Chapter 160: Zero Point
Chapter 160: Chapter 160: Zero Point
Chapter 160: Zero Point
[Estimated time before return to base stats: 10 Seconds.]
The red text flashed in Draven’s vision.
Above him, the shattered [Mana-Siphon Grid] sparked and faded into nothingness. The sky over the Vanguard Plaza immediately darkened as Tharzek Noctis summoned his terrifying Level 200 magic back into existence.
"Die!" Tharzek roared, his voice echoing from his Abyssal Steel armor.
The Fifth Elder thrust his massive hands downward. A tidal wave of gray, rotting entropy crashed toward the plaza, ready to turn Draven, Aegon, Bram, and the unconscious Lord Commander into ash.
[8 Seconds.]
Draven did not panic. He did not let a single stray thought enter his mind.
He shut out the screaming of the dying soldiers. He shut out the terrifying pressure of the descending Edict. He closed his pitch-black eyes, entering a state of absolute, unadulterated focus.
He gripped the remaining siphoned Level 200 mana circulating in his veins and began to aggressively compress it.
He forced the volatile energy down into the very center of his mana core, packing it tighter and tighter until his internal organs felt like they were going to burst.
[4 Seconds.]
The gray wave of rotting magic was only thirty feet away. The ambient temperature plummeted. The pavement began to instantly decay.
Tharzek Noctis laughed, a cruel, triumphant sound that shook the air. The Elder believed he had already won.
[1 Second.]
Draven opened his eyes.
[Seed of Valor Activated: Event Horizon]
The universe did not hear a sound, but it felt a massive, catastrophic shift in reality.
Draven released the violently compressed mana, converting it entirely into a singular, localized gravitational vector centered directly on the Vanguard Plaza.
Gravity and time are fundamentally bound together by the laws of physics. The heavier the gravitational pull, the slower time moves. Draven did not cast a magical spell to freeze the clock.
He simply increased the gravity in the plaza to such an unimaginable, horrifying density that it mimicked the core of a black hole.
He made the gravity so heavy that time itself was crushed to a complete halt.
The world violently drained of color, leaving only a stark, silent canvas of black and white.
The roaring tidal wave of rotting gray magic froze exactly three inches from Draven’s white mask.
The falling rain hung suspended in the air like tiny glass beads. The dust from the shattered concrete stopped settling.
High above, Tharzek Noctis was completely paralyzed.
The Fifth Elder’s nine-foot-tall Abyssal Steel body was locked perfectly in place.
His mind was entirely awake, trapped inside a frozen shell, but his vocal cords could not move to scream. His lungs could not expand to breathe.
’Huh? What-what is happening?! This power is very similar to that person. But why can this mortal brat use it?!’
Draven exhaled slowly. His breath plumed into the frozen air.
Because Draven was the absolute master of kinetic vectors, he dictated the direction of the gravity. He was the only moving thing inside the Event Horizon.
Draven took a step upward. He did not fly. He placed his combat boot on the frozen air molecules, walking up the sky like an invisible staircase.
He was a literal God who controlled the time in this dimension and nothing could move here!
’If the Elder was in his prime state, then this would have become a very dangerous battlefield! not dangerous, but suicidal! The trap proved to be useful, but let’s deal with this nuisance first!’
He walked past the suspended wave of rotting magic, stepping higher and higher until he hovered directly in front of the paralyzed Fifth Elder.
Tharzek’s milky eyes were wide with a terror he had not felt in a hundred years. But as Draven looked closer into the Elder’s pupils, his Tactical Appraisal caught something entirely unnatural.
Deep inside Tharzek’s frozen eyes, a faint, golden light flickered. It was a remote consciousness.
The High Pontiff of the Church of the Eternal Eclipse was watching.
The supreme leader of the Cult, sitting on a throne thousands of miles away, was viewing this exact moment through the optic nerves of his Fifth Elder. The High Pontiff was watching a masked boy freeze time itself.
Draven stared directly into the golden light of the Pontiff’s remote gaze. He leaned in close to the frozen giant’s face.
"I know you are watching! The Embracing Hands send their regards," Draven whispered, his cold voice perfectly clear in the dead silence of the time-stop.
Draven raised his right hand and placed it flat against the center of Tharzek’s impenetrable Abyssal Steel chest plate.
He did not punch. He did not push.
He inverted the gravitational vectors inside the Elder’s own mass.
CRUNCH.
The nine-foot-tall Abyssal Steel behemoth violently collapsed inward. The hyper-dense metal, the corrupted flesh, and the Elder’s bones were instantly crushed together by an overwhelming internal gravity.
Tharzek Noctis folded into himself, shrinking from a giant monster into a condensed ball of metal, and finally, into a microscopic speck of heavily compressed matter.
The Fifth Elder ceased to exist.
The moment the Elder died, the [Event Horizon] shattered.
Color violently flooded back into the world. The sound of the falling rain returned.
Without the Elder’s active mana to sustain it, the massive wave of rotting entropy hovering over the plaza instantly dispersed into a harmless gust of wind.
Draven dropped gracefully to the bloody concrete, landing right beside Aegon and Bram.
There was no physical body left to loot. There was no bloody corpse. Just a tiny, insignificant piece of ultra-compressed matter falling into the dust.
A series of brilliant blue screens immediately populated Draven’s vision.
[System Alert: Level 200 Anomaly Executed.]
[Directive 07 Complete: Prevent the Spatial Collapse.]
[Reward: 50,000 System Points, 1x Mythic Sign-In Token, 1x Abyssal Core (Transferred directly to Host’s Inventory).]
Draven stood up straight, brushing a speck of dust off his black Warlord jacket. He looked around the ruined plaza.
The remaining Vanguard Knights, who had been bracing for death just a second ago, lowered their arms.
They looked at the empty sky where the terrifying Elder had just been floating. Then, they looked down at the masked boy in the black coat.
Absolute, pin-drop silence fell over Bastion Six.