~CRINCH~
The spear-tip didn't just break; it disintegrated upon contact with Soren's constantly vibrating sternum.
The Golden Elite had put his entire strength into the thrust, expecting to pierce flesh and bone
The kinetic energy, having nowhere to go against the Star-Iron density of Soren's new frame, rebounded instantly into the wooden shaft.
The wood shattered in his hands, sending splinters flying like shrapnel, as the vibration traveled up his arms, shattering his radius and ulna in a simultaneous, wet snap.
The Golden Elite holding it screamed in horror, but Soren didn't even blink.
To his 3D Energy Vision, their "Golden Body" technique was nothing but a shell of what it was meant to actually be.
It was a thin, shimmering veneer of gold plating, hiding a core of rotting, green sludge.
"Structural Integrity: Zero," Soren stated, his voice a low grinding sound like tectonic plates shifting.
"Weak... Your foundation is mud. You're all just gold painted over rust."
The Elite Guard stumbled back, his arms dangling uselessly at his sides as if they each had multiple joints in them.
The "Green Static" inside him flared, trying to stitch the broken bones back together, but the recoil had done too much damage, and the trauma too severe.
The other four Elites hesitated. Their hive-mind connection to the Envoy stuttering.
They were the Envoy's best—killers trained to slaughter entire squads, programmed to fight monsters and beasts, built to break bones and pierce flesh.
But they were never programmed to fight a walking iron-mountain.
Soren took a step forward. The unfortunate stone floor cracking, as a spiderweb of fissures raced towards the Elites like racing flames on a trail of leaked fuel.
"You aren't tempered elites," Soren said, reaching out to grab the first Elite by the throat. "You are just hollow shells filled with green smoke."
He one-handedly lifted the first Elite, grabbing him by the throat.
The man kicked and thrashed, his golden aura flickering, but Soren's grip was absolute.
"Analysis: Parasitic infestation at 90%," Soren's internal monologue ran cold and fast. "Target is deceased. Unit is purely driven by hydraulic pressure of the Green Qi."
Soren didn't even need to calculate the pressure needed. He just squeezed.
There was no crunch of bone—the neck was too soft for that. There was only a wet pop as the pressure seal of the Elite's body failed.
Green slime erupted from the Elite's eyes and mouth, splashing onto Soren's matte-red chest.
It hissed and sizzled against his skin, but instead of burning him, the Black Sun in his chest pulsed, hungry for the escaping energy.
Soren's skin had simply become too dense to burn.
Then He tossed the limp body aside like a ragdoll.
"Burn him!" the Bronze Masked Shaman shrieked from the back of the room.
He Shaman slammed his staff into the ground, causing the forge fires to roar, turning from orange to a virulent, sickly green.
The temperature in the smithy spiked to over a thousand degrees.
The flames leaped from the pits, twisting into snakes of fire that lashed out at Soren.
Liora, huddled behind the massive iron anvil, gasped, as the air began to singe her lungs.
She curled into a ball, pressing the vault against her face in a bid to shield it from the swiftly raging heat wave.
Soren on the other hand, didn't even flinch. He inhaled the superheated air. His Master Builder Gene detected the thermal spike and didn't register damage.
It registered fuel.
The Chimera Cub on his back opened its eyes, the hematite plates shifting.
It didn't fear the fire. It wanted it.
"Thermal Regulation: Offline," Soren's instincts commanded internally. "Initiate: Thermal Overclocking."
The Master Builder Gene responded like an overclocked CPU causing the silver veins in Soren's skin to begin to glow a dull, cherry red.
Instead of rejecting the heat, his Jade-Alloy lattice absorbed it, channeling the thermal energy directly into his kinetic output.
He was steadily becoming a walking furnace.
The Chimera Cub on his back hissed, its hematite plates sliding open to vent excess steam, creating a shroud of white mist around Soren's silhouette.
He turned to the remaining Elites.
"Trying to fight a forge with fire?" Soren asked, his voice distorted by the heatwave. "Foolish."
The silver veins in his skin began to glow a deep, angry crimson.
He didn't block the flames. He let them wash over him.
His Star-Iron bones absorbed the heat, turning his body into a living furnace.
Steam hissed from his shoulders. He wasn't burning; he was charging.
He looked at the remaining Elites through the haze of heat.
Two of them simultaneously lunged at him, their spears aiming for his eyes—the only soft points they could identify.
Soren didn't dodge.
He moved through the attack with a terrifying speed for someone so heavy.
He caught the spear shafts, the wood instantly bursting into flame upon touching his superheated palms.
He yanked the Elites forward, pulling them off balance. Then with a savage growl and a pivot that defied his immense mass, he slammed their heads together.
~BANG~
~CRUNCH~
The impact sounded like a thunderclap in the enclosed space.
Their golden auras shattered like glass, not from force, but from the sheer shock of the collision.
Their helmets caved in, and their skulls fractured instantly.
But the moment the residual energy of the heat emanating from Soren enveloped them, they completely collapsed in on themselves, smoke rising from their armor.
The Shaman watched in horror.
He had been pouring his entire reserve into the fire, trying to cook the "Anomaly," but he was only making him stronger.
Soren dropped the two smoking corpses.
He was glowing brighter now, the red heat spreading from his veins to cover his entire matte-red surface.
He looked like a demon forged from the core of a dying star.
His skin was radiating a heat so intense that the stone floor beneath his feet began to soften and warp.
"If your god wants to fight me with rot," Soren said, walking toward the Shaman.
The stone floor melted slightly where his feet touched.
"I will respond with the harshest heat. Heat plus density equals force."
The fourth Elite desperately drew a heavy iron mace. He swung it with a roar, bringing it down on Soren's shoulder.
~CLANG~
The iron hit Soren's Star-Iron reinforced scapula, sounding like a church bell being struck by a sledgehammer.
But the mace didn't break his bone, instead it bent into a number seven.
The heat from Soren's body conducted instantly into the weapon, turning the iron handle red-hot in the Elite's grip.
The Elite screamed in sheer horror. He hastily threw the weapon aside, but his gloves had already been set ablaze.
Soren though, simply backhanded him right in the sternum.
It was a casual motion, like swatting a fly, but the mass behind it sent the Elite flying across the room.
He hit the stone wall with a sickening crunch and stuck there for a second, fused to the rock by the heat of the impact, before sliding down as a pile of broken humanoid meat.
"The Golden Body requires rigidity," Soren lectured, his voice calm amidst the carnage.
"It relies on the tension of surface energy. But heat expands molecules. It disrupts tension."
Ever since he had begun to temper hi body within the Forbidden Zones of the High Wastelands, he had begun to learn the best way possible.
Learning through experience. Almost like a standard scientific method.
He sees or experiences a situation, develops a hypothesis, then Master Builder Gene tests the hypothesis through various scans and sensory feedback.
Instinctively, Soren comes to a conclusive theory.
But now, after repeatedly testing and experimenting this theory against the Ignis Tribe Golden Body Elite and himself, he had finally reached a conclusive principle.
He had found the way the Golden Body was meant to help withstand one's Rite of Awakening and prevent one from bursting apart by the sudden and excessive influx of atmospheric Qi.
Because the Golden Body uses atmospheric Qi to stiffen one's outer skin, the more Qi influx one absorbs during one's awakening, the tougher one's outer shell becomes.
This inevitably helps one contain whatever amount of Qi one might possibly have access to, though even that would have a limit because of a single flaw in the technique.
The body cannot harden infinitely, and as such, there will definitely be a point when it would begin to fissure and crack.
However, that only made Soren more curious about just how much Qi his current body would be able to withstand if he had been able to awaken.
Unfortunately, he has a void soul, which means he can't cultivate Qi.
"Regardless, this path suits me better, and so far so good, it has proven much better."
He reasoned. But he also knew there is a flaw in that train of thought.
He had yet to face someone who could actually wield Qi, and as such, he had little to no idea about what such an expert can be capable of.
If the Envoy was anything to go by, especially based on the level of feat he had managed to achieve thus far, then he knew he might be a little in over his head.
Then to top it off, he knew for certain that the Envoy wasn't the ceiling in terms of Qi Cultivation as well, because there was still the mysterious figure called the Withered Hand.
All of these thoughts raced through Soren's mind in less than the fraction of a second, and by the time his vision focused, he was already standing before the final Elite now.
Soren realized why he hadn't been attacked while he was briefly distracted; the guard was actually trembling in horror, his golden aura flickering out entirely to reveal the pale, terrified boy beneath.
The parasite in his brain was trying to force him to attack, but the biological fear response of his instincts was overriding the command.
Soren made a mental note never to allow his thoughts switch off his attention and focus again.
"Please..." the boy whispered, his eyes bleeding green tears. "It hurts... the voice in my head... It won't stop screaming."
Soren paused.
His 3D Energy Vision zoomed in on the boy's brainstem. The parasite had burrowed deep and was totally fused within.
"Extraction: Impossible," the Master Builder Gene concluded. "Subject is terminal."
Soren looked at the boy. There was no malice in his tricolor eyes, only a terrible, clinical mercy.
"Silence is coming," Soren whispered.
He placed a hand on the boy's forehead. He released a focused pulse of magnetic force from his palm.
It wasn't an attack; it was an extermination—clean, dark, and final.
The parasite disintegrated instantly.
The boy slumped, dead before he hit the ground, his face finally relaxed in peace.
Now, only the Shaman remained.
The Bronze Mask was motionless.
The fire in the forge had died down, consumed by Soren's hunger.
"You... you are an abomination," the Shaman hissed, backing away until he hit the sealed doors.
"The Envoy is coming. He will not let you leave.
The Spire knows what you're made of now.
That insatiable void you can somehow generate... we've felt it
You cannot fight the entire tribe!"
Soren grabbed a cooling bar of Star-Iron from the pile next to him.
He clamped it. The metal groaned and deformed like clay in his heated grip, forming a crude, heavy spike.
"The Envoy sees this, right?" Soren said. "Good. Then he should know what is coming.
"I am not here to fight the tribe," He declared. "I am breaking their chains.""
Liora peeked out from behind the anvil. The air was cooler now, breathable.
She saw Soren standing amidst the carnage—five dead Elites, the floor slick with green sludge and melted stone.
He didn't look like a victor. He looked like a demon king, with all the steam rising from his silver-veined skin.
He looked like a catastrophe that had paused to catch its breath.
She looked at the Shaman. The Bronze Mask was ornate, depicting a face screaming in ecstasy. However, his trembling body hinted otherwise.
"Soren," she called out. "The Shaman... he must know where the source is."
Soren turned his gaze to the Shaman, and a savage realization dawned on him.