Crack. Crack. Crack.
Fine fractures began appearing across the surface of the bone exoskeleton — spreading in thin, branching lines, threading outward from each point of contact with the quiet, inevitable patience of sothing that had already decided where it was going. Tommy’s bones were formidable against raw physical force — built to absorb impact, to distribute pressure, to outlast what ordinary materials would have crumbled under long ago.
But the lightning coiling around the serpent’s body was not raw physical force.
It was a living current — electric, relentless, striking the sa surfaces dozens of tis in the span of a single breath. Not crushing. Vibrating. Shattering from within, the way a sustained frequency can bring down sothing that a single blow never could. Slowly but steadily, the bone reinforcent was being reduced.
Lukas did not care.
He was busy.
His eyes moved through the floating evolution windows with the rapid, focused efficiency of soone triaging a situation — reading fast, discarding fast, keeping only what mattered. He had been through this process before and had already developed a working principle from the experience.
Ignore everything and choose the last option. Experience had proven that the last option always produced the best effect.
His gaze settled on the two available paths for the Rare grade Gravity Pressure.
[1. Advanced Gravity Pressure — ...]
[2. Superior Gravity Pressure — Gravity Pressure is increased by ten tis. There is even a slight chance of stunning the enemy for one second.]
Fortunately, the list was short. He didn’t waste ti on the first option. Advanced Gravity Pressure didn’t even receive the courtesy of being fully read before being dismissed. His focus went directly to Superior Gravity Pressure, lingered for exactly as long as the decision required, and confird.
The floating windows collapsed.
What replaced them was pain.
It arrived without warning and without courtesy — cold, sharp, precise, as if a set of fine nails had been driven directly into his skull and were now being slowly turned. His jaw clenched so hard the muscles along the back of his neck corded with the effort. He didn’t make a sound. He simply held on, the way one holds on to sothing in a high wind, and waited for it to pass.
It passed.
And in its absence, Superior Gravity Pressure descended — fully, completely, with the settled authority of sothing that had graduated past its previous limitations and was no longer interested in being modest about it.
The effect was imdiate and total.
The gravity in the hundred-ter radius amplified by ten tis in a single instant. The air itself seed to register the change — a visible ripple moved through the space like a curtain of heavy water being drawn across the world, distorting the light at its edges. Loose stones on the cavern floor didn’t roll or slide. They were simply pressed into powder, the weight above them suddenly ten tis greater than the structural integrity of rock could accommodate. Even the yellow lightning discharging from the serpent’s body was affected — the crackling arcs that had been surging freely in every direction were pressed down, pinned, losing their reach, the current struggling to expand outward against a gravity that had decided expansion was no longer permitted.
Now.
Lukas felt it before he saw it — the loosening of the coils around his fra as the serpent’s muscles fought against a force they had not been designed to resist. The grip that had been grinding against Tommy’s bones eased by a fraction — just enough.
He moved.
He launched himself upward in a single, explosive motion, the direction of it giving the serpent exactly the right kind of surprise — not away, not retreating, but directly above, the last place a creature currently struggling to lift its own body would think to track. Under the pressing weight of Superior Gravity Pressure, the serpent registered what was happening. Its instincts scread. Its muscles fired.
Nothing moved fast enough.
Lukas completed a full one-eighty-degree rotation in the air, the blood-infused copper sword gripped in both hands, and ca down on the serpent’s head like a falling verdict.
The blade found the vertical eye.
The impact was total and imdiate — the eye collapsing under the thrust like a pressurized container eting a point sharp enough to penetrate, bursting outward in a spray of blood that painted Lukas’s mask and chest in a single hot, wet line. The sword drove through, past the eye socket, past the bone behind it, erging from the other side of the skull with a force that embedded itself in the cavern floor beneath.
The hiss that followed was not fury.
It was agony — pure, involuntary, the sound of sothing massive experiencing a level of pain it had never encountered before and had no frawork to process. The serpent’s body surged with the instinct to throw him off, muscles firing in desperate, violent waves.
Superior Gravity held it down.
Lukas pulled the sword free and hit it again. Then again. Then again. The rhythm was not elegant. It was not surgical. It was complete and committed and absolutely without hesitation — each strike opening another point of catastrophic damage across the serpent’s skull, the impacts accumulating faster than the creature’s biology could respond to any single one of them. He punched through scale and bone with Tommy’s reinforcent amplifying every blow, the knuckles of his free hand caving in surfaces that the sword had already compromised.
He kept going until there was nothing left of the skull that resembled what it had been.
Then he stopped.
The serpent’s body hit the cave floor with the enormous, dead weight of sothing that had simply run out of the ability to stay upright. More than twenty feet of pale yellow scales crashed against the stone, the impact sending a tremor through the ground that Lukas felt through the soles of his feet. Blood moved outward from beneath the creature in dark, spreading channels, finding the low points in the uneven cavern floor and filling them, dyeing the crimson stone a deeper and more permanent shade. The thick, copper-heavy sll of it rose imdiately, saturating the enclosed air of the cavern in a way that had nowhere to dissipate.
The serpent was dead.
Its body had not accepted that fact yet. The more-than-twenty-foot length continued to move — writhing against the cavern floor in slow, diminishing arcs, the residual nerve impulses working through the muscles with the stubborn, aningless persistence of biology that hadn’t received the final ssage. The tail scraped against the stone. The coils tightened and released against nothing.
Lukas watched it from above with complete indifference.
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