Episode-993
Chapter : 1985
For a split second, she stood frozen. Then, a web of white cracks appeared on her skin. They spread from the point of impact, racing across her arms, her legs, her face.
With a sound like a chandelier being dropped from a ten-story building, Spirit Jasmin exploded. She didn't die—spirits are energy—but her physical manifestation was obliterated. Shards of spiritual diamond sprayed across the desert like glitter. Her physical form was obliterated, leaving only a scattered cloud of spiritual dust and a flickering blue essence that began to recede into Lloyd's soul. She was functionally deleted from the battlefield, her data returning to the safety of the hairpin.
"No!" Lloyd roared.
Atlas tried to intervene. The Water King surged forward, forming a tidal wave to sweep Anthony away.
Anthony didn't dodge. He simply vibrated his entire body. The red electricity flared, creating a repulsive field. He ran through the water. The liquid boiled and evaporated on contact with his field. He punched Atlas in the chest, the red lightning disrupting the spirit’s cohesion. Atlas dissolved into a puddle, forced to retreat to reform his body.
In ten seconds, Anthony had dismantled Lloyd’s entire support team.
The red blur stopped in the center of the canyon. Anthony stood there, steam rising from his armor. The red cables in his neck pulsed, pumping combat drugs and data into his brain.
"Isolation complete," Anthony stated. "Now. We dissect the pilot."
Lloyd sat in the cockpit of the Aegis. His dashboard was a Christmas tree of red warning lights. His sensors were blinded by the electrical interference. His spirits were down.
The battlefield was silent again, save for the hum of the red lightning.
Lloyd forced himself to breathe. He forced the panic down into a little box in his mind and locked it. He looked at the monster in front of him. This wasn't a fight about strength anymore. It wasn't a fight about firepower.
It was a math problem.
Problem: The enemy moves faster than I can think.
Variable: I cannot speed up my own nerves.
Variable: The Aegis suit has a maximum turn speed.
Conclusion: If I try to react to him, I die. I will always be one second too late.
Lloyd watched the red light pulse. He realized the bitter truth. This was the wall. This was the limit of flesh and blood. No matter how much magic he learned, no matter how many spirits he bonded with, he was still a human inside a can. And humans were slow.
"You're right, Anthony," Lloyd said over the open channel. His voice was quiet. "You're faster. You're stronger. You gave up your humanity to become a calculator."
Anthony crouched, getting ready to launch himself again. "Evolution requires sacrifice, Ferrum. Prepare for deletion."
Lloyd took his hands off the control sticks for a second. He flexed his fingers. They were trembling, just a little.
"Yeah," Lloyd whispered. "But the thing about calculators is... they're predictable. You don't have intuition anymore. You have programming. And programming has rules."
Lloyd grabbed the sticks again. He didn't try to track Anthony. He didn't try to aim. He looked at the layout of the canyon. He looked at the debris field. He looked at the puddle of water where Atlas had fallen.
He stopped trying to be faster. He started thinking about how to stop motion itself.
"Come on then," Lloyd said, engaging the last of his fuel reserves. "Let's see whose math is better."
Anthony vanished again. The red blur screamed toward him. The death blow was coming, moving at the speed of a circuit.
________________________________________
The red warning light on Lloyd’s dashboard wasn't blinking anymore. It was just a solid, angry crimson line screaming that death was less than a second away.
Inside the cockpit of the Aegis Mark I, the air was hot and smelled like burning copper. The digital display showing the enemy’s speed had simply given up. It couldn’t calculate numbers that high. Anthony, the cyborg monster who used to be a man, was coming at him like a red lightning bolt. He wasn't running; he was tearing through the space between them.
Lloyd’s hands were frozen on the control sticks. His brain, honed by eighty years of warfare and engineering, ran the simulation a thousand times in a single heartbeat.
Scenario A: Dodge left. Result: The Aegis is too heavy. Anthony adjusts course in a millisecond. Impact unavoidable. Death.
Scenario B: Raises shields. Result: Anthony’s vibrating fist shatters the armor plating like it’s made of sugar glass. Death.
Chapter : 1986
Scenario C: Counter-attack. Result: Lloyd punches empty air because his nervous system is biological and slow, while Anthony is digital and fast. Death.
Lloyd stopped looking at the screens. He leaned back in the pilot’s seat and let go of the controls. To an outsider, it looked like he was giving up. It looked like he had accepted that the machine was faster than the man.
But Lloyd wasn’t giving up. He was switching gears.
"You can’t win a race against light," Lloyd said, his voice flat and calm in the chaos of the cockpit. "So, you stop the race."
He closed his eyes. The physical world vanished. He dove deep into his own soul, ignoring the screaming alarms and the shaking metal frame of his suit. He reached out to the spiritual bond that connected him to his team. He found the connection to Atlas, the Water King.
Atlas was currently a puddle on the canyon floor, trying to pull his scattered water molecules back into the shape of a muscular giant. He was hurt. The red lightning had boiled parts of him away. But he was still there.
"Atlas," Lloyd commanded. His mental voice didn't ask; it ordered. "Drop the form. I don't need a warrior right now. I don't need a king."
Atlas’s consciousness rumbled back, confused but listening.
"I need an ocean," Lloyd said. "Core-Release. Now."
It was a cruel order. A spirit’s form is their identity. Asking Atlas to give up his humanoid shape was like asking a person to melt into a soup. It was a sacrifice of self. But Atlas felt Lloyd’s resolve. He felt the cold, hard logic of the Major General. If they didn't do this, they all died.
There was a moment of silence in the spiritual link—a deep, heavy nod of acceptance.
Outside, in the real world, the red blur was fifty feet away. Anthony was screaming something about deletion and evolution. His fist was pulled back, vibrating with that terrible, high-pitched hum that could shatter diamonds.
Then, the puddle on the floor exploded.
It didn't splash. It expanded. It was as if a hole had been punched in the bottom of the world and the sea was rushing in to fill it. The blue water didn't shoot up; it swirled inward, creating a vortex of impossible weight.
"Domain Expansion," Lloyd whispered. "Oceanic Singularity."
The water turned dark, almost black. It became heavy. This wasn't water you could swim in. This was the kind of water found five miles down at the bottom of the Mariana Trench, where the weight is so great it can crush a submarine like a soda can.
The red blur hit the black water.
Usually, when something fast hits water, it skips off the surface or cuts right through. But this water had "Conceptual Mass." It was sticky with gravity.
BOOM.
The sound wasn't an explosion. It was a dull thud, like a hammer hitting a mattress. Anthony didn't stop instantly—momentum doesn't work like that. He tore into the sphere of heavy water, shredding the liquid for about ten feet.
And then, physics caught up with him.
The water clamped down. It wrapped around the gold limbs of the Sirius suit. It filled the gaps in the armor. It pressed against the red cables pulsing in Anthony’s neck.
"What is this?!" Anthony’s voice screeched over the external speakers. It sounded garbled, like he was speaking from inside a deep tunnel. "Movement... restricted. Thrusters... failing."
The red lightning that usually let Anthony ignore friction started to fail. The water was too dense. It was grounding the electricity, absorbing the energy, and turning it into heat. The water around the Sirius suit began to boil, sending massive bubbles of steam up to the surface, but the pressure didn't let up.
Lloyd watched the sensors. The enemy speed dial dropped from "Error" to 500 mph. Then 200. Then 50.
Finally, zero.
Anthony was suspended in the middle of a massive, floating sphere of dark water that hovered in the center of the canyon. He looked like a fly trapped in blue amber. The Sirius suit was thrashing, its engines whining and screaming as it tried to push against the weight of a virtual ocean. The servos in the arms sparked and smoked.
"You think water can hold me?" Anthony roared, his voice distorted by the liquid. "I am a machine god! I will boil this ocean dry!"