Floor Six of the Abyssal Crypt was a graveyard of broken swords.
Grand Elder Moros leaned heavily against his celestial broadsword, his crimson robes stained with ash. Behind him, two hundred and eighty surviving imperial spellblades formed a weary circle, spirit shields flickering.
Before them rose the Iron King's Gate.
The portal was three hundred feet high, forged from enchanted black iron. Beyond it lay the lower subterranean chambers where the legendary Primordial Void Core was rumored to rest.
Standing directly before the gate was a living mountain of metal.
The Adamantine Colossus.
The automaton stood sixty feet tall, with limbs forged from unblemished adamantine alloy. Its chest glowed with a crimson furnace core, and its twin ruby eyes burned with ancient malice.
In its right fist, it gripped a war hammer capable of flattening watchtowers.
【Target: Adamantine Colossus】 【Grade: 8th-Tier Ancient Titan Construct】 【Defense: Absolute Physical & Elemental Immunity】 【Inspector Note: A sixty-foot metal brick with severe anger issues. Striking it with a sword is like throwing dried peas at a mountain. Requires an environmental cheese or fifty hours of mindless grinding.】
"Draw the Nine-Sun Severing Array!" Moros commanded, coughing blood into his sleeve. "Channel all spirit stones into the focal crystal!"
Ten battle-alchemists slammed their staves down.
A searing beam of golden solar energy erupted from the array, striking the Colossus dead center.
The heat was intense enough to melt iron in seconds.
Yet when the smoke cleared, the Colossus remained completely unharmed. Not even a smudge of soot marred its silver chest plate.
The titan let out a grating sound like grinding boulders, raising its colossal foot.
*THOOOOOM.*
The shockwave blasted across the cavern floor, tossing fifty spellblades through the air.
Moros skidded backward twenty yards, his boots gouging deep furrows into the rock.
"It is hopeless," Moros gasped, knuckles white on his hilt. "The First Emperor forged this sentinel from primordial star-iron! It possesses the Dao of Absolute Density! Even three Saint-Realm masters could not pierce its skin in a hundred days!"
Despair settled over the vanguard like a cold shroud.
Two hundred miles away, under a clear azure sky, Felix Vance tossed a candied walnut into his mouth.
He lay sprawled in his Zero-Gravity Recliner on the porch of Solitude Spire.
The afternoon sun warmed his bare legs, and a breeze carried the sweet honey perfume of the blooming Sun-Lotus Cabbage across the cedar deck.
Down in the clover, the Thunder Gryphon was snoring loudly, its eagle beak resting across its feathered paws like a contented barnyard dog.
On the porch railing, Barnaby the clockwork owl stood rigidly on guard.
His polished copper-tipped beak was sealed tight by the black rubber laboratory stopper. He clicked his gears in quiet frustration, tracking Felix's movements with amber crystal lenses.
Inside the kitchen, the short front leg of the pine table rested firmly on Grandmaster Vivienne’s Sovereign Heart Seal, perfectly rock-steady.
And in Felix's chest, the 2.0-Earth-Mass terrestrial core hummed with tranquil, planetary gravity.
Felix held the brass-cased AetherDeck in his left hand, gazing at the screen.
On the display, *Catacomb Crawler v2.0* had reached Floor Six.
His 8-bit knight stood at the threshold of a massive boss chamber. Directly across the room stood a giant gray sprite labeled with an intimidating red nameplate:
Felix stared at the boss statistics, his eyebrows furrowing in deep annoyance.
"Nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine armor?" Felix muttered. "And my basic punch does twelve damage? That's less than one point of damage per hit after armor reduction!"
He chewed the walnut, feeling a familiar wave of gamer disgust.
"Who designed this encounter?" Felix complained to the quiet porch. "A four-hour fight of tapping glass with my thumb? What is this, a grindy Korean MMO from 2004? I am not giving myself carpal tunnel for a mobile mini-game."
He studied the pixelated layout of the boss arena.
The chamber was a wide hall with vaulted ceilings. The Adamantine Golem marched along a rigid, predictable patrol path in front of the Iron Gate.
Right above the boss's route was a high stone ledge running along the northern wall.
Sitting on the edge of that ledge, teetering over the arena, was a round gray boulder sprite outlined with blinking white pixels.
In gaming language, a blinking outline on an object meant only one thing.
It was an interactive physics prop.
Felix’s sleepy eyes lit up with satisfaction.
"Look at that," Felix chuckled. "A loose physics boulder perched right above the boss path. The developers gave this guy ten thousand armor, but left an environmental kill prop sitting right on the ceiling."
Felix smiled a nostalgic smile.
Fair fights were for suckers. If the developers give you a boulder, you drop the boulder.
"Work smarter, not harder," Felix said smoothly.
He flicked the virtual D-pad.
His tiny 8-bit knight ignored the boss, jogging up a stone ramp along the side wall. The knight approached the blinking boulder from behind.
Felix pressed the virtual `[B]` button.
A prompt popped up: `[INTERACT: KICK PROP]`.
"Have a nice trip, buddy," Felix murmured, tapping the glass.
On the screen, the silver knight gave the boulder a casual boot.
The round stone rolled forward, tipped over the lip, and plummeted toward the golem below.
Two hundred miles away, in the subterranean darkness of Floor Six, the air pressurized violently.
High above the battlefield, three hundred feet in the air, the cavern ceiling rippled like liquid glass.
A spatial rift tore open with an echoing *CRACK*.
From that pitch-black tear, a monstrous object emerged.
It was a spherical boulder of meteoric granite, eighty feet wide and weighing five hundred solid tons. The rock was wrapped in atmospheric friction, glowing dull red around its edges.
The Adamantine Colossus froze mid-stride, its ruby eye-slits flickering in confusion.
*BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM.*
The impact was deafening.
The five-hundred-ton meteoric stone struck the crown of the Adamantine Colossus at terminal velocity, driven downward by the gravitational fury of a condensed planetary core.
The ancient titan did not deflect the stone.
The colossal kinetic force simply overwhelmed the structural integrity of matter itself.
With a sound like a hydraulic press flattening a tin can, the sixty-foot titan was smashed into the floor.
*SPLAT.*
Its metal legs buckled instantly. Its torso collapsed like an accordion. Its glowing ruby eyes shattered into red dust.
When the dust settled, the invincible titan was gone.
In its place lay the massive granite boulder, resting peacefully in a twenty-foot-deep crater. Poking out from beneath the stone were two flattened, paper-thin sheets of silver metal.
The titan had been compressed into a two-inch-thick pancake.
Grand Elder Moros stared at the crater, his jaw hanging completely slack.
Behind him, two hundred and eighty elite spellblades stood frozen like statues.
"A... a boulder?" Moros squeaked, his voice cracking into high soprano. "A five-hundred-ton meteoric celestial stone... dropped from the heavens?"
Master Alchemist Vane dropped to his knees, trembling violently.
"Grand Elder!" Vane shrieked. "A supreme spatial master reached into the cosmos, plucked an asteroid from the astral sea, and dropped it precisely onto the demon's crown!"
Moros collapsed to his knees, his forehead slamming into the cracked tiles.
"The Dao of Absolute Cheese!" Moros cried out, tears streaming down his cheeks. "He did not even deign to trade blows with the guardian! To the supreme ancestor, an eight-tier primordial titan is merely an ant beneath a rolling pebble! He kicked a stone from the heavens to clear our path!"
The spellblades dropped to their knees in unison, weeping with relief.
"Praise the Great Ancestor of the Heavens!" the soldiers chanted.
Back on Solitude Spire, Lyra Ashford stood frozen beside Felix's chair.
She had felt the tremor.
The 2.0-Earth-Mass terrestrial core in Felix's chest had pulsed once—a micro-gravitational flick that resonated with the tectonic plates.
Lyra’s violet eyes moved from Felix’s relaxed face down to the obsidian screen.
On the screen, a cartoonish 8-bit rock sat on top of a flattened gray sprite.
*He... he crushed an ancient titan with a casual kick,* Lyra thought, her knees trembling beneath her silk robes.
*The vanguard poured their blood into the battle, yet Senior Brother saw the futility of their struggle. With the divine indifference of a creator god, he nudged the celestial firmament! What mortals call an invincible guardian, Senior Brother treats as an interactive plaything!*
She watched Felix chew another walnut, his expression utterly bored.
*To Senior Brother, combat is merely an exercise in finding the path of least resistance! The True Dao does not fight—it simply rolls over the obstacle!*
On the AetherDeck screen, the heavy iron gate slid open with a pleasant 8-bit chime.
A loot reward window popped up:
Felix tapped the screen to claim the loot, but when he saw the item description, his face twisted in disgust.
"A crushed adamantine sheet?" Felix grumbled, rolling his eyes beneath his straw hat. "That's it? I defeat a giant boss and all I get is flattened scrap metal? What am I supposed to do with this, make a cookie baking tray?"
He tossed another walnut into his mouth, crunching it with deep dissatisfaction.
"Cheap developers," Felix sighed. "Always skimping on boss drops. At least give me some gacha tickets, you stingy cowards."
Beside him, Barnaby let out a sympathetic series of brass clicks from behind his rubber stopper, nodding his mechanical head.
Down in the yard, the Thunder Gryphon let out a sleepy yawn, curling back up into a tight ball.
Felix pulled his straw hat down over his nose.
His right thumb flicked the virtual D-pad, guiding the little silver knight through the open iron gate and down the stairs toward Floor Seven.
"Four more floors until the thousand-crystal milestone," Felix muttered, drifting halfway into a nap. "If the next boss doesn't drop decent loot, I'm writing a strongly worded review."