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The moment Skar King felt the Ultra Slashes coming, it spun around and bolted behind Shimo. No thought of attacking. Just survival.
Shimo looked up.
Two Ultra Slashes, screaming toward it. And behind them, a column of ultra-high-temperature light chasing close behind.
"Roooar, !!" Shimo threw out a blast of frost breath, sweeping it across both spinning discs. The ice slowed them, shifted their angle, and they buried themselves deep into the hall floor with a grinding thud.
Around them, the Giant Apes scattered. Neither fighter was anything they wanted to get near. Unlike the surface Titans, these creatures had enough intelligence to form clans, enough sense to know when a fight wasn't theirs.
Frost breath was no ordinary technique. Among Titans, it was feared absolutely. King Ghidorah himself had been frozen solid by it. Every Giant Ape that had ever dared defy Skar King had ended up an ice sculpture.
But this time, it was facing the Spacium Beam. Five hundred thousand degrees. Five hundred thousand horsepower of raw destruction.
And right now, in Natsuki's hands, the beam was running close to the power of his prime. Temperature, force , both pushed further than baseline. You could see it without even measuring: the beam twisted the air around it, rolling out hellish waves of heat that warped everything in its path. Frost breath had no answer for that. No comparison, none at all.
"Roar!"
"ROAR!" Skar King flattened itself behind Shimo as the wave of heat hit it in the face. It screamed at Shimo to push harder, crank up the frost, do something.
The expression on its ugly face was pure panic.
Where the hell did this freak come from?
It had spent years building toward this. Gathered its strength, built its army, prepared to flatten the Hollow Earth and then the surface. With Shimo at its side, no Titan could match it. Its strategist had confirmed it: the Atomic Dinosaur was weakened, a shadow of what it used to be. Nothing in this world should have been able to stop them.
And now it looked like they might not even make it out of the Hollow Earth.
"Roooar..." Shimo watched its frost breath dissolve the instant it touched that beam. It was losing ground fast. Steadily, inevitably.
Maybe it should just give up.
The frost breath melted on contact. The plasma fireballs the beam generated as it warped the air were enough to break apart the frost before it could even spread. There was no move to make here. No angle that worked.
Shimo's temperament had always been extraordinary , not in power, but in patience. Hit it once and it might blink, go quiet for a while, sulk inward. A complete contradiction to the titanic force it carried. Easily the most docile creature of its tier.
"OOH! OOH OOH!" Skar King saw Shimo starting to check out and immediately panicked, jamming its crystal, forcing the connection harder. Not now. It absolutely could not retreat now. If it fell back here, it was finished.
The conquest of the world could not end here.
"Roooar, !!" And then Kong came in with the axe.
Shimo had no attention left for Skar King. Kong had his footing back, his head clear, and he'd spotted the opening , Skar King flinching, distracted. He closed the gap fast, grabbed Skar King by the throat, his battle axe still surging with charge from the temple altar. Combat power at absolute peak.
With a roar, he swung the axe at Skar King's neck.
"OOH OOH!!" Skar King snapped back. It drove a kick into Kong's gut and grabbed the axe arm with its other hand before the blow could land.
It wasn't nothing, Skar King. Years of surviving, absorbing Hollow Earth radiation, the symbiotic crystal sustaining its lifespan across ages , none of that time had gone to waste. Among the Giant Apes alive today, its combat ability sat second only to Kong. The two of them ground against each other, locked.
During the struggle, Kong glanced over his shoulder at the beam smashing unstoppably through the frost.
"Roooar—!!" He drove everything he had into his arms and hurled Skar King , diagonally, upward.
"Ooh!" Skar King had never wanted to be in close range anyway. Kong launching it? Perfect. It went with the force, caught air, and vaulted upward.
Nearby, Shimo had already made its peace with losing.
It was just quietly praying the beam wouldn't hurt too much on impact.
Ice was supposed to counter fire. That was the law of nature. But this beam wasn't really fire. The temperature was almost incidental. A side effect. Shimo's frost breath had no leverage against whatever this actually was.
It braced itself.
Then the beam changed direction.
"Roo?" Shimo blinked.
In the air above, the giant shifted his arm. The beam swung across the stone wall of the hall in a single motion, cutting clean through it, leaving a hollow gash in the rock. Fast. Blindingly fast.
Skar King was still floating higher up.
It felt it a half-second before it understood.
It's coming for me.
Then the light swallowed everything.
"SCREEEEEEEEECH——!!"
No ground. No leverage. Nothing to push off from. The Spacium Beam hit Skar King dead-on, and the heat tore into it , not fire, something worse, something that didn't care what kind of body it hit. The energy ripped through every layer of defense and kept going. The sheer impact force drove it backward and upward, tumbling through the air.
The comeback. The conquest. Every war it had planned and dreamed and bled toward.
All of it died the moment the light did.
BOOM. BOOM. BOOM.
A massive hole blew open in the ceiling of the hall. Skar King's remains and the beam traveled together, still climbing. The beam found the crystal in Skar King's grip and shattered it. Then it erased Skar King along with it. Then it kept going, crossed the gravity boundary, and didn't slow.
It hit the surface of another gravity continent on the other side , a lake. Water detonated upward. The nearest water vaporized instantly. The beam drove through soil and stone, bored through layer after layer of rock, and kept boring.
Over a thousand miles of rock. No tunnels, no shortcuts. The beam punched through all of it , from the Hollow Earth, up through the crust, up through the seabed. The ocean floor shook. Then the beam broke into the dark water, crossed the sea, and rose into open sky. The clouds above spiraled outward in a perfect ring from the impact, and then the beam punched through those too, and was gone.
"Roooar..." Kong stood with his mouth open.
He knew his ally was strong. He'd known that.
But this?
By the time the attack reached its latter half, the timer on the giant's chest had already hit its limit. The light flickered to red. He de-transformed.
Natsuki hadn't held back. Not a fraction.
He didn't want to find out what a second phase looked like.
➤ Next: You Are Out of Time
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