Chapter 287: Decapitation Strike
"Next!" the Chaos Sorcerer laughed maniacally, turning his target to Maine's squad.
He pushed his other, still human-shaped hand forward in the air. A semi-transparent psychic barrier that constantly distorted light instantly deployed like the toughest shield, steadily blocking the Volkite ray that Maine fired immediately after.
The thermal energy, sufficient to instantly incinerate flesh and blood, could only stir up violent ripples on the barrier, unable to penetrate it.
Dorio tried to rely on her speed to bypass the barrier and launch a surprise attack from the flank, but was repelled by the invisible force field extending from it. Her Volkite heavy punch smashed into the force field, only making the barrier's light flicker briefly.
This was only the beginning!
The Chaos Sorcerer fully displayed his terrifying power as a fallen psyker.
With just a casual wave of his hand, an invisible, massive force materialized out of thin air like a siege ram, ruthlessly smashing into the chest of Jackie's Iron Guard prototype!
The heavy war machine let out a metallic groan and was actually pushed back, stumbling from this pure psychic force. The plasma cannon's stabilizer sounded an overload alarm.
He opened his mouth and let out a shriek infused with destructive psychic fluctuations. The sound waves drilled into everyone's eardrums like physical impacts. Pilar and Falco bore the brunt of it, painfully covering their ears and falling to their knees, blood streaming from their noses, their senses temporarily deprived.
Just as Dorio steadied herself, the metal pipes originally fixed to the ground beneath her feet suddenly twisted and sprang up like living vipers, tightly wrapping around her legs and waist, immobilizing her.
Maine's squad instantly fell into an extremely passive and bitter struggle.
Their physical attacks struggled to break through the psychic barrier, while the various bizarre psychic abilities the Chaos Sorcerer released with every gesture left them exhausted just trying to cope, unable to advance an inch.
Even the two Iron Guards, lacking effective guard-breaking methods and continuously subjected to psychic interference, found it difficult to quickly break through this psychic cage.
The Chaos Sorcerer looked at the people struggling in the psychic storm, a cruel and gleeful twisted smile appearing on his half-human face.
He raised his hand again. Even more frenzied and unstable psychic energy gathered in his palm, compressing into an energy sphere radiating a destructive aura, aimed directly at the temporarily trapped and unable-to-dodge Maine and Dorio! He intended to crush these two most threatening "mortal" leaders first!
At this critical, life-or-death juncture!
Valerie's mind was highly concentrated; all the clamor of the outside world seemed to fade away.
An intense desire to survive and the will to protect her teammates transformed into the purest, swiftest neural pulse, instantly activating the Sandevistan neural acceleration cyberware deeply implanted in her spine and motor cortex!
Simultaneously, through the deep neural link, this acceleration effect that transcended mortal comprehension was synchronized without delay to the core processing unit of the Iron Guard prototype she piloted!
Hummm—!
A strange hum, perceptible only to her, swept through her entire sensory world.
Time, in her perception, was stretched to the limit, distorted, until it nearly stagnated!
Everything outside—the slowly expanding, extremely dangerous destructive psychic sphere in the Chaos Sorcerer's hand; Maine and Dorio's struggling yet snail-like movements; leaping electrical arcs seemingly frozen in mid-air; flying metal shrapnel suspended in her vision; even the afterimages brought by the distant Astartes swinging his chainsword—all turned into nearly static oil paintings filled with the aura of death.
Only she and her Iron Guard were the sole existences retaining a normal flow of time in this frozen space-time of death! No, even faster!
Her thoughts were perfectly synchronized with every hydraulic transmission, every power joint, and every sensor feedback of the Iron Guard.
This massive war machine was no longer a controlled metallic creation, but transformed into an extension of her will and body, her incarnation of steel!
"Move!"
Following her will, the Iron Guard's massive body brought up a blur of afterimages, taking a fierce step forward!
This movement, which appeared almost like teleportation to the outside world, even generated a brief and piercing sonic boom cloud, pushing the dust and debris on the ground outward!
At the same time, subtle and efficient mechanical operating sounds came from the Iron Guard's right arm.
The armor plate on the outer side of the arm instantly slid open. A giant combat blade, usually stored within and almost the same length as the arm armor itself, sprang out under hydraulic propulsion and was firmly gripped by the Iron Guard's metal fingers!
The blade's edge was instantly activated. A layer of ghostly blue disruption field light covered it, emitting a low and dangerous hum. The surrounding air distorted slightly due to this powerful energy field.
The Chaos Sorcerer seemed to sense something.
His action of gathering psychic energy experienced an extremely brief hesitation that even he might not have clearly realized—it was the momentary astonishment and adjustment instinctively produced by a living creature facing a speed beyond its cognition.
He tried to turn the soon-to-be-formed destructive energy sphere in his hand toward this sudden, impossibly fast threat.
But this flaw of less than a tenth of a second, in Valerie's senses which had been accelerated dozens or even hundreds of times, was infinitely magnified, as clear as a broad avenue!
Now!
The Iron Guard's massive body and that humming combat blade seemed to merge into one, transforming into a dark red lightning of death tearing through the frozen space-time!
No detours, no probing, only the most extreme speed and the most direct trajectory of slaughter! She swept past the Chaos Sorcerer's rear flank!
The disruption field combat blade, carrying unparalleled kinetic energy and the laws of cutting, cut in from above the sorcerer's mutated, bulging shoulder blade at an exquisite and lethal angle, slicing diagonally downward, sweeping through his torso without any resistance!
There was no violent sound of metal clashing, only the subtle yet hair-raising energy hum of the disruption field acting on organic matter, and the nearly inaudible cracking sound of molecular bonds being forcibly torn apart.
The flow of time returned to normal.
The Chaos Sorcerer's movements froze completely. The cruel and gleeful expression on his face solidified, turning into extreme shock and bewilderment.
The energy sphere in his hand that had gathered terrifying psychic energy collapsed out of control like a punctured balloon, turning into a chaotic psychic breeze and disappearing without a trace.
He subconsciously and arduously lowered his head, seeing an impossibly smooth cut extending clearly from his right shoulder all the way down to his lower left abdomen.
The next moment, under everyone's shocked gazes, his upper body slowly separated from his lower body along that smooth cut, sliding off and crashing heavily onto the filthy ground with a dull thud.
Foul blood, twisted and mutated internal organs, and shattered bones spilled out. The expression on that half-human face was frozen forever, while the writhing flesh on the other half lost its vitality at a visible rate, rapidly shriveling, carbonizing, and turning into disgusting charred necrotic tissue.
The powerful Chaos Sorcerer was actually instantly killed on the spot in the blink of an eye by Valerie's strike—a union of human and machine that transcended mortal comprehension!
With the complete death of the caster, the two Bloodletters currently entangled with the Astartes and Jackie's Iron Guard let out roars filled with unwillingness and resentment, as if they were final cries from the abyss.
Their bodies began to violently flicker, twist, and become unstable, like holographic images with poor signals, rapidly switching between physical and illusory states.
Finally, amid several muffled thunder-like explosions, they burst into two rapidly expanding and swiftly dissipating clouds of sulfurous smoke, leaving only a nauseating odor behind as they returned to the realm of Chaos from which they were born.
The pre-processing area suddenly plunged into a bizarre silence.
Only heavy panting, the sporadic crackling of short-circuiting equipment, and the Inquisitor's unconscious groans remained. The psychic barrier vanished, and the metal pipes entangling Dorio returned to dead silence.
Maine and the others looked at the remains of the Chaos Sorcerer cleanly cleaved in two, and then at the Iron Guard slowly sheathing its blade—the disruption field's light gradually extinguishing as it stood rooted like a boulder—their hearts filled with indescribable shock.
Valerie's earth-shattering strike not only eliminated a terrifying foe capable of wiping out the entire squad, but also demonstrated to them in an incredibly profound way the near-miraculous combat realm attainable when a deep neural link was combined with the Sandevistan system.
This was no longer simple brute force, but an art of slaughter born from the fusion of technology and will.
(End of Chapter)