Chapter 179: The Blind Abyss and the Reverse Hunt (Part 4)
The fabric of space chewed them up and spat them out with brutal violence. Squad 5 was thrown through the dimensional fault, feeling their stomachs churn as they suddenly lost all notion of up and down in the framework of reality.
When they finally impacted against a solid surface, the disorientation was almost total. They weren't in a damp cavern or the halls of a castle. They found themselves in the exact center of what appeared to be a cyclopean colosseum, but its architecture was a direct blasphemy against the laws of physics. The amphitheater was completely inverted. The immense stone bleachers descended toward a "sky" that was nothing more than an infinite abyss of static, sickly light. Gravity was altered; it didn't pull them down, but toward the center of the black pumice stone arena where they had just landed, forcing them to step on a "floor" that, visually, was floating above nothingness.
Darius quickly stood up, dusting the black powder off his tunic, his inquisitive mind already frantically scanning the environment. Altair positioned himself beside him, instinctively covering his fists and forearms with a thin layer of dark ash armor. Aion, Aia, and Aylin formed a flawless defensive triangle a few meters away, their weapons drawn and their auras circulating on the verge of ignition.
"Keep your centers of gravity low," Aion ordered, his expressionless, calm voice resonating with a strange echo in the colosseum's acoustics. "The traction on this stone is irregular."
Barely had they finished analyzing their precarious position when the ground beneath Altair and Darius's feet erupted with a dull roar.
The black pumice stone fractured like cheap glass under pressure, and from the burning depths of the sand emerged an aberration. It was a massive humanoid colossus with a grotesque bull's head. Its skin wasn't made of flesh, scales, or leather, but a viscous, black, and eternally bubbling substance, identical to boiling pitch. With every heavy exhalation from its taurine jaws, the arena filled with thick, suffocating, yellowish smoke loaded with pure sulfur.
Without uttering a warning roar or showing any intent, the tar colossus launched a massive swipe that cut through the air toward the two young men. Altair reacted instantly, crossing his ash-coated arms to absorb the impact, while Darius nimbly slid backward. The beast's tremendous blow failed to break Altair's guard, but the pitch, at over a thousand degrees, splashed onto his arms, hissing dangerously.
As they retreated and took a desperate gasp of air, both geniuses involuntarily inhaled the dense ambient sulfur smoke.
Instantly, Darius fell heavily onto one knee, clutching his chest with a grimace of agonizing pain. Altair coughed, feeling his eyes become bloodshot with boiling blood. It wasn't a common poison that attacked the blood or the nervous system. The smoke acted as a lethal catalyst; upon entering their lungs, the Qi flowing within their meridians began to boil violently, overheating to the critical point of vaporization. They felt as if their internal energy channels were about to burst from the immense pressure of the heat.
"Do not inhale the ash that thing releases!" Darius yelled through the Soul Nexus, forcing his Dantian to spin in reverse to cool down, while retreating a considerable distance from the smoke. "It heats the Qi from the inside!"
While Altair and Darius desperately tried to stabilize their meridian pressure and deal with the mountain of pitch, the space behind Aion, Aia, and Aylin crackled with a malignant static that made the hairs on the back of their necks stand up.
Out of absolute nowhere, a tall, slender, and deathly pale figure emerged. It was a woman, but instead of hair, dozens of snakes made entirely of crackling, black lightning writhed and hissed from her scalp. Before Aylin could turn to raise her spear, the woman raised a bony hand and unleashed a violent storm of dark lightning at point-blank range toward their backs.
Aion did not flinch. His face, cold as a tombstone, showed no surprise. His dominance over gravity and mass was absolute. With a slight, almost lazy flick of his wrist, he raised his weapon, [The Void Anvil]. The hand hammer, forged from the core of a dead star, emitted no light; it looked like a block of matte black iron sucking the colors from its surroundings. By planting it in the air, he activated the [Black Hole Shield: Void Inertia].
He generated a gravitational vortex of Dark Matter inches from his back. The lethal black lightning, which should have fried them alive in a millisecond, was mercilessly sucked in, curving and falling into Aion's invisible mass well. The boy absorbed the destructive force, assimilating it into a sphere of pure energy between his hands, containing it for a microsecond. Immediately, he transferred that immense kinetic and elemental energy, now stabilized, directly to his twin sister through the sacred bond of their bloodline.
Aia spun on her heels like a court dancer, her silver hair shining under the static light of the abyss. She took the enemy electrical energy her brother had just packaged for her, drastically multiplied it by channeling it through her Fluid Starlight, and fired it back as a dazzling refracted beam, forcing the lightning woman to scream in surprise and leap backward to dodge the fury of her own empowered attack.
In a matter of seconds, the inverted colosseum had become a fierce battlefield of two simultaneous fronts.
On the side of the black pumice stone arena, Altair decided he had had enough of retreating. He took the offensive against the taurine colossus, releasing his bloodline's ocular seal. His eyes snapped open, activating his [Matte Black Eyes]. The sclera and iris became an absolute abyss, swallowing any reflection of ambient light, granting him his terrifying [Vision of Expiration].
Altair stared intently at the tar monster. He expected to clearly see the creature's remaining biological "lifespan" or the inherent entropy fissures in its destructive heat technique, so he could sink his claws in there, accelerate its decay, and turn the beast into gray dust.
But his dark vision violently collided against a conceptual wall. There was no hourglass, no blinking life cycles. The sulfur-spitting creature was a purely undead being, an inert biological machine that had already surpassed natural death millennia ago; Altair's bloodline couldn't snatch years of life from something that, conceptually, was not alive.
"Damn it," Altair muttered through his teeth. Without his main and most lethal ocular advantage, he resorted to the raw destruction of his material arsenal.
He channeled the Entropy Ash directly into his thick gauntlets, the [Void's Embrace]. The metal of stellar lead and black beast bone began to emit a constant hiss, as if it were absorbing the air itself. The gray runes on his knuckles flickered with a dying purple.
Altair lunged forward, applying his [Withering Touch]. As his fists impacted against the monster's pitch, there was no physical impact crash. There was a dry pop, a sonic void where the pitch experienced an instantaneous molecular collapse. The boiling tar began to turn into gray dust under the Singularity Touch of his gauntlets, but the monster simply bellowed; its temperature was so unnaturally high that the dark liquid renewed itself, bubbling up and devouring the entropy itself.
Seeing that contact wasn't enough, Altair stepped back and unleashed a massive [Cloud of Dead Stardust]. He exhaled a thick, dark gray mist with silver sparkles that flowed close to the ground like a living entity. The goal was to smother and suffocate the ambient Qi feeding the monster. At the same time, Altair opened the covers of his arcane codex, the [Book of Mute Entropy].
The pages of the yellowish parchment radiated a passive aura that warped reality within a ten-meter radius. The world around Altair lost its color, turning sepia. The sound of the colosseum was drastically muffled, creating a terrifying spiritual silence. The aura of Inevitable Aging forced the pumice stone to crack into barren dust beneath his feet, attempting to drag the beast into absolute decomposition.
But after a relative half-hour of relentless assaults, of dodging boiling pitch hammer blows that melted the stone, Altair stopped, breathing with extreme difficulty, his chest burning from proximity to the smoke. He had burned through almost forty percent of his Qi reserves. The aura of death from his mythical codex and his stardust clouds had barely managed to cool a superficial layer of the monster, which continued to roar and spit thick sulfur like an infernal boiler in full operation. His supreme law of entropy was proving tragically useless against an anomaly designed specifically to burn for eternity without consuming biological fuel.
Seeing that his physical exhaustion was not achieving decisive results, Altair exchanged a silent, meaningful glance with Darius. He had to change targets; perhaps his entropic and disintegrating powers would be much more effective against the lightning woman who was frantically harassing the twins.
While Altair nimbly repositioned himself on the flank, Darius took sole control of the confrontation against the taurine tar colossus. His brown eyes closed, and when they opened, they shone with an inquisitive, unholy, and merciless light.
He activated the secrets of his incomplete manual, the [Demon Eyes of the Nightmare]. His appearance changed in a blood-curdling way; the sclera of his eyes turned a disturbing, oily black, while his pupil fragmented into three thin, crimson-red vertical slits that spun erratically, desperately seeking to anchor themselves in someone else's sanity. Thin, unsettling tears of black blood welled from his tear ducts, staining his cheeks.
The air around him turned as cold as an open grave. A bolt of black static directly connected his fractured gaze with the colossus's flaming eyes. Darius attempted to project the [Veil of Infinite Horror], diving into the enemy's Sea of Consciousness to extract its deepest fear, materialize its trauma, and break its spirit from the inside to paralyze its physical functions.
The Inquisitor's sharp, trained mind violently crashed against the beast's psyche, but found no memory labyrinths, no fears, no latent traumas, not a single rational thought to twist. Instead, it crashed directly into a roaring hell, a wall of fire and basic programming that nearly incinerated him on a spiritual level.
Darius withdrew his mind with an agonizing gasp, stumbling backward, feeling the phantom heat burning the back of his own skull, victim to the dangerous feedback effect of his cursed art.
"It has no mind!" Darius transmitted through the Soul Nexus, his mental voice vibrating with the pain of the psychic burn. "It's just a rabid, blind biological combustion engine! But... I just saw its anatomical structure when I invaded it... It has immense hidden valves and orifices along its back! It's violently sucking the air from the arena to feed the constant fire inside its fake Dantian. Aylin, distract it! I need Aion to buy time!"
Aylin, who had been positioned defensively covering the twins, nodded and masterfully spun the geological bronze shaft of her spear, the [Thorn of the World]. Her pure Earth and Jade Storm Dragon Bloodline erupted with an emerald and ocher light.
"[Root Cyclone Dance!]" Aylin shouted, plunging the immense ferrule of the spear into the stone.
From the black pumice sprouted dozens of thick, knotty vines like centuries-old trunks, spinning in a hurricane vortex that quickly and violently tangled around the taurine colossus's thick pitch legs. The beast bellowed, burning with rage, and began to burn and melt the ironwood roots upon contact, but Aylin didn't stop there.
While maintaining the vegetal cyclone to limit the behemoth's steps, she executed the [Thousand Stone Flowers Technique]. She rhythmically struck the ground with the base of her weapon. Hundreds of sharp pebbles, obsidian slabs, and rock shards rose, defying the strange gravity, and began to orbit her own body in complex geometric patterns, sustained by micro-currents of her emerald wind. When the monster managed to free an arm and launched a pitch swipe at her, the "stone flowers" acted as a swarm shield, intercepting and breaking against the boiling pitch with a sound identical to a catastrophic hail storm hitting a metal roof.
Seeking to land a critical blow, Aylin finally activated her codex's brutal navigation skill, the [Earth Storm Spear].
The obsidian book glowed, and Aylin simply dropped, sinking without resistance into the solid pumice stone as if she were a shark diving into dark water, leaving behind a swirl of sand and wind. She traveled beneath the surface of the arena at terrifying speeds. A second later, she emerged directly beneath the beast, executing the [Pyroclastic Drill].
The ground erupted into a violent column of debris, friction fire, and hurricane winds. Aylin shot upward, enveloped in a colossal spinning aura shaped like a giant brown and emerald drill. The supersonic impact broke the sound barrier with a dull boom and struck the base of the taurine monster's chest, forcing the immense beast to stumble sharply backward and fully expose its broad, smoking back.
Darius, perfectly synchronized, didn't waste a millisecond and contacted Aion, the only one in the entire tomb with the absolute authority to alter fundamental physical laws to that degree.
Aion, leaving his twin Aia the task of temporarily dealing with the irritating electric woman, walked toward the colossus's fight with his perpetual, inscrutable stone face.
"Fire needs to breathe, no matter how infernal it is," Aion murmured, analytically observing the colossus's boiling fury as he opened his [Event Horizon Eyes].
His pupils turned a disturbing, swirling storm gray. For the young master of gravity, solid matter and the terrifying appearance of the pitch completely disappeared. Instead, the world translated into raw Energy Vectors and lines of "Mass". Observing the monster's exposed back from Aylin's strike, Aion clearly saw the massive, dense, and constant flow of ambient oxygen being greedily sucked into the organic valves feeding the internal flame.
Aion didn't launch a spectacular technique. He simply raised his immense Void Anvil. He condensed a heavy core of Dark Matter in the black iron head and, with a precise movement, manipulated spatial curvature. He didn't seek to crush or strike the beast with the hammer; he created a directional mini black hole, a stationary well of absolute vacuum, exactly half a meter above the breathing valves on the colossus's back.
The vacuum well activated. The black hole began to mercilessly suck all the oxygen and air from the immediate surroundings, overcoming the monster's own suction with deafening centripetal violence.
Instantly and drastically deprived of its only physical fuel, the biological furnace at the monster's core suffocated. The furious internal flames died instantly, coughing out dead ashes. Without the overwhelming, constant heat needed to maintain the substance in a liquid state, the burning pitch forming the colossus stopped boiling and cooled radically in less than two agonizing seconds. The taurine monster let out one last pathetic wheeze of air before completely solidifying, losing its mobility and turning into an immense, dark, fragile statue of hard, freezing tar.
Aylin, frustrated by the immense physical effort and coughing to clear her throat of the yellow smoke she had swallowed, had not an ounce of mercy for the inert statue. She shot forward again, using the rocks on the ground to propel herself, and swung the heavy amber tip of her Thorn of the World in a violent downward arc.
The brutal inertia and tectonic force of the spear struck the center of the frozen tar. The shockwave traveled through the solidified substance, causing the gigantic taurine statue to shatter into a million harmless fragments of black slag that fell harmlessly onto the sand.
But while that flawless victory was being consummated on one end, on the other flank of the arena, the situation had deteriorated critically.
Altair, following the rotation plan, had quickly joined Aia to pressure and corner the black lightning woman. Altair's inescapable aura of entropy was beginning to wreak small but noticeable havoc, rotting the deadly dark bolts projected by the monster before they hit, but the electrical entity, guided by primal survival instincts, understood that it was being systematically hunted.
With a sharp hiss that made the geniuses' hairs stand on end, the woman of lightning snakes drastically transformed. Her corporeal figure seemed to become pure sizzling static energy, losing physical mass, and she moved at an absurd speed that defied human perception tracking. She ignored the glowing Aia and the destructive Altair entirely, blinking across the arena in a single, silent, unpredictable bolt of dark light.
She materialized physically, reassembling her atoms, directly in front of Darius's position, who had just deactivated the severe drain of his nightmare ocular skills and still had his guard dangerously low, overconfident from the fall of the tar mountain.
It was barely a fraction of an instant. Darius made the most basic and fatal mistake: he instinctively raised his head upon feeling the static electricity and directly locked eyes with the woman's glowing, lethal electrical eyes.
It wasn't a mystical petrification technique. The beast's cursed biological skill did not consist of turning soft flesh into cold stone. The precise moment their pupils met, a colossal, indescribable demonic discharge of millions of invisible volts traveled at the speed of light through his own visual perception. The unnatural electricity mercilessly entered through Darius's optic nerve, bypassing any defensive barrier of his skin or aura, and connected, directly frying his sensitive Spiritual Sea and carbonizing his fragile central nervous system.
Darius let out a heart-rending scream of pure agony that was quickly cut off into a choked, electrical gurgle. He fell heavily flat on his back onto the hard pumice stone. His body arched unnaturally as he convulsed violently, spitting white foam; his meridians were completely fried, overloaded, and plunged into total arrest due to the massive voltage overload.
"Darius!" Aylin screamed, her deep instincts for support, healing, and terrestrial defense taking absolute control of her rationality.
She threw herself to the ground and struck the black sand with both bare palms. The earth and firm rock of the colosseum responded immediately to her desperate, protective call. In a single blink, the terrestrial matrix technique erected an immense, impenetrable, thick dome of solid basalt and pure earth that enveloped Darius and herself, hermetically sealing them in a cool, protective darkness.
Outside, frustrated by losing her victim, the lightning woman hissed, turned her pale head, and intentionally fired two immense, thick, continuous dark beams of pure annihilation from her eyes directly toward the improvised dome.
But the tough, martial-grade rock didn't budge. The pure earth Aylin had summoned acted as a perfect electrical blocker and insulator; the devastating dark beams crashed against the wall, branched out uselessly across the rough surface of the basalt dome, and dissipated harmlessly into the black floor of the colosseum, flowing toward the abyss without managing to penetrate or heat the earth tamer's ironclad defense.
Outside the impenetrable dome, Aia ran at top speed toward the dangerous electric beast. Her eyes were not her brother's dark abysses; she had activated her own [Event Horizon Eyes], but hers shone with a radiant, illuminated storm gray. Unlike Aion, who mathematically deciphered the mass and inertia of the world, Aia's eyes saw a much more aggressive concept: the "Trajectory". She analyzed in a blink the swift unidirectional vector of the light energy that had just so cruelly struck down Darius.
"Shut your vision, do not look her in the eyes under any circumstances!" Aia warned quickly through the urgent Nexus channel, her mental voice sounding crystalline but full of imperative urgency. "Her ultimate attack doesn't travel through the air like an elemental projectile, it travels directly through light and eye contact! She uses our own visual perception against us to overload the meridians from the inside out!"
Aion, holding his heavy hammer, and Altair, with his smoking destroyer gauntlets, gathered tactically next to Aia. The three geniuses kept their heads down, their deadly eyes rigidly fixed on the floating electric monster's pale chest or swift feet, avoiding any risk of direct eye contact with her lethal face.
Aia, however, despite the critical tactical situation, slightly raised the corner of her lips in a confident smile. Despite the imminent mortal danger and having one of her brothers in arms severely convulsing inside a cold dome of earth, her radiant silver eyes shone with an intense, overflowing predatory amusement that only members of the Morningstar Elite could exhibit when brushing against annihilation.
"If the physical basis of your unbeatable assault is mere light and rectilinear visual trajectory..." Aia murmured aloud, twirling her exceedingly fine and shiny spear, the [Vector Needle], with deadly elegance in her graceful right hand "...then you are stepping onto the wrong queen's turf. Aion, my brother, it is time to permanently put out this noisy spark."
Aion nodded in tense, absolute silence. He side-stepped, positioning himself exactly shoulder to shoulder, arm against arm, with his silver twin sister.
Without hesitation, their free hands sought each other out and tightly intertwined.
At the exact instant of the contact of their skin and their souls, their opposing bloodlines, the two eternal and inseparable sides of the same overwhelming cosmic coin, collapsed and fused. The very structure of the crazy inverted colosseum seemed to shudder from its invisible foundations before the gravitational force that had just been born.
[Eclipse Resonance: Stellar Absolute Zero].
A deafening burst of energy of a perfect, neutral, and absolute gray hue—an incomprehensible symbiotic mix of Aion's all-devouring darkness and Aia's absolute, radiant brilliance—expanded explosively into a perfect dome with a hundred-meter radius.
They dictatorially entered a supreme state of Elemental Law Negation. The crushing cosmic gravity imposed by Aion's silent domain became so absurdly heavy on matter that it firmly immobilized and pinned the lightning woman's immaterial energy legs to the ground, denying her speed. Simultaneously, the incandescent, white, radiant light of Aia's domain violently saturated the visual environment, completely blinding the overwhelmed, sensitive light senses of the immobilized monster.
Subjected under the immense, oppressive, inescapable pressure of this divinely combined technique, the very space of the room began to groan, collapse, and creak loudly around its opponents, creating small, unstable dark dimensional ruptures that cut and tore the hissing air.
Feeling permanently immobilized by gravity and overwhelmingly crushed by the world, the cornered lightning woman entered a state of pure, primal panic and unrestricted charged her ultimate attack. All the remaining demonic Qi from her corrupted core flowed violently into her glowing eyes, preparing an immense black lightning bolt, a supercharged lethal gaze destined to penetrate the light and carbonize the insolent twins with a single destructive electrical pulse.
Aia, breaking the rule she herself had dictated, did not close her storm eyes or avert her defiant gaze. She was ready for the train wreck.
She used the inertia and stationary gravity her brother sustained. She raised her slender spear, which was forged from exotic Dimensional Liquid Silver, an unreal metal that generated no friction or air resistance. She aggressively molded her Fluid Starlight Qi at speeds the eye could not catch. In less than an absolute blink, she created dozens of solid, reflective circular "mirrors" forged from dense crystallized light energy. Executing the [Refracted Light Spear], she formed a perfect, angular, closed geometric matrix that completely enveloped the pale torso and head of the immobilized electric beast, like an intricate, glowing kaleidoscopic cell.
Desperate, the monster fired its terrifying, immense final destructive gaze.
The lethal, dark visual lightning of millions of demonic volts crashed directly against the immaculate surface of the first starlight mirror Aia had positioned precisely to the millimeter in front of its menacing eyes. The fragile light mirror did not break, yield, or melt from the heat; it dictatorially fulfilled its pre-established geometric purpose and altered the vector's trajectory. It reflected the enemy light flawlessly.
The beast's dense black beam bounced violently to the side. It instantly struck a painstakingly calculated lateral mirror of the matrix, then bounced against an upper mirror, ricocheting from crystal to crystal, from wall of light to wall of light at the absolute, literal speed of light inside the tiny prismatic cage.
With each furious, blind consecutive bounce inside Aia's inescapable geometric refraction trap, the kinetic and luminous intensity of the demonic lightning multiplied, overloaded, and condensed upon itself, feeding off its own trapped energy, unable to dissipate. It was a hyper-fast cage of light and death spinning to infinity.
Aia coldly calculated the final angle of the perfect execution. With an elegant, subtle flick of her delicate silver wrist, the Vector Needle adjusted the tilt of the last mirror in the lethal light matrix.
The overwhelming beam of black light, which now, after countless light-speed ricochets, was mathematically a thousand times denser, hotter, and more lethally potent than when it was originally fired by the demon, shot out from the surface of that final mirror in a straight, glowing line of flawless annihilation... and returned violently and irremediably to its origin, plunging brutally, directly, and deeply into the exact center of the horrified monster's own glowing, open pupils.
The energy feedback inside the biological body was of apocalyptic proportions. The dark electric beast, anatomically designed over millennia to emit projectiles and overloads outward, but possessing zero defenses to withstand its own invasive visual law being injected back into it, multiplied and concentrated straight to the brain, let out a desolate, agonizing shriek of pure pain that shook the fake foundations of the inverted stone arena.
Its dark, unnatural demonic core in its chest suffered a massive, boiling, instantaneous short circuit upon trying to process infinite voltage in its own receptors. Its unstable form of pure contained energy collapsed spectacularly, and the tangled, hissing lightning storm making up the dark snake hair erupted into an inferno of erratic sparks, acrid smoke, and burned flesh, leaving the entity falling heavily to its knees on the pumice stone. It was left completely stunned, hopelessly blind, its eyeballs fried and empty, and muscularly paralyzed to the core, a victim of its own destructive light technique reflecting back at a thousand percent.
Aylin, sensing through the ground's vibration that the oppressive, chaotic electrical threat had been contained and silenced, and that Darius, beside her, had stopped convulsing, dissolved the safe dome of pure earth with a quick wave of her dirt-stained hands.
She and Altair, seeing the opening, did not wait silently to receive verbal or mental orders from the twins. Knowing by team instinct that siblings Aion and Aia had to keep the immobilizing Eclipse Resonance active and consuming resources to ensure they repressed and pinned down the powerful creature's residual movements, preventing it from attempting self-immolation in a final act of desperation, the two warriors leaped and crossed the open space toward the exposed center of the arena, aiming at the fallen beast.
Altair ran, fiercely concentrating all the remaining dangerous, withering Entropy Ash from his codex onto the black surface of his fists, while Aylin channeled and compressed an immense, unstoppable tectonic earth force into the sharp blade and gravitational core of her heavy spear.
They struck in unison, in a perfect, lethal cross of biological and physical destruction.
The savage, blunt punches of pure decomposition from Altair's void gauntlets shattered the beast's paralyzed chest as if it were fine glass, withering its latent energy and reducing its fragile pale skin to ashes upon the very physical impact of singularity. A nanosecond later, the relentless, mountain-dense tip of Aylin's spear pierced the electric woman's exposed skull from side to side, bursting the core of her blind brain with Stratum-Piercing Inertia.
The fearsome monster of lethal ocular lightning did not bleed. It dissipated violently in a spectacular final explosion of crackling, harmless static electricity, falling apart and losing cohesion to definitively become a thick column of inert black smoke that was quickly swept away and dispersed by the currents of the silent, inverted light abyss.
The arena's ambush and attrition combat had officially ended in favor of Samael's invaders.
Aylin spun on her heels, without celebrating, and ran back to Darius's side, who was still lying on the dark pumice stone floor. His violent spasms had subsided, but a faint, concerning wisp of black smoke continued to trail slightly from his burned ears, evidence of the brutal damage to his internal circuitry. The earth girl knelt, warmly placed her gloved palms directly on his chest, and began channeling steady, rhythmic waves of her gentle, healing terrestrial Qi—a stabilizing natural element—to purify the excess remaining electricity and smoothly reboot, one by one, the overwhelmed and scorched circuits of the clan's feared Mental Inquisitor's central nervous system.
In the center of the field, Aion and Aia separated in sync, breaking their handhold and deactivating the monumental Qi drain of their colossal technique, the Eclipse Resonance. They brushed off the black rock dust that had clung to their spotless ceremonial battle tunics, exchanging a fleeting but intense silver glance of silent, mutual satisfaction for the flawless execution. A few meters away, Altair, the void bearer, sighed deeply in relief, carefully rubbing the strong, marked forearms that had been severely burned and reddened by the high temperatures of directly blocking the boiling pitch impacts of the colossus, but alive nevertheless.
Aion closed his pale horizon eyes and mentally connected to the massive, structured hive mind that spanned the dark bowels of the tomb.
"Squad 5 reporting securing of final position," Aion transmitted. His mental voice acted as a necessary, soothing balm of extreme coldness, calm, and total control for the rest of the anxious legion scattered in the dark. "We have completely cleared the inverted arena of threats and active hostiles. Darius will need a reasonable minute in the rear guard for his primary nervous system to fully reactivate and purge after suffering a severe, painful frontal ocular short circuit, but we are operationally functional. The abominations in charge of this zone were fundamentally based on heat and boiling passive biological combustion, and directed static light discharge energy. We are passively and defensively awaiting the Architect duo to decipher the cumbersome spatial barriers in the central room to finally initiate the convergence of our vanguard."
"Sitrep copied, Aion," instantly replied the authoritative, serene voice of their leader, Kael Morningstar, from some other incalculable, unfathomable distance in the shattered nightmare labyrinth. "Rigidly hold your defensive position and use this valuable time to rest your muscles and circulate pills in your meridians. Iris and Cedric confirm to me that they are just a few steps and runic iterations away from violently breaking the cipher of the old spatial code and forcing the broken islands to collapse in on themselves. We will see each other soon to resume the hunt for the king's head."