Chapter 660: The E.N.D Armour
[AZURA INFERNO DRAGON HEART FORGE COMPLETE]
[ITEM READY FOR EQUIPPING]
[Would you like to equip new forge item?]
The YES sat in his vision for one second before he selected it.
Then the ground around his feet darkened.
’There it is,’ Noah thought, and something in his chest that had been held at a particular tension since the moment he woke up in Burt’s body with an empty system interface loosened by one degree.
Not quickly, not slowly. At the pace of something that was being built rather than conjured, each piece finding its position with the deliberateness of construction rather than the drama of summoning. The greaves first, black plate over dark underlayer, the void energy running through the joints in channels that pulsed with each piece that locked into place. The leg armor rising to meet the waist section. The chest piece last on the lower body, and when it sealed across his torso Noah felt the dragon heart at its center engage.
Not painful. Not even uncomfortable. A deep ambient warmth that radiated inward rather than outward, the kind of heat that came from something very old that had been running continuously for so long that heat was simply its baseline state. The Azura Inferno Dragon Heart sat at the chest piece’s center and it breathed, not metaphorically, it actually cycled, the purple glow of it deepening and releasing in a rhythm that had nothing to do with Noah’s own heartbeat and everything to do with something that had been keeping its own time for fourteen centuries.
The pauldrons came last, angular and aggressive, the dragon motif across the shoulders carrying the same dense carving quality as the gate’s stone walls, as if whoever or whatever had designed this armor had been made in the same era as the things that built those structures.
[Helmet Available — Equip Full Set?]
Noah selected NO.
He had missed this. Not the power specifically, not the capability, but this feeling. The void energy running through the seams of the armor was the first void energy he had felt moving freely around his body since the progression lock had engaged, and it moved through the channels in the plating like water finding grooves that had been carved for exactly it, and he stood in it and breathed and felt genuinely, physically glad in a way that surprised him with its intensity.
Egor was looking at him.
"I am guessing," Egor said, "that is your blessed item."
Egor looked at it for another moment.
The system notification assembled itself in Noah’s vision while Egor was still looking.
[Item Name: E.N.D]
[Classification: Mythic Grade Armor Set]
[Materials Consumed:]
— Blue Shell Crystal [Harbinger Mothership Core Material, Unique]
— Category 4 Beast Cores x47 [Consumed]
[Armor Properties:]
The Dragon Heart at the armor’s core continuously absorbs ambient energy from the surrounding environment. Heat, kinetic force, residual void energy discharge. All of it converted into a slow but uninterrupted stream of void energy regeneration. The armor does not rest. It feeds.
Blue Shell Crystal latticed throughout the armor’s structure redistributes incoming kinetic and energy force across the full surface area before it reaches the wearer. A strike that would transfer its full force into host’s body instead bleeds off across the plating as void energy discharge. The harder the impact, the more energy generated.
Duration: 30 seconds maximum. Cost: 200 void energy per second active.
[Set Effect — Deep Reservoir]
[Void Energy Capacity: 24,000 → 32,000]
Cooldown: Once per extended engagement.
Noah read through it twice.
’It is a shame about the timing.’
He looked at the four horn.
It was biting itself.
"What is that beast doing," Egor said.
Egor was quiet for a moment.
"The worse this gets," Noah confirmed.
And there it was. Another variable that changed how this fight was supposed to go.
Noah could see the rise and fall of it. The exposed movement of a heart that was supposed to be behind considerably more than what was currently in front of it.
He had been standing here, recalibrating, discussing, with that in his chest and that arm hanging, and his face had given none of it.
Noah looked at the hammer.
Egor looked at him for a long moment.
He turned and walked into the forest and did not look back, which was the most Egor thing he had ever done.
Then he breathed in.
He reached into void storage.
He held Egor’s hammer in his right hand.
He looked at the four horn, which had stopped biting itself and was looking back at him with the expression it had worn since EXCELLLENT, the expression of something that had found what it came here for.
"Alright," he said. "Let’s do this."
The E.N.D armor’s void energy channels lit up with the acceleration, the Harbinger Skin passive already reading the environment, and the four horn dropped back to all fours and came at him and the distance between them closed in a second that neither of them wasted.
They met in the middle of the field and the field said so.
In that moment Noah’s left hand brought Gorrauth’s sword around.
Not pain. Surprise.
The four horn’s tail came around.
’Good,’ he thought. ’Keep hitting me.’
KROOOOM!!
Gorrauth’s sword found the four horn’s chest.
’There,’ Noah thought. ’That is the gap.’
THROOOOM!!
It looked up at him.
BOOM!!
He brought it down again.
And again.
Each impact driving the crater deeper, the rock around it fracturing outward in new rings, the mountain below them recording what was happening to it with the patience of something that had been absorbing events for geological time and had decided this was simply the current event.
Noah stood over it, both weapons in hand, his chest working, the E.N.D armor’s void energy channels running at full brightness in the dawn light. He looked at the thing at his feet and waited the way he had learned to wait with things that did not stay down.
He raised Gorrauth’s sword.
The sword went through.
The four horn went still the only way things that had been fnished did.
He looked at the mountain around them. At the craters in the rock face. At the missing section of ridge. At the trees below the slope that marked the path they had taken from the forest, the broken canopy visible from here as a scar through the green.
’The biggest threat is handled,’ he thought. ’For now.’
The one horns and two horns were still there.
Werner and Pip and Nami were still there.
"You’re finished," he said, to the mountain and the crater and the thing in it.