Lily's laughter, both distant and near, pierced through the night fog, a chilling grip seizing Lin Jie and Marcus.
The hunt had entered its final stage.
Except they weren't the hunters;
they were bystanders shackled in place, forced to watch their treasure be stolen away.
"Damn it!!" A furious roar erupted from Marcus's throat.
His eyes were locked onto that dark figure standing with its back to them, admiring its distant "masterpiece."
He forced himself to stand up from the ground, wanting to charge over and tear that twisted bastard to shreds with his raw strength.
Yet, his battle-hardened body protested vehently.
The mont he stood, a violent wave of vertigo hamred his skull.
The solid ground beneath his feet felt like a deck tossed in a storm, making even basic standing a struggle.
His proud, stable stance had beco a joke in this domain where physical laws were rewritten.
"It's useless, Marcus!" Lin Jie's voice grated out from between clenched teeth.
He knelt on one knee, one hand pressed against his throbbing temple, the other clutching the twisted sixpence that served as his "ntal anchor."
"Its domain expands outward from itself! The closer we get, the greater the effect! Charging in will only make us lose all combat ability from sensory overload before we even reach it!"
The reality was brutally, utterly hopeless.
They could see the enemy but couldn't approach.
They knew where the danger was but couldn't rush to aid.
They were trapped in this "cage" casually erected by the enemy, seemingly harmless yet deceptively sturdy.
"Are we... just supposed to watch?" Marcus's teeth ground together with an audible crunch, the tallic taste of blood spreading in his mouth.
For a warrior like him, who was accustod to solving problems with strength and courage, this was a tornt worse than death.
The Twisted Man sensed their despair. Its dark head turned at an impossible right angle to look back at them.
It was a gaze filled with the smug malice of certain victory, the cruel playfulness of a cat toying with mice.
And it was this very malice that acted like a shot of adrenaline into Marcus's hunter heart, which was on the verge of rampage.
"No..." Marcus slowly straightened his towering fra from the ground.
The frantic rage born from helplessness in his bloodshot eyes was rapidly fading, replaced by a desperate, all-or-nothing madness.
"You're right, Lin Jie." Marcus's voice beca unusually low. "Conventional thods won't work. But the reason hunters are hunters is because we were never 'conventional' to begin with!"
Before the words fully faded, he violently slamd his shotgun into the muddy ground beside him.
Then, with a ritualistic solemnity, he raised his feet.
"Hummm—"
A deep, resonant vibration sounded!
Within the balance-disrupting field, Marcus's massive hand casually pressed down on Lin Jie's shoulder, acting like a mountain rising from the earth, forcibly canceling out all the chaotic kinetic energy transmitted towards them.
What truly made this possible wasn't his bear-like brute strength, but the seemingly ordinary, thick military boots on his feet, which were now undergoing a bizarre transformation!
The sturdy leather seams of Marcus's cowhide military boots suddenly lit up with a deep, dark red, lava-like glow!
This light didn't radiate outward but converged inward, as if sothing heavy and dense was being activated.
As the glow brightened, intricate, ancient runes, resembling fine rock textures, began to appear on the surface of both boots.
The soft, muddy ground beneath his feet rapidly dried, cracked, and hardened at a visible pace, instantly drained of all moisture and vitality, transforming into a patch of tallic-gray "bedrock" roughly two ters in diater!
Even more perplexing, Marcus's originally swaying, bulky body, affected by the field, now beca utterly motionless, as if welded in place by a force of ten thousand tons!
He stood there, letting the surrounding space stretch and twist, letting the ground beneath roll and tilt. His feet seed to have taken root deep within the earth, connected directly to the planet's very core.
He was no longer a man on a tossing deck;
he was the one absolute, immovable "anchor" in this chaotic world!
Grotesque Armant – [Unshakable Bedrock]!
"This is..." Lin Jie's eyes revealed unconcealed shock.
He knew Marcus, as a senior field investigator, must have his own trump cards, but he never imagined Marcus's Grotesque Armant ability would be so... unreasonably overpowering!
"I, am the earth."
Marcus slowly uttered this powerful declaration.
The core material of these combat boots ca from a rare UMA rated as Town-class by I.A.R.C. – the "Walking Mountain Range of Kandahar," though locals more commonly called it the "Kandahar Giant."
It slumbered in a dry, barren mountain region of Afghanistan, originating from an ancient tribe that revered the "earth."
It could not be killed, only sealed.
During the last encirclent operation, Marcus's elite squad paid a heavy price to forcibly extract a piece of "Core Bedrock," containing its primordial power, from within that colossal spirit.
Arthur perfectly fused this bedrock with the pair of military boots that had accompanied Marcus for over a decade.
The final effect was singular: upon activation, it granted Marcus "absolute stability" and an "excessive gravitational field" within a certain range!
Within this domain, he was the King of the Earth!
Laws affecting his body related to "displacent," "instability," and "distortion" would be brutally crushed and smoothed away by this heavy, earth-origin power the mont they approached him!
The Twisted Man also sensed this brutish force intruding upon its "painting."
Its perpetually mocking, twisted body stiffened slightly.
It retracted the "arm" pointing into the distance, focusing its entire attention on Marcus, this invader who had suddenly beco an "unshakable bedrock."
It began increasing the field's output!
Lin Jie clearly saw the distortion of the space around them intensify by another degree.
The ground undulated like boiling water, the air grew thick as syrup, and even the light from the lantern in Marcus's hand was forcibly bent at a ninety-degree angle just three ters from his body!
This was a truly, well-deservedly, insane world!
But no matter how crazily this world turned upside down, Marcus and the two-ter circle of gray bedrock beneath his feet remained like a lighthouse standing firm against stormy waves, like a thumbtack embedded in a twisted canvas that would never slide, stable and profoundly reassuring.
"Lin Jie!" Marcus's voice ca from beside him.
It was hoarse from the strain of resisting the imnse forces.
"I don't know how long this damn armant can hold! Every activation feels like it's killing ! But at least right now, I've bought you a patch of stable ground where you can think or counterattack in peace!"
"Now use that brain of yours and figure out a way to kill this son of a bitch! Fast!!" he roared.
A flash of gratitude crossed Lin Jie's eyes.
In his most brutish yet most reliable way, Marcus had forcibly carved out a small, precious blank space on this chaotic draft paper scribbled at the enemy's whim—a space where Lin Jie could rewrite the "rules."
User Comments
0 comments from readers