「Two days later.」
In the Meditation Room, Allen was pushing his Spiritual Power to the limit.
[WARNING: HIGH-PRIORITY ALERT]
[EXTREME MAGIC POWER ERUPTION DETECTED 800 KILOMETERS AWAY. PEAK VALUE EXCEEDS DETECTOR THRESHOLD.]
Jarvis’s voice suddenly interrupted the intense session in the Meditation Room.
Allen’s eyes snapped open.
His consciousness instantly pulled out of his Sea of Spirit and took control of the Demon Eye node deployed at the very front.
The feed came through.
The battlefield, where fighting had raged for ten days, was now completely unrecognizable.
What was once a flat wasteland had been violently carved into a massive basin over thirty kilometers in diameter. The earth’s crust, repeatedly melted by extreme temperatures, now had the dark red, glassy sheen of obsidian.
Both behemoths had taken heavy damage.
Large sections of armor on the chest of the three-hundred-meter-tall Giant Humanoid Golem had broken off, revealing the complex Magic Power circuits within.
Its opponent, the Rock Armor Earth Dragon Emperor, was in even worse shape.
Seventy percent of its thick, dark-gold scales were shattered, and a massive, bone-deep scorch mark stretched from its neck to its abdomen. Scalding, dark-red blood gushed down, drenching the earth like a waterfall.
This clash of titans was finally approaching its endgame.
The Giant Golem’s three main Magic Power cores went into overload simultaneously.
A piercing, sizzling sound tore through space, filling even the communication network of the Demon Eye over a hundred kilometers away with static.
An endless torrent of electrical arcs converged and compressed furiously between the Golem’s hands.
This time, it wasn’t a lightning spear.
It was a high-density plasma sphere, compressed to the point it was nearly solid.
It started at only ten meters in diameter, but in less than a second, it ballooned to a hundred meters.
Its blinding blue-white light made it look like a star that had been dragged down to the mortal world.
The space around it began to visibly distort from the terrifying energy.
The Golem thrust its arms forward.
The plasma sphere vanished.
There was no visible trajectory, no sound of it cleaving the air. Wielding enough energy to annihilate everything, it materialized directly above the head of the Rock Armor Earth Dragon Emperor!
BOOM—
The Demon Eye’s feed was instantly whited out.
Even from a thousand kilometers away, Allen could still clearly see a new, blazing sun rising on the horizon.
The light consumed everything.
The ground for tens of kilometers was instantly vaporized. Rampant electrical arcs, like countless furious serpents, ravaged the scorched earth, turning the entire basin into a true lightning-scarred Hell.
A full minute passed.
The intense light finally began to subside, and the Demon Eye’s optical sensors captured an image once more.
The Rock Armor Earth Dragon Emperor had fallen.
Its massive body had been completely devastated by that last blow. Half of it was charred black, and it lay motionless at the bottom of the crater, its chest no longer rising or falling.
[SCAN COMPLETE. TARGET MAGIC POWER READING: 1200. LIFE SIGNS: ABSENT.]
Allen leaned back in his chair and let out a long breath.
The regional boss’s health bar was finally empty.
’My mentor’s Golem is tough as nails. A single machine just wore down and killed a Morning Star-class Magical Beast on its own.’
"Jarvis, re-evaluate the defensive pressure on the western front," Allen commanded.
Now that the greatest threat had been dealt with, once this Giant Golem had a moment to recover, the remaining beast horde to the west would be little more than a mopping-up operation.
His production lines, which had been pushed to the breaking point, could finally get a breather.
[IMPORTING LATEST PARAMETERS. RECALCULATING...]
Jarvis’s voice suddenly faltered.
[WARNING! ABNORMAL HIGH-ENERGY REACTION DETECTED IN TARGET AREA! ENERGY SIGNATURE: UNKNOWN!]
Allen shot upright, his eyes glued to the projection.
At the bottom of the crater.
The carcass, which should have been completely dead, twitched.
A thick black mist erupted from the Dragon Emperor’s shattered husk. The mist, seeming to have a life of its own, rapidly wove and coiled together, forcibly filling in the missing half of its body.
The black mist solidified into twisted flesh tendrils and sharp bone spurs.
With a bizarre posture that defied all logic, the Dragon Emperor slowly got back on its feet.
Only half of its skull remained. Within its ruined eye sockets, two clumps of ghastly green soulfire ignited.
Allen’s eyes narrowed.
’A second phase? Health-lock and a revive?!’
The tide of battle turned in an instant.
The Giant Golem’s world-ending attack had completely drained its energy reserves.
[DEMON EYE SCAN CONFIRMS: MAGIC POWER LEVELS OF THE IRON STAR 6TH LEGION’S CORE UNIT HAVE DROPPED BY EIGHTY-SEVEN PERCENT.]
The Golem tried to create some distance.
But after its Corpse Transformation, the Dragon Emperor was somehow even more terrifyingly fast than when it was alive.
Its massive body floated into the air, defying gravity, and shot forward like a black meteorite, crashing violently into the Golem.
CRASH!
Amid the thunderous impact, the Golem was sent flying for several kilometers, crashing hard into the earth.
The Dragon Emperor lunged, forgoing any Magic-like abilities. Its giant claws, wreathed in black mist, began to furiously shred the Golem’s already damaged armor.
Sparks flew. The shriek of twisting, breaking metal echoed across the wasteland.
Even its high-grade self-repairing metal was rapidly corroded into useless slag by the abyssal energy infused within the black mist.
Half of the Golem’s body was about to be ripped to shreds.
Allen’s fingers dug into the tabletop, his knuckles turning white.
If this Golem was completely destroyed here, and that monster turned east, Zone 18 wouldn’t be able to withstand a single one of its attacks.
’Even if I threw all five of my legions at it and emptied my entire stock of Red Lotus missiles, they’d just be glorified cannon fodder.’
’Mentor, this thing is off the charts. You’d better have something up your sleeve,’ Allen thought, taking a deep breath to suppress the frantic beating of his heart.
Just as the Dragon Emperor raised its claws of black mist high, preparing to drive them through the Golem’s chest...
The sky lit up.
Allen instinctively looked up, and the Demon Eye swiveled toward the same direction—to the heavens, far higher than even its own vantage point.
Far, far above, near the edge of the planar crystal wall...
A dazzling Morning Star seemed to burst into brilliant light.
There was no deafening roar, no telltale gathering of energy.
A pillar of incandescent white light, over fifty meters in diameter, crashed down from beyond the sky like a stroke of Divine Punishment.
Its speed surpassed the limits of sight and thought.
The pillar of light struck the Dragon Emperor’s head with unerring precision.
Or rather, it pierced through it.
There was no explosion, no extraneous discharge of energy.
It was pure annihilation.
The fifty-meter-wide beam of light instantly vaporized half of the Dragon Emperor’s head, cleanly evaporating its brain, bones, and soulfire into nothingness.
Its momentum undiminished, the beam bored deep into the earth, leaving behind a perfectly straight, bottomless hole with edges as smooth as glass.
The Dragon Emperor’s massive body froze in place.
The black mist that animated it began to dissipate like snow under a blazing sun.
「A few seconds later.」
The unsupported mountain of flesh collapsed with a thunderous crash.
This time, it was well and truly dead.
The battered Giant Golem slumped on the ground, falling silent as well.
Deathly silence filled the control room.
Allen stared at the holographic screen, speechless for a long time.
For the first time, he understood the true meaning of a "dimensionality-reduction strike."
’A space-based weapon!!!’
’A genuine orbital strike!’
’His Golem Legion, the tactical system he had devised and perfected day and night... before that pillar of light from the heavens, it wouldn’t last a single second before being turned to dust.’
’Is this the power that reigns above the very heavens? Is this the confidence that allows High-tier Wizards to look down upon all mortals?’
"Jarvis," Allen said, his voice a little hoarse as he broke the silence.
[Here, Commander.]
"Did you record the energy level of that beam of light?"
[RECORDED. INSTANTANEOUS POWER OUTPUT EXCEEDED THE MAXIMUM THRESHOLD OF CURRENT DETECTORS; A SPECIFIC VALUE CANNOT BE GIVEN. HOWEVER, BASED ON THE DESTRUCTION RADIUS AND THE RATE OF MATTER ANNIHILATION, IT IS ESTIMATED TO BE SEVERAL TIMES GREATER THAN A MAGIC POWER READING OF 12,000.]
’Several times greater.’
Allen closed his eyes, as if he could feel the sheer might of that magnificent power crashing down on him.