Chapter 146: Broken Gravity

Stepping through the swirling vortex felt like plunging into freezing, deep water.

The air inside the rift was thick, carrying the sharp smell of ozone and old mana. There was no sky above, only a shattered expanse of dark purple twilight with glowing cracks that stretched endlessly into the void.

Sharp towers of dark stone and bright purple crystals stuck out at odd angles across the giant canyon.

Before Evren’s boots could fully settle against the ground, the world tilted violently.

Without any warning, gravity broke.

WHOOSH!

The downward pull vanished in an instant, violently shifting ninety degrees to the left.

Loose rocks and gravel on the ground suddenly fell sideways, clattering noisily against a massive vertical cliff that had instantly become the new floor.

Amber gasped as she lost her balance, but she quickly flared her wings to catch herself. Zephyra slid across the slick stone, digging her boots in as she anchored a shadow tether to a rock outcropping.

Evren didn’t flinch. His Kinetic Flow predictive sight had caught the distortion a split-second before it hit.

Planting his combat boot against the new horizontal floor, Evren released a localized pulse of his SS-Rank Gravity Domain. A golden-black ring of force rippled outward, anchoring the stone beneath Amber and Zephyra and completely canceling the disorientation.

"Everyone steady?" Evren asked.

"Steady," Amber exhaled, resting one hand against her hip as her wings settled behind her. "The gravity in this rift is completely broken."

"Not broken," Zephyra murmured, her violet eyes narrowing as she looked into the gloom. "It is divided into corridors. Look."

Evren picked up a fist-sized chunk of dark rock and tossed it forward. The stone flew straight for twenty paces, crossed an invisible boundary, and suddenly shot straight up toward the shattered sky.

Before anyone could speak, a series of guttural hisses echoed from the cliff wall above them.

Eight Level 60 Void Prowlers scrambled over the rocky ridge. They were six-legged, lizard-like monsters with hard crystals and sharp claws. Using the sideways gravity like a flat road, they ran straight down the wall toward the group.

"Ambush from the ridge!" Amber called out, her hands dropping to the hilts of her twin dragon-bone sabers.

"Take them!" Evren commanded as he surged forward and closed a twenty-yard gap in a single stride.

The two lead prowlers lunged with bared fangs. Evren swung the Frost-Bane Cleaver in a wide arc. The pure kinetic force of the blade sheared through both beasts, flash-freezing their blood and shattering their bodies before they hit the ground.

To his right, Zephyra dissolved into black mist.

A prowler pounced where she had been standing, but Zephyra instantly reformed behind it in the air. With a quick flash of her twin daggers, she cleanly sliced through its spine.

Flickering forward, she appeared beneath two more charging beasts, driving her blades through their jaws in two surgical thrusts. Both collapsed instantly.

On the left flank, Amber moved with blinding speed.

Her dragon-bone sabers ignited fire with bright golden flames. She ducked under a hard swipe and spun around quickly.

SWISH—CRACK!

A crescent wave of light cut off the beast’s front legs, while her backhand strike cleanly severed its head. The last two prowlers tried to jump back, but Amber flew forward on her glowing wings and pinned them both to the cliff in a burst of golden fire.

In less than twenty seconds, all eight Level 60 predators were dead.

Amber pulled her blades from the stone with a soft flick of her wrists, wiping the smoking ichor on a cloth. A bright, exhilarated smile lit up her face. "Not bad for a warm-up."

"Their reflexes were slow," Zephyra noted quietly, cleaning her curved daggers with practiced ease. "The gravity shifts seem to disrupt their coordination."

"Don’t get complacent," Evren said, resting his massive cleaver lightly against his shoulder. "This is just the perimeter. The core is deeper down."

They kept walking along the broken stone path, moving carefully through the changing gravity zones. In some spots, they felt completely weightless, while in others, their heavy armor weighed them down even more.

After walking along the winding paths for five minutes, the land narrowed into a floating bridge made of broken stone islands over a deep void. Here, the gravity pulled upward, lifting loose pebbles toward hanging stone points above.

A loud, sharp scream echoed through the cave.

A flock of ten Level 62 Spatial Razor-Drakes detached from the inverted ceiling. They were bat-like, winged horrors with crystalline wing edges sharp enough to cut through reinforced steel. Folding their wings, they dived like ballistic missiles, firing pressurized void darts from their feathers!

"Incoming from above!" Amber shouted.

Her golden wings flared, rocketing her into the sky. Defying the inverted gravity pull, Amber spun through the barrage of void darts, her sabers carving glowing golden arcs through the flock.

Two drakes shrieked as their wings sheared off, tumbling helplessly into the abyss.

Zephyra vanished from the bridge. A heartbeat later, she materialized atop a diving drake, driving both daggers into its spine and using the falling carcass to launch herself toward the next target.

A thirty-foot alpha drake locked onto Evren, opening its maw to unleash a concussive shockwave.

Evren didn’t bother dodging; he leapt straight into the air, crashing through the shockwave. With his left hand, he caught the drake by its throat in a crushing grip, bringing its momentum to zero.

Evren spun in mid-air and slammed the beast face-first into a floating rock platform.

BOOM!

The impact shattered the platform in two. The alpha drake’s skull collapsed under the overwhelming kinetic weight, dying on impact.

Evren landed smoothly as Amber and Zephyra dropped down beside him, breathing steadily with bright, excited eyes.

"That was exhilarating," Amber laughed softly, sheathing one saber while resting the other against her shoulder. "The mana here is wild, but it makes every strike feel twice as sharp."

"The air is getting warmer ahead," Zephyra reported, pointing toward a narrow archway at the end of the floating bridge. "I sense a massive concentration of life force."

Evren led the way through the archway, his senses flaring with warning.

They stepped onto a wide ridge that looked over a massive sunken arena. The cavern floor stretched out for nearly half a mile, encircled by tall crystal walls glowing with an eerie red light.

Then, the silence shattered as a wave of chittering and scraping echoed from every corner of the vast amphitheater.

The ground, the steep walls, and the ceiling started to shake. From hundreds of cracks in the stone, an endless swarm of creatures poured out into the open area.

They were Crystalline Void Crawlers, Level 55 to 58 spider-like horrors covered in jagged purple carapaces, each wielding razor-sharp mandibles and venomous stingers.

There weren’t dozens of them.

There were at least five hundred.

A sprawling sea of glowing red eyes looked up toward the observation ridge, hissing in hunger as the entire swarm began surging toward their position.

For any normal high-tier Capital guild, facing over five hundred Level 55-plus beasts in an erratic gravity zone would be an immediate death sentence.

Evren, however, merely looked down at the writhing sea of monsters with a slow, confident smile spreading across his face. He rolled his shoulders and rested the heavy Frost-Bane Cleaver across his back.

Beside him, Amber’s golden eyes shone. She drew her second dragon-bone saber with a crisp metallic hiss.

"That is quite a crowd," Amber smirked, glancing over at Zephyra. "What do you say to a little wager? Five hundred credits per kill?"

Zephyra stepped to the edge of the ledge, her silver hair fluttering in the rising wind. "Make it a thousand credits," she countered coolly. "Your golden light is too flashy, Amber. Shadows kill much faster."

Amber chuckled, spreading her wings wide. "We’ll see about that!"

Evren laughed, his eyes glowing with mana as he looked between the two eager heroines.

"Whoever finishes with the lowest count buys dinner and gives shoulder rubs back at the tower tonight," Evren declared with a grin. "Try to keep up!"

With an earth-shaking roar, the five hundred crawlers charged up the canyon walls.

Without a second of hesitation, all three of them leapt off the ridge, diving straight into the sea of beasts.