Chapter 179: The Crystal Bridge and the Shot that Defied Time (Part 5)
Reality tore like an old cloth, sucking the five snipers and controllers of the Morningstar Clan into the depths of the labyrinth's impossible architecture. Squad 6 plummeted through a vortex of distorted light, feeling the absolute cold of the void licking their martial tunics.
When the violent dimensional rearrangement finally spat them out, they didn't find a stone floor or rusted metal. They landed with cat-like agility, rolling over their shoulders to dissipate the kinetic force, onto a smooth, translucent, and chillingly fragile surface.
Varian stood up first, his immense dragon-bone bow already firmly gripped in his hand, and looked around. The breath caught in his throat. They weren't in an underground cavern.
They were suspended in the very middle of an unfathomable cosmic void. Above them, below them, and in all directions floated the silent corpses of dead stars: colossal spheres of black rock and fossilized magma emitting a sickly, dying glow. The only structure keeping them from falling eternally into absolute nothingness was a broken crystal bridge, a walkway of iridescent material stretching into the darkness. It had jagged edges where entire sections had broken off and been lost to the abyss.
One false step on this terrain meant an endless fall.
"Hold the center of the bridge," Varian ordered through the Soul Nexus, his voice tense but authoritative. "The structure seems stable, but the crystal has visible micro-fissures. Do not use massive area-of-effect or brute-force attacks that could shatter the ground beneath our own feet."
Selene, Lia, Nylas, and Lyra nodded silently, forming a tight back-to-back circle, covering all angles of the infinite void. The silence of the dead cosmos was deafening, overwhelming.
And then, the "sky" moved.
An immense shadow blocked the faint glow of the nearest dead stars. From the heights of the abyss, a moth of colossal proportions descended silently. Its wings were the size of war galleons, but the most disturbing thing was their texture: they seemed to contain fragments of deep space, a living tapestry of dark galaxies and swirling nebulas. As the beast fluttered majestically over the crystal bridge, it began to release a bright, silver dust from its wings that fell over the five geniuses like a luminescent snow shower.
"Artillery, fire at will!" Varian shouted, raising his bow to initiate the execution.
But before he could channel his Qi, reality fractured before his very eyes.
Varian blinked, and the giant moth was no longer in the sky. Instead, a few meters in front of him floated Nylas, his own squadmate. Nylas's eyes were bloodshot with an uncontrollable homicidal hatred. Without warning, the gravity controller clenched his fist and unleashed an [Abyssal Wrath Explosion]. A shockwave of pure demonic energy hit Varian like a giant mace, forcing him to slide backward on the crystal to avoid flying off the edge.
"Nylas, what the hell are you doing!" Varian roared, barely regaining his balance.
But the illusion gave him no respite. The fake Nylas lunged with an [Underworld Claw]. His claws, wreathed in dark static and black flames, slashed the air. Varian dodge-rolled, but the flames grazed his shoulder. He felt an icy, piercing burn that infiltrated his skin like poison, slowing the flow of his emerald plasma and making it hard to breathe.
Three meters away, the perspective was equally chaotic and lethal. Lia, her bow crackling with unstable lightning, saw Selene aiming directly at her heart with a deadly wind arrow.
"Selene, put the weapon down!" Lia screamed, firing a defensive bolt to deflect what she perceived as a point-blank execution.
In a matter of seconds, Squad 6's flawless formation collapsed into a fierce, free-for-all friendly fire battle. For five agonizing minutes, the delicate crystal bridge was filled with erratic lightning, hurricane-force wind gusts, gravitational distortions, and screams of betrayal. The five geniuses jumped, dodged, and counterattacked on the edge of the precipice, blindly convinced they were fighting for their lives against mutinous allies due to some labyrinth curse. It was a deadly dance; each dodged "lethal attacks" that were actually visceral illusions superimposed over their comrades' desperate real defensive movements.
Amidst the pandemonium, Lyra rolled nimbly across the crystal floor to evade a decapitating wind slash she thought she saw coming from Varian's hand. Her heart pounded wildly in her chest, but her instinct, relentlessly forged in the dark abysses of mental manipulation and psychological warfare, screamed at her that something was fundamentally broken in the logic and flow of this combat.
Her body reacted moments before her rational mind. Lyra squeezed her eyes shut, and upon opening them, activated the pure power of her Fog Dragon bloodline.
Her [Gray Smoke Orb Eyes] awakened. Her human pupils completely disappeared, turning into slow, ethereal, and hypnotic swirls of grayish fog. The Spiritual Frequency Vision violently tore away the veil of the physical lie. Lyra stopped seeing the light, the dead stars, the falling bright dust, and the tense physical bodies of her friends.
Instead, she saw the naked plane. She saw "thought waves". She saw the unmistakable aura of fear, panic, and confusion vibrating erratically in the Spiritual Seas of Varian, Lia, Selene, and Nylas. She read their intentions; there wasn't a single hint of killing intent directed toward her or among them. There was only an hallucinatory, desperate terror to survive. And, looking up into the void, floating placidly in the air above them, she saw the immense, filthy, malicious mental signature of the space moth, projecting its hallucinogenic visions into their retinas like a maddened puppeteer pulling strings of light.
Lyra understood the terrifying trap instantly. Her brain, like those of her comrades, was processing false visual information, fed directly by the luminescent dust raining down from the monster.
"CEASE FIRE!" Lyra's psychic scream through the Soul Nexus was so powerful, so loaded with spiritual authority, that it made the molecules of the crystal bridge vibrate. But she knew, better than anyone, that mere words wouldn't be enough to stop elite warriors trapped in a life-or-death survival hallucination.
Lyra extended her crushing illusory will and forced a pulse of temporary sensory amnesia, firing it like bullets directly into the minds of her four teammates. It was a brutal shock, as if someone had violently unplugged and rebooted their nervous systems. For a single, absolute second, Varian, Selene, Lia, and Nylas forgot how to see. Their visual cortices went pitch black, "wiping" themselves, radically eliminating the illusion the dust was projecting onto their deceived retinas.
When their vision returned the next heartbeat, blinking in confusion, the hyper-realistic image of their comrades massacring them had vanished. It was replaced by the raw, shameful reality: they were panting, on the verge of killing each other on the edge of the cosmic abyss, while the immense giant moth fluttered safely and untouchable in the sky, dropping its glowing poison.
"No one is attacking anyone!" Lyra transmitted, her breathing ragged from the mental exertion. "That dust bends light and space! It makes us see the beast assimilated into the figures of our allies! It's a dimensional-grade visual hallucinogen!"
Varian immediately lowered his bow, easing the tension on the string as a cold sweat soaked his forehead upon realizing, horrified, how close he had come to blowing Nylas's head off with a plasma arrow.
Perfectly understanding the physics of the illusion—which strictly required the dust particles to be suspended in the air to refract the light into their eyes—Selene took a firm step to the front of the group. Her pink eyes, which read the currents, shone with the indomitable fury of the primordial winds.
Selene inhaled deeply, her chest expanding unnaturally as she gathered her bloodline's pressure. Opening her mouth, she unleashed her pent-up fury. It wasn't a simple gale or shockwave. It was a hyper-concentrated pressure squall that swept the entire surface of the crystal bridge like the invisible hand of a wrathful god. The wind cleaned, swept away, and expelled every single miserable, glowing hallucinogenic dust particle, blasting it hopelessly into the infinite cosmic void.
The air became pristine and crystalline. With the dust screen dissipated and its trick ruined, the immense moth was left completely exposed, floating vulnerable beneath the cold, sickly light of the dead stars.
"My turn to play with your pathetic mind," Lyra hissed, her gray orbs swirling with vengeful fury.
She advanced to the edge, fixed her piercing gaze directly onto the colossal insect's multiple compound eyes, and drew her arsenal. In her left hand, she held the [Phantom Requiem Bell], forged in spectral silver. In her right, she wielded the [Staff of Eternal Mist].
Lyra didn't wait. She shook the bell violently. The artifact didn't emit an audible sound in the air, but resonated directly against the fabric of the soul and space. Waves of translucent indigo expanded, causing the solid matter around her to become unstable. The colors of the abyss washed out, momentarily turning gray and ethereal. The cohesion of reality had fractured.
At the same time, Lyra struck the crystal with the base of her pine staff. The cold mist crowning the staff erupted into a violent electric violet, injecting mass and physicality into the void the bell had left. She had achieved the supreme [Dream Truth Resonance].
Lyra's bloodline erased the border between nightmare and flesh in a single stroke. She invaded the moth's rudimentary, insectoid Spiritual Sea and activated her [Delirium Materialization]. She injected it with an illusion of [Real Phantom Pain]. In the beast's mind, it wasn't floating in the sky; it had suddenly been plunged into a boiling ocean of cosmic, corrosive acid.
The giant moth began to shriek in a shrill, unnatural way, its immense galactic wings beating erratically and clumsily in pure desperation. And then, the macabre and impossible happened: although there wasn't a single drop of physical acid in the air of the abyss, the beast's tough exoskeleton began to sizzle, smoke, and melt disgustingly. Its own nervous system, completely deceived and dominated by the dream illusion, ordered its own biology to dissolve and destroy itself.
"Don't let it escape my mind!" Lyra yelled through gritted teeth, blood dripping from her nose from the immense effort of maintaining the dimensional mental torture. "Anchor that damn bug to the ground!"
Nylas took a heavy step forward, his face shadowed by a sepulchral coldness. He unleashed all his power and opened his [Singularity Pupils]. His eyes became two infinite wells of absolute black, with a single, tiny point of light trapped in the dense center.
Nylas's [Gravitational Vector Vision] fully activated. For him, the starry cosmos, the light, and the crystal bridge disappeared, replaced by a strict map of geometric lines of gravitational tension and mass. In a fraction of a second, he identified the center of gravity, the aerodynamic drag, and the exact mass of the moth writhing in acid pain in the sky.
Nylas extended both hands, cramped his fingers as if gripping the invisible chains of the world, and unleashed the oppressive [Gravity Well Authority].
The Abyssal Demonic Dragon Bloodline brutally imposed its [Event Anchor] upon reality. In a two-hundred-meter spherical radius, the entire area sank mercilessly under a monstrous [Oppressive Density]. Everything existing in that range of punishment—the air itself, the floating cosmic dust, and the immense moth—instantly became fifty percent more massive.
The specks of rock floating harmlessly in the void plummeted, smashing against the crystal bridge. The giant moth, whose anatomy delicately depended on cosmic weightlessness to sustain its immense, heavy galactic wings, was crushed from the heavens as if Nylas had tied the weight of a lead mountain to its back. The beast shrieked as its altitude broke; it plummeted vertically and crashed brutally onto the iridescent walkway. The violent impact made the crystal bridge creak alarmingly beneath their feet, completely pinning the creature to the ground, unable to lift its crushed wings a single millimeter.
In this oppressive hyper-gravity field where internal organs weighed heavily and breathing required the effort of a titan, Nylas was the only entity standing upright with total, majestic freedom, looking down with disdain at the paralyzed prey.
"The beast is anchored to the stone," Nylas reported, his deep, cavernous, unyielding voice reverberating in the gravity. "Fire at will for execution. Let's finish it before its own weight ends up breaking the ground beneath us."
Varian, Selene, and Lia, the sacred trinity of heavy artillery of the Morningstar empire, raised their bows in perfect synchrony. There was no room in their hearts for mercy, and the monstrous moth pinned to the ground was the most perfect target practice in the galaxy.
Lia was the first to secure the net. She opened her [Thunder Hawk Eyes]. Her golden vertical pupil, surrounded by an intimidating pure black sclera, emitted dense electric arcs that crackled furiously in the heavy air.
Raising her majestic bow, the [Static Storm Zenith], Lia drew her weapon. She didn't pull a gut or metal string; her index and middle fingers pulled a filament of vibrating cyan light, pure plasma contained between the asymmetrical lightning-silver limbs. The air around her crackled, ionizing instantly. Her Hawk Eyes acted as an absolute combat rangefinder: they calculated the immense resistance of the air compressed by Nylas's gravity, the zero humidity of the void, and traced the beast's internal nerves, which glowed like exposed wires in her vision.
Lia released the plasma string with a snap that broke the sound barrier. Three swift electric blue light arrows shot out. They didn't impact the beast's body; they intentionally missed, missing the moth's wings and chitinous head by millimeters to embed themselves in the crystal of the bridge. The thunder genius was masterfully using her passive, [Ionization Marking]. By grazing the creature, the arrows left a thick trail of charged ions over the beast's skin and scales.
"Static attraction routes ready," Lia reported with a sharp smile, her golden eye gleaming with cruelty. "It's completely marked. The target is now a giant magnetic magnet."
Varian didn't stick around to admire the electrical work. The Sky Hunter raised his fearsome bow, forged from ivory Void Dragon bone. But Varian didn't aim or look at the moth in a conventional ballistic manner. He activated the supreme and dictatorial [Fixed Destiny Authority]. The sacred Emerald Storm Hawk Dragon Bloodline dictated an undeniable spatial law: If the hunter's eye sees it, the talon has already struck the flesh.
Varian was about to fracture the very causality of the universe. He wasn't going to fire an arrow so it would docilely travel the distance of the bridge; he was going to force reality to register the lethal damage as a pre-existing and inevitable event.
As he raised his arm, the [God's Nerve]—an ultra-fine golden light filament acting as his bowstring—emitted a hum akin to the heartbeat of an ancient heart. Simultaneously, his Emerald Plasma Blood boiled. The highly pressurized, liquid wind energy flowed through his glowing veins, traveled down his forearms, and condensed, injecting a blinding, neon green glow straight into the invisible tip of his technique.
The moth, despite being crushed by Nylas's overwhelming gravity and tortured to the brink of madness by Lyra's illusion, felt the cold breath of absolute death and began agonizingly forcing its shattered wings, managing to crack the crystal beneath it even further, a second away from managing to release a final, desperate burst of kamikaze dust that would doom them all.
Varian didn't tense his muscles. He relaxed his fingers.
The execution of [Zenith Sentence: Synchrony Execution] activated.
There was no heroic flight. There was no trail of green energy crossing the long space between hunter and prey. The arrow, loaded with pure Emerald Plasma Blood and containing the power of a bottled hurricane, simply ceased to exist on the bow and materialized instantly and peacefully, embedded perfectly and completely deep directly into the beating center of the colossal moth's thorax.
The pre-existing impact had been fulfilled. The shot had killed before it was fired.
It was then that the technique detonated. The [Green Meteor Shower] erupted from inside the creature. The immense pressurized hurricane energy burst, fragmenting the magical arrow into tens of thousands of tiny, spinning blades of emerald wind and liquid plasma. The blades mercilessly shredded the entirety of the beast's biology from its internal organs, cutting outward.
The immense moth of galactic wings grotesquely inflated for a fraction of a second before exploding from its center in a disgusting shower of dark alien blood, viscera, and melted chitin fragments that were immediately and mercilessly flattened against the crystal floor by Nylas's gravitational pull.
Just a second after seeing the beast explode into a thousand pieces, the dry, sharp snap of the golden plasma string echoed in the team's ears.
One monster annihilated and erased. But the trial wasn't over. A horror remained on the board.
The squad, without losing their breath, turned their bows and their attention unanimously to the left. There, a gaseous entity of a necrotic, sickly green color, devoid of solid shape, bones, or flesh, floated majestically just above the bridge, slowly melting and evaporating the solid iridescent crystal beneath it with its mere physical proximity.
The purely ghostly entity opened a horrifying "mouth" where it possessed no face and emitted a sonic scream directed at the geniuses.
None of the five heard a single decibel, but the crystal bridge felt it. At the precise instant that mute, inaudible scream impacted the walkway a few meters from them, the solid, unbreakable iridescent matter simply stopped making sense. It didn't break with crunches, it didn't crack like ice; the transparent rock instantly disintegrated into fine atomic dust, silently creating an enormous crater of absolute vacuum that threatened to collapse and swallow Lia whole, as she was tragically closest to the center of impact.
The lethal gaseous ghost didn't stop to admire its handiwork. Gliding over the void at a chilling, unnatural speed, it tried to treacherously pounce on Lia's back while the golden archer still had her bow lowered from executing the moth.
But Lia's reactive nerves weren't subject to standard human biology. The trait of her [Chain Shot] bloodline—which had successfully replaced her clumsy biological nerve impulses with pure, swift, direct lightning impulses—activated on autonomous survival instinct.
Her hyper-accelerated brain processed the lethal phantom ambush exactly at the speed of light. Before the gaseous specter could even caress the fabric of her tunic with its atomic claws, Lia's body flawlessly performed an electric blink.
With a loud, sudden crackle smelling of pure ozone, Lia disappeared in a bright, blinding flash of violet light. In a millisecond, she safely repositioned herself fifty meters away on the other safe end of the crystal bridge, leaving the deadly specter uselessly attacking the empty air she had just abandoned.
Seeing its ambush against the thunder archer foiled so humiliatingly, the relentless necrotic green gas entity instantly shifted its lethal target to the next closest motionless prey: Selene.
The wind genius hadn't been idle at all. Despite the specter's sudden surprise, she was standing, feet firmly planted, in the midst of the complex and delicate preparation of her own ultimate heavy artillery attack.
Her pink [Zephyr Eyes] were wide open, frantically reading the subtle thermal currents and air densities of the abyss to calculate a deadly, absolutely infallible wind trajectory. She had already fully channeled the [Zero Friction Void]. All air resistance and molecular friction had been eliminated from her slender body and her arrow, erasing her acoustic presence completely in order to fire her ultimate technique.
But the specter's imminent arrival forced her to abort the perfect shot.
The green entity lunged savagely at her, opening its ghostly maws to emit another destructive, inaudible disintegration pulse that threatened to erase Selene at an atomic level in a blink.
The sniper's extreme concentration snapped, but her ancient Cutting Zephyr Dragon bloodline was, above all, an untouchable master of supreme evasion. In the millisecond of contact, her ultimate defensive skill, [Gale Mirage: Steps of the Fleeting Breeze], detonated instinctively, requiring no conscious thought.
Selene's physical body seemed to burst and violently dissolve into a spectacular, expansive gust of dense pink air. When the specter's destructive atomic attack lethally struck the spot, it didn't erase flesh, blood, or bones, but disintegrated harmless empty air. In that exact same microsecond, five deceptive, perfect afterimages of Selene appeared sharply on the bridge, running frantically in five opposite directions to mislead and confuse the gaseous entity's senses.
At the same time, the real, solid Selene materialized safely and abruptly two hundred meters away, on the secure periphery of the bridge's combat area.
The dimensional escape miraculously saved her from total disintegration, but the abrupt, unnatural interruption of her powerful ultimate attack mid-expansive channeling carried a high, painful physical cost. The moment her boots touched the crystal, Selene fell heavily to her knees. She spasmodically coughed up a thick mouthful of bright red blood that stained the transparent walkway, suffering a severe internal energy backlash from the violently interrupted Qi flow.
"Selene!" Lia screamed from her position, angrily raising her electric bow to defend and avenge her injured comrade.
Without hesitating, Lia charged and rapid-fired three arrows of pure blue lightning at maximum power, aiming directly at the center of the lethal green entity's chest. But then, the true, maddening nightmare of the spectral monster's Conceptual Law revealed itself to her eyes.
Lia's hyper-fast arrows of pure energy, traveling while tearing the air, barely grazed the outer edge of the monster's aura... and didn't even make physical contact. They instantly and pathetically disintegrated into tiny, harmless static sparks in the air. Their potent magical Qi bonds and dense matter were completely undone, vibrated to destruction, by the imperceptible destructive frequency constantly emanating from the gas beast.
"Nylas, tactical analysis now!" Varian demanded, taking a step back as he analyzed the absolute failure of the electric artillery.
Nylas was intensely observing, with his black hole pupils, the exact spot where Lia's powerful arrows had unraveled into nothingness. His devouring eyes quickly processed and broke down the impossible physics behind the defense phenomenon.
"It's not pure arcane magic, nor does it possess a dense, traditional Qi shield!" Nylas transmitted to the hive, finally understanding the profane, cunning nature of their immaterial enemy. "It's a molecular vibration wave pushed to the physical extreme! That thing is constantly vibrating at such a high frequency that it mechanically destroys the basic bonds of the atoms that touch it. Solid arrows and our magical energy can't touch it because, the moment they approach its field, they literally unravel and are dismembered by its rhythmic frequency. Anything physical, piercing weapon, or condensed magic we throw at it head-on will simply be shaken into atomic dust before achieving a single real impact!"
A cold, desperate, sepulchral silence filled the vast crystal bridge. The Morningstar tactical brains were working in overdrive. How the hell, under the laws of the nine heavens, could you hurt or kill something that passively disintegrated your weapon and your magic before it even managed to touch it?
Lyra, catching her breath after the immense mental drain of materializing the lethal delirium in the dead moth, slowly stood up and stared with hatred at the vibrating phantom.
"If that thing's absolute shield is mere vibration..." Lyra thought quickly. "...then its defense is governed by the rules of sound, waves, and information."
Lyra put away her artifacts and bravely stepped forward, her swirling gray orbs locked with determination on the exact, glowing center of the deadly gaseous mass's green core.
"Cover your ears immediately," she murmured to her comrades through the Nexus, and slowly parted her pale lips to unleash her bloodline's sonic trait, the dreaded [Voice of the Void Siren].
Lyra didn't emit a powerful war cry capable of bursting eardrums. Her vocal cords, modified by the dragon, let out a soft, inaudible whisper. The subtle vibration didn't travel by pushing the air like normal acoustic sound; her voice was transmitted surreptitiously, directly penetrating the incorporeal spiritual plane of the labyrinth.
The imperceptible phantom sound smoothly penetrated the specter's invincible atomic disintegration defense—precisely because the voice of the void was neither physical matter nor conventional magical energy that could be atomically broken—and the message lodged deeply and directly into the entity's false core of consciousness.
That ethereal whisper carried the [Seal of the Broken Memory].
Lyra introduced pure chaos, spiritual static, and white noise into the primitive cognitive processes holding the undead monster's form together.
The overwhelming green entity shuddered violently and asymmetrically. Its constant, perfect molecular disintegration frequency stuttered and went out of tune for the first time since its creation, suddenly losing its perfect stability and the atomic rhythm protecting it from attacks. The phantom was deeply stunned, its vibration rhythm shattered by the mental static.
Varian, taking command, and Selene, still on her knees, exchanged electric glances across the massive fractured distance of the iridescent bridge. They didn't need to utter words or devise long strategies; the six grueling years forging blood and sweat in Samael's Pagoda, coupled with the symbiotic connection of the Soul Nexus, had forged a completely flawless, lethal tactical telepathy between them.
"If the spectral monster's main defense is an extreme acoustic or molecular vibration wave to disintegrate..." Varian thought, raising his colossal bow again and nodding toward the wind sniper.
"...then, by absolute physical laws, it mandatorily requires and needs a dense medium, like oxygen, air, or the heavy density of ambient Qi, for that lethal frequency to be able to travel, vibrate, and act as a shield," Selene completed the equation in her own mind. She stood up stoically, wiping the crust of blood from her lip with the back of her pale hand.
Selene looked up and firmly aimed the open palms of her hands directly at the unstable gaseous entity still trembling, stunned by Lyra's song.
This time, she didn't use her legendary, flawless manipulation and mastery of the wind in the conventional way. She didn't blow a hurricane. She didn't fire destructive bullets of sharp air. Selene clenched her fists and did the unthinkable. Selene violently sucked.
With an agonizing, violent pull born from her ironclad martial will and her comprehension of the wind, Selene forcibly extracted absolutely all the oxygen, wind currents, and any ambient gas atoms in a perfect ten-cubic-meter radius around the green specter's position, creating in a second a transparent, claustrophobic spherical bubble of absolute spatial vacuum, devoid of any matter.
"Nylas, harden the trap! Seal it now!"
Nylas reacted on the spot without blinking. Manipulating his Gravity Well, this time he didn't irresponsibly increase the crushing physical weight toward the fragile crystal floor below. Instead, he projected the skill and created a strict "Event Anchor" in the shape of an invisible, geometric, unbreakable six-sided gravitational box directly around his comrade Selene's newly created vacuum bubble, hardening the delicate walls of three-dimensional space so the pressure of the dense cosmic outside air could never re-enter and ruin the vacuum.
The powerful gaseous green specter, previously untouchable by any weapon or mage, suddenly found itself caged and trapped in absolute nothingness.
Without air molecules, without oxygen, and without a dense or solid atomic medium around it to vibrate or bounce off of, the gas beast's once-perfect and invincible disintegration frequency didn't have a single material vehicle through which to travel, propagate, or exist. Physics were relentless: sound cannot exist in a pure vacuum. Atomic vibrations and destructive shockwaves die irremediably in the complete absence of matter to push against.
The amorphous, untouchable gaseous form of the necrotic entity began to react violently and unpredictably to the drastic, sudden lack of a physical medium to sustain its molecular existence. Its lethal dark green mist condensed, grew dense and heavy, then horribly slow and lethargic, until finally, the post-mortal energy and will went critical, unstable, and collapsed upon its own axis, solidifying irremediably all at once.
The once-invulnerable flying specter transformed before their eyes into a rigid, petrified, fragile, and defenseless statue of cold, crystallized green energy, suspended comically and clumsily like a dead quartz crystal inside the suffocating, unbreakable spatial vacuum forged by Nylas and Selene's brilliant synergy.
Its absolute, impenetrable defense had been nullified and humiliated by the simple, raw, crushing application of natural physics.
"Lia, now is the time! Execution!" Varian ordered, adrenaline spiking.
Lia didn't hesitate for a single blink. At the exact second the statue solidified, her Thunder Hawk Eyes detected and relentlessly targeted the cold, crystallized inert core of the green beast. She raised her imposing bow, the hard, striped wood creaking dangerously under the immense, chaotic, lethal charge of accumulated static electricity threatening to shatter the air.
But Lia, in a masterstroke of ballistic calculation, didn't aim physically toward the monster suspended in front of her in the center of the crystal bridge. She drastically tilted her bow upwards. She aimed vertically toward the infinite, abyssal, completely empty dark sky of the silent dead stars looming above them.
"Static Attraction Charge at maximum limit. Ionization mark previously confirmed and anchored. Executing sentence," Lia whispered with a deadly smile.
Lia released the tension of the plasma string and fired the apocalyptic [Bolt of Heavenly Judgment: Nervous Breakdown] upward, straight into the cosmic infinity.
The brilliant electric arrow ascended, tearing the air, and completely disappeared into the unfathomable heights of the dark vault for a second that seemed eternal. Then, lethal physics and ionic attraction stepped onto the stage and did their inescapable work. Just like a lightning rod in a primordial storm, the arrow of pure electricity, loaded with cataclysmic voltages, was magnetically pulled downward at an absurd speed. It was guided blindly by the static ionic signature Lia had cunningly, intentionally placed beforehand in the vicinity of the crystal bridge during her first failed shots, but now drastically redirected by the archer's firm, merciless will straight toward the fragile, solidified statue.
The dark sky seemed to open. A bolt of celestial, destructive light, a colossal pillar of divine electric punishment the thickness of a millennial oak, plummeted devastatingly from the domains of the dead stars.
The immense, dazzling homing beam, traveling at near light-speed, pierced the ceiling of Nylas's solid gravitational box without flinching. It crossed the interior of Selene's absolute vacuum bubble without losing an ounce of its strength, speed, or electromagnetic fury—since light and pure electricity, unlike the phantom's poor sound waves, travel freely and furiously through the very nothingness of the spatial vacuum—and impacted flush, with a deafening sonic boom, directly and with all its luminous mass against the fragile, inert statue of solidified necrotic energy.
The resulting immense cosmic explosion was dazzling and blinding, forcing the snipers to cover their sensitive retinas with their arms.
The powerful green specter was incapable of defending itself. It couldn't react or disintegrate the invasive lethal electricity because its own vibratory frequency and atomic shield were irrevocably suffocated and pathetically nullified inside its prison of pure vacuum.
The deafening, apocalyptic punishment of the divine lightning simply shredded, heated, and catastrophically, finally shattered the entire rigid, solid structure of the formerly immaterial entity. It made it explode, with the sound of thunder at the end of the world, into a billion pieces of harmless green light. The fragments scattered and rained languidly over the smooth surface of the fragile crystal bridge and the sea of galactic darkness, falling and shining faintly and harmlessly as if they were tiny dying fireflies from a distant forest, gradually losing their glow before fading and going out, finally erased for all eternity.
The thick silence—dense, exhausting, but immensely comforting—returned triumphantly to the vicinity of the broken crystal bridge.
Selene, pale and sweaty, dropped both arms to her sides. She slumped heavily, sitting on the translucent floor, breathing erratically, hoarsely, and very heavily after the enormous, dangerous effort of generating, sustaining, and stabilizing an environment of absolute vacuum in an open space. Nylas, in turn, snapped his fingers and undid the impenetrable containment box of the hard gravity well, untying the knots of space and allowing the ambient atmospheric pressure and precious fresh oxygen to return to refill the evacuated area with a loud, reassuring, violent hiss that relieved everyone.
Lyra rubbed both her temples hard, blinking with effort as an intense, annoying headache began to throb powerfully inside her skull. A fair price after the brutal spiritual drain of having managed to subdue, break, and sustain impossible dimensional illusions and deliriums of torture against two ancient horrors of unnatural nature almost consecutively.
Varian, standing tall like a monarch of battle, walked slowly until he was positioned very close to the dangerous, sharp edge of the immense, shattered crystal bridge. He lowered the immense, hot dragon-bone bow from his stained hands and looked stoically, in silence and with deep warrior reverence, into the depths of the dark, unfathomable abyss, populated only by the dying lights of the old dead stars. They were alive. All of them. The majestic, feared imperial artillery had completely cleared and secured their corner of the tomb's fake sky.
"Squad 6 reporting," Varian's calm but exhausted voice traveled through the Soul Nexus, connecting with the hive of Kael, Cedric, and Iris. "We have cleared the crystal abyss. Dimensional optical hallucination monster and molecular vibration entity purged. The anti-air zone is secured. Selene is slightly injured by a Qi backlash, but everyone is operational and lethal. We are awaiting convergence."
"Excellent work, Varian," Kael's firm voice arrived. "Iris is seconds away from rewriting the central matrix. Ready your weapons. When the walls fall, we all go toward Violeta. The damn Saint King messed with the wrong group."
In the silent, monumental, cold immensity of that graveyard of floating celestial bodies and dead stars, the lethal Squad 6 swiftly readied and secured their exotic lethal arrows, bows, and cannons one last time in that lonely hell. The Morningstar Clan was about to close its fearsome jaws on its desperate prey; they only waited, stoically formed at the edge of the iridescent precipice, for the very structure of the fake space to bend hopelessly, giving them a triumphant passage to the bloody stage of the long-awaited final execution.