Orion's expression hardened.
"That's… not possible."
Protocol was already running at full priority, tearing through the incoming data. Mana sense
flared, recalibrated, discarded false positives. Temporal Locus anchored again, mapping
continuity instead of structure.
And then he saw it.
Another anchor.
Not where the first had been.
Deeper.
Offset at a different vector entirely.
A second core.
Smaller. Denser. Newly ford.
His eyes narrowed.
"So you can regenerate the anchor itself."
That was new.
The realization landed at the sa mont the abomination attacked again.
But this ti, it didn't attack harder.
It attacked faster.
The shift was imdiate and violent. Appendages blurred, no longer telegraphing their motion
with pressure buildup or displacent cues. Instead of massive, crushing strikes, the creature
switched to rapid, precise sweeps—slashes, hooks, glancing blows ant to overwhelm
reaction ti rather than brute defenses.
Protocol scread warnings in rapid succession.
Orion moved.
Kairos Step chained into Aether Step seamlessly, his body slipping through impossibly tight
intervals as claws and segnted limbs tore through the space he had occupied fractions of a
second earlier.
Stone exploded around him.
The cave scread.
He felt pain for the first ti.
A sharp line across his shoulder as sothing clipped him mid-transition. Not deep. Not
crippling. But real.
Then another.
A scrape along his side.
Another across his forearm.
The abomination learned.
If power couldn't catch him, speed could.
Orion clicked his tongue quietly.
"This is getting annoying."
He considered pushing more mana through his movent skills, increasing displacent speed
further—but dismissed the idea almost instantly. That would be brute escalation. Wasteful.
Inelegant.
He had better tools.
The Seer activated.
Mana surged upward imdiately, far more demanding than any of his other skills. Protocol
intercepted the flow, calculating optimal output in real ti—how much future vision he could
afford without burning through reserves prematurely.
The answer was clear.
Short windows.
Constant refresh.
Fragnts of the imdiate future flooded his perception—overlapping possibilities, branching
actions, attack vectors forming before they existed.
The world slowed.
Not in reality.
In comprehension.
The abomination's attacks beca readable before they happened. Appendages blurred
toward him—but Orion was already moving, stepping into the spaces they would miss, pivoting
through futures that never fully manifested.
The fight escalated instantly.
Darkness churned as Orion weaved through a storm of motion, dodging, countering, striking in
brief, surgical bursts. Nova Spark detonated against joints and connection points, not to destroy
but to disrupt. Appendages ruptured and reford faster than before, but the interruptions
stacked.
Still not enough.
The second core shifted constantly, sliding through the creature's mass whenever Orion aligned
with it. Every ti he ca close, the body restructured violently, blocking access with layers of
dense flesh and mineralized bone.
This thing wasn't just durable.
It was adaptive.
The cave began to collapse.
Walls sheared apart as spatial implosions and kinetic impacts tore through stone. Jade veins
ruptured, spilling raw mana that the abomination absorbed almost instantly. The ground split
open beneath Orion's feet more than once, forcing rapid repositioning.
Protocol chid sharply.
Mana reserves: 60%.
Orion frowned.
That hadn't happened in a very long ti.
The Seer was expensive. Even minimized, even optimized, it drained steadily. He couldn't
maintain this pace indefinitely.
He needed a solution.
Now.
Another slash passed inches from his throat as he Aether Stepped sideways, reappearing
against a fractured wall. He pushed off imdiately—
And paused.
Sothing flashed.
Barely noticeable.
A faint glow along the cave wall, gone as quickly as it appeared.
Normally, he would have ignored it. The cave was saturated with jade, mana fluctuations were
common here. But the timing bothered him.
Protocol flagged the anomaly.
Orion's gaze snapped toward the wall mid-dodge, Seer still active, temporal fragnts aligning.
Was the monster drawing energy from the cave?
The idea should have occurred to him earlier.
He dismissed it instinctively—and Protocol confird why.
There was no detectable mana transfer.
No flow.
No siphoning.
If mana had been exchanged, he would have noticed imdiately.
Still—
His attention returned to the second core.
Mana flowed outward from it cleanly, feeding the body. Conversion was happening there. That
much was certain.
Which ant the core wasn't a decoy.
It wasn't even an anchor in the traditional sense.
It was a processor.
The realization hit fully ford.
The creature wasn't generating mana.
It was converting sothing else into it.
Sothing his senses didn't register.
That explained everything.
Why the cave mattered.
Why jade veins reacted.
Why the environnt bent and warped without direct mana manipulation.
The cave wasn't supplying mana.
It was supplying fuel.
Raw, untyped energy embedded in the stone itself—geological, elental, sothing older
than mana refinent. The abomination absorbed it, processed it through the core, and output
mana.
A self-sustaining system.
Orion laughed softly.
"Well," he muttered, dodging another flurry of strikes, "that's just wonderful."
No wonder destroying the core hadn't killed it.
As long as the system remained connected to its source, it would just rebuild.
Which ant—
He had to cut it off.
He Aether Stepped upward sharply, vanishing and reappearing high above the chamber, his
mana sense and Temporal Locus expanding to cover the entire creature at once.
The abomination reacted instantly, launching appendages upward in a violent attempt to pull
him back down.
Orion didn't let it.
He brought his hands together, palms slapping sharply as spatial coordinates collapsed.
Teleport.
Both of them vanished.
The transition was violent.
Light exploded into existence.
Orion reappeared in broad daylight, standing on shattered stone at the base of the mountain,
the abomination materializing several ters away with a disoriented lurch.
The effect was imdiate.
The creature shuddered.
Its movents faltered.
The pressure dropped sharply.
Withdrawal.
Orion smirked.
The abomination twisted violently, angling its bulk back toward the cave entrance, appendages
clawing at the ground, desperate to return.
"Sorry, buddy," Orion said calmly, mana gathering around him. "Your addiction ends here."
He didn't widen his next attack.
He compressed it.
Every ounce of gathered mana was forced inward, constrained brutally by Temporal Distortion
and spatial compression. Nova Bloom began forming—but not as an expanding sphere.
As a prison.
A perfectly contained collapse field wrapped around the creature's entire body, limiting the
blast radius to its physical form.
The abomination thrashed wildly, composure gone, movents erratic and desperate. Without
access to the cave's energy, regeneration slowed drastically. Appendages tore apart and failed
to reattach properly.
Orion released.
The collapse was instantaneous.
There was no explosion.
No sound.
The creature simply… ceased.
Space folded inward, consuming mass, structure, core, and conversion system alike. The
compressed Nova Bloom annihilated everything within its boundary with ruthless efficiency.
When space relaxed again, there was nothing left.
No residue.
No presence.
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