The core of Atlantis was now saturated with a hair-raising sense of "liquefaction."

  It was the energy fallout radiating from the Codex of Super Civilization—the "Mystery Book" in Stan Jackson’s hands. Deep and pale blue Aether light intertwined frantically within the massive ring, emitting a series of sharp, pearl-cracking "sizzles." This was a one-way bridge between hell and salvation. Stan’s hands shook; the Codex thrummed violently in his grip, every second of maintenance draining his life force.

  He could not let go. Behind that cerulean portal, tens of thousands of warriors from the Ancient Alliance, the PDN rebels, and all the hopes of Squad 313 stood ready to surge through like an iron flood.

  "Enough."

  Instructor Rasnor stepped forward slowly. He did not touch the crumbling Stan; instead, he turned his gaze toward the man beside him—Dr. Dissard, who was now completely limp, his eyes hollow. The founder of PDN, who once held the world in his palm, was now kneeling like a soulless, stray dog.

  "Stan Jackson," Rasnor said, his tone icy as he watched Stan’s silhouette hoisting the Codex. "I don’t know how long you and 'That Person' have been playing this game of chess. But I know that if you fail to hold it together now, these tens of thousands will be bisected in the fissures of space. My greatest fear, however, is the 'Unknown' you carry—things even Dissard doesn't know. Look at him... the teacher who raised you can’t even comprehend the book in your hands."

  Rasnor turned and roughly hauled the ashen-faced Dissard to his feet. He ignored Stan’s fragility, venting all his fury on the despondent old man. Rasnor shoved Dissard with such force that the elder staggered several paces.

  "Get up, Dissard! Don't you dare cower there like a dead dog!" Rasnor roared.

  Stan let out a low, weary sigh, his hands still raised high to maintain the Quantum Gate. Tiny beads of blood began to seep from his skin—a sign that the Aether flow had exceeded his physical capacity.

  "I don't ask you to believe me..." Stan said to Dissard with resignation. "But I am telling you, Alexander has begun the Final Purge in the Giant Rock Hollow aboard the Bahamut. Eden has fallen. The survival count is plummeting."

  At the words "Eden has fallen," Dissard snapped his head up as if struck by lightning. He lunged forward, his trembling hands grasping Stan’s arms, his voice a desperate plea: "What did you say? The workers... are they all lost?"

  Stan closed his eyes heavily and gave a slow nod.

  "GO! I can't hold this much longer!" Stan erupted into a soul-shattering roar. "Court-martial me or execute me later! Right now, that place is filled with wailing, and Yarudima has engaged the Bahamut! MOVE!"

  Dissard looked at the gate. In that instant, his rationality was completely pulverized by a tidal wave of guilt. Without waiting for Rasnor’s order, and with a total disregard for his own life, he was the first to charge into the churning blue light. Rasnor was shocked; knowing Dissard was on a suicide mission in his current state, he spun around and roared at the massive army behind him:

  "All units, hear me! Follow Dissard! Before that gate closes, I want every last one of you through it—even the rats!"

  Tens of thousands of Ancient Alliance warriors, wielding old but lethal weapons, surged forward alongside the elites of the PDN Training Center. Like an endless tide of steel, they poured into the Quantum Gate. Stan’s body shook with violent tremors; he felt the Codex devouring his flesh, but he grit his teeth and held on. He knew that the progress bar of these thousands was the last spark of life for the Hollow.

  Hikariko (Mitsuko) and Oosora (Sukuhono), piloting the Guren (Crimson Lotus), streaked through the curtain of light at maximum speed.

  The second Oosora cleared the gate and her vision returned, she let out the most terrified scream of her life.

  In the once-silent expanse of the Giant Rock Hollow, the 2,500-meter black hull of the Bahamut spanned the sky like a divine judgment. The sheer pressure of its mass made Oosora’s hands shake uncontrollably on the controls.

  "...That... that’s a monster..."

  Hikariko embraced Oosora tightly from behind, her heartbeat transmitting through the flight suit—warm and calm.

  "Don't be afraid. I am here," Hikariko’s voice echoed in Oosora’s ear. "Oosora, just focus on my voice. Don't think about the battleship. It is only iron. We... are the Will of the Stars."

  Meanwhile, Dissard, having charged in first, ran into the ruins of the settlement.

  Along the path were bodies strewn everywhere. The miners, the pioneers who had once greeted him with honest smiles, were now charred remains under the Bahamut’s fire. Dissard’s mechanical right eye began to short-circuit and discharge frantically due to emotional overload; the "sizzling" sound was the echo of his inner weeping. Cold machinery had become the only outlet for his feelings.

  Dissard looked at the distant Yarudima rising and at the Eden he had built—now a morgue. His sanity snapped.

  "WHAT HAVE I DONE!!!"

  Dissard knelt in a pool of blood, howling at the sky. His voice carried a soul-tearing agony. "I should never have used 'saving lives' to package this cruelty!! I should never have let the ambitious exploit this!! What have I done?!"

  Rasnor arrived with the follow-up forces. He saw the broken Dissard wallowing in self-pity and reached out to help him, but just then, a familiar, weakened voice drifted from deep within the ruins.

  Lilith dragged her battered body forward, leaning on a snapped stone pillar, and limped toward Dissard. She looked at the weeping, spineless man before her, and her hardened heart was instantly filled with rage. Lilith lunged forward and slapped Dissard across the face so hard that sparks flew from his mechanical eye.

  "Dissard! You old bastard! Those defense toys you gave us were worth absolutely nothing!"

  Dissard was stunned into silence. He stared at her, murmuring, "Lilith... you're alive..."

  "Of course I’m alive! But my dead brothers aren't coming back!" Lilith pointed to the charred crater ahead and roared:

  "Old man! If even you don't believe in what you stood for, then who are we supposed to believe in?!"

  Her voice drowned out the roar of the Bahamut’s engines. Her dust-covered eyes locked onto his.

  "Look at the subordinates behind you! Look at these people who risked their lives to cross that gate to save you! PULL YOURSELF TOGETHER!!!"

  Dissard turned his head. He saw Rasnor. He saw the tens of thousands of Ancient Alliance warriors, eyes red with grief yet weapons held firm, standing before him. He saw the PDN mercenaries who had once abandoned him, now choosing to return.

  This was no longer just Dissard’s personal atonement. This was the final offensive of the "Scraps."

  Dissard stood up, trembling, and pushed away Rasnor’s helping hand. He wiped the blood and water from his face. The light of a destroyed world flickered back into focus within his mechanical eye.

  "You're right... Lilith." Dissard’s voice turned dangerously low, carrying a weight that felt as if it could crush the crust itself. He looked up at the sky-blotting Bahamut, toward the CEO’s office.

  "I raised the tiger that now bites me. This causality—I will sever it here with my own hands."

  Dissard made his final decree, his voice resonating through the atmosphere to every corner of the Hollow:

  "Alexander... you mad dog... I will NEVER let you go!!!!!!"

  The air in the Giant Rock Hollow (GRH) became heavier than lead.

  As Dissard stumbled out of the cerulean light of the Quantum Gate, he expected the noise of battle. Instead, what met his mechanical eye was a despair quieter than hell and colder than the abyss. The "Eden" he had spent the latter half of his life carving out—an attempt to escape Armageddon’s iron shackles—was now a slaughterhouse abandoned by God.

  The "Ghost Moss" that once clung to the vaults, flickering azure with the planet's breath, was now withered and blackened. It no longer glowed; it fell like the dander of the dead, grey and miserable in the gravitational turbulence of the Bahamut’s passage. The once-sweet air, fragrant with moist earth, was replaced by a stench that provoked nausea—the smell of flesh carbonized by phase cannons, mixed with engine oil, blood, and the ash of crushed hope.

  Dissard froze. His gaze fell upon a black rock nearby. A familiar face lay there: Tony. The miner who used to complain about the heat but tenderly cared for the rock-eating ants. Tony’s tattered work clothes were fused to the rock; a thirty-centimeter hole gaped in his chest, its edges charred black by gravitational distortion. Beside him, his dented metal canteen lay in a pool of blood, its lid open, the cold water having long since run dry to mix with the crimson into a bizzare purple.

  Dissard felt his mechanical eye flickering wildly. His internal processors were failing to analyze the scene, his emotional load exceeding logic thresholds. The "zap-zap" of electrical discharge echoed in his socket, carrying a searing pain. This cold, cybernetic limb, meant to transcend flesh, had become his only outlet for agony—as if these gears and circuits were weeping tears of blood in place of his parched tear ducts.

  "I... I did this..."

  Dissard’s voice was like rusted iron plates grinding. He walked forward, every step feeling like he was treading on his own soul. He saw more. Someone curled in the corner of a shattered greenhouse, clutching a withered sprout; someone fallen on a doorstep, leaving a bloody handprint from an attempt to shield a child.

  This was his ideal. He had told these outcasts that by coming to the Hollow and following his tuning, humanity could find common ground with the planet. He had decorated his ambitious blueprints with words like "Healing," "Salvation," and "Evolution." But he never imagined that Alexander, the man he had personally nurtured, would use his technology to "format" this utopia.

  This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

  Rumble————

  The entire Hollow shook violently. It was the resonance of Yarudima’s roar from the depths clashing with the Bahamut’s low-frequency vibrations. Water that had accumulated on the dome for centuries fell like a torrential rain, drenching Dissard’s aged, trembling shoulders. In that moment, the string of rationality he had held taut for decades finally snapped.

  "WHAT HAVE I DONE!!!"

  Dissard crashed to his knees in the viscous blood. His hands clawed at the rubble, nails sinking into the cracks until they bled. He threw his head back toward the black belly of the ship, toward the unseen gods and demons, and let out a roar that threatened to tear his vocal cords:

  "I should never have used the word 'Saving' to package this cruelty!! I should never have used 'Healing' as a rhetoric to let the ambitious harm the innocent!!! What have I done! WHAT HAVE I DONE!"

  His voice echoed through the corridors of the cavern like the wailing of a thousand ghosts. The once-wise, composed leader who hadn't flinched at the Atavism was now a pathetic sinner.

  Rasnor and the tens of thousands of follow-up troops had cleared the gate. When the instructor saw the shura-field before him, his pupils constricted. But he had no time for regret. He was a commander; behind him were thousands of soldiers gripped by the throat of terror. He rushed over and grabbed Dissard by the collar.

  "Old man! Get up!" Rasnor barked. But Dissard was a pile of mud, weeping, trying to shove Rasnor away. "Let me go... it’s my fault... I brought the wolf into the fold..."

  "Wake up! What use is crying now!" Rasnor was about to use force when a weak but piercing voice arrived from the ruins.

  "Dissard! You old bastard! Those defense toys you gave us... were worth absolutely nothing!"

  Dissard shivered. That voice—thick with tobacco and unreasonable toughness—hit his soul like a current. He shoved Rasnor aside and turned to see a silhouette in the dust. Lilith.

  She was covered in wounds, her white hair matted with blood and rock dust. She leaned on a snapped pillar, her bloodshot eyes staring at him with the hardness of granite.

  "Lilith... you... you're alive?" Dissard stumbled toward her.

  "I'm not dead yet! But my thousand brothers are! And there are a thousand more still breathing!" Lilith watched the cowering Dissard, her fury erupting. As he drew near, she didn't offer a hand; she used the last of her strength to deliver a massive slap to his biological cheek.

  SLAP!

  The sound was a whip-crack in the silence of the wreckage. Dissard’s head snapped to the side. His malfunctioning mechanical eye actually stabilized for a moment from the shock.

  "Lilith, I—"

  "SHUT UP, DISSARD!" Lilith pointed to the steaming phase-cannon crater, her voice drowning out the engine drone. "Old man! If even you don't believe in what you stood for, then who are we supposed to believe in?!"

  She stepped forward, clutching his clothes, pulling his face to hers until their noses touched.

  "Look at these subordinates! Look at these people who fought through a Quantum Gate to follow you into this hell to save you! Look at the fear and expectation in their eyes! PULL YOURSELF TOGETHER!!! If you give up now, then those of us who just died... really were just meaningless trash!"

  Dissard froze. He slowly turned his head to look at the Ancient Alliance army. He saw Cavill and Alphelia, weapons drawn, pale yet standing at the edge of the line. He saw the PDN mercenaries he had abandoned, now weeping as they carried surviving workers from the rubble.

  This was no longer just Dissard’s personal purgatory. These thousands hadn't come to watch an old man break; they came to find the end-point of an unjust world. Dissard felt a burning current rise from his heart—something more violent than Aether, harder than machinery. He wiped the blood and tears from his face and stood tall.

  "You're right... Lilith." Dissard’s voice no longer shook. He looked up at the Bahamut. He looked at the CEO’s office 2,500 meters up, where Alexander sat. His mechanical eye no longer sparked; it pooled with a piercing red light, as if the magma of the core was burning behind the cold lens.

  "I raised the tiger. This causality—I will sever it here... with my own hands."

  Dissard pushed away the soldiers trying to help him. His spine went straight as a monument. Simultaneously, Rasnor sensed the return of Dissard’s will. He knew that in an environment of extreme terror, soldiers needed a clear, even manic goal.

  "All units, hear me!" Rasnor bellowed through the wide-band speakers. "Concentrate at the town center! Recover every survivor you find—I don't care who they are—bring them back to the Eden Fortress! In this battle... we don't lose a single soul!"

  Rasnor drew his sidearm and fired a shot toward the black shadow in the sky. It was a useless gesture against the ship, but in the dark, it was a signal.

  "Don't think about how big that ship is! Think about the comrade alive next to you! The Bahamut was built by men, and if it's man-made... it can be destroyed!"

  The soldiers who had been paralyzed by the sight of the dreadnought felt a spark of hope reignite at Dissard’s stand and Rasnor’s roar. They stopped trembling like lambs and began organized search-and-rescue.

  "Lilith, how much of the 'Afterlife' defense is left?" Dissard checked a terminal.

  "Less than 30%. Most was melted by Alexander’s 'greeting'." Lilith spat blood. "But he missed one thing... he forgot this town’s foundation was driven into the hardest obsidian on the planet."

  "Good..." Dissard watched the sky, his hands a blur on the controls. "If he wants a show, we’ll give him a grand finale. Alexander... you mad dog... this time, I’m stuffing you into a hell of your own making!"

  High above, Hikariko watched the awakening.

  "Hikariko... do you feel it?" Oosora felt the resonance—the will of tens of thousands rising from the ground.

  "Yes," Hikariko whispered, her eyes flashing blue as the Aether responded to the planet's rage. "Dissard has woken up. Oosora, the road ahead will be cold... but I will hold you the whole way."

  The gears of the battlefield began to turn again. This was no longer a slaughter; it was a war of the "Scraps" against heaven. The Bahamut still hung in the sky, but it no longer faced a few helpless miners—it faced a legion of fire and a Founder transformed into a Shura of vengeance.

  The lament of the core had finally become the first drumbeat of war against the False God.

  The deep belly of the GRH, a place vast enough to bury civilizations, was now ruled by a morbid palette. It was the color of the sky—no, not the sky, but the 2,500-meter black False God: the Bahamut. This titan was a temple of the Reaper hung upside down in the void, its mass rewriting the local gravity constant. The 500-meter obsidian horns on its hull flowed with dark violet light; every electromagnetic pulse caused the rock below to groan and split.

  At the summit of this engine of destruction, inside a CEO’s office of pure white composite, the atmosphere was bizzarely like a private concert. Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5: Fate echoed at a deafening, bone-shaking volume. Every beat of the kettle drums overlapped with explosions on the field below, creating a suffocating rhythm.

  Alexander stood silently before the gargantuan window. His crisp white suit, without a single crease, looked inhumanly cold in the reflection of the red and blue energy storms outside. He held a baton inlaid with meteorite metal, tracing precise, cruel arcs in the air to the "da-da-da-dum" motif of the symphony.

  He was a conductor seeking a twisted apotheosis in this movement of ruin. To him, the struggling miners, the roaring Titans, and even his own soldiers were merely notes in an epic score. He walked to his desk, picked up a peanut from a silver tray, and cracked the shell with his manicured fingers. Snap. He ate the kernels slowly, eyes shut as if tasting the final bitterness of the planet.

  Then, he picked up his comms.

  "Adimas... did you just flinch?"

  His voice was flat, yet possessed a soul-freezing penetration. On the vast command bridge, Adimas sat in the Captain's chair like a broken doll. Her eyes were wide with terror.

  "My monitors see every corner of this ship," Alexander’s voice hissed in her ear like a viper. "Adimas... did I just see you shout 'Abandon Ship'?"

  Adimas shivered violently, her teeth chattering. Her fear of the Titan Yarudima was instantly replaced by her terror of Alexander’s omnipresent surveillance. In PDN, Alexander was God. He didn't need cannons; he needed only a "Clearance Revoked" code to make her vanish from every database in existence.

  "CEO... yes. I... it won't happen again." Adimas stood on shaking legs, sweat soaking her uniform. "All hands will hold their posts and repel the... monster."

  "Isn't it a beautiful fireworks display? We even have a lead actress..." Alexander smiled neurotically, looking through the glass at the 1,000-meter Yarudima locked in a primal struggle with the Bahamut.

  "Use it," Alexander said with a wave of his baton. "Bring out that weapon."

  Adimas gasped, her logic crushed by fear. "CEO! Please reconsider! Using that weapon in this enclosed underground environment... the spatial backlash would devastate the Bahamut too! We could be lost!"

  As she spoke, Yarudima moved. The planetary guardian converged all its azure light into its chest—a compression of the Hollow's Aether. A beam of blue contraction, capable of evaporating the definition of matter, erupted and pierced the Bahamut’s lower defense array.

  BOOM————!!!

  The 2,500-meter vessel underwent a catastrophic shudder. The Beethoven music was cut by the shriek of red alarms. Alexander was thrown aside, but he caught the edge of the desk with elegance, regaining his footing with a look of scientific curiosity.

  "Severe penetrative damage!" the comms officer screamed. "Hull integrity... dropped to 52%!!"

  52%. The number was a death knell. Adimas looked at the red damage map, her worry pushed into a corner by a sudden, pure desire for vengeance. If they didn't strike back, the Bahamut would truly be destroyed.

  But before she could order a strike, Alexander’s bone-chilling voice broadcasted ship-wide:

  "This victory will be total. At this moment, I revoke Adimas’s command. I take full control."

  Adimas stood dazed before collapsing into her chair. Around her, the officers bowed their heads, awaiting the final decree of the man in the tower. Alexander restarted the symphony. He gestured at the window like a maestro of a dance of death.

  "Prepare the Anti-Gravity Causality Matrix," he said with religious fervor. "100% output. Fire."

  The air inside the ship froze. At the weapons console, a young officer looked at the blood-red icon being unlocked. His hand shook; a tear fell onto the cold stick. He whispered to the screen: "Mom... I'm sorry. I should have listened and stayed out of the army... forgive me."

  No one blamed him. Everyone knew that once the Causality Matrix was active, the space would no longer belong to humans. It was a forbidden weapon that shredded space, causing severe temporal discord—forcing thousands to suffer the "Effect" before the "Cause" ever occurred.

  Alexander watched as purple cubic particles began to churn and collapse between the obsidian horns. The light didn't illuminate the dark; it "ate" reality.

  In the ruins below, Dissard held Lilith, staring up at the nightmare orb. Alexander lowered his baton.

  "First wave of Monster Drivers, launch!"

  The Bahamut’s belly opened, and hundreds of mechanical mechas surged out like a black tsunami. Inside were mercenaries like the old Mitsuko—people who accepted modification for pay. Alexander watched as the "Scraps" were compiled into his final notes.

  Facing this sea of mechas, the alliance soldiers found it hard to breathe. But Cavill issued his final rally:

  "Do not fear! The one who once destroyed hundreds of thousands, the pilot of the strongest mecha, is now in our ranks! I believe that with her, no one can match us!"

  WHOOSH————!

  A fire-red streak of light cut through the smoke. It was the Guren.

  Oosora sat in the pilot's seat, hearing Cavill’s words. She joked into the comms: "Hikariko, look how well Cavill understands you! He’s turning your dark past into a drumbeat. Maybe you should date him later?"

  "Shut up! Focus!" Hikariko replied, blushing as she pinched Oosora’s waist, provoking a yelp.

  "Fine! Fine! Let my flames hit maximum output! I am the elite of Squad 313!!!"

  Oosora pushed the throttle. The Guren became a meteor. A single shot from its cannon pulverized a Monster Driver into scraps. It drew a 100-meter high-frequency blade, severing two more mechas in one swing. Oosora felt an unprecedented power in the machine—a miracle born of her mental resonance with Hikariko. She looked back; Hikariko was radiating light like a star. The Guren’s trail left a long, azure and white energy mark in the air.

  The trail looped and spiraled, accidentally forming a massive Infinity symbol (∞) over the battlefield. The Guren darted through the center, stopping directly before the Bahamut’s CEO window. Hikariko picked up the radio, her Aether-burning eyes locking onto Alexander’s across the glass.

  "Alexander... I will never forget what you and Endolf did to me," Hikariko’s voice was majestic and cold. "This time... I am going to destroy you with everything I have!!!!!"

  Alexander looked at the white light before him and gave a cold, arrogant laugh: "A single mecha... you think you can stand against the Bahamut?"

  At that moment, Yarudima let out an earth-shaking roar. The Titan leapt across the field, its massive, pulsing blue claws clamping onto the Bahamut’s bow.

  The thunder of Ifrit had just entered its most violent movement.

  To the side, Persephone watched the jumping purple data and turned to Sward: "Tell Adimas to stop being incompetent. Prepare to execute Project Jerusalem."

  Sward gave a cunning, cruel laugh: "Oho~ so the frog-dissecting lunatic is finally ready to move?"

  "If you don't want to wake up in a vat of formalin, shut up and do your job," Persephone said, a flash of cold purple in her eyes.

  Adimas, on the bridge, received the code for Project Jerusalem. Her pupils dilated. It was PDN’s final, extreme measure of annihilation. Like a rebooted droid, she regained her icy, lethal posture. She stood and strode toward the ship’s reactor.

  She passed through the heavy automated doors and stopped at a door marked "Nuclear Fusion Reactor" with the highest level taboo symbol. Adimas entered her biometrics. The door slid open, revealing a roar of high-energy particles like the final gasp of the gods.