Chương 350: Plan B

The obsidian mesa of Obsidian Zero had been transformed from a defensive fortress into a planetary-scale battery. For forty-eight straight hours, I didn't leave my seated position beneath the flagpole. Through the [Symphony of the Animus Arch], I acted as the conductor for a staggering amount of mana being channeled through the base's primary shunts. Leoric and the Dweorg elite had finished the "Spike Lattice" yesterday.

They had forged fifty-two specialized rods from a mixture of null-steel and the magnet-enriched ores harvested from Bir-Z's crust. Each rod was etched with Sylvari resonance-paths and then buried deep into the soil surrounding the magnetic canyon hundreds of miles away by my unseen Echoes.

"It is a messy piece of work, Master," Leoric muttered, his fingers jittery from excitement and perhaps a little too many alchemical stimulants and elixirs as he reviewed the final connection.

"We are effectively turning the canyon's entire magnetic field into a resonant speaker. If we pulse your mana through it at the right frequency, we aren't just disrupting their runes. We are overwriting the planet's permission for their reality to exist."

"That is exactly what we needed," I replied. Zareth drifted beside me, his aura looking denser, more opaque than I'd ever seen it.

"The anchors are secured. The Lords of the Deep have entered the subterranean layers through the rifts. They are hungry, pacing the border-zones of their 'sanctified' ground like caged lions. On your command, I can invite the void inside." I looked at the Ring of Wrath on my finger. The crimson ember was glowing with an eager, low-frequency hum. It wanted a collision. It craved more conflict, vibrating in agreement with the Bracelet of Gluttony. My plan was simple, and intentionally expensive.

I spent thirty percent of my total mana Void Star reserves to manifest a singular, reinforced, powerful Echo. This construct wasn't a disposable drone; it was a high-fidelity signature-clone. I wove thousands of microscopic Sylvari runes into its artificial skin, making its Essence and Soul signature almost identical to my own. I wanted to give the puppet master the one thing his data predicted: an arrogant Sovereign coming to crush a cage with his own two hands.

"Go," I commanded. The Echo manifested at the mouth of the magnetic canyon. It moved with the heavy, deliberate tread of a man who thought he had already won. I watched through its eyes as the grey Lead-silk and porcelain-masked drones began to scurry from the salt-ore pillars. Inside the atrium of the canyon base — that industrial wreck of glass and gear-stones — the Echo triggered the trap on purpose. As I stepped onto the geometric runic lattice I'd seen in my vision, the floor erupted.

Thousands of conceptual charcoal-black chains lanced from the ground, boring through the Echo's aura to latch directly onto its Soul Gate. The spatial anchor clamped down, making the Echo's Tier 7 power stutter and flicker. Lord Sargon of the Hollow-Suns stepped from the brass doors once again, his Ivory staff glowing with that liquid silver mana.

"Impulsive. Arrogant. And predictable," Sargon noted, walking toward the trapped Echo. He didn't smile this time; his mask of religious fervor was absolute, but perhaps his patience was fraying.

"The Holy One calculated your arrival within a deviation of less than three days. You Ferrans are remarkable in your lack of original thought." Now, I projected back to the Sanctum. Five hundred miles away, Lucas and the Dweorg engineers hit the primary capacitors.

"Runic Overload: Resonance Pulse!" Freja commanded on the wall. The hidden magnet-spikes around the canyon activated. Through the Lattice, it looked like a ripple in a pool. A shockwave of pure Void-tuned vibration traveled through the minerals of the planet, striking the atrium. The charcoal chains groaned, their frequencies being forcefully disrupted by the Sylvan logic we had injected into the planet's soil.

"Zareth. Bring the guests," I projected. Reality instantly turned inside out. A localized Domain of the Void — a sphere of absolute dark ink — exploded outward from my trapped Echo, engulfing the entire three-mile headquarters. From the shadows of the canyon walls, ten Tier 8 Void Lords descended. Their scythes were drawn, their black-red lightning crackling with a terrifying sound of grinding bone. They began tearing through the puppet-drones with a cold, predatory silence. Sargon staggered, but he didn't panic.

A sound — not a voice, but a harmonic chord of blinding, white frequency — resonated from his staff.

"Did you think the Architects were unaware of your infestations, rodent?" Sargon yelled.

"The Holy One provides!" Sargon and three other high-tier officers slammed their weapons into a central pedestal. A massive warding device — a sphere of pulsing, translucent starlight-crystal — was triggered. A wave of "Sanctified Starlight" expanded from the crystal. The energy was resonating with a strange signature that felt like a combination of the Divine essence from my Glimpse but… altered. My two days of preparations have clearly allowed them to study Bir-Z's unique mana.

As it hit the Void Lords, the black chimeras shrieked in an agony that bypassed my soul-ward. The light seemed to cauterize the concept of "Void" wherever it touched. One Void Lord's arm simply vaporized into grey mist; another was driven back into the Lattice, its frame flickering in pain. Unauthorized usage: this tale is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings. The enemies began to laugh, their confidence in their "Holy One" resurging.

"Your monsters are irrelevant within His Architecture!" a grey-clad officer shrieked, preparing a conceptual nuke.

"We have the filter, Ferran! You've delivered yourself to us in a velvet ribbon!" That was when the sky of Bir-Z vanished. I didn't panic and teleport my main body in. I didn't engage the [Flame]. I simply leaned into my Zero-tier connectivity through the relay. Above the canyon, the auroras of the planet were blotted out by a mass of light-eating Nothingness that dwarfed Sargon's crystal shield. The absolute authority of my [Omnipresence] began to edit the local clouds. The laughter died.

The Void wasn't just a bunch of summons anymore; it was the entire atmosphere. Sargon looked up at the obsidian firmament where the moons should have been, his ivory staff trembling in his grip.

"Wait…" he whispered, his eyes wide as he looked at my Echo.

"You haven't Ascended. Your nodes aren't consolidated. How are you manifesting an Inner World on this plane?" The confusion rippled through the officers. They were trained on System tiers — on the "possible." To them, a Tier 7 creating a sovereign biome across thirty miles was impossible.

"Something's wrong!" the silver-eye in the porcelain mask yelled, stepping from the back ranks.

"He's still pinned by the Anchor Spike! Kill him now! Don't let him bridge the connection!" The mind-controlled puppet that was the most perceptive of the lot recognized that while I held the sky, the ritual chains on my Echo were still functioning — acting as a feedback loop. If they could atomize the Echo while it was tethered to the "Atmosphere," the resulting backwash would likely shatter my physical mind, and likely prevent my Inner World from completely manifesting.

The alliance warriors threw everything they had. Sargon unleashed [Starlight Oblivion], a beam of white-silver energy that pierced the Void clouds, aiming for the Echo's chest. The warding device flared with blinding intensity, its filter burning the remaining Void beasts into cinders as it carved a path toward me. The Echo struggled. I tried to pull the [Syntropy] through the link, but the charcoal chains had been pre-programmed by "The Holy One" specifically to counter Lattice feedback. My movements were slowed.

My spatial-flickers were being grounded. In the real world, back at the flag-pole, I opened my eyes. I felt the sweat trickling down my spine and the blood pooling in the Echo's boots across the map. Anna was standing right in front of me, her bow drawn, guarding my trance.

"Eren?" she asked.

"Is it failing?"

"Their gear is too specialized," I whispered. I could feel the Anchor Spike draining my Sigil-Echo's structural durability to less than five percent.

"They have a leash on the Void itself. They've built a warding crystal that feeds on the Lattice itself." I looked at her, and the black-red liquid of the [Voidflame] began to bubble at my eyes.

"But they haven't seen the other side of the moon yet," I said. I keyed the global communication array of Bastion, bypassing the System's local scramble-guards through the Dweorg-Sylvari link.

"Obsidian Zero to all frontline units," I projected, my voice cold and calm.

"Anchor yourselves. Joyce — ground the fortress. General Kalt — deep-freeze the foundations. Marcus — get every support member inside the Vault."

"Eren, what are you doing?" Lucas asked, planting his shield.

"Plan B," I replied, standing up and brushing the stardust from my coat.

"Everyone, prepare for an earthquake." Moments later, I reached through the quantum tether — not into the Echo's brain, but into its reactor-heart. The "Krom" suicide mission had been a test run. This was the production. I funneled every remaining drop of Essence from my star-cores, backed by the uncooled vengeance of the Ring of Wrath and the absolute consumption of Gluttony.

I channeled the Liquid Voidflame Apocalypse directly into the sigil-echo's core, which was already located at the center of the magnetic canyon's ritual rune.

"Get ready, it's about to blow!" I laughed. I didn't wait for Sargon to finish his final swing. I detonated the tether. Miles away from our base, in the heart of the magnet-ore canyon, a sound was born that shouldn't have been heard by biological ears. A point of black-red starlight erupted from the atrium floor. It was an expansion of Absence.

A colossal pillar of Voidflame, looking like a geyser of boiling black ink shot through with jagged crimson lightning, punched through the canyon's floor and into the upper atmosphere of Bir-Z. The tectonic plate supporting the southern quadrant was forcefully shattered by the kinetic and conceptual backwash. From my balcony, the horizon vanished behind a rising wall of dark-fire smoke. A wave of force, so powerful it physically moved the obsidian mesa three feet to the East, washed over our shields.

The "Resonance Relay" screamed, siphoning the overflow until our storage capacitors melted into slag. The roar lasted for thirty long seconds — a scream of a world being bitten in half. When the dust cloud reached the sky and blotted out the aurora permanently, a profound, eerie silence settled over Bir-Z. The signature of the magnetic canyon, the "Grave-Singers," and the "Holy" warding device were gone. Not a trace to be found.

I couldn't perceive a single atom of their alliance within fifty miles of the impact zone. I stayed on the parapet, watching the black mushroom-cloud churn against the lavender starlight. The recoil of the detonation had left my hands numb, and a thin line of blood ran from my lip where the star-core's surge had cracked a mana-conduit. [Planetary Integration Hazard detected.] [Total Territory Erosion: 6%. Scaling Sector Penalty…] I looked toward the north, sensing the distant demons of Malacor huddling in their lava pits. I could feel the Hive scuttling in terror in the East. I adjusted the Ring of Wrath on my finger, its dark crimson hue now as calm as a sleeping dragon.

"Plan B seems to have handled the housekeeping," I noted softly, wiping the blood from my chin with the back of my hand. I looked at Anna and Lucas, who were staring at the distant, black pillar with a mixture of awe and genuine dread. I didn't care about the penalty points or the metadata alerts.

"Let's see if anyone's been able to survive that," I whispered. Phase Two wasn't just nearing its end. It had just been burned to the bone. And as the smoke cleared, I knew that whatever "The Holy One" sent next wouldn't be arriving with a porcelain mask. It would be coming with a casket.

"War," I muttered, looking at the scoreboard in my vision.

"It's all just a game of power to them. We really have to put an end to this madness." I gazed into the ashen canyon, my pupils swirling with the black-red fire. The game had just changed yet again, and I was the only one left standing in the dark with the flashlight. It was time to see what rose from the ashes.