Chương 279

"Support those you can reach!" Esmeralda yelled as she leaped, her rapier already drawing blood from an augmented soldier who was attempting to blindside Erethemor. Verner fanned out to the right, casting arcane darts that punched through the advancing guards' helmets. Orion ignored the wider skirmish, his eyes locked on Jordan. His friend was fighting a desperate, retreating duel near the ruins of the eastern gate. Dozens of cuts scored his armor, and places were scorched black.

Worse, his Light flickered, struggling against the Silence fog. Yet, through it all, he still endured, never letting his enemy gain on him or box him in. The thing he was fighting was unlike anything Orion had ever seen. Unlike many of its brethren, it was built like a sleek, silver hound walking on two legs, wielding twin curved blades that sprouted directly from its forearms. It moved with liquid grace, seemingly entirely alien to the mechanical limitations typical of Iron State engineering.

As he closed in, Orion pushed mana into his adamantine frame. The Silence fought the scan, throwing intermittent static across his vision, but he forced the connection through with raw mental focus, which was easier out here. Iron State Prototype - Code: Mage-Killer Class: [High-Assassin Construct] [B-rank] Level: 148 Mind: 310 Attunement: 0 Body: 1. 325 Traits: [Silence-Alloy Chassis] [A-rank]; [Adaptive Combat Module] [B-rank]; [Kinetic Deflection] [B-rank] What in the blazing hells is that thing?

Beyond its high level, the Mage-Killer possessed several traits that set it apart from every other machine. First, it had zero Attunement. Orion hadn't even known that was possible, since everything in this world seemed to have at least a loose reflection in the Field, but it had none. Given its name, there is a likely explanation. It was deliberately built that way, designed so that nothing about it could be sensed. A weapon crafted specifically to kill Cyril's mages. Then there was its insane Body Score.

That would have been worth noticing even in a tier-four being, but for a tier-three… And lastly, its first Trait. [Silence-Alloy Chassis] was [A-rank], and while he would have liked to dismiss it as merely another iteration of the regular armor worn by the Iron State, he knew he wasn't that lucky. Jordan blocked a sweeping strike, bringing his sword up in a desperate parry.

The moment the silver blades touched his sword, the holy aura clinging to the steel sputtered and died, devoured by the metal itself, and Orion knew he was right. The impact rang out like a bell, hurling the Paladin back several feet. Orion triggered his kinetic skates, launching himself across the courtyard. As he closed the distance, his attention was caught by a figure standing fifty feet behind the duel.

A man in a pristine crimson coat, cut to mimic Uther's style, stood atop the flatbed of a treaded transport vehicle, rising above the chaos. Dark goggles rested on his forehead, and he held a brass tablet, calmly tapping its surface with a silver stylus. He looked remarkably out of place amid the grime and violence, and when their eyes met for the briefest moment, no sneers or shouted battle cries followed. He merely observed the battlefield with the detached curiosity of a researcher evaluating a trial.

"Apprentice Ketor's logs: must adjust the gyroscopic stabilizers on the Mage-Killer by three degrees," his voice projected across the courtyard, devoid of emotion. It was almost mechanical, yet he seemed wholly human.

"The Paladin's aura is compensating for the lateral strikes. Note for the next iteration: increase kinetic absorption in the primary knee joints to punish blocks." Orion hit the ground, sliding, and threw his hands forward. As he moved, he built a gravity well and unleashed it directly beneath the silver machine's feet, intending to crush its mobility and give Jordan room to breathe. As expected, the gravity increased severalfold, and the concrete spiderwebbed beneath the machine.

It even stuttered for a second, but then a series of internal gears whined, and its posture shifted. It recalibrated its balance to account for the increased gravitational pull, using the extreme weight to anchor an upward-spinning kick that nearly decapitated Jordan. Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings. Orion cursed, dropping the well and establishing a repelling vector to push his friend out of the blade's path.

"Fascinating," Kethor observed, his stylus moving rapidly across his tablet.

"As the master predicted, I can see spatial distortion beyond what your level would suggest. Prototype, compensate the gyros. Note: the gravitational manipulation puts extreme stress on the chassis, but the structural integration holds. Hmm, yes, a commendable result."

"It's too damn fast, and its armor is stronger than other machines," Jordan gasped, falling back to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Orion. Blood trickled from a deep cut on his cheek, and his eyes were unfocused from the last blow.

"Every time I meet its blade, I feel the Light being drained away."

"Try to build up a charge," Orion said, his mind racing.

"I will handle its armor." As the Mage-Killer lunged, he met it with the Barrage doctrine. Here in the open, even in the fog, he had little trouble conjuring two dozen gravity bullets and unleashing them in a rapid wave. The impacts sounded like a high-caliber machine gun hitting a steel wall, and thanks to his tracking algorithm, the bullets struck its chest, shoulders, and legs. Yet the Mage-Killer danced through the onslaught.

The bullets simply sparked against the sleek silver armor, bleeding their force into the metal without leaving a single dent, and Orion realized that the [Kinetic Deflection] trait was mitigating the damage too much, distributing the force across its entire chassis.

"As expected, even above-standard kinetic strikes are yielding a zero percent penetration rate," Kethor muttered, tilting his head slightly.

"The alloy's tensile strength is exceeding projections." Orion gritted his teeth. If blunt force failed, he would have to use something a bit more specialized. He began to shape [Null Light], his hands glowing with the pitch-black beam rimmed in stark white.

"I need a clear shot to its chest!" he murmured. Jordan nodded tightly, abandoning his defensive stance. He leaped forward, launching a reckless assault and unleashing great waves of light. The Mage-Killer easily sidestepped the first two blows and the follow-up, bringing its forearm blades down in a lethal scissor strike aimed at Jordan's neck. Jordan raised his holy steel pauldron and tanked the hit.

Orion saw the blades bite deep into the armor and into his flesh, but before they could go any deeper, Jordan twisted his body, locking the machine's weapons between his collarbone and his sword hilt.

"Now!" He roared, holding the struggling construct in place. Orion fired [Null Light]. Dark light struck the machine directly in its chest plate. Orion expected the silver metal to disintegrate into subatomic dust, like the Troll Shaman and all other Iron State constructs. Instead, the spell scattered. The beam struck true but dissipated, refracting across the sleek silver surface in a spiderweb of harmless gray rays. Orion could only stare in shock.

The energy drain left his arms trembling, but it was the visual feedback that paralyzed his mind. He had seen the spell shatter on contact, its arcane structure shredded by the metal's mysterious properties. The Silence wasn't a coating, as he'd expected. No reactive gas pocket released on contact, nor was a chemical wash applied to the steel. The Silence was the metal. This Kethor had forged a true alloy. He had somehow melted the alchemical devourer of magic directly into the steel and made it stable.

The man tapped his stylus on his tablet, producing an irritating click that was somehow audible even above the roars of battle.

"A perfect integration, just as I expected," he said with a note of genuine academic pride.

"I admit the erasure spell was surprising, but I can see it relies on breaking the target's fundamental structure, and the new alloy lacks the standard magical bonds that can be broken. It is a purely physical compound of steel and Silence, after all. Truly, I am the best of master's apprentices." Who the hell even takes the time to compliment themselves at a moment like this? The thought was faintly hysterical, but Orion couldn't help it.

He'd known[Null Light]'s efficacy would be diminished by his lack of true understanding of the alloy's nature, but it should have done more. The Mage-Killer wrenched its blades free from Jordan's shoulder, sending blood spurting out and delivering a front kick that sent him tumbling across the cracked asphalt. It then turned its glowing optical slit toward Orion, its twin blades vibrating with a deadly hum. He stepped back, his chest heaving. A perfect integration.

Kethor's words echoed in his mind, stripping away panic and leaving only cold, hard logic. It was clear that the man—if he was a man—was treating the entire battle as little more than a field test. Somehow, he had crafted an alloy that even Cyril's best alchemists had deemed impossible. Given that Uther hadn't worn anything like it, Orion had been inclined to believe them, but now he could see the truth starkly.

Somehow, he managed to meld two concepts that should not have been able to merge, much less stabilize enough to build armor from the result. He knew he couldn't let Kethor live. The secret had to die with him, and as soon as possible. But how? The Mage-Killer is insurmountable, not to mention what Kethor is capable of. What did he know? What could he do? Almost unbidden, his mind drifted to his most powerful spell. If there was a time to use it, it was now. But just as he was about to, another realization came.

Throughout his progression, he had used the two powers that made it possible as separate tools in the same toolbox. He used light to blind and burn while gravity crushed. Even when he formed [Gamma Ray], he did so by creating a narrow tube of gravity and forcing the light through it, applying immense pressure to the spell structure, merely mimicking a portion of the true Roar of Creation. It was a hammer and an anvil. Two separate things interacting and working together to make a new whole.

What he really needed to reach the next level was an alloy. He needed perfect integration. Even as the Mage-Killer stalked closer and Jordan struggled to get back in position, he closed his eyes, ignoring the screeching metal and the roar of Erethemor's fire. He reached into the deepest parts of the CC and pulled up the fragmented data he had recorded during Uther's clash with the High Priestess. One thing, at least, was easy to make out.

The Holographic Principle, the concept that the 3D volume of a space was entirely encoded on its 2D boundary. Light was a wave. Photons lacked rest mass but carried momentum, and general relativity dictated that gravity curved the spacetime they traveled through. If he created a gravitational well steep enough, he could compress the wavelength of the light trapped inside it. As space contracted, the photons' frequency would skyrocket, blue-shifting the spectrum until it pushed into extreme radiation.

But doing so conventionally required too much mana, and the Silence alloy would simply dissipate the energy upon impact. He stopped trying to manipulate the light along with the gravity. Are they not merely facets of the same tesseract that is reality? When he opened his eyes, he brought his palms together, leaving a gap exactly two inches wide. Between his palms, he created a micro-singularity. A gravity well so infinitely steep and so utterly dense that it formed a microscopic event horizon.

The space between his hands warped as the courtyard's light bent into a swirling, distorted halo around his fingers. There was no need for him to do more. Physics provided. With what had to be a mad grin, he applied the fraction of Uther's conceptual imposition he had managed to decipher. He used the immense gravity to rewrite the informational boundary of the space the light occupied. He forced the two distinct concepts—the curvature of spacetime and the photon's frequency—to occupy the same systemic data point.

It was almost akin to the Crystal Refraction, but more refined, more True. The spell came together.