Chương 315: Ignis 7

Navigating the deeper levels of Ignis-7 wasn't a stealth mission in the traditional sense. It felt more like swimming through the exhaust pipe of an active dreadnought. Core-Blight, the demonic capital built directly beneath the planet's primary volcanic vent, completely abandoned the concept of architecture. It was purely mechanical.

The descent from the staging camp took my Echo three hours of precise, nauseating spatial slips to avoid the overlapping Essence, thermal and gravitational sensors baked into the bedrock. What I found waiting at the bottom was a civilization optimized for singular, unending extraction. The cavern spanned roughly thirty miles across, illuminated exclusively by the sickly orange glow of thousands of open magma canals channeling the world's blood toward a central collection hub.

Millions of laborers swarmed the slag heaps. Hiding inside the shadow of a massive processing tank, I let the [Nullifying Veil] thin out by a fraction of a percent to allow me to draw in more sensory data. I expected chaos. I assumed a demonic hierarchy would operate as a brutal, bloody free-for-all, much like the disparate territories on Wahash. It was surprisingly peaceful. A high Tier 5 overseer holding a molten whip strode past my hiding spot without checking his flanks. There was no paranoia in his posture.

He didn't need it. I swept my [Void-Lattice Perception] across the district. The revelation settled like cold lead in my stomach. The demons weren't fighting each other because they possessed an ironclad, culturally programmed caste system built upon the absolute subjugation of anyone who wasn't a demon. The frail, ashen humanoids — which I discovered were the actual native Integration candidates of Ignis-7 — did every scrap of manual labor.

If a demon needed a task completed, they didn't bargain with a rival or assassinate a superior; they just burned another thousand slaves to ash to meet the quota. The Kyorian Empire we fought previously was a tangled web of arrogant Founding Houses desperately plotting civil war against each other. House Vorr hated House Lyras more than they cared about winning. The Cinder Throne, however, operated as a completely unified engine. Their xenophobia created an unbreakable internal harmony.

They were a stabilized front line. I observed the continuous, rhythmic docking of heavily armored barges loading compressed reality-shards directly into containment silos near the cavern's center. I sat back against the hot iron of the tank and finally let the economics of the Great Crucible snap into focus. The Prime System wasn't just throwing these ten worlds together to find a strong planetary champion out of morbid curiosity. The winner of a Crucible didn't just survive.

They absorbed the consolidated rights, unmined geographic resources, and base dimensional authorities of the nine worlds they conquered. A fledgling, terrified human settlement winning the Crucible would view the reward as a lifeline. A fully industrialized, ancient interstellar empire treating the Integration Phase like a corporate loophole viewed that same reward as the largest hostile takeover in the cosmos. They shattered their way into the nursery while the walls were forming.

If Malacor cleared his local Tower and subsequently wiped us out when the quarantine Veils dropped, the Cinder Throne wouldn't just take Ferra. They would receive all the benefits from the direct System-sanctioned dividends meant to help the newly integrated. It was brilliant. It was systemic cheating. And it would have been easy to ignore right up until the moment it required killing my friends and family to complete the transaction. I pushed the Echo away from the holding tanks, moving closer to the epicenter.

I needed to see the architect. Malacor's command post was suspended over the absolute center of the main magma vent — a dark-metal hexahedron hanging on immense, mana-forged chains. Navigating the interior was a delicate process. Elite guard units — solidly mid Tier 6 — lined the obsidian corridors. Their auras possessed the raw, physical heaviness of an orbital strike. But there were no alarms. No detection wards or any traps for that matter.

As I slipped cleanly between a pair of guards blocking a set of colossal bronze doors, the strings of reality running through my vision offered an explicit confirmation of a reassuring theory. There was an absolute ceiling here, just like on Ferra. The Prime System maintained one ironclad law to ensure its bloody sandboxes actually produced fighting results instead of simple slaughters: Ascendants couldn't cross the Veil until the Century Veil concluded. I didn't sense a single conceptual thread above Tier 8.

Whatever Empire sponsored the Cinder Throne, they had been forced to leave their god-tier leadership on the outside. Malacor was the maximum permitted threat. I stepped into the primary war room. It was wide, utterly silent, and devoid of the choking smog dominating the rest of the planet. Malacor stood before an intricate, holographic rendering of Sector Z-99. He didn't look like the brutish monster I expected. He possessed an unsettling, predatory elegance.

Standing perhaps nine feet tall, he wore segmented charcoal armor over charcoal skin. His horns swept back tightly against his skull like a crown. There was no fire blazing from his body. Instead, he consumed the ambient light. The very concept of heat within the room gravitated slowly toward him, dying instantly as it met his armor. He was also the absolute peak of Tier 8 with a solid foundation that I could barely perceive even through the Lattice.

I let my Echo rest in the corner, thoroughly calculating the risk of tripping a failsafe. Did he possess an Ascendant's scrying tool tucked inside his inventory? Would analyzing his timeline immediately alert whatever higher power stood behind him? The math said my upgraded stealth metrics, fortified heavily by Sylvaris' harmonic logic, should be conceptually denser than his defensive output.

I inhaled deeply inside the sterile Sanctum back on Ferra, forcing the Void around my real heart to stabilize, and pushed the intent across the tether to the clone on Ignis-7. I isolated the causal thread encompassing the throne room. [Glimpse of a Path.] The physical world halted. The colors muted into shades of grey. In the simulation, I dropped the Veil entirely.

I manifested the most densely packed, condensed dagger of localized [Entropy] the Echo could safely render without severing my neural link, aimed purely for Malacor's primary mana circulation node at the base of his skull. If you stumble upon this tale on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it. I struck precisely to kill. The moment the dagger pierced his skin by a millimeter, the simulation aggressively warped.

A sort of automated defense sub-routine flared — the literal air occupying the space ten feet around his body instantly transmuted into absolute zero friction. The concept of kinetic momentum failed entirely. My arm slowed. The blade hit a barrier of pure null-space. Malacor slowly turned his head. His eyes, burning white, met mine within the halted timeframe. He manifested a scythe with the condensed weight of a star and swung backward.

My clone held for a few seconds, but its weaker Domain and overwhelmed Authority couldn't match a proper half step Ascendant with a strange powerful artifact. The simulated Echo was vaporized, collapsing my localized timeline branch back into safety before the backlash traveled through the lattice. I gasped softly in the true timeline, leaning heavily against the wall as the subjective color bled back into reality. My clone was still veiled, safely hidden in the corner, entirely untouched.

Malacor hadn't shifted an inch, still idly manipulating his war table, unaware of the simulated murder attempt. The cold terror usually associated with an entity detecting me was absent. Instead, an absolute, analytical clarity washed over my mind. I measured his counter-measure. He relied heavily on passive, automated spatial manipulation. His strike speed was formidable, but his wind-up was linear. If this was a surprise duel on an empty battlefield without heavy terrain disadvantages, it would be dangerous.

But standing within my completed, highly tuned [Domain of the Ashen Phoenix] backed by the combined predetermined knowledge from a glimpse and whatever countermeasures Leoric could come up with… I rubbed my chin inside my protective shadow. The System hadn't dealt an unwinnable hand. He was merely a mathematical problem lacking variety. He possessed high damage and brutal sustain, but we could defeat him and his army. It wouldn't require a universe-breaking gamble; it simply required preparation.

I set the Echo's internal programming parameters, switching it from active manual control to a passive observer. It would stay wedged securely inside the shadows of the command bunker, passively siphoning logistical timetables, troop movements, and mapping the interior vault codes until the moment we dropped in for real.

"Going dark," I muttered softly across the empty space. I completely severed my direct tether connection to the primary pilot seat of the proxy. My consciousness slammed backwards at relativistic speeds, plunging violently through the tearing scabs of ancient fast-travel physics, until I gasped and slammed my hands down flat on the heavy oak desk of the War Room back in Bastion. Cold, clean, climate-controlled air filled my lungs.

I hacked twice, convinced the phantom smell of ash remained coated along my throat, before grabbing the cup of water left near my notes and draining it. Jeeves manifested from a sliver of darkness near the main door, his eyes evaluating my heart rate immediately. Lucas and Anna were pacing on the far side of the room, entirely clad in combat gear out of sheer anxious habit.

"Neurological load registering nominal levels," the Seneschal confirmed smoothly, gliding forward.

"Did the host greet you with sufficient courtesy, Master?"

"They run a tidy house, provided you aren't allergic to local slavery," I croaked out, standing and working a painful knot out of my right shoulder. I quickly laid out the logistical framework of Ignis-7 to the small war council. The absolute nature of the Cinder Throne's intent. The scale of the work camps. And, most importantly, the confirmed limits of Malacor's Tier 8 threshold.

"An entire organized army possessing stable lines of communication," Lucas rubbed a hand tiredly over his stubbled face.

"Our overlapping shields will comfortably deflect anything below Tier 8 indefinitely. But if they mass coordinate ten thousand simultaneous bombardment spells focused specifically against our regional power grids while throwing raw slave bodies onto the physical barriers to exhaust our secondary mana cores…"

"It will crack our planetary line within a week, even with Dweorg reinforcement protocols operating at maximum output," Leoric agreed from his side console, running swift, unpleasant data trajectories.

"The fundamental issue is the broader empire behind them," Anna noted sharply, crossing her arms. She looked profoundly unhappy.

"Even if Malacor is completely within your grasp, what stops their people outside the Veil from funneling millions of reinforcement potions, Siege Breakers, and spatial artillery just prior to the war opening? It's a proxy war for them." The table grew silent. We had essentially maximized our local, domestic infrastructure. But geopolitics at this scale usually involved networking.

"The logical diplomatic pivot involves approaching the Chorus," Jeeves pointed out cleanly.

"The enigmatic representative known as Altaier from the Grand Concourse possesses an inherent interest in establishing lucrative investments on functional integration spheres. Revealing our strategic insight regarding the Cinder Throne to them might trigger protective oversight or material backing to counter outside imperial interference."

"No." I flatly vetoed the option, shaking my head violently. Calling down Tier 11 and higher investors simply to swat a local demonic incursion was like releasing a shark in a bathtub to take care of a spider.

"If we alert Altaier to the existence of an illegal forward operating base immediately, we admit the current hand exceeds our local administrative control. Sponsors don't help fledgling worlds out of kindness; they help out of investment certainty," I tapped the table hard for emphasis.

"The absolute minute the Chorus realizes the system failed to lock out imperial proxy networks correctly, their price for bailing us out shoots through the literal stratosphere. We don't contact them unless our walls have a risk of actually failing."

"Then we lack essential data entirely on this Empire," Anna sighed heavily.

"You don't formulate a counter-strategy relying strictly on assumptions, Eren."

"Then I seek a friendlier, heavily disconnected library," I concluded firmly. I triggered the localized communication array anchored firmly onto the War Room table, opening a high-end conceptual frequency directly to the Ascendant hub located deep off-planet. The console hummed heavily, attempting a multi-dimensional ping, before an imposing projection made entirely of serene, heavily shifting azure water formed lazily over the projector.

Borvo, the colossal World-Soul managing the Zenith, didn't appear fully corporeal through a casual line.

"Eren," Borvo's deep, ambient resonance filled the heavily insulated room, smelling momentarily of ancient oceans.

"A rare check-in. The academy instructors I supplied for your project continue to report astounding, slightly terrifying returns on their investments. Does Bastion finally require external real estate expansion?"

"It requires gossip, actually," I replied, adopting a highly casual stance to maintain a bargaining position.

"I am attempting a broader geographical scan. Sector records pertaining to an entity known as the 'Cinder Throne.' Do you happen to know anything?" The oceanic form shifted thoughtfully. The sound of distant animals briefly distorted the link.

"The Zenith network maintains explicit, systemic blindness toward heavily quarantined Integration coordinates," Borvo rumbled politely but firmly.

"Furthermore, the outer-fringe demonic alliances function under dozens of obscure sub-brands. They are notably unreliable clients. My information involving the Cinder Throne's tactical tendencies would amount largely to rumor mongering gathered by heavily drunk mercenary bands centuries ago. Apologies, young Walker."

"Appreciate the clarity regardless, Borvo. Hope to see you soon." I cut the projection link abruptly before he asked invasive questions regarding exactly why I sought the data. I stood in silence for several seconds considering my available options.

"Where do we source reliable, system-spanning logistical rumor without owing heavy political favors to gods?" Lucas asked simply.

"From an equally established faction with a massive underground network spanning six star-systems that is friendly to us," I stated, walking over to secure my bracers. A profound, tired nostalgia unexpectedly curled around my heart. The memory of cold Void and heavy gravity. I reached into my Armory and procured a specialized tuning-fork composed of pink, heavy null-glass.

"You guys continue organizing the frontline siege defense rotations for the new Vanguard cohort," I ordered softly, spinning the key thoughtfully between my fingers.

"It's been over a year. I'm taking a relatively quick trip out to Crystal City. Let's see what old Crys is up to these days."