Chapter 179: The Anvil of the Titans and the Scythe (Part 6)
The fall was a direct descent into the beating bowels of a nightmare. Squad 7, the relentless heavy vanguard and physical titans of the Morningstar Clan, were sucked through the spatial rift and mercilessly thrown into a dark, dense abyss.
There was no agile or clean landing. They crashed violently against a floor that yielded slightly under their enormous combined mass, emitting a repulsive, sickening wet sound. Magnus, Korg, Goran, Maren, and Draven rolled to dissipate the kinetic force, immediately getting to their feet like awakened beasts, their elemental auras erupting and sweeping away the gloom.
The surrounding scenery defied all architectural logic. They were not in a rock, basalt, or ice cavern. The walls, the curved ceiling, and the floor beneath their heavy boots were composed entirely of petrified flesh. Gigantic fossilized arteries, as thick as millennial tree trunks, protruded from the walls, pulsating with a dead, sinister energy. It was as if the twisted labyrinth had swallowed them directly into the dissected corpse of a primordial god. The air was suffocatingly dense, claustrophobic, and reeked of coagulated blood, rust, and rancid marrow.
"Tight phalanx formation," Goran grunted, raising his immense, dark tower shield, his eyes scanning the fleshy darkness with military precision.
Barely had they taken their first coordinated step when a deafening metallic clang echoed in the cavern. It was the heavy dragging of thick iron links, each the size of a war carriage.
From the shadows ahead of them emerged an aberration. It was a deformed humanoid giant with hypertrophied muscles that threatened to tear its own grayish, stretched skin. But the most terrifying thing wasn't its imposing size, but the immense block of matte black iron it dragged. The giant was heavily chained by the wrists to a colossal anchor, a metal block so immensely massive it seemed to have been forged in hell to stop the movement of an entire continent.
The monster did not emit a roar to announce its presence. It simply raised its massive arms toward the ceiling and smashed the heavy tip of the anchor directly into the floor of petrified flesh.
The impact did not generate an expansive shockwave to push them away; it altered the fundamental law of space around them.
In an exact radius of five hundred meters, gravity was multiplied by a thousand.
It was instantaneous and biologically devastating. Magnus, Korg, and Goran, who formed the stoic frontline and possessed bodies with immense, dense mass, suffered the crushing effect disproportionately. The air itself became as heavy as solid lead. The bones of the three colossi creaked ominously. They were crushed against the ground, forced to drop to one knee into the fossilized flesh, which cracked and sank under the absurd pressure of their multiplied weights.
Draven and Maren, located in the rearguard and being physically lighter, managed to remain hunched over, but they felt the blood failing to reach their heads and their internal organs being ripped downward by butcher hooks.
"Argh!" Korg roared, his metal boots sinking deep into the floor. "It's crushing me!"
The giant, moving with terrifying slowness amidst its own domain of immovable gravity, dragged the anchor's chain, preparing to drop it directly onto the skulls of the paralyzed intruders.
But Korg's primal instinct sensed the mortal danger. His cells forced an abrupt awakening. He activated his [Iron Scales]. His grayish skin mutated; the cells became interlocking hard metallic scales, a living armor that fused with his flesh.
Korg forced his muscles to defy the crushing gravity. His fibers tore internally, but under the extreme pressure, his boiling magma blood erupted from the micro-fractures of his skin and instantly solidified upon contact with the air, creating scabs of vulcanized metal even harder than the original skin. He was self-repairing and strengthening himself through pure, raw, and painful physical punishment.
With a guttural cry that spat burning steam from his lungs, Korg stoically stood up.
"I will not kneel before a damn pile of scrap!" Korg bellowed.
He ignored the crushing gravity by channeling the absolute heat of the forge within him. He lunged forward, moving heavily, but with unstoppable inertia. Korg did not draw swords; his body was the only weapon he needed.
He clenched his fists, activating his lethal gauntlets, the [Crucible of the Tyrant King]. The heavy, matte black star iron glowed. A strident hiss flooded the cavern as the pyroclastic valves on the wrists opened, releasing a violent shield of incandescent iron steam that enveloped his body like a deity of the forge. At the same time, the gauntlet's machinery reacted to his bloodline; his fingertips opened, and sharp, red-hot tungsten carbide blades extended, covering his true dragon claws.
Korg struck the giant's chest. In the microsecond of contact, he unleashed the [Volcanic Marrow Injection].
The incandescent scales on his knuckles opened microscopically. He didn't just tear the beast's skin; he injected a violent burst of his own liquid, molten iron Qi directly through the aberration's pores. Once inside the giant's dead bloodstream, the liquid metal expanded and drastically overheated.
The giant let out a deafening shriek that vibrated the marrow of the cave. Its blood began to boil from within its own meridians. The thick veins of its neck and chest swelled to the point of bursting, glowing a sickly orange beneath the gray skin. The immense, burning physical pain forced the monster to release its perfect grip on the heavy anchor, stumbling two clumsy steps backward, coughing steaming vapor from its rotten lungs.
That brief retreat was absolutely everything Magnus needed. As the monster's concentration on the iron anchor loosened, the x1000 gravity faltered and flickered for a fraction of a second.
Magnus, the invincible Vajra Titan, unleashed his ten percent. His eyes became furious golden pools. Beneath his skin, the [Liquid Vajra Skeleton] awakened in all its splendor. His bones, having absorbed the densest earth Qi in the world, acquired the absurd density of a neutron star and an absolute golden metallic glow. His [Absolute Inertia] dictatorially imposed itself over the cavern's laws. Magnus ceased to be a mortal affected by the imposed gravity; he became an immovable force of nature.
The Titan stood tall. The joints of his strong legs acted as colossal hydraulic shock absorbers, stabilizing his immense conceptual weight. He took a heavy step toward the giant, and the entire cavern trembled. It wasn't a magical tremor; it was pure, raw physics displacing itself.
He clenched his right fist, activating his [Tectonic Gravity Authority]. At the same time, his massive gauntlets, the [Vajra-Annihilators], ignited. The thick veins of molten gold over the matte black metal gleamed. The air around his arm began to be violently sucked toward his clenched fist, trapped in a whirlwind of stellar compression. His bloodline dictated that his mass, at that exact point, was infinitely greater than that of a mountain.
He lunged alongside Korg. The two biological reactors of the Morningstar Clan collided with the giant simultaneously.
Korg threw fierce, boiling hooks, melting the tough skin and roasting the monster's organs with every injection of liquid iron, showering molten metal across the cavern. Beside him, Magnus delivered straight, silent, and devastating blows. Every time Magnus's heavy golden fist touched the giant, the immense shockwave didn't disperse into the air; his gauntlet's pistons fired at hypersonic speeds, penetrating straight through the monster's torso, pulverizing ribs, shredding muscles, and causing massive hemorrhaging through pure, abusive mass superiority.
The giant was battered backward repeatedly, its colossal body being humiliated and used as a simple punching bag by the two geniuses of strength.
But the creature was a twisted entity from the Primordial Era. Its unholy vitality did not obey biological logic. Despite having its organs cooked by Korg and its thick bones pulverized by Magnus, the giant roared, blind madness shining in its hollow eyes.
With a violent, desperate pull of its thick arms, it dragged the colossal chain from its wrists, lifting the immense anchor into the air, and smashed it with all the fury of its agony against the ground, with exponentially greater force than before.
BOOM.
Gravity didn't multiply by a thousand; it became a crushing, catastrophic, absolute domain. The floor of petrified flesh caved in, forming entire craters beneath their feet. Korg was forced to spit boiling blood, falling face first and denting his own armor against the ground. Behind, Maren and Goran were plastered against the fleshy surface as if a hundred-story skyscraper had suddenly dropped onto their backs.
Even Magnus felt his own unbreakable Vajra bones creak under the cosmic pressure. If he didn't do something drastic that very instant, his comrades would be turned into a puddle of meat pulp and metal in a matter of seconds.
Magnus planted both feet deeply into the petrified flesh, anchoring himself to the earth. He crossed his immense armored arms in front of his face. His Vajra-Annihilator gauntlets responded immediately to the [Eternal Mountain Stance: The Vajra Shield].
A deafening CLANG! resonated as the heavy magnetic plates of his forearms unlocked and expanded, forming an impenetrable hexagonal tower shield of solid amber light. A golden dome of heavy, yet fiercely controlled gravity erupted from Magnus's body. The Titan reversed the polarity of his own infinite weight to create a lightning rod for massive gravitational damage.
All the lethal, crushing pressure the giant's anchor was imposing on the vast cavern was forcibly sucked and drawn directly onto Magnus's broad shoulders and golden back.
Magnus roared. The thick veins in his neck looked ready to burst beneath his skin. His heavy boots sank a full meter into the floor of flesh and arteries. He was single-handedly taking the gravitational punishment of the entire battlefield onto his own body, miraculously freeing his allies from the oppressive pressure.
"Get up!" Magnus bellowed, thick blood dripping from his gums as he held the shield. "I can't... hold up the fucking sky... forever!"
Korg struggled to his feet, his organic iron skin groaning from the stress. Maren and Draven regained their breath and mobility, their bodies suddenly becoming light as they exited the direct pressure zone thanks to their leader.
Thus began the vanguard's true, unbearable hell. An agonizing and brutal stalemate that lasted almost two painful hours.
Magnus remained stoic as the mythological pillar sustaining his comrades' existence, constantly receiving and absorbing the anchor's crushing pressure. Korg and Goran tried to launch risky physical assaults on the flanks to push away and take down the monster, but the giant, enveloped in its own impassable hyper-gravity aura, deflected their slowed blows. The attrition was simply inhuman. The Titans' dense Qi evaporated like water in the desert, and the extreme muscular fatigue was dangerously grazing the edge of total biological collapse.
From the protected rearguard of the formation, Draven, who had been meticulously observing the monster's mechanics with the cold, analytical mind of an Ice Anvil, finally tied the loose threads of his swift tactical calculation.
The giant was materially shattered and burst from the blows, but it wouldn't fall or die. The anchor itself was an invulnerable rock of pure iron. Where was the power flowing from?
Draven fixed his sharp eyes on the immense, unbroken iron chain that firmly linked the shackles on the monster's wrists to the heavy ring of the anchor. The thick chain throbbed and pulsed with dense, sickly dark Qi, sending constant pulses of parasitic energy into the monster's deformed body.
"The crushing gravity isn't coming from its body!" Draven yelled through the Soul Nexus, his icy voice echoing clearly in his comrades' exhausted minds. "It's coming directly from the anchor when it hits the ground! And the chain is the only conduit! That throbbing chain is the creature's real health bar! If we break the central link, we disconnect it from its power supply!"
"Maren, it's all yours!" Magnus roared, his golden knees finally beginning to tremble and bend slightly from the grueling hours of pure gravitational torture.
Maren, who had wisely been conserving his depleted energy in the rearguard, nodded quickly. His eyes turned a pure, blinding white, giving off aggressive blue sparks that jumped across his face. He activated the destructive core power of his bloodline: the [Wandering Lightning Form].
Maren's physical body simply ceased to exist as solid matter. His flesh, blood, and bones radically broke their own molecular cohesion to transmute into pure, untamable electricity. The solid light wings on his Zenith Steel greaves, the [Thunder Step], vibrated at an inaudible frequency, completely eliminating his weight.
Maren didn't run toward the giant; he shot forward like a flash of lightning, an erratic zigzagging line of blue and white that split the air. For him, the world entered a static state, frozen in time. He tore through space with a shattering sonic boom.
The giant clumsily tried to lift the anchor again, but Maren was absolute speed incarnate. At the incomprehensible speed of lightning, Maren passed straight through the colossus's broad chest from side to side.
It wasn't a blunt or cutting impact. Maren passed like a ghost through the dense aberration. And inside the monster's body, the speedster's Intent, the [Synaptic Acceleration], detonated. The devastating electrical impulses of Maren's transmuted body crashed directly and mercilessly against the giant's slow, dead nervous system and dark meridians. He internally overloaded them with millions of volts of pure, destructive electricity in a single millisecond.
The giant suffered a horrifying, instantaneous multi-organ failure and a severe, total paralysis of its nervous system. Its immense gray body froze rigidly on the spot, with its massive arms locked and tense in the air, completely unable to drop the anchor or move the chain a single millimeter.
Maren suddenly rematerialized right behind the enormous monster, falling heavily to his knees, his entire body smoking violently from the colossal cellular stress of transmuting his own biology.
Draven didn't waste his crucial one-second window of absolute immobility. The expert of absolute cold raised both arms toward the creature. From his tunic sleeves shot out thick, deadly chains forged of pure Anvil Ice, like furious white vipers.
Draven brutally planted his shield, the [Glacier Scale], into the floor of flesh. The [Arctic Wall] expanded, emitting a pulse of blinding cyan light from the Blizzard Eye in the center of the heavy blue metal. The oppressive cold slowed time around him even further.
The icy chains flew across the cavern and tangled violently and tightly around the immense central black iron link connecting the paralyzed giant's wrists to the massive anchor.
Draven clenched his left fist with crushing force. His cold wasn't designed to burn skin; it was scientifically designed to bring the atomic vibration of matter to a dead stop. The deep temperature of the imprisoned iron link plummeted abysmally to absolute zero almost instantaneously. The extremely hard, invulnerable black metal lost its flexibility, contracting until it became fragile, brittle, and weak as cheap ice crystal under the pure thermal invasion.
With a war cry, Draven gave a hard, sharp, savage backward pull with his own arms, suddenly channeling all the kinetic force and weight of his body into his ice chains anchored to his shield.
The enormous central black iron link shattered into a thousand fragile frozen pieces that tinkled as they fell.
The parasitic connection was broken forever.
The disgusting giant, suddenly disconnected and stripped of the inexhaustible primordial source that kept it anchored to the world of the living, let out one last, pathetic, hollow groan. Without the anchor's energy flow to artificially sustain its rotting flesh, the creature's colossal body disintegrated with terrifying speed. Its thick gray skin, hypertrophied muscles, and hard bones withered, turning into a fine dust of dark ash that rained harmlessly onto the fleshy floor.
The monster disappeared completely, leaving only the gigantic, heavy black anchor lying alone in the cavern, free of its thick chains, but still emanating a passive, massive inertia over the area.
Magnus collapsed heavily forward with a loud crash, resting his exhausted golden hands on the petrified floor, breathing noisily like a huge industrial forge about to burst its valves. Korg sat cross-legged, coughing, as his cracked organic iron slowly and painfully retracted back into simple gray scales.
"One horrifying monster down..." Goran panted, slowly loosening his cramped grip on his immense black shield, cold vapor still emanating from its edges.
But the sadistic Secret Realm knew not an ounce of mercy. It didn't give them a single valuable minute to celebrate their survival, to ingest healing pills, or even to victoriously contact the other squads over the Nexus line.
As the cavern's suffocating gravity slowly returned to the dimension's normal parameters, the high ceiling of petrified flesh directly above their heads tore open with a wet, tearing, and deeply repulsive sound.
A cold, painfully toxic green light suddenly flooded the claustrophobic cavern. Dropping nimbly from the open ceiling with the lethal, silent grace of a perfect predator, a colossal insect landed a few meters from the formation. It was a slender, deadly mantis four meters tall, but its tough exoskeleton wasn't made of the usual chitin; it was composed entirely of beautiful, gleaming green jade, polished to the extreme and razor-sharp, emitting an unnatural, necrotic glow.
Goran, assuming his vital role as the group's undisputed Shield, was the first to react.
Seeing the swift, hissing creature raise and ready its immense, serrated scythe-like forelegs, Goran firmly positioned himself at the front, placing himself between the beast and his highly exhausted comrades. He awakened his Bronze Dragon bloodline to full capacity. His skin transmuted; his cells biologically fused with microscopic scales of dense mystical bronze, drastically increasing his physical weight to five hundred solid kilos to become an immovable wall against the danger.
His eyes took on the cold color of burnished brass. The [Bronze Compass Eyes] immediately read, like a geological map, the lines of gravitational force in the cavern and the beast's posture, calculating the perfect blocking angle to absorb and dissipate the imminent impact into the earth.
But Goran, prudent and methodical, didn't settle for just using his shield's passive hardness. Planting a heavy boot firmly onto the soft, petrified flesh floor, he used his [Ironclad Earth Transmutation].
His will and his bloodline's Qi spread like a golden plague across the ground. The dead flesh and disgusting fossilized arteries within a fifty-meter radius began to solidify, alchemically transmuting into pure, gleaming Divine Bronze. In a single magical blink, the repulsive organic battlefield became an unbreakable plate of solid metal beneath their feet, and right in front of him and the beast, he sprouted a massive bronze wall two meters thick.
The lethal jade mantis did not hesitate, nor did it slow its march. It lunged swiftly forward, its front scythes slicing the air with a sharp, hissing buzz.
The insect's jade legs didn't strike the sturdy bronze wall with blunt force or sparks; they simply grazed the dense metal as they passed. But what happened next terrifyingly defied all of Goran's vast defensive knowledge.
The thick, proud Divine Bronze wall, capable of impassively withstanding the simultaneous magical and explosive bombardment of dozens of orthodox Saints, was sliced cleanly, without noise or resistance. As if it were a piece of soft, warm butter under the pass of a red-hot knife. The two perfect halves of the impenetrable wall fell uselessly to the sides with a dull, humiliating thud.
Goran's brass eyes widened in pure terror. He barely had the biological time to react.
He activated his invincible ultimate defensive skill in an act of pure desperation and survival: [The Wall of the Black Turtle]. He violently buried the tip of his massive black pavise into the newly transmuted ground. The central sapphire relief glowed, and he created an imposing, thick dome of bronze energy, anchoring the entire overwhelming defense directly to the pseudo-dragon veins of the deep earth beneath him. His Shield activated the [Absolute Zero Seal], covering the dome with ten centimeters of eternal ice to halt the kinetic force of the impact.
The jade mantis's vibrating scythe struck the dome and the eternal ice.
A shrill, unnatural, extremely high-frequency sound, as sharp as a thousand sharp nails aggressively scraping a steel chalkboard, filled and tortured the ears of everyone in the cave. The unbeatable Black Turtle dome cracked and turned to dust almost instantly. Goran felt, horrified, that the jade blade wasn't pushing; it was simply cleanly penetrating the frozen energy, then passing through his bloodline's sacred metal shield as if it were water, and finally, lethally grazing his own dense, cellular bronze armored arm.
Goran roared in pure agony, desperately throwing himself backward with all his might, breaking his own stance. His unbreakable dark shield was split exactly in half, ruined, and a clean, perfect, surgically smooth cut had passed through the thick armor of his left forearm, slicing dense muscle, tendons, and dangerously grazing the bone before he managed to pull away. Had he stayed planted on the ground for a single millisecond longer, he would have lost the entire limb.
Goran rolled painfully across the bronze floor, gripping his bleeding arm tightly as blood gushed out.
"Do not block! Retreat from the front line!" Goran bellowed through the Soul Nexus, his hoarse voice filled with intense pain and a terrifying urgency that chilled his comrades. "It doesn't attack with brute force or inertia! Its damn front legs are vibrating at an absurd, sonic speed! It's a molecular cutting saw! It cuts and separates atoms directly! It will cleanly slice Korg's iron and Magnus's Vajra with the same horrifying ease! Avoid close combat at all costs!"
The drastic, painful warning suddenly froze the Titans' burning warrior blood.
The proud Squad 7 was the epitome of physical strength, unsurpassable toughness, and Morningstar's bloody close combat. But before them stood a silent aberration whose simple, twisted Conceptual Law dictated that anything physical or magical that came into contact with its vibrating edges would be irrevocably separated at an atomic level. Their formidable, invulnerable bodies, forged in pain, were useless against a blade that did not recognize hardness.
Maren, in a blue flash, immediately appeared beside Korg, his electric eyes shining with pure tactical frustration. "Even if I flank it and surround it at my top speed, my electric body cannot pierce or strike that jade exoskeleton if it's vibrating like that. Its cutting aura would slice me to pieces before I manage to overload it again."
Korg and Magnus took one prudent step back after another, keeping their intense eyes fixed on the stylized mantis slowly advancing, its lethal scythes buzzing in the air with a necrotic, menacing vibration. Their experienced tactical minds desperately searched for a solution. They didn't have Joren's massive sonic scream on hand, they didn't possess Lyra's mental illusions, nor Selene's spatial vacuum to drown it. They were only mass, muscle, and crushing strength.
How do you destroy something that, by simple atomic physics, you cannot afford to touch with your hands or your weapons?
Magnus's bright golden eyes scanned the gloomy bronze cavern, greedily searching for any minimal advantage the sparse terrain might offer. And then, his attentive gaze landed on the gigantic, heavy black anchor. The block lay lonely and abandoned on the bronze floor Goran had created.
The anchor, although disconnected from the parasitic giant, still retained its brutal material properties unaltered. It was an immense, solid block of profane iron specifically designed to passively multiply gravity; it possessed, in its own right, the absurd inertia and crushing density of a small mountain range.
A suicidal, barbaric, and purely brutal idea germinated in Magnus's calculating mind.
"If we try to strike it directly, it will cut our arms off as if we were sheets of paper," Magnus transmitted quickly, outlining the master plan through the Nexus. "But its entire body is made of elegant, vibrating jade. Crystal is hard to cut cleanly, but extremely fragile against blunt mass pressure. If we suddenly crush it with an inertial mass so large and heavy that its vibration cannot cut or separate it in time... its structure will shatter to pieces under its own weight and friction."
"Draven," the Titan ordered with absolute coldness. "I mandatorily need you to entangle it and pin it exactly to that spot on the ground for a single second. No more, no less. Maren, use your speed, lure it, and position it at the foot of the anchor. Korg, brother, get ready. We're going to lift the world."
Maren didn't need to hear any more instructions. In a sonic boom of blue lightning, he disappeared and appeared directly in front of the jade mantis's impassive face. The lethal creature reacted instantly with a lightning-fast transverse vibrating slash that would have cleanly decapitated the speedster, but Maren was no longer there. He appeared three meters further back, emitting sparks and brazenly provoking the beast.
The lethal mantis, furious at the deception and blindly following its primal killer instincts, lunged forward, tenaciously chasing Maren's trail of light. It moved away from a wounded Goran and approached, buzzing directly and at full speed toward the kill zone where the colossal black anchor lay.
When the aggressive mantis was barely two meters from the immense, inert iron block, Maren disappeared in a flash, bouncing toward the safe ceiling of the cave.
"Now, Draven!"
From the deep peripheral shadows, Draven unleashed his entire containment arsenal. Dozens of thick chains forged with the impenetrable absolute zero ice shot out from his shield like furious white vipers. This time, they didn't aim uselessly at the monster's lethal, vibrating scythes, but directly at its angled hind legs and its heavy jade abdomen. The thick chains violently entangled themselves around the beast's body, suddenly and strongly anchoring it to the firm bronze bases of the floor.
The mantis shrieked shrilly, surprised by the abrupt pull. Immediately, it began to aggressively vibrate its entire body at a molecular level to melt the paralyzing ice and cut its bonds. Draven's thick sacred chains instantly began to turn into fine snow dust under the aggressive supersonic friction, breaking link by link rapidly. Just as they calculated, the durability of the sacred ice would give exactly one agonizing, single second of immobility.
It was more than enough time for the Morningstar colossi.
Magnus and Korg, moving in complete and terrifying synchrony, were already perfectly positioned on both narrow sides of the gigantic, immovable anchor.
Both titans pushed their astonishing biological capacities to the absolute extreme, beyond the bounds of sanity. Korg injected his boiling volcanic marrow directly into his own muscles, hyper-stimulating them to generate strength, painfully ignoring the agonizing tearing of his fibers. Magnus forced his indestructible Liquid Vajra skeleton until his skin glowed intensely like a golden sun in the gloom, channeling his overwhelming tectonic gravity in reverse; instead of becoming heavy, he attempted to lighten the cosmic, crushing weight of the iron mass.
The two indomitable biological reactors of the Morningstar Clan roared in unison, their powerful voices blending into an animalistic, titanic bellow that painfully made the ears of their three nearby comrades bleed.
With a display of pure, absurd, and unreal physical strength that no human, beast, or Saint Realm cultivator should ever possess, Magnus and Korg ripped the immense, lethal gravity anchor from the bronze floor with a dull thud. They deadlifted it above their heads for a heroic fraction of a second, their invulnerable knees creaking at the limit of fracture, the thick veins in their necks on the verge of bloodily bursting under the humiliating, immeasurable weight of holding up an inert mountain range.
The frantic mantis finished cutting the last ice bond on its legs and, finding itself free, raised its sharp jade gaze.
"Crush it!" Magnus roared, his golden muscles convulsing from the colossal effort.
They fiercely threw and pushed the colossal iron anchor forward and downward, letting it plummet directly onto the insect's small, immobilized body, guided by the relentless pull of gravity.
The jade mantis, in a final, desperate act of instinctive offense, swiftly crossed its sharp scythes upward in an "X" shape, attempting to use its unbeatable rapid molecular cut to split the immense, crushing black iron block in half right before it touched and crushed its head.
But it was simply too much compact mass falling all at once.
The powerful vibrating scythes tore through the air and surprisingly managed to enter half a meter deep into the base of the anchor's metal, cutting the dense iron with a sharp hiss. However, the colossal accumulated inertia, the enormous compact volume, and the absurd natural gravitational pressure of the black block vastly and vastly exceeded the material speed at which the small monster could separate and push aside the atoms.
The brutal friction and massive resistance generated by attempting a molecular cut on so much density at once caused a violent, unstable, and catastrophic kickback of kinetic energy onto the mantis's own fragile crystal body.
The colossal iron block simply fell, heavy, mute, and unstoppable, upon it.
The definitive impact was a dull, dry, and deeply repulsive crash. The mantis's elegant jade body, marvelously designed by nature for flawless offense and absolute cutting, but proving extremely rigid and fragile against massive, blunt pressures, could not withstand the violent weight of a mountain suddenly dropping onto its tough exoskeleton.
The crystalline green jade instantly cracked everywhere under the immense shock pressure. In less than an agonizing second, the lethal vibration that protected and armed the monster turned savagely against itself. The jade shattered to pieces, completely destroying its own structural integrity, unceremoniously crushed beneath the raw, overwhelming, ignorant reality of mass physics.
The monster burst in silence. Millions of sharp pieces of beautiful green jade and toxic blood shot out like shrapnel from beneath the base of the anchor, scattering to stain the shiny transmuted bronze floor, becoming completely inert and dead. The terrifying, inescapable threat of the unstoppable molecular saw had been definitively eradicated through sheer brute force, camaraderie, and a pragmatic, desperate use of the oppressive environment.
The dark cavern was plunged into a deep, exhausted, and dense silence, broken only by the ragged, relieved panting of the five powerful vanguard warriors.
Magnus fell to his knees, his armor dented. His strong golden arms trembled uncontrollably from muscle damage and the inhuman, almost suicidal effort of lifting the gravity anchor. Korg lay flat on his back, completely sprawled out on the cold bronze, his organic iron skin smoking and returning to soft, vulnerable grayish skin. Draven hurried over to Goran; he knelt and began applying coagulating ice magic directly onto the terrible, deep wound on his left arm to stop the arterial bleeding, while Maren silently watched the perimeter, exhausted, with barely any electricity reserves left, but stoically alert to the shadows.
Magnus, resting his heavy, sweaty forehead against the cold, solid metal of the anchor that had saved their lives, peacefully connected to the broad network of the Soul Nexus.
"Squad 7 reporting total securement," the Titan transmitted, his voice sounding extremely rough and tired, like thick sandpaper scraping stone. "Nightmare cavern cleared of threats. Colossal deep gravitational manipulation enemy and agile molecular cutting aberration completely eliminated. Goran has severely lost his defensive operational capacity in his left arm due to a deep cut, but he's already stabilized and remains standing in the fight with us. We are all physically exhausted and with our Qi at reserve limits, but alive. Eager to break a few more things. Patiently awaiting regroup orders."
"Report copied, Titan. You guys did an exceptional job holding down the worst physical part," Kael immediately replied, the clear, human tone of relief evident in the telepathic connection upon knowing his main shield was safe. "All other fronts have successfully secured their combat positions. Iris, what is the exact status of the central matrix?"
"Code usurpation at ninety-nine percent, Commander," came Iris's calm, bright, and purely mathematical voice, resonating in the minds of the forty warriors. "Prepare yourselves. Put your guards up. I'm going to violently force the artificial space to collapse in on itself all at once to unite the isolated coordinates. Stand firm where you are. The illusory labyrinth of this false god is about to disappear."
Magnus closed his heavy eyes, flashing a tired, genuine, bloody smile. The worst part of that tactical hell of attrition was finally over. Soon, very soon, the separated squads would reunite. And then, whatever damn monster, demented king, or Primordial Era entity tried to stop the imminent advance of the Morningstar Clan would feel upon its shoulders the true, apocalyptic, and devastating wrath of forty-five dragons working together as a single, invincible predator.