The "Manual Override" didn't feel like a surge of power. It felt like a seizure.
The moment the command left Jinsu's lips, the violet light from the System screens didn't just hang in the air—it violently collapsed inward, sinking directly into his pupils.
[Warning: Host Stability: 59%... 54%...]
[Neural Pathways are being forcefully pruned to allocate Void Processing.]
Jinsu's heart skipped a beat. Then another. His pulse ceased to be a rhythm and became a high-frequency vibration that made his teeth ache. The taste of copper flooded his mouth, hot and thick.
The Guardian's silver spear-tip was exactly three inches from his windpipe.
To the Guardian, time was flowing perfectly. To Jinsu, the universe had flatlined. The ambient dust in the air froze like mid-air pebbles. The crackling, roaring shockwave of displaced air from the Boss's supersonic launch was stretched into a low, demonic, vibrating groan.
Now, the Nihil Engine roared in his mind. Catch it.
Jinsu raised his left hand.
Because of his newly acquired Processing speed, he didn't swing his arm; his body simply bypassed the necessary frames of animation. His hand glitched—disappearing from his side and reappearing instantly, his fingers wrapping around the shaft of the silver spear.
The kinetic energy of a supersonic strike—an impact meant to vaporize marble and human bone alike—collided with Jinsu's palm.
But there was no explosion. No shockwave.
The moment his skin touched the Guardian's weapon, the deafening pop of a vacuum opening echoed through the hall, followed by that horrifying, high-pitched plucking sound.
[Skill: Void Grip (Lvl 1) has evolved into ➔ Absolute Arrest (Lvl 1)]
The blinding blue mana coating the spear didn't scatter. It was eaten.
The Guardian's eyes—burning with a cold, bureaucratic blue—widened slightly. For the first time, the ancient, machine-like entity showed a micro-expression of something resembling human confusion. The spear hadn't been blocked. The kinetic energy, the momentum, and the very mana fueling the strike had been entirely deleted from reality.
"My turn," Jinsu rasped. His voice sounded hollow, echoing as if he were speaking from the bottom of an empty well.
He didn't pull the spear. He pushed his own existence forward.
[Attribute: Erasure — Overdrive Engaged]
Jinsu stepped into the Guardian's guard, his right hand shooting out, palm flat, aiming dead center for the ornate silver chest plate.
The Guardian reacted with terrifying, centuries-old combat efficiency. Recognizing the failure of its weapon, it instantly released the spear shaft and brought its massive, armored forearms together in a perfect cross-block. It was an ultimate defense, layered with defensive runes meant to withstand a mountain-leveling siege.
Jinsu's palm struck the silver bracers.
There was no sound of metal colliding. There was no physical pushback.
Instead, a perfect, basketball-sized sphere of absolute violet nothingness expanded from Jinsu's palm. The Guardian's silver armor, the ancient defensive runes, the condensed mana—they simply ceased to be.
They didn't break. They were unwritten, leaving behind only faint, jagged violet glyphs of absence hanging in the air.
"Records," Jinsu spat, his eyes glowing with toxic violet light, "are meant to be burned."
The sphere of nothingness bypassed the erased arms and sank directly into the Guardian's chest.
[Alert: Enemy 'Failed Guardian' is attempting a Logic-Shield!]
[Void Saturation: 12%... 18%...]
The heat in Jinsu's blood instantly inverted into a freezing, marrow-deep cold. His vision flickered to monochrome. He was winning the physical exchange, but his biology was screaming. Every microsecond he held the erasure, a percentage of his own "Stability" was being fed into the Engine as fuel.
CRACK.
The Guardian's blue eyes violently flickered like a dying bulb.
"Fatal... Error..." the Boss wheezed. Its voice had lost its iron-bell authority; it was now the skipping, jagged sound of a corrupted audio file. "Unregistered... variable..."
With a final, desperate surge of will, Jinsu pushed his palm one inch deeper.
The vacuum-sealed silence of the Sanctum violently popped. The air pressure slammed back into the room as the Guardian was blown backward. Its chest was missing a perfect, smooth, circular hole right where the core of a machine should be.
The massive entity crashed into the golden throne, the impact so violent the entire dais split in two, sending chunks of gold and marble raining down.
Then, dead silence.
Jinsu stood alone in the center of the ruined hall, his right hand still outstretched, trembling uncontrollably.
[Hidden Boss 'The Failed Guardian' has been neutralized.]
[Calculating XP...]
[Level Up!]
[Level Up!]
[Level Up!]
[Warning: Host Stability: 41%]
[Emergency Shutdown imminent. Do you wish to claim rewards before neurological collapse? Y/N]
Jinsu's knees buckled.
He hit the shattered marble floor hard. The adrenaline was evaporating, leaving behind a pain so absolute it felt like his veins were filled with crushed glass. His lungs burned as he desperately tried to suck in the stale, holy air of the Sanctum.
His vision was rapidly collapsing into a dark tunnel, but through sheer, stubborn spite, he forced his heavy head up, looking toward the ruined throne.
A loot drop was floating above the Guardian's dissolving corpse.
But it wasn't a standard blue system orb. It wasn't a glowing silver artifact.
It was a jagged, fist-sized shard of pure, flickering black static.
And it was humming with the exact same frequency as his Nihil Engine.