Chương 63: Battle Against the Titan Colossus

The ground on Floor 15 split open into a bottomless chasm. From deep within the earth, the Corrupted Titan Guardian rose slowly — forty meters tall. Its entire body was cast from a single block of pre-war black alloy, covered in blood-red arcane vein patterns burning across its surface. Its chest housed a colossal mana reactor, hissing out ear-splitting steam vents like the whistle of an arcane freight train. BOOM! Every step the Titan took shook the entire corner of the jungle. A Unified System v2.

0 notification appeared in front of Lucian, its edges flashing red. [DUNGEON BOSS WARNING: CORRUPTED TITAN GUARDIAN (RANK B+ — NATIONAL)] Combat Power: 88, 000, 000 (88 MILLION!) Attributes: 90% elemental magic resistance, self-repairing Titan-alloy armor. ['Read the Fine Print' skill activating structural analysis:] SYNTAX ERROR & PRESSURE BLOCKAGE DETECTED AT: Left shoulder joint (jammed heat-exhaust valve). Central Reactor Core (reversed mana flow). Eighty-eight million Combat Power.

Fifty meters away, Evelyn stood on a high outcrop, an arcane spyglass pressed to her eye. She adjusted the focus, studying the Boss's smoke-belching hydraulic joints, then grabbed the magical communicator at her hip and shouted.

"Lucian! This thing's running on an ancient hydraulic operating system! The exhaust valve on its left shoulder joint is jammed, so all its mana's backing up locally! Hit the red pin on its shoulder blade and the whole system auto-triggers a Force Shutdown!" Lucian stood on the ground, fingers on his dagger's hilt, shouting back.

"Got it! Hitting the bug to save on maintenance costs!" Beside him, Eleanor drew her holy sword, glancing between Lucian and Evelyn.

"What language of the gods are you two even speaking?!" Lucian didn't answer, just pointed forward.

"Council President, take your squad and pull its attention. Astra, take the right arm off!" Eleanor didn't hesitate. She swung her sword and launched straight into the air.

"Holy Knights, spread formation and open fire!" BOOM! Twelve beams of golden holy light shot from Eleanor's sword straight into the Titan's magical eye, shattering the protective sensor glass into a shower of blinding sparks. The Titan let out an ear-splitting mechanical shriek, swinging its thirty-ton right arm to crush Eleanor's formation. WHOOSH! A figure in a white floral dress cut through the empty air.

Astra kicked off nothing but the air itself, the Sun-Slaying Dragon Sword erupting into a fifty-meter arc of platinum blade-force. SLASH! The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation. The Titan's thirty-ton metal arm was cleanly severed at the elbow joint, dropping straight into the swamp and crushing dozens of Mud Elementals beneath it. At the same moment, up on the outcrop, Evelyn raised a freshly assembled arcane rifle and squeezed the trigger. BANG!

A glowing mana-ore guide-arrow buried itself precisely in the red pressure valve on the Titan's left shoulder blade, marking it with a brilliant glow. Blink. Silent Blink. Lucian's silhouette vanished from the ground, reappearing directly atop the colossal metal shoulder blade of the Boss. He drew his silver dagger and drove it into the gap in the pressure valve, then opened his mouth and spoke a precise chain of commands in Titan Script.

"Khar-val-null: reverse mana flow!" Ninety-five billion points of Spell Control poured through the blade, straight into the machine's central control conduit. The eighty-eight million points of mana churning through the Titan's reactor abruptly bent 180 degrees, flowing back into the combustion chamber.

Thousands of years ago, the mighty Titan civilization hadn't fallen to any foreign invasion — it had collapsed because its own automated machines had been "poisoned at the source code level," their energy circulation loops turning to devour each other from within. And now, a former finance worker and a former software engineer had just recreated that exact historical flaw on the body of their last surviving machine. BOOM! CRACK! CRACK!

The mana conduits running the length of the Titan's body exploded in a chain reaction. White smoke and electric sparks burst from every joint. The reactor in its chest went dark, fading from blazing red to cold, dull grey. The Titan Colossus froze. For a moment, the battlefield became completely silent. The hundreds-of-tons metal giant stood motionless, every red mana conduit across its body flickering weakly before finally going dark.

Then, with a deafening metallic groan, the ancient machine slowly collapsed into the swamp. It wasn't defeated by brute force. It simply stopped functioning — like a machine that had finally reached the end of its lifespan. BOOM! Dirt and muddy water shot dozens of meters into the air. Total fight time: exactly one minute forty-five seconds. Lucian leapt down from the Titan's shoulder, prying loose a watermelon-sized Rank A Titan Star Crystal glowing pale purple from its chest and tucking it into his spatial ring.

"Eight hundred thousand clean gold. Fair pay for the work." Click. From the ruptured core of the Boss's combustion chamber, a foot-long key of solid black metal fell out, landing point-first in the mud in front of his boots. Etched into the key's shaft was the symbol of a hundred-story tower reaching toward a starry sky — the emblem of the World Tower. Behind the safety barrier, Roger, the thirty rescued students, and the professors who had just arrived could only stare. Nobody spoke.

Nobody even remembered to breathe. Their eyes moved between three things. The mysterious Titan key. The Rank B+ monster that had terrified an entire generation of students. And the four people standing in front of it like this had been nothing more than an inconvenient afternoon assignment. A ten-year-old boy casually holding a small kitchen knife. A girl in a flower-patterned dress eating the last bite of strawberry ice cream. A royal princess still holding a holy sword.

And a genius scholar carrying a screwdriver instead of a weapon. The lead rescue professor dropped his staff into the mud, muttering in absolute shock.

"Lucian Vance..." The professor's voice trembled.

"This isn't a student club." He looked at the group standing beside the fallen Titan.

"This is an entire era's command center disguised as one." Ting! Ting! Ting! The System notifications exploded one after another. Ting. Ting. Ting. The endless stream of rewards flooded Lucian's vision with golden light until he couldn't even see the battlefield anymore. For anyone else, this would have been the greatest moment of their life. For Lucian... His first thought was much simpler.

"How much is this thing worth?"