locking Markus's boots to the floor and pulling his physical frame directly into the trajectory of the left hammer (Ignis).
Ignis descended like a falling star, the superheated air exploding outward in a localised shockwave.
"Displace," Markus commanded smoothly, burning a sharp ten percent of his mana pool to force a localised spatial tear, attempting to phase himself into the sub-spatial layer.
Clang!
A deafening, metallic toll echoed through the cavern. The King's dual hammers struck the empty air, but the sheer density of the black-mana shockwave fractured the spatial fabric itself.
The displacement array shattered like brittle glass, violently tearing Markus back into real space.
He skidded across the obsidian floor, his boots carving deep trenches into the stone as a line of crimson blood trickled down his cheek. Standard spatial avoidance models were entirely useless; the King's weapons were actively rewriting the physics of the arena.
The King merely barked a gravelly, metallic laugh. Driving his left hammer into Nagini's shadow-flesh, he unleashed a continuous pulse of superheated plasma. Simultaneously, he swung his right hammer backwards, striking her tail with a localised gravity collapse. The dual elemental inversion was catastrophic.
Nagini let out a low-frequency hiss of agony as her shadow physiology was violently disrupted, forcing her to dissolve back into Markus's shadow to regenerate.
Markus stood alone in the center of the trembling plaza, his silver-blue eyes narrowing into two icy points of absolute calculation. The King was already prepping a secondary charge, the twin hammers spinning in his grip like a vortex of fire and shadow.
Clinically analysing the entity's energy signature, Markus recognised the fundamental flaw in his current strategy. The King was directly tethered to the mutating Red Gate core. His mana reserves were effectively infinite so long as the central forge engine remained online.
To break him, Markus would have to forcefully decouple the King from the dimensional rift—a manoeuvre that required a complete, unmitigated structural inversion of the caldera's spatial architecture.
"Nagini, draw his focus for exactly seven seconds," Markus ordered, his voice dropping into a freezing, absolute frequency. "I am draining the well."
Markus raised both hands, his fingers spreading wide as his silver-blue mana erupted from his skin like a solar flare. He wasn't casting a spell; he was forcefully seizing the spatial layout of the entire pocket dimension.
Markus snapped his left hand closed. A massive, invisible vice of compressed space clamped down on the eastern magma channels, severing the energy conduits feeding the King's left hammer. Ignis instantly flickered, its white-hot plasma dying down to a dull, sputtering ember.
Markus stepped forward, his veins burning with an intense, agonising heat as his mana pool plunged into the critical zone. He threw his right hand downward, crushing the western gravity stabilisers. The right hammer (Null) let out a screech of tearing metal, its localised singularity violently collapsing inward and fracturing the King's right mechanical arm.
Seeing his industrial framework systematically dismantled, the King let out a guttural roar of pure fury. Channelling the absolute entirety of the Red Gate's remaining raw energy into his shattered frame, he broke through Nagini's shadow storm.
Leaping into the air, he brought both hammers down in a final, apocalyptic descent directly toward Markus's head.
The air was completely locked. The kinetic pressure alone was enough to crush Markus's internal organs, but his expression remained a mask of flawless, unyielding stone. His mana pool tracker flashed a violent, warning crimson in the corner of his vision
[Mana: 2,000/90,000]
He had exactly enough energy for a single, final calculation. He didn't use it to defend. He didn't use it to retreat. He directed every single remaining drop of his sovereign mana into the space inside the Dwarven King's mechanical heart.
"Sovereign Inversion," Markus whispered.
He forced the volume of the space within the King's core to compress to absolute zero.
The effect was instantaneous and horrific. The King's dual hammers stopped less than an inch from Markus's face. The massive mechanical sovereign froze in mid-air as a microscopic, absolute singularity manifested directly inside his chest. The immense, irresistible suction force didn't explode outward—it imploded inward.
The roaring plasma of Ignis, the crushing gravity of Null, the adamantine armour plating, and the King's very flesh were violently sucked into the collapsing spatial point within his chest. Within three seconds, the entire ten-meter-tall industrialised monarch was compacted into a harmless, solid marble-sized bead of hyper-dense matter, which dropped to the floor with a soft, metallic clink.
The Red Gate behind him let out a final, dying hiss before snapping completely shut, its structural anchor entirely dissolved.
Markus fell to one knee, his breath coming in ragged, shallow gasps. His mana pool was completely empty—a total, absolute zero percent saturation that left his physical muscles trembling with an excruciating, hollow exhaustion. He had never pushed his framework to such a catastrophic limit.
The silence inside the ruined caldera was absolute. Slowly, the shadows beneath his hand pooled together, and Nagini's small, diminished form slid out, coiling gently around his forearm to support his weight.
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Name: Markus Blackwell
Age: 14
Class: Void Apprentice
Affinities: Space (L), Time (L)(Sealed), Fate (EX)
Health: 100,000/100,000
Mana: 90,000/90,000
Level: 69
Strength: 330
Agility: 330
Constitution: 330
Intelligence: 330
Hidden Attribute
Perception: 93
Available free attributes: 0
Laws: Space (100%), Time (0.05%)
Active Skills: (Damage Multiplier: 10x)
Spatial Slash
Void Severance
Spatial Bubble
Spatial Domain
Spatial Detonation
Dark Singularity
Sword Skills:
Vorpal Strike
Meteor Strike
Spatial Ascension
Legacy Skills: (Damage Multiplier: 10x)
[Legacy of Sagittarius]
Starlight Bow
Passive Skills:
Body refinement (Tier 6)
Void Perception
Dimensional Inventory (100 x 100 sqm)
Fate's Eye
Equipment:
Heavenly Scriptures of Space
Key to the Temple of Space
Valerian Academy Student Badge
Aurelian Royal Family Crest
Rosalind's Royal Family Crest
Dimensional Storage Ring (Tier 3)
Prayer Cushion
The Aegis of Eternity (Tier 6)
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