Chapter 542: An unexpected turn
Sofia watched the bolt launch forward like a bright tear in reality as she was flung backward by the recoil. The moment stretched before her as time itself seemed to slow down. The instant before the bolt hit its target felt like it lasted forever.
A thunderous roar echoed through the entire palace as everything turned white, the blinding light from the explosion bright like a thousand suns, completely overwhelming whatever had been suppressing all non-candle-light throughout Sorrow’s palace. Sofia’s vision went momentarily blank from the sheer overload of her senses. The air stormed around her, a wall of heat and pressure like a dragon’s breath. Her sight started to return, the afterimage of the explosion a ghost of fire and energy imprinted on her vision. Then came the shockwave, an invisible fist slamming into her body with a force that would have reduced even her Lumian body to dust.
Sofia was flung back much further than the staircase should have allowed for, her muscles tensing reflexively against the onslaught though she knew it could do her no true harm. The sheer energy of the explosion tore at the air and everything in its path.
For an instant, she felt like she could hear a loud silence beyond the destruction, at the heart of the blast itself.
Then, as abruptly as it had come, the shockwave passed, continuing its path of destruction inside of the red-hot melting walls of the palace’s new immense underground chamber of Sofia’s creation.
Everything was on fire, and dust hung in the air like a thick shroud as Sofia spread her mana senses past the turbulent remains of the explosion, trying to locate the dwarf. She had received a lot of dings from the system alerting her that she had killed Caveling Horrors and Zombies of the candle, but the lack of a single murder notification meant that the dwarf had survived.
She soon found out how, it was like a small bubble of calm amidst the chaos, a floating dark-gray chest, held still by some space magic at the very center of the crater, where the bolt had exploded.
An Asterite chest?!
Asterite was the stupidly hard white-speckled stone which the system used to create boundaries within the trials. Even Anna’s dagger could only scrape it with difficulty, yet this dwarf had an entire treasure chest made from the stuff to hide inside of.