Chapter : 1989

  Lloyd ignored the warning. He looked through the main camera. Through the layers of transparent diamond and the swirling dark water inside, he could see Anthony. The golden Sirius suit was trapped in the center like a bug in amber. Anthony was thrashing, banging his fists against the inside of the wall, his mouth moving in silent screams.

  Anthony had tried to use speed. He had tried to use advanced calculations. He had tried to turn himself into a computer to win a fight. But Lloyd knew something about computers—they had limits. They had rules. And Lloyd was about to rewrite the rulebook.

  "In a perfect diamond," Lloyd whispered, his voice a cold monotone that cut through the humming of the machinery, "light cannot escape. It doesn’t fade away. It doesn’t get tired. It just keeps moving."

  He flipped the safety cover off the firing trigger.

  "It only evolves."

  Lloyd pulled the trigger.

  There was no recoil. Recoil happens when an explosion pushes air. But here, there was no air to push. The energy didn't have anywhere to go but forward.

  A blinding column of pure, white-hot energy erupted from the Nova Cannon. It didn't look like fire. It didn't look like lightning. It looked like liquid sunlight. It slammed into the Diamond Coffin.

  Normally, a laser beam hits something and stops, or it punches a hole through the other side. But this wasn't normal. This was Spirit Jasmin’s ultimate defense. The walls of the coffin were perfect mirrors on the inside.

  The beam entered the diamond sphere and hit the back wall. Instead of breaking through, it bounced. It reflected off the interior surface at a sharp angle, shooting back toward the center. It missed Anthony by an inch and hit the front wall. Then it bounced again. And again. And again.

  Because light travels at 186,000 miles per second, the beam didn't just bounce a few times. In the span of a single heartbeat, that beam of plasma reflected millions of times.

  The interior of the Diamond Coffin instantly turned white. It was no longer a prison of water and crystal. It had become a reactor.

  Inside the trap, Anthony stopped screaming. He didn't have time to scream. He was watching his sensors go from "Danger" to "Offline" in a fraction of a second. The first beam grazed his shoulder, melting the gold armor like it was made of wax. The second beam hit his leg. The third beam hit his chest.

  Then, the beams multiplied.

  The light was bouncing so fast that it filled every single inch of space inside the sphere. There was no shadow. There was no darkness. There was only the laser. The beam was everywhere at once. It was piercing his armor from the front, the back, the top, and the bottom simultaneously.

  "System failure," the Fire Fly computer screeched inside Anthony's brain. "Thermal overload. Shields evaporating. Armor integrity at zero percent."

  Anthony’s "Circuit-Ascension" form—that horrific mix of man and machine—couldn't handle it. The red cables plugging into his neck began to boil. His blood turned to steam. The "Null-Alloy" armor that was supposed to be invincible against magic was useless against this much raw heat. The armor didn't break; it simply ceased to exist as a solid. It turned into gas.

  The Sirius suit began to glow. Not from its own power, but because it was becoming translucent from the heat.

  Lloyd kept his finger on the trigger. He wasn't stopping. He was pouring every last drop of mana, every spark of Iffrit’s fire, and every volt of Fang Fairy’s lightning into the cannon. He was feeding the fire.

  The diamond sphere began to vibrate. It wasn't cracking yet, but it was humming with a terrifying sound, a high-pitched shriek that sounded like the universe tearing apart. The ground beneath the sphere turned to glass instantly, melting from the sheer radiation leaking through the crystal.

  "More," Lloyd grunted, his teeth grit together. "It's not enough."

  He pushed the throttle forward, forcing the Nova Cannon to draw power from his own life force. His vision started to blur. His nose started to bleed. But he didn't let go.

  Chapter : 1990

  Inside the sphere, the temperature had reached levels that didn't belong on a planet. It was the temperature of a star’s core. The water that had been holding Anthony was long gone, split into hydrogen and oxygen atoms that were now fueling the fire. Anthony himself was gone. The man, the machine, the arrogance—it had all been vaporized. There was nothing left but superheated gas swirling in a prison of light.

  But the light wanted out.

  ________________________________________

  The Diamond Coffin was shining so brightly that it was impossible to look at it directly, even through the filtered lenses of the Aegis’s sensors. It hung in the air like a second sun, a perfect sphere of blinding white fury that drowned out the desert daylight.

  Lloyd Ferrum finally took his finger off the trigger. The Nova Cannon hissed and powered down, the barrel glowing a dangerous cherry-red. The metal of the Aegis’s right arm was warped and twisted from the heat, the white-and-gold plating fusing together into a useless lump of slag.

  Inside the cockpit, Lloyd panted, his chest heaving against the safety harness. Sweat stung his eyes, but he didn't blink. He watched the readouts.

  "That... should do it."

  It was an understatement. The energy density inside the diamond sphere had reached a critical mass. The laws of physics on the planet Riverio were screaming in protest. You cannot trap that much energy in such a small space without consequences. The universe has a way of correcting such insults.

  The diamond shell held for one more second. Then, reality gave up.

  It didn't shatter like glass. It shattered like time.

  CRACK.

  The sound was absolute. It was a noise so loud it registered as silence because human ears couldn't process the frequency. The space-time inside the prison had been incinerated. The diamond shell failed, and the energy was released.

  BOOM.

  A massive explosion of white and purple light erupted outward. It wasn't a fire explosion; it was a shockwave of pure force. It hit the Aegis suit and threw the twelve-ton machine backward like a toy tossed by an angry child.

  Lloyd felt the world spin violently as his mech tumbled end-over-end through the air. The internal dampeners screamed, trying to compensate for the G-forces, but it wasn't enough. The Aegis crashed into the canyon wall three hundred yards away, burying itself in a landslide of rock and dust.

  The shockwave didn't stop there. It leveled the surrounding mountains. Huge peaks of rock were turned to dust in an instant. A crater three miles wide was carved into the earth, turning the Sky Canyon into a massive bowl of smoking glass.

  Lloyd groaned inside the darkened cockpit, his head ringing from the impact. The main power was offline, and the emergency red lights pulsed like a dying heartbeat. His HUD was fractured, static lines running across his vision.

  "System report," Lloyd rasped, tasting blood.

  "Critical failure," the computer drone replied, its voice glitching. "Mobility... compromised. Power levels at... 1%."

  He didn't bother opening the faceplate. The radiation and heat outside would be lethal to a human. Instead, he forced his hands to move over the manual controls, rerouting the last dregs of power to the optical sensors. He used his [All-Seeing Eye] to peer through the suit's cracked external cameras at the center of the explosion.

  There was nothing there.

  No golden suit. No Anthony. No debris. It was just... empty. The "Infinite Refraction" had done its job. It hadn't just killed the enemy; it had erased him. Anthony’s physical body, his digital consciousness, his machine—all of it had been returned to atoms.

  Lloyd slumped back in his seat, a grim satisfaction settling over him. The threat was gone. The Fire Fly agent who had mocked his world was dust.

  "Physics," Lloyd muttered, his voice raspy. "It always wins."

  He reached for the ejection sequence, intending to climb out and verify the kill with his own eyes. But just as his hand touched the lever, a blip appeared on his passive radar.

  He froze. He zoomed the sensors in on the center of the glass crater.

  The ground was still hot enough to melt rubber, glowing with the remnants of the plasma storm. But hovering in the exact center, right where Anthony’s chest had been, was a small, black object.

  It wasn't damaged. It wasn't scratched. It was a perfect, smooth sphere, about the size of an apple. It was pulsing with a dark, dimensional energy that made Lloyd’s stomach turn. It looked like a hole in the world.

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  Chapter : 1991

  Lloyd frowned beneath his helmet. He recognized the technology instantly from the classified archives of his past life.

  It was a "Reincarnation Orb."

  It was a fail-safe device used by high-ranking corporate agents. If they died, this device would record their memories, their data, and their soul, and transmit it back to the headquarters via a subspace burst.

  "He triggered it," Lloyd realized, his blood running cold. "In the last millisecond. He backed himself up."

  If that orb survived, the Fire Fly Corporation would know everything. They would know about Lloyd’s powers. They would know about the planet's defenses, the spirit magic, and the exact location of the mana well. They would come back, and next time, they wouldn't send a scout. They would send a fleet.

  "No," Lloyd hissed. "You don't get to report back. You don't get to tell them anything."

  The orb began to glow brighter. It was charging up for a transmission. The air around it began to warp, creating a low, humming sound that vibrated through the hull of the Aegis.

  Lloyd grabbed the manual control sticks. They were heavy, dead weight in his hands.

  "Move," Lloyd growled at the machine. "Move, you piece of junk."

  He bypassed the safety protocols. He diverted life support. He drained the last, flickering embers of the Golem Heart’s reserve energy.

  The Aegis suit shuddered. With a groan of tortured metal, the massive black machine pushed itself out of the rubble. It stood up, swaying unsteadily, oil leaking from its joints like black blood.

  "One percent," Lloyd whispered. "That's all I need."

  He stomped forward. Thud. Thud. Thud.

  The mech moved slowly, every step a struggle against gravity and friction. Lloyd ignored the warning sirens screaming in his ears. He focused only on the black sphere.

  He reached the center of the crater. The orb was pulsing faster now, the hum rising to a shriek. A beam of data was starting to form, pointing toward the sky.

  "Stay dead!" Lloyd shouted inside the cockpit.

  He didn't fire a weapon. He didn't have any ammo left. He used the only thing he had: twelve tons of Star-Frost Ore.

  Lloyd slammed the right pedal forward. The Aegis lifted its massive, hydraulic right leg. He put the entire weight of the suit, the force of his Void Power, and the last drop of the battery into a single, world-shaking stomp.

  The Star-Frost boot—a metal forged to ignore the laws of magic—slammed down onto the high-tech Reincarnation Orb.

  CRUNCH.

  The collision of 22nd-century corporate technology and ancient soul-engineering created a "Logic Fail" that the universe simply couldn't calculate.

  The orb didn't shatter; it imploded.

  A sound like tearing fabric filled the air. The black sphere collapsed in on itself, but instead of disappearing, it created a vacuum. A sudden, violent pull grabbed the leg of the Aegis suit.

  It wasn't gravity. It was suction. Ancient, raw mana from the space between worlds reached out and grabbed the metal.

  "Oh no," Lloyd whispered, his hands flying across the controls to reverse thrusters.

  But there was no power left.

  The vacuum was stronger than iron. It was pulling him in, dragging the entire mech downward toward the tiny black hole he had just created.

  The world twisted. The sky above him stretched into long lines of color. The ground beneath the Aegis dissolved into static.

  "Not like this," Lloyd gritted out, bracing himself against the console.

  But physics didn't care.

  With a final, sickening lurch, the Aegis suit was ripped off the ground. The heavy metal plates screamed as they were sucked into the purple rift. Lloyd felt the G-forces slam him back into his seat as the machine crossed the threshold.

  The desert vanished. The crater vanished.

  There was only the cold, dark silence of the void, and the man trapped inside the falling metal giant.

  There was no sound. There was no light. There was only the feeling of falling, but not falling down. It felt like falling sideways, through a tunnel made of ice and static electricity.

  Lloyd Ferrum didn’t know how long he was in that tunnel. It could have been a second. It could have been a hundred years. His body felt heavy and numb, like when you sleep on your arm wrong, but all over. This was the "Cold Sleep." It was the feeling of being pulled apart by the universe and stitched back together in the wrong order.

  Then, the silence broke.

  It didn't break gently. It shattered.

  CRASH.

  Chapter : 1992

  The impact was brutal. It wasn't the clean, hard hit of metal on stone. It was a wet, heavy thud, followed by the sound of snapping wood and tearing leaves. The world spun violently, and then stopped with a jerk that rattled Lloyd’s teeth inside his helmet.

  For a long time, Lloyd didn't move. He sat in the darkness of the Aegis cockpit, breathing hard. The air inside the suit was stale and hot. It smelled like burnt wires and ozone—the smell of the battle he had just finished. His heart was hammering against his ribs, trying to make sense of the sudden stop.

  "Damage report," Lloyd rasped. His throat felt like he had swallowed sand. "System check."

  Silence.

  The usually calm, synthetic voice of the System Administrator didn't answer. The screens in front of him were dead black. There were no flashing red warning lights, no scrolling data streams, no targeting reticles. The machine was dead. The Golem Heart, which usually hummed with a deep, rhythmic thrum, was silent.

  Lloyd tried to move his arm. The heavy hydraulic joystick was stiff. Without power, the Aegis Mark I was just twelve tons of dead metal. It was a coffin in the shape of a giant.

  "Great," Lloyd muttered. "Just great."

  He reached up and fumbled for the manual release latch for the faceplate. His fingers felt clumsy, his gloves thick and unresponsive. He found the latch and pulled.

  Nothing happened. The seal was jammed.

  Lloyd gritted his teeth. He couldn't use his [Steel Blood] power to force it open. He could feel it immediately—the "emptiness." In Riverio, the air was thick with mana. You could feel it on your skin like static. Here, the air felt empty. It was hollow. There was no magic to grab, no spirits to call. His internal battery was dry.

  He was just a man in a broken can.

  "Open," he grunted, bracing his feet against the pedals and pushing against the helmet with his back. He used pure, angry muscle. "Open, you piece of junk!"

  With a screech of tortured metal, the latch gave way. The faceplate popped open about three inches.

  Immediately, the world rushed in.

  It wasn't the dry, dusty heat of the Sky Canyon. It was water.

  Water was everywhere. It wasn't just raining; it was like the sky had opened up and was trying to drown the earth. Rain hammered against the metal hull of the Aegis with a sound like a thousand drumrolls. It hissed as it hit the hot armor plating.

  Lloyd pushed the faceplate up further and took his first breath of the new world.

  He gagged.

  The air was thick. It was heavy and wet, like breathing through a warm, damp towel. It didn't smell like the desert. It smelled of wet mud, rotting leaves, crushed flowers, and life. It was an overwhelming, organic smell. It smelled like a greenhouse that had been left to grow wild for a thousand years.

  "Where..." Lloyd coughed, wiping rainwater out of his eyes. "Where am I?"

  He unbuckled his harness and squeezed through the opening of the cockpit. It was a struggle. His body was sore, bruised from the fight with Anthony and the trip through the void. He pulled himself up onto the top of the ruined mech.

  He looked around, and his heart sank.

  He was in a forest. But this wasn't like the Shadowfen Forest or the woods near his estate. This was a jungle.

  Massive trees towered over him, their trunks thick and twisted, covered in green moss. Vines as thick as a man’s leg hung from the canopy like snakes. The leaves were huge, broad, and dripping with water. The rain was relentless. It came down in sheets, turning the ground into a churning river of brown mud.

  The Aegis suit had crashed through the canopy and landed half-buried in the mud bank of a swelling river. Steam was rising from the black metal, mixing with the rain to create a thick, white fog around the crash site.

  Lloyd slid down the side of the mech, his boots sinking ankle-deep into the sludge. He almost lost his balance. The gravity felt... normal. That was a good sign. At least he wasn't on a planet with crushing gravity.