Chương 83: When the Author Goes to Edit His Manuscript in Real Life

The blizzard howled violently, tearing through the night at Broken Wind Ravine. From the pitch-black geological rift at the mouth of the ravine, a Dark Colossus, over a hundred meters tall, slowly rose. Its entire body was covered in jagged, purple-black scale armor, six blood-red eyes glowing amid a sea of toxic mist. BOOM! It slammed a massive clawed foot down onto the ground, crushing all five outer layers of the trench's barrier into rubble.

A shockwave of black mana and physical force erupted, sending hundreds of steel shields flying through the air; its Combat Power reading held at 1. 2 BILLION. The ravine's only exit was completely sealed. Behind the legion, the three-thousand-meter granite cliff loomed like an eternal wall with no way through. Lucian ran toward the base of the cliff, his ash-grey cloak snapping in the storm wind. Right behind him, Evelyn hauled a heavy metal crate packed with compressed arcane explosives.

Lucian pulled The Nameless Knight, Volume 2 out of his spatial ring, flipped to chapter forty-five, and jabbed a finger at the crude sketch on the page.

"Right here! Exact coordinates of the ketchup smear I drew when I was a kid!" Evelyn set the metal crate down and drove a geological scanner into the cliff face.

"Solid granite, a hundred fifty meters thick! The mineral vein inside is too dense — a standard detonation needs at least ten minutes to trigger a full chain reaction! The legion out there won't last ten minutes!" Lucian tossed the novel aside. He drew his silver dagger, his dark eyes shifting into a state of absolute, cold focus.

"If reality doesn't have an escape route, I'll carve one that matches the manuscript." Layered Focus: Full activation. Spell Control: 95. 2 BILLION—precision capacity engaged. Read the Fine Print Lv. 1: scanning geological fault lines. Ting! A Unified System v2. 0 notification flashed instantly. [PEAK FUSION: 95. 2 BILLION SPELL CONTROL + TITAN SCRIPT!] Skill: 'Silent Blink' chain-activating 50 times per second! Target: Etching a structural disintegration matrix into a 150-meter-thick cliff. WHOOSH! WHOOSH!

WHOOSH! You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story. Lucian's silhouette vanished from the ground, transforming into a thin, weaving thread of silver light crisscrossing the granite cliff's surface. In under two seconds, he shifted position across space fifty times, driving the tip of his silver dagger into every load-bearing pressure point in the rock, carving thousands of brilliantly glowing Titan Script characters deep into the mountainside.

Evelyn didn't waste a tenth of a second, slamming her palm down on the arcane detonator.

"ACTIVATE!" BOOM! CRACK CRACK CRACK! A pressure explosion erupted from deep within the mountain of stone. The entire hundred-fifty-meter block of granite, its structure disintegrated from within by the Titan characters, collapsed into tens of thousands of fragments, sliding away to either side, revealing a twenty-meter-wide artificial tunnel leading straight through to the safe forest beyond the mountain range. Cold wind rushed in from the forest outside, clearing away the dust and smoke.

A hundred thousand soldiers, on the verge of despair in the trenches, all looked up at once. They saw a three-thousand-meter cliff face just punched through by a ten-year-old boy in the blink of an eye, dawn light streaming through the tunnel, falling across their blood-stained black cloaks. An earth-shaking roar tore out from the front of the ravine. The Dark Colossus swung its massive fifty-meter-long clawed arm through the air, aiming a devastating blow straight at the mouth of the newly opened tunnel. SLASH!

A blinding streak of platinum light tore through the raging blizzard. Astra leapt off a rocky outcrop, launching into the air. Holy mana erupted from the Sun-Slaying Dragon Sword at full output, a platinum wave of blade-force that drove her Combat Power reading into the eighteen-billion range as it cut a straight line across the sky. SLASH! The Colossus's massive fifty-meter arm was severed cleanly at the shoulder joint, dropping to the snow with a BOOM that shook the entire valley.

Black blood boiled and sprayed across the surrounding cliffs. Astra landed lightly on a boulder, reached into her pocket, popped a strawberry candy into her mouth, and turned back.

"Path's clear!" Eleanor stood on a high ridge, sword raised, pointing straight at the tunnel.

"All forces, retreat! Battalions 1 through 15, into the tunnel first! Rearguard, form shield walls in column!" A hundred thousand soldiers snapped out of the nightmare all at once. They raised their shredded shields to cover one another, dragging the wounded, streaming into the artificial tunnel amid choked cries of relief.

"The path to salvation is open!"

"Retreat! Fall back safely!" Eleanor and Lucian stood on either side of the tunnel mouth, their eyes meeting through the storm. No orders needed — Eleanor swung her sword, raising a barrier of holy light to hold back the smaller beasts closing in, while Lucian used Silent Blink over and over, plucking up wounded stragglers and hurling them straight into the tunnel. In under three minutes, more than ninety thousand soldiers, along with every wounded man, had safely crossed through.

Behind them, the Dark Colossus clutched its bleeding black shoulder, dropping to one knee in the snow. Its six blood-red eyes stared straight at Lucian. Its throat suddenly vibrated with low, guttural syllables, spoken in an ancient tongue.

"Khar'ash... Zul... Tartarus..." Lucian, mid-motion pulling the last soldier into the tunnel, froze. That was Supreme Ancient Demonic — the tongue of the Ancient Demon Lord's legions. The monster wasn't a wild beast. It was an ancient biological war machine of the Demon race, abandoned ten thousand years ago. HUMMM... HUMMM... The black mana reactor in the Colossus's chest suddenly swelled to twice its size, turning blood-red.

Its black mana reactor began forcibly compressing its entire available reserve into a single point, preparing to trigger a nuclear-scale self-destruction that would level the entirety of Broken Wind Ravine within the next ten seconds.