Chương 146: Thermal Overload

Dex stood a few meters from the enormous central cannon, his chest heaving rapidly from the physical and magical effort he had expended to break through the Guard's ranks. And despite the fiery heat of his body, he felt a harsh cold, a true death-cold, emanating from the negative mana energy accumulated inside the dark crystal. This ancient technology was warping reality around it, to the point where the air surrounding the cannon appeared drained of color and emptied of oxygen.

Without wasting a single second on deliberation, Dex drove forward and attempted a decisive strike. He raised his blazing dagger with both hands and brought it down on the base of the black crystal with his full physical and fiery force, a blow sufficient to split a battle tank in two. But what happened was shocking. There was no sound of shattering or penetration. Instead, the dagger rebounded with tremendous force, as though it had struck a mountain of solid pure diamond.

Dex's arms shuddered violently, fire sparks scattered in the air, and the dagger nearly flew from his grip. Transparent, hexagonal ripples materialized in the air around the cannon, revealing the existence of an invisible energy shield encasing the weapon entirely.

"Stop, Dex! There's a spherical force field surrounding all three cannons!" Lumia cried out, her silver eyes wide open to their limit as she attempted to analyze the shield's composition through her advanced spatial sight. Her mind was processing the information at lightning speed.

"This is no ordinary defensive shield. It's a Repulsion-and-Absorption Shield, it reflects all physical and kinetic attacks completely, and at the same time absorbs the energy of any magical attack directed at it and converts that energy into charge for the crystal. It feeds on our attacks! It cannot be breached from the outside by force!"

"Charge at 98%! Activating final launch protocol!" came the automated announcement from inside the armored control carriage, cold and entirely without mercy. The dark crystal was now blazing with such terrifying intensity that even the shadows around the cannon, and even Dex and Lumia's own shadows, appeared to writhe, distort, and be drawn toward it, like a small black hole on the verge of swallowing light and matter.

A few seconds, perhaps five, and the cannons would release the catastrophic disintegration ray that would not merely erase the village and the World Tree, it would vaporize Dex and Lumia where they stood. Dex looked at the crystal pulsing with death, then looked at his own blazing hands. His mind, trained in prison dungeons to find gaps in the most fortified security systems and the most powerful adversaries, began to work in its habitual dirty fighting mode, but now on a cosmic scale.

"It absorbs magic and feeds on it to recharge itself?" Dex whispered, and a strange smile, simultaneously desperate and deranged, spread across his scorched lips.

"Very well. If this beast is so ravenously hungry for energy... let us feed it until it chokes and its innards explode." In a sudden motion, Dex cast his golden dagger aside, letting its blade plunge into the muddy earth. He advanced with steady, quick steps until he reached the edge of the transparent hexagonal energy field. He raised both bare hands and pressed them directly against the invisible barrier.

"Dex! What in the heavens are you doing?! Don't touch the absorption shield! The negative Eclipse energy will reverse the magical flow and dissolve both your arms down to the bone!" Lumia shouted in genuine panic, terrified at the sight of her partner moving to commit what appeared to be certain suicide, and ran toward him trying to pull him back.

"Don't come near me, Lumia! Stay back!" Dex replied in a commanding, sharp voice that stopped her in her tracks. He turned to her halfway, his orange eyes gleaming with a mad and frightening light, the gleam of a gambler who had realized he had nothing left to lose, and had decided to lay his life and everything he possessed on the table in one final throw of the dice.

"I am not some ordinary Imperial mage who hurls fireballs. I possess a phoenix core. I am a living nuclear battery that walks on two legs. And I am going to show it right now what thermal overload actually means." Dex closed his eyes in absolute concentration and summoned every remaining drop of mana in his body, every atom of energy stored in his cells.

The phoenix mana, which he had always maintained at a controlled safe level to prevent burning his nerve pathways and destroying his body from within, he now unleashed entirely and without any defensive restraint. Support the creativity of authors by visiting the original site for this novel and more. Dex recalled the brutal training hours he had spent with Lumia in the preceding days, when she had used her own celestial mana to expand the mana channels in his body and allow them to withstand higher pressures.

Without that training, his body would have exploded the moment he attempted what he was about to do now. [Absolute Override Mode: Solar Heart]! Dex's body began to glow from within in a terrifying fashion. The glow was no longer the blood-red of before, no longer orange or even golden. As the temperature and energy surpassed the boundaries of all known magic, the radiance emanating from his skin's pores transformed into pure white, a blinding white, like the heart of a raging sun.

His body temperature rose with immediate, mad intensity. The black heat-resistant leather clothing he had worn through the entire battle, which had endured everything, began to combust and reduce to drifting ash around him. The wet clay earth beneath his bare feet did not merely dry, it melted instantly and transformed into smooth volcanic glass that reflected his white radiance.

With a battle cry that tore his own throat, Dex began pumping raw mana, fiery and white and dense with energy, from his body and directly into the cannon's shield through his palms. The ancient shield had been designed to absorb magical attacks and gradually convert them into energy, but it had never, in all its history, been designed to absorb a direct nuclear meltdown, never designed to absorb a miniature sun discharging its energy all at once through a single point of contact.

Inside the armored command carriage, the magical screens transformed into a sea of red warnings.

"Warning! Catastrophic warning! Foreign energy levels in the central cannon exceeding maximum absorption capacity by 400%!" the automated measurement devices shrieked in a panicked mechanical voice, while the Imperial technicians rushed about like madmen around burning control panels.

"The black crystal has become structurally unstable! Core temperature dissolving the magical cooling circuits!"

"Cut the charge immediately! Sever the mana pathways! Drop the shield!" screamed the head technician, his face drained of all blood, but it was already too late. The shield was feeding, and the crystal could not stop consuming. Outside, the scene was simultaneously legendary and agonizing. Dex was screaming in a continuous cry of pure pain. The white heat passing through his body was burning the mana channels in his arms and tearing the fine muscle fibers within him from the inside.

The skin on his arms began to crack and bleed light instead of blood. But he did not stop. He clenched his teeth until they nearly shattered, and continued forcing the dark crystal, by sheer brutal will, to accept far more energy than it had ever been designed to withstand. The metaphysical dissonance was immense. The disintegration energy, the ancient crystal's black energy of death, in direct confrontation with the excessive white heat of the construction energy of the rare phoenix bloodline.

A war between nothingness and existence, crammed inside a glass shield. Spider-web cracks began to appear and spread across the surface of the enormous black crystal. The black light that had been absorbing everything began to tremble, and through its fissures, a burning white light seeped out and intermixed with it in a turbulent, uncontrollable energy vortex.

"The game is over, Empire of shame," Dex whispered in a fractured voice, blood dripping from his mouth. He sensed the absolute collapse threshold of the crystal, and in one final, desperate motion, he wrenched his scorched hands from the shield with all his remaining force and drove his feet against the glass earth, attempting to leap backward at maximum possible speed. CRAAAACK! An earsplitting sound of shattering glass.

The invisible hexagonal shield shattered into millions of energy fragments that dissolved into the air. Then, rather than the unstable crystal discharging its black disintegration ray outward toward the forest, something far more violent happened. The crystal imploded. A reverse energy collapse, an Implosion, occurred. The central cannon first consumed itself, its solid black metal crumpling inward like an empty tin can crushed in the hand of an invisible giant.

Then, with the impossibility of containing two opposing pressures, it detonated outward in an enormous and terrifying sphere of turbulent gray light, a fusion of the black disintegration energy and the white phoenix fire. The gray energy sphere expanded at lightning speed, swallowing the central cannon entirely and reducing it to atoms, then extended to swallow the two adjacent cannons beside it, melting them in their places like two pieces of plastic in a furnace.

The devastating, ferocious shockwave that followed struck Dex's body as he was attempting to retreat, and hurled him and Lumia more than fifty meters backward through the air, crashing them into the wreckage of the Imperial camp. Where the secret weapon had stood, the weapon that had threatened to annihilate the forest, nothing remained but an enormous smoking crater, melted and blazing with magical radiation.

The pride of ancient Imperial manufacture, Vargas's trump card, had been reduced to nothing more than twisted metal scrap that evaporated in the wind.