Chapter 157: Chapter 157: The Sky Falls, Starfall
Vane crushed the Divine-tier [Impregnable Scroll] on the highest ridge of the Crimson Canyon.
The heavy silver chains binding the parchment shattered.
The sky above the canyon didn’t darken. It solidified.
A massive, perfectly translucent, geometric dome of golden energy slammed down over the entire canyon basin.
It completely encapsulated the airspace, cutting off the escape routes for the Vanguard’s Legacy players and sealing Dante inside the kill-box.
[Divine Item Activated: Impregnable Seal]
[Duration: Permanent until caster is defeated or the seal is mathematically overwhelmed.]
[Effect: Absolute Environmental Quarantine. All spatial displacement, teleportation, and physical exit vectors are completely disabled.]
Down in the canyon floor, Dante had just finished deleting a cluster of thirty heavy infantry players with a rapid, chained combination of [Phantom Waltz] and [Cyclone of Ruin].
His invulnerability timer was currently sitting at an absurdly high buffer of several minutes.
He didn’t pause his slaughter to look at the golden dome, but he felt the immediate shift in the server’s spatial physics.
The [Mantle of the Void-Dragon] flared slightly, reacting to the suppression of its flight passives.
Dante tried to trigger [Meteor Stride] to close the gap on a retreating group of mages.
[Error: Spatial displacement failed. Impregnable Seal active.]
He materialized exactly where he had started, stumbling slightly as the Zenith-tier skill failed to execute.
"Okay," Dante muttered, looking up at the massive golden dome covering the canyon. "That’s annoying."
The surviving Vanguard’s Legacy players, numbering roughly eight thousand, realized they were trapped.
The panic shifted from desperate flight to cornered, feral aggression. If they couldn’t run, they had to fight.
"He can’t teleport!" a commander roared from the southern ridge, spotting Dante’s failed skill. "The Architect locked his movement! Surround him! Drown him in bodies until his invulnerability drops!"
The massive army surged back toward the center of the canyon. They abandoned all tactical formations.
They didn’t care about overlapping firing lines or synchronized magic. They just charged, a literal tidal wave of thousands of heavily armored avatars pouring down the red cliffs, desperate to bury Dante under a mountain of digital meat.
Dante watched them come.
He couldn’t teleport out of the canyon. He couldn’t blink through the incoming wave of players.
His invulnerability frames were high, but he couldn’t just stand there and let eight thousand people hack at him.
If the timer ran out and the [Asura’s Descent] buff dropped, he would instantly die to the sheer volume of chip damage against his zeroed-out defense.
He needed to clear the entire canyon. Simultaneously.
He didn’t need a sword. He didn’t need a hurricane.
He needed an apocalypse.
Dante didn’t run. He planted his iron boots firmly in the dusty red dirt. He gripped the hilt of [Voidsever], resting the massive black blade casually against the ground.
He looked up at Vane, who was currently laughing hysterically from the safety of the high ridge, confident that his Divine-tier trap had finally cornered the anomaly.
"You think a dome is going to save you?" Dante asked quietly.
He opened his system interface, navigating past his standard skills and accessing the newly acquired, Mythic-tier class abilities of the [Asura Vanguard].
He locked his gaze onto the third skill on the list.
[Class Skill 3: Starfall (Active)]
[Description: The user commands the atmosphere to violently collapse. Summons a massive, indiscriminate AoE barrage of superheated, cosmic meteors within a 500-foot radius. Deals catastrophic Fire and True Damage. Cooldown: 24 Hours.]
Dante had saved it. He didn’t want to use it in the tight, enclosed spaces of the Necropolis or the Mists of Carnage because the destruction would likely collapse the dungeon geometry entirely.
But out here, in an open canyon, trapped inside a massive golden dome with an army of eight thousand enemies?
It was exactly the tool for the job.
Dante raised his empty left hand, pointing his open palm toward the sky.
[Skill Executed: Starfall]
Because of his [Chrono-Shift] talent, the massive, twenty-four-hour cooldown was instantly slashed in half, and the astronomical mana cost was completely waived.
He didn’t just cast it once.
He rapidly tapped the internal command trigger three times in quick succession before the animation lock fully engaged.
The system didn’t flash a warning prompt. The game engine physically hitched, struggling to process the sheer, overwhelming cosmic weight of three overlapping, Mythic-tier area-of-effect ultimate skills executing simultaneously in the exact same coordinates.
The bright blue sky above the golden [Impregnable Seal] didn’t just darken.
It violently, aggressively tore open.
The daylight was instantly snuffed out, replaced by a swirling, chaotic vortex of deep, bruised purple and aggressive, blood-red cosmic energy. The atmosphere above the canyon completely collapsed.
The thousands of charging Vanguard’s Legacy players stopped dead in their tracks.
The roaring battle cries died in their throats. They looked up, their avatars completely frozen in absolute, unfiltered horror.
"What is that?" a paladin whispered, dropping his heavy iron shield into the dirt.
Up on the ridge, Vane stopped laughing. The mad Architect stared at the tearing sky, his unblinking eyes widening as his mathematical models completely, utterly failed to comprehend the scale of the incoming data package.
"That is not a spell," Vane breathed, taking a slow step backward. "That is a server-wipe event."
The Zenith Protocol didn’t calculate standard magic projectiles. It pulled literal, physical mass from the orbital layers of the game’s architecture.
The meteors didn’t fall. They crashed.
Hundreds of massive, superheated, burning chunks of raw, cosmic rock broke through the swirling red vortex.
They didn’t rain down in a scattered pattern; they plummeted with terrifying, directed precision, aiming entirely for the 500-foot radius surrounding Dante.
The meteors hit the golden dome of the [Impregnable Seal].
The Divine-tier barrier, designed to withstand the siege damage of entire armies and lock down high-tier bosses, didn’t stand a chance.
The sheer, overwhelming kinetic force of the first meteor shattered the golden dome like cheap glass.
The barrier exploded into a million useless yellow pixels, completely eradicating Vane’s ultimate trap in a fraction of a second.
The rest of the meteors hit the canyon floor.
The sound wasn’t a roar or an explosion. It was the deafening, physical sound of the world ending.
The Crimson Canyon was instantly turned into a sun.
The massive rocks of superheated plasma and true damage slammed into the ground, completely vaporizing the eight thousand players caught in the blast zone.
There were no damage numbers. There were no screams. The sheer volume of the damage output completely skipped the combat math, instantly deleting the avatars from the server.
The [Absolute Ruin] passive of the Asura class triggered simultaneously.
The meteors didn’t just kill the players; they permanently, violently altered the geometry of the canyon.
The towering red cliffs were sheared in half. The dusty basin was blown out, creating a massive, glowing crater hundreds of feet deep, entirely paved with bubbling, liquid magma.
Dante stood in the absolute dead center of the apocalyptic bombardment.
The meteors crashed down all around him, turning the ground into slag, but he didn’t flinch. He was the caster. He was entirely immune to his own area-of-effect destruction.
The golden invulnerability frames from [Asura’s Descent] flickered warmly around his dark armor, completely unbothered by the extinction event happening inches away.
The bombardment lasted for exactly ten seconds.
When the final meteor impacted, the swirling red vortex in the sky slowly closed, returning the sky to a serene, clear blue.
The Crimson Canyon was completely gone.
In its place was a massive, smoking, glassed crater that stretched for nearly a mile. The towering cliffs were reduced to jagged, melted stumps.
The Vanguard’s Legacy army of ten thousand players was completely, flawlessly eradicated.
Dante lowered his hand. The golden invulnerability frames finally faded from his avatar, returning his defense stats to their baseline numbers.
He let out a long, slow breath. The physical strain of channeling that much cosmic energy was intense, but [Breath of the Colossus] instantly refilled his stamina, wiping away the digital fatigue.
He looked up at the highest ridge.
Vane’s perfectly concealed hiding spot had been completely blown away by the edge of the meteor strike.
The mad Architect was standing on a small, precarious shard of melted rock, his pristine white robes scorched and smoking.
Vane wasn’t dead. He had managed to survive the edge of the blast zone, likely relying on high-tier celestial mitigation passives. But his health bar was flashing a desperate, critical red.
The rogue Celestial stared down at the massive, glassed crater, entirely unable to process the total destruction of his flawless execution grid.
"You broke the math," Vane whispered, his voice trembling violently. "You completely broke the math."
Dante didn’t answer. He triggered [Meteor Stride].
With the golden dome shattered, his spatial displacement was fully functional again.
He vanished from the center of the crater, materializing instantly on the melted shard of rock directly in front of Vane.
The sonic boom of his materialization stunned the mad Architect.
Dante didn’t use a Zenith-tier skill. He simply raised [Voidsever] and swung the massive black blade horizontally.
He wanted to finish the fight quickly.
Before the blade could connect, Vane’s avatar violently glitched.
The Architect wasn’t a standard player; he was a Celestial entity. He had a failsafe.
Vane crushed a small, glowing silver crystal in his hand. It wasn’t a standard teleportation scroll.
It was an emergency bypass protocol that ripped his avatar completely out of the server’s immediate rendering distance.
The black blade of Voidsever passed through empty air as Vane dissolved into a burst of red and silver light, instantly vanishing from the canyon.
"Coward," Dante muttered, lowering the sword.
Vane had escaped, but the army he had commanded was gone. Silas’s trap had failed catastrophically.
Dante dismissed Voidsever back into his wrist and turned to look down at the massive, smoking crater.
Because the ten thousand players had initiated combat under the aggressive, open-world PvP parameters, the system penalized them heavily for dying.
The massive, glassed crater was completely littered with an astronomical amount of dropped loot.
It looked like it had rained silver and gold coins, rusted armor, and mid-tier weapons.
Before Dante could even open his infinite inventory to start the tedious process of vacuuming up an entire army’s worth of gear, a massive, cast-iron frying pan dropped from the sky, landing heavily in the smoking dirt next to his boots.
Mei dropped down from a high, surviving rock formation, landing gracefully on the pan.
"Boss!" Mei cheered, wiping soot from her forehead. "That was the coolest thing I have ever seen! You literally dropped the sky on them!"
Pip fluttered out of her tunic, taking one look at the massive, endless field of dropped loot.
The tiny red dragon’s eyes actually rolled back into his head, completely overwhelmed by the sheer, unadulterated volume of wealth.
"I am going to need a shovel," Pip breathed heavily, instantly diving into the nearest pile of silver coins.
"You guys followed me?" Dante asked, genuinely surprised.
"Of course we did!" Mei grinned. "We’re the vanguard! We don’t hide in the city while the Boss is out flattening canyons."
Dante smiled slightly.
"Start looting," Dante ordered, turning away from the crater. "We have a lot of gear to haul back to the Emporium."
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