Chapter 179: Symphony of Gears and the Chess of Death (Part 3)
The fall through the dimensional fracture was not a free fall; it was like being violently dragged through the throat of a mechanical beast in agony. The coordinates of space and time lost their meaning. The group felt their organs being compressed and stretched, grazing the edges of physical collapse, until the gravitational anomaly finally stopped chewing them.
When space stopped spinning, Cedric, Iris, Borg, Eira, and Cassius were spat out with devastating brutality onto a freezing metallic surface. The sound that dominated this new environment was overwhelming, a constant and titanic grinding of heavy metals and colossal chains, as if they had just landed inside the pocket watch of a demented, furious god.
They found themselves in an immense spherical room, so vast that their own echo took entire seconds to return and fade into the darkness. The curved walls surrounding them were covered by an ocean of cyclopean gears forged from rusted bronze and black iron. Each of those metal teeth was the size of a palace and spun with a crushing slowness, grinding the space around it with seismic creaks. Among the infernal machinery, thick lines of ancient runes pulsed with a dim light, oozing a thick, dark, crimson liquid that fell toward the central abyss like a perpetual rain of blood.
"Maintain a tight lotus formation," Cedric ordered immediately, dusting off the shoulders of his tunic as his feet sought anchorage on the slippery floor. "We are in the operational core. This is the engine room that controls the distortions of this entire spatial labyrinth. If the tomb is a body, we are in the beast's heart."
Cedric closed his left eye. His right eye underwent an instantaneous, geometric mutation. He had activated the [Eye of Architectural Truth]. The gray of his iris lightened until it adopted the color of an electric, translucent sapphire. Inside his pupil, the human shape disappeared, replaced by an intricate three-dimensional mandala composed of concentric rings of golden and platinum light spinning in opposite directions. Like the diaphragm of an arcane camera, the rings aligned, emitting a faint, cylindrical beam of light.
For the Runic Architect, the chaos of the spherical room suddenly lost its physical opacity. The entire environment of rusted metal and blood became completely translucent, taking on a matte blue-gray hue, similar to a holographic parchment blueprint. The solid structures revealed their internal lines of force as golden filaments, showing the immense chains of martial code that sustained the non-Euclidean prison.
"It's a work of profane engineering, but it's rotten to the foundation," Cedric murmured, his mind processing the immensity of data at breakneck speed. In his vision, the "energy knots" of the matrix pulsed in an incandescent purple, revealing their structural weaknesses. "The runes on the walls... if we manage to rewrite the matrix on the four cardinal gears, I can reverse the energy flow. We'll force the collapsed space to untangle, and all the squads will converge on our point. Iris, I need your processing power to decipher the base layer."
"Understood. Connecting my Spiritual Sea to the runic network," Iris replied without a second of hesitation.
The amber-eyed girl did not move from her spot, but the air around her became saturated with intellectual pressure. Her pupils, which also contained oscillating geometric patterns, fixed on the bleeding walls. Instantly, she materialized her [Stellar Jade Chessboard]. The heavy block of deep green jade, engraved with thousands of fractal micro-grooves, pulsed with an internal silver light. Her fingers, whose phalanges had become translucent data terminals of runic crystal, moved over the smoky quartz pieces on the board.
As she placed the pieces, threads of golden light shot out toward the ceiling and walls, forming a holographic projection that mapped the environment's energy nodes. As was their paranoid and methodical custom on any raid, both geniuses already had Saint-Grade defensive formations spinning silently a millimeter from their skin; concentric and subtle barriers designed to repel any sudden physical or spiritual intrusion. A few steps away from them, Eira remained on high alert, her icy aura freezing the ambient moisture and the rain of blood around her, creating a small dome of absolute cold.
That extreme tactical caution was what saved their lives in the first critical second. But, tragically, it was what doomed their vanguard.
From the deepest darkness of the immense spherical room's concave ceiling, camouflaged among the deafening gears, hung a grotesque mass of pulsing tendons and nerves. Without emitting a single sound, without generating even a ripple of wind or a fluctuation of killing Qi, the aberration dropped a dozen translucent threads, as fine as spider silk, but forged from pure concentrated nervous energy.
The invisible tendrils descended like silent guillotines, seeking to bury themselves in the napes of the five invaders.
The threads heading for Cedric and Iris's heads bounced off their passive runic barriers with a dull, electric crackle. The nervous appendages seeking Eira crystallized and shattered into pieces half a meter from her skin, destroyed by the passive absolute zero barrier. Cassius, who kept his body in a constant martial sway by spinning his spear in small circles, felt a microscopic disturbance in the air and dodged out of pure survival instinct.
But Borg was different. The immense vanguard colossus relied entirely on the impenetrable hardness of his bronze skin and his extreme muscular density. Against blades, fire, or mountains falling on him, he was a god of resistance. However, he was the anatomically perfect target for an attack that didn't seek to tear flesh, but to penetrate the nervous system at a spiritual level.
Four translucent, invisible threads drove cleanly, without spilling a drop of blood, into the base of the giant's spine.
The bronze titan stopped dead. His immense fists, which were clenched and ready to crush any threat, fell to his sides. His eyes, normally filled with a controlled martial fury, widened enormously before turning completely white, devoid of irises and pupils. A violent spasm, followed by the crunch of his massive bones adjusting under an alien command, shook his immense frame.
"Borg?" Cassius asked, taking a cautious step toward his squadmate, slightly lowering the tip of his spear.
"Get back!" Iris's voice screamed through the Soul Nexus. Her Divine Probability Processing, calculating alternate futures at terrifying speeds, had warned her of a spike of extreme violence a fraction of a second before the giant's muscles even tensed.
Borg did not respond to his name. With a guttural, bestial roar that didn't sound human in the slightest, the giant spun on his heels, denting the metal floor. His arm tensed, and he launched a devastating punch loaded with the entirety of his Battering Ram Bloodline's inertia straight toward the chest of Cedric, who was closest.
Cedric, whose eyes showed him the glowing crimson vector of the imminent impact thanks to his detected geometric flaw, barely had time to cross the thick gauntlets of his forearms in front of him.
He channeled his Qi at a frantic pace and quickly invoked his [Sovereign Interference Network]. Threads of platinum light sprouted from his palms, instantly weaving three layers of runic metal shields in front of his torso. However, the physical strength of Borg, an individual designed to demolish entire fortresses bare-handed, was something not to be underestimated. Borg's immense bronze fist crashed into the network. It pierced the first two defensive runic formations as if they were wet rice paper and dented the third shield of solid light, sending Cedric sliding backwards over ten meters. The architect's iron boots struck furious sparks against the metal floor as he tried to keep his balance.
"His motor system has been completely usurped!" Cedric grunted, coughing and spitting blood from the violent transfer of kinetic force that rattled his ribs. "Something in the shadows of the ceiling is using him as its damn meat puppet!"
But before anyone could look up at the vault of the room to search for the controlling parasite, the physical space directly behind Cassius tore open with a wet, repulsive, fleshy sound.
It wasn't a spatial portal of light opening. It was a horrifying aberration literally being born from the puddle of runic blood covering the floor. A grotesque mass over three meters tall emerged right behind the lancer. The beast possessed no visible skin covering its anatomy, and lacked a normal bone structure. It was built entirely from dozens of withered Dantians of fallen cultivators and hundreds of exposed, beating hearts, all forcibly sewn together by thick, black, pulsing veins pumping a toxic fluid.
The organ monster issued no battle cry. It did not roar. One of its immense asymmetrical arms, formed by bundles of intertwined muscles around multiple stolen energy cores, swung with the brute, unstoppable force of an avalanche of flesh.
Cassius, the Jade Lancer, possessed exceptional reflexes forged through thousands of deaths in the Pagoda. However, all his physical and martial attention was concentrated on evading the immediate threat Borg represented. When the Nexus radar warned him and he tried to spin on his heels to raise his spear shaft and block, it was already too late. The monster delivered the blow.
The immense fist of hearts and tendons hit him flush on the right side, trapping his arm and crushing his ribcage.
The horrifying crunch of multiple bones fracturing echoed clearly over the noise of the gears. Cassius was sent flying through the air with the violence of a ragdoll kicked by a titan. He flew over fifty meters before crashing horribly against the wall of one of the immense rusted bronze gears, bouncing off and finally falling to the metal floor, motionless, rapidly enveloped in a dark puddle of his own blood.
"Cassius!" Eira's scream cut through the air.
The White Witch didn't hesitate for a single millisecond. She wasn't going to let them hurt her family in front of her. Her eyes became unfathomable pools of glowing frost, and she let the pure, despotic wrath of her Permafrost Emperor Bloodline flood her veins.
Eira raised her weapon, the [Scepter of the Absolute Zero Sovereign]. The rod of Frost Silver and Snow Tree Wood gleamed. With a mental command born of fury, she activated the weapon's phase transmutation. The immense blue diamond of the World's Heart at its peak emitted a deafening electric flash. Twelve crystalline snaps resonated in quick succession as the jewel intentionally fractured, releasing twelve sharp petals of diamond ice that began to orbit her body at supersonic speeds, creating freezing rainbows by refracting the ambient light in a Waltz of the Thousand Ice Splinters. At the same time, the staff's core extended and sharpened, becoming a deadly rapier of translucent black ice.
From Eira's hands and the edge of her new sword erupted an overwhelming torrent of Eternal Winter Execution. A massive stake of hyper-compressed frost shot out at the speed of sound. It pierced the air and drove deeply and violently into the exact center of the blood-born aberration's mass of hearts. The monster was brutally impaled, its enormous body pinned against the engine room's metal floor. The imperial frost rapidly began to expand through its black veins, freezing and extinguishing the beast's rotten Dantians one by one.
Eira wasn't going to give it a reprieve. She prepared her second move, raising her black sword to shatter the frozen target into a million pieces of harmless diamond dust. But then, she witnessed something that managed to chill her own soul, which was accustomed to extreme cold.
The monster's rotten hearts that hadn't yet been reached by the permafrost began to beat at a frantic, almost musical, unnatural rhythm. The Dantians embedded in its amorphous flesh began to change color before her very eyes, shifting from a withered bloody red to an icy blue glow, identical in magical signature and frequency to Eira's own Qi.
The creature wasn't dying in agony; it was assimilating. It was learning.
The organ monster raised one of its arms, grabbed the imperial ice stake impaling it and, with a sickening pull that tore its own flesh and tendons, ripped it from its chest as if it were a mere annoying splinter. Its multiple cores had successfully processed the elemental frequency of the Thermal Void Authority. Instead of trying to close the distance for a melee attack again, the aberration demonstrated its horrifying evolution. It opened a hole in what should be its deformed "chest" and fired a colossal beam of freezing energy straight at Eira.
It wasn't normal ice it was firing. It was "Anti-Ice," a frost frequency that imitated the girl's own magical signature, returning the damage she had just caused, but multiplied and corrupted.
Eira barely had a millisecond to react. Instead of evading, her instinct activated her automatic satellite defense. The twelve diamond petals orbiting her instantly crossed in front of her, converging to form a physical crystal shield. The Anti-Ice beam crashed into her satellite defense. The petals didn't break, but the kinetic shockwave was so immense that it forced Eira backward, her boots skidding violently over the rusted metal floor while the extreme cold burned the air around her barrier.
The aberration had changed its role and combat style in a tactical blink; upon receiving a direct elemental Qi attack, it had transformed into a long-range heavy artillery cannon, becoming virtually immune to that specific element by assimilating it.
The engine room had instantly become a two-front hell that demanded the maximum from the squad.
On one side, Cedric was engaged in a desperate dance of runic melee combat against his own teammate, Borg. The vanguard giant advanced relentlessly, throwing slow but titanically powerful punches that shattered the floor, dented the walls, and made the gears around them groan.
Cedric, being fundamentally a tactical scholar and a master of large-scale complex formations, did not possess his companion's bone density or brute strength. However, he used his analytical brilliance and his Metal and Matrix Dragon Bloodline to survive. He fully activated his [Kinetic Formation Seal]. Instead of trying to block Borg's immense inertia with force, he fought in a constant, calculated retreat.
Every time Borg's fist drew near, Cedric quickly moved his hand, tracing light runes in the air. He invoked his [Instant Deflection Matrix], a circular formation that didn't stop the blow but mathematically altered its vector. Borg's arm struck the invisible matrix and slid millimeters to the side, smashing the metal wall instead of the architect's head. Cedric summoned steel shackles from the floor to lock the colossus's boots, created slanted runic ramps on the ground to make Borg's charges lose friction, and slid out of lethal range.
His goal wasn't to hit, cut, or kill Borg—Cedric knew perfectly well that his friend's soul was still in there, a prisoner in his own body due to the nervous parasite—but to contain the beast without permanently injuring him.
"Iris, I can't hold him off forever without hurting his Dantian or breaking his legs!" Cedric transmitted through the Nexus, the tension obvious in his mind as he barely blocked a spinning kick from Borg that made his meteorite-steel-protected forearms tremble and bleed. "Find the position of the damn controlling parasite!"
But the relative hours began to take their toll. Time inside the collapsed Secret Realm was an invisible doom devouring their stamina. What had begun as a quick ambush inevitably devolved into an exhausting and painful three-dimensional chess match where the Sequences were losing pieces and breath.
The assimilated-heart aberration didn't stop firing barrages of destruction. Eira, realizing her ice attacks were now useless due to the enemy's learned resistance, tried to drastically change her strategy. She fired her twelve orbital petals as independent blades attempting to slice the monster's tendinous joints, but the beast simply adapted others of its dark Dantians to learn and replicate the new pattern. It began to return storms of devouring void mixed with dark ice arrows simultaneously. The monster revealed itself to be a mirror of absolute chaos; any elemental Qi-based energy attack it received in its flesh, it assimilated, broke down, and spat back out with increased lethality.
Cassius, who had finally managed to get to his knees a few meters away, panted heavily. Barely able to stand and painfully holding his Yggdrasil spear with his uninjured left arm while his right hung uselessly, he tried to drag himself toward the beast's flank to activate his life drain and recover his health, but the aberration's constant flurry of area bombardments and ranged attacks kept him constantly at bay, pinning him down in a defensive position.
Exhaustion, both physical and spiritual, began to cloud the Sequences' peripheral vision. Cold sweat soaked Cedric's martial tunic. Eira's breathing was shallow and erratic as she sustained her permafrost field. Borg, controlled entirely by the entity on the ceiling's invisible nerve threads, felt no lactic acid, fatigue, or pain, making him an endless, perpetual siege machine against his own team's waning resistance.
That was when Iris, who had been collaterally dodging cross-attacks while stubbornly maintaining her telepathic connection with the immense runes on the room's walls, closed her physical eyes and made the decision to let her Bloodline and her matrices take total control of her perception.
Her [Divine Probability Processing] activated at one hundred percent of its runic capacity. Her pupils flooded with amber fractal patterns that rotated like mystical cogwheels, breaking down the structure of reality itself into source code.
The thunderous chaos of the battle—Borg's supersonic punches fracturing the floor, the lethal Anti-Ice beams fired by the golem, the slow, thick fall of runic blood drops from the ceiling gears—was organized in her brain and became a perfect, harmonic mathematical equation. Through the eyes of the matrix dragon, she no longer perceived the chaotic and dangerous present; her consciousness elevated to observe, calculate, and interact with the battlefield exactly two seconds in the future. Her fingers traced equations on her Jade Chessboard at speeds that defied human sight.
"Eira, side step to the left, execute an exact evasion angle of 30 degrees. Now," Iris's order sounded cold, devoid of emotion, and mechanically perfect in the Soul Nexus.
Eira blindly trusted her teammate's mastermind and obeyed out of pure self-preservation instinct, shifting her weight and sliding her boots exactly as instructed. Barely a fraction of a millisecond after shifting her body, a thick beam of hyper-concentrated dark ice fired by the golem grazed millimeters past her right shoulder, violently crashing into and freezing the bronze wall behind her. If Eira hadn't taken that exact step in that microsecond, the impact would have cleanly torn off her entire arm and half her torso.
"Cassius, hit the deck, keep your head down. Cedric, raise a runic wall of physical containment at coordinate X-7, Y-12. Apply a structural incline angle of 45 degrees," Iris continued dictating unflinchingly, her hands moving like bursts of amber light, tracing auxiliary runes in the air to empower her ally's technique.
Cedric slammed his fists onto the metallic floor, injecting his Qi through his gauntlets, and a solid wall of shining steel and runic light erected out of nowhere just as Borg made his most savage charge. The colossus charged and crashed into the armored steel wall at the exact physical angle Iris had dictated. The wall's calculated incline redirected Borg's immense, unstoppable kinetic mass upward as if it were a ramp, sending the giant flying harmlessly over Cedric's head to end up crashing and temporarily burying himself against one of the mountains of rusted scrap at the far end of the room.
Iris didn't stop there. Her hyperactive, omniscient mind had already dissected and understood the macabre biology of the heart aberration tormenting them.
"The organ monster is not a living being, it's a massive assimilative Qi processor," Iris transmitted to the entire squad simultaneously, her crystal fingers tracing swift golden polygons of defense and geometric projection in the cold air. "It cannot be destroyed or damaged using magic or elemental attacks. Its multiple dead Dantians assimilate any energetic frequency to return it. Its only fundamental weakness is neutral energy. The brute, pure, inert, unrefined force of a crushing kinetic impact. A direct physical blow possessing not a single trace of Qi it can assimilate. We need Borg free from its control to tear it to pieces bare-handed."
Just as she transmitted this revealing tactical analysis to her comrades, the organ aberration, perceiving the strategist mind as the new greatest threat, loaded three immense combined spheres of ice and devouring void in its open chest and fired them in a fan shape directly toward Iris's exposed position.
The chess board girl didn't make the slightest move to dodge. In front of her, the complex luminous polygon she had been laboriously tracing in the air shone with dazzling intensity. It was the [Infinite Matrix Mirror: Geometric Redirection].
The three lethal, devastating dark energy attacks impacted head-on against Iris's translucent shield. But instead of clashing, generating friction, and exploding in a shockwave, the dense enemy magic was instantly absorbed by the shield's geometric surface. With an instantaneous mathematical calculation of refraction and ballistic angles, Iris didn't block the overwhelming force of the magic; she simply redirected it effortlessly, altering its trajectory at an exact 90-degree rebound angle straight upward.
The flesh monster's own massive attacks shot like cannons toward the dark concave ceiling of the enormous engine room, exploding high above and briefly illuminating, with bursts of cold light, the suffocating upper darkness hiding the gears.
That ephemeral lightning flash of illumination, lasting barely a microsecond, was absolutely everything the squad's eyes, and especially Cedric's, needed.
"There!" Cedric yelled at the top of his lungs. His Eye of Architectural Truth, tracking the thermal and structural vectors, instantly locked onto the origin of the ceiling shadows illuminated by the flash.
Stationed fifty meters high, camouflaged and clinging to the cold surface of the enormous bronze gears, hung a repulsive aberration with an anatomy vaguely resembling a spider, but built entirely of thick pulsing nerves, marrow, and exposed brain tissue dripping yellow bile. From its inflamed, soft belly descended the four invisible threads of nervous silk like puppet strings, burying into Borg's spine and controlling his motor functions.
"If we attack the parasitic spider directly with projectiles or Qi, due to its neural link, it could use Borg's body as a human shield to intercept the damage or, worse, decide to collapse and burn out our ally's internal nervous system before we manage to kill it," Iris calculated at lightning speed, her mental voice ringing with icy urgency. "We can't kill it in one immediate blow. We must cut it off and isolate it from the system first. Cedric, Eira... prepare for a combined Architectural Immobilization maneuver. Coordinated siege sequence in 3... 2... 1..."
"EXECUTE!"
The synchronization of the arcane architect duo and the ice empress was an indisputable masterpiece of tactical brutality and silent understanding.
Eira, understanding her role in the offensive synergy, aimed the blade of her translucent black sword straight at the ceiling. She didn't aim at the bloated brain monster, but at the empty space hanging directly below it. With an exhaling cry, she released and purged almost all the cold Qi left in her depleted Dantian, violently forcing the ambient temperature near the ceiling to drop to near absolute zero. All the heavy moisture from the blood and stagnant air of the tomb instantly condensed along the trajectory of the parasitic spider's invisible nerve threads, covering them completely with a thick, opaque layer of frost.
Thanks to the imperial cold, for the first time in hours of anguish, the damn neural control threads were visible to the naked eye for everyone: four glowing, frozen white lines stretching taut from the upper darkness until disappearing into the back of Borg's neck.
With the precise location of the plague and the physical route of neural control fully revealed to mortal eyes, Cedric didn't attack with a flurry of flying swords, light, or volatile elements. Instead, he leaped and drove, with devastating force, both metallic palms of his [Matrix-Breaker Gauntlets] straight into the engine room's resilient metallic floor. The violet disruption crystals hummed with a deafening tone and pressurized steam escaped through the slits in his armor.
His overwhelming structural dominance over metal and his ability to rewrite runes spread like a computer virus across the vibrating floor and rapidly climbed the immense curved walls.
With a monumental roar of pure exertion that strained the veins in his neck, Cedric violently usurped the architectural control of the sacred tomb's own gears and ancient metals. Dozens of long, heavy black iron beams, rusted bronze debris, and thick steel chains were torn from their roots in the walls, flying and shooting toward the ceiling guided by the Architect's mathematical will. They didn't fly to painfully impale the spider, but began to intertwine and weld together in mid-air to quickly weave a solid, heavy spherical cage around it.
In less than a blink, an impregnable sphere of pure solid steel and compressed debris over three meters thick completely enveloped the soft parasitic aberration, crushing its appendages and locking it hermetically against the bronze ceiling.
But the physical pressure of the metal wasn't enough to cut the strong invisible nerves already biologically connected to their friend's spine. To achieve the severing of the brain transmission, there was Iris.
Iris extended the palms of her hands upward, letting the golden runes flow freely from her crystal terminals. A gigantic, complex golden runic formation, spinning like a beautiful but strict cosmic mandala, materialized, expanding around the steel cage just forged by Cedric. It was a powerful [Supreme Sensory Isolation Matrix and Absolute Energy Void Seal]. The glowing runes spun at extreme speeds, completely isolating and sealing off the cage's interior space, cutting off any minimal possibility of magical, biological, sonic, or nervous transmission to the outside world.
Finding themselves suddenly severed from the order and parasitic connection of the monster's main hive mind, the densely frosted threads pulled painfully taut and then, losing their life support, turned into inert, fragile dust, detaching like dead cobwebs from the bloody back of Borg's neck.
Down on the surface, finally freed from his fleshly hijacking, the bronze giant fell heavily to his knees on the metal. He began to cough violently and convulsively as the ghostly white disappeared and his pupils regained their natural brown color, bloodshot.
"My head...! My damn head is burning!" Borg grunted, bringing both his massive hands up to clutch his skull, deeply disoriented, nauseous, and aching from the brutal neural invasion of his nervous system.
The repulsive spider was temporarily sealed and trapped, but the Sequences' energy reserves were in the red and on the verge of imminent collapse. Cassius, the regeneration engine, could barely stand supported by his spear; Cedric bled profusely from his nose and from multiple micro-fractures and internal injuries caused by absorbing and deflecting his own teammate's brute force attacks for hours; and Eira had her Dantian almost empty, unable to cast another spell.
"Now. Let's restock," Cedric murmured, panting, spitting a blood clot onto the metal floor, but with a relentless, calculating, wolfish smile illuminating his face. "Cassius, the feast table is served on the ceiling."
Cassius, painfully dragging his injured leg and grimacing in agony, positioned himself right beneath the sealed metal cage hanging high above. His eyes, previously filled with pain, turned a dark, primitive, and deeply hungry emerald green. He raised and aimed his supreme weapon at the sky, the [Yggdrasil Spear, the Thorn of Rebirth]. The weapon was a living conduit; its body, forged from Stellar Bronze and World Tree Wood, throbbed in his hands with thick lines of pulsing violet light imitating the constant pumping of an organic circulatory system. At the peak, the forged tip of the Primordial Blade—a dark, translucent violet crystal—did not reflect the runic light, but voraciously absorbed it.
The tight reinforced steel cage and Iris's impenetrable wall of dense golden runes did not allow the spider to attack, see, cast magic, or control anyone outside, but Cassius, smiling, knew a dark secret of his Life Bloodline: he didn't need the tough metal cage to open to be able to feed on the prey. His terrifying spear didn't cut or steal physical chunks of flesh; his spear, by divine nature, stole the abstract concepts of vitality and life energy.
Cassius channeled the last breath of pure Qi he had left to activate his fearsome ultimate skill. The [Primordial Root Lunge].
It wasn't a physical assault, nor the launching of a metallic projectile. Upon giving the dry thrust into the air, an immense and terrifying spectral projection formed by intricate, thick jade roots and emerald ironwood shot out from the tip of his Yggdrasil Spear. The translucent image flew through the thick armored steel bars forged by Cedric and penetrated Iris's strict, mathematical isolating matrix as if they were mere irrelevant mists, and buried itself deeply, brutally, and silently into the soft, pulsing, bloated nervous and brain tissue of the trapped aberrant spider.
The nervous aberration on the ceiling, surprised and defenseless, let out a grotesque, guttural shriek of pure biological horror, a scream inaudible to ears outside the cage but one that made the prison tremble, as its immense and dense vitality—a dark life reserve it had patiently accumulated over millennia of slumber and slowly ambushing and digesting the bodies and essences of clueless beasts and cultivators in the abyss—was sucked out, ripped away, and brutally dismantled from the very root of its cells by the spear of rebirth.
The dark spear in Cassius's trembling hands shone with a blinding, pure, overwhelming emerald light. The Lancer nimbly spun the heavy shaft and struck the back end of the weapon directly against the cold metal floor of the bloodied room with a resounding force.
The primal, dense, pure, unrefined, freshly stolen vitality was instantly processed by the weapon and poured from the end of the stellar wood like an explosive geyser of green light. It quickly connected and expanded like a warm, illuminated tide, embracing and enveloping the badly wounded, exhausted bodies of Cedric, Iris, Eira, and the colossal Borg in a radius of absolute healing.
It was a glorious, intoxicating, and miraculous feast of life energy amidst the mechanized graveyard. Under the thick, healing green mist, Cassius's fractured, ground bones in his arm and ribs crunched sickeningly as they relocated and welded together with a loud snap, healing to perfection. Cedric's burst, bruised, and bloody lungs healed and expanded instantly, washing away the metallic taste from his mouth. Eira and Iris's exhausted, empty, thirsty Seas of Qi rapidly refilled with liquid energy until their Dantians were bordering on overflowing. And, above all, the draining mental fatigue, dizziness, nausea, and lingering pain in Borg's invaded brain were wiped away in a stroke, immediately replaced by a pure, blind, primitive, overwhelmingly volcanic rage.
Borg slowly rose from his kneeling position, stretching his immense stature over the engine room's metal plain. His massive, thickly gauntleted fists cracked in the air, an intimidating sound resembling the violent, tectonic clash of two mountains of pure stone. His eyes, now free from the white smoke of mind control, regained their brown color and locked, brimming with inescapable homicidal intent, straight onto the gigantic amorphous monster built of beating hearts and assimilating Dantians that had cowardly taken advantage of his mental hijacking to damage, hunt, and nearly murder his comrades in cold blood.
"My turn, trash," Borg growled. His hoarse voice echoed off the immense walls of the spherical room, sounding like heavy gravel grinding inside an industrial shredder.
The horrifying organ golem, sensing through its stolen nervous systems the brutal, terrifying spike of immense gravitational threat radiating from the furious giant, took a heavy step of flesh backwards. Without hesitation, it began to light up and charge dozens of stolen Dantians embedded along its amorphous anatomy simultaneously, desperately preparing a monstrous combined barrage of elemental projectiles: lethal ice arrows, destructive devouring void spheres, cutting blasts of necrotic wind, scorching black fire, and destructive crimson lightning. A hyper-saturated magical assault focused on a single target that would disintegrate the entire area and melt any Qi barrier the bronze man tried to raise.
"Borg, straight trajectory, pure frontal assault. Without channeling or using a single drop of your defensive or offensive Qi. Only inert muscular force and pure mass," Iris dictated, injecting her strategic directive directly into the giant's tactical hive mind through the Soul Nexus.
Borg nodded with menacing slowness. He obeyed the directive to the letter. He disconnected and slammed shut his own spiritual meridians, blocking the natural flow of energy through his body. He did not channel a single drop of precious, destructive martial Qi into his muscles. He wove no aura shield techniques, nor did he ignite the usual bright flames or golden protective barriers that commonly enveloped cultivators in a frontal charge.
He deployed solely and exclusively the brute, muscular, cellular, and skeletal strength of his imposing human battering ram body, a mass of destruction forged in the flames and pressure of the hell of thousands of consecutive, painful deaths in the extreme gravity chambers of Samael Morningstar's Training Pagoda.
With a final, explosive, deafening stomp that permanently dented and sank the room's resilient forged metal floor several centimeters, creating a small circular depression that expelled smoke and dust, the human vanguard colossus was literally fired forward like a heavy, lethal ballistic missile composed of pure flesh, tendons, and unbreakable bones.
The terrified organ golem immediately fired its chaotic barrage of deadly elements. Dozens of arcane, destructive projectiles shot out. But Borg didn't try to raise his arms, he didn't try to dodge the trajectory, nor did he use his arm's shield to block the volley.
The magical explosions struck directly and head-on against the vast, exposed surface of his body. The flames burned away large sections of his Morningstar martial tunic, reducing it to ash; the ice temporarily frosted his heavy combat boots, and the lightning superficially scorched the tough skin of his bare torso and shoulders. But his pure, unnatural, immeasurable passive Saint-level physical resistance, the resistance of a man designed to be an unbreakable wall of flesh, allowed him to absorb the impacts and pierce straight through the dense storm of arcane destruction without losing a single millimeter, or a single degree, of his terrifying accumulated kinetic inertia.
The repulsive anatomical beast, whose dangerous Law of Chaos Reflection, its only real advantage, was desperately configured and eagerly waiting to assimilate and absorb the volatile, active Qi of the attacker to nullify the charge and return it strengthened, suddenly met an incomprehensible wall, a lethal miscalculation, and a fatal, unresolvable paradox for its magical existence.
There wasn't a single gram, not a single spark of ambient or spiritual Qi to assimilate or bounce back. The giant wasn't projecting magic it could copy or eat. Facing the assimilating monster, there was only a solid fist forged of pure, dense, calloused human bronze weighing gravitational tons, approaching at breakneck speeds, blind, mute, devoid of magic, and aimed straight at its soft, vital anatomical center of beating stolen hearts.
Borg slammed into the monster.
For the final blow of his personal execution, Borg unleashed from his spatial ring the heavy summon of the [Black Iron Bonebreaker Mace], a colossus forged to ignore technique and focus on pure structural collapse through inertia. The immense matte rectangular block of Deep Black Iron appeared in his enormous, bloody hands. As he advanced the final meter toward the monster, the air in the entire engine room vibrated deafeningly, pleading and violently distorting under the atomic density of the mace's metallic head.
Borg activated his only physical skill compatible with inert attacks, the [Heavy Inertia Seal]. Using no fire or tricks, the mace simply unnaturally and terrifyingly multiplied its own gravitational physical weight and its brutal static mass until it became unstoppable by the physical laws of the world during the short trajectory of its downward arc.
There was no fire, heavenly light, golden spells, colorful magical explosions, or sweeping magic at the moment of the violent, decisive impact against the aberration's body. The sound that flooded the spherical abyss of mechanical gears was a deafening, horrendous, dry, deep THUD!, a dull crash devoid of metallic music that resonated sickeningly in the guts and stomachs of all the warriors present, as if an immense, unstoppable mountain of basalt and solid iron had just plummeted straight from the starry sky to smash directly onto the rocky peak of another, smaller mountain.
The monumental, atrocious weight of the giant's black mace sank and buried itself painfully and deeply into the soft, wet, disgusting central mass of the golem's repulsive chest of intertwined hearts, burst blood vessels, and bare muscles.
The incalculable pure kinetic force of the titanic black iron blow didn't break the beast by splitting it in two and didn't pass through its body to externally damage its flesh. The gigantic collapsed inertia of the mass attack was released expansively and directly into the monster's thick, dense organic interior, triggering a structural collapse.
Clashing against an impact that completely lacked the magical frequency and volatile Qi its skills needed to process and imitate damage, the intricate organic networks, internal defensive formations, and assimilators of the aberration's withered Dantians were overwhelmed, useless, and unable to absorb or redirect the colossal purely physical damage. The crushing, brutal massive impact generated an internal, pressurized seismic shockwave that flawlessly and devastatingly collapsed the repulsive beast's skeletal structure and containment veins from the inside out.
The wet, tearing, visceral sound of dozens upon dozens of sturdy foreign hearts bursting and exploding painfully simultaneously, like disgusting water balloons filled with blood under too much pressure, was thoroughly repulsive, sickening, and disturbing.
It had been literally erased from all functional existence on the material plane, shattered beyond recognition and turned into a purely physical pulp of blood and flesh in an expanding puddle at his feet, irrefutably eradicated by a single, powerful, unstoppable blunt strike loaded with divine frustration, accumulated punishment, and the pure muscular power of the Morningstar colossus's mace.
Meanwhile, securing the complete victory of the squad trapped in the core, in the dark ceiling of the upper machinery covered by the enormous chains, the spider was slowly turning into a useless layer of dry dust, devoid of any life energy, which rained harmlessly like a gloomy gray snowfall over the heavy solid steel bars of the cage that should have contained it.
The exhausted Squad 3, victorious after their infernal defiance against the Secret Realm's plague of time and magical assimilation, slowly gathered in the spacious blood-bathed center of the colossal room of deafening machines. They were still breathing deeply and exhaling with evident difficulty; the heavy blood, the lingering wrath of combat, and the inexhaustible martial adrenaline were still boiling uncontrollably in the dense flow of their bruised veins. Without using the full-scale attacks of their main destructive skills, which were temporarily limited, they had fought with primal ferocity and had managed to victoriously survive the stifling ambush of pure biological attrition in the very inert heart of the enemy's mechanical system.
As Cedric looked up to gaze at the structure again, his cold, focused gray eyes were bleeding fine, concerning threads of thick red blood that dripped painfully from the corners of his tear ducts. This was the inevitable, heavy physical punishment of overload for having kept open, focused, and calculating during too much prolonged stress the extreme and immense neural capacities and the uninterrupted use of the Eyes of the Divine Architect at their maximum power.
"Monsters purged," Cedric said, his voice transmitting through the Soul Nexus to the other squads. "Engine area secured. Iris and I are beginning the usurpation of the spatial code. Hold your positions. We'll soon stitch this damn place back together."
Far from there, in a gigantic corridor forged with ribs that seemed to hold up the tomb's sky, things were about to take a much darker turn. Because while the other squads fought against beasts, Violeta and her team were about to meet, face to face, the true owner of the labyrinth.