The Guardian gods
Chapter 586

Chapter 586: 586

Kaelen’s initial burst of energy and speed was noticeably flagging. His figure, previously a swift blur, was becoming slower, his movements more labored. His very form seemed to be falling apart with each energy expenditure, bits of his outer casing flaking away, internal components sparking visibly. Yet, Vorenza herself was nothing short of a nightmare. Pieces of her skin and clothing hung precariously, her silver-threaded repairs struggling to keep pace with the damage. Only her enraged roar at Kaelen’s retreating figure spoke of her fading power and rising desperation.

She was truly desperate. What had begun as a mere inconvenience, a few seconds of suppressed movement, had now escalated into a full-blown minute of being actively hampered by Lyra’s curse. The more she was attacked, the weaker she became, and agonizingly, the stronger the curse’s grip on her grew.

Vorenza shattered through the latest stillness imposed by the curse, her eyes locking onto Kaelen’s retreating form. She saw it then—the subtle falter in his movements, the diminishing shimmer of energy around him. He wasn’t attacking anymore, wasn’t even attempting to deploy another spear. He was just running, a desperate, fading shadow, buying time for the curse to do its work.

A grim smile, more a baring of teeth than genuine amusement, stretched across Vorenza’s bloodied face. This was it. Her internal clock was screaming, the "bomb" of Lyra’s curse threatening to detonate and tear her apart from the inside out. But Kaelen was also at his limit, a broken machine running on fumes. She had one last chance.

Vorenza decided to take a gamble.

Vorenza’s eyes, though wild with desperation, held a flicker of cold, strategic cunning. Kaelen was retreating, his energy all but spent. An energy blast, a simple concussive force, would be wasted. He was a machine, yes, but one that could endure direct damage. She needed something more insidious, something that would strip him of his last, vital resource: motion.

"You think to hide in the sky, machine?" she rasped, a new, chilling resolve hardening her voice.

She began to weave. No grand, flashy display this time, but a series of interconnected, almost imperceptible manipulations of the Laws around her. First, a subtle distortion of the Law of Buoyancy. Not to make Kaelen fall, but to subtly negate his ability to maintain his airborne position, causing an almost imperceptible drag, a whisper of a pull downwards. On top of this, she wove a concentrated application of the Law of Friction, not against his body, but against the very air particles around him, making his movements exponentially more difficult, as if he were trying to swim through treacle.

Then came the final, brutal layer. As Kaelen, now visibly struggling against the invisible resistance, fought to maintain his altitude, Vorenza imposed a localized Law of Inertia. She didn’t increase his mass, but rather, made it exponentially harder for him to change his state of motion. Every twitch of a limb, every attempted correction, became a titanic effort, draining what little energy he had left. It was like trying to stop a charging bull with a single thread, yet magnified to the scale of his entire being.

Kaelen, already running on empty, felt it immediately. The air turned thick, cloying, then impossibly heavy. His internal gyros shrieked, struggling against an unseen force that pressed down on him, dragging him, holding him. He tried to ascend, but his thrusters flared uselessly against the overwhelming, invisible resistance. He tried to move laterally, but it was like attempting to push through solid stone. His systems, already critically low on mana, spiked into the red, then flatlined. The curse’s grip was the final, deciding factor, preventing Vorenza from being able to maintain this complex weave for long, but she held it just long enough.

With a last, futile surge, Kaelen’s struggling figure simply stopped. And then, gravity, amplified by Vorenza’s brutal imposition of Laws, asserted its dominion. He fell. Not a controlled descent, but a lifeless plummet from the sky, a broken puppet whose strings had been cut. He outputted and focused most of his remaining mana to reinforce himself and protect what he could as he hit the ground with a sickening thud, raising a cloud of dust. He lay there, motionless, his systems mostly drained, his body incapable of even twitching. Vorenza had done it.

Vorenza, her gamble paid off, now plummeting from the sky. Her remaining good leg hardened, a single, devastating point aimed directly at Kaelen’s inert core. It was the killing blow, a desperate finality.

Below, Ikenga held his breath, his eyes wide. "Will Keles words come to pass? Will the inevitable still occur?" he murmured, a tremor in his voice.

Vorenza’s foot made contact with the frozen abyss floor, a silent trigger. The bomb inside her detonated. Just as her hardened leg touched the very tip of Kaelen’s Chest, she froze. This time, the chill was absolute, originating not from the external cold, but from her very soul.

Only a guttural, despairing roar of "No!" resounded through the abyss, a final, futile protest. Then, in an instant, Vorenza, the terrifying wielder of Concept Weaving, was transformed into a frozen ice sculpture, her last attack forever suspended, inches from its target.

Kaelen lay on the cold ice floor, his eyes wide, fixed on the frozen foot hovering mere inches from his chest. A ragged, almost disbelieving whisper escaped him. "I survived."

The whisper swelled into a choked laugh, then full-blown, joyous cackles that echoed in the chilling silence of the abyss. "Hahahaha, I survived!" He couldn’t stop. He was utterly drained, his core screaming in protest, his body a shattered mess, but he was alive. He, a mere Ogre, had done the impossible. He was going to take the demon queen’s head back with him.

A wave of debilitating weakness washed over him. He needed sustenance, some form of quick energy conversion to even stand. The abyss armor clinging to him was usually perfect for siphoning energy from defeated demons, but there wasn’t a demon, or even a scrap of flesh, in sight.

With immense effort, Kaelen began to crawl, dragging himself away from Vorenza’s frozen foot. He pulled his ruined body across the slick, icy floor, inch by agonizing inch, toward where the abyss portal should b. Along the way, all he saw was the devastating aftermath of Lyra’s final, desperate act: the entire landscape was an icy graveyard, everything frozen solid, a testament to her dying curse.

Any body he thought might just be frozen was, in fact, a complete ice sculpture, utterly transformed by the influence of Lyra’s Law. Kaelen continued his agonizing crawl, hoping against hope that something, anything, might have survived the devastating aftermath.

He considered the ice around him. Ordinarily, he could process such a substance, convert it into the vital energy he desperately needed. But this was no ordinary ice; it was infused with Lyra’s Law. In a normal state, his own inherent Laws would counteract the influence, allowing him to safely consume it. Now, however, he was too depleted to even call forth his own Laws. Eating the ice would mean sharing the same fate as everything else in sight: permanent, soul-deep freezing.

Kaelen didn’t know how long he’d been crawling when the faint sound of footsteps reached him. They were close, too close. He instinctively sought cover, his ruined body dragging him towards a jagged ice formation. But before he could fully conceal himself, the footsteps quickened. Whoever it was, they knew he was there. Hiding was useless.

Kaelen painfully rolled onto his back, his damaged optical sensors struggling to focus. Walking over to him was a Ratman, an impossibility given the context of this battle. His eyes narrowed, trying to make sense of the sight. The Ratman wore the ornate, flowing robes of a mage. Did he steal them from a fallen soldier? Kaelen wondered, a thought that seemed almost ludicrous in his current state.

Then he noticed something else, something even more out of place, floating silently beside the Ratman: a cube. As the figure drew closer, Kaelen’s fractured vision sharpened. It was a cube he’d seen before, one often associated with certain enigmatic young goblin he has worked with.

So many questions flooded his mind, but for Kaelen, bleeding energy and utterly spent, only one thing truly mattered. With a hoarse, crackling voice, he managed to croak, "Are there other survivors like you? Do you happen to have some food on you?"

The Ratman remained silent, his gaze unreadable. Instead, a voice, calm and metallic, emanated directly from the floating cube. "This should be considered a safe distance." The words instantly raised a red flag in Kaelen’s mind, a jolt of caution overriding his desperate need for sustenance.

The Ratman figure halted, raising a staff Kaelen recognized instantly. The muzzle at its tip was rapidly condensing energy, aimed directly at him.

Kaelen reacted in a flash. His hand briefly glowed with a faint blue light as he slammed it against the icy abyss floor. In the blink of an eye, he closed the distance. The Ratman, clearly not expecting such strength and a rapid counter from a seemingly broken opponent, barely had time to react before Kaelen’s hand plunged through its stomach. They both collapsed to the icy ground.