Chương 343: The Scrapper’s Feint

The interior of the magnet-canyon ruins was less of a dungeon and more of a geographical cataclysm to the senses. Through the sensory-link of Echo One, I found myself navigating a reality that seemed to find the concept of a "straight line" personally offensive. I had been inside for hours, and the frustration was beginning to manifest as a low, burning heat in my Star-cores.

No matter how many corridors I navigated, no matter how many ninety-degree turns I took through the matte-white architecture, I felt like I was tracing the rim of the same infinite wheel. The material of the walls was unnervingly warm to the touch — not any stone or metal, but a substance that hummed with a vibration higher than the [Symphony of the Animus Arch]'s current capacity to decode.

"I'm going in circles," I muttered through the Echo's pilot seat, pausing in a vast, vaulted chamber where hundreds of lodestones hovered in the air like sleeping bees. I leaned back against a pillar, closing the Echo's eyes to focus purely on meditation. If my standard perception was failing, I had to look with my soul. I reached into the Inner World, unlocking the "Experimental Harmonic Architectures" section of the Inner library I had scavenged from Sylvaris. Is this another System? I wondered.

I compared the resonance of the room to the elven mana-weaving techniques that valued organic, liquid flow. It didn't match. I compared it to the Sylvaris laws of vibration. It felt similar, yet heavier — as if the Sylvaris language was a different translation of the tongue being spoken in these walls. A sudden thought chilled the marrow of the Echo's faux-bones. What if my trip to Sylvaris wasn't just a clever exploit on my part?

What if the Prime System, that gargantuan intelligence seeking constant optimization, allowed me to find that dead world specifically because it wanted to record how resonance-based logic interacted with its own rigid tiers? I kept having these thoughts constantly. If the machine was stagnating, it needed new code. By allowing me to navigate through the Void to integrate non-System logic, it was effectively using me as a research probe. It let me go to the library so it could read the notes over my shoulder.

My meditation was violently severed. Back in the material world, sitting beneath the flag at Obsidian Zero, the Lattice erupted. A series of high-energy signatures had just crested the northern glass-ridge.

"They're finally here," I whispered, my own eyes snapping open, shimmering with a sudden black-red liquid flame that quickly smoothed out into the grey distance of my support veil. I broadcast the warning through the base's mental relays, sounding the internal alarms that only those of the Void Star could hear. Anna was by the central flagpole within seconds, followed by Lucas, Silas, and the Noren generals. We stood on the upper rampart, looking out at the valley. The horizon was no longer serene lavender.

A dust cloud of blue-and-silver essence was racing toward the mesa. It wasn't one Faction. I mapped the signatures: The Argent-Scale Drakes were leading, their metallic scales flashing under the silver auroras. They were backed by a cohort of Machinist walkers — tripedal brass spiders that vented orange steam — and a squadron of Eldar-Green avian scouts who were circling in a high-altitude thermal pocket.

"The three worlds are joining hands again," Lucas noted, adjusting the heavy star-steel gauntlet Leoric had provided.

"Must've made quite an impression. They've decided we are a threat that needs to be liquidated first and foremost."

"There's more than these three," I said, pointing toward a jagged obsidian spire five miles behind the advancing alliance.

"A shadow. A fly on the wall." I used my [Lattice Perception] to highlight the signature for the others. Hidden within a pocket of intense camouflage was an ashen scout from the Cinder Throne.

"One of Malacor's pets," I grinned.

"The Demon Lord is too cautious to charge in blindly. He's sent an observer to record the play. He wants to know how our sovereigns perform compared to our lower Tiers before he charges in. His methods really don't fit his theme."

"What's the plan?" Joyce asked, clutching her morning star. I looked at the signatures. I analyzed the highest Tier among the approaching hundred. The strongest of the Silver-Drakes was a towering beast draped in prismatic scales, brandishing a glaive of concentrated static electricity. A Tier 7. But just barely. He possessed a decent pool of mana, but his foundation felt "manufactured" — like a warrior who had risen through the Tiers with awards rather than earning them through struggle.

"It's a probe," I summarized.

"They want to see if we're all bark and no bite. Or maybe he hopes that I'd walk out there, use a few Mythic skills, and deplete my core so they can strike right after." Anna looked at the Silver-Drake leader and then at me, a fierce, almost predatory smile touching her silver-lit features.

"Don't go out yet, Eren," she said. She pulled [Final Word] from her shoulder, the black-glass bow whining in anticipation.

"Nobody knows how powerful you really are. If you go out and delete them in a minute, Malacor gets his data, and they will all pull back to wait for the final week where they'd probably all team up against us. Let us handle it. Let the world see a 'Sovereign' who is barely holding it together, being protected by his people."

"She's right," Lucas added, planting his tower-shield and assuming the [Indomitable Anchor] stance.

"Keep the Veil up. Make yourself look like the support battery you acted like last week while we do the fighting. We'll show the demons what a Ferran welcome looks like."

"Fine," I replied, sitting back into my cross-legged meditation position against the flagpole.

"But don't get arrogant. That Tier 7 has at least one Mythic trick up his sleeve." I split my awareness again. I manifested a temporary third clone while putting the scout into the Singularity. This Echo was a low-output sigil clone wreathed in the grey rags of a depleted servant. I utilized Sylvaris techniques to "fray" its signature. I forced the mana-circulation to stutter, creating a false aura of a Tier 7 who was bordering on mana-burn from over-taxing himself with the base's construction.

To the demon-scout five miles away, I looked like a spent fuel cell. The alliance hit our borders with the weight of a meteor. The Machinists fired first. Their brass walkers launched high-velocity magnet-enriched shards that hammered against our outer walls. My leaching-wards hummed, siphoning the kinetic energy into our own capacitors, but the sheer volume was making the mesa vibrate under my boots. This story has been unlawfully obtained without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.

"Engage!" Lucas roared. The fight became a spectrum of strategic chaos. The Noren storm-warriors called down hurricanes that threw the avian scouts into the dirt. Silas and the elven trackers used a "Grid-Bind" technique, turning the valley's crystal leaves into a sea of snares that slowed the charging Silver-Drakes. I monitored everything from my throne of shadow, funneling siphoned quintessence from my Void-Star into my warriors' mana-wells through the stone itself using the "Sylvaris Relay" I'd built.

I made sure our warriors weren't using their own mana; instead drawing on my relatively endless sea to save theirs for an unexpected turn of events or emergencies. To anyone observing, it looked like they were fighting with the desperation of soldiers who knew they had only one shot. The Drake leader, General Hroth, saw his scouts flailing and snarled. He leapt five hundred yards in a single electrical burn, manifesting in front of our main gate.

"Coward in the clouds!" Hroth screamed at my Echo standing above the portcullis.

"Face me or witness your family being pulverized into the grit!" Anna met him mid-air. She wove the [Domain of the Chronos-Hunter], a localized temporal stutter that made her arrow-release silent. She was carving paths with every shot. She fired a triple-spread that Hroth parried with a crack of his electric glaive. They locked into a beautiful, violent aerial duel. Anna was moving like silver mercury, her time-skips making her almost impossible to pin.

But as Hroth lunged, I felt a sudden, massive shift in the Lattice around him. I tried to warn her, but the perception from my real-body meditation and the frustration from the white ruins south interfered with my reaction speed. The gap in focus lasted less than a millisecond, but it was enough. General Hroth triggered a veiled Mythic, [Heaven's Static Scourge] but it was empowered by a strange artifact with a signature I haven't encountered before. It was a conceptual release.

The air around Hroth simply turned into a high-voltage pressure chamber. Everyone within fifty yards had their neurological systems seized. I saw it coming, but Lucas and Freja saw it first.

"PROTECT THE ANCHOR!" Lucas bellowed. The Shield-master threw himself in front of Anna, flaring [Aegis] with every sliver of the siphoned mana I had given him. Freja was right beside him, summoning a local whirlwind to disperse the ionization. The discharge erupted with the sound of a mountain splitting. The energy was too high for their Tier 6 stats. Even with my siphoned energy, their bodies were biological frames that had limits. Lucas' left arm, holding the shield-straps, turned to charred meat.

I watched in horror through my Perception as the bone turned to white carbon and his entire forearm vanished in a spray of vaporized blood. Freja fared little better; a secondary lightning-fork caught her as she was pushed back, cleanly severing her right leg at the hip. The impact sent Anna flying back toward our gate, coughing silver mana, her ribs buckled. General Hroth stood amidst the debris of the front trench, laughing, his armor scorched but whole.

I felt the Liquid Black-Red flame of the Ring of Wrath roar into life behind my physical ribs. I was seconds from standing up and turning the valley into a sinkhole. I missed it, I snarled internally. I was over-calculating the ruins and let this bird injure my allies. I manifest the Echo beside them on the trench-floor. To the distant ashen-fly, I looked like a desperate medic reaching for his fallen guards.

"I'm sorry," I whispered into the link. I ignored the Drake leader for a heartbeat. I funneled [Syntropy] through the sigil-echo. Because the Echo was capped at mid Tier 7, the mana output required was immense to reject such high-tier damage, making the Echo stagger and leak mana visibly to sell the "Drained" illusion.

"NO!" I commanded within the Echo's soul. Reality groaned. A bubble of gold light wrapped Lucas and Freja. Before their severed limbs even hit the crystalline dust, the space itself edited their biology. Lucas' arm zipped back from the carbon, his muscle and skin manifesting in a microsecond. Freja's leg reconnected as if the strike had been a bad dream. They gasped, their eyes flying open as the trauma of the loss was deleted from their cognitive registers.

General Hroth blinked, his grin fading into a look of absolute, terrified shock.

"How does a spent combat battery heal my...?" Anna hit the ground, corrected her posture mid-roll, and stood with three arrows notched. Seeing her friends' sacrifice and resolve gave her the clarity she needed.

"Hearth-Bound!" Anna roared, unleashing a skill I didn't recognize. She released all three arrows at once. They traveled through Hroth's local time-buffer, arriving at his heart-center before he could raise his glaive to block the subsequent arrows he thought were the real threat. The Drake General went rigid. He stared down at the three glass arrows buried deep in his prismatic-center core.

"The... inevitable…" he croaked. He dissolved into a silver mist, his Essence spread towards those who took part in the fight. He was gone. Seeing their Tier 7 leader "evaporated" by a simple Archer after he'd decimated the frontline elite shook the alliance. They didn't understand how the limb-losses had been rejected. Panic flooded their lines, and the Machinists immediately prioritized a retreat-pattern.

My Sigil-Echo at the gate slumped heavily against the black stone, his aura venting dark, sputtering mana, coughing visibly to the observation-cloud five miles away.

"Report!" Hissed the voice of the Cinder-Scout, its transmission being caught by Jeeves back on Ferra after we analyzed their signatures through [Omnipresence]. Scout Alpha to Throne Command. Contact secured. Target is compromised. Foundation is leaking. The healing of the Tier 6 guards drained him to critical levels. Strategy confirmed: Attrition works. He has limited stamina. Command deployment is suggested within 48 hours, after a few more skirmishes and probes.

I closed my mental channel to their signal, the dark satisfaction tasting like aged bourbon.

"You guys did good," I projected to my bloodied, yet miraculously whole squad as the alliance scrambled back into the forests.

"I lost focus. I was too busy trying to decipher the ruins. I'm sorry." Anna walked back through the gate, leaning on her bow, her chest heaving as she stabilized her Chronos-well. She looked at me, ignoring the Echo puppet, sensing my true body behind the wall.

"Malacor has what he needs now," Anna said, her voice hard.

"He will probably be making a real attempt soon."

"Let him try," I replied, my voice sounding deep within my meditation room. I looked back towards the south-wedge on the holographic map. The Echo in the ruins hadn't found the secret, but seeing Hroth's "Heaven's Static" had given me a piece of the math.

"Hroth was utilizing a frequency that these ruins seem to be the source for. If I can decode this white maze before Malacor arrives, I'm not just going to beat him." I looked at the Ring of Wrath and then at my black sabre. The excitement was finally becoming real — no rules, no watchers, just two predators finding out who truly governs the food-chain.

"Get the armor-reinforcements in place," I commanded.

"We stay 'broken' for another twenty-four hours. Lucas, get the engineers to finish the decoy wall. This sunset will be thought of as a victory to the Cinder Throne... but it won't be long before they realize how wrong they were. Because dawn is coming. And with it, we will rise." I turned my focus entirely into Echo One. The maze was silent, the matte-white walls waiting.

"Round one was just the invitation," I thought, moving the Echo back into the spiral depth of the proto-world.

"It'd be rude if we refused after all of that."