Chapter 298: The Day Of Judgment [5]

The twelve-foot demon turned its head toward us, its burning crimson eyes locked onto my position. Fire dripped from the massive, molten iron warhammer held in its clawed grip, scorching the stone floor beneath its feet.

Dammit, I cursed internally, my knuckles turning white around the hilt of Oathstorm.

How am I supposed to kill a creature like this without Administrator Mode?

The sheer strain would knock me completely unconscious the moment it ended, leaving me totally helpless in the middle of a demon invasion.

I didn’t have time to weigh the risks.

"Jin! It’s opening its guard!" Sira barked.

Before I could even shout a warning, Sira blurred forward. She drove her boots off the shattered stone, her twin silver daggers held in a reverse grip as she targeted the exposed joints in the monster’s obsidian neck.

It was a trap.

The demon’s lips curled into a sadistic grin. With speed completely terrifying for its colossal size, it swung the massive, fiery warhammer in a sweeping horizontal arc aimed straight for Sira’s midsection mid-air. The wind pressure alone locked her in place, she couldn’t turn, dodge, or block.

She’s going to get crushed into paste!

[Debug Vision — ACTIVATE!]

World color drained into stark monochrome, revealing the raw code vectors of the demon’s attack trajectory. My mind raced at hyper-speed as I focused on the glowing red line tracing the warhammer’s swing.

[Command: Alter Trajectory Vector -> Offset: +15 Degrees!]

CLACK!

Mid-swing, the warhammer violently shuddered, its trajectory warping upward by a few crucial inches. The molten iron head grazed past Sira’s boot soles, missing her body entirely, and slammed directly into the massive stone support pillar behind her instead.

BOOM!

Exploding masonry showered the landing. Sira tumbled through the air, thrown off by the massive shockwave, but she landed on her feet, gasping for breath as she stared at the shattered pillar in disbelief. She didn’t know what had just happened, she only knew she was still alive.

"Don’t stop!" I roared, surging forward.

While advancing, I snapped my free hand toward her, dragging my virtual interface across her silhouette in my field of vision.

[System Command: Deploy Localized Combat Buffs!]

[Target 1: Self -> STR +20\%, AGI +30\%]

[Target 2: Sira -> AGI +40\%, Reaction Speed +50\%]

Sira’s breath hitched as an unseen wave of energy surged through her limbs. She couldn’t see the translucent system text hovering over her head, but her eyes widened as her muscles suddenly felt infinitely lighter, her perception of time slowing down to a crawl.

We hit the demon together.

Oathstorm flared with dark, crackling lightning as I thrust the blade straight into the demon’s armored knee, while Sira flashed past its flank, her daggers becoming a blur of silver light as she carved deep gouges into its leather-wrapped tendons.

CLANG! CHANK!

Sparks and black blood rained down onto the flagstones. The monster roared in frustration, sweeping its massive arm backward to crush us.

We fought with everything we had, dancing along the edge of death. But despite our forced stat buffs, the gap in raw, fundamental power was a mountain we couldn’t cross.

The demon’s obsidian hide was simply too thick; our blades barely penetrated an inch deep before hitting dense, magic-resistant muscle. Every swing of its hammer sent concussive shockwaves that rattled our internal organs and cracked the floorboards beneath us.

Minutes of non-stop, desperate combat wore us down to the bone.

My chest heaved, hot blood trickling down from a cut on my hairline into my eye.

[Warning: Mana Reserve Critical!]

[MP: 42 / 1,650]

Shit. I was running completely on empty. The dark lightning dancing along Oathstorm was flickering out, sputtering like a dying candle.

"Jin! Look out—!" Sira screamed.

The demon suddenly slammed its foot into the floor, detonating a radial wave of hellfire.

The fiery explosion blasted me backward, slamming my back hard against the stone wall. Oathstorm slipped from my numbed grip, clattering across the floorboards. I coughed up a mouthful of blood, my vision swimming as I struggled to push myself up.

Sira tried to dive away from the flame blast, but her foot caught on a piece of jagged rubble.

In that split second of vulnerability, the demon didn’t use its hammer. It whipped its massive, spiked tail around like a iron siege cable.

CRACK!

A sickening, horrifying sound echoed through the ruined hall, the sound of shattering bones and crushed metal armor.

The blow caught Sira square in the ribcage. Her body was violently catapulted sideways across the entire length of the landing. She hit the far wall with a brutal, dead-weight impact before slumping limply into a heap of rubble.

"SIRA!" I screamed, forcing my battered legs to move.

I scrambled across the blood-stained stone, throwing myself down on my knees beside her.

"Sira... Sira, hey!"

She didn’t answer. Her twin daggers had fallen from her hands. Her pale face was caked in grey stone dust and crimson, her head resting awkwardly against the shattered wall at an unnatural angle.

I reached out, my trembling, blood-stained fingers pressing desperately against the cold skin of her neck.

No pulse.

I stared at her chest. It didn’t rise. It didn’t fall.

She wasn’t breathing.

The ambient noise of the battle instantly dissolved into total, absolute silence.

Something deep inside my chest, something held together by logic, calculations, and cold survival instincts... violently snapped into a thousand sharp pieces.

A suffocating, icy heat flooded my veins. The air in my lungs turned to pure glass.

Slowly, I stood up.

The world before my eyes lost all its color, washing out into a pitch-black canvas filled with jagged, bleeding red code.

The massive hammer demon turned toward me, letting out a low, guttural chuckle as it raised its fiery warhammer to crush me into dust alongside her.

"To hell with the backlash."

I reached deep into the core architecture of the System, grabbing the locked admin seal, and ruthlessly tore it to shreds.

A blinding, violent wave of distorted, pitch-black static erupted from my body, blowing the surrounding stone debris outward.

[ADMINISTRATOR MODE: ACTIVE]

[TIME REMAINING: 05:00]

I lifted my head, my eyes glowing with a terrifying, pitch-black light as I locked my gaze onto the demon.

"Your five minutes start now."