Chapter 198: COUNTDOWN: 00:00:00

The four void guardians attacked immediately.

Their eight-foot obsidian bodies moved forward at the same time, their four muscular legs pounding against the stone floor like pistons.

The air around their forearms blurred and shrieked with high-frequency vibrations. As they closed the distance, the wind coming off their spatial scythes was so sharp that it sliced deep grooves into the bedrock beneath them.

"Spread out!" Evren shouted. "Don’t let them pin us against the wall!"

Amber was already moving.

Her crimson wings snapped wide with a loud, whip-like crack, launching her straight up into the air. She banked hard to the left, circling above the cavern floor to draw the attention of the nearest guardian.

The monster took the bait. It reared back on its hind legs and lashed out with its right scythe, aiming a vertical crescent of distorted air straight at her chest.

Amber twisted mid-flight, letting the blade of air whistle past her ribs by inches.

In the next breath, she dove straight down like a falling hawk. Her twin dragon-bone sabers ignited with blazing red aura as she drove both blades deep into the beast’s shoulder joints.

CLANG-CRUNCH!

Sparks erupted from the black shell, followed by a spray of corrosive purple ichor. The guardian screeched in rage, thrashing its upper body to dislodge her, but Amber held firm, planting her boots onto its armored back and wrenching the blades sideways to cripple its scythe arm.

To the right, Zephyra stepped into the shadows.

Her body melted into a pool of dark liquid on the cavern floor, slipping silently beneath the second guardian’s charge.

The monster swung its blades at empty air, confusingly clicking its mandibles.

A split-second later, Zephyra rose from the creature’s own shadow directly behind its back legs.

Her dark whip-blade uncoiled from her wrist with a metallic hiss, wrapping tightly around the beast’s rear left knee.

"Down," Zephyra whispered coldly.

She yanked the hilt with both hands, channeling a surge of dense shadow mana through the segmented wire. The sharp wire bit deep into the soft joint between the armor plates, slicing clean through the thick tendons.

The guardian’s rear leg snapped outward with a sickening pop. Unable to support its massive weight, the eight-foot monster crashed violently onto its side, scraping across the gravel and leaving a wide trench in the stone.

Before it could push itself back up, Zephyra blurred forward, driving two dark daggers straight through its soft neck vents.

That left the final two guardians facing Evren.

Both creatures lowered their heads and charged side-by-side, raising their vibrating scythes high in an overlapping scissors strike aimed straight for his neck.

Evren tracked their movements through the predictive red lines of Kinetic Flow.

’Ten feet. Five feet.’

"Sit down," Evren muttered.

He triggered his Gravity Domain at maximum output.

BOOM!

A fifty-meter ring of crushing downward force slammed down over the two charging monsters.

The stone floor instantly fractured beneath their boots, sinking three inches into the earth. The sudden weight hit both guardians like a falling mountain, snapping their momentum in an instant.

Their four legs buckled, and their vibrating scythes were forced downward, scraping helplessly against the cracked bedrock.

Evren stepped into the kill zone.

He channeled his mana directly into the Frost-Bane Cleaver, activating the Level 45 Glacial Wyvern Dual Frost Core. Thick white frost raced across the steel blade, dropping the air temperature to a bitter, biting chill.

Evren stepped past the lead guardian’s lowered scythe and swung the cleaver in a clean, horizontal arc straight into its exposed neck.

CLANG-SHATTER!

The sub-zero edge bit through the black carapace like glass.

The cryogenic frost exploded into the wound, instantly freezing the creature’s purple blood and internal organs into brittle crystalline ice.

Before the monster could even let out a death cry, Evren unleashed a roaring arc of Heavenly Lightning from his left hand, driving the electric shockwave straight through the frozen wound.

KABOOM!

The electrical burst detonated inside the frozen husk. The lead guardian shattered into thousands of gray chunks, dissolving into wisps of ash before the pieces even hit the floor.

A glowing, fist-sized Level 82 Void Core tumbled out of the ash, clattering against the rock.

The fourth guardian, still pinned by the heavy gravity, let out a desperate, rattling hiss. It forced its remaining scythe upward, trying to skewer Evren through the stomach.

Without much effort, Evren caught the flat of the vibrating blade with his left hand, completely halting its momentum with raw physical strength. Then with his right hand, he reversed his grip on the Frost-Bane Cleaver and drove the steel point straight down through the center of the monster’s skull.

CRACK!

Blue lightning and white frost shot through the blade, shattering the monster’s head in a bright flash.

The monster went limp, its massive body collapsing into a heap of gray ash within three seconds, leaving another Level 82 core resting on the stone.

Evren exhaled a plume of cold white mist, lowering his blade.

Beside him, Amber and Zephyra wiped the dark slime from their weapons, stepping up to his flanks.

"All four down," Amber said, her breath slightly elevated.

Evren immediately checked the screen of his tactical wrist-pad.

The red numbers were blinking with frantic urgency:

[COUNTDOWN TO SSS-RANK EMERGENCE: 00:08:15]

Eight minutes left.

Evren looked up at the curved cavern wall.

Forty translucent purple pods were still hanging twenty to thirty feet up, suspended by thick, glowing bio-cables that pumped mana straight toward the massive cocoon in the center.

"We don’t have time to cut them down one by one," Evren said grimly.

He took a deep breath and drew the Frost-Bane Cleaver back with both hands.

Evren gathered every spark of Heavenly Lightning in his core, channeling the raw high-voltage electricity into the steel until the entire blade glowed with blinding blue light.

The air in the cavern hummed with static electricity, making the hair on their arms stand on end.

"Stand back," Evren warned. ℴℴ𝘮

He swung the cleaver upward in a massive, two-handed horizontal crescent.

ZZZZZZZZ-BOOM!

A seventy-foot arc of crackling blue lightning tore through the air, traveling along the curved rock wall in a sweeping, devastating wave.

The high-voltage lightning sheared straight through every single glowing bio-cable, burning the rubbery tendrils to cinders in less than a second.

SPLASH! SPLASH! SPLASH!

With their support lines severed, all forty resin pods dropped twenty feet from the ceiling, slamming heavily into the cavern floor.

The impact burst the thin, rubbery sacks open.

Dozens of elite hunters spilled out onto the cold stone, coughing violently as they gagged on mouthfuls of purple stasis vapor.

At the front of the pile, Silas Drake pushed himself up onto his hands and knees.

His golden armor was covered in slimy residue, and his face was pale from the intense mana drain. He coughed hoarsely, clutching his throat as his sharp golden eyes darted around the cavern in total confusion.

"What... what happened?" Drake wheezed in a raspy voice. "The land-bridge... the golden beacon..."

"It was an illusion," Evren’s voice cut through the cavern.

Drake flinched, snapping his head up to see Evren standing ten yards away with the Frost-Bane Cleaver resting over his shoulder, flanked by Amber and Zephyra.

Around Evren’s boots lay four smoking piles of gray ash, along with four pristine Level 82 Void Cores.

Drake looked from the ash to the severed cables on the wall, and then to his own trembling hands.

His eyes widened in shock.

He was an S-Rank hunter and the master of the Solar Crown Guild. He understood battlefield situations in a fraction of a second.

The strike force hadn’t been fighting on the bridges at all. They had been trapped in psychic stasis the moment they entered the rift, hanging like cattle while the cocoon fed on their energy.

And Evren had broken free alone.

Drake swallowed hard, a lump forming in his throat. His stubborn pride wanted to find an excuse, but the cold reality in front of him made any excuse impossible.

If Evren hadn’t saved them, every single guild master in this room would have died without ever waking up.

Drake pushed himself up to his feet, leaning on his golden rapier to steady his trembling legs. He looked Evren dead in the eyes and gave him a deep, respectful nod.

"Chairman Evren," Drake said in a steady voice, despite his fatigue. "You pulled forty high-rank hunters back from the grave. Solar Crown owes you a blood debt."

Evren reached into his spatial ring and pulled out several bundles of high-grade mana restoration vials, tossing them toward Drake.

Drake caught them cleanly out of the air.

"Save the gratitude for after we make it back to the capital," Evren replied bluntly. "Drink those potions and get your men in formation. We have less than three minutes."

Drake popped the cork of a vial with his thumb and downed the glowing blue liquid in a single gulp.

He turned around and roared at the groggy hunters struggling on the floor: "Everyone, get on your feet! Form defensive rings right now! Drink your reserves!"

The forty hunters scrambled to their feet. Potions were downed, tower shields were slammed into the bedrock, and spellcasters began chanting protective barrier wards.

Just as the last hunter locked their shield into place, a piercing alarm shrieked from every tactical wrist-pad in the room:

[COUNTDOWN: 00:00:00]

The rhythmic bass thumping inside the six-story cocoon abruptly stopped.

A suffocating, dead silence blanketed the cavern.

Not a single pebble fell. Not a breath was drawn.

Then, a tiny, hairline fracture appeared down the center of the giant obsidian shell.

CRACK.

A blinding pillar of violet light shot out from the crack, piercing through the cavern ceiling and tearing into the sky above.

CRACK! CRACK! CRACK!

Thousands of glowing fissures tore across the six-story cocoon like jagged spiderwebs.

BOOOOOOOOOOM!

The entire shell exploded outward in a cataclysmic dimensional shockwave.

Massive chunks of black carapace the size of boulders flew through the air, smashing into the cavern walls and obliterating stone stalactites.

A hurricane of purple wind swept across the cavern floor, forcing all forty hunters to brace behind their tower shields as their boots skidded back across the stone.

From the smoking crater in the center of the chamber, an enormous, terrifying shadow rose into the air, and four glowing cosmic eyes snapped open in the darkness.