Chương 77: Chapter 78: The Gates of Zaphon

The damp, ash-caked draft of the cavern hit Ethan's leather corslet with the cold, heavy weight of an unventilated tomb. He stepped back across the threshold on foot, moving with the quiet, high-endurance stride of a desert tracker. Behind him, the remolded clay scarab beetle ground its six thick mud legs into the limestone floorboards, its wide carapace gleaming with a fresh, raw casing of brittle high-carbon cast-iron plating. Its structural durability sat at a perfect one hundred percent.

When they hit the first limestone bottleneck of the inner vault, the cackling, bone-snapping shrieks of the initial Rephaim hyena line erupted from the dark. Ethan didn't hesitate. He dropped his center of gravity, locked his lead heel flat onto the unpaved cave dirt to trigger his Unyielding Frame health buffer, and drew his rawhide sling taut.

As the first level-44 target lunged through the limestone gap, Ethan drove his weight through his heel, matching the release apex with an explosive, snap-rotation of his hips—the exact same hip-whip torque he practiced in the real world. The cords snapped flat with a sharp, lethal whip-crack.

The iron-oxide missile flew in a razor-straight, unwavering line across the open clearance of the scarab's back, driving itself straight into the flashing, translucent Nephesh throat node that his eighty-five Perception was tracking through the gloom. The iron-heavy clay bullet shattered the windpipe with a deep, heavy critical-hit chime. The cackle cut off in a choked, wet gasp as its windpipe collapsed, its health bar cleanly deleted through pure, body-weight physics.

He loaded, swung, and snapped his pelvis with absolute, rhythmic precision. He wasn't guessing the trajectory anymore. Every single shot flattened its flight line, drilling straight into the flashing neck joints of the incoming targets. His physical frame compressed under the operational strain, his baseline health pool swelling to absorb the continuous recoil.

Every single stone now flattened its flight line perfectly, drilling directly into the flashing throat nodes until the remainder of the wave was choking in the black ash. The moment the final carcass collapsed into the dirt, Ethan didn't pause to breathe. His real-world mortgage timer was still running down in his head. He immediately unslung his bronze scrapper trowel from his pack, his passive multiplier kicking into a blistering three hundred percent extraction speed.

He knelt in the dark mid-fight, his hands a blur of industrial precision as he methodically strip-harvested the coarse bristle pelts, elastic tendons, body fats and high-density calcified fangs straight off the fallen carcasses, tossing the raw materials into his pack.