Chapter 156: Crush the High-Dimensional Priest!

The savage spatial storm raged through the massive core hall like countless invisible high-dimensional blades slashing in every direction.

The main cannon wreckage, blown apart by the Extreme Dao energy, along with the Reaper's impossibly thick degenerate-state armor plating from the bow section, was now cracking apart piece by piece, jamming up the entrance to the portal.

The pale blue light vortex was more than half-choked by this mountain of metallic debris, and what had been a stable space-folding zone had collapsed into complete chaos.

Black spatial rifts sliced across the surrounding indestructible dark-gold walls, leaving behind grooves that oozed with eerie light.

"Everyone down! Activate maximum-level gravity anchors!"

Osiris roared with eyes wide and bloodshot, grabbing his meteoric iron combat blade with both hands and driving it hard into the metal floor, using it as an anchor against the storm trying to tear him away.

The Demon-Hunter Corps reacted instantly. The feet of their second-generation power armor shot out thick alloy spikes that drove deep into the metal ground.

War Ghost wasn't so lucky. The storm sent his massive body rolling across the floor more than a dozen times before he let out a furious roar and wrapped both arms around a broken load-bearing column.

"Did that damn gate close or not!" War Ghost bellowed at the top of his lungs, but the storm's howl shredded his voice to nothing.

Nicholas stared at the screen flooding with corrupted data, sweating through his suit. "Close? Like hell it did! The flagship is wedged in there — the spatial corridor is collapsing! If this keeps up, forget the fortress — the entire far side of the moon is going to get sucked in and ground to paste!"

Boom.

Ryan dropped from midair and hit the ground like two mountains crashing down through his feet.

Violent violet-gold Extreme Dao energy blazed across his entire body, carving out an absolute vacuum around him.

The spatial rifts — the kind that could cut through high-dimensional armor — barely got close to him before the violet-gold flames burned them out of existence.

Then, from deep within the portal, buried in the blue-white blaze of light, a strange purple glow flickered to life.

It carried an arrogance that sat above everything else, completely ignoring the raging spatial storm.

Even the savage black spatial rifts scattered out of its way like mice fleeing a cat.

Then a skeletal hand reached slowly out of the void. It pressed against the warship wreckage wedged in the portal with what looked like almost no effort at all.

Click.

One soft sound.

That slab of degenerate-state armor — larger than the Abyss's main hull — was pushed aside by that one hand, and instantly lost all molecular cohesion. It crumbled into a vast cloud of pale gray dust.

The storm stopped dead.

An old man in a wide purple robe stepped slowly out of the light vortex.

He leaned on a twisted staff topped with the skull of some alien creature, bleached gray-white.

He wore no spacesuit, no high-dimensional battle armor. He simply floated in the hard vacuum, surrounded by lethal radiation and the ruins of the spatial storm, as if none of it existed.

Supreme Council of the Hunter Civilization. High Priest — Saren.

Saren looked down at the people in the hall, his gaze finally settling on Ryan.

"Carbon-based creature of Earth. You genuinely surprised me."

Saren's mouth never moved, yet his voice bypassed every physical medium and detonated directly inside everyone's minds.

"To push the Reaper to this point by yourself. That power inside you... is interesting."

Ryan had no patience for this old monster's monologue.

He snapped his wrist. The meteoric iron broken blade rang out with a sharp, piercing cry, and its violet-gold tip leveled straight at Saren in the air above.

"Go back to your star system. Or die here."

Saren shook his head with something like pity. His bony fingers tightened on the staff, and he tapped it gently against the void. "You primitive life-forms, still stuck to your home planet — you always develop such laughable delusions about power."

"In front of a true high-dimensional divine being, the brute force you're so proud of doesn't even rise to the level of an ant struggling."

The moment the staff touched down, the physical rules inside the hall were forcibly rewritten.

The detector in Nicholas's hands erupted in a blinding shower of sparks and died completely.

"Commander! The gravitational field parameters have been overwritten! Gravity's gone negative!" Nicholas screamed, his voice cracking with terror.

Before the words were out of his mouth, the gravity inside the entire fortress reversed entirely.

The crushing force that had been ten times Earth's gravity instantly became a terrifying upward pull.

The metal wreckage on the floor weighing hundreds of tons, the shattered parts of destroyed mechanical soldiers, even the alloy plating of the floor itself — all of it shot upward toward the dome like a waterfall running in reverse.

"What the—!" War Ghost cursed.

The load-bearing column he was holding onto was ripped clean from its base, taking him with it as it hurtled upward.

Osiris and all eight thousand Demon-Hunter Corps members found their gravity anchors useless against a law-level force. The floor gave way in an instant.

In moments, everyone in the hall was in freefall toward the dome with no control over their bodies. Power armor thrusters burned at full output but couldn't do a thing against a change in the rules of space itself.

But Ryan hadn't moved an inch.

In the instant gravity reversed, he drove both feet down with explosive force.

"Hold."

Savage energy poured through his feet and into the ground, branching out like enormous roots that punched through layer after layer of alloy and locked onto the stellar-core foundation buried deepest inside the lunar fortress.

Through nothing but the raw power of his body and his bloodline, he nailed himself in place inside the twisted space.

The storm tore at his black coat, making it snap and crack. The True Dragon Tyrant Blood inside him let out a deafening dragon roar, and he forced open an absolute gravitational domain that belonged solely to him — carving it out by sheer will against the reversed gravity field.

Saren stared at Ryan, and for the first time something like surprise crossed that bark-dry face. "You can still stand?"

His bony fingers felt around inside his purple robe and pulled out a small transparent glass vial, specially made.

It was small. Inside it, a mass of blood moved slowly, almost like it was breathing.

The blood was a vivid violet-gold. Even through the high-dimensional glass, it radiated wild pulses of energy.

The moment Ryan saw that vial, his heart clenched hard.

The True Dragon Tyrant Blood inside him resonated with a violent jolt.

That presence... he knew it too well.

It was his own bloodline.

No — wait. Younger than his, rawer, but the same source, the same root.

That was... Ella's blood.

"I can see you felt it." Saren swirled the vial slowly. "This little thing you've been keeping hidden on Earth is, in fact, a perfect catalyst."

"We locked onto this particular genetic sequence on Earth ten years ago."

"To study this dimensional-breaking power, we used our agents on Earth — what you call the Stargate Holy See — to extract this genetic sample little by little from that newborn infant."

"It's only a copy, but the purity of this power is more than enough to open the gateway to the higher dimensions."

Boom.

Saren's words hit Ryan's mind like a nuclear warhead going off.

Ten years ago.

Ella had barely been born. She was still in her cradle.

These things, hiding somewhere in the deep reaches of the universe, had already gone after his daughter back then.

Five years of inhuman torture in the Extreme Evil Abyss.

The despair of watching his daughter drained like a blood bag in the slums.

The Stargate Holy See hunting them without end.

None of it had ever been about Earth's own power players. Every last bit of it had been orchestrated in the shadows by these beings looking down from on high.

They had used Ella as a living experiment. As a flesh-and-blood key to unlock an interstellar gateway.

Thud... thud... thud...

Ryan lowered his head. A sound rose through the hall — a heartbeat that made everyone's skin crawl.

"You..."

"Used my daughter..."

"As a test subject?"

Boom.

Violet-gold flames erupted from Ryan's body with a violence that no words could describe, holding nothing back.

The rage poured itself into a single pillar of violet-gold light that tore from the ground to the sky.

The high-dimensional metal floor beneath Ryan's feet couldn't take the heat. It began melting across a wide area into dark red magma.

Saren watched Ryan's fury with complete indifference. In his eyes, this was nothing but a dying animal's helpless rage.

He pulled the stopper from the vial and poured the violet-gold blood slowly over the skull at the top of his staff.

"Native. Take your anger and die. Let the laws of the high dimensions come and cleanse this filthy planet."