The Kernel Sovereign didn’t pause to reassess its strategy with human pause.
Recognizing that raw striking force had met an unexpected clockwork bending, the titan engaged its backup defense protocol. Its four arms spread wide, and the rotating dodecahedrons of its chest lined up into a single, flat sharp-angled plane. A blinding flash of clear cyan soft glow burst from the central starlight core, washing over the entire Central Console Dais.
A six-sided cage of pure, frozen map point boundaries snapped into existence around the platform.
The air within the cage ceased to circulate.
To Lin Tao’s senses, the physical environment underwent a terrifying, unnatural solidification. Dust motes floating in the air froze in mid-motion, locked into their exact spatial map points. Sound shakes died within inches of the lips. The howling wind of the Singularity Well was put out, replaced by a choking, crystal-clear silence that pressed against the ears like deep ocean water.
The light in the chamber was refracting into millions of tiny cyan prisms, splitting the shadows into sharp-angled fragments. Across Lin Tao’s augmented left eye, a high-priority system countdown began to tick down in crimson fractions: T-minus three point eight seconds until sky-high discharge. Core energy thickness approaching critical saturation.
