Chapter 172: His Crumbled Guardian

The Elector raised his bare left hand and pointed his open palm straight at Lucian’s chest.

Raziel did not hesitate.

He burned the last drops of Anchor Blood in his veins to push his exhausted muscles forward.

He charged across the stone corridor on Level -1 and threw himself directly at Lucian.

He slammed his shoulder into the noble’s ribs. The physical impact knocked Lucian off his feet and threw them both onto the cold, dusty tiles.

They hit the ground hard a fraction of a second before Mordecai swiped his left hand through the empty air.

BZZT!

A massive, flat gray void ripped open in the space where Lucian just stood.

The unrendered hole deleted the torches on the wall and erased the solid stone archway behind them.

The red digital static chewed on the jagged edges of the missing bricks and crawled across the ceiling.

Raziel rolled over on the dirty floor and grabbed Lucian by the collar of his dark tunic.

“Get up!” Raziel yelled. He spat a mouthful of dark blood onto the tiles. “Do not let him look at you!”

Lucian scrambled backward.

The arrogant noble looked completely broken. His green eyes locked onto the solid stone floor where Gideon vanished moments ago.

He lost his steel dagger to the digital ash and he lost his friend to a literal glitch in reality. He had zero weapons and zero tactical options to fight an administrator.

Mordecai lowered his hand.

He adjusted the pristine gold trim on his white sleeve and stared down at the two boys bleeding on the floor.

“You delay the inevitable,” Mordecai’s amplified voice carried absolute, mechanical patience.

“The corrupted code will be erased.”

The Elector raised his crystal cane.

He pointed the glass tip at Raziel’s face and prepared to cast a wide-range deletion wave to clean the corridor.

A heavy, terrifying vibration shook the entire foundation of St. Celeste.

RUMBLE!

The stone floor under Mordecai’s boots cracked open.

The colossal stone construct smashed through the ceiling of Level -5 and tore straight up through the intermediate basement levels.

Lithos crushed the brick walls and the heavy support beams with raw, unstoppable physical force.

The ancient guardian erupted through the stone floor of the corridor right behind the Elector.

A massive shower of jagged rock and thick dust exploded into the air. Lithos pulled its enormous upper torso into the narrow hallway.

The construct ignored the spatial dimensions of the building.

The ancient magic warped the physical space to accommodate the sheer size of the divine weapon.

Two massive golden eyes ignited in the dark dust cloud. The eyes consisted entirely of living, shifting silver runes.

They locked directly onto the pristine white robes of the Elector.

The Silencer artifact erased the containment seals holding Lithos in the abyss. The deletion frequency smothered Caius’s command tether.

The guardian reverted to pure, corrupted instinct. It woke up to protect the node, and it recognized the cleanup protocol as the ultimate existential threat to the temple.

Lithos roared.

The noise sounded like grinding tectonic plates and screeching metal.

The guardian raised a colossal fist made of solid granite and ancient silver metal. It relied on absolute, crushing physical mass.

Lithos swung the massive stone fist straight down at Mordecai’s head.

The punch carried the kinetic force of a falling mountain.

The air pressure in the corridor warped and slammed Raziel and Lucian flat against the floor tiles.

The sheer wind from the strike shattered the remaining torches on the walls.

Mordecai did not run. He did not dodge the colossal attack or cast a holy shield.

The supreme commander of the Inquisition turned around and looked up at the falling granite fist.

He raised his bare left hand.

CRASH!

The massive stone fist collided with Mordecai’s open palm.

The kinetic impact shook the entire academy.

A shockwave of pure physical force ripped through the corridor and blasted the heavy iron doors off their hinges. Dust blinded Raziel and filled his lungs, forcing him to cough hard against the stone floor.

The dust settled.

Raziel stared through the gray haze and his tactical brain completely froze.

Mordecai caught the granite fist with one hand.

The Elector did not bend his knees. He did not sink into the stone floor from the massive weight.

The invisible, digital barrier surrounding his physical body absorbed the raw kinetic energy and deleted the momentum completely.

Lithos pushed harder.

The golden runic eyes flared with blinding light. The construct forced its entire massive weight down onto the Elector, grinding the bedrock fist against the invisible shield.

Mordecai did not flinch.

The skin on Mordecai’s raised left arm started to change.

The human flesh peeled back and glitched with black digital squares.

The illusion of the supreme commander faded, revealing the raw, jagged black code running beneath the surface.

“You are an obsolete asset,” Mordecai stated to the stone god.

The Elector raised his crystal cane with his right hand. He used the tip of the cane to tap the empty air in front of his chest.

He moved the crystal in short, sharp, precise strokes.

The tip left glowing white geometric lines hovering in the dark space.

He typed a command directly into the server.

Mordecai finished the sequence and tapped the final glowing line.

CLICK.

The white code flashed and vanished into Lithos’s granite fist.

The colossal stone guardian froze.

The golden runic eyes stopped shifting and locked in place. The massive grinding noise of the bedrock ceased entirely.

The solid granite fist touching Mordecai’s invisible barrier began to dissolve.

The physical stone turned into hundreds of floating red and white polygons.

The geometric shapes drifted off the construct and dissolved into the empty air like digital ash.

The deletion spread up the guardian’s massive arm.

Lithos opened its colossal stone jaw. It tried to roar again, but the audio channels inside its throat ceased to exist.

Zero sound came out.

The red static reached the guardian’s chest.

The solid rock turned into transparent wireframes.

The glitching polygons ate the massive golden eyes and erased the face of the dead gods.

The deletion consumed the entire construct in less than ten seconds.

The massive stone guardian dissolved into nothing. The red static faded and the floating polygons vanished into the dark corridor.

Lithos was gone.

The cleanup protocol erased the ultimate defense mechanism of the Primordial Pantheon with a single typed command.

Raziel lay on the floor and stared at the empty space.

He brought six Forbidden Gifts and the corrupted Umbral Paragon core to fight an ecclesiastical war. He expected to fight holy fire and elite executioners.

He just watched an administrator type a code and delete a god.

Mordecai lowered his bare left hand.

The black digital squares on his skin vanished, and the pristine human flesh returned to cover the raw code.

He locked his cold eyes on Raziel.

“The board is clean,” Mordecai stated.

The Elector raised his crystal cane and pointed it straight down at Raziel’s chest.

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