Chương 80: Chapter 81: The Glass Crucible

The path down to the second terrace dipped steeply into the lower bedrock. Ahead of him, the cold-patched clay scarab beetle crawled forward with a heavy, grinding friction, its wide mud carapace caked in the thick, dry layers of ancient Kipsu sacrificial ash that choked this entire floor. Ethan stepped after it on foot, his eyes tracking the dark rock walls. The air down here was different—dead, silent, and smelling faintly of cold copper ore.

He unslung his sling, checking the tension of the cords against his palm. He had two hundred and seventeen iron-oxide bullets packed tightly into his scout bag. But the darkness ahead didn't give him the luxury of range. The silence of the corridor tore apart with a sudden, deafening clash of metal against stone. From the deep rock seams directly ahead, a high-velocity surge of high-level Living Bronze Wardens erupted in a blind, coordinated sprint [local]. These were level-45 elite variants.

Their skeletal frames were wrapped in heavy bronze scale armor, and their hollow eye sockets burned with an unyielding malice. The lead Warden lunged. A heavy bronze battle-axe came down in a terrifying, high-leverage overhead cleave. The blow struck the scarab beetle dead center. The seventy-five percent cold-patched clay carapace failed instantly under the massive concentrated stress.

Without a hot-cooked, carbonised iron shell to flex under compression, the un-fired red mud cracked with a heavy, wet fracture sound. The bronze axe bit straight through the patch into the core. The golem's durability hit zero. The entire beetle frame shattered outward in a violent spray of loose red silt, collapsing with a dead mud-thud across Ethan's feet. The defensive line was gone. The bottleneck was entirely open. Ethan didn't turn to run.

If he turned his back to flee up that steep, pitch-black limestone incline, he would lose his line of sight, stripping away his ability to dodge or parry what he could not see. Standing his ground wasn't an act of bravery; it was the only to survive. His bare feet locked straight into the unpaved cave dirt. The moment his soles flattened against the soil, his Unyielding Frame multiplier initialized, violently doubling his baseline health parameters into an ironclad defensive cushion.

He wasn't an infantry tank, but the multiplier gave his low Constitution the rigid mass required to survive a frontal clash. He dropped the rawhide sling into the dirt. His right hand reached over his shoulder, his fingers locking onto the rawhide-wrapped handle of his custom amber-teal glass mace-cudgel. He ripped the weapon free, the razor-sharp jewel teeth caked into the wild olive wood casting a dangerous, sea-green glitter through the torch-smoke as he stepped straight into the point-blank clearance.

The second Warden rushed the gap, its notched axe head whistling toward Ethan's ribs. Ethan swung the mace with a hard, aggressive right arm slash. It was a terrible mistake. The top-heavy mass of the wild olive branch didn't handle like a sword; the raw, un-centered momentum of the heavy glass head dragged his entire right shoulder violently forward, tearing through his center of gravity. The strike flew wide, clipping the Warden's thick shoulder scale with a harmless, hollow clink.

The over-rotation left his entire front flank completely naked. The Warden's counter-strike came instantly—a brutal, short-range bronze elbow smash that caught Ethan dead-center across his rawhide-wrapped left forearm shield. The kinetic force slammed through his bones. Ethan stumbled backward three paces, his teeth grinding as the impact sent a sickening, numbing hand-shock tearing straight up his left arm.

The doubled health pool of his Unyielding Frame absorbed the worst of the mechanical blow, keeping his skin from splitting open, but his vision blurred as he tasted the sour, copper tang of sacrificial ash in his throat. The Warden stepped forward, raising its axe for a clean downward split. Ethan backed up his lead heel, his breath hitching. He was fighting the weapon with his arms, stiffening his chest muscles, and letting the club's dead weight drag him out of his stance.

It was the exact same structural error he had made with the sling. He didn't look at the axe. He looked at his own feet. As the Warden closed the distance, Ethan stopped trying to force the club with his upper upper body. He sank his weight low, dropping his hips until his center of gravity sat flat across his core. He pulled the mace-handle tight against his lower ribs, treating the heavy wild olive branch not as an extension of his fingers, but as a dead weight he had to pivot over his baseline.

It was the old, repetitive muscle memory of his childhood athletic drills—the thousands of exhausting hours spent loading an opponent's full body-mass across his hip line before snapping his pelvis to drive their weight into the canvas. The Warden lunged, the bronze axe cutting a lethal vertical plane through the dark. Ethan didn't swing. He pivoted.

He executed a tight, explosive snap-rotation of his hips, using the rotational torque of his core to whip the heavy glass club upward in a short-range, rising shovel-hook. He didn't use his biceps; the entire kinetic force of his fifty-four Strength came straight from the unpaved dirt, transferring through his heel right up to the apex of the turn. The trajectory flattened to perfection. The mace's glass-teeth bit straight into the underside of the Warden's skeletal jaw joint.

The collision triggered a violent, frame-stuttering hit-stop that froze the pixels for a split second as the razor-sharp amber jewel shards ground through the ancient bronze scales, shattering the calcified bone plate into white fragments. The target's head snapped back with a wet, splintering crack, its health bar taking a massive critical deletion as its entire stance collapsed onto the floorboards. The mace caked itself deep inside the broken bone cavity, its heavy weight dragging against Ethan's forearms.

He didn't celebrate. His shoulders throbbed with the raw, heavy vibration of the impact backlash, his breath ragged as he forcefully yanked the jewel teeth free from the skull. The lag of the recovery window was massive. Another line of bronze scales was already shuffling forward through the torch-smoke. He shifted his footing on the loose silt, lowering his hips once more to lock in his base, entirely alone on the front line as the real grind of the second terrace initialized.