Free Web NovelChapter 73: [73] : The Dune Leviathan, A City-Sized Problem
The heavy steel plate slammed into place over the breached western wall.
Bram pulled his blowtorch away and wiped a thick layer of grease and sweat from his forehead. The Level 30 Artificer was exhausted.
"The patch is holding, boss!" Bram yelled down from the scaffolding. "But the sub-core is running incredibly hot. We cannot take another breach like that."
Declan stood in the center of the courtyard and nodded slowly.
He looked up at the massive blue glass barrel of the Mana Breaker Cannon mounted above the main gate. The Relic tier weapon was practically smoking, and the cooling vents on the side of the machine blew out thick clouds of white steam.
It had done its job. The concentrated beam of anti-magic instantly vaporized thousands of Void beasts, giving Bram the sixty seconds he needed to seal the wall.
Declan looked through the transparent black energy dome.
The sea of shifting dark matter and glitching purple eyes was still out there. Millions of Abyssal monsters were packed tightly against the barrier, clawing and biting in a blind frenzy.
But then, something weird happened.
The endless screeching suddenly stopped. It did not fade out slowly. It cut off instantly like someone had hit a mute button on the server.
The millions of Void beasts stopped attacking the shield. They turned around and started scrambling backward, climbing over each other in a desperate panic to get away from the Iron Bastion like there were running away from something.
A bigger force.
They looked like rats fleeing a sinking ship.
"They are retreating!" a player near the forge yelled as he dropped his rusted sword and pumped his fists in the air. "The cannon scared them off! We won!"
A few other players started cheering. People hugged each other and cried tears of relief. They actually thought the Abyssal Tide event was over.
Declan did not cheer.
His dark eyes tracked the retreating monsters.
’Monsters do not retreat in a wave defense event,’ Declan thought to himself. ’They do not have a survival instinct coded into them. They only move away from a target if the system forces them to.’
He gripped the heavy dark matter shaft of his +40 Eclipse Severance.
"Bram," Declan called out calmly. "Get off the wall. Now."
Bram did not ask questions. The old NPC dropped his tools, grabbed the edge of the scaffolding, and slid down the metal ladder as fast as his boots could carry him.
A second later, the ground shook.
It was not a small tremor, and it was not the heavy thud of a Goliath Mech walking down the street. It was a massive, violent earthquake that physically threw people off their feet!
The entire Iron Bastion rattled. The heavy stone paving blocks cracked open. The weapon racks tipped over, spilling iron swords and wooden shields across the dirt.
Players screamed as they fell to their knees and grabbed onto whatever they could find to stay upright.
"What is happening?!" a player yelled, clutching the edge of the water fountain.
Declan planted his +10 Spiked Striders into the stone. His massive Abyssal Sovereign stats kept him perfectly balanced.
He looked out through the transparent shield.
About two hundred yards away from the city wall, the ground was bulging upward. The toxic mud and broken concrete of the wasteland pushed up into a massive hill.
The hill kept growing. It reached fifty feet. Then a hundred feet. Then two hundred feet.
It looked like a volcano was forming in the middle of the ruined slums.
Then, the top of the dirt mountain exploded!
Tons of rock, mud, and debris shot into the dark sky. Out of the massive crater rose a monster that completely broke the scale of the game.
Declan had to tilt his head all the way back just to look at it.
It was a sandworm, but calling it a worm was a massive understatement. It was easily the size of a commercial skyscraper. Its body was covered in thick, overlapping plates of dark brown armor that looked harder than titanium.
It had no eyes. It had no arms. It just had a mouth.
And it was right there, there were staring at it.
The maw of the beast opened, revealing rows upon rows of massive, spinning stone teeth. The teeth ground against each other with a deafening, mechanical roar.
The monster cast a massive shadow over the entire Iron Bastion and blotted out the purple lightning in the sky.
A golden system prompt appeared directly in the center of Declan’s vision.
[World Boss Alert: The Abyssal Tide Zenith]
[Name: Dune Leviathan]
[Level: ???]
[HP: ??? / ???]
Declan stared at the question marks. The system was basically telling him that this thing was so far above his pay grade that it didn’t even bother rendering the numbers.
"Oh, you have got to be kidding me," a player choked out in absolute despair. "We cannot fight that. We cannot even scratch that."
"It is a literal mountain!" another player screamed. "We are dead! The shield cannot stop a mountain!"
Panic completely consumed the courtyard. People ran blindly and slammed into the walls of the central keep. They desperately tried to find a place to hide, completely forgetting that if the dome fell, the entire city would be crushed flat.
Bram ran up next to Declan. His mechanical obsidian arm twitched nervously as he looked up at the Dune Leviathan.
"Boss," Bram swallowed hard. "That thing is not going to chew on the walls. It is going to swallow the entire city whole. The sub-core barrier will not stop a monster that big from just eating the ground underneath us."
"I know," Declan replied.
The Dune Leviathan let out another deafening roar. It arched its massive body backward and pulled itself higher into the sky. It was winding up for a strike.
It was preparing to dive straight down and consume the Iron Bastion in a single bite!
Declan looked at the +40 halberd in his hand.
The Spacetime Laceration trait was incredibly broken. It ignored all physical armor and deleted the code of anything the blade touched. But there was a massive problem.
The blade was only about two feet long.
If Declan used Void Blink to teleport up to the Leviathan, he could easily slice through its armor. He could cut a perfect, clean line right through the monster’s face.
But cutting a skyscraper in half didn’t stop it from falling on you.
If he sliced the beast, gravity would just pull the millions of tons of dead monster meat straight down onto the Iron Bastion. The physical impact alone would shatter Bram’s sub-core barrier and crush the three thousand players inside to a bloody paste.
He could not punch it. He could not slice it.
He needed to completely obliterate it before it touched the dome.
"Bram," Declan said, his eyes glued to the towering boss. "Keep the shield powered. Do not let it drop."
"What are you going to do?" Bram asked frantically. "You cannot fight that thing in melee range! It has too much mass!"
"I am aware of the physics," Declan said casually. "Give me ten seconds. I need to go shopping." freewёbnoνel.com
Declan dismissed the massive halberd back into his digital inventory. He crossed his arms, planted his feet, and pulled up the Global Auction House interface.
The giant worm was currently falling toward them. He was on a strict timer.
It was time to buy a bigger gun.
