Episode-1042
Chapter : 2083
The immediate danger had been pushed back, but the war was far from over. The PRIDE machine, though damaged, was already repairing itself. Across the courtyard, the mechanical devil stood up. Its armor shifted, plates sliding over the scorched areas. The red light in its sensors grew brighter, shifting from a scanning mode to a combat mode.
"RE-EVALUATING TACTICS," the machine droned. "MULTIPLE HOSTILES DETECTED. ENGAGING OMNI-DIRECTIONAL OFFENSE."
It wasn't scared. It didn't get tired. It was just recalculating the math needed to kill them all.
Eun-ha didn't look at the machine. She looked down at Lloyd and Rosa.
"We have about twenty seconds before it reboots its primary cannon," Eun-ha said. Her voice was calm, fast, and professional. It was the voice of a project manager dealing with a tight deadline. "Rosa, stop healing him. He’s stable enough to stand. We need him active."
Rosa looked up, her grey eyes narrowing. "He has multiple fractures. His mana reserves are critical. If he fights, he could permanently damage his core."
"If he doesn't fight, we all die, and his core won't matter," Eun-ha countered sharply. "This isn't a hospital, Rosa. It’s a demolition site. Get him up."
Rosa hesitated for a fraction of a second, then nodded. She respected logic. She withdrew her healing magic and instead slapped Lloyd’s chest—hard.
"Wake up," Rosa ordered. "Your other wife is being bossy."
Lloyd groaned and sat up. The pain was blinding, but he pushed it into a box in the back of his mind. He forced his legs to work, standing up shakily between the two women.
"Okay," Lloyd said, wiping blood from his chin. "I'm up. What's the play? That thing has a reactor that runs on gravity. I punched it, and it just got mad."
"You punched it with brute force," Eun-ha said, tapping her temple. "You were trying to break the casing. But the problem isn't the armor. It’s the operating system. It’s adapting to you. Every time you hit it, it learns how to block that specific impact next time."
"So we can't beat it?" Rosa asked, summoning a spear of ice in her hand.
"We can't beat it one by one," Eun-ha corrected. "It can calculate single variables instantly. But if we throw three different systems of logic at it simultaneously? It will crash."
Eun-ha raised her hand. "Permissions requested. Admin access: Shared Network."
"Granted," Lloyd said instantly.
Eun-ha pressed her fingers against Lloyd’s forehead. Then she reached out and touched Rosa’s forehead.
ZING.
A high-pitched sound rang in their ears.
Suddenly, Lloyd’s vision changed. The standard red text of his own System interface was overlaid with a new layer of green, scrolling data. He wasn't just seeing the world through his eyes anymore; he was seeing it through Eun-ha’s sensors.
He could see the heat signature of the machine. He could see the flow of mana in the air. He could see wind speed, structural stress points, and probability percentages floating over every object.
Rosa gasped. She was seeing it too. For a woman born in a medieval fantasy world, the sudden influx of mathematical data was overwhelming. Numbers streamed across her vision, calculating the exact temperature required to freeze the machine’s hydraulic fluid.
"What is this?" Rosa whispered, looking at her own hands. She could see the mana flowing through her veins like a blue river.
"It’s a Tactical Patch," Eun-ha explained. "I’ve linked our nervous systems. We are now running on a shared server. I can see what you see. You can know what I know. We don't need to talk to coordinate. We just need to think."
Lloyd looked at the machine. The overlay highlighted a series of weak points in glowing yellow. It showed the cooling vents, the joint servos, and the central processor in the chest.
"I see it," Lloyd said. "The lag is gone."
"Exactly," Eun-ha said. Her eyes were glowing fiercely now. "We are going to overload its CPU. It can adapt to magic. It can adapt to physics. It cannot adapt to both at the same time."
The PRIDE machine finished its repairs. It revved its engines, the sound a deep, vibrating roar. It deployed blades from its wrists and charged its chest cannon. It took a step forward, cracking the ground.
Eun-ha stepped back, positioning herself behind Lloyd and Rosa. She wasn't a front-line fighter in this form; she was the controller.
"Assignments," Eun-ha barked, her voice echoing in their heads through the link.
She pointed at herself.
Chapter : 2084
"I'll handle the software," she stated. "I will hack its sensors. I will feed it false data. I will make it see ghosts and miss targets. I will keep it confused."
She pointed at Rosa.
"Rosa, you handle the thermodynamics," Eun-ha ordered. "That machine generates massive heat. If you cool it down rapidly, the metal becomes brittle. The circuits slow down. Keep it frozen. Control the environment. Don't let it move freely."
Rosa nodded, her grip tightening on her ice spear. She understood. Control the temperature, control the machine.
Finally, Eun-ha pointed at Lloyd.
"Lloyd," she said, a small, grim smile touching her lips. "You handle the hardware."
Lloyd looked at his fists. He felt the [Steel Blood] responding to the data feed, sharpening the metal in his blood to a molecular edge. He looked at the machine stomping toward them.
"Hardware," Lloyd repeated. "I can do hardware."
"Good," Eun-ha said. "The target is a walking calculator. Let's introduce it to the concept of a fatal error. Let's dismantle this toaster."
The three of them moved as one.
Rosa stepped forward, unleashing a wave of absolute zero cold that turned the ground into a skating rink.
The courtyard was no longer a courtyard. It was a grid of lethal calculations, a chessboard where the pieces moved faster than the eye could follow.
The PRIDE machine—the monstrous fusion of the Devil King Lucifer’s corpse and Fire Fly technology—did not roar. It did not taunt. It simply vanished.
Lloyd Ferrum, standing in the center of the wreckage, felt the impact before he saw the movement. There was a dull thud against the side of his armor, followed by the screech of tearing metal. He was thrown sideways, his boots skidding across the cracked stone, carving deep trenches into the ground.
"What was that?" Lloyd gritted out, tasting blood. "My sensors didn't pick up anything. No movement. No energy spike. Just impact."
"It’s not speed," Eun-ha’s voice echoed in his mind, crisp and terrified. Through their shared neural link, Lloyd could see what she saw. Her digital vision was scrolling with red error messages. "Lloyd, look at the timestamps. The damage log says you were hit at 06:30:03. But the current time is only 06:30:00."
Lloyd froze. "It hit me three seconds from now?"
"It’s a Time-Compression Drive," Eun-ha explained, her mind racing a million miles a minute. "The machine isn't moving faster than light. It’s moving faster than time. It is executing attacks in the immediate future, and reality is struggling to catch up. By the time we see it move, we have already been hit."
It was the ultimate cheat code. How do you dodge a punch that has already landed?
The PRIDE machine materialized again, standing ten feet away. Its red sensor eyes glowed with cold satisfaction. It raised its arm cannon, aiming at Rosa.
"PROCESSING..." the machine droned. "TARGET LOCK CONFIRMED. EXECUTION IN T-MINUS THREE SECONDS."
But in the machine’s internal logic, those three seconds had already passed. The beam was already fired. Rosa was already dead. The universe just hadn't rendered the graphics yet.
"Rosa, move!" Lloyd shouted, but he knew it was useless. You can't outrun the future.
But Rosa didn't run. The Winter Queen stood her ground, her silver hair whipping in the wind of the gathering energy. Her eyes, glowing with blue-white light, narrowed. She didn't understand the physics of a Time-Compression Drive. She didn't know about quantum mechanics or temporal relativity. But she understood one thing perfectly: Ice stops things.
"If it moves in the future," Rosa said, her voice calm and freezing, "then I will simply freeze tomorrow."
She slammed her ice spear into the ground.
"Sovereign Authority: [Temporal Anchor]."
The temperature in the courtyard didn't just drop; it ceased to exist. Rosa wasn't targeting the machine’s physical body. She was targeting the stream of time itself. She visualized the seconds ticking by as water flowing in a river, and she turned that river into a glacier.
Absolute Zero is the state where all atomic motion stops. Rosa pushed it further. She applied Absolute Zero to the fourth dimension.
The effect was jarring. The air around the PRIDE machine turned a strange, misty grey. The machine, which had been blurring into the future, suddenly jerked violently. It looked like a video video that was buffering.
The cannon blast, which should have already hit Rosa, suddenly retracted back into the barrel. The machine flickered, its form snapping back from where it wanted to be to where it actually was.