The victory in the Shatter-Canyons had been clean, but the silence that followed was suffocating. As Kael's skiff returned to the Golden Bastion, the earth beneath them didn't just vibrate—it moaned. It was a deep, sub-harmonic sound that bypassed the ears and rattled the very marrow of their bones.
"Kael, the Satellite Link is screaming," Sia reported, her light-filaments flickering in agitation. "The High Overlord isn't sending another convoy. He's draining the Taurus Array dry. He's pulling the energy from the planetary crust and focusing it into a single coordinate."
Kael stood at the prow, his platinum eyes fixed on the High Spire in the distance. "Where?"
"Here," Lyra's voice came through the neural link, trembling. "The coordinate is the Sump's main support pillar. Kael... he's not trying to crush the city anymore. He's trying to wake up the Guardian."
CRA-AAACK.
The sky above the Sump didn't break—the ground did. Five miles from the Bastion, the black glass floor of the wastes erupted. A hand made of compressed obsidian and glowing orange magma, the size of a cathedral, clawed its way out of the earth.
This was the Taurus Golem.
It was a nightmare of Runic engineering and Calamity-energy, a three-hundred-foot titan of living stone. Every movement it made caused a localized 7.0 magnitude earthquake. Its head was a single, massive Taurus-Rune that pulsed with the light of a dying sun.
"Legion! To the battlements!" Jax roared, his Runic bellows hissing a desperate, high-pressure cloud of steam. "Man the Gravity-Harpoons! Sia, get the shields to 200%!"
The Sump-Legion moved with disciplined precision, but even with the Unbroken Mantle, the sheer presence of the Golem was overwhelming. The air around the titan was so heavy that birds falling from the sky were crushed into paste before they hit the ground.
Kael leaped from the skiff, his obsidian cloak flaring. He didn't wait for the Golem to reach the gates. He met it in the open wastes.
Compared to the three-hundred-foot titan, Kael was a speck of dust. But as he touched the ground, a shockwave of platinum light rippled outward, stabilizing the earth for a thousand meters.
"You've spent centuries building a god out of rock," Kael's voice echoed, amplified by the Sovereign Star Protocol until it rivaled the thunder of the Golem's footsteps. "But you forgot that the stars are what gave the rock its weight."
The Golem roared—a sound of grinding stone and erupting gas. It raised a massive fist and slammed it down toward Kael.
[WARNING: KINETIC IMPACT EXCEEDS LIMITS] [ESTIMATED FORCE: 5,000,000 TONS] [ADVICE: EVADE]
"I don't evade," Kael whispered.
He raised his left hand, the Tectonic Fragment he had just captured from the Azure glowing in his palm. He didn't use Inertia to stop the punch. He used Molecular Reconstruction to become the punch.
As the Golem's fist made contact with Kael's platinum field, the world went white.
The shockwave leveled every obsidian pillar in the canyon. The Sump-Legion, even behind the Bastion's walls, was thrown back by the atmospheric pressure. But Kael didn't move. He stood in a crater of his own making, his hand buried six inches deep into the Golem's stone knuckles.
"ARIES... REDIRECTION."
Kael didn't just push back. He funneled the Golem's own 5,000,000 tons of force back through its arm. The sound of the Golem's obsidian limb shattering was like a mountain range collapsing. Fragments of rock the size of tanks were launched into the sky.
The titan shrieked, its orange core flickering. It opened its mouth—a jagged rift of magma—and prepared to unleash the Tectonic Breath, a beam of pure molten gravity.
"Sia! The Harpoons! Now!" Kael commanded.
From the Bastion's walls, six massive bolts of refined Gravity-Ore, trailing Sia's gold light-filaments, shot out. They didn't pierce the Golem's chest; they anchored into the ground around it.
"Jax! Rin! Link with me!"
The neural bridge flared. Kael, Jax, and Rin became a singular triangle of Sovereign energy. Kael provided the Authority, Jax provided the Endurance, and Rin provided the Silence to mask the feedback.
Together, they pulled.
The Golem, for the first time in its existence, felt its own weight turned against it. The light-filaments tightened, siphoning the orange energy from the Golem's core and feeding it directly into the Bastion's batteries.
"It's working!" Lyra shouted. "The Golem's energy signature is dropping! Kael, finish it before the Overlord triggers the self-destruct!"
Kael ascended, his boots leaving trails of platinum fire in the air. He reached the level of the Golem's glowing Taurus-Rune.
"This ground no longer recognizes your command," Kael said, his hand glowing with the final resonance of the Tectonic Fragment.
He slammed his palm into the rune.
"RESET."
The orange light didn't explode. It imploded. The massive obsidian titan didn't shatter; it turned back into simple, unmoving stone. The heat vanished. The gravity returned to normal.
The three-hundred-foot guardian of the House of Terra was now nothing more than a new mountain standing in front of the Golden Bastion—a permanent monument to the High Overlord's failure.
Kael stood atop the Golem's head, looking toward the High Spire. He could feel the Overlord's rage, a distant, tectonic vibration. But he also felt something else: the Taurus Sign was finally fully unlocked in his mind.
[ZODIAC SYNC: 45% (TAURUS)] [TRAIT EVOLVED: THE EARTH-KING'S STRIDE] [DEAD MAN'S SWITCH: 05:12:33]
"The shield is permanent now," Kael said, looking back at his cheering Legion. "But the Overlord is out of pets. It's time we paid him a visit in his own throne room."