Good. The tactics are working.
Rover twisted sideways, letting Dreamless' Havoc longsword carve the air where she'd been a heartbeat ago. A single clean hit from that blade would almost certainly kill her on the spot. The knowledge didn't slow her down. She found the gap in Dreamless' recovery and struck.
One hit. Never greedy. Teleport out.
She stopped limiting herself to Dreamless' blind spot at the rear. Every angle the creature couldn't see became an opening.
Bang. Bang. Bang.
From the distant hillside, the Midnight Rangers' ace snipers threaded round after round into Dreamless with surgical precision. The bullets couldn't scratch a Calamity Class, but they could irritate. They could distract.
And every flicker of distraction gave Rover a cleaner window.
Then...
"Rover, we have a plan on our end!"
Yangyang's voice came through the Pangu Terminal, relaying the Rangers' battle strategy. Rover agreed the instant she heard it.
But Dreamless changed.
Mid-swing, the Havoc longsword in her grip ballooned outward, its slender form snapping back into the massive war scythe. She spun with the weapon's momentum, a full three-sixty, scything everything within reach.
"Ngh!"
Rover had just teleported behind the creature and nearly ate the blow head-on. Pure instinct fired off a time-stop centered on herself, freezing the war scythe inches from her face. She ducked under the stilled blade and warped clear.
This is a problem.
Sweat beaded along her hairline. The longsword's reach had been limited, manageable. The war scythe turned every swing into a full-circle kill zone. No more backstabs.
Pair that with the Havoc Authority that meant instant death on contact, and even she had to admit it was absurd.
For what it was worth, this would become the universal verdict of every enemy the two Rovers ever faced in the future. The "terrifying scythe-wielder" and her Havoc Authority were, by consensus, completely unfair.
And it didn't stop there.
Dreamless was a Calamity Class Tacet Discord. Her arsenal couldn't be limited to melee. She'd maxed out ranged combat capabilities that rivaled the Bell-Borne Geochelone's.
"Bestowing... death."
She rose into the air, and around her bloomed countless diamond-shaped portals of violet light. In the next instant, like a certain golden king unleashing the full fury of his treasury, an endless volley of purple lances rained down.
The barrage shook the earth.
The firepower of a single Tacet Discord matched an entire legion's bombardment, and every lance carried Havoc Authority. Countless projectiles. Impossible to block. Lethal on contact.
They exploded on impact.
"Could you be any more broken?!"
"Rover!" The cry came from a dozen throats at once.
Yangyang and the others watched in horror. Without waiting for orders, every Midnight Ranger and Black Shores operative opened fire on Dreamless with everything they had. They knew it wouldn't hurt her.
But if it drew her attention for even a second, that was enough. Even if the price of catching Dreamless' notice was death.
Dreamless ignored them all.
She would kill every last member of this Civilization, of course. But first, the greatest threat had to be confirmed dead.
When the dust and smoke cleared, as if honoring the ironclad rule that explosions without a visible body meant survival, Dreamless found nothing but scorched, ravaged earth.
Rover was gone.
An Originite: Type II came spinning out of the air behind her.
"Hmph. Over here."
The moment Dreamless had started her barrage, Rover had slipped into a spatial pocket without hesitation, waited for the creature to plow the ground ten times over, then teleported back into her blind spot.
"Truly... persistent..."
Then the wings on Dreamless' back flared with ominous violet light. Before Rover could process what was happening, something seized her ankles. She looked down.
Hands. Dozens of purple energy hands had erupted from the ground and locked around her legs, gripping with desperate strength. They looked exactly like the countless arms that formed Dreamless' wings, like souls clawing from an abyss.
"Now... you have... nowhere to run."
Dreamless regarded her captive and opened the diamond portals again, hundreds of them, surrounding Rover in a perfect sphere with no gaps, no angles of escape. Purple Havoc lances charged inside every one of them.
In the last possible second, everyone's preparations came together.
"Rover, now!"
"Right! Time, fall silent!"
She poured everything into the Temporal power without hesitation.
Throughout the fight, she'd felt the ability growing at a staggering rate. What had once frozen time in a radius of two or three meters now reached incomparably further.
A smile tugged at her lips.
It's like you're fighting beside me. I'm glad.
She knew exactly why the temporal power had surged. An image of the male Rover flickered through her mind. Time across the battlefield froze solid. Even hovering in the sky, Dreamless couldn't escape it.
On the hillside, the final trump card rolled into position. A massive cannon forged from Tacetite, its bore wide enough to swallow a man whole.
The Threnodian of War could absorb weapon Frequency, which was why the Midnight Rangers kept few heavy weapons. Among their scarce arsenal, this was the oldest and the most devastating.
Left behind by someone, centuries ago. Its name was Zaokong.
Powerful enough to level Jinzhou in a single shot.
Every Midnight Ranger general and Jinzhou Magistrate across the generations had known the Threnodian would grow stronger from absorbing this weapon's Frequency. They'd kept it anyway. The reasoning was simple.
It was a last resort.
If Civilization fell and there was no coming back, at least they could cripple the enemy. Or take it down with them.
Now this city-killing relic was aimed squarely at Dreamless.
"Fire!"
The roar tore from a hundred throats. An engineer slammed the launch trigger, sending everything they had at the Calamity Class that had made herself a perfect target, frozen in midair by stopped time.
The blast hit like a falling star.
Light and fire consumed Dreamless entirely.
Seconds passed.
"Hm? It broke?"
Rover looked up to find the hands binding her dissolving into nothing. The charged Havoc lances hanging in the air dissipated too. What that meant needed no explanation.
When the fire faded, the body of Dreamless, struck dead-center by the Zaokong...
...was still intact.
Only intact. The Calamity Class dropped from the sky like a puppet with its strings cut, crashing to the earth. Her pale, statue-like body had been scorched black. Hairline fractures laced every surface. Even her Whisperin Core was on the verge of shattering.
The Bell-Borne Geochelone might have tanked a city-killer shell. But Dreamless' defenses weren't built for that.
A Calamity Class body could survive the Zaokong's blast without being reduced to dust, but her health was a candle guttering in the wind.
"Incredible," Rover murmured, staring at the fallen creature. "A weapon left behind centuries ago, and it still has this kind of power. I wonder who made it."
Dreamless said nothing.
Who indeed. Such a mystery.