Chapter 520 - 517 – The Fifteen-Minute Limit and the Scythe’s Dance Across the Miasma Sky
Although Sylvia’s current appearance was overwhelmingly impressive floating in the air with twelve magnificent black-golden Fallen Angel wings spread wide, half of her face semi-transparent silver radiating sacred elegance, and a giant scythe studded with hundreds of ancient runes pulsing with power the reality inside the head of the fused entity was far from calm.
"Insane! Look at the density of that stone armor! That’s not ordinary meteorite rock, it’s a primordial asteroid core layer with rank-nine density! Its trajectory is at a forty-five-degree angle from the right shoulder, but the gravity around it is distorting the path by about 1.8 percent! Don’t swing recklessly, Sylvia! If you cut the joint hinge wrong, the mana impact recoil will shatter our own ribs! And why does my new left wing feel so heavy? Didn’t you balance the mana flow across the back? Hey! Are you even listening to me? Look at the numbers in the corner of your vision, that’s the atmospheric pressure indicator!"
Stacia’s voice exploded inside their mental space like an unending storm of cannon fire. A rapid-fire barrage of mathematical analysis, technical warnings, and small bursts of panic echoed at such a frantic tempo that Sylvia’s head felt as if it were about to crack. For Stacia, whose mind was directly connected to the data stream from every element on the battlefield, the world was an ocean of numbers that changed every millisecond, and she seemed incapable of restraining herself from shouting every detail of those changes straight into Sylvia’s inner eardrums.
"Stacia, shut up! You’re making it impossible for me to focus on holding this scythe blade!" Sylvia growled inwardly. In the real world, her one red and one silver eyebrow furrowed sharply.
"I’m not being noisy, I’m giving tactical guidance! If you ignore the structural weakness calculation on its neck, we could "
"Sshh. Calm down, Stacia. Let Sylvia lead our physical movements."
A gentle, cool wave of warmth suddenly enveloped their mental space. It was Alicia, acting as the soul-balancing bridge, who took decisive action: she channeled a silver-white spirit domain shield to wall off Stacia’s voice channel, effectively "muting" her older sister’s verbal panic without cutting the flow of important data, which continued to be projected into the corner of Sylvia’s vision as calm, neatly arranged rune symbols.
"Mmh...! Mmmph!!" Stacia still tried to protest in the form of muffled grumbling at the edge of their shared soul, but Alicia only smiled softly within the fused consciousness.
"Thank you, Alicia. If you hadn’t done that, this head would have exploded long before we could even swing the scythe," Sylvia thought with a sigh of relief.
Yet that mental calm arrived together with a hard warning that none of the three could ignore. This form of soul-and-relic fusion, although it granted a surge of power beyond ordinary existence, was not an eternal form. The density of mana required to unite three undead souls, each already at level 380, was immense. Every second they maintained this form, their core veins burned through energy reserves at a terrifying speed, like pouring pure oil onto a flame.
"Our effective time is at most ten to fifteen minutes," Alicia’s clear voice echoed, reminding them of the absolute, unchangeable fact. "Beyond fifteen minutes, the stability of our soul cores will collapse from mana overload, and we will automatically separate in a completely exhausted state. We must finish this hundred-meter creature before that time limit runs out."
"Fifteen minutes to bring down a mountain of bones... Enough," Sylvia answered coldly.
In front of them, the hundred-meter giant that was the Last Boss of the Primordial Zenith land gave them no time to relax. The giant’s golden eyes blazed even denser, burning the surrounding miasma air until it turned into vibrating hot steam.
HOOAAARRRGGHHH!!!
The roar of the giant creature was not merely sound; it was a physical shockwave that slammed across the entire horizon. The already empty land trembled violently, new cracks yawned open in the earth, and pillars of dust shot into the sky. Together with that roar, the giant raised its right foot the size of a hill and stomped it into the ground.
BLAAMMM!!
A wave of dense black gravity exploded from the impact point, racing at lightning speed across the surface of the land and rising into the air, trying to drag down anything floating in the sky. The space around Sylvia suddenly felt a thousand times heavier, as if the entire sky were collapsing onto her shoulders.
Yet the fused entity did not submit to the giant’s law of gravity.
Sylvia’s left hand holding the ancient blue-flame lantern lifted slightly. The sacred blue flame inside the lantern flared, releasing expanding rings of silver light around their body. That was Alicia’s pure spirit domain. The black gravity wave that struck the domain immediately unraveled and vanished, as if ice doused with boiling water.
"One second," Sylvia murmured, her eyes locked directly on the giant’s throat.
The twelve Fallen Angel wings on her back beat in unison.
ZHUUSSH!!
The air where Sylvia stood exploded with a double sonic boom, leaving rings of white vapor blasted backward. The fused body vanished from ordinary sight, transforming into a single line of tricolor light blood red, blue-gold, and silver-white that sliced through the miasma storm at a speed that defied the logic of a being of such size.
The hundred-meter giant sensed the approaching threat. Its colossal left hand swept horizontally through the air in a motion so wide it covered Sylvia’s entire flight path, like a giant palm trying to swat a fly. Its black claws tore through space, leaving dimensional fracture trails thick with miasma.
"Three hundred meters ahead! Horizontal sweep doesn’t block it directly!" Stacia’s voice rang through visual data transmission into Sylvia’s eyes.
Sylvia did not waste her flight momentum. Exactly ten meters before the colossal palm struck her, the six pairs of feathered wings folded sharply inward, changing her trajectory ninety degrees vertically upward in a fraction of a microsecond. The hurricane-force wind from the giant’s sweeping hand only tore through the residual afterimage Sylvia left in the air.
The moment she was directly above the giant’s arm, her twelve wings spread wide again, instantly stopping the upward momentum and converting gravity into a downward thrust.
"Break!" Sylvia shouted.
Her right hand swung the giant fused scythe forward. Hundreds of magic runes from Stacia’s Grimoire engraved on the scythe’s blade blazed brightly, turning the iron of the scythe into glowing blue surrounded by black Death Flame and sacred silver light.
SRINGG!! JLEBB!!
The scythe blade slammed into the shoulder joint of the hundred-meter giant, the meeting point between eternal asteroid armor and the network of black mana tendons that Stacia had calculated.
The impact produced no metallic clang, but the scream of space itself being cut. The ancient stone armor that had so proudly claimed near-impenetrability was sliced open along a twelve-meter length like butter under a hot knife. Dense golden mana blood sprayed violently from the wound, evaporating into a hissing energy mist in the air.
KRAAAGHHH!!
The giant roared in pain for the first time since rising from beneath the ground. Its colossal left arm suddenly lost stability, crashing down onto the land and creating a massive-scale earthquake.
Yet the Last Boss of the Primordial Zenith land was not a creature that could be underestimated with a single wound on the shoulder. Before Sylvia could pull the scythe blade free from the enemy’s mana tendon network, the giant’s chest dimmed for a moment, then exploded with a wave of golden fire radiation from the thousands of pores of its ribcage.
WOOOMMMM!!
The temperature within a hundred-meter radius of the giant’s body surged sharply to thousands of degrees Celsius in less than a second. Rocks on the ground surface immediately melted into liquid lava, and the air itself burned away into an oxygen vacuum.
"Retreat!! The heat radiation exceeds the physical defense threshold!" Stacia shrieked through the warning system on Sylvia’s retina.
Sylvia yanked the scythe free and leaped backward into the air, but the heat wave was too fast. Walls of golden fire surged from every direction, swallowing her small body in the middle of a blazing hellscape.
Inside that deadly inferno, the blue lantern in Sylvia’s left hand worked independently. Alicia’s consciousness, linked to the relic, spun the lantern’s core. Extremely cold silver light swirled around their body, creating a Spirit Frost cocoon that froze the golden fire just a few centimeters before it could touch their skin and wing feathers. The collision between primordial radiation heat and the absolute cold of the spirit shield produced super-dense steam that hissed blindingly.
From behind that dense steam, the hundred-meter giant did not remain idle. It opened its skull jaws wide. Inside its throat cavity, a black-gold energy sphere spun with gravitational density so terrifying that the light around it was sucked into the hole. The creature was gathering mana to unleash a long-range Breath cannon shot capable of annihilating anything within the range of an entire floor.
"Time remaining: nine minutes forty seconds!" Alicia’s voice echoed, tense yet still focused. "If that cannon is fired, this entire sanctuary land will be destroyed and we will have nowhere left to stand!"
"Do you know its weakness, Stacia?" Sylvia asked directly into the core of her sister’s consciousness, momentarily releasing Alicia’s mute so Stacia could speak.
"The energy accumulation center is in the heart core, but it’s protected by four layers of eternal ribs! The only direct entry path is through its mouth when it’s about to fire that cannon!" Stacia shouted, her voice filled with analytical tension. "But the trajectory is insane! The temperature inside its mouth can dissolve ordinary relic iron in two seconds, and the gravitational pressure will pull you in before you can even swing!"
"Ordinary iron might dissolve," Sylvia’s smile widened a thin smile that blended the power of the Queen of Death with the silver elegance of a Maiden of Spirit. "But this weapon is the fusion of the three of us."
Sylvia did not wait for the giant to finish condensing its energy. Instead, she folded her twelve wings slightly, then dove sharply from the heights of the sky straight toward the gaping maw of the giant.
"Hold on tight, sisters!"
ZHUAAASHH!!
Like a tricolor meteor falling from the sky, Sylvia shot straight toward the jaws of the hundred-meter giant. Seeing its prey willingly fly into the mouth of its cannon, the giant accelerated the rotation of its energy sphere, ready to fire early and reduce its enemy to atoms.
Five hundred meters.
Three hundred meters.
One hundred meters.
The gravitational pressure from inside the giant’s jaws tore at the air, trying to suck Sylvia’s body in and make her lose balance. Yet every time her trajectory deviated even half a millimeter, the hundreds of runes from Stacia engraved on the scythe flared, performing automatic trajectory corrections that kept her flight path straight as a sacred arrow.
"Now, Alicia!" Sylvia cried.
Exactly when they were ten meters from the open jaws at the moment the black-gold cannon sphere inside the giant’s throat reached critical density and was ready to explode outward Sylvia swung the blue lantern in her left hand forward.
CRACKK!!
All the sacred energy from Alicia’s domain was released at once from inside the lantern, forming a twelve-meter-long spirit ice spear that shot straight into the center of the energy sphere being condensed inside the giant’s throat.
The collision between the hot primordial cannon sphere and the absolute cold of the spirit ice spear created an extraordinary reaction instability inside the enemy’s oral cavity.
BLAAARRR--KRAK!!
The energy sphere failed to fire outward; instead, a premature explosion occurred inside the enemy’s own throat! Golden fire and fragments of spirit ice burst from the gaps between the giant’s skull teeth, tearing the inner neck tendon network and making the giant shake its head in a howl of pain that shook the sky.
"Now it’s my turn!" Sylvia roared.
In the middle of the chaotic explosion inside the mouth, Sylvia did not retreat. Using the remaining momentum of her dive, she burst through the curtain of flying flames, floating directly in front of the giant’s chest that was now unprotected by magic because its energy focus had fallen into chaos.
Both her hands gripped the black-gold shaft of the scythe. She raised the massive scythe high above her head.
The twelve Fallen Angel feathered wings on her back released their entire reserve of black-golden light feathers, channeling thousands of those energy particles directly into the scythe blade. The blade formed from the fusion of the Chain of Abyss and the Grimoire now extended to thirty meters a shadow scythe blade radiating three colors of energy that intertwined in a perfect harmony of slaughter.
"Time remaining: four minutes!" Alicia warned.
"Trajectory angle 0 degrees cut perpendicularly through the third rib cavity straight into the crystal core!! NOW, SYLVIA!!" Stacia screamed with the highest volume her consciousness could reach.
"VANISH, YOU HUNDRED-METER CLOWN!!"
Sylvia swung the thirty-meter scythe downward with every remaining ounce of physical strength, magic, and soul from the three level-380 entities inside her body.
SLAAASHHHH--!!!!
A single hair-thin black-silver cutting line appeared in the miasma sky, stretching vertically and splitting the air from the highest clouds down to the bottom of the earth. Time seemed to stop for several seconds as that cutting line passed through the body of the hundred-meter giant, exactly from the center of the upper chest down through the lower abdomen.
The giant froze. The colossal hand that had been reaching for Sylvia stopped in mid-air. The golden fire eyes inside its skull sockets began to tremble unstably.
CRACK... CRACK... BLAARRRR!!!!
A line of blue-golden light exploded from the center of the giant’s chest. Layer after layer of eternal asteroid stone armor shifted and split perfectly in two. The giant crystal core the size of a horse-drawn carriage, hidden behind the creature’s third rib, was cut cleanly through the center with nothing left remaining.
When that core crystal shattered, the entire structure of the hundred-meter giant’s body began to lose its mana cohesion. The ancient bones that formed its colossal frame collapsed, turning into rivers of black dust and silver ash that scattered across the sky of the Primordial Zenith land, leaving a pure mana explosion wave that swept the entire horizon for fifty kilometers.
In the air, Sylvia’s breathing came hard and labored. The light in her crimson and silver eyes faded drastically. The twelve wings on her back began to fall apart into light fragments that drifted away on the miasma wind.
"One minute before the critical limit..." Alicia whispered weakly, her consciousness beginning to fade.
"Trajectory calculation... complete... enemy confirmed eliminated one hundred percent..." Stacia added in a tone that was finally calm, though it sounded extremely exhausted.
"Good work, sisters," Sylvia smiled as the fused body slowly lost its footing in the air.
The tricolor light exploded softly like a withering flower petal. Within seconds, the single entity’s body separated again into three figures, Sylvia, Stacia, and Alicia now floating downward toward the bone-ash land beneath them, completely drained of all strength yet filled with the undeniable satisfaction of victory. The final Chapter of this floor had ended.
