CHAPTER 46 Lightning in the Throat and the Fried Ocean

CHAPTER 46 Aerodynamic Cone, Priceless Trophy, and the Fried Ocean

The storming of the final levels of the ninth ten in the Forgotten Necropolises had turned into a routine, perfectly calibrated business operation for our trio. After the clinical neutralization of the Mirror Colossus and the glass labyrinth on the eighty-sixth floor, we had no intention of slowing our momentum for even a fraction of a second. My energy pathways, firmly anchored and reinforced at a safe thirty percent throughput of my Vessel, purred with a deep, silent, and unwavering frequency beneath my black coat. The sapphire reactor in my chest operated at a calm, highly economical idle, pumping clean, dense vitality through my bloodstream without a single tremor or a hint of internal friction.

We crossed the threshold of the eighty-seventh floor, where the environment abruptly shifted from sterile glass corridors into a razor-sharp, wind-swept mountain ridge suspended directly over an abyss. The ambient frost here was aggressive, biting into exposed stone with a dry, cracking hiss. Heavy, leaden clouds hung low above our heads, churning with pale blue discharges, while the freezing gale howled through the basalt crags like a choir of dying beasts.

"Tactical radar active, boss!" Kaede's cheerful, high-pitched ping echoed in my left ear in our native Polish operational cipher. "Paczka zmutowanych jaszczurów na szlaku! Trzy sztuki z prawej, cztery na półce skalnej powyżej! Szykują plwociny z mroźnego gradu!"

"Clear the path, Shnee," I commanded calmly, keeping my hands deep in the pockets of my black coat and stepping forward with an unshakeable, brazen chill. "No need to waste heavy kinetics on trash mobs. Practice your fluid footwork."

The white-haired elf didn't need to be told twice. With a feline, soundless bound, Shnee launched herself into the blizzard. Her Celestial Silver rapier, glowing with the pristine, amorficzny frost of her refined elemental mana, whistled through the freezing air like a silver streak. Guided by Kaede's precise directional callouts, Shnee wove between the charging Frost Shriekers—armored, five-foot lizards spitting dense cascades of razor-sharp ice crystals—with terrifying, balletic precision.

She didn't engage in prolonged fencing or brute force clashes. With surgical efficiency, her blade found the microscopic gaps between their heavy, frosted scales, driving deep into their central mana nodes. The extreme, concentrated cold of her weapon froze their internal circulatory pathways in a fraction of a millisecond. One after another, the armored lizards froze mid-stride, their momentum carrying them forward until they crashed onto the basalt and shattered into harmless piles of grey ash and cloudy mana crystals.

I walked behind her at a lazy, measured pace, flicking my wrist to catch the levitating essence cores with subtle telekinetic threads and sweeping them straight into the bottomless pouch at my belt.

Ten minutes of continuous, silent slaughter later, the wind on the ridge suddenly dropped to an eerie, dead standstill.

We stepped onto a monumental, circular basalt plateau that protruded out over the endless void. At the far edge of the arena, perched atop a massive obelisk of solid permafrost, waited the Lord of the eighty-eighth floor.

The Frozen Wyvern.

The monster was gargantuan. Its wingspan easily exceeded twenty meters, casting a heavy, suffocating shadow over the ice-bound arena. Its entire body was encased in thick, overlapping scales of steel-hard, steel-blue ice that gleamed like polished armor plate, and from the tip of its broad, reptilian snout protruded a single, flawless, two-meter horn of crystal-clear permafrost, glowing with immense, compressed mana.

The Wyvern let out a deafening, bone-rattling roar that sent shockwaves rippling through the plateau, causing deep cracks to spiderweb across the ice beneath our boots.

I stopped in my tracks. I raised my right hand, joining my thumb and index finger into a small, precise director's frame, framing the gargantuan reptile's head within the gap. My analytical mind, operating at sterile, instant speeds, evaluated the physical parameters of the target on pure logic.

"Look at that horn, Shnee," I remarked aloud, my low voice carrying effortlessly through the quiet air. "Untouched, flawless crystal. And those scales—dense, steel-grade frost armor. In the markets of the Upper City, or in Silas's ledger, this carcass is worth a small mountain of gold. If I hit it from the outside with a heavy kinetic blast or an area-of-effect electrical shockwave, the physical impact will shatter the horn and ruin the scales. That is a tragic lack of profit optimization."

"Jak chcesz go usmażyć od środka, szefie?" Kaede asked curiously from my pauldron, her small spider eyes blinking. "Pancerz ma chamsko gruby!"

"Every machine, no matter how thick its outer plating, has an intake valve," I replied with a predatory, relaxed smile. "Watch and learn."

The Frozen Wyvern, enraged by our nonchalance, snapped its massive wings and launched itself from the obelisk. The sheer displacement of air created a localized hurricane that sent clouds of snow swirling around us. The monster folded its wings and entered a steep, vertical dive, opening its terrifying maw bristling with rows of translucent, needle-like teeth, intending to swallow my entire upper body in a single, crushing bite.

I didn't reach for a sword. I didn't summon an energy barrier. My brazen chill didn't flicker even a fraction of a millimeter.

I waited until the last possible millisecond, feeling the freezing, sulfuric breath of the diving beast on my skin. As the massive, needle-lined jaw descended upon my head, I executed a single, minimalist half-step to the left, shifting my center of gravity with effortless precision.

The Wyvern's multi-ton head thundered past my shoulder.

Before its momentum could carry the beast past me, I thrust my right arm forward. My forearm and hand, instantally coated in a thick, diamond-hard sleeve of Sapphire Slime, plunged straight into the open, fleshy gullet of the passing Wyvern, driving deep into the soft, unarmored tissues of its esophagus.

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"Systemic uziemienie," I muttered coldly.

I unbuckled the mental valve in my weaves, letting a raw, concentrated charge of sapphire current flow directly from my internal reactor straight through my palm into the monster's guts. I didn't bother shaping the energy into complex spells or blades—I simply unleashed a triple-voltage impulse of pure Sapphire Lightning directly into its digestive tract and central nervous system.

BOOM!

A muffled, wet detonation echoed from deep inside the Wyvern's massive torso. The reptile's eyes rolled back in absolute, paralyzed shock. Thick, blue-tinged smoke mixed with the pungent stench of flash-roasted organs billowed violently from its nostrils and open mouth. The ultra-high voltage cooked its internal organs, brain, and mana channels in a fraction of a second, destroying its biological infrastructure from within while leaving the external frame completely untouched.

The gargantuan beast went completely limp in mid-air. Its massive momentum carried the dead carcass sliding across the frozen plateau for twenty meters before it came to a dead halt right at the edge of the precipice.

Not a single scale was cracked. The pristine, two-meter crystal horn remained flawlessly intact, sparkling beneath the pale light of the dungeon.

"Clean, surgical disposal," I evaluated calmly, walking over to the carcass with my hands pushed back into my black coat pockets.

With a short, precise flick of telekinesis, I severed the crystalline horn at its base and extracted the gargantuan, glowing purple essence core from its chest, floating both trophies directly into my bottomless pouch.

"Pierwszy przystanek odhaczony, szefie!" Kaede cheered, doing a little victory lap around my pauldron. "Czysty zysk, zero zniszczonego towaru!"

Shnee approached with a quiet, trusting smile, sheathing her rapier with a soft click. "Your pragmatism is terrifying, Dave. Most hunters would have spent hours trying to chip away at those scales."

"Wasting calories on thick armor is an amateur's mistake, darling," I replied, cracking my neck with a dry pop. "Let's see what the eighty-ninth floor has prepared for us before we wrap up the ninth ten."

We descended the winding stone staircase leading down to the eighty-ninth floor—the final barrier before the threshold of the ninetieth level.

The moment our boots touched the floor, we were hit by a violent, chaotic thermodynamic anomaly. The eighty-ninth floor was a monumental, subterranean chasm where two extreme biomes violently collided. To our left, a towering wall of ancient, blue glacier ice oozed a freezing, arctic mist. To our right, a roaring, churning river of liquid, orange-red magma flowed out of the volcanic depths below, hissing violently as it met the cold. The air was a suffocating, dense fog of scalding steam, sulfur, and ionized ozone, while the ground beneath us trembled continuously.

In the center of this steaming, roaring caldera stood the Lord of the floor.

The Thermal Golem.

The monster was a fifteen-meter colossus built from massive blocks of solid basalt and deep-ice minerals. Its left half was composed of glowing, red-hot volcanic rock dripping with liquid lava, while its right half was formed of dark, transparent permafrost. In its chest, right at the intersection of the two opposing elements, glowed a massive, unstable core that pulsed with terrifying energy.

The Golem roared, raising its gargantuan, multi-ton fists and slamming them into the basalt floor, sending a seismic shockwave and a geyser of magma and shattered ice shooting toward us.

"Szefie, ten kloc waży z pięćdziesiąt ton!" Kaede reported sharply, her legs tightening on my collar. "Jego rdzeń jest osłonięty przez zderzenie dwóch skrajnych temperatur! Działa jak podwójna tarcza termiczna!"

Shnee immediately lowered her stance, her amorficzny rapier gleaming as she prepared to leap forward, but I placed a gentle hand on her shoulder, halting her.

"Don't waste your calories, Shnee," I said, a drapesny smile creeping onto my lips. "A fifty-ton construct carrying massive momentum is not something you fight with brute force. You use its own physics against it."

The Thermal Golem spotted us through the steam. With a grinding, deafening roar, the fifteen-meter giant launched itself into a heavy, crushing charge. Its multi-ton basalt-and-ice fist was raised high, gathering kinetic energy for an overhead strike that would have flattened a steel fortress.

I didn't move an inch. I didn't even take my hands out of my coat pockets.

"Every object in motion has momentum," I explained calmly, my voice cutting through the roar of the steam. "And momentum relies entirely on friction at the point of contact. On pure logic: if you reduce friction to absolute zero, gravity takes over the calculation."

At the exact millisecond before the Golem's foot landed for its final, devastating leap, I extended a thin thread of my volitional telekinesis onto the floor beneath its feet.

I constructed an inclined Kinetic Ramp—a perfectly smooth, mirror-like plane of compressed force angled at forty-five degrees, sloping directly toward the roaring river of liquid magma. Within that specific zone, I compressed the coefficient of friction down to absolute zero.

The Thermal Golem's multi-ton foot struck the Kinetic Ramp.

Instead of gaining traction for its strike, its foot instantly shot forward on the frictionless surface. The giant's fifty-ton mass and forward momentum, deprived of any point of support, turned against it with ruthless, mechanical precision.

The Golem lost its balance completely. Its massive, stone-and-ice body violently pitched forward, sliding uncontrollably down the Kinetic Ramp like a runaway train.

With a gargantuan, roaring splash that sent plumes of scalding steam three stories into the air, the fifteen-meter Thermal Golem plunged headfirst into the middle of the boiling magma river!

"Ryk?!" the monster uttered a confused, grinding roar as the boiling lava instantly engulfed its icy right flank.

The thermodynamic reaction was instant and catastrophic.

The sudden, violent temperature differential between the liquid magma and the deep-ice permafrost caused the moisture trapped within the Golem's core to vaporize in a fraction of a millisecond. The internal steam pressure expanded exponentially inside its solid basalt frame, finding no outlet.

BOOM!

The Thermal Golem exploded from the inside out with a deafening, seismic thud. Millions of tiny basalt pebbles, shattered ice fragments, and boiling water droplets rained down into the magma, extinguishing the monster in less than five seconds without requiring a single joule of offensive energy from my Vessel.

A massive, glowing purple essence core popped out of the steam, floating gently on the heat haze.

With a lazy gesture of my hand, I drew the heavy crystal toward me, catching it effortlessly and dropping it into my pouch alongside our other spoils.

"Clean, effortless disposal on pure logic," I summarized nonchalantly, adjusting my coat collar.

Shnee stood beside me, her mouth slightly open in a rare moment of stunned disorientation. She looked at the bubbling magma river where a fifteen-meter boss had existed five seconds ago, then turned her silver eyes to me.

"Dave... you didn't even touch him," she whispered, a deep, fanatical pride blooming across her face. "You made the dungeon destroy itself."

"Physics never lies, darling. Unlike the system," I replied with easygoing calm, turning toward the stone archway leading to the ninetieth floor. "Kaede, status?"

"Radary czyste, szefie! Zero zużycia kalorii!" the spider chirped happily. "Jesteś po prostu bezczelnym suwerenem tego lochu! Dziewiąta dycha leży i kwiczy!"

"Then let me wrap up the ninetieth floor and head back to the base," I declared, stepping into the dark descent. "Mina's roast is waiting, and our Vessel demands a proper, high-protein reload."

The gate to the ninetieth floor swung open, welcoming us to the final execution of the ninth zone.