Accompanied by the heavy, grinding hum of poorly lubricated metallic servo motors, the cold red optical sensors lining their heads locked dead onto us.
“Open fire!!”
Brad roared. The steam-driven exoskeleton on his shoulders vented a harsh blast of exhaust as massive hydraulic pistons braced his arms. He leveled his heavy double-barreled steam autocannon and held down the trigger on the leading Spider-Mechs.
Violent muzzle flashes instantly lit up the dim ruins. The high-velocity alloy slugs poured out with an earsplitting shriek.
Then, the suffocating reality of the tech gap hit us.
Half a meter before the rounds even touched the spider-mech's rusted chassis, the air violently rippled, generating a hyper-dense, deep-blue hexagonal grid—a Deflector Shield.
A dense staccato of heavy impacts rang out. The second those terrifyingly kinetic armor-piercing slugs hit the forcefield, they were either violently deflected off trajectory, or the sheer kinetic resistance forced them to detonate prematurely.
High-explosive thermite sparks blossomed mid-air in a spectacular, blinding fireworks display, but didn't even scratch the ancient mech’s primer paint.
“Dammit! We can't punch through!” Brad ground his teeth, watching his gun barrels already starting to glow cherry red.
The twelve mechanical spiders didn't even slow down under Brad’s barrage. The particle accelerators mounted on their heads began to spool up, emitting a blinding white light accompanied by a high-frequency whine.
“We’re going to get flash-fried!”
Jasta’s bushy tail was tucked firmly between his legs in sheer terror. Yanking his personal flintlock pistol from his belt, he screamed at me: “Boss! Take off Selena’s inhibitor collar! Conventional ballistics can't pierce those shields; only high-frequency mana can overload a forcefield!”
Hearing that, I grabbed Selena by the collar of her jumpsuit and violently yanked her behind a collapsed concrete load-bearing pillar.
“Mykra! Disengage her physical lock!”
The shadow warlock slid over to us like a ghost. His fingers flew across the keypad on the black-iron collar bolted around Selena’s neck, punching in the override code.
A crisp, mechanical release. The blinking red light on the collar—the absolute symbol of mana suppression—instantly flipped to green. The heavy iron ring hit the dirt.
The exact second the collar popped, Selena closed her eyes, dragging in a massive, ragged breath of the bone-dry, radiation-soaked air.
Instantly, the dead ruins around us erupted into violent chaos.
Even in this severely mana-depleted wasteland, visible currents of cyan wind-elemental energy converged on her like a hurricane, ripping loose chunks of concrete and rebar right off the ground. The former Empress of the Cloud Summit still commanded a terrifying, absolute authority over the elements.
She snapped her eyes open. Her dull silver pupils exploded with blinding cyan light.
“Rise!”
She thrust both hands forward. An incredibly dense, high-frequency rotational vacuum wall materialized instantly in front of us.
At that exact millisecond, the lead mechanical spider discharged a blinding, high-energy particle beam.
The beam slammed into the wind wall with an agonizing, high-pitched screech. The sheer kinetic shear of the high-frequency vacuum band actually managed to physically refract a particle beam designed to melt through tank armor!
The deflected beam of superheated light grazed the edge of the wind wall, cleanly shearing through a massive cluster of rusted rebar right next to us. Molten slag rained down like water.
In that microsecond of reclaimed godhood, Selena turned her head, looking at me standing less than half a meter away.
I knew exactly what she was calculating.
A single twitch of her finger right now, and an invisible wind blade would sever my carotid artery, permanently terminating her humiliating captivity..
But she just stared at me, a profoundly complex mix of killing intent and cold risk-assessment flashing through her eyes. Then, she snapped her head back forward, keeping both hands locked onto the advancing mechanical swarm.
“Keep firing, you useless grunts!” Selena roared over the gunfire.
Her hands blurred through rapid, intricate arcane gestures. Countless razor-sharp “micro-vacuum wind blades” launched out like a swarm of enraged hornets, surgically striking the mechanical spiders’ shields, triggering cascading ripples of blue light.
“Nice shot, Your Majesty!” Brad barked a laugh, his autocannon roaring back to life.
Huddled behind the concrete, I kept my eyes locked on the data streaming across my retinal UI panel, my brain running massive parallel calculations.
These machines weren't invincible. They had been abandoned for two thousand years, constantly exposed to extreme mana radiation and abrasive sandstorms. Even with self-repair protocols, they had absolutely hit the physical limits of their operational lifespan.
Lines of green code rapidly disassembled the enemy’s structural integrity in my vision:
Unauthorized use of content: if you find this story on Amazon, report the violation.
“Brad!” I screamed the tactical override over the deafening roar of gunfire. “Focus fire on the third unit on the left! Its shield generator is out of phase, and the hydraulic piston on its front right leg is rusted through!”
“Copy that!”
“Mykra!” I snapped my head toward the shadow warlock. “Short out its physical insulation!”
“...C-copy.”
Mykra understood the assignment perfectly. Slapping his hands together, he violently compressed a sphere of shadow mana and hurled it like a glob of pitch-black, highly corrosive acid, splattering it directly onto the rusted front right joint of the targeted mech.
“Insulation layer breached! I... I short-circuited its motor relays!”
“Brad, hit it now!”
The autocannon hit its maximum RPM. This time, without the absolute barrier of the blue forcefield, the large-caliber capped armor-piercing slugs hammered surgically into the mech’s degraded front leg.
Accompanied by the agonizing shriek of snapping metal, the massive Spider-Mech lost its center of gravity. It smashed heavily into the dirt, exposing the fragile, dust-clogged radiator grille on its underbelly.
I raised my heavy-caliber revolver. Without a microsecond of hesitation, I put a slug straight through its exposed coolant lines.
The slaughter machine that had slept for two millennia suffered a catastrophic internal cook-off, venting a violent shower of electrical sparks before permanently flatlining into a pile of scrap.
But we didn't have a single second to celebrate.
We had barely managed to drop one, and the remaining eleven mechanical spiders immediately recalibrated their formation.
The particle accelerators on their heads spooled up again. Their overlapping fields of fire aggressively compressed our operational zone.
Selena’s windshield was spiderwebbed with fractures. A thin line of blood leaked from the corner of her mouth; she was redlining her mana reserves. Brad’s autocannon barrels were glowing cherry red, seconds away from a catastrophic breach. Jasta’s left arm had been grazed by a refracted laser, bleeding heavily as he hissed in pain.
“We can't win a war of attrition here! Fall back!”
Firing my revolver to lay down suppressing fire, I frantically scanned the massive ruins through my UI panel.
Through the chaotic static of the radiation data streams, the system locked onto a highly concealed thermal signature at the base of the inverted pyramid structure.
“Ten o'clock! Behind the rubble of that collapsed tower! There’s an access tunnel!” I pointed and roared.
Biting her lip until it bled, Selena squeezed out the absolute last drop of her mana, summoning a localized micro-tornado. Yellow sand and metallic shrapnel whipped into the air, instantly blinding the mechanical spiders’ optical sensors.
Brad yanked the pins on every thermite incendiary grenade on his belt, hurling them directly into the spider-mechs' pursuit path. A wall of fire burning at thousands of degrees temporarily severed their line of advance.
Under the deafening shriek of incoming lasers, we scrambled, crawled, and dove toward the concealed bunker access tunnel behind the ruins.
...
The end of the tunnel.
A dead end.
We crashed into the dim corridor, only to find the far end completely sealed by an incredibly heavy alloy blast door, stamped with the faded E.D.E.N. logo.
There was no mechanical wheel. No magical keyhole. Just a dust-covered black biometric scanner panel.
Outside, the heavy, perfectly synchronized thud of the mechanical spiders was already closing in on the tunnel entrance. Red scanning lasers cut through the dust, painting the corridor walls.
“Boss! The door is dead! We’re boxed in!”
Brad desperately hoisted his empty autocannon, then drew the heavy broadsword off his back, preparing for a suicidal melee stand.
Selena slumped against the freezing wall, gasping violently, her face deathly pale. She had completely burned through her reserves. Closing her eyes, she waited for the end with a calm, faintly mocking acceptance.
I stared dead at the black scanner panel.
A completely insane calculation flashed through my brain.
Reaching inside my vest, I pulled out the item Zayla had handed me before we launched—the fractured, metallic Cat-kin royal key.
The exact second I pulled it out...
This "magical relic" of the wasteland seemed to detect the ping of its host network. It suddenly began to pulse with an incredibly intense, high-frequency, deep-blue light.
Stepping up to the console, I took this "key" and pressed it hard against the black scanner panel.
BEEP—
An incredibly crisp electronic chime, bridging a gap of two thousand years, echoed through the sealed corridor.
My retinal UI instantly shifted from glaring red threat warnings to the deep, authoritative cobalt blue of maximum clearance:
With a teeth-grinding groan of heavy hydraulics that hadn't fired in two millennia, the blast doors slowly slid apart.
“Get inside! Move!”
I grabbed the exhausted Selena and shoved her through the gap. A microsecond before the first lethal high-energy laser swept into the tunnel, all five of us tumbled through the darkness and hit the floor.
The massive doors slammed shut behind us, locking with a heavy, fatal finality.
The thick lead-zinc alloy completely sealed out the lethal radiation. Constrained by their foundational hardcode—Do Not Damage E.D.E.N. Bunkers—the mechanical spiders immediately ceased fire. Their heavy footsteps lingered outside the door for a few minutes before slowly fading away.
I clicked on my flashlight. The blinding beam cut through the absolute darkness, illuminating a massive interior space that hadn't seen a human footprint in two thousand years.
There was no yellow sand here. No radiation. Only rows of dormant cold-light strips automatically flickered to life as we entered, revealing an endless, pristine metallic corridor.
Everyone lay collapsed on the freezing alloy floor, gasping for air.
Selena slumped weakly against the wall, sweat soaking the rough collar of her jumpsuit. She didn't have the kinetic energy to lift a single finger.
“Good work, Selena. You just bought us our lives.”
I looked at the former enemy, my tone carrying a complex layer of genuine respect.
But a second later.
Mykra picked himself up off the floor. He retrieved the Mana-Inhibitor that had been tossed aside earlier. Moving like an emotionless machine, he quietly walked over to Selena, preparing to bolt her back into her cage.
Selena didn't fight back.
She just weakly dropped her head, watching the heavy black iron ring snap back around her throat.
A bleak, mocking smile tugged at the corner of her mouth as she closed her eyes.
“You won't even grant me... one minute of reprieve, Builder?”
Click.
The collar locked.
The red light flared back to life.
[LitRPG] [Cultivation] [Crafting] [Smart MC]
Synopsis (Click to Expand)
To transcend the heavens, one must first forge the ladder.
He is a Cultivator who values volume over speed.
He is a Chronicler who will not stop at the sky.