Episode-1056
Chapter : 2111
Liam watched it with a calm expression. He wasn't straining. He wasn't sweating. To him, this was just closing a program.
The bubble shrank until it was the size of a marble.
It hovered in the air for a second, a perfect, swirling pearl of white and grey light. It was beautiful. It was the tombstone of Commander Marcus.
Then, it fell.
CLINK.
The marble hit the rocky ground. It rolled a few inches and stopped near Liam’s boot. It looked like a common toy, something a child might play with.
The sky returned to normal. The gray faded, replaced by the blue of the morning. The wind started blowing again. The birds, confused by the sudden silence, began to sing.
Liam reached down and picked up the marble. He held it up to the sun, inspecting it. Inside the glass-like surface, swirls of gas and light moved slowly. It was a souvenir.
"Messy," Liam murmured. "But effective."
He tossed the marble over his shoulder. It bounced off a rock and rolled off the edge of the cliff, falling down into the valley below to be lost forever in the grass.
Liam stood alone on the ridge. The Fire Fly squad was gone. The threat from the sky was neutralized. He reached up and adjusted the collar of his greasy jumpsuit. He wiped a smudge of dirt from his cheek.
He reached into his pocket and pulled out a communication stone. It was glowing faintly.
"Lloyd," Liam said into the stone. His voice was steady, calm, and completely relaxed. He sounded like he had just finished fixing a toaster, not erasing a high-tech army.
"Do you copy?"
Static crackled, and then Lloyd’s voice came through, sounding breathless and tired. "I copy, James. I saw the flash. Is it done?"
"It's done," Liam said. He looked around the empty ridge. "I cleared the trash. The Commander has been... relocated."
"Relocated?" Lloyd asked.
"Let's just say he's exploring new opportunities in the field of astrophysics," Liam joked dryly.
Liam looked toward the distant smoke of the Ferrum Estate. He could see the flashes of light where the final battle was still raging. He knew what was waiting there. Lucifer. The cyborg. The King of Pride.
Liam had done his part. He had secured the flank. He had taken out the support. Now, it was up to the main hero.
"The board is clear, Lloyd," Liam transmitted, his voice turning serious. "No more interruptions. No more snipers. No more bombs."
He leaned against the rock, feeling the fatigue finally start to set in. Using Omega took a lot out of him, even if he didn't show it.
"The Boss fight is all yours," Liam said. "Make it count."
He lowered the stone and took a deep breath of the fresh air. He reached into another pocket and pulled out a small, crumpled pack of cigarettes. He put one in his mouth and snapped his fingers. A tiny, precise flame appeared on his thumb—a spark of the same power that had just birthed a universe.
He lit the cigarette and took a drag, watching the smoke drift toward the estate.
"Give him hell, kid," Liam whispered.
Date: Year 2513, Month of Sun, Day 18 – 06:50 AM
Location: Ferrum Estate Ruins
The silence that King Liam had bought them didn't last long. The invisible data stream from the sky had been cut, severing the puppet strings that held the PRIDE machine together, but a puppet without strings doesn’t always just fall down. Sometimes, if the puppet is built from the corpse of a Devil King and powered by a singularity reactor, it thrashes.
In the center of the ruined courtyard, the cyborg that wore Lucifer’s dead face was having a violent, mechanical seizure. The red light in its sensor eyes, which had been steady and calculating just minutes ago, was now strobing wildly. The machine was blind, deaf to the orders from orbit, and completely lost in its own broken code.
It threw its head back and let out a sound that wasn't a scream, but a distorted blast of static noise that made Lloyd’s teeth ache inside his mouth. The machine spun around, its massive metal arm smashing into a stone pillar that had survived the initial battle. The pillar disintegrated into dust.
"It’s not shutting down," Rosa shouted over the noise of grinding gears. She stood to Lloyd’s left, her ice spear raised, her silver hair whipping around her face in the turbulent wind caused by the machine’s erratic movements. "It’s panicking. It’s like a wounded animal."
"It’s worse than an animal," Eun-ha replied, her eyes scanning the scrolling green data on her virtual display. "It’s a localized software crash. The logic gates are failing, so it’s defaulting to its most basic factory setting: destroy everything in close proximity."
Chapter : 2112
As if to prove her point, the PRIDE machine leveled its gravity lance at nothing in particular—a pile of rubble near the old stables—and fired. A beam of purple force tore through the debris, erasing it from existence. Then the machine jerked to the left and fired a plasma bolt into the sky. It was flailing, firing blindly, but every shot was lethal.
Lloyd Ferrum watched the chaos with the cold, hard eyes of a general assessing a bomb that was about to go off. He was exhausted. His body felt like it was held together by tape and stubbornness. The [Seventh Demon Gate] had torn his muscles and fractured his bones, and he was running on the last fumes of his adrenaline. But he couldn't rest. Not yet.
He looked at the machine. It was stumbling toward the main house—the place where Mina and his son were hiding in the bunker. The machine didn't know they were there; it was just walking in a random direction, smashing everything in its path.
"We can't let it wander," Lloyd said, his voice a low growl that cut through the noise. "If that gravity lance hits the foundation of the house, the bunker will collapse."
"We need to put it down," Rosa said, stepping forward.
"No," Lloyd stopped her. "We don't just need to put it down. We need to erase it. If we destroy the body but leave the core intact, it could detonate. That Singularity Engine is unstable. If it blows up conventionally, it takes the whole province with it."
He looked at his two partners. Rosa, the Queen of Ice, and Eun-ha, the Queen of Data. They were powerful, but they were running on empty, too. This needed a finisher. It needed a move that didn't just break the machine but removed it from the equation entirely.
Lloyd stepped forward, ignoring the pain that shot up his legs. He reached deep into his internal reservoir. The mana he had gained from the Kohinoor Diamond was still there, humming in his veins, but he needed more than just magic. He needed biology. He needed hunger.
"Containment first," Lloyd roared, his voice amplified by the remnants of his suit's speakers. "Hold it still! I’m going to drain it!"
The PRIDE machine heard him. Or maybe it just sensed the movement. Its head snapped toward Lloyd, the red eyes flickering.
"TARGET... ERROR... DESTROY... ERROR..." the machine buzzed. It raised its arm, preparing to fire a gravity blast directly at Lloyd.
Lloyd didn't dodge. He didn't have the energy to dodge. He slammed his right hand onto the cracked earth of the courtyard.
"[Void Wood]!"
He didn't summon steel. He didn't summon fire. He summoned the parasitic power he had stolen from the Devil Beelzebub.
The ground beneath the machine exploded.
Thick, grey roots erupted from the soil. They didn't look like normal wood; they looked like twisted cables made of ash and dead iron. They moved with the speed of striking snakes. The roots lashed out, wrapping around the ankles of the massive cyborg.
The machine tried to step back, but the roots were relentless. They coiled up its legs, tightening like pythons. The metal of the machine’s greaves creaked under the pressure.
"OBSTRUCTION... DETECTED..." the machine screeched. It tried to fire its thrusters to fly away, to burn the roots off, but Lloyd was faster.
"Life-Eater," Lloyd commanded. "Drink."
The grey roots didn't just hold the machine; they bit into it. Thorns the size of daggers punched through the outer armor plating, seeking the energy lines beneath.
The effect was immediate. The glowing purple lights on the machine’s legs dimmed. The thrusters sputtered and died. The Void Wood was sucking the mana directly out of the machine’s batteries. It was drinking the fuel that kept the gravity engine running.
The machine thrashed violently. It swung its arms, tearing at the roots, ripping some of them apart. But for every root it broke, two more shot out of the ground to take its place. They wrapped around its waist, pinning its arms to its sides. They grew over its chest, seeking the heat of the core.
Lloyd gritted his teeth, sweat pouring down his face. Controlling the Void Wood was like wrestling a starving beast. The power wanted to consume everything, and he had to keep it focused solely on the machine. He could feel the dirty, corrupted energy of the cyborg flowing back into him through the roots—a bitter, metallic taste in his soul.
"It’s fighting back!" Lloyd shouted to the others. "The engine is trying to surge! It’s pushing more power to the servos to break the wood!"
The machine roared, a sound of straining metal. It began to glow brighter, the purple light turning white-hot as it tried to overload its own systems to burn the roots away. The grey wood began to smoke and char.