Episode-913
Chapter : 1825
He flickered out of existence just as the scythe swept through the space where his neck had been. He reappeared ten feet away, panting.
"Okay," Lloyd said. "Defending is good. But winning is better. How do I kill a ghost?"
Lloyd watched the Shadow Guardian. It was preparing for another swing. But as it moved, Lloyd’s [All-Seeing Eye], boosted by the active Void energy, picked up something interesting.
The Guardian wasn't solid. It flickered.
It was like a bad hologram. Every few milliseconds, its form would blur, shift, and re-stabilize.
"It's phasing," Lloyd realized. "It exists between dimensions. It dips into our reality to attack, then dips back out to avoid damage. It’s blinking."
That was why Ben’s lance had failed. That was why the bullets had passed through. The Guardian wasn't intangible; it just wasn't there when the attacks landed. It was reacting to the incoming threats by shifting its phase frequency.
"Clever girl," Lloyd muttered.
To kill it, he needed to stop it from shifting. He needed to grab it by the metaphysical scruff of its neck and hold it still so he could punch it.
"I need to force it into a single point of space-time," Lloyd deduced. "I need to lock the coordinates."
He looked at his right arm. The Nova Cannon module was still retracted in the subspace pocket of his suit.
"Nova," Lloyd thought. "Wake up. We have work to do."
The suit rippled. The white and gold plating of the Nova Cannon unfolded, encasing his arm. The heavy hum of the weapon filled the air.
The Guardian paused. It sensed the energy build-up. The Nova Cannon wasn't just a gun; it was a spirit. It had a presence.
"THREAT," the Guardian hissed. It sensed that this weapon could hurt it.
The Guardian began to fade. It was retreating fully into the other dimension, planning to attack from a different angle, or maybe just wait until Lloyd passed out from blood loss.
"Oh no you don't," Lloyd said. "You don't get to leave the party just because the music got loud."
He couldn't just shoot it. If he fired the Nova Cannon now, the beam would just pass through the empty space where the Guardian used to be. He needed to pin it down first.
"System," Lloyd commanded. "I need a spatial anchor. I need a gravity well. I need a Space Lock."
[Analyzing...] the Administrator’s voice replied smoothly. [Space Lock is a theoretical application of Void Power. Success rate: Unknown. Energy cost: Extreme.]
"I have a lot of energy," Lloyd said, thinking of the daily conversions he had been doing. "And I love theory. Do it."
He raised his left hand. His right arm, the cannon, began to glow. The cooling vents hissed.
"Hey! Ghost-Face!" Lloyd shouted.
The Guardian, which was half-faded, paused.
"Smile," Lloyd said.
He activated his Void Power. But he didn't shape it into chains. He didn't shape it into a shield. He shaped it into a cage.
He projected a grid. A three-dimensional lattice of Blue Rings shot out from his left hand. They expanded, surrounding the area where the Guardian stood.
"Contract," Lloyd ordered.
The rings slammed inward. They didn't hit the Guardian. They hit the air around it. They hit the space itself.
The air distorted. Gravity twisted. The space inside the rings became heavy, dense, solid.
The Guardian shrieked. It tried to phase out. It tried to slip into the shadow dimension. But the door was closed. The Space Lock had solidified the boundaries of reality.
The Guardian’s form snapped back into focus. It became solid. It became real. It looked less like smoke and more like black glass.
It struggled, thrashing against the invisible pressure. It realized, with a dawning horror that only a sentient spell can feel, that it was trapped.
"Gotcha," Lloyd whispered.
He raised his right arm. The Nova Cannon was fully deployed. The barrel was open. The white light inside was blinding.
"Charging," Lloyd said. "Maximum output. Bypass safeties. I want this thing erased."
The suit whined in protest. The silver threads of the stealth tech began to glow red from the heat bleeding off the cannon. Lloyd’s arm felt like it was in a furnace.
"Warning," the System said. "Critical heat levels."
"I know!" Lloyd yelled.
He aimed. The Guardian screamed, raising its scythe in a futile attempt to block.
"You're not a ghost anymore," Lloyd said. "Now, you're just a target."
He didn't aim for the head. He aimed for the center of mass. He aimed for the fabric of reality that the Guardian was occupying.
"No more ghosting," Lloyd muttered.
Chapter : 1826
He pulled the trigger.
The air on the obsidian plateau wasn't just hot; it was screaming.
Lloyd Ferrum stood with his feet planted wide on the black rock, his body acting as the anchor for a weapon that had no business existing in a fantasy world. The Nova Arm Cannon, fully deployed and wrapped around his right forearm, was currently charging past its safety limits. The sleek, matte-black stealth suit he wore—a masterpiece of nanoweave technology designed to keep him invisible, cool, and silent—was failing at all three jobs.
The suit was designed to absorb heat. Right now, it was trying to absorb the thermal output of a miniature sun strapped to Lloyd’s wrist. The silver threads woven into the fabric began to glow a dull, angry cherry-red. The air around Lloyd shimmered and twisted, distorting the view like a mirage on a desert highway. To anyone watching, Lloyd was no longer a shadow; he was a lighthouse of thermal energy standing in the middle of the dark void.
"Warning," the System’s voice buzzed in Lloyd’s ear, sounding uncharacteristically frantic. "External suit temperature exceeding 400 degrees. Internal cooling systems are at 100% capacity. Critical failure imminent. You are literally cooking yourself, sir."
"I like my steak medium-rare," Lloyd gritted out through clenched teeth. Sweat was already pouring down his face inside the helmet, stinging his eyes where the blood from his earlier psychic exertion had dried. "Just keep the arm from melting off for ten more seconds!"
His left hand was extended forward, fingers curled into a claw shape, trembling with the effort of maintaining the spell. This wasn't a fireball. This wasn't a lightning bolt. This was the [Space Lock].
In front of him, trapped within a grid of glowing Blue Rings, the Shadow Guardian was losing its mind.
The entity was a nightmare of shifting smoke and abyssal mana, a creature that had spent thousands of years guarding this gate by simply not being there. Its primary defense was "phasing"—shifting its body between dimensions so that swords, bullets, and magic passed harmlessly through it. It was the ultimate cheat code. It was a ghost that could cut you, but you couldn't cut it back.
But Lloyd had changed the rules.
The grid of blue rings wasn't attacking the Guardian directly. Instead, Lloyd was using his Void power to attack the empty air around the monster. He was compressing the space, increasing the gravitational density of that specific cube of reality until it was solid as concrete.
Imagine trying to swim through water, and suddenly, the water turns into ice. That was what was happening to the Guardian.
SCREEEEEEE!
The Guardian shrieked. It was a sound that didn't just hurt the ears; it rattled the teeth and vibrated in the marrow of the bones. It was the sound of pure, unadulterated panic. The monster tried to flicker out of reality, to slip into the shadow dimension like it always did. But every time it tried to phase shift, it slammed into the invisible walls of the gravity well.
THUD.
The sound of a ghost hitting a wall of compressed gravity was surprisingly dull and heavy.
"Stop wiggling!" Lloyd shouted at the thrashing monster, his voice amplified by the suit’s speakers. "You're making the targeting calculations harder than they need to be!"
The Guardian didn't listen. It swung its massive, violet energy scythe at the invisible walls of the Space Lock. Usually, that scythe could slice through the mind of a grown man like a hot knife through butter. But against the condensed gravity of the Void, it bounced off with a harmless spark of purple light.
For the first time in millennia, the Guardian was fully solid. It had mass. It had volume. And because it couldn't phase out, it had mortality.
Inside the glowing blue dome of the Mental Fortress a few yards away, Ben watched the scene with wide, terrified eyes. He had just recovered from a mental breakdown, his mind pieced back together by Lloyd’s intervention. Now, looking out through the translucent walls of the shield, he saw his cousin transforming into a deity of destruction.
Ben saw the heat radiating off Lloyd. He saw the rock beneath Lloyd’s boots turning soft and molten from the sheer energy bleeding off the cannon. He realized, with a jolt of awe, that Lloyd wasn't just fighting a monster. He was conducting a high-stakes physics experiment with his own body as the laboratory.
"Lloyd!" Ben shouted, his voice barely audible over the humming whine of the cannon. "It’s solid! You got it! Shoot it before the suit explodes!"