2026-03-06 10:00:31"The enemy of my enemy is not my friend," Finnian muttered as he adjusted his stance. "He's just bullet fodder that happens to breathe."
The Aethelgard Stone Circle had turned into a cosmic gladiator arena. Dozens of Dimensional Creepers pitch-black, living two-dimensional shadows, began to rise from the ground, from cracks in the rocks, and even detaching themselves from the shadow of the iron tower itself.
The purple sky above them rumbled, soundless lightning flashing like ruptured veins in the eyeball of a god.
The Iron Fang soldiers trembled. Their advanced plasma rifles, designed to penetrate tank armor, felt like water pistols against these creatures.
"What are your orders, Lieutenant?!" shouted one of the Iron Fang sergeants, his voice cracking as he watched his comrade turn into dust blown away by the wind.
The Iron Fang commander, Lieutenant Kael, stared at Finnian with a mix of hatred and desperation. He swallowed his bitter pride.
"Do what he says!" Kael shouted. "Focus fire to... dammit, just distract them!"
"Good," Finnian grinned, his eyes glowing wild green. "Make some noise. I'll do the hitting."
One shadow creature darted forward. Its movement was strange, glitchy, as if skipping several frames of animation at once. Suddenly, it was right in front of a young soldier on the left flank.
SHRRAACK!
The shadow swung a void claw. The soldier's rifle rusted instantly into red powder. The soldier screamed, scrambling back, tripping over a generator cable.
"Hey, Flat Face!"
Finnian lunged in. He didn't punch the creature physically but slammed his left Gauntlet into the empty space right in front of the shadow's chest. White energy from the Verdant Core exploded.
BOOM!
The shadow creature screeched with a high-frequency static sound before disintegrating into black smoke.
"One down," Finnian counted, his breath heaving. "Only... fifty more?"
"You heard him?!" Lieutenant Kael shouted, directing his troops. "Form a V formation! Cover O'Connell! Use phosphorous grenades! Bright light slows them down!"
For a moment, an impossible scene unfolded. The world's most wanted fugitive and the forces hunting him worked together like a well-oiled machine.
Phosphorous grenades detonated. Blinding white light seared retinas, forcing the shadow creatures to retreat, hissing in pain as intense photons disrupted their body structures.
As they retreated, Finnian advanced. He became the sole striker on the field. Every punch, every backhand chop, erased an existence from this world. But the cost was high. Every contact made Finnian's Gauntlet hotter. The black metal began to glow red, burning the skin of Finnian's arm beneath it.
"Damn, Finn, the temperature..." Elena shouted from behind a rock, reading the indicator on the back of Finnian's hand that started blinking a danger red.
"Don't worry about my hand, Doc!" Finnian retorted while kicking (with an energy-coated leg) a Creeper's head until it dissipated. "Worry about that generator!"
Three Creepers ignored the troops and darted toward the main diesel generator powering the floodlights. They knew: kill the light, and dinner is served.
"They're going for the lights!"
Finnian turned, but he was too late. He was too far away.
One of the Creepers touched the generator.
HISSS...
The metal generator aged a hundred years in a single second. The machine crumbled, its oil dried to dust, and POP... the floodlights across the entire site died completely.
Total darkness engulfed the Aethelgard site.
Panicked screams of Iron Fang soldiers erupted everywhere. Without light, shadows became kings. The hissing of the creatures came from all directions, overlapping with the sound of brittle bones and bodies turning to dust.
"Turn on Night Vision!" Kael ordered in vain. Their NVG goggles only displayed white static.
"Back to back!" Finnian shouted in the darkness. He ignited his Gauntlet to maximum intensity, becoming the sole source of light a green lighthouse in a black sea. "Get close to me!"
The remaining soldiers ran to crowd around Finnian and Elena. They formed a pathetic little circle. Twenty men left out of fifty.
The shadow creatures surrounded them. Hundreds of nonexistent eyes stared hungrily from the dark. Finnian's circle of light was shrinking. His Gauntlet started emitting black smoke that smelled of burning ozone.
"This is a bad end," Finnian muttered, feeling his energy draining away. "At least we die with the enemy."
Lieutenant Kael, bleeding from his temple, reloaded his pistol. "It's been an honor fighting with you, O'Connell. Even if you are a bastard."
"You too, fascist," Finnian replied.
The Creepers prepared to lunge all at once.
Suddenly, a strange humming sound cut through the air. Not organic, not static shadow noise.
Pure, clean high-tech humming. Like the sound of a giant MRI machine powering up.
A bright purple beam as thick as a coconut tree trunk, shot from the dark forest on the other side. The beam wasn't a laser, but compressed particle waves.
VWOOOM!
The beam swept through the swarm of shadow creatures on the left flank. Whatever the beam touched didn't explode, but solidified. The shadow creatures were forced to condense into black crystal statues, then shattered into pieces.
"What is that?" Elena looked up, squinting.
From behind the fallen trees, a walking machine stepped into the stone circle area.
It wasn't a Walker Tank. It was an armored Mobile Platform carrying a throne-like seat on top. Hovering on its left and right were two giant combat drones carrying Anti-Entropy Cannons.
And sitting on that throne, with a fresh glass of wine in his hand, was Colonel Elias Thorne.
His face was calm, unaffected by the small apocalypse around him. He pressed a button on his armrest. The drones fired purple beams again, wiping out the remaining shadow creatures surrounding Finnian's group in seconds. Precise, lethal, and arrogant.
The cosmic threat vanished, replaced by a far more sadistic human threat.
The floodlights from the Mobile Platform turned on, spotlighting Finnian's exhausted and burned face.
"Field note number four," Thorne's voice sounded clear through the loudspeakers, his tone like a lecturer giving a class. "Rift entities appear susceptible to stabilized Tachyon particles. Fascinating. Truly fascinating."
Thorne stepped down from his seat, walking casually across the battlefield filled with the dust of his own dead men. He didn't even glance at the remains.
Viper appeared beside him, her weapon aimed straight at Elena's head.
The surviving Iron Fang soldiers, including Lieutenant Kael immediately knelt in salute, trembling in fear.
"Forgive our failure, Colonel!" Kael shouted.
"Failure?" Thorne smiled thinly. He stopped five paces in front of Finnian. "You succeeded in drawing the rat out of his hole. That is a success."
Finnian stood tall, though his legs shook. The Gauntlet on his left hand was dead silent from overheating. Smoke billowed from the metal. He was defenseless.
Thorne looked at Finnian from head to toe, then his gaze fell on the black Gauntlet on Finnian's left hand.
"Ah," Thorne sighed, his eyes gleaming with greed. "Commander Cian's glove. He stole it from me twenty years ago. You've taken poor care of it, Finnian."
"Go to hell," Finnian spat.
"Always rude," Thorne shook his head. He made a hand signal.
Dozens of red dot lasers from snipers in the dark forest instantly appeared on Finnian and Elena's chests.
"Game over, Warden," Thorne said softly. "The ceasefire ends now."
***
Previous Chapter
Latest Chapter
Chapter 179: Cosmic Frankenstein Laboratory
The portal from the transit hub did not lead to another planetary surface.Leo OConnell stepped out of the crackling spatial tear and his heavy boots met the cold, porous surface of a massive, drifting asteroid. He was completely surrounded by the infinite, freezing vacuum of deep space, bathed in the harsh, unfiltered light of distant, dying stars.He did not suffocate. A localized, rapidly deteriorating atmospheric bubble encased the jagged rock, generated by a sprawling network of dying, graying ironwood roots that clung to the asteroid surface. The magic was failing, struggling to maintain oxygen and gravity. Finnian had been here, drained the life from the stone, and abandoned it.Leo raised the collar of his leather trench coat against the biting chill. He looked toward the center of the asteroid.Built into the cratered rock was a crude, brutalist structure. It was not a palace. It was a makeshift laboratory, forged from warped alien st
Chapter 177: The Steam Engine Dimension
The portal spat Leo OConnell out like a piece of chewed-up gristle. He hit the cobblestone street hard, rolling to distribute the kinetic momentum, his heavy leather trench coat sweeping across a puddle of thick, iridescent black oil. The jagged tear in reality snapped shut behind him with a deafening crack that echoed down the desolate, fog-choked alleyway. Leo stood up slowly, brushing the greasy grime from his knee. He drew a deep breath and immediately gagged. The air in Sector Seven-G was absolute poison. It smelled of raw sulfur, burning coal, and the unmistakable, metallic tang of dried blood. The sky above was a suffocating canopy of thick, yellowish-brown smog, entirely blocking out whatever sun this dimension possessed. Towering structures of rusted brass, exposed copper pipes, and massive, silent gear-works loomed over the narrow streets like the skeletons of dead metallic giants. This was a steampunk purgatory. But something was fundamentally, terrifyingly wrong. It w
SERIES 8: THE CONVERGENCE OF UNIVERSES Chapter 176: The Fractured World
The raindrop did not fall to the ground. It hit the toe of Leo OConnell heavy combat boot, completely defied the laws of gravity, and slowly rolled upward along his shin, ignoring every established rule of physics before shooting violently back into the gray, bruised clouds.Leo stood perfectly still in the desolate, rotting center of Greyfenwood. He watched the water droplets ascend into the sky. Above him, the heavens did not look like a natural atmosphere anymore. The clouds were flickering with jagged, blinding lines of white and black static, looking exactly like a broken analog television screen attempting to tune into a dead channel.It had been exactly five terrestrial years since his father plunged into the cosmic void with the corpse of his mother.For the planet Earth, half a decade had passed. But for Leo, the raw, unfiltered burden of containing the apocalyptic magical fallout of the Verdant Core had exacted a terrifying biological toll. The forced evolution that had save
Chapter 175: The Beginning of Darkness
The master levers locked into place with a deafening, metallic crash that resonated through the very bedrock of the Himalayan mountains.Finnian OConnell did not look back at his screaming son or the armed rebels in the corridor. He stared directly into the jagged, bleeding tear in the fabric of reality hovering above the massive glass vat.The Spirit Gate violently expanded.It was not a clean, stabilized portal like the one Elias Thorne had tried to open. This was a crude, brutal, and apocalyptic wound torn into the multiverse using corrupted, necrotic magic. A shockwave of pure, freezing black energy blasted outward, shattering the remaining medical equipment in the laboratory. The walls of the Imperial Palace groaned, cracking under the immense gravitational pressure of a black hole trying to digest the physical world."Papa, stop!" Leo screamed, fighting against the hurricane-force winds pulling everything toward the vortex. The six-year-old boy dug his small boots into the crack
Chapter 174: Forbidden Obsession
The Imperial Palace of Verdantia was slowly choking to death. The vibrant, bioluminescent green vines that had once pulsed with infinite magical energy, illuminating the grand obsidian corridors like glowing emerald veins, were turning into brittle, blackened husks. The polished walls cracked and groaned as the thick roots within them violently shriveled. A foul, suffocating stench of ancient decay hung heavy in the stagnant, freezing air of the mountain fortress. Deep within the isolated northern wing, Finnian OConnell stood before the colossal glass vat in the center of the ruined medical laboratory. He did not sleep. He did not eat. For weeks, the King of the Forest had worked in absolute, manic isolation. His physical body was a horrifying reflection of the dying city around him. The dark, impenetrable ironwood of his skin had turned a sickly, ashen gray, peeling and flaking away like dead bark. His once broad and powerful shoulders were hunched, burdened by the crushing, invis
Chapter 173: The Fall of the King
The Imperial Palace of Verdantia was a towering monument to absolute silence.Finnian OConnell walked through the colossal, obsidian-paved entrance hall, his heavy, biomechanical footsteps echoing like the slow, rhythmic tolling of a death bell. The magnificent ironwood doors had been left wide open. The glowing green vines that usually illuminated the grand pillars had completely withered, turning a sickly, brittle gray. The ambient magic of the city was dying because the heart of its King was entirely dead.He did not look up at the vaulted ceilings. He did not look at the empty pedestals where his Praetorian Guards used to stand. The sprawling, invincible army he had mutated to conquer the world had vanished into the mist, following the only true prince of the forest. Finnian was utterly alone.As he approached the base of the grand staircase leading to the throne room, a single, trembling figure stepped out from the shadows. It was a low-ranking sentry, a young man who had been t
You may also like
THE EXTINCTION AGENDA
Christopher 'Ozoya' Wrights3.8K viewsThe Art of Magic
Sylas Reed10.5K viewsThe Search for Xanar
Cybermage90094.3K viewsRedemption
blackeshadowe2.9K viewsLAST IMMUNE: THE APOCALYPSE KING
trae trae 💕419 viewsNEURAL ASHES
Ruby Martyr788 viewsDivine Essence
Shaman blaze581 viewsMartial God Reborn As A Robot
VKBoy369 views