Chapter 187: Pin it Down

Evren pushed himself up from the cracked stone platform, spitting another mouthful of blood onto the floor. His chest burned with sharp, throbbing pain where half of his own strike had slammed back into his ribs.

Ahead of him, the sixty-foot Level 80 Star-Diamond Void Titan was already raising its massive crystal hammer for a second swing.

Evren stared at the glowing text still lingering in his vision:

[BOSS TRAIT: RETRIBUTION LATTICE ACTIVE]

[DAMAGE REFLECTION: 50% RETRIBUTION FORCE APPLIED]

"So any damage I deal to it gets thrown right back at me," Evren muttered, taking a ragged breath. If he kept trading direct blows, he would shatter his own body long before the giant fell.

He opened his spatial ring, checking his inventory. Inside, two boss-tier monster cores rested in the storage slots: the Level 65 Void Devourer Core and the Level 75 Mutated Abyssal Hydra Regeneration Core.

Both cores ready for his SS-Rank ability, Beastlord Core Manifestation.

’If I hit it, the damage bounces back to me,’ Evren thought, his mind racing. ’What happens if a summoned beast hits it instead?’

He decided not to gamble with both at once. He needed to test the theory first to see if the retribution lattice would target him through the summon.

Evren pulled the Level 65 Void Devourer Core from his ring and channeled his mana into it. "Manifest!"

A swirl of dark purple shadow burst from the core, expanding across the platform into a massive, four-legged void beast. The Level 65 Void Devourer let out a terrifying shriek, its gaping maw lined with razor-sharp crystal teeth.

"Attack!" Evren commanded.

The Void Devourer lunged forward in a blur of shadow, clamping its jaws onto the Titan’s lower ankle. Its crystal teeth crushed into the meteoric armor, tearing free a chunk of dark rock.

The sixty-foot giant let out an angry roar. A bright purple grid flashed across the Titan’s crystal skin as the Retribution Lattice flared to life.

A violent shockwave blasted out from the Titan’s leg, throwing the Void Devourer backward across the stone floor. But Evren stood ten yards away, feeling absolutely zero pain in his own chest.

"It worked," Evren said, a grim smile touching his face. "The reflection only hits the attacker."

Without wasting a single second, Evren reached into his spatial ring and grabbed the second core: the Level 75 Mutated Abyssal Hydra Regeneration Core.

"Manifest!" he shouted, pouring a massive surge of mana into the dense core.

A deafening roar shook the entire subterranean dome as a colossal nine-headed serpent erupted into existence. Standing over sixty feet tall, the shadow hydra flared with dark scales and glowing purple eyes, its long serpentine necks hissing in unison.

"Pin it down!" Evren ordered both beasts.

The Level 75 Hydra surged across the platform, wrapping its thick coils tightly around the Titan’s waist and arms. The Void Devourer charged back in, leaping onto the giant’s back to tear at its neck armor.

The Titan struggled furiously, slamming its crystal hammer into the ground to release waves of spatial lightning. The shockwaves severed two of the Hydra’s heads, but black mana immediately sprouted from the stumps, regenerating the heads in seconds.

With both summoned monsters drawing the giant’s aggro, Evren used the chance to observe the clash. He activated Kinetic Flow, watching how the Retribution Lattice reacted to every hit.

Every time the Void Devourer tore into the giant’s leg, the purple grid flared, detonating kinetic shockwaves that battered the shadow beast. But the summoned monster simply snarled and bit harder, absorbing the reflected damage without a shred of pain passing to Evren.

When the Hydra’s massive coils constricted the Titan’s torso, the retribution grid exploded with blinding violet sparks. Two of the Hydra’s heads were blasted apart by the recoil, but its Level 75 regeneration kicked in immediately, regrowing fresh heads in seconds.

The reflection only damages whatever lands the blow, Evren noted, analyzing the monster’s defenses. The summons are soaking the recoil completely.

Yet, as he watched the battle unfold, a cold knot formed in his stomach.

The Level 65 Void Devourer and Level 75 Hydra were holding the giant down, but their attacks lacked the raw burst power to crack the cosmic crystal shell and reach the star-shaped diamond core.

Above them, the black singularity sphere was spinning even faster, howling like a hurricane as it sucked huge boulders into its center.

Evren glanced at his System display:

[ASTRAL-CHASM RIFT SINGULARITY COLLAPSE: 00:18:40 REMAINING]

With the singularity’s time compression, eighteen minutes on the clock meant less than ten minutes in real time.

At this pace, the summoned beasts would run out of energy and the entire sixty-level chasm would collapse into dust. To destroy a Level 80 boss before the rift imploded, Evren had to deliver the fatal blow himself.

He did the math in his head.

Delivering the catastrophic level of force needed to obliterate a sixty-foot Level 80 giant meant taking half of that lethal explosion straight into his own body.

And the amount of force needed for that to happen, even when halved, it wouldn’t just bruise him; the shockwave could be completely fatal, stopping his heart beneath that level of blunt trauma.

Evren looked up at the radiant star-shaped diamond beating in the giant’s chest.

In his mind, he saw Calista sitting in her wheelchair back at the penthouse, remembering her gentle smile and the fragile hope in her eyes when she spoke about walking again.

He had promised to bring her cure home. "I’m not leaving without it," Evren whispered with cold resolve as he tightened both hands around the hilt of the Frost-Bane Cleaver.

The Hydra tightened its massive coils, dragging both of the Titan’s arms down against the stone. The Void Devourer sank its jaws into the giant’s throat, forcing the Titan’s head back and exposing its fractured chest plate.

Evren pushed off the ground with all the power of his SS-Rank Titan legs, rocketing into the air like an artillery shell.

He channeled every ounce of mana he possessed into the weapon, coating the broad blade in biting sub-zero frost while blinding golden Heavenly Lightning danced in violent arcs along the cutting edge.

Using Kinetic Flow, Evren locked onto the exact hairline crack in the center of the giant’s chest, right above the star-shaped diamond. Reaching the top of his jump, he spun around and brought his cleaver down with all his strength.

"Die!" Evren roared as the blade smashed into the crack with world-shattering force.

A bright wave of frost, golden lightning, and pure force exploded across the platform. The massive Titan froze as bright cracks spread across its dark armor, then shattered into a cloud of ash and broken crystal.

The glowing Level 80 Star-Diamond Void Core dropped through the smoke, falling directly into Evren’s outstretched left hand. At that exact millisecond, the Retribution Lattice detonated.

Fifty percent of that catastrophic, boss-killing explosion slammed directly back into Evren’s chest. It didn’t feel like a punch; it felt like an entire skyscraper had collapsed on top of him.

His sternum cracked, the air was knocked completely out of him, and his heart stopped instantly. Everything turned white, then black, as he fell limp toward the ground below.

As his consciousness slipped away into the dark, the telepathic link in his mind suddenly flared with terrified screams.

’Evren?’ Amber’s voice cried out in pure panic through their bond, followed by Zephyra’s scream. ’Evren!!!’