Chapter 67: Chapter 67: Dola’s Tactical Overload

The darkness encroaching upon The Deep Steam Vents was no longer a mere absence of light; it had become a sentient, predatory entity. The sphere of abyssal energy hovering above Malphas’s head continued to expand, greedily devouring every stray photon from the flickering crystal lamps on the walls and the dying sparks from the ruined Sentry Gun’s scorched circuitry. The atmosphere in the dead-end corridor felt frozen—not because of a drop in temperature, but because of the crushing aura of despair radiated by the Demon General. Every breath Dayat took felt like inhaling heavy, suffocating grave dust.

Dayat remained on his knees, his right hand clawing at the cold, rusted metal of the floor. The adrenaline from Baruk-Ahn’s rune was still screaming through his veins, but it was merely a biological life-support system now, keeping his heart beating while his muscles remained paralyzed by the General’s sheer presence. Before him, Malphas stood with a thin, mocking sneer, appearing to savor the final seconds before he erased their existence from the map of Aethera.

“Dola…” Dayat croaked, his voice nearly swallowed by the low-frequency thrum of the black sun above.

Dola, who had been kneeling in a protective stance beside Dayat, suddenly stood up. Her movements were no longer fluid or human-like; they were precise, jerky, and governed by a mechanical cadence. The electric-blue glow in her eyes began to vibrate with a high-frequency shudder, slowly bleaching into a terrifying, cold silver-white.

The atmosphere surrounding Dola shifted instantly.

A wave of transparent energy rippled outward from her chassis, sweeping away the sulfurous steam and pushing back Malphas’s dark miasma in a perfect three-meter radius. This wasn’t magic. It was something that defied the fundamental understanding of Lunethra, who was gasping for air behind the Hesco barricades. The air around Dola seemed to crackle and groan, as if reality itself were being forced to submit to a higher, more absolute authority.

[GLITCH PROTOCOL: THE MAIDEN OF STEEL – OUTPUT: 15%.]

Dola turned her head slightly toward Dayat. Her expression was a void—an absolute, chilling empty space. There was no longer any trace of affection, jealousy, or the helpful assistant’s tone. What remained was a terrifying majesty.

“Subject: Hidayat Nur Mustafidl,” Dola’s voice was now multi-layered, a chorus of thousands of synchronized machines speaking in perfect, eerie harmony. “Initiating temporary tactical synchronization. Human cerebral capacity will be overclocked to process sub-molecular military data. Pain receptors will be suppressed via temporary sensory nerve severance.”

Dayat opened his mouth to protest, but before he could utter a sound, his vision exploded.

In a single second that felt like an eternity, Dayat’s consciousness was violently yanked from his physical body. He no longer saw the dark corridor or the demon. He saw a vision that threatened to shatter his remaining sanity.

Under a blood-red sky, a gargantuan kingdom—a city of floating crystal towers that pierced the clouds—collapsed in heartbeats. It wasn’t destroyed by armies or dragons, but by a single woman clad in silver armor standing in the heavens. With one casual wave of her hand, thousands of lances of white light rained upon the earth, turning the civilization into an ocean of fire and glass in an instant. It was structured, calculated annihilation. No mercy. No hesitation.

And that woman possessed the exact same face as…

THUMP!

Dayat’s consciousness slammed back into his body. His nose wasn’t bleeding. His head didn’t ache. On the contrary, he felt his mind become impossibly clear. It was so sharp that he felt he could count every individual speck of dust dancing in the air. Thousands of weapon schematics, gravitational coordinates, and the atomic lattice structures of alloys flooded his mind like a torrential yet perfectly ordered river.

“Data transferred,” Dola stated with absolute finality. “Authorized duration: 300 seconds. Upon expiration, technical memory will be purged to prevent permanent neurological scarring of the subject’s cortex.”

Malphas, who had been observing with an arrogant curiosity, narrowed his violet eyes. He felt the shift in the human’s aura. Dayat no longer looked like a terrified youth; he stood up slowly, his movements possessed of a lethal calm, his eyes reflecting the same silver-white coldness as Dola’s.

“An intriguing metamorphosis,” Malphas hissed.

The General swung his arm. The orb above him released a dozen black spears that streaked toward Dayat with the speed of lightning.

“Dola!” Dayat shouted instinctively.

Dola didn’t dodge. She raised her right palm. Instantly, a complex geometric pattern of shimmering hexagonal plates appeared in the air, interlocking with one another to form a crystalline energy barrier.

CLANG! CLANG! CLANG!

Malphas’s shadow spears hammered into the shield and shattered into thousands of harmless shards, as if they had struck an unyielding wall of diamond. The hexagonal barrier vibrated slightly, emitting a deafening static hum.

Lunethra’s eyes widened in shock. As an Elf who had walked the earth for eight centuries, she had seen every form of protective sorcery—from the Holy Shields of men to the Aegis of Nature. But this? This wasn’t Mana manipulation. It looked as if Dola was literally commanding the molecules of the air to harden into transparent steel.

“What power is this…” Lunethra whispered. She felt like a small insect witnessing a duel between primordial gods.

Malphas, growing irritated, unleashed a larger assault. The shadows beneath his feet surged upward, forming a gargantuan hand that attempted to crush Dola’s shield.

“Break!” Malphas commanded.

Dola remained silent. Her focus was not on the General, but on serving as an absolute firewall for Dayat. Every time the shadow hand struck, the hexagonal shield regenerated itself in milliseconds. She was holding back the entirety of Malphas’s aura and minor attacks, providing Dayat the “processing space” he needed to operate.

Meanwhile, Dayat felt as if he were standing inside a massive combat simulator. He couldn’t see the flow of Mana in the traditional way, but the data Dola had provided allowed him to see Malphas as a series of biological and energetic anomalies. He saw the “stress points” on Malphas’s bone armor—the specific coordinates where the dark energy was most concentrated and where it was most brittle.

“I need something that can punch through that density,” Dayat muttered. His hands extended to his side.

The sapphire light of his manifestation now bled into the silver radiance of Dola’s energy. Metallic particles began to solidify in the air, but the process was far slower and heavier than anything he had done before. This manifestation wasn’t a simple firearm; it was an anti-matter delivery system that required insane energy compression.

Malphas laughed, though a thread of anxiety now laced his voice. “You believe you can win by hiding behind a shield? Human, you are but a mortal breath in the wind!”

The General ceased his minor attacks. He began to compress the entire mass of the dark orb into the palm of his hand. He intended to end the encounter with a singular, reality-warping strike that no barrier could withstand.

Kancil, who was busy binding his wounded shoulder with a torn piece of his shirt, stared at Dayat with wide-eyed dread. “Big Bro Dayat… his face looks like someone else entirely.”

It was true. Dayat was fighting a war on two fronts: the demon outside and the data flood inside. Even with his pain suppressed, the mental pressure of processing the temporary knowledge was monumental. He felt as if he were trying to contain an ocean within a single tea-cup.

“Just a little more…” Dayat hissed through gritted teeth.

In his hands, a large launch tube began to take its final shape. It featured modern, aerodynamic lines, an advanced thermal optical sensor, and a laser-locking mechanism. It was the FGM-148 Javelin, but with a Mana-Electric Hybrid modification calculated by Dola to allow the warhead to penetrate the Abyssal dimension.

Dola glanced at Dayat through the corner of her eye. “Time remaining: 120 seconds. Energy synchronization reached 80%. Master, prepare for high-yield kinetic and thermal release.”

Malphas realized the danger. He didn’t wait any longer. He lunged forward, his hands coated in Abyssal crystals, slamming into Dola’s hexagonal shield with his full weight.

KRAK!

For the first time, one of the energy panels cracked. Dola’s physical form began to glitch violently; her arm briefly vanished, replaced by scrolling lines of binary code for a few milliseconds before re-solidifying.

“DIE!” Malphas roared, his elegant features contorting into a monstrous mask of fury.

Dayat hoisted the Javelin launcher onto his shoulder. His eye locked onto the thermal-mana signature of Malphas’s chest, where the demon’s heart beat with a dense, purple light. Through the HUD projected in his mind, a red box snapped onto the target and chirped with a lethal tone: [TARGET LOCKED].

“Dola, hold him for one more second!” Dayat yelled.

“Executing,” Dola replied curtly. She forced her system to its limit, causing the hexagonal shield to flare with a brilliance that blinded everyone in the corridor.

The battle in the dead-end tunnel had reached its zenith. Baruk-Ahn, still unconscious in the corner, had no idea that a new history of Terragard was being written. A youth from Earth, aided by an entity that had nearly unmade the world in the distant past, was preparing to challenge a General of the deepest Abyss.

But Dayat knew one thing. Even with this weapon, Malphas was an anomaly. This single shot had to find its mark, or they would all become forgotten history, buried beneath the steam of the mountain.

“Let’s see… how well that bone armor holds up against a top-attack anti-tank missile,” Dayat whispered, his gaze colder than the void itself.

[3… 2… 1… FIRE.]

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