Chapter 1187: The Wrong Vault
Ethan shook his head.
"No need to waste time on them."
His gaze slid past the figures prowling in the distance and locked onto the deeper sky beyond.
"What matters right now is summoning more people and boosting our overall strength. If a full-scale war breaks out, our current size isn’t enough to take on every faction in this world."
Ataneya nodded obediently.
She was about to turn and pass the orders along—then her steps stopped short, like something had just hit her. She quickly pulled out a small, pale-yellow gemstone and held it out to Ethan.
"Master, I almost forgot."
She looked at him, excitement lighting up her eyes again.
"Before this, we found a world with insanely rich mineral resources. That’s where I broke through to where I am now."
Ethan took the pale-yellow gem. The moment his fingers closed around it, he felt the residue of a spatial coordinate inside—along with the unmistakable "scent" of ore veins. His expression shifted.
Ataneya kept going. "A lot of Emerald Castle’s people are still over there absorbing energy. I don’t think it’ll be long before they open a spatial passage and come here."
Ethan’s eyes widened.
He’d assumed Ataneya was the one special case—lucky enough to absorb a power that fit her perfectly, which was why she’d grown this fast.
Now it was obvious.
It wasn’t just her.
The whole of Emerald Castle might be getting a massive upgrade on the other side.
Ethan tightened his grip on the pale-yellow gem, and the messy half-formed ideas in his head snapped into place.
"Good."
He looked toward the distant mountains, his voice dropping into something colder and heavier.
"Then we’ll wait here."
Once they arrived, Emerald Castle’s overall strength would jump again. And only then would they truly have the confidence to sweep this world clean.
"When they get here," Ethan said, eyes sweeping toward the factions still lurking at the edge of the mountains, "we launch the total offensive immediately."
"Wipe this world out—completely."
Ataneya didn’t argue. She simply nodded, quiet and compliant.
The days that followed were... oddly calm.
Emerald Castle stayed in the valley and expanded at full speed. Creature Dwellings went up one after another. Ore was mined, hauled, and stockpiled nonstop. The Sky Fortress rotated patrols high above, while Fallen Star Guard and Powered Combat Armor reorganized and re-formed their units.
Before long, an overwhelmingly solid army had taken shape in the valley.
...
That day, the sky was suddenly ripped open by an astonishing force.
The cloud layer above Emerald Castle’s camp caved outward in a ring. Then a gigantic dimensional vortex yawned open. Its rim spun violently, black space-cracks and arcs of blue energy flashing together—like an exit had been torn open in the side of some dying world.
Bodies poured out of the vortex.
The moment they dropped into this sky, their energies were still in chaos. One had out-of-control thruster flames blasting from his back. Another dropped to one knee midair, one hand clamped hard over a裂口 in his chest. A few were in even worse shape—already split in half, kept alive only by raw energy forced through their Powered Combat Armor.
The man in front stabilized first.
He whipped his head around, face twisted with anger. His breathing was ragged, and there was still a wild, cornered frenzy in his eyes—the kind you only carried after running for your life.
"Where the hell did we end up?"
He snarled the words, an energy sphere condensing instantly in his palm. Blue light compressed inside it until it looked almost solid. With a casual flick, he hurled it into the empty sky beside him.
BOOM!
The sphere detonated midair and blew a thin, elongated裂缝 straight through space. Turbulent distortion spilled out around the edges—then the world’s own force slammed it shut, sealing it like a wound that refused to stay open.
A few people nearby were gulping air, still shaking.
One of them—a man with ram horns—braced himself with one hand while the other clamped around a severed arm, gripping it like he could force it back on through sheer will. Blood dripped from a crack in his Powered Combat Armor, but before it could fall, a blue gemstone embedded in the armor’s abdomen pulsed and drew the blood back in, reabsorbing it.
"Don’t know."
The horned man lifted his head, taking in the surrounding mountain ranges and the camp below. His voice came out rough and hoarse.
"Looks like an unfamiliar world. But the energy here is dense. We should be able to recover our strength."
Everyone who’d burst out of the dimensional vortex was injured.
The lightly wounded had shattered armor and unstable energy. The serious ones were missing huge portions of their bodies, their remaining flesh pinned in place by mechanisms inside the Powered Combat Armor—barely held together so they wouldn’t fall apart midair. It looked like they’d just suffered a crushing defeat and had been forced to flee into this world.
And yet...
Even like this, their auras were still terrifying.
Their Powered Combat Armor came in different designs—some as thick and heavy as mobile fortresses, some tight and layered like scales, some fitted with enormous propulsion wings. But no matter the style, every single set had the same thing:
A blue gemstone embedded in the abdomen.
Those blue gems kept glowing.
Each pulse sent a flood of energy racing along the armor’s lines, through their bodies—closing wounds, stabilizing shattered limbs, and keeping them floating in the air. Watching from afar, Ethan made the call immediately.
That thing was an energy core unique to another world.
Its presence was absurdly strong.
And it could keep feeding them power without end.
Just then, the man in front spotted Emerald Castle’s camp in the distance.
It sat dead-center in the valley like it owned the place. Creature Dwellings were packed tightly along the ore-vein nodes. The Sky Fortress hovered high overhead. Layer after layer of energy barriers covered the walls and the ore warehouses.
For someone who’d just fled a crushing defeat and desperately needed to rebuild his strength... this wasn’t a camp.
It was a treasure vault sitting out in the open.
The man’s eyes lit up.
Whatever caution he’d had left vanished. His aura detonated outward, and he turned into a streak of blue light that shot toward the camp. In moments, he was hovering above Emerald Castle, looking down from on high like he already owned the sky.
"Didn’t expect to find something this big out here," he said, lips curling into a grin.
Greed drowned out the pain in his face.
"Boys," he barked, "wipe this place off the map. Now."
The people behind him moved immediately.
Energy flared out of their shattered Powered Combat Armor, surging in all directions. The blue gemstones embedded in their armor lit up at the same time, throwing beams between them—threads of light that knit together into a thick, oppressive blockade around the camp.
In the blink of an eye, the space around Emerald Castle’s perimeter was sealed.
Inside the camp, alarms screamed to life.
Ethan felt that terrifying pressure the instant it dropped.
He lifted his head toward the sky. Power rose in his body in sync, responding like muscle memory. Then he stepped out and floated up above the camp. Transparent lightning coiled around him. Golden runes brightened along his arms. The strength he’d only just stabilized snapped right back into combat readiness.
The people up there looked half-dead—armor wrecked, bodies broken, some of them barely holding themselves together.
Ethan still didn’t underestimate them for a second.
If they could flee here from another world and still lock down the space around Emerald Castle while seriously injured... their background was anything but simple.
"Who are you?" Ethan’s voice carried upward.
The man in front narrowed his eyes.
Energy rippled out from him, gathering behind his back and condensing into a huge, warped silhouette. Its outline was blurry, but the pressure it gave off was suffocating—like a monstrosity stitched together from countless shattered armor plates and blue cores.
"What I am isn’t your business," the man said, staring down at Ethan with pure arrogance.
"From this moment on, this camp is mine."
He lifted a hand and pointed toward the small city below.
"Take your people and get the hell out. Right now. Otherwise..."
His grin widened, ugly and sure of itself.
"...I’ll kill every last one of you."