Episode-811
Chapter : 1621
Lloyd didn't move. He let the landslide bury him. He stood there, under the pile of rubble, feeling the weight.
It doesn't hurt, he thought. Nothing hurts.
The rocks bounced off his steel skin. The dust couldn't get into his lungs because he didn't need to breathe in this form. He was sealed. He was safe.
He shoved his way out of the pile of rubble, tossing boulders aside like they were pebbles. He stood amidst the destruction, gleaming and untouched.
"Do you see?" Lloyd roared, his voice shaking the ground. "Nothing gets in! Nothing touches me!"
For a moment, he felt a surge of manic joy. He had done it. He had solved the equation of mortality. He just had to be this. Always.
But then the warning lights in his mind flashed red.
Critical Energy Depletion.
The steel skin flickered. The rock body began to crack. The weight, which had felt empowering, suddenly felt crushing. His heart—his human heart, buried deep inside the rock—struggled to beat against the pressure.
"No," Lloyd whispered. "Not yet. I need more time."
He tried to force the form to hold. He channeled his life force into the bond. But the laws of magic were absolute. The form shattered.
It wasn't a graceful de-transformation. It was a collapse. The steel dissolved into mist. The rock crumbled into dust. Lloyd fell thirty feet, crashing onto the hard ground.
He lay there, staring up at the sky. He couldn't move. He couldn't feel his legs. He was completely, utterly paralyzed by exhaustion.
"Master!" Fang Fairy cried, rushing to him. She placed her hands on his chest, checking his vitals. "You stopped your heart for four seconds! You idiot! You absolute, tactical genius moron!"
Lloyd coughed, a dry, hacking sound. He tasted copper.
"Did it... hold?" he wheezed.
"Yes, it held!" Fang Fairy yelled, tears of mana streaming down her face. "You punched a mountain! Now stop trying to kill yourself!"
Lloyd closed his eyes. He felt the cold ground against his back. The safety was gone. The invulnerability was a lie. It was temporary. Just like everything else.
He lay there for a long time, too weak to return to the real world. He thought about the Aegis suit. The Titan form was too expensive. It used his own soul as fuel. He needed a machine. A machine didn't feel pain. A machine didn't get tired.
I have the data, he thought, his mind working sluggishly. I know how the armor needs to layer. I know the density.
He forced his eyes open. He had to get up. He had work to do.
"Help me up," he whispered to his spirits.
Iffrit and Fang Fairy exchanged a look. They were terrified. Not of the monsters in the valley, but of the monster their master was becoming. But they obeyed. They helped the broken man stand up.
Lloyd limped toward the portal. He looked back at the ruined valley one last time.
"Next time," he muttered, "I stay in the suit."
He stepped through the portal, leaving the Titan behind, but carrying the heavy, crushing weight of it in his soul.
Lloyd returned to the real world.
Lloyd sat in the corner of the laboratory, staring at the Aegis Mark I.
He had just returned from the Soul Farm. His body still ached from the expansion of the Titan form, but his mind was vibrating with a terrifying realization.
In the Soul Farm, when he merged with Atlas, he had felt it: Conceptual Mass. When the giant stomped on him, he didn't just survive because he was hard; he survived because the Spirit of the Earth simply refused to break. It was a law of reality, not just physics.
He looked at the Aegis suit hanging in the chains.
Yesterday, he thought it was a god. It had Star-Frost armor. It had layers of Adamantite. It was an engineering masterpiece.
"But it's just metal," Lloyd whispered, the cold dread settling in his stomach.
"System," Lloyd croaked. "Run a comparative simulation. Defender A: Aegis Mark I (Current Configuration). Defender B: Atlas Titan Form. Attacker: Lucifer (Gravity Crush)."
The System hummed, processing the data from his recent fight and the suit schematics.
[Simulation Complete]
Defender B (Atlas Titan): The Conceptual Weight of the Titan counters the Conceptual Gravity of the Devil. Result: Survival. Damage negligible.
Defender A (Aegis Suit): The armor withstands the physical pressure. However, the suit possesses no Conceptual Mass. The Devil's Authority passes through the atomic gaps of the alloy. Result: Armor intact. Pilot Liquefied.
Chapter : 1622
Lloyd stared at the red text.
Pilot Liquefied.
He started to laugh. It was a low, jagged sound.
He had built the strongest coffin in the universe. On Earth, this suit would conquer nations. But here? In a world of Concepts and Souls? It was a tin can. If he put Ken in this... if he put Jasmin in this... Lucifer wouldn't even have to break the shell to kill the yolk inside.
"It's too thin," Lloyd gasped, standing up and stumbling toward the blueprints. "The reality... the reality is leaking through the metal."
He grabbed a charcoal stick. He didn't see a masterpiece anymore. He saw a death trap.
"It needs the Spirit," Lloyd muttered feverishly. "I can't just wear the metal. I need to weave the Titan into the metal. I need the machine to have a soul, or it’s just a tomb."
He began to scribble frantically over the beautiful designs, ruining them with heavy, angry black lines.
"Thicker!" he screamed at the empty room. "It needs to be conceptually thicker!"
His hands were shaking, but his lines were straight. The manic energy had taken hold. He was running on pure adrenaline and potions.
Alaric, his head alchemist, knocked on the door frame timidly. "My Lord? You... you have been absent for a long time. The shifts have changed twice."
Lloyd spun around. His eyes were wild. "Time is irrelevant, Alaric! Physics is relevant! Impact resistance is relevant! Do we have the Golem Heart interface calibrated?"
Alaric swallowed hard. "We... we are having trouble with the heat dissipation. The Lilith Stones overheat when we try to run the autonomous defense protocols."
"Then cool them!" Lloyd shouted, slamming his hand on the table. "Use liquid nitrogen! Use ice magic! I don't care! Fix it!"
Alaric flinched. He had never seen Lloyd like this. Lloyd was usually the calmest person in the room, the one who made jokes when things exploded. Now, he looked like he was about to explode.
"Yes, my Lord. Immediately." Alaric fled.
Lloyd turned back to his work. He picked up a wrench and started tightening a bolt on a prototype joint. He tightened it until the metal screamed. He kept tightening. Snap. The bolt sheared off.
"Weak," Lloyd hissed. He threw the wrench across the room. It shattered a glass beaker.
He began to pace. The lab felt too small. The ceiling was too low. He felt trapped. He needed to be the Titan again. But he knew his body couldn't take another merge so soon. So he channeled that frustration into the machine.
He worked for three days straight. He drank potions that tasted like battery acid to keep him awake. He refused to sleep. Sleep was the enemy. Sleep was where the replay happened.
The spear. The blood. The silence.
"No," Lloyd said aloud to the empty room. "Work."
He started assembling the chassis frame. He used his Steel Blood to weld the joints, his eyes glowing with the blue rings of the Austin power to ensure microscopic perfection. He was a man possessed. He wasn't building a suit; he was building a coffin that could punch back.
On the fourth day, his temper snapped. A junior assistant dropped a tray of screws. The sound—clatter, clatter, clatter—triggered something in Lloyd’s frayed nerves.
He was across the room in a blur of Void Steps. He grabbed the assistant by the collar and slammed him against the wall.
"Silence!" Lloyd roared. "I need silence!"
The assistant terrified, dropped the tray again. Lloyd stared at the boy’s terrified eyes. For a second, he didn't see a boy. He saw a threat. He saw noise.
Then, reality crashed back in. He let go. The boy slid to the floor, sobbing.
Lloyd stepped back, horrified. He looked at his hands. They were trembling violently.
"Get out," Lloyd whispered. "Everyone. Get out."
The lab cleared in seconds. Lloyd was alone. He sank to the floor, leaning against the cold metal of the half-finished Aegis suit. He pulled his knees to his chest.
He wasn't the Silent Lion anymore. He was a wounded dog, snapping at everything that moved.
He looked at the Golem Heart sitting on the workbench. It pulsed with a soft, rhythmic light. Thump. Thump.
"You're lucky," Lloyd told the rock. "You don't have to feel anything."
He stayed there for hours, catatonic, staring at a dust mote floating in a sunbeam. He tried to calculate the trajectory of the dust. It was the only thing that kept him from screaming.
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