His plan to trap her was a good plan, but by the time he started shrinking the enclosure, she had thrown the lance and left the mental enclosure. So she was already gone and the bullets of the two Gatling guns only shot the air where she used to be.
This made him curse, saying, "Damn, she’s fast."
She had tried to leap above the mental tentacles and escape into the air, but he had used his intuition and his vague sense of her location to make the mental tentacles grab at her.
She was so fast that if not for the fact that he sensed that one of the mental tentacles had touched her mind and that the Mental Freeze Metac had taken effect upon contact, he would have thought that she passed through the enclosure unscathed.
But she wasn’t unscathed. Her mind had been frozen when she came into contact with the enclosure.
However, she had been moving at a fast speed, which granted her body a lot of momentum. The immense momentum had catapulted her out of the encirclement, even though her mind was frozen and she couldn’t control her body.
When she came out from the other side of the enclosure, the Mental Freeze Metac stopped affecting her mind, so she regained control of her body. Then she zoomed off.
All of these had happened too quickly for him to take advantage of the period her mind was frozen to plant a Mind Node in her mind. In fact, she didn’t appear to have been affected by the enclosure at all. There was only a slight dip in her speed when she touched the mental tentacle.
As for the lance that she threw, it had struck him on his shoulder. But just like the previous one, it didn’t hurt him much. In fact, the damage from this one was far less than the other one because she threw it at a farther distance from him.
So both he and she had failed in their attacks. But this didn’t satisfy Loki.
He looked in the direction she escaped to and said, "I wish I had a cloud of darkness that could turn into stone right about now."
Then he looked at the ground and said, "What do we have here? Isn’t this stone? And a lot of it too."
Since what he needed was already around him in a large quantity, he decided to take advantage. So, he deactivated both the Mind Network Metac and the Mind Freeze Metac. Then he had the Shifting Armor fuse his two cannon hands into one large drill.
The drill that he created had a diameter that was longer than the length of his shoulders from left to right. So even though the drill was small compared to his overall size, it was thicker than his body.
After activating the drill, he pierced the ground with it and let it dig into the ground. As the drill ejected soil from behind it, it created a hole in the ground. Loki went into this hole head-on.
He let the drill create a passage through the ground while he followed along in the passage in a prone position. The position was inconvenient, but his speed was fast. This was because the drill was pulling him forward, and he didn’t need to do anything to move.
In the darkness of the ground, he smiled bitterly as he said, "See me, the great and powerful Loki, reduced to moving around like a mole. I hope this is going to be worth it."
He still continued to move in the direction of the next city. The only difference was that he was doing it underground, and he couldn’t be sure if he was moving in the right direction.
In order not to get lost in the ground, he had come to the surface occasionally to get his bearings and make sure that he was on the right path. This was both tedious and frustrating.
A few seconds after resorting to digging through the ground like a mole, the guardian of light arrived. She looked around and didn’t find him. All she saw was a hole in the ground.
When she paid attention to the ground, she sensed the vibrations coming from the ground. As for the hole, it looked like something had entered the ground through it.
While she was wondering what all of these meant, she saw Loki come to the surface for directions. Then she saw him reenter the ground and disappear from sight.
This made her realize that he was the one responsible for the hole and vibrations in the ground. It also forced her to make a decision.
She could never give up right now, try to stop him from digging in the ground, or follow him into the ground.
Following him into the ground was out of the question, as that would reduce her speed. Even if she were to enter the tunnel that had already been dug, her speed would still fall to a crawl because she would have to crawl through the tunnel.
Since going into the ground was out of the question, and she didn’t want to give up, she could only try to force him to come out of the ground.
After thinking for a long time, the only way she could think of to force him to come up was to stomp on the ground right on top of him.
So she flew to the ground and crashed right on top of him. The collision between her and the ground caused the ground to crack.
The force of the collision was so great that the tunnel that had been created had to cave in. Then the ground also tried to crush Loki in it.
Unfortunately for her, Loki might be behaving like a mole, but he wasn’t as soft and squishy as a mole. His body is as durable as tungsten, and his armor is also very powerful.