Episode-995
Chapter : 1989
Lloyd ignored the warning. He looked through the main camera. Through the layers of transparent diamond and the swirling dark water inside, he could see Anthony. The golden Sirius suit was trapped in the center like a bug in amber. Anthony was thrashing, banging his fists against the inside of the wall, his mouth moving in silent screams.
Anthony had tried to use speed. He had tried to use advanced calculations. He had tried to turn himself into a computer to win a fight. But Lloyd knew something about computers—they had limits. They had rules. And Lloyd was about to rewrite the rulebook.
"In a perfect diamond," Lloyd whispered, his voice a cold monotone that cut through the humming of the machinery, "light cannot escape. It doesn’t fade away. It doesn’t get tired. It just keeps moving."
He flipped the safety cover off the firing trigger.
"It only evolves."
Lloyd pulled the trigger.
There was no recoil. Recoil happens when an explosion pushes air. But here, there was no air to push. The energy didn't have anywhere to go but forward.
A blinding column of pure, white-hot energy erupted from the Nova Cannon. It didn't look like fire. It didn't look like lightning. It looked like liquid sunlight. It slammed into the Diamond Coffin.
Normally, a laser beam hits something and stops, or it punches a hole through the other side. But this wasn't normal. This was Spirit Jasmin’s ultimate defense. The walls of the coffin were perfect mirrors on the inside.
The beam entered the diamond sphere and hit the back wall. Instead of breaking through, it bounced. It reflected off the interior surface at a sharp angle, shooting back toward the center. It missed Anthony by an inch and hit the front wall. Then it bounced again. And again. And again.
Because light travels at 186,000 miles per second, the beam didn't just bounce a few times. In the span of a single heartbeat, that beam of plasma reflected millions of times.
The interior of the Diamond Coffin instantly turned white. It was no longer a prison of water and crystal. It had become a reactor.
Inside the trap, Anthony stopped screaming. He didn't have time to scream. He was watching his sensors go from "Danger" to "Offline" in a fraction of a second. The first beam grazed his shoulder, melting the gold armor like it was made of wax. The second beam hit his leg. The third beam hit his chest.
Then, the beams multiplied.
The light was bouncing so fast that it filled every single inch of space inside the sphere. There was no shadow. There was no darkness. There was only the laser. The beam was everywhere at once. It was piercing his armor from the front, the back, the top, and the bottom simultaneously.
"System failure," the Fire Fly computer screeched inside Anthony's brain. "Thermal overload. Shields evaporating. Armor integrity at zero percent."
Anthony’s "Circuit-Ascension" form—that horrific mix of man and machine—couldn't handle it. The red cables plugging into his neck began to boil. His blood turned to steam. The "Null-Alloy" armor that was supposed to be invincible against magic was useless against this much raw heat. The armor didn't break; it simply ceased to exist as a solid. It turned into gas.
The Sirius suit began to glow. Not from its own power, but because it was becoming translucent from the heat.
Lloyd kept his finger on the trigger. He wasn't stopping. He was pouring every last drop of mana, every spark of Iffrit’s fire, and every volt of Fang Fairy’s lightning into the cannon. He was feeding the fire.
The diamond sphere began to vibrate. It wasn't cracking yet, but it was humming with a terrifying sound, a high-pitched shriek that sounded like the universe tearing apart. The ground beneath the sphere turned to glass instantly, melting from the sheer radiation leaking through the crystal.
"More," Lloyd grunted, his teeth grit together. "It's not enough."
He pushed the throttle forward, forcing the Nova Cannon to draw power from his own life force. His vision started to blur. His nose started to bleed. But he didn't let go.
Chapter : 1990
Inside the sphere, the temperature had reached levels that didn't belong on a planet. It was the temperature of a star’s core. The water that had been holding Anthony was long gone, split into hydrogen and oxygen atoms that were now fueling the fire. Anthony himself was gone. The man, the machine, the arrogance—it had all been vaporized. There was nothing left but superheated gas swirling in a prison of light.
But the light wanted out.
________________________________________
The Diamond Coffin was shining so brightly that it was impossible to look at it directly, even through the filtered lenses of the Aegis’s sensors. It hung in the air like a second sun, a perfect sphere of blinding white fury that drowned out the desert daylight.
Lloyd Ferrum finally took his finger off the trigger. The Nova Cannon hissed and powered down, the barrel glowing a dangerous cherry-red. The metal of the Aegis’s right arm was warped and twisted from the heat, the white-and-gold plating fusing together into a useless lump of slag.
Inside the cockpit, Lloyd panted, his chest heaving against the safety harness. Sweat stung his eyes, but he didn't blink. He watched the readouts.
"That... should do it."
It was an understatement. The energy density inside the diamond sphere had reached a critical mass. The laws of physics on the planet Riverio were screaming in protest. You cannot trap that much energy in such a small space without consequences. The universe has a way of correcting such insults.
The diamond shell held for one more second. Then, reality gave up.
It didn't shatter like glass. It shattered like time.
CRACK.
The sound was absolute. It was a noise so loud it registered as silence because human ears couldn't process the frequency. The space-time inside the prison had been incinerated. The diamond shell failed, and the energy was released.
BOOM.
A massive explosion of white and purple light erupted outward. It wasn't a fire explosion; it was a shockwave of pure force. It hit the Aegis suit and threw the twelve-ton machine backward like a toy tossed by an angry child.
Lloyd felt the world spin violently as his mech tumbled end-over-end through the air. The internal dampeners screamed, trying to compensate for the G-forces, but it wasn't enough. The Aegis crashed into the canyon wall three hundred yards away, burying itself in a landslide of rock and dust.
The shockwave didn't stop there. It leveled the surrounding mountains. Huge peaks of rock were turned to dust in an instant. A crater three miles wide was carved into the earth, turning the Sky Canyon into a massive bowl of smoking glass.
Lloyd groaned inside the darkened cockpit, his head ringing from the impact. The main power was offline, and the emergency red lights pulsed like a dying heartbeat. His HUD was fractured, static lines running across his vision.
"System report," Lloyd rasped, tasting blood.
"Critical failure," the computer drone replied, its voice glitching. "Mobility... compromised. Power levels at... 1%."
He didn't bother opening the faceplate. The radiation and heat outside would be lethal to a human. Instead, he forced his hands to move over the manual controls, rerouting the last dregs of power to the optical sensors. He used his [All-Seeing Eye] to peer through the suit's cracked external cameras at the center of the explosion.
There was nothing there.
No golden suit. No Anthony. No debris. It was just... empty. The "Infinite Refraction" had done its job. It hadn't just killed the enemy; it had erased him. Anthony’s physical body, his digital consciousness, his machine—all of it had been returned to atoms.
Lloyd slumped back in his seat, a grim satisfaction settling over him. The threat was gone. The Fire Fly agent who had mocked his world was dust.
"Physics," Lloyd muttered, his voice raspy. "It always wins."
He reached for the ejection sequence, intending to climb out and verify the kill with his own eyes. But just as his hand touched the lever, a blip appeared on his passive radar.
He froze. He zoomed the sensors in on the center of the glass crater.
The ground was still hot enough to melt rubber, glowing with the remnants of the plasma storm. But hovering in the exact center, right where Anthony’s chest had been, was a small, black object.
It wasn't damaged. It wasn't scratched. It was a perfect, smooth sphere, about the size of an apple. It was pulsing with a dark, dimensional energy that made Lloyd’s stomach turn. It looked like a hole in the world.