Sector 2 was a graveyard, but the Iron Hounds did not walk like mourners.
They moved like predators.
The six-man Tier-1 strike team advanced through the toxic green fog with terrifying precision. They wore bulky, matte-black exosuits—cutting-edge military technology specifically designed for extreme hazardous environments.
The thick, corrosive mist that melted silver armor in seconds simply slid off their suits, repelled by a constant, humming layer of localized [Mana Filtration Fields].
"Contact," the point-man whispered into the comms, raising his heavy energy-repeater.
From the shadows of a ruined intersection, twenty [Corrupted Soldiers] charged. Their eyes burned with the fanatical emerald light of the Sovereign's Grave. They were fast, mutated, and felt no pain.
The Vanguard of the Silver-Blood Guild would have raised shields and prepared for a brutal melee.
The Iron Hounds didn't even break their stride.
"Clean them out," the squad leader, Captain Thorne, ordered flatly.
The team's heavy gunner didn't cast a spell. He pulled the trigger of his rotary cannon.
Not bullets. Not raw mana.
It fired concentrated rounds of [Purified White-Phosphorus Mana].
BRRRRRTTT!
The barrage tore through the charging horde. The moment the white-hot rounds pierced the corrupted flesh, they didn't just explode; they aggressively burned away the toxic mana animating the corpses.
The Corrupted Soldiers collapsed instantly, their bodies turning to ash before they even hit the ground.
Ten seconds. Twenty enemies erased. Zero casualties.
"Sector clear. Proceed to Spike Point Alpha," Thorne commanded, his cybernetic left eye whirring as it scanned the retreating fog. "The anomaly's density is increasing as we near the Core Tower. Setup the disruption spike. Now."
The team's engineer knelt on the cracked asphalt. He unslung a massive, one-meter-long metallic cylinder from his back and violently slammed it into the concrete.
He twisted the activation dial.
THROOOM.
A blinding pillar of pure white light shot into the sky.
But it wasn't an explosion. It was a frequency.
A localized, ultra-high-frequency anti-mana pulse radiated outward from the spike.
High above, in the ruined control room of the Core Tower, Arthur felt it immediately.
It wasn't a physical blow. It was a sickening, tearing sensation deep in his chest.
The thick, suffocating green fog blanketing the streets below violently recoiled, pushed back by the white light. The massive [Graveborn Mana Heart] behind Arthur shuddered, its deep, rhythmic heartbeat stumbling for a fraction of a second.
Arthur gasped, gripping the windowsill.
[Warning: Domain Integrity Dropping.]
[Connection to Subordinates disrupted by 30%.]
Beside him, the boy collapsed to his knees, clutching his chest and screaming—a soundless, agonizing roar. The dark, unstable mana Arthur had planted inside him was furiously clashing with the purifying pulse of the spike. The boy's newly formed void-veins flared violently under his skin.
"Endure it," Arthur said coldly, though a sharp line of black blood trickled from his own nose. "Or the light will burn you out."
Arthur's eyes narrowed. He looked at his hand.
The connection to the [Domain of the Dead] felt static. Like a radio signal losing its frequency.
He wasn't panicking. But for the first time since he entered Tartarus, he felt... friction.
"Interesting," Arthur murmured, wiping the blood from his lip. "They didn't bring swords. They brought a scalpel."
He stepped up to the shattered window.
Below, the Iron Hounds were rapidly moving toward the second spike point. They were heavily shielded, armed with anti-corruption weaponry, and actively choking the life out of his territory.
"If they plant the second spike," Arthur noted, watching the boy thrash on the floor, "the connection to the Heart will be severed entirely. The Domain will collapse."
Arthur didn't summon the massive Null Executioner or the Abyssal General. Dropping a nuke on an enemy who brought EMP jammers was suicide. If the disruption spike severed his mana connection mid-summon, he risked permanently losing his Epic and Mythic assets to the void.
He needed a scalpel of his own.
He pulled the [Mantle of the Fallen Lord] tightly around his shoulders.
"Stay here," Arthur ordered the trembling boy. "Let's remind them that the monster... is just a tool."
...
In the streets, the Iron Hounds reached the second intersection.
Captain Thorne's cybernetic eye whirred frantically, tracking invisible shifts in the air currents. This wasn't his first Dead Zone. But it was the first time... the silence felt alive.
"Spike Beta, plant it," Thorne ordered, his grip tightening on his rifle. "Something is wrong. The horde stopped attacking. We are too close to the Core for it to be this quiet."
The engineer knelt, slamming the second massive cylinder into the ground.
Crack.
It wasn't the sound of the spike activating.
It was the sound of the engineer's helmet visor shattering.
Before the engineer could even scream, a jagged, dark-purple crystal blade pierced straight through the thick, reinforced plating of his exosuit, severing his spine and tearing out through his chest.
"SNIPER!" Thorne roared, instantly raising his heavy repeater. "TEN O'CLOCK! HIGH ELEVATION!"
THWACK!
A second crystal spike descended from the shadows of a ruined overpass.
The heavy gunner raised his rotary cannon to block, but the sheer kinetic force of the armor-piercing arrow shattered the weapon's barrel and pinned the gunner's arm to the asphalt. The man roared in pain as the toxic crystal immediately began eating through his localized mana filter.
Standing on the ruined overpass, cloaked entirely in the light-devouring Mantle, Arthur looked down at the squad.
Beside him stood the three [Crystal-Spine Bone Archers] he had forged back in Tartarus.
"Pin them," Arthur commanded.
THWACK! THWACK! THWACK!
A relentless volley of armor-piercing, toxic crystal arrows rained down on the squad.
But Captain Thorne wasn't Oliver.
He didn't panic. He anticipated.
"Shields up! Overcharge the filters!" Thorne bellowed, raising a massive energy barrier that perfectly angled the deadly spikes away, though the barrier hissed and cracked under the sheer toxicity. "Mage! Anti-air burst! Predict the drop!"
The team's battlemage slammed his staff into the ground. He didn't aim at the overpass. He aimed at the structural supports beneath it.
A blinding pillar of holy fire obliterated the concrete pillars. The entire overpass Arthur was standing on groaned, collapsed, and plunged into the street in a tidal wave of burning rubble.
The three Bone Archers fired one last desperate volley as they fell, shattering the shield of another soldier, before they were instantly crushed and vaporized by the intense heat and falling concrete.
[Warning: 3 Summons Destroyed.]
Arthur plummeted with the debris, his Mantle absorbing the worst of the impact.
Before the dust could even settle, Thorne's cybernetic eye flared red.
"He's in the dust! Three o'clock!" Thorne roared, firing his heavy repeater point-blank into the smoke.
The white-phosphorus rounds tore through the rubble, striking Arthur's chest.
The [Mantle of the Fallen Lord] flared violently.
[Lord's Aegis Activated.]
[Fatal Attack Absorbed. Cooldown: 24 Hours.]
The rounds splashed against an invisible barrier, but the sheer kinetic force threw Arthur backward, sliding across the wet asphalt.
For a fraction of a second... his body forgot how to exist. The breath was knocked out of his lungs, and a sharp, terrifying void clawed at his consciousness.
He saw through the concealment, Arthur realized, forcing his fractured mind to stabilize as he slid. The cybernetic eye tracks air displacement, not mana.
Arthur didn't try to stand. He used the momentum of his slide to vanish into the thick shadow of a ruined storefront.
But he wasn't retreating empty-handed.
As he slid past the team's defensive diamond, he didn't summon a weapon. His bare right hand glowed with the terrifying, world-ending red lightning of [Absolute Synthesis].
The mage, who was recovering from casting the massive anti-air burst, didn't even have time to blink.
Arthur slapped his glowing hand directly against the mage's chest armor as he slipped past.
"Live Synthesis," Arthur whispered.
The red lightning didn't spark smoothly. It fought the holy aura of the mage's suit, hissing and crackling wildly. The mage screamed, aggressively channeling mana to push the corruption out.
For a terrifying half-second, the synthesis almost failed. The red lightning flickered, threatening to backfire and blow off Arthur's arm.
Arthur forced his bleeding willpower into the storm.
CRUNCH.
The red lightning bypassed the failing anti-corruption shield.
The mage didn't just die. The space around him stuttered. The sound of the rain cut out completely for a three-meter radius. The light from the streetlamps bent unnaturally toward the man's chest.
The mage's high-tier armor and flesh were violently compressed and crushed into a pulsing orb of raw mana in a fraction of a second. A horrific glitch in reality.
"FALL BACK!" Thorne roared, firing blindly into the shadow where Arthur had vanished.
When the sound returned, Arthur was gone.
The second disruption spike lay on the ground, unactivated.
Captain Thorne stood amidst the burning rubble, his breathing ragged. He looked down at the empty, bloodless crater where his mage used to be, and the dead engineer.
Two elite operatives, gone in seconds. Not by a mindless horde. But by calculated, terrifying precision.
"Captain," the surviving sniper whispered, pulling the toxic crystal from his arm, his voice shaking. "We... we hurt its connection. It lost three summons."
Thorne looked at the blinding white light of the first spike, then at the dark, silent alleyways surrounding them.
The green fog was retreating, yes.
But the silence was far more terrifying.
"We hurt it," Thorne muttered, his cybernetic eye whirring as it scanned the impenetrable darkness. "But it isn't fighting like a beast anymore. It sacrificed pawns to take out our magic output."
He looked up at the looming shadow of the Core Tower.
"It's learning."
...
High above, sitting on the edge of a shattered gargoyle, Arthur looked down at the pulsing, raw mana orb in his hand.
His coat was scorched. His [Lord's Aegis] was on cooldown. Blood dripped steadily from his nose, and the connection to the Domain was still screaming in agony.
For the first time, he had been forced to retreat from a direct engagement.
He looked at the blinding white pillar of the single disruption spike slowly choking a kilometer of his domain.
A slow, cold smile spread across Arthur's pale face.
"So," Arthur whispered into the dark, his eyes gleaming with genuine, terrifying excitement. "This is how you fight me."
He crushed the orb in his hand, violently absorbing the raw mana to forcibly stabilize his fractured connection to the Heart.
"Good. The game was getting boring."