Chapter 266: Birth of the Thunder Beast
Iron continued to circle above the rift, trying not to fly past the invisible boundary.
Suddenly, another Guardian materialized right above him. Wasting no time, it dropped down with all its weight, driving Iron straight into the ground with its shield and body.
The engineer barely had time to catch his breath when the Guardian formed a spear in its hand and raised it for a strike to his chest. In the final split second, Iron compressed space and instantly shifted a couple of meters to the side. The spear drove into the ground with a dull crack right where he had just been lying.
At the same time, on the surface, Noah was fighting off three Guardians. Making a quick dash backward to evade another lunge, he accidentally bumped back-first into Iron.
From the sudden shove, the engineer lost his balance and took a few forced steps forward. Turning his head, he saw that Noah had already dodged out of the way of an attack, and a thrown spear was hurtling straight at Iron's face. Iron simply altered its movement vector, sending the spear back at the Guardian who threw it.
"Can't you pull off that trick again?" Noah shouted, slicing through a Guardian's body on the fly with his sword.
Iron stepped toward the edge of the rift, deflecting flying lightning bolts into the nearest Guardians along the way:
"I can. But I need to be right up close for that..."
Noah, ducking under another swing, cut him off:
"Then don't!"
"...I wasn't planning to," Iron replied briefly.
By this time, the clouds above had finally turned completely pitch black. The discharges within them flashed even brighter, more frequently, and more devastatingly.
Iron spotted another lightning bolt rushing at him. He dodged sharply, but the discharge didn't just pass by; it turned in mid-air and followed right after him. Iron swerved once more and deflected the lightning straight down. It slammed into the soil, detonated with an explosion, and from the scattering sparks, a new Guardian instantly wove itself together.
Iron was just about to push off and take flight when he caught movement in the sky with his peripheral vision. Turning his head, he saw it: a colossal barrage of lightning was raining down on them straight from the black clouds — no less than a hundred strikes at once.
Noah, fighting nearby, noticed it too and got distracted for a moment, glancing up. One of the Guardians immediately tried to exploit the opening and strike. But Noah instantly dashed behind the Guardian's back and unleashed dozens of rapid-fire punches onto its torso.
In that same second, a hundred lightning bolts crashed into the ground with a deafening roar. The discharges struck the entire surrounding area, directly missing only Noah and Iron themselves. A massive electrical explosion thundered, everything around lit up with blinding light, and a powerful shockwave rolled across the ground.
When the flash subsided, Iron was already dashing away in mid-air from several Guardians pursuing him. He let out a heavy, ragged exhale, saying to himself:
Damn... this is way harder than I thought.
Iron landed on the ground, but the Guardians immediately lunged at him, giving him not a second to rest. They closed in almost point-blank, raising their shields, fists, and spears to attack.
Iron swung his arm sharply, instantly creating a massive semicircular gust of air in front of him. The powerful gust blew away all the Guardians in a crushing gale — their foggy bodies scattered into dozens of separate particles in all directions, but didn't completely disappear.
The airflow died down. Iron looked at the scattered particles and saw how they slowly started to shift back together into a single whole.
Noticing this, Iron immediately ran closer, hoping to finally destroy them before they could recover. But right in front of him, the particles abruptly fused together, instantly turning back into fully-formed Guardians.
Iron sharply pulled his hand back and began to make a series of quick dashes backward. He extended his palm, activating attraction, and the particles of the Guardians' bodies began to tear away again and pull towards his hand.
But suddenly Iron felt a strong electrical shock hit his hand and forearm. His arm jerked convulsively, his control slipped, and the pulled particles instantly returned to the Guardians' bodies.
At the same time, one of the Guardians hurled a spear at Noah with a short windup.
Noah dodged it easily with a slight tilt of his torso and already extended his fingers, intending to intercept the shaft with his hands on the fly. But in the next split second, he remembered that the weapon had no solid mass, and immediately saw long electrical spikes crackling out right from the socket and shaft of the spear.
Noah instantly snatched his hand back and made a sharp dash backward.
The protruding spikes detached from the weapon and hurtled straight after him at breakneck speed. Noah deflected and shattered them on the fly with his sword, but the destroyed needles immediately wove themselves anew and continued their relentless pursuit.
A moment later, the spear itself loudly detonated in an electrical explosion. From the flash, a new wave of spikes burst out in all directions, surrounding Noah in a tight ring on all sides.
Noah leaped up powerfully, hacking his way through the spiked barrier with several precise cuts. Finding himself in the air slightly above the others, he saw another spear rushing straight at him, while two Guardians were already hovering nearby, preparing to deliver a synchronized strike.
Hanging at the apex of his jump, Noah instantly pumped all his blood into both arms at once. And with all his might, he clapped his hands deafeningly right in front of himself.
A crushing compressive shockwave erupted from the powerful collision of the two compressed masses. The acoustic pulse vaporized all the flying spikes in the air in an instant, and instantly atomized the figures of the two Guardians into dozens of foggy particles.
Noah landed lightly on the ground, immediately made a wide swing, and sent four quick slashes from his blade straight at the hovering clumps of fog. But the slashes simply cleaved the air, dealing absolutely no damage to the particles.
Noah stared in bewilderment at the fog hanging in the air. He blinked just for a moment, and when he opened his eyes — both Guardians were already standing right up against him, raising their weapons to attack.
Meanwhile, Iron opened his palm right amidst his continuous dodging of attacks. Three-dimensional geometric shapes pulsed above his hand, within which physical equations began to rapidly assemble.
With his peripheral vision, he caught the countdown timer: 03:29.
Dodging a spear lunge, Iron dashed forward and punched right through the chest of the nearest Guardian. But the enemy's foggy particles simply scattered to the sides and immediately wove back together.
Iron backed away with a series of quick dashes. Lightning tore loose from the black clouds again. Iron redirected its vector into the ground, but immediately noticed the energy density in the soil. The earth exploded almost instantly with a flash, but right after that, a violent hum resumed right beneath his feet.
A giant pillar of pure electricity burst upwards from the ground with a deafening roar.
Iron managed to jump back in the air, but dozens of secondary lightning bolts started branching out in all directions from the massive beam. Iron redirected the first few discharges, but in the next moment, a savage, heavy physical and mental fatigue washed over him. Realizing his resources were running low, he instantly stopped redirecting the lightning and switched to pure evasion.
The electrical pillar died down. Iron dropped to the ground, swaying slightly from the strain. Looking up, he saw two Guardians already standing point-blank in front of him, raising their weapons for a final strike.
In that exact millisecond, Lumon's crisp, emotionless voice echoed in his mind:
"All components have been updated."
The Guardians brought their spears down on empty space. Iron had instantly materialized at the bottom of the rift right opposite the source.
He had already extended his hand to launch the corrected anti-resonance pulse, but Lumon immediately issued an emergency system signal:
"Critical threat. Massive energy discharge detected. Immediate teleportation required. Minimum safe radius: three hundred meters."
Iron glanced up and saw a blinding, incredibly compressed cluster of energy crashing down from the clouds.
Wasting not a fraction of a second, Iron locked onto himself and Noah with a spatial anchor, instantly teleporting them both three hundred meters away.
A moment later, a giant yellow beam of electrical energy crashed down onto the spot where they had just been.
The impact completely obliterated the terrain: all the earth, rock, and the rift itself were reduced to dust, covered in crackling electricity, and crumbled into molecules.
As the clouds of dust and the blinding light began to fade, a massive silhouette appeared in the place of the destroyed rift.
A giant purple creature towered in the center of the smoking crater. Its eyes burned with yellow light, and thin cracks ran all over its purple body, through which a searing red-orange light seeped out. Powerful wings spread open behind its back, bearing sharp claws at the joints and scorched yellow edges.