Chapter 152: Tearing Apart the High-Dimensional Gate with Bare Hands!
Chapter 152: Tearing Apart the High-Dimensional Gate with Bare Hands!
Ryan kicked the metal console in his way to pieces.
"Nicholas, get over here and lead the way." Ryan pressed his comm. "Osiris, bring your people and follow up. Leave two thousand men outside to mop up the stragglers. Everyone else pushes into the core with me."
"Coming, coming!" Nicholas scrambled out of the rubble clutching a silver briefcase, half-crawling, falling in behind Ryan.
Shadow Reaper materialized from the air and locked into position on Ryan's left.
Osiris led eight thousand Abyssal Riders, freshly equipped with second-generation powered armor, driving deep into the heart of the fortress in a sweeping tide.
Core corridor. Inner fortress.
The entire passage was cast from a dark-gold high-dimensional alloy. Two hundred feet wide — enough for heavy armored vehicles to drive side by side.
No lights lined the walls. The only illumination came from a faint red glow the metal itself gave off.
Every surface was covered in dense, layered bas-reliefs.
Ryan glanced at them.
All slaughter. Towering Hunter-caste warriors standing over twisted carbon-based lifeforms, burning blue and green planets to ash with energy weapons. A trophy wall of their conquest across the universe.
"These bugs really know how to set the mood." War Ghost spat from the back of the column. "I'm smashing every one of these walls when we're done."
Nicholas walked point, holding a palm-sized scanner in both hands.
The needle was spinning wildly.
"Commander, the energy field in here is a complete mess." Nicholas stared at the screen, forehead slick with sweat. "High-dimensional trap signatures everywhere. I need time to sort through the frequencies."
"No time." Ryan kept walking. "You find the path. I'll spring the traps."
Eighty-seven percent.
The sync countdown burned on his retina, relentless. Every second Ella spent on Earth was another second of danger.
Then, from somewhere above the corridor, came a deep, grinding mechanical click.
"Commander! Watch your head!" Nicholas shouted.
CLANG —
A dark alloy blast door dropped from the ceiling without warning and slammed into the floor, splitting the formation clean in two.
Ryan, Nicholas, and Shadow Reaper had been walking at the front. Now they were sealed on the inside.
Osiris, War Ghost, and all eight thousand Abyssal Riders were locked on the outside.
"Commander!" Osiris hammered the door from the other side. His heavy meteoric iron war-blade struck it again and again and left nothing — not even a scratch.
"Save your strength. That's high-dimensional compressed alloy — ten times harder than the armor outside." Nicholas knocked on the door twice. "The internal structure is completely locked. Nothing's getting through."
Then the walls on both sides of the corridor slid open without a sound, revealing hundreds of tiny nozzles.
Dense green gas blasted out and flooded the sealed space in an instant.
Where the gas hit the air, a sharp hissing corrosion filled the silence.
"Cough, cough!" Nicholas caught a breath of it. His face went deep red in seconds.
He yanked on his custom respirator, but the moment the filter made contact with the green gas, it spat black smoke and died.
"Nerve agent!" Nicholas clutched his throat and collapsed to the floor, limbs already seizing. "This stuff punches straight through carbon-based filtration systems. Dissolves alveoli and neurons directly!"
Shadow Reaper wasn't doing any better. The optical stealth suit he wore was being eaten away by the gas, pitting and warping until his silhouette bled through.
"I'll cut through it." Shadow Reaper drew his high-frequency cutting blade, flicked his wrist, and drove the blue cutting beam straight at the door's seam.
Tssss —
The beam hit the surface and bounced. A thin, semi-transparent film had activated across the door, deflecting it completely.
The reflected beam grazed Shadow Reaper's shoulder and carved a deep gouge into the metal wall beside him.
"No good. Energy-reflective coating." Shadow Reaper pressed a hand to his scorched shoulder, his breathing growing heavier by the second. The gas was eating into his airway.
Ryan stood at the center of it all, where the gas was thickest.
The green vapor poured into him with every breath.
A normal person inhaling this concentration would have liquefied organs within three seconds.
Inside Ryan, the True Dragon Tyrant Blood kicked in on its own — and drove itself to the limit.
The gas reached his lungs. Before it could touch a single cell, the raging sovereign fire wrapped around it completely.
The devouring instinct of the True Dragon Tyrant Blood came fully awake.
Nerve agent that could kill an elite warrior outright — Ryan stripped it of its toxicity by force, converting it into waves of pure energy that poured back into every part of his body.
No suffocation. His power was doubling.
"You're trying to poison me?" Ryan pulled one corner of his mouth up.
He drew a long, deep breath. His chest expanded.
The thick green gas around him swirled toward him at a visible speed, forming a small vortex in the air — and he pulled all of it inside.
Nicholas watched from beside him, eyes nearly falling out of his head.
"Commander... your lungs are titanium, aren't they?" Nicholas wheezed, backing away.
Ryan ignored him and walked straight to the blast door.
"Osiris, get everyone back." Ryan pressed his comm.
"Copy!" Outside, Osiris gave the order immediately. The Rider formation pulled back fast.
Ryan crouched low, all ten fingers hooking into the gap at the very bottom of the door.
Purple-gold energy surged out of him, flowing down both arms and into the metal.
"Up."
The muscles in his arms rose. The sleeves of his coat split apart.
GRRRK —
The high-dimensional compressed alloy door — thousands of tons of it — let out a grinding metallic shriek that set teeth on edge.
The hydraulic locking mechanisms on both sides threw off showers of sparks and tore free.
Ryan drove from his core, both arms thrusting upward.
The door lifted three feet off the ground.
"Good God." Outside, War Ghost's jaw nearly hit the floor.
Ryan didn't pause. He shifted his grip from lifting to pushing.
The purple-gold energy detonated in his palms.
BOOM.
The entire door — thousands of tons — was ripped clean out and hurled down the corridor.
It tumbled through the air and hit the far end, punching a massive hole straight through the metal wall.
The passage was open.
"Move in!" Osiris roared and led the charge.
Fresh air rushed in from outside and swept the remaining gas away.
Nicholas hauled himself off the floor, gasping, and immediately drove a detox shot into his thigh.
"Commander, thank God for your lung capacity." Nicholas wiped his face, still shaken.
Ryan rolled his wrist.
Eighty-nine percent.
Time was running out.
"Keep moving." He stepped over the wreckage on the floor.
Eight thousand Abyssal Riders poured through in a column, their heavy footfalls striking the metal floor in a rolling, rhythmic thunder.
Through the hole punched in the far wall, a massive circular chamber opened up ahead.
At its center — the pale-blue portal vortex.
It had expanded to a thousand feet across. The starlight inside it was clear now, and the outlines of warships were visible through the swirl.
Rings of ultra-high-frequency spatial radiation pulsed outward, sharp enough to ache in the eardrums.
Around the portal, ranks of soldiers stood in tight, uniform formations.
These were nothing like the cannon-fodder mechs outside.
These were the real thing — Hunter-caste elites. The Imperial Guard.
They wore deep crimson full-coverage high-dimensional combat armor.
Most striking of all: every one of them held a diamond-shaped high-dimensional shield in their left hand and a long spear crackling with thermal energy in their right.
Shield locked to shield, forming an airtight crimson energy wall with no gaps.
At the front of the formation, a commander leveled his spear at Ryan.
"Trespassers in the sacred ground are sentenced to death."