The Automaton Angel moved with a terrifying grace that belied its six metallic wings and cold, expressionless face. It was the purest embodiment of Peak Sage-tier power—not the messy, volatile energy of a living cultivator, but a perfectly engineered system of destruction.
Kaelen didn't hesitate. He knew that even exhausted, the chasm between a Legend and a Sage remained absolute, but this creature was tapping into the very core of the Mythic Forge. It wasn't just a Sage; it was a Sage with infinite battery life. A constant power source elevates a Sage to a credible, sustained threat.
The Angel raised its two massive, crystalline blades. The air around them shattered as the blades, moving faster than the eye could follow, executed a simultaneous, multi-angle attack.
Kaelen parried the first blade with a simple, fluid upward motion of his gray sword, the impact sending a shockwave that cracked the ancient laboratory floor. He then ducked beneath the second blade, feeling the razor-sharp wind shear across his scalp. The force was immense, but the precision was the true danger.
One, two. Attack vectors are 17 degrees and 84 degrees, executed sequentially with a 0.005-second delay. Perfect efficiency.
Kaelen's mind, honed by years of computational analysis in his forgotten life and tempered by the brutal discipline of his modified cultivation, wasn't focused on fear. It was focused on the data.
The Angel retreated exactly three paces, its six wings humming with a high, steady frequency—it was calculating its next move. Kaelen used the brief pause to force a small, agonizing surge of mana into his sword hand. The veins on his arm bulged, a physical manifestation of the torture inherent in his technique.
"You're a program," Kaelen muttered, his voice ragged. "And every program has a loop, a vulnerability, or a dependency."
The Angel launched its next sequence: a relentless, complex flurry of strikes designed to break through defenses. Its movement was mathematically perfect, maximizing kinetic energy while maintaining core stability. It was an assault sequence meant to overwhelm a dozen Sages simultaneously, not one exhausted Legend.
Kaelen met the attack with the simplest possible defense: he didn't counter-attack, he deflected. He analyzed the flow, the trajectory, the geometry of the assault. Every time a blade came in, he nudged it aside with a minimum of force, allowing the Angel's own kinetic energy to push the blade off its target line. He was using the Angel's perfect, relentless force against itself.
The Angel, programmed for optimal destruction, registered Kaelen's failure to crumble. Its synthesized voice echoed: "Target stability exceeding parameters. Recalibrating combat protocol. Increasing energy draw by 150%."
The hum from the central apparatus in the chamber intensified. The Angel's wings glowed white-hot, and the air crackled with raw, unstable mana.
There it is, Kaelen thought, a cold, exhilarated certainty blooming in his mind. The dependency. The Angel's perfection came from its external power source. A living Sage draws from their core; this machine draws from the Forge's power conduit.
Kaelen remembered the Architectural Mana Stability theorem etched on the pillar in the Atrium. The theorem described how Mythic beings anchored energy to matter. The Angel's power link to the central apparatus was not a physical wire, but a frequency resonance—a constant, unwavering vibrational link in the mana field.
To defeat the Angel, Kaelen realized he couldn't use overwhelming force to destroy its body (which was Peak Sage-tier reinforced); he had to use precise, Legendary force to disrupt the link. He had to introduce a catastrophic error into the system.
He dropped his defensive stance. The Angel, seeing an opportunity, lunged with its deadliest attack—a full-power, six-winged diving slash designed to cleave the chamber in half.
Kaelen closed his eyes for a split second, ignoring the incoming death, focusing entirely on the high, steady frequency of the Angel's power hum. He found the perfect pitch, the 23rd harmonic of the resonance lock.
He unleashed the Iron Heart Slash. It wasn't a powerful, wide burst of Legendary energy. It was the purest application of the torture technique—a single, focused, infinitesimally thin blade of mana, honed by the swordsman's pursuit of perfection and guided by the engineer's search for the breakpoint.
The slash did not target the Angel's head or body. It targeted the precise point in the air where the Angel's power frequency was the densest, right where the Angel's energy field met the output vent of the central core apparatus.
The microscopic blade of energy struck the frequency.
The effect was instantaneous and catastrophic. Instead of slicing through the Angel, Kaelen's slash created a positive feedback loop in the Mythic conduit. The Angel's external power supply, instead of flowing into it, was forced to surge back out through the same channel.
The Automaton Angel froze mid-slash, its crystalline blades centimeters from Kaelen's neck. Its white eyes flickered violently, cycling through a dizzying series of debug colors—red, amber, blue.
"System Overload. Thermal Runaway. Core Containment Breach imminent," the synthesized voice shrieked, now warped and distorted.
Kaelen, exhausted, breathless, but completely steady, stepped forward into the Angel's dead zone. He was not a warrior; he was an executioner. With a final, simple thrust, he plunged his gray sword into the Angel's chest plate, directly into the massive core crystal that was now glowing an unstable, destructive red.
The energy exploded, not outwards, but inwards, imploding the Angel into a cloud of dust, shattered crystal, and silence.
Kaelen staggered back, using the obsidian wall for support. He had won. The central apparatus, the Forge's heart, was still humming, but the Angel was gone. He looked at the dust where a Peak Sage-tier entity had stood, a dangerous mix of relief and crushing exhaustion washing over him.
He had solved the most pressing problem of the Forge with a combination of Legend-tier power and ancient Stanford physics. But the noise of the battle would have already reached the Atrium.
Vex and the Hidden Sun Syndicate now knew that Kaelen Vayne was not only capable of breaching the Will, but also of destroying the inner defenses. They would realize the true value of this Vault, and they would realize that the Legend was currently running on empty.