Chapter 158: New Array Created

Chapter 158: New Array Created

Lothe shook his head.

"If we cut the wrong line, the displaced energy won’t vanish. It will flood the damaged section. The formation will either seal the leak or vent the excess in a violent recoil."

Professor Sy’s face darkened. "And that recoil dumps straight down onto the trenches."

"Exactly."

Neither spoke for a beat. Below them, another crimson sphere hammered down.

BOOOOOOM!

An Ice sword shot out clashing with it.

The entire valley rattled.

Professor Sy glanced over the edge. "We have minutes. Maybe less."

"I see it."

"Then what is your angle?"

Lothe didn’t blink. His [Qi Sight] tracked the rivers of red fire running through the clouds, charting every node, every turn, every reserve.

"We can’t hit it in pieces. We have to jam the circulation across multiple intersections at the exact same instant. If it can’t reroute the current, it can’t build pressure."

Sy caught the logic immediately. "A multi-node suppression array? It would take an entire engineering corps half a day to lay that groundwork. And the moment it senses foreign runes, it will evolve around them."

"Which is why we don’t lay down several arrays," Lothe said.

"Then what?"

"One array."

Sy stared at him like he had grown a second head. "You want to cast a live, unanchored formation powerful enough to strangle an ancient catastrophe mid-flight?"

"That’s the shape of it."

"Lothe, this isn’t an academy exam. If your calculations are off by half a millimeter, the backlash won’t just kill us—it will punch through the roof and vaporize the survivors below."

"I know."

"And you’re still stepping up?"

Lothe looked back at the older man. His eyes were steady. Calm.

"Professor, we can stand here and watch that thing hammer our people into paste, or we can take a swing. I don’t plan on watching."

Sy looked at him for three long seconds. Then he exhaled, shaking his head. "You are completely out of your mind."

"That’s an insult to my genius."

Before Sy could fire back, the sky groaned.

KRRR-CLANG.

High above, the massive crimson-black formation shuddered. Hundreds of weeping eyes rotated in unison. Their pupils snapped shut, locking onto the two figures hovering near the lower stratum.

The air grew heavy. Suffocating.

Sy’s jaw tightened. "It noticed us."

Lothe’s lips curved into a thin smirk. "Good. Let it look."

Then the smile vanished.

His posture straightened. The easy, lazy posture disappeared, replaced by the razor focus of a master craftsman stepping up to an anvil.

Purple spatial Qi boiled around his right wrist.

WHIRRRRR.

A spirit brush materialized between his fingers, its polished black shaft humming with dense energy.

Lothe raised it.

For a heartbeat, he went entirely still. The screaming gale, the falling fire, the thunder below—all of it faded into white noise. In his mind, the sky was an empty blueprint. He saw the fault lines. The shifting coordinates. The hidden channels feeding the guns.

He knew what to build. And he knew how thin the margins were.

Lothe slashed the air.

SHAAAH!

A vibrant violet rune blossomed in empty space, rotating with a crisp hum.

Another stroke.

SHAAAH! SHAAAH!

Runes bloomed in rapid succession. Some were sharp geometric grids.

Others were ancient, fluid symbols that made Sy’s head ache just trying to decipher their trajectories.

Lothe’s wrist became a blur.

The glyphs shot outward, taking calculated positions around the perimeter of the red storm. Violet filaments of spatial light stitched them together, locking one to the next.

A primary ring formed.

Then a second, wider ring.

Then a third.

Three concentric wheels of purple light rotated across the upper atmosphere, each turning on a different axis, driven by strict spatial mathematics.

Sy watched, his breath catching in his throat.

He understood the theory. But watching it materialize out of thin air was terrifying.

Lothe wasn’t combining old school templates. He was writing an entirely new martial language in real-time.

The outer wheel was built to pinch the enemy’s circulation.

The middle wheel was designed to mirror its rerouting paths.

The inner wheel was set to snare the core the moment it showed its face.

It was an array built to adapt against an adapting monster.

Lothe brought the brush down in one final, punishing slash.

KLANG!

The keystone rune locked into place.

The entire purple matrix flared into blinding brilliance, three colossal wheels spinning in the clouds with mechanical precision.

Above them, the crimson storm stuttered. A dozen offensive eyes flickered and dimmed.

A clean, silver window flashed across Lothe’s vision:

[PING!]

[New Array Created.]

[Array Name: Fourfold Void Array: Spatial Severance]

[Classification: Spatial-Runic Array]

[Recorded in Runic Grimoire.]

[Soul Energy: +400]

Lothe didn’t blink. "Four hundred? Fair enough."

Sy stared at him, stunned. "You just improvised a high-tier structural array in the middle of an active bombardment?"

Beside them, Justin, Oren, and Nyren and the rest paused, staring up at the violet wheels burning against the red sky. They could feel the strange, foreign pressure radiating off the construct.

Lothe didn’t answer. He was already moving to the next step.

Drawing the blueprint was easy. Making it hold under fire was the real test.

Lothe thrust his left hand forward, pouring pure Soul Energy into the lines. Unlike raw Qi, this energy seeped straight into the metaphysical spine of the runes, anchoring their weight against reality.

The wheels spun faster.

WHOOOOOOM!

The surrounding air warped. Space began to bend under the rotational torque.

Then the Void Spear materialized beside his hip, humming with dark intent.

Lothe looked at the weapon. "Let’s see how much you can take."

He clenched his fist.

CRACK.

A hairline fracture shot down the black shaft. Then another.

In a fraction of a second, the spear snapped into four jagged, razor-sharp black shards.

Sy’s heart jumped into his throat. "What are you doing?!"

Lothe didn’t answer.

With a flick of his wrist, the four black shards tore through the air like screaming arrows!

SHING! SHING! SHING! SHING!

Each shard drove itself into a cardinal coordinate of the spinning purple wheels.

North.

East.

South.

West.

The fragments locked into the fabric of space itself, erupting into four towering pillars of violet light. They weren’t just parts of a weapon anymore—they were spatial stakes, pinning Lothe’s array to reality so the enemy’s turbulence couldn’t shake it loose.

Lothe spread his fingers wide.

"Fourfold Void Array: Spatial Severance!"

The array roared to life.

The outer wheel clamped down. The middle wheel accelerated. The inner wheel swept the dark sky like a hunting net.

Under Lothe’s [Qi Sight], every single vein of red fire running through the ancient storm lit up like exposed nerves.

And his wheels began cutting them.

BOOOOOOM!

A massive quadrant of the crimson formation died.

The flow of red energy choked. The ancient storm instinctively tried to reroute the power through secondary veins.

Lothe’s middle wheel shifted instantly, dropping three new runic barricades across the detour.

The storm tried to pivot again.

The four spatial pillars pulsed, locking down the space and cutting off the escape route.

Sy watched in stunned silence.

Lothe wasn’t overpowering the ancient relic with brute force. He was out-thinking it. He was suffocating its nervous system, blocking every reflex before the signal could even reach the muscle.

The crimson eyes in the sky began to lose their rhythm, firing erratically, their light turning dim and unstable.

Lothe’s eyes narrowed, his gaze piercing through three layers of dying fire straight into the black hollow at the center of the storm.

A dark, pulsing core hovered in the open, stripped of its shields.

"There you are."?