Episode-1035
Chapter : 2069
The spear slammed into Lucifer’s side, right in the ribs. The armor cracked. Lucifer grunted, sliding sideways across the ice.
"Again," Lloyd whispered to himself.
He dissolved the spear and reformed it into a whip of braided steel wire. He lashed out, wrapping the wire around Lucifer’s ankle. He pulled.
Rosa saw the move. Instantly, she created a heavy block of ice above Lucifer’s head.
Lloyd pulled the Devil King off balance. Rosa dropped the block.
CRASH.
Lucifer was slammed into the ground.
For a moment, there was silence in the courtyard. The servants peeking out from the ruined windows couldn't believe their eyes. The Devil King, the monster who had crushed their Arch Duke, was being tossed around like a ragdoll.
Lloyd and Rosa stood on opposite sides of the fallen King. They were breathing hard. This level of coordination was exhausting. It required perfect timing, perfect trust. They had to know exactly what the other person was going to do before they did it.
It was the most intimate they had been in years.
"He's getting up," Rosa said, her voice calm and cold.
"I know," Lloyd replied. "He's getting mad."
Lucifer slowly pushed the block of ice off his chest. He stood up. He wasn't smiling anymore. He wasn't sneering. His face was a blank mask of pure, unadulterated rage.
The "game" was over. He realized that if he kept playing around, these two humans might actually kill him. The thought was humiliating. It burned him more than the steel sand.
"Enough," Lucifer whispered.
He reached up and tore the damaged armor off his shoulders. He threw the pieces to the ground. The black cables under his skin pulsed violently, pumping a black, oily substance into his muscles.
"You want to see technology?" Lucifer asked, his voice shaking the ground. "You want to see power?"
He tapped the center of his chest. The Reality Anchor opened up, revealing a core of swirling, black antimatter.
"Let's see you freeze this."
From the core, a new kind of energy began to gather. It wasn't fire. It wasn't gravity. It was a void. It was the color of a starless night.
"Anti-Matter," Lloyd realized, his eyes widening. "He's charging an annihilation beam."
"Rosa, move!" Lloyd shouted.
But Rosa was already casting. She threw up wall after wall of diamond-hard ice.
It wasn't going to be enough. Lloyd knew physics. Anti-matter didn't care about hardness. When anti-matter touched matter, both things simply ceased to exist. If that beam hit Rosa's ice, the ice would vanish, and the explosion would take out half the estate.
Lucifer leaned forward. The black light screamed.
"Die."
He fired.
________________________________________
The beam of anti-matter was silent. It didn't roar like fire or crackle like lightning. It was a beam of pure absence. It tore through the air, leaving a trail of absolute nothingness behind it.
It was aimed straight at Rosa.
Lloyd tried to move, to intercept it, but he was too far away. His [Void Steps] were fast, but he couldn't outrun a beam of light.
Rosa braced herself. She poured every ounce of her Sovereign power into her shields, layering ice upon ice, creating a glacier in front of her. But she knew, deep down, it was like trying to stop a tidal wave with a sheet of paper.
The beam hit the first wall of ice. The ice didn't shatter. It just vanished. Erased.
The beam continued.
Then, a shadow moved.
It wasn't Lloyd. It wasn't Rosa.
From the side of the courtyard, a figure blurred into the path of the beam. It moved with a mechanical precision, a perfect calculation of angles and speed.
It was Jasmin.
The Black Diamond Queen.
"Shield Protocol: Absolute Absorption," Jasmin’s voice rang out, devoid of fear.
She didn't try to block the beam with a wall. She caught it.
She slammed her hands together, creating a focal point. Her entire body, made of the black star-diamond forged in the underworld, began to vibrate.
The anti-matter beam hit her hands.
Normally, this would be the end. Matter plus anti-matter equals boom. Jasmin should have been vaporized.
But Jasmin wasn't made of normal matter anymore. Her body was a construct created by the System, reinforced by Lloyd’s own Sovereign Potential, and tempered by the laws of the Archive of the Lost. She was a "Dense Object." She was a singularity of loyalty.
The beam hit her palms and... stopped.
It didn't explode. It was sucked in.
Chapter : 2070
Jasmin’s black diamond skin began to glow with a terrifying purple light. The anti-matter was trying to eat her, trying to erase her existence. But her body was acting like a sponge. She was absorbing the destructive energy, converting the "void" into "density."
"Processing," Jasmin said through gritted teeth. "Energy levels... critical. Rerouting to armor density."
Her skin grew darker. The purple light faded as she forced the energy into her molecular structure, making her diamond form harder, heavier, and more indestructible than ever before.
She stood her ground, her feet sliding backward, carving deep trenches in the stone. But she didn't break.
The beam finally sputtered and died. Lucifer had emptied his capacitor.
Jasmin stood there, smoking. She looked like a statue carved from the night sky. She lowered her hands.
"Threat neutralized, Master," she reported.
Lucifer stared at her. His mouth hung open slightly.
"What... are you?" Lucifer whispered. "That was anti-matter. It eats gods. You... you ate it?"
"I am the Shield," Jasmin said simply.
Lloyd walked up to Jasmin and put a hand on her shoulder. He felt the immense heat radiating off her, but she was solid. She was okay.
He looked at Lucifer.
"You're running out of tricks, Lucy," Lloyd said.
Lucifer looked at the three of them. The Steel King. The Ice Queen. The Diamond Shield.
They were a wall he couldn't break. They were a puzzle he couldn't solve.
And for the first time since he descended from the sky, Lucifer felt something he hated. He felt fear.
Not the fear of death—he was immortal, mostly. But the fear of losing. The fear of humiliation. He was the King of Pride. Losing to humans wasn't just a defeat; it was a stain on his soul.
"No," Lucifer muttered. He started to shake. "No. I do not lose. I do not retreat. I am the Morning Star!"
He grabbed the Reality Anchor on his chest. His fingers dug into the metal casing.
"If I cannot break you," Lucifer snarled, his eyes rolling back in his head, "then I will break the board."
He twisted the device.
CLICK.
A sound like a siren began to wail from his chest. The purple light returned, but it wasn't steady anymore. It was pulsing, erratic and violent. The veins in Lucifer’s neck bulged, turning black as the device pumped a toxic mixture of liquid adrenaline and raw, unfiltered dark mana directly into his heart.
It was the "Overdrive" setting. It was a suicide switch. It pushed the user’s power beyond 100%, burning their life force to create a momentary burst of god-like energy.
The ground around Lucifer began to liquefy. Not from heat, but from gravity. The stones floated up and then crushed themselves into dust. The air turned black.
"I will sink this island!" Lucifer screamed. His voice was distorted, sounding like two voices speaking at once—one human, one machine. "I will create a singularity right here, and I will pull all of you into hell with me!"
The gravity well expanded.
Jasmin braced herself, but even she was struggling to stand. Rosa fell to one knee, her ice cracking under the immense pressure.
The purple light coming from Lucifer’s chest wasn't just bright; it was heavy. It felt like the air itself had turned into lead. The gravity well was expanding, twisting the stone floor of the courtyard into dust and pulling everything toward the center where the Devil King stood.
Lloyd Ferrum watched the numbers on his internal display scrolling down to zero. The Aegis suit was screaming warnings about structural failure. Jasmin was on her knees, her diamond form cracking under the pressure. Rosa was struggling to keep her ice domain active, her face pale as she fought against a force that wanted to crush them all into a tiny ball of nothingness.
There was no time for a plan. There was no time to consult with his team or come up with a clever trick using physics. Lucifer wasn't playing a game anymore. He was about to turn himself into a black hole, and once that process finished, there would be no Ferrum Estate, no Titan Squad, and no family left.
"Brute force," Lloyd whispered, his voice raspy inside his helmet. "It’s the only way."
He closed his eyes. He stopped trying to fight the gravity with his muscles. He stopped trying to use his suit. He turned his attention inward, deep into the dangerous, forbidden menu of his System.