Chapter 267: Ssengnihton

Making a lightning-fast dash forward, Noah closed the distance with the enormous beast. On the move, he instantly pumped blood into both arms at once and, with a full swing, deafeningly clapped his hands right in front of himself.

​The resulting compressed-air wave whistled towards the Dragon. The pulse reached the giant creature but dealt no damage — the powerful stream merely rippled across its massive purple body.

​The Dragon reacted instantly. Its massive maw swung wide open, revealing its insides, which glowed with blinding yellow electricity. In the next split second, a dense beam erupted from its throat straight at Noah with a devastating roar.

​Noah dodged easily, making a sharp leap to the side. The energy stream bit exactly into the spot where he had just been standing, punched through the soil with a crash, and scorched the top layer of earth, simply erasing it to dust.

​At the same time, Iron was already levitating below, right next to the protective rock that hid the crystal source. Even though the entire surrounding area had been completely obliterated, the protective casing itself remained intact and unharmed.

​Iron reached out his hand and launched an anti-resonance pulse. Through the internal scan, he clearly saw how the transparent wave went deeper into the structure and destroyed several internal energy nodes with a crackle. However, this was still not enough.

​Iron immediately realized that to completely sever the connections, he needed to significantly increase the flow. Wasting no time, he immediately delivered a second anti-resonance pulse — many times more powerful and denser than the previous one.

​And suddenly, as soon as the amplified anti-resonance wave tore from his hands, the engineer saw the entire space grow brighter. Iron looked up: several thick, blinding beams were hurtling down straight from the sky, and one of them was blanketing Iron.

​The engineer thrust his hand up, preparing to redirect the beam, but in that same second, he jerked sharply. A savage, twisting pain flared up inside him. Iron broke into a heavy cough, doubled over, and a surging wave of terrible weakness instantly hit his entire body.

​The beam crashed down with a roaring hum right onto the spot where he was. The incredibly powerful energy discharge completely incinerated all the rock at the bottom of the crater. However, the crystal's protective casing withstood this strike as well.

​A millisecond before the catastrophe, Lumon detected the lethal threat and emergency-teleported Iron to a safe distance.

​Iron lay heavily on the ground, struggling to catch his breath and staring into the clouds. With his peripheral vision, he caught another branching lightning bolt hurtling straight at him at an angle. Iron flicked his gaze slightly to the left and then simply, calmly closed his eyes.

​A couple of seconds later he opened them again — but he was no longer lying on the ground. Noah was dragging him on his back, making rapid dashes.

​"Have you completely lost your mind?!" Noah barked, turning his head slightly on the run. "You would have died back there!"

​"I knew you would save me," Iron replied quietly.

​Glancing back on the run, Noah noticed several lightning bolts rapidly catching up to them from behind. He had already raised his hand, intending to throw Iron off his back and turn around to fight.

​Iron, noticing this, quietly said:

​"Don't."

​Noah cast a brief glance at him for a moment and stopped abruptly. The launched lightning bolts whistled over their heads a little further ahead, traced an arc in the air, and turned right back at their faces.

​At that same moment, the claws on the Storm Dragon's wings flared even brighter, and a dense yellow beam formed once again from its wide-open maw.

​"Behind you," Iron warned.

​Noah turned his head slightly back and saw several dense beams.

​Reacting instantly, Noah crouched deep, his posture signaling that he was ready to leap upward. The incoming lightning bolts immediately corrected their trajectory, starting to aim higher. But instead of jumping, in the last split second, Noah planted his foot into the ground and pushed backward with all his might.

​The lightning bolts went up and exploded in the air with a roar, scattering discharges in all directions. And the Dragon's beams burned deep tracks into the soil exactly where Noah had been a second earlier.

​Noah swiveled his head and saw two Guardians, who were already leveling their stances and preparing their sparking spears for a throw.

​"This is pissing me off..." Noah muttered through his teeth.

​Sensing Noah's sharp intent to resume the fight, Iron wrapped his arms tightly around Noah's shoulders to avoid flying off.

​Noah instantly launched himself forward. Ducking under the trajectory of the first flying spear, he raised his sword to strike on the counter, but the spear that had flown past suddenly detonated in midair.

​A powerful electrical blast erupted with a crash, sending discharges in all directions. The powerful wave of current threw both their bodies backward. Noah took the brunt of the hit, was covered in sparking discharges, and crashed hard onto the ground. Iron fell along with him, but in the final split second managed to cover himself with a spatial block, avoiding severe burns.

​A couple of seconds later, Noah heaved himself to his feet. Faint bluish smoke was rising from his clothes and skin. Iron got up after him, dusted off his sleeves, and glanced at the singed fabric:

​"Damn... clothes got dirty again."

​Wasting no time, the Guardians were already running at them. Noah straightened up completely and rushed to meet them, engaging in close combat.

​Iron, meanwhile, instantly collapsed space and materialized right in front of the crystal source's protective rock. However, before he could touch the surface, dozens of thick, blinding beams crashed down on him from directly above.

​Noticing the lethal energy discharge, Iron immediately activated a retreat shift, vanishing from the point of impact. Appearing at a safe distance, he silently watched as a devastating explosion thundered once more at the site of the rift.

​Iron shifted his gaze to the timer, which was counting down the final seconds: 00:59.

​He let out a heavy sigh:

​"Sigh..."

​Iron opened his right palm, and a small circle formed above it.

​Another series of beams immediately tore loose from the sky. He had no strength left to levitate, so Iron maneuvered on the ground, evading the blinding strikes.

​At this time, the small circle on his right palm began to rapidly expand. Without slowing his pace of evasion, Iron opened his left palm — a second identical circle immediately formed on it, which instantly began to grow in size.

​Suddenly, the Storm Dragon roared deafeningly. Such a dense wave of air burst across the area from its roar that Noah, who was still fiercely hacking at the Guardians, was thrown backward, and Iron only barely kept his balance by pressing his feet into the ground. The immaterial Guardians, meanwhile, were completely unaffected.

​Noah quickly regained his footing and continued to draw the Guardians' attention to himself, buying Iron precious seconds.

​The Dragon finished roaring and turned its massive head straight at Iron. The thin cracks all over its scaly body flared with bright crimson light, while the claws on its wings and its maw lit up with blinding yellow electricity. In the next second, a barrage of beams poured out in all directions from its body — straight from the cracks, the wings, and the mouth. Dense energy streams slashed across the entire space, ionizing the air and scorching the soil white.

​Maximum power, Iron thought.

​The world instantly slowed down for him. Iron's eyes flared gray-white. The engineer clearly saw the entire trajectory of the falling beams, the vector structures of the attacks, their phase elements, and time intervals.

​The circles on his palms began to change their shape at breakneck speed: a circle would instantly rebuild into a triangle, then into a hexagon, and collapse back into a circle. Inside their crisp outlines, long lines of formulas and numbers appeared, scrolling in reverse.

​Iron took a deep breath and clapped his palms together in front of him — geometric shapes with spinning symbols swirled around his hands. Immediately after that, he raised his hands up and opened his palms: the resulting geometric structure rapidly expanded, becoming many times larger than ever before.

Iron directed the resulting cluster straight at the beam hurtling toward him. Right in mid-flight, the glowing geometric cluster instantly restructured, taking the shape of a perfect rectangle.

​Flying strictly down the center of the beam, "Ssengnihton" cleaved through the energy stream. Wherever the geometry of the spell passed, the yellow beam instantly fell apart, extinguished, and vanished without a trace.

​Noah, fighting off another swing from a Guardian, caught this with his peripheral vision and froze for a moment, seeing how the stream rushing at Iron was simply being canceled.

​In less than a second, "Ssengnihton" reached the Dragon's snout and smashed into it at full speed. However, upon collision, the Dragon's foggy body didn't scatter in all directions like it did from ordinary physical and energy attacks. Instead, "Ssengnihton" itself spread in all directions across its body and penetrated right inside the figure.

​In the next second, the spell inside restructured into two overlapping decagons, around which a triangle began to spin in a maddening vortex. All the formulas and numbers that had scattered across the Dragon's body began to whistle as they were sucked back into the center of the geometric construct, spinning frantically inside.

​In an instant, nothing was left of the Dragon's massive body except its lifeless legs.

Iron saw that "Ssengnihton" didn't just burn up the form, but also completely obliterated the energy channels feeding into the storm clouds. A rapid chain reaction ran through the remains of the legs, definitively turning them into dead statues.

​Iron immediately collapsed space and materialized below, directly opposite the protected rock. He extended his hand and launched an anti-resonance pulse. The protective casing instantly crumbled into fine dust, revealing the inside.

​In the center lay a multifaceted dark blue crystal with a faint white glow along its sharp edges. Iron picked it up with his fingers and immediately returned to the surface.

​In that same second, the skill's effect ceased. Iron froze: blood flowed from his eyes and mouth, his insides constricted with savage pain, and everything before his eyes spun in a maddening fractal chaos. His legs gave out, and he collapsed to the ground.

​Meanwhile, Noah was still fiercely hacking at the Guardians. Making another quick dash forward to attack, he was already raising his sword for a strike, when suddenly the Guardians right in front of him synchronously lowered their weapons and dissolved without a trace.

​Noah just froze mid-strike with his sword raised. Standing like that for a second, he lowered his blade and returned to his normal stance.

​Noah turned his head and saw Iron lying helplessly on the ground. The clouds in the sky had calmed down by this point — thunderstorms were still sparking, but had become magnitudes weaker.

Making sure there was no threat, Noah calmly walked up to Iron, squatted in front of him, and examined him before asking:

​"What kind of magic was that...?"

​Iron only breathed raggedly, looking at the spinning world before his eyes, and then simply closed his eyes.

​Noah picked up the dark blue crystal from the ground, threw Iron's unconscious body onto his back, and took a step forward.

After walking for a minute, Noah took another step—and in that same instant, he found himself in the middle of a room. Noah froze and looked around in bewilderment until his gaze settled on a small window. It was room five in the hotel.

Noah looked out the window at the view outside for a few more seconds. Then he sighed and laid Iron on the bed. Noah himself sat heavily on a chair and placed the crystal on the table.