"Next!" The Chaos Sorcerer cackled, turning his attention to Maine's crew.
His other hand, still in human form, pressed forward into the air, and a translucent, light-distorting psionic barrier instantly unfolded. Like the toughest shield, it firmly blocked the incendiary ray that Maine fired right after.
The heat, enough to instantly incinerate flesh, could only create violent ripples on the barrier, unable to penetrate it.
Dorio tried to use her speed to bypass the barrier and launch a surprise attack from the flank, but she was repelled by an invisible force field extending from the barrier. Her incendiary heavy punch against the force field only made the barrier's light flicker.
This was just the beginning!
The Chaos Sorcerer fully unleashed his terrifying power as a fallen psyker.
With a mere casual wave of his hand, an invisible, immense force, like a battering ram, materialized out of thin air and slammed hard into the chest of Jackie's iron guard prototype!
The heavy war machine let out a metallic groan, actually staggering backward from this pure psychic force, and its plasma cannon's stabilizer issued an overload warning.
He let out a shriek imbued with destructive psionic fluctuations. The sound waves, like physical impact drills, bored into everyone's eardrums. Pilar and Falco bore the brunt, clutching their ears and collapsing to the ground in pain, blood streaming from their noses, their senses temporarily deprived.
As soon as Dorio stabilized herself, the metal pipes beneath her feet, originally fixed to the ground, suddenly twisted and coiled like living vipers, tightly wrapping around her legs and waist, immobilizing her.
Maine's crew instantly fell into an extremely passive, bitter struggle.
Their physical attacks struggled to break through the psionic barrier, while the various bizarre psionic abilities the Chaos Sorcerer unleashed with every gesture left them scrambling and unable to advance.
Even the two iron guards, lacking effective means to bypass the defenses and under continuous psionic interference, found it difficult to quickly break through this psionic cage.
The Chaos Sorcerer watched the struggling figures in the psionic storm, a cruel and gleeful twisted smile appearing on his half-human face.
He raised his hand again, and even more violent, unstable psionic energy gathered in his palm, compressing into a destructive energy orb. Its target was Maine and Dorio, temporarily trapped and unable to evade! He intended to crush these two most threatening "mortal" leaders first!
It was at this critical moment, a matter of life and death!
Valerie's mind was highly focused; all external noise seemed to fade away.
Intense will to survive and protect her teammates transformed into the purest, fastest neural impulse, instantly activating the Sandevistan System neural accelerator cyberware deeply embedded in her spine and motor cortex!
Simultaneously, through that deep neural connection, this accelerating effect, beyond mortal comprehension, was synchronized without delay to the core processing unit of the iron guard prototype she was piloting!
Buzz—!
A strange hum, perceivable only to her, swept through her entire sensory world.
Time, in her perception, was stretched, twisted, and nearly frozen to its limit!
Everything external—the slowly expanding, extremely dangerous destructive psionic orb in the Chaos Sorcerer's hand; Maine and Dorio's struggling movements, slow as snails; the jumping electric arcs seemingly frozen in mid-air; scattered metal fragments suspended in her vision; even the afterimages from the distant astartes chainsword swings—all became almost static, death-laden oil paintings.
Only she and her iron guard were the sole existences retaining a normal flow of time in this solidified death-space! No, even faster!
Her thoughts were perfectly synchronized with every hydraulic transmission, every power joint, and every sensor feedback of the iron guard.
This colossal war machine was no longer a manipulated metal construct, but an extension of her will and body, her steel avatar!
"Move!"
At her command, the iron guard's massive body blurred into an afterimage, taking a thunderous step forward!
This movement, appearing almost like teleportation to an outside observer, even generated a brief, ear-splitting sonic boom cloud, pushing dust and debris away from the ground!
At the same time, a subtle yet efficient mechanical whirring came from the iron guard's right arm.
The armor plates on the outside of the armguard instantly slid open, and a giant combat knife, usually stored within and almost as long as the armguard, sprang out with hydraulic propulsion, firmly gripped by the iron guard's metal fingers!
The blade of the combat knife was instantly activated, a layer of ethereal blue decomposition field light covering it, emitting a low, dangerous hum. The surrounding air even slightly distorted due to this powerful energy field.
The Chaos Sorcerer seemed to sense something.
His action of gathering psionic energy experienced an extremely brief delay, perhaps not even consciously registered by himself—it was the instinctive momentary surprise and adjustment a living being makes when faced with speed beyond comprehension.
He tried to redirect the destructive energy orb, which was about to form in his hand, towards this sudden, incredibly fast threat.
But this less than 0.1-second flaw, in Valerie's senses, accelerated dozens, even hundreds of times, was magnified infinitely, as clear as a wide passage!
Now!
The iron guard's massive body and the humming combat knife seemed to become one, transforming into a dark red lightning bolt of death tearing through solidified time!
No detours, no probing, only the ultimate speed and the most direct killing trajectory! She swept past the Chaos Sorcerer from his rear-side!
The decomposition field combat knife, carrying unparalleled kinetic energy and the laws of cutting, sliced in at a precise and deadly angle, entering above the Sorcerer's distorted, protruding shoulder blade and diagonally down, passing through his torso without hindrance!
There was no violent metallic clash, only the subtle yet chilling energy hum of the decomposition field acting on organic matter, and the almost inaudible cracking sound of molecular bonds being forcibly torn apart.
Time flow returned to normal.
The Chaos Sorcerer's movements froze completely, the cruel and gleeful expression on his face solidifying into one of extreme shock and bewilderment.
The terrifying psionic energy orb in his hand, like a popped balloon, lost control and dispersed, vanishing into a chaotic psionic breeze.
He instinctively, laboriously, looked down and saw an incredibly smooth cut extending clearly from his right shoulder all the way down to his lower left abdomen.
The next moment, under everyone's astonished gaze, his upper body slowly separated from his lower body along that smooth cut, sliding down and falling with a heavy "thud" onto the fouled ground.
Foul blood, twisted mutated organs, and shattered bones splattered. The expression on his half-human face was permanently fixed, while the other half of writhing flesh visibly lost vitality, rapidly shriveling and carbonizing into disgusting, charred necrotic tissue.
The powerful Chaos Sorcerer was, in an instant, instantly killed by Valerie's human-machine integrated, super-mortal strike!
With the complete death of the spellcaster, the two Bloodletters, still entangled with the astartes and Jackie's iron guard, let out a final roar full of unwillingness and malice, as if from the abyss.
Their bodies began to violently flicker and twist, becoming unstable, like holographic images with poor signal, rapidly switching between solid and ethereal states.
Finally, with several muffled thunderous bangs, they exploded into two rapidly expanding and quickly dissipating sulfurous smoke clouds, leaving behind only a nauseating smell, returning to the chaotic realm from which they were born.
The pre-processing area suddenly fell into an eerie silence.
Only heavy breathing, the sporadic crackling of short-circuited equipment, and the Inquisitor's unconscious groans remained. The psionic barrier had vanished, and the metal pipes entwining Dorio had also returned to their lifeless state.
Maine and the others looked at the cleanly bisected remains of the Chaos Sorcerer, then at the iron guard, which slowly retracted its knife, its decomposition field light gradually extinguishing, standing like a bedrock in its original spot. Their hearts were filled with an indescribable shock.
Valerie's earth-shattering blow not only eliminated a terrifying enemy capable of wiping out the entire crew but also, in an incredibly profound way, demonstrated to them the almost miraculous combat realm achievable when deep neural connection and the Sandevistan System are combined.
This was no longer simple brute force, but an art of slaughter born from the fusion of technology and will.