Dragging his broken frame up the final stone step, Hegemon collapsed onto the dais beside Lily. His lungs burned like fire, and his right knee was a mangled mess, but he ignored the blinding agony. Lily lay pale and motionless, her consciousness trapped in the void while the grotesque magical tool squirmed at her abdomen, greedily siphoning her life force.
To safely detach the parasite without causing fatal shock, Hegemon needed to inject a massive counter-burst of mana to overload its absorption core. His own reserves were practically empty, but then a sharp realization struck him. Lily's mana was directly tied to her vast, virtually infinite reservoir of knowledge. She possessed all the energy required—it just needed to be redirected from within.
Hegemon pressed his trembling palms against the pulsing device, forcing his own faint mana thread to bypass the parasite's intake valve and tap directly into Lily's infinite core.
Suddenly, a terrifying pressure descended upon the altar.
Noticing the disruption to his siphon, Leo completely abandoned his duel with Kenji. Phasing straight through the air, the white-haired officer lunged directly for Hegemon and Lily to crush them into dust. But Kenji's instincts fired instantaneously. Dropping his guard, the Hero hurled his entire body forward, throwing himself right between the strike and the altar to block Leo's advance with his divine golden aura.
CRACK!
The abrupt shockwave of kinetic energy and redirected mana caused the parasite to violently rupture. The black device shattered into harmless, glowing dust.
As the parasite broke, Lily's eyes snapped open. Still half-unconscious and operating on raw survival instinct, her gaze locked onto Leo. A blinding, geometric aperture exploded within her pupils as she instinctively unleashed Eyes Sealing.
Before Leo could even process the threat, her gaze forcefully compressed his spatial dimension (D), violently dragging his existence out of the current reality and banishing him straight into the Digital World—a far lower, artificial sub-reality layer.
Leo's eyes widened in absolute, horrifying disbelief. "Impossible—!" he shrieked, his voice distorting into static before his entire body dissolved into pixelated fragments and vanished completely.
Kenji and Hegemon stared in absolute shock. The overwhelming ability activated and vanished in a fraction of a second, completely bypassing any friendly targets without causing a single scratch to them. Having expended her remaining strength, Lily's eyes closed once more, and she collapsed back onto the stone dais.
BOOM!
Without Leo's spatial presence and Relay's anchor, the entire subterranean altar began to violently collapse. Massive boulders rained from the cavern ceiling, and the folded space tore apart at the seams.
"The whole pocket dimension is coming down!" Kenji yelled over the deafening roar. "We have to leave now!"
"Dammit... move!" Hegemon rasped, desperately trying to drag his shattered body forward across the crumbling floor.
"We don't have time for you to crawl!" Kenji barked. Without wasting a single second, the Hero scooped up the unconscious Lily under his left arm, grabbed Hegemon by his collar with his right hand, and hoisted them both up like cargo.
Sprinting at maximum speed, Kenji leaped across the fracturing stone bridges, carrying both of them out of the collapsing abyss just as the cavern shattered into complete darkness.