Chapter 393: Containment
Dan Heng swept his spear in a fluid arc, the Cloud Piercer's tip precisely deflecting a lethal beam of energy aimed straight at March 7th. Without missing a beat, he channeled his energy to restabilize the Jadeite Shield enveloping Stelle. The gray-haired Trailblazer shifted restlessly on her feet, eager to strike.
"Perhaps he already possessed the strength to contend with us head-on," Dan Heng analyzed, his voice a calm anchor amidst the chaos. "The essence of this Ghoulification is an extreme, insatiable craving for Aether energy. His instinct to consume fuel simply took priority over fighting us."
He narrowed his eyes at the towering monstrosity. "His earlier retreat wasn't out of fear. He was buying time to gorge himself on more fuel, forcing his body and power to reach a more 'complete' state."
Lumine twisted her wrist, her blade flashing as she shattered an incoming energy ray into harmless sparks. Dan Heng's words clicked into place. A sharp gleam of realization crossed her golden eyes.
Bringer lunged, unleashing a ferocious, sweeping blow. Lumine brought her sword up, parrying the heavy strike and using the violent kinetic feedback to launch herself backward. Mid-air, her gaze swept across the battlefield, rapidly assessing their tactical situation.
Stelle's devastating, armor-shattering strikes required precious seconds to charge. Dan Heng's crowd control and defensive maneuvers were holding the line, while March 7th's relentless icy interference kept the enemy off balance. They had the rhythm, but they lacked a definitive, lethal finishing blow.
Bringer was currently boxed in, yet the dark aura radiating from his monstrous frame was steadily thickening. His strength was climbing. If this war of attrition dragged on, the variables would spiral out of control. A tactical blueprint instantly snapped together in Lumine's mind.
"Stelle! Get ready to end him!" Lumine shouted over the din of combat.
Stelle, having just deflected a crushing overhead smash from Bringer, immediately understood. She fell back in perfect synchronization, lowering her stance as she began to funnel every ounce of her energy into her weapon, letting the momentum build to a critical peak.
"Dan Heng, with me!" Lumine commanded, her voice ringing clear and authoritative. "We lock him down head-on!"
Responding to her will, a brilliant, blinding surge of emerald Dendro energy erupted from the blade of her Prototype Rancour.
Dan Heng didn't need further explanation. He shifted his stance, and the Cloud Piercer transformed into a blur of motion. His offensive exploded into a torrential downpour of thrusts. He abandoned lethal strikes, instead carefully targeting Bringer's face, his armored joints, and the three eerie floating eyes hovering around him. The sheer density of the spear shadows forced the monster to pull back, dedicating all his focus to parrying the suffocating harassment.
Lumine darted into the fray. She wove around Bringer's massive frame like a butterfly flitting through a storm. Her longsword, practically dripping with concentrated Dendro power, lightly tapped the earth.
"Surge forth!"
One, two, three... In the blink of an eye, six lush, vibrant Lea Lotus Lamps sprouted from the ground. She had scattered them with pinpoint accuracy, forming an irregular, inescapable ring around Bringer's towering body.
The Lea Lotus Lamps slowly rotated, projecting a suffocatingly rich Dendro aura. Countless emerald specks of light drifted outward, filling the air like the dense, glowing morning mist of a primordial forest.
The moment these vibrant Dendro spores made contact with the ambient moisture around Bringer—and collided with the chaotic, dark red Aether bleeding from his armor—a violent, marvelous elemental reaction triggered.
Dendro Cores materialized. Emerald green and pulsing with highly unstable light, the seed-like constructs rapidly condensed at Bringer's feet, clustered at his sides, and even clung stubbornly to the jagged edges of his armor. They multiplied exponentially in seconds, laying down a highly volatile, glowing green minefield all around the beast.
The floating eyes hovering over Bringer's shoulders twitched violently. His corrupted Ghoul instincts screamed at him, flooding his senses with deep unease. He was fundamentally repulsed by this overwhelming surge of pure, vibrant life energy.
He unleashed a furious roar, attempting to tear through the encirclement and crush the Lea Lotus Lamps. But Dan Heng was relentless. The archivist's spear shadows clung to him like a suffocating shadow, while Stelle's intermittent, bone-rattling feints kept him entirely boxed in. He couldn't take a single step.
Desperate, the floating eyes swiveled, locking onto the Lea Lotus Lamps to blast them into cinders. Before the energy beams could even charge, March 7th's preemptive ice arrows shattered against their lenses, instantly followed by Lumine's intercepting slashes that knocked the eyes off-kilter.
Yet, the emerald Dendro Cores Lumine had so carefully placed did not detonate into explosive bursts as they normally would. Instead, they began to undergo a terrifying morphological shift.
Hyper-stimulated by the chaotic, dark red Aether radiating from Bringer, the hyper-dense Dendro energy mutated. It was suddenly imbued with a savage, primal vitality, awakening with a terrifying sentience.
Crack! Snap! Whoosh!
The deafening sound of rupturing earth echoed across the battlefield. Massive, python-thick vines erupted violently from the Dendro Cores. Coated in a tough, bark-like texture and glowing with a fierce emerald luminescence, they lashed out like predatory whips.
They moved with a predatory consciousness. The vines deftly slithered past Dan Heng, completely ignoring the archivist. Instead, like starving tentacles catching the scent of blood, they collectively converged on the source of the most polluted, turbulent energy in the array: Bringer.
Bringer had just flared his Aether to violently deflect one of Dan Heng's trickier lunges. He braced his legs to launch a devastating counterattack, but his ankles suddenly locked in place. A split second later, an immense, crushing pressure coiled around his waist and arms.
He looked down. Incredibly thick emerald vines had already bound him, wrapping around his colossal frame layer upon layer. They didn't just restrict his physical movements. The vibrant life energy pulsing across the vines clashed violently against his foul Aether, generating a horrific, sizzling hiss of corrosion. A searing, burning agony flooded his nerves, accompanied by a paralyzing wave of sluggishness.
"What is this?!" Bringer roared, his voice a distorted blend of shock and pure rage. The primary eye mounted behind his shoulder flared with bloody light, frantically commanding his auxiliary floating eyes to blast the vines to ash.
But the vines were regenerating at an absurd rate. They were unnaturally flexible, whipping through the air to actively entangle the energy tethers connecting his floating eyes, completely short-circuiting his commands.
Bringer's raw physical strength was monstrous. He thrashed and tore, his muscles bulging as he snapped one, then two of the thick vines. But for every vine he broke, three more slithered up to take its place. Like the most stubborn, inescapable shackles, the flora dragged his massive body to a dead halt, locking him inside a temporary, suffocating botanical seal.
"Now, Lumine!" Dan Heng shouted. He recognized the fleeting window of absolute control. The ethereal dragon shadow coiling around the Cloud Piercer flared to life, and the speed of his assault spiked by a terrifying thirty percent. He became a wall of steel, forcing Bringer to endure the strikes rather than focus on tearing the vines away.
Lumine was already in position. Standing at the edge of the cratered battlefield, she raised both hands toward the sky. Pure, suffocatingly heavy Geo elemental power was violently ripped from deep within the earth's Ley Lines, funneling directly into her palms.
The air above the battlefield warped and groaned under the sudden shift in gravity. The jagged outline of a colossal Geo Construct—a Starfell meteorite far larger than anything she usually summoned—rapidly solidified. Radiating a dark, heavy golden brilliance, the massive chunk of bedrock descended directly over Bringer's head, bringing with it a suffocating atmospheric pressure.
"Suppress!" Lumine screamed, thrusting her hands downward.
Down below, Bringer unleashed a guttural roar. The dark red Aether pooled within his core finally detonated outward like a volcanic eruption, violently shredding the remaining emerald vines into burning confetti—
But he was a second too late. The dark gold meteorite, containing nearly all of Lumine's current Geo reserves, crashed down with the apocalyptic force of a falling mountain. It struck with absolute, inescapable precision.
It slammed squarely into his shoulders, brutally crushing the unsteady, newly freed monster straight into the dirt.
The cataclysmic impact sent shockwaves rippling through the entire Mountain Suppressing Spirit Locking Array. A massive plume of pulverized rock and blinding dust exploded into the sky.
"ROAR—!!"
A muffled, utterly furious bellow echoed from beneath the crushing weight of the meteorite. The sickening sound of grinding stone and cracking bedrock filled the air as Bringer pushed upward, his monstrous strength desperately trying to lift or shatter the suppressing construct.
Fine beads of sweat broke out across Lumine's forehead. Her arms trembled as she maintained her downward posture, gritting her teeth as she continuously channeled her Geo energy to repair and reinforce the cracking meteorite. Her golden eyes darted anxiously toward the opposite side of the battlefield.
"Stelle!" she screamed, her voice tight with urgency and absolute trust.
Stelle was already waiting.
While Lumine had been weaving the Dendro vines and calling down the meteor, the Trailblazer had tuned out the entire world. She poured her spirit, her iron will, and every last drop of her physical strength into the blade in her hands. She was channeling an incomparably devastating strike—the Golden Light Demon Subduing art.
The reckless, burning resolve of Destruction and the unyielding, diamond-hard conviction of Preservation intertwined within her chest. The two opposing Paths connected, fusing together to birth the purest, most violently concentrated blade aura imaginable.
The very millisecond Lumine called her name, Stelle's tightly shut eyes snapped open.
The usual chaotic liveliness and deadpan humor were completely gone from her gaze. In their place was a terrifying, brilliant radiance. Her eyes blazed like molten gold, as piercing and utterly merciless as a dying star.
The apocalyptic aura she had been forcibly compressing around her body finally detonated. It was as if a long-sealed divine weapon had just been unsheathed. The sheer sharpness of her intent pierced the heavens, carving invisible, razor-thin ripples through the stagnant air of the array itself.
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