General Baltro dashed forward and slashed down with a Magical Artefact! The Artefact tore through the Shadow Machina’s sword arm, and the Shadow Machina felt an intense pain surge through its body as the arm fell to the water below! The Shadow Machina could see its own death arriving quickly, and in that moment, it felt a strange sense of relief coursing through its body! The Shadow Machina had been a soldier right from the moment it was born. It had been experimented on and trained by the scientists to follow orders. And the only time it could think or feel at all was when it was given an order to carry out a mission. The Shadow Machina had nothing even remotely resembling a life.
But at this moment, for the first time in its life, the Shadow Machina felt like it was in control of its destiny. The Shadow Machina realised at that moment that General Baltro hadn’t discovered him by accident! The Shadow Machina was fast enough to have made sure General Baltro never noticed it in the sky, and it was strong enough to have killed multiple Machina and escaped from here without much effort! But there was a desperate creature inside the Shadow Machina that wanted this to happen! The creature had forced the Shadow Machina to move slowly through the sky while hoping that someone would detect it, and it was that creature that made the Machina fight a losing battle against more than a hundred soldiers! The Shadow Machina realised that it wanted to be killed.
General Baltro pointed his cannon blaster at the Shadow Machina’s head with a sneer on his face, and the Shadow Machina smiled as the bright red light of the cannon blaster filled its vision!
’I feel alive.’
BOOOMMM!!!
The cannon blaster completely eviscerated the Shadow Machina’s head, and wires and blood flew through the air as the Shadow Machina was killed! General Baltro frowned as the Shadow Machina’s last moment replayed in his head again, and General Baltro wondered why the Shadow Machina had been smiling. But General Baltro didn’t allow that to bother him for long, as he felt another thought take over his mind. Who was this Machina, and what had it been looking at up here in the sky! General Baltro turned around to look in the direction the Shadow Machina had come from, and at that moment, he felt his eyes widen as a massive structure began to appear in the sky!
’Is that... a city!?’
General Baltro saw a massive castle and multiple buildings slowly forming out of thin air, but before he could appreciate the beauty of what he was seeing, a pressure unlike anything General Baltro had ever felt before suddenly pressed down on everyone!
DOOON!
The weaker Machina soldiers felt their minds break from the sheer power behind that pressure, and many of them began to fall to the ocean below as they lost consciousness! But the stronger Machina soldiers like General Baltro were able to maintain their consciousness for a few seconds longer, and that was the only reason why General Baltro managed to catch a glimpse of a beautiful black-haired woman rising from the top of the castle like a fallen angel ascending from hell! Blood and shadows swirled and twisted around the woman in a protective bubble, and as the woman raised her hand to the sky, the pressure pressing down on the Machina suddenly rose to even greater levels, and in the next moment, the world of Riyad exploded!
KA-BOOOOMMM!!!
.....
[Within the City of Atlantis]
[A Few Minutes Earlier]
They were close, Jason could feel it in his bones. Jason’s eyes were narrowed in concentration, and there was sweat dripping from his chin as he went through multiple rune sequences and glyphs in rapid succession. Beside him, Azrael and Vana were also going through the same process as they tried to figure out the final connection between the rune Key and the Foundation to finally break through the Rune! The process of Rune Crafting was a very interesting subject because although the creation of a Rune was something that took a very long time and a lot of effort, it was also known that the destruction of a rune was something that could be done very easily. A rune that took you more than a day to create could be destroyed in less than a minute by someone with the right amount of knowledge and expertise in rune crafting! So long as someone is able to find the connection between the Rune Key and the foundation, and they can break that connection, then your rune would fall apart!
This singular fact led a lot of rune crafters to become a lot more creative with the way they connected their Runes together! Master Rune crafters were known to create entire sequences that would hide the connection between the Key and the foundation, and this made it extremely hard for people to break their rune down! There was even one Rune crafter who had become known for creating entirely new secondary runes that would serve as the sequence to hide the connection! So before you could break down the main rune, you had to first figure out how to break down the secondary rune!
The man who created the [Cage of Eternity] had done something similar to protect his own rune! But rather than using just one single secondary rune that would protect the sequence, he had made an algorithm of runes that connected in a certain way across the entire rune! This allowed him to hide the main Rune Key and Foundation within those sequences, and unless you were capable of deciphering the algorithm in just the right way, you wouldn’t be able to unlock his cage! It was grueling work that required absolute concentration as well as extreme intelligence to work around! There were parts of the rune where you needed to carry out massive mathematical additions and multiplications, and other parts where you needed to work on riddles in the Aruna language before you could figure out what was going on!
But for a runecrafter who was confident in himself, something like this wasn’t impossible! Jason, Azrael, and Vana had been working around the clock like a well-oiled machine as they tried to figure out every single sequence in the rune! They had gone through nearly everything that they needed to complete, and they finally managed to separate the Rune Key from the foundation, so now the only thing that was left for them to completely break this rune was figuring out the final mathematical sequence holding the key and foundation together.
’This is an inverted oval with some parts missing. I need to integrate it and figure out the smaller unit before putting it back in. Azrael, carry out the calculations while I work on connecting the glyphs. Vana, I need you to make sure the key and foundation remain separate while we work. If you notice anything out of place, then alert me immediately.’
Jason passed these messages to his subordinates with a frown, and the subordinates immediately agreed as they began to carry out their tasks! Jason released a calm sigh and used his hand to clean the sweat on his chin before he began to rearrange the glyphs to connect them properly. Jason had no idea that a rune could ever be this hard, and he didn’t know if he would’ve been able to break through this rune if he didn’t have Azrael and Vana here with him. But Jason couldn’t deny that this was fun! It was so fucking fun that it was almost enough for him to ignore just how complicated it was! The [Cage of Eternity] was absolutely fucking brilliant, and Jason actually found himself wishing that he would run into Jucal Varga sometime in the future! If Jason ever met Varga, he would first punch him in the face for putting such a fucking difficult rune in Jason’s path! But after the punch, Jason would shake his hand for such an extraordinary achievement! The amount of effort it would’ve taken to create this rune was immeasurable, and Jason knew that it definitely deserved a lot of respect!
’My King, I’ve made a breakthrough with the algorithms. All that remains is to connect it with the glyphs.’