Chapter 77: Saint Hilarius Hospital (9)
Chapter 77: Saint Hilarius Hospital (9)
— Valisera’s POV —
In the world of "Elysium," power is measured by how much you can destroy before the universe snaps back to crush you. I had always believed my unique spatial magic made me the exception to that fundamental rule. I was usually the one doing the crushing.
But standing in the middle of the underground laboratory, that belief was being severely tested.
The massive room was filled with the mangled remains of the chimera army. Blood covered the white sterile tiles, pooling together to form a sticky, macabre lake that reflected the violently flickering emergency red lights above. The stench was nearly unbearable—a sickening, heavy cocktail of oxidized copper, sterilized medical alcohol, and the burnt flesh of the abominations I had just slaughtered. The air itself felt incredibly dense, still trembling with the chaotic residual ether of my previous attacks.
And on the opposite side of this slaughterhouse... stood "The Surgeon."
An S-Rank modified monster.
This classification was not placed arbitrarily in intelligence records. In the Hunter Association’s official hazard handbook, an A-Rank anomaly requires a coordinated strike team of elite veterans just to contain it. But an S-Rank? It means a walking catastrophe. It means an entity capable of wiping an entire city sector off the map if left unchecked for even an hour. It means a designated zone of total quarantine, where survival is no longer a goal, but a statistical anomaly.
And this specific thing standing before me... was not merely a raging beast driven by mindless instinct. It was a mechanical and biological nightmare. It possessed an analytical mind that likely surpassed military-grade quantum computers, armed with tools designed specifically to dissect, neutralize, and harvest the Awakened. Its upper torso retained a sickening mockery of human anatomy, clad in a tattered, blood-stained white coat, but everything else was a symphony of cold steel, exposed hydraulics, and pulsing synthetic veins pumping a luminescent blue fluid.
"The patient’s pulse is stable, but carries an unseen tension. Heart rate elevated to one hundred and forty beats per minute," said the Surgeon in its calm, artificial voice—polite in a profoundly nauseating way.
It didn’t sound angry, malicious, or bloodthirsty. It sounded like a veteran doctor diagnosing a terminal illness on a Tuesday morning, completely detached from the absolute horror of its own existence.
It adjusted its metallic medical glasses over its glowing laser eyes, while its eight black, mechanized spider legs slowly embedded their razor-sharp tips into the solid concrete floor, anchoring its massive frame.
"Resistance during the anesthesia process will inevitably lead to severe muscle tissue tearing and nerve damage. I highly advise you to remain entirely still for the incision."
"Save your medical advice for yourself, you piece of scrap," I growled, my crimson eyes igniting with a lethal, gravitational glow. The dark ether flared around my silhouette.
I didn’t wait for it to finish its twisted diagnosis. I never let the enemy make the first move.
I extended my right palm forward, forcing my ether circuits into absolute overdrive. The air around my hand warped violently, distorting the light like a mirage over boiling asphalt.
Spatial fracture.
Shzzzzzzzz!
Three pitch-black lines, as thin as human hair but infinitely dense, sliced through the very fabric of the air at supersonic speed. They bypassed the physical realm, heading directly toward its human-like chest and the glowing blue mechanical heart encased within.
This attack literally erases the space between atoms; no physical armor, magical barrier, or enchanted shield can block it. It ignores durability entirely.
It should have split the Surgeon into four perfectly equal parts in a fraction of a millisecond.
But... what happened next made my pupils shrink to the size of pinpricks in sheer, unadulterated shock.
The Surgeon didn’t dodge after the attack was launched.
It dodged before it was launched!
Its mechanical eyes weren’t just optical cameras; they were highly sensitive ether-wave receptors. Its laser sensors weren’t reading my physical body’s movement—they were reading the micro-fluctuations in the ambient ether, analyzing the literal "spatial distortion" in the atmosphere before the spell even fully materialized from my palm!
In the microscopic fraction of a millisecond it took my ether to fold space, its hydraulic spider legs had already fired like massive pistons, propelling its heavy frame aside at a speed no human eye could ever hope to track.
The black lines of fractured space sliced through empty air and struck the massive rear wall of the underground lab.
Kraaaaaaaaaaash!
The wall—made of two-meter-thick, titanium-lined concrete and heavily reinforced with S-Rank engineering enchantments designed to withstand massive bunker-busting explosions—split wide open. A perfectly smooth, bottomless gorge was carved deep into the foundation.
A massive cloud of concrete dust and powdered titanium scattered into the already suffocating air.
"Inaccurate movement detected. The patient is currently experiencing severe neural spasms and lack of coordination," the Surgeon’s clinical voice echoed from my right side, entirely unharmed.
I spun around quickly, ready to cast again, but it had already begun its surgical counter-attack.
One of its six multi-jointed surgical arms extending from its metallic spine shot toward me like a striking viper.
It held a "laser scalpel." However, it did not emit a normal, precise medical beam. It unleashed a brilliant, blinding white ray of condensed energy so intensely concentrated that the ambient oxygen around it began to boil and turn into plasma just from the radiating heat.
"Gravity Shield!" I shouted.
I instantly condensed the space directly in front of me, weaving the ether into a solid, impenetrable wall of absolute, localized gravity.
Any physical projectile or magical attack should have been instantly crushed under thousands of Gs and dropped harmlessly to the floor the exact moment it touched this barrier.
Tssssssssssss!
The blinding laser scalpel struck the invisible gravity shield.
And for the first time in my entire life... the attack was not immediately crushed.
The scalpel vibrated at an immense, terrifying atomic frequency, emitting a high-pitched whine that threatened to burst my eardrums. It wasn’t trying to break through with brute force. The Surgeon’s quantum processor had instantly calculated the exact ether density and gravitational pull of my shield. It matched the wavelength, and the scalpel began meticulously "cutting" through the overlapping layers of gravity itself!
The blinding white light began piercing the invisible wall millimeter by millimeter. The searing heat bled through, scorching the skin of my face and singeing the tips of my dark hair.
This thing... is analyzing and dissecting my conceptual magic in real-time?!
I stepped back quickly, cutting the ether supply to the shield before the scalpel could fully penetrate the barrier and reach my eye.
"Frequency adjustment complete. Protective dermal layer breach successful. Beginning initial deep-tissue incision," said the Surgeon, relentless, not giving me a single microsecond to recover my footing.
It leapt high into the air, using all eight of its mechanized legs as massive hydraulic springs.
It covered the twenty meters separating us in a literal instant, ascending to the ceiling and descending directly above me like a predatory, steel-carapace spider dropping on trapped prey.
Midair, a horrifying clicking sound echoed as it opened all six of its surgical arms at once!
The blazing laser scalpel, a massive, rotating, diamond-tipped bone saw, and a thick hydraulic syringe dripping with glowing, corrosive purple acid—all of them came crashing down toward me simultaneously like an inescapable cage of mechanical death.
"Crush!"
I roared at the top of my lungs, abandoning all precision, and slammed both of my hands together in a praying motion.
I didn’t target its armored body—I targeted the center of gravity directly beneath it.
I drained nearly a third of my ether reserves in a single breath, creating a massive, localized gravitational focal point directly in the ground below the descending machine, attempting to drag it down into the earth’s core and completely flatten it before its weapons could reach my flesh.
The sudden shift in gravitational force was absolutely terrifying.
The ambient temperature plummeted. The white tiles beneath us didn’t just crack; they instantly turned to fine, powdery dust. The reinforced concrete foundations beneath them groaned, snapped, and caved inward with a deafening roar that sounded like tectonic plates colliding, or a mountain screaming in agony.
The Surgeon, caught entirely midair, was violently dragged downward with the accumulated force of hundreds of tons!
BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!
The sheer impact shook the entirety of underground sector B3.
The hospital floor—architecturally designed to withstand nuclear-level seismic disasters—completely collapsed, forming a terrifying, thirty-meter-wide crater!
Thick reinforcement steel grids jutted out from the edges of the pit, twisted and snapped like the broken ribs of a giant corpse.
The resulting shockwave was like a physical wall of air. It violently hurled Aiden, who had been watching the clash in frozen terror from the far corner, lifting him off his feet and slamming him brutally into the steel door, where he fell to the ground groaning in pain.
A massive, suffocating cloud of pulverized concrete, rusted metal shavings, and vaporized, coagulated blood rose high into the air, completely obscuring all vision and plunging the crater into a hazy darkness.
I stood at the edge of the destruction, breathing heavily, my chest heaving. The sudden, massive drain on my ether reserves made my head spin slightly.
Did I crush it? I thought, my eyes darting through the thick dust. Did the sheer, undeniable weight of gravity finally destroy its reinforced spider frame?
Suddenly... from within the dead center of the suffocating, silent dust cloud—
Clang!
A thick, industrial metal chain shot out, cutting through the debris like a striking cobra. At the end of the chain was not a blade, but a massive, jagged surgical clamp!
I couldn’t fold space in time to teleport—the dense, ether-infused dust cloud heavily distorted my spatial vision and delayed my casting time by a fatal fraction of a second.
I twisted my body forcefully, relying entirely on pure, raw physical instinct.
The massive clamp zoomed past, narrowly missing my waist... but it didn’t miss completely.
Slaaaaaaaaaaash!
The sharp, serrated metallic edges of the surgical clamp, engineered specifically to latch onto and tear through aura-reinforced armor, shredded the fabric of my new white coat as if it were wet tissue paper. It didn’t stop there. The jagged teeth plunged deep into the soft, unprotected flesh of my right side, violently scraping against my lower ribs!
"Aaaargh!"
A sharp, involuntary, and completely human scream of agonizing pain forcefully escaped my throat.
Flesh tore open, and the visceral sensation of cold, unforgiving metal violently carving through layers of my muscle and fat was simultaneously sickening and burning hot.
Hot, crimson blood burst forth instantly, soaking my clothes in an instant and dripping heavily onto the ruined concrete rubble below.
Fighting through the blinding pain, I violently pulled gravity to strike the chain, attempting to shatter it, but the Surgeon’s reflexes were inhuman. The clamp released its bite and retracted at lightning speed, disappearing safely back into the swirling dust cloud, taking a chunk of my flesh with it.