Chapter 249: Final Climb (1)

Nathan led the charge out of the ruined stadium, leaving the nightmare of Layer 5 behind them. The faceless crowd dissolved into ash, and the melting banners wept into the void. The Giant’s dying scream rattled in their chests, lingering long after the silence took over.

Ahead of them lay the ascent.

It was less a staircase and more a monument to suffering. Each tier was a massive slab of black iron, veined with a sickly, pulsing green luminescence that throbbed like a dying heart. It spiraled upward into the suffocating darkness of the cavernous ceiling.

[Lord Creation Progress: 89%]

[Time Remaining: 26 Minutes]

"Move!" Nathan roared, his voice cutting through the oppressive heat.

Nobody wasted breath on an argument.

The climb was agonizing. Gravity itself seemed heavier here, dragging at their armor. The green veins beneath their boots radiated a blistering heat that baked the sweat onto their skin.

Dillon, naturally, shattered the pace. Ozone trailed in his wake as his Storm Striders violently discharged, propelling him over the massive steps in jagged, lightning-fueled arcs. He vaulted the final ledge, landing lightly on a narrow span of stone, his katana already halfway out of its sheath.

"We’ve got a welcoming committee!" he shouted down the stairwell.

The party surged upward, adrenaline overriding their burning lungs. As Nathan crested the top, the battlefield revealed itself.

A bridge of churning, molten slag spanned an abyssal drop, the only path to the towering obsidian archway of Layer 7. And blocking the crossing was a wall of black iron.

Twelve constructs. Eight feet of segmented armor plates glowing with internal furnace-heat, wielding colossal, white-hot forge hammers. Faceless. Merciless.

[Enemy Detected: Forge Warden]

[Threat Level: High]

[Count: 12]

"Twelve of them," Kaito muttered, stepping up beside Dillon, his grip tightening on his hilt.

"Twelve is a warmup," Dillon smirked, though his eyes were locked in dead earnest on the heavy infantry. "We’ve killed worse."

"Not on a timer, we haven’t," Kaito shot back.

Nathan’s eyes flared with Hunter’s Insight, the world briefly shifting into a wireframe of kinetic weak points. Thick plating. Devastating AOE potential. But their heavy joints—glowing with that same sickly green light—were exposed.

"We don’t fight their armor; we break their footing!" Nathan barked, falling into a tactical stance. "Kaito, Arthur—anchor the center. Don’t let them push! Garrett, Red—shatter the left flank. Elise, I need a thermal shock on that bridge. Dillon—be the storm. Blind them. Bleed them."

Dillon grinned, the air around him already humming with static. "Finally, a strategy that respects my genius."

"Just don’t get crushed."

"Never."

The raid party exploded onto the bridge.

Kaito and Arthur took the vanguard, their combined shields forming an impenetrable phalanx. The Wardens swung in unison. The impact was deafening—a thunderous crash of forge-hammers against enchanted steel that sent a shockwave ripples across the molten river below.

From the rear, Elise thrust Aurora’s Heart skyward. Her Frost Golem materialized with a glacial roar, slamming its massive fists directly into the molten bridge. A shockwave of absolute zero tore across the metal. The superheated slag flash-froze in an instant, screeching as the extreme temperature shift caused the Wardens’ iron boots to fuse to the ground and their leg joints to turn dangerously brittle.

"Now, Garrett!" Nathan yelled.

Garrett and Red hit the immobilized left flank like a freight train. Red lowered his massive horns, goring a frozen Warden behind the knee. As the construct buckled, Garrett launched himself off Red’s back. Volcan descended with a terrifying scream of compressed heat. The hammer met supercooled iron with a concussive boom, the thermal pulse utterly shattering the Warden’s rigid helm into a spray of shrapnel.

Then, Dillon was unleashed.

He didn’t just run; he weaponized the friction. Flash Step activated. The world blurred. He materialized directly behind a Warden, using the ice to slide under a devastating horizontal hammer swing. Thunder Edge shrieked as he drew it, the electrified blade carving cleanly through the construct’s brittle knee joint.

Before the colossal machine even began to tip, Dillon was gone. A clap of displaced air, and he reappeared on the right flank. Slash. Another joint severed.

Cloudy trailed his master, the Cloud Serpent weaving through the chaotic melee. It discharged blinding arcs of chain lightning that grounded out on the Wardens’ conductive armor, frying their internal mana-circuits and throwing their strikes wildly off-balance.

Nathan didn’t waste the openings. He drew back his bowstring, channeling mana until the air hummed. Starfall Barrage. A volley of radiant arrows tore through the smoky air, threading the needle between his allies to punch directly into the Wardens’ exposed, glowing joints. Three of them collapsed, their structural integrity failing under the precision fire.

Amara’s spirits swarmed the remaining constructs, dragging at their limbs with ethereal chains. Kaito and Arthur stepped out from behind their shields, blades dancing in brutal synchronization to decapitate the bogged-down machines.

The final Warden swung a desperate, wild arc at Dillon. The speedster merely tilted his head as the white-hot hammer breezed past, smiled, and vanished. He reappeared directly above the Warden, driving Thunder Edge downward through the nape of its iron neck, severing the central green vein.

The giant collapsed into lifeless scrap. The bridge was clear.

[Lord Creation Progress: 90%]

[Time Remaining: 18 Minutes]

"Don’t stop!" Nathan yelled, his boots crunching over the shattered iron.

They sprinted across the frozen bridge, bursting through the archway.

And stepped into Layer 7.

It was a cathedral of despair.

Seamless black stone walls stretched into a ceiling lost in suffocating shadow. There were no torches, only an ambient, sickly luminescence radiating from the center of the room.

There sat a monolithic throne, choked by thick, pulsating green veins that burrowed into the stone like parasitic roots. Above the throne floated the anomaly—a silver-green sphere of condensed, terrifying mana. It was spinning, expanding, breathing. A Lord in its embryonic stage.

Standing on the dais, blocking the path to the throne, was Goliath.

His massive blade was drawn, the metal still slick with Shinny’s luminescent blue blood. He didn’t look like a conqueror. He looked hollowed out. His eyes were dead, staring through the raid party rather than at them.

"You made it," Goliath rasped, his voice scraping like stone on stone. "I’m... genuinely impressed."