The Steam Core roared with the mechanical indignation of a dying god. High-pressure vents saturated the air with scalding vapor, turning the narrow brass walkways into a labyrinth of translucent silver curtains. Condensation trickled down the rusted cooling towers to mix with the fine mercury dust coating every surface. This was a place of industrial noise and thermal chaos, a world where the laws of the surface were muffled by the rhythmic throb of ancient pumps.

Captain Kaelen stood at the threshold of the primary junction. His violet eyes glowed with an intensity that pierced the steam. Through his Analytical Sight, the world was not a barrier of fog but a complex web of mana-vectors, thermal gradients, and skeletal stress points. He observed the flickering Event Horizon twenty yards ahead. The sphere of darkness trembled as if it were on the verge of total collapse.

Crouching behind a brass conduit, Vane watched the Justiciar. He utilized Internal Pulse to synchronize his breathing with the rhythmic hiss of the vents, effectively erasing his acoustic signature. Beside him, Valerica remained perfectly still. Her violet hair was damp with silver mist. She held Mara's hand, feeling the girl's pulse thrumming with a terrified, steady resolve.

Kaelen took a measured step forward. His backup blade, a standard Imperial steel rapier, hummed with the residual violet mana of his aura. He moved with the practiced grace of a man who believed he held the only lantern in a dark room.

"The shards are misaligned," Kaelen murmured, studying the pattern. "Desperate improvisation from a Rank 4 mind." His violet eyes traced the mana-threads, cataloging every flaw in their defense. "This ends now."

Kaelen's violet eyes narrowed. He focused his sight on the central crystalline shard, the one Vane had embedded at the apex of the gravity well. He intended to find the primary mana-thread and sever it, ending the farce with a single stroke. He did not realize that the Silver Fang was waiting for him to exhaust his vision. Vane knew the Silver Fang was a scalpel. It could not reject a mountain while it was solid and whole. It had to hollow it out. It had to starve the core until the law of the aura became a tattered, flickering suggestion.

Vane signaled with a sharp, silent gesture.

Mara reached into the Crystalline Lattice. She did not try to build or reinforce. Instead, she adjusted the internal pitch of the embedded shards. These were not barriers. They were resonators. When Kaelen's Analytical Sight—a skill that functioned by projecting pulses of precision mana—hit the first crystal, the light did not simply pass through. It hit a microscopic, hexagonal grating.

The Soul Mirror triggered.

Kaelen gasped as his vision suddenly inverted. The pulses he had sent out to analyze the world were reflected back into his optic nerves with triple the frequency. It was a moire effect of the soul. Because Kaelen was a Justiciar, his brain was hard-wired to process sensory data at a speed far beyond a normal human's capacity. The shards acted as an alias, creating thousands of ghost-images that were perfectly synced to his mana-refresh rate.

The violet light in Kaelen's eyes began to flicker violently. He saw the Steam Core splinter into a million identical fragments. The gravity well appeared to be in ten places at once. The floor seemed to liquefy.

"What is this?" Kaelen stumbled. He clutched his head. His backup rapier clattered against a steam pipe.

"The truth is too bright for you, Captain," Vane's voice emerged from the fog, appearing to come from every direction simultaneously.

The feedback loop began to bleed into Kaelen's mana-channels. His own skill was being used as the battery for his destruction. To keep his brain from seizing under the sensory overload, Kaelen was forced to flare his violet aura to its absolute limit. He poured massive amounts of mana into a protective shell, trying to burn through the distortion.

Vane watched the white-hot intensity of the Justiciar's aura. The purple light was brilliant, but it was tattered. Kaelen was burning through his reserves at an unsustainable rate. His Rank 5 core struggled to maintain a law that was currently being fed back into itself.

Valerica stood up. She did not use a crouch or a stealthy approach. She stood like the Sun rising over a grey horizon. Her violet hair floated as the Celestial Heart activated, her internal reactor reaching a critical state. She began to condense plasma between her palms, the golden heat pushing back the silver fog in a perfect, expanding circle.

She was preparing the Solar Lance.

This was her most devastating skill, a concentrated beam of stellar fire that traveled at a velocity the eyes could not track. It required a stationary anchor and a massive amount of internal pressure. Valerica's face was a mask of absolute focus. The dark of her eyes was nearly swallowed by the golden glow of her Authority.

Kaelen roared, his voice a mixture of pain and aristocratic fury. He dropped to one knee. The floorboards beneath him turned red from the heat of his flaring aura. He realized the trap. He realized that the ghosts and the aliasing were designed to make him blind during the one moment he needed his sight the most.

With a desperate cry, Kaelen closed his eyes entirely. He abandoned his Analytical Sight and reached out with his physical hearing, trying to find the source of the heat that was rapidly rising in the chamber.

"You think you can incinerate a Justiciar?" Kaelen hissed. Blood began to leak from his ears as the internal feedback reached its peak. "I am the Third Division. I am the law."

Kaelen threw his backup blade blindly toward the source of the heat. The sword was a streak of violet mana, cutting through the steam toward Valerica's chest.

Vane moved. He did not use a skill. He used the pure, mechanical speed of the Argent Horizon. He met the sword in mid-air with the shaft of his star-metal spear. He utilized Lunar Deflection, catching the violet blade on the frictionless sleeve of his mana and sending it skidding into the rafters.

The recoil sent a shockwave through Vane's shattered arm. He gritted his teeth, the taste of copper filling his mouth. He looked back at Valerica. The Solar Lance was nearly ready. The air around her was beginning to warp from the sheer density of the plasma.

"Mara. Now," Vane commanded.

Mara squeezed her eyes shut. She sent a final, shattering pulse through the crystalline shards. The glass did not break. It resonated at a frequency that matched the vibration of Kaelen's skeletal structure.

The Seer screamed as his bones began to chatter. His violet aura, already exhausted and flickering, finally collapsed. The law of his protection was reduced to a thin, grey mist. He was no longer a mountain. He was a man standing in the path of a star.

Valerica's eyes snapped open. They were no longer violet. They were pure, incandescent gold.

"The sky was never yours, Kaelen," Valerica said. Her voice carried the weight of the Sol lineage, cold and absolute.

She released the Solar Lance.

A beam of pure sunlight, no thicker than a finger, tore through the Steam Core. It did not create a blast. It did not create a sound. It simply erased everything in its path. The silver fog was vaporized instantly. The brass pipes melted.

The lance struck Kaelen in the center of his chest.

Because Kaelen's aura had been stripped by the Soul Mirror, the stellar fire encountered no conceptual resistance. It burned through the Imperial plate armor as if it were parchment. It pierced through the Captain's lungs and exited through his back, cauterizing the wound in the same microsecond it was created.

Kaelen was thrown backward. His body slammed into a cooling tower with a dull, heavy thud. He did not fall. The heat of the lance had fused his armor to the metal of the tower.

He was still breathing. But the mountain had been hollowed out.

If you find any errors ( broken links, non-standard content, etc.. ), Please let us know < report chapter > so we can fix it as soon as possible.