Chapter 762: 762. The Grannies Are Finally Working Together! Who Would’ve Thought!
"A chaotic, non-Euclidean soup that neither of us has ever tested individually."
"Which means the Foresight has no reference for it!" Valentina yelled, a manic laugh bubbling in her throat. "It will try to ’look up’ the answer, and in that moment of confusion... that’s our half second."
"No," Morwenna corrected, her expression turning deadly serious as she prepared to launch their final, desperate gambit. "We don’t just need a half second."
"A half second is a heartbeat; it’s too short to land a killing blow."
"We need to build something that takes longer than half a second to assemble within that occluded medium."
"We don’t just want to confuse its math..."
"We want to blind the god," Valentina finished, her eyes locking onto the Avatar’s glowing, magma-like gaze. "We need to build a field so complex, so spatially broken, that the Foresight cannot see through it at all."
"We aren’t just changing the path... we’re erasing the map."
They stood frozen for a moment, two warriors etched in the dust and blood of a dying battlefield, staring at one another across the jagged, broken geometry of the engagement zone. The air between them was thick with the smell of ozone, pulverized stone, and the metallic tang of their own sweat and blood.
"If the field occludes the Foresight’s medium," Morwenna said, her voice dropping to a low, gravelly rasp, "the construct will pivot."
"It won’t be blind, but it will shift its sensory priority..."
"It will fall back on its geological awareness, and the Earthen Authority will stop looking at the air and start reading through the substrate."
"It’ll try to feel us through the ground," Valentina added, her eyes narrowing as she visualized the physics. "The geological awareness reads position and mass."
"It’s a sonar of the soul of the earth. But it doesn’t read elemental working architecture."
"It doesn’t understand the shape of magic. If I can run the compressed elemental output inside the field where the geological awareness can see the mass signature but can’t decipher the specific working structure, it won’t be able to predict the output vector."
"It’ll be like trying to catch a ghost by feeling the wind."
"The field has to be massive," Morwenna countered, her brow furrowing. "It has to be wide enough that the geological awareness can’t peer in from the outside and reconstruct the geometry of the working."
"Twenty meters’ diameter," Valentina calculated instantly, her mind a whirlwind of energy math. "Based on the geological awareness read range at this current mass of substrate."
"Any smaller and it’ll see through the cracks."
Morwenna turned her head slowly, her gaze drifting toward the Avatar.
The titan had not moved. It stood like a monument to inevitable destruction, a silent, terrifying god of stone.
It wasn’t idle; it was calculating. Its foresight was reading the sudden lull in the combat, recognizing the pause in their movement, and it was holding its optimized response timing.
It was waiting for the exact microsecond to commit to a strike that would end them. It possessed the terrifying, unnatural patience of a machine, a creature that felt no psychological pressure, no anxiety, and no fear of the silence.
"It is listening," Morwenna whispered, a chill running down her spine.
"It hears us," Valentina corrected, her voice tight. "But it cannot interpret what it is hearing."
"The social comprehension layer isn’t at full function yet..."
"It reads our emotional register, the spikes in our adrenaline, and the tremors in our voices, but it doesn’t understand the conversational content."
"To him, our voices are just more vibrations in the air."
"Are you certain of that?" Morwenna asked, her hand tightening on her weapon until her knuckles turned white.
"I have been testing it for fourteen minutes!" Valentina snapped, the frustration of the fight bleeding into her tone.
HAAH... HAAH...
"Every time I’ve said something that should have fundamentally shifted its tactical approach based on the meaning of my words, it didn’t react."
"It only changes when our energy output changes."
"It’s not listening to our plans, Morwenna... It’s reading our signatures, and it’s tracking our power, not our intelligence."
Morwenna closed her eyes for a heartbeat, accepting the grim reality. The god was deaf to reason but sensitive to strength.
"Then we build the field together," Morwenna commanded, her voice hardening into steel. "My spatial distortion will act as the outer volume of the shroud."
"Your spatial compression will be the inner structure, the core."
"The combination will occlude the Foresight’s medium, and when the geological awareness tries to look in, it will only see a massive, distorted signature that matches the field itself, rather than the lethal working we’re hiding inside it."
"I need thirty seconds," Valentina said, her eyes glazing over as she began the mental heavy lifting. "Thirty seconds of pure, uninterrupted concentration to assemble the compressed elemental output inside the field."
"If my focus breaks for even a second, the whole thing collapses."
"I can hold the distortion field for forty," Morwenna said, her stance widening, bracing herself for the immense mana drain. "That gives us a ten-second margin."
"Do not let that margin run to zero," Valentina warned, her voice turning sharp, almost desperate. "If the distortion field collapses even a fraction of a second before the assembly is complete, the geological awareness will instantly read the geometry of the working, the Foresight will catch up, and Tremor will have everything it needs to crush us into red paste."
"I know how margins work, Valentina," Morwenna said.
Her voice wasn’t sharp or offended; it was the calm, weary voice of a veteran who had spent twenty years managing the razor-thin line between life and death. It was the voice of a woman who had seen friends die because a margin slipped by a millisecond.
"I know you do," Valentina said, a small, grim smile touching her lips as she prepared to begin the most dangerous ritual of her life. "I said it for myself."
They moved.
It wasn’t a frantic scramble or a desperate lunge; it was a synchronized, lethal transition. The coordination between the two women, forged in the crucible of a twenty-minute slaughter, snapped back into place with the terrifying precision of a closing trap.
Morwenna had just clawed her way back from the brink of physical annihilation. Only moments ago, Rex, acting on Aisella’s desperate command, had released the crushing six times gravity hold that had been threatening to turn Morwenna’s bones into powder.
The sudden global shift in pressure had been a violent, sickening sensation, like being yanked from the bottom of a deep ocean to the surface in a single heartbeat. Her lungs had screamed, her muscles had spasmed, and her very marrow had felt as though it were boiling.
But she had recovered with the grim, unnatural speed of a veteran whose entire existence was defined by managing external force. She was bruised, her breathing was a ragged, wet sound in her chest, and her muscles were twitching from the residual strain, but she was operational.
And an operational Morwenna, paired with a restored Valentina, was a nightmare the Avatar had been struggling to contain for the last four minutes of this eighteen-minute hell.
They had finally found it. The seam.
It wasn’t the physical chink in the stone armor that Calivara had identified during the early stages of the massacre. This was something far more profound.
This was a conceptual fault line, a crack in the very logic of the god. It was the precise point where the Avatar’s 97.3% predictive accuracy collided with the jagged, unmodelable 2.7% of its own existence.
It was the gap where the construct ceased to be Rex and became a machine trying to mimic a soul, a place where the simulation ran into the wall of the unknown.
VREEEEEEEEE!
Morwenna’s spatial distortion erupted first.
The air around her didn’t just move; it groaned. A low, nauseating hum vibrated through the ground as she forced the local reality to bend to her will.
The working expanded outward from her position, a violent, invisible wave of warped physics that carved out the exact twenty-meter diameter they had calculated.
SHHHHHH WIP!
The visual effect was haunting. The space within the sphere didn’t explode; it shimmered. It was a nauseating, liquid distortion, like looking through a lens of thick, moving oil.
Light hit the boundary and didn’t reflect; it curved, bending in ways that defied the eye, creating a localized pocket of reality where the very concept of "straight" no longer existed. Inside that sphere, the world became a surreal, warped nightmare of refracted light and twisted shadows, the unmistakable signature of a medium that had abandoned the laws of standard physics.
The Avatar reacted instantly.
THOOM!
The titan’s head tilted, its magma-bright eyes flashing as its Foresight swept the battlefield. It was looking for the next strike, the next trajectory, the next movement to counter.
But as its predictive gaze hit the boundary of Morwenna’s field, the Foresight hit a wall of pure, unadulterated chaos. The twelve-second window of future sight didn’t just fail; it shattered. The math didn’t add up.
The vectors were nonsensical. The "future" within that twenty-meter sphere was a blurred, unreadable smudge of spatial static.
CRACK RUMBLE!
The Avatar didn’t hesitate. It didn’t pause to wonder why its vision had gone blind.
It pivoted with the terrifying efficiency of an Apostle-class construct. As Valentina had predicted, the Foresight’s failure triggered an immediate sensory shift.
The god’s focus dropped from the air to the earth. It abandoned the visual and the temporal, plunging its consciousness deep into the stone, shifting its primary sensory input to the geological awareness.
It began to "feel" for them, searching the vibration of the substrate, trying to map their mass through the very floor of the plaza.
