Episode-1040
Chapter : 2079
It wasn't a vocal scream. It was the sound of metal being tortured. The massive, blocky ship began to fold in on itself. It was shedding weight. Heavy armor plates popped off and fell to the ground, crashing into the ruins of the Ferrum manor like meteors. The wings of the ship retracted and snapped, reconfiguring into something sharper.
The massive engine block compressed. The cockpit dissolved.
Lloyd watched from the ground as the mountain of metal shrank. It was getting smaller, denser. The air around it began to warp and twist as the gravity engine kicked in.
"It's condensing," Lloyd whispered. "They're building a body."
The huge ship was shedding its skin to reveal the monster inside. It was discarding the transport shell to unleash the weapon.
"Get back!" Lloyd shouted to Ken and the Titan Squad, who were watching in stunned silence. "Everyone get back! That thing is going to drop!"
The transformation was violent. Sparks the size of fireworks rained down. The humming noise pitched up until it became a shriek that shattered the remaining windows of the estate.
Then, the noise stopped.
The floating debris fell away.
Hovering in the air, where the massive ship had been just seconds ago, was a single figure.
It was ten feet tall. It was humanoid, but only in the way a nightmare resembles a person. It dropped from the sky, landing in the center of the crater where Lucifer had been defeated.
BOOM.
The impact didn't kick up dust. It flattened it. A shockwave of pure pressure rolled out, knocking Ken and the others off their feet.
Lloyd squinted through the dust. He saw the figure standing up.
It was sleek. Its body was a masterpiece of chrome and black composite materials, designed for speed and aerodynamics. It had long, jagged wings on its back, but they weren't made of feathers. They were made of black solar panels, sharp as razors, designed to drink light and convert it into death.
Its chest was open, revealing a terrifying, spinning vortex of purple light—the Singularity Engine, powered by Lucifer’s stolen core.
But the face... the face was the worst part.
The engineers at Fire Fly had a twisted sense of irony. They had taken the skin of Lucifer’s face—the pale, handsome features of the Devil King—and stretched it over a chrome skull. It was a mask of dead flesh worn by a robot. The eyes were gone, replaced by glowing red optical sensors that zoomed and clicked as they scanned the battlefield.
It wasn't Lucifer. It was a suit wearing Lucifer.
The creature didn't breathe. It didn't pose or gloat. It just stood there, the engines in its legs humming with a low, menacing growl.
"System," Lloyd asked his own internal computer, his voice shaking slightly. "Identify."
[Analyzing...] his System responded. Even the AI sounded hesitant. [Target matches Fire Fly database. Designation: Exterminator-Unit. Codename: PRIDE.]
[Warning: No biological life signs detected. No soul detected. This is an Autonomous Kill-Droid. Threat Level: Extinction.]
The Cyber-Devil turned its head. The red sensors locked onto Lloyd. It didn't recognize him as a rival or a warrior. It scanned his face, matched it to a database, and processed the order.
A voice came from the machine. It wasn't Lucifer’s voice, and it wasn't Marcus’s voice. It was a synthesized, grinding sound, like metal teeth chewing on gravel.
"ORGANIC RESISTANCE DETECTED," the machine said.
It took a step forward. The ground cracked.
"INITIATING CLEANSE PROTOCOL."
The Exterminator-Unit, the thing that Lloyd’s system had labeled PRIDE, took its first step.
It felt wrong. When a living thing moves, there is a wind-up. Muscles tense, weight shifts, breath is taken. This thing just happened. One moment it was standing still, a statue of chrome and dead flesh; the next, it was ten feet closer. It moved with a jerky, strobe-light speed that defied momentum.
It was a glitch in the world.
"Everyone, scatter!" Ken Park roared. He was the first to recover from the shock. He grabbed a stunned Wraith by the collar and threw him behind a pile of rubble. "Do not engage! I repeat, do not engage!"
The Titan Squad—Ren, Vala, and Kaito—were veterans. They had fought armies. They had fought demons. But they froze. Their Aegis suits, massive machines of war, suddenly looked like toys compared to the sleek, murderous perfection standing in the crater.
PRIDE didn't care about them. Its red ocular sensors were fixated on one thing: Lloyd Ferrum.
Chapter : 2080
The machine’s internal logic was simple. It had a list of targets. Lloyd was at the top of the list. The directive was absolute: EXTERMINATE.
The machine raised its right arm. The limb didn't bend like a human arm; it transformed. Panels slid back, revealing a barrel that glowed with the purple light of the gravity engine. It wasn't a gun. It was a projector.
"GRAVITY LANCE," the machine synthesized.
It didn't shout the name like an attack. It just stated the function.
A beam of distorted space shot out. It wasn't light; it was force. It tore a furrow through the ground, ripping up the marble floor of the courtyard and turning the stone into powder.
Lloyd couldn't dodge. His body was broken from the Seventh Gate. He was sitting on the ground, his legs useless.
"Lloyd!" Rosa screamed.
She threw herself in front of him. Her hands came up, summoning a wall of Sovereign-level ice. It was the thickest, hardest barrier she could create, a glacier condensed into a shield.
The Gravity Lance hit the ice.
There was no explosion. The ice didn't shatter. It simply crumpled. The gravity wave compressed the ice wall until it was the size of a pebble, and then the pebble disintegrated. The beam punched through without slowing down.
It was going to hit them.
But at the last microsecond, the beam curved.
It didn't miss. The machine moved it. The Exterminator-Unit flicked its wrist, and the beam whipped sideways, slashing through the main support pillar of the Ferrum manor house behind them.
CRASH.
The entire east wing of the mansion collapsed. Stone and timber rained down, creating a cloud of choking dust.
The machine wasn't missing. It was clearing the field. It calculated that the building was an obstruction to its line of sight, so it deleted the building.
"It’s not fighting," Lloyd realized, watching the destruction with wide eyes. "It’s working. It’s just completing tasks."
This was worse than fighting a demon. A demon had ego. A demon wanted you to suffer. You could trick a demon. You could make it angry and force it to make a mistake.
You couldn't trick a toaster. You couldn't make a math equation angry.
PRIDE began to walk toward them again. The sound of its footsteps was a heavy, rhythmic THOOM-THOOM-THOOM.
With every step, the jagged solar-panel wings on its back flexed. They were absorbing the ambient light, dimming the sun around the estate. The machine was eating the daylight to power its weapons. The area around the courtyard grew dark, plunged into an artificial twilight.
"Target: Lloyd Ferrum," the machine ground out. "Probability of Survival: 0%."
It lowered its head, like a bull preparing to charge. The engines on its back flared with blue fire.
"Run," Lloyd told Rosa. He tried to push her away with his good hand. "Rosa, get out of here. You can't fight this. It eats magic."
"I am not leaving you," Rosa said. Her voice was shaking, but her feet were planted. She summoned her ice spear again, though it looked fragile against the metal monster. "If we die, we die together."
"Romantic," the machine said.
Lloyd froze. That wasn't a pre-recorded line.
The machine stopped walking. It tilted its head, the dead face of Lucifer stretching into a gruesome, mechanical smile. The red eyes narrowed.
"Sentiment is an inefficiency," the machine continued. The voice was changing. It was still robotic, still synthesized, but there was a ghost in the machine. A flicker of the personality that had been processed. It sounded like Marcus, the Fire Fly Commander. "This unit is designed to exploit inefficiency."
The machine wasn't just following orders. It was being piloted remotely. Or worse, the AI was learning.
"It's talking," Ken shouted from the flank. "Since when do the robots talk?"
"Since they uploaded a sadist into the hard drive," Lloyd muttered.
PRIDE raised its hand again. This time, the fingers extended into long, razor-sharp claws made of super-heated plasma.
"Let’s verify the data," the machine said. "Does the subject bleed? Or does it break?"
The sonic boom hit them before the movement did.
BANG.
The machine vanished. It moved so fast it broke the sound barrier instantly. The shockwave knocked Rosa off her feet, sending her tumbling across the gravel.
Lloyd didn't even see it coming. He just felt the wind.
And then, a cold, metal hand wrapped around his throat.