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ArabicArknights: Soul Knights of Terra — Chapter 11
Chapter 11: The “Little” Flying Shield is Coming~
Meanwhile, the airspace and ground surrounding Rhine Lab had been rapidly seized by official Columbia armed forces.
Massive, razor-sharp drones circled the sky like vultures, their searchlights cutting through the thick smoke. Below, a heavily fortified defensive line of armored vehicles and fully equipped soldiers locked down the perimeter.
At the center of the blockade, the military commander snarled into his communicator. His face was livid, his anger directed entirely at the Director of Rhine Lab—Kristen Wright.
“Kristen! Are you seriously telling me that the monster tearing your core sector apart isn’t one of your creations? Do you think I’d swallow a lie so stupid even a toddler would choke on it?!”
The commander’s voice warped through the static, thick with fury.
“Do you really think the military is blind? That thing is absolutely a Fiend! Did you think I didn’t know about your little Fiend Project?!”
On the other end of the line, Kristen’s voice remained entirely flat, devoid of a single ripple of panic.
“Sir, I will reiterate. This incident is completely unrelated to any official research project sanctioned by Rhine Lab.”
“The target’s method of manifestation, its energy composition, and its behavioral patterns all exceed the parameters of our existing database. We are victims in this scenario. We are the party under attack.”
“[Columbia profanity!]”
“Save your excuses for the President! Right now, you will hand over all research data and defense access immediately! Otherwise, don’t blame us for taking necessary measures!”
He gave Kristen zero room to reply, violently severing the connection.
“Damn it! A bunch of self-righteous lunatics!”
The commander spat a curse into the dirt, shifting his gaze toward the distant sea of fire where the Lava Troll was currently raging. He took a deep, steadying breath, forced down the creeping dread in his chest, and barked into the tactical channel.
“All units, attention! Target confirmed as an unregistered, high-threat organism capable of extreme destructiveness. You are authorized to use all necessary force!”
His voice boomed across the staging ground through the heavy loudspeakers.
“Execute combat protocol! Repeat, execute combat protocol! Fire!”
The instant the order dropped, the Columbia military’s primed heavy ordnance erupted.
Missile nests slung beneath the circling drones snapped open. Dozens of specialized high-explosive armor-piercing shells screamed through the air, trailing thick white exhaust as they swarmed the Lava Troll like a hive of enraged hornets. Simultaneously, a torrential rain of Originium-etched ammunition poured from the armored line, weaving a suffocating net of death across the sky.
Their objective was absolute: erase this unstable variable from Columbian soil with overwhelming, uncompromising firepower.
The Boss, whose mind had just been dragged back into a frenzied state by the sheer influx of raw energy, was instantly buried beneath the bombardment. The blinding flash of detonations and the crushing shockwaves swallowed his massive frame whole.
However…
“ROAR—!!!”
Every single shell, every ounce of kinetic and thermal impact, was violently converted into pure energy. The terrifying beast was not broken. Instead, the molten rock plating his body expanded, his silhouette growing even more massive.
This time, his earth-shaking roar carried a terrifying blend of agony, madness, and boiling fury.
Watching the situation spiral into an irredeemable abyss, Saria’s expression darkened. The military’s heavy-handed intervention hadn’t solved a thing; it had only poured gasoline on a raging inferno.
The Boss’s consciousness was drowning in chaos. His last shreds of reason flickered like a dying candle in a hurricane.
Through his molten, distorted vision, the incoming missiles were nothing but glowing, annoying insects. The heavily armed military line in the distance was just an ant colony, flashing with pathetic fire and spitting detestable noise at him. Every explosion against his armored skin failed to leave a scratch, instead forcing more volatile energy into his core, intensifying the endless, tearing agony threatening to rip him apart from the inside.
He wanted the noise to stop. He wanted to crush the source of the pain.
Tyrannical killing intent surged through his chest like erupting magma. He unleashed a bellow that shattered the low-hanging clouds. The apocalyptic energy violently thrashing inside his body instinctively rushed toward his massive arms, compressing at a terrifying rate.
[Explosive Flying Shield]
The Paladin’s third skill.
Under normal circumstances, it was a balanced offensive and defensive technique: raise a shield to absorb damage, then hurl it to inflict blunt force trauma and a stun effect.
But right now, channeled through a colossal body forged from liquid fire and pure energy, the skill underwent a catastrophic mutation.
There was no physical shield. Instead, the air between his massive arms warped and twisted under the sheer, ungodly heat. The flowing lava from his own body and the ambient energy escaping into the atmosphere were violently sucked into the vacuum between his hands, compressing inward!
In the span of a single breath, a colossal sphere of churning lava, over ten meters in diameter, materialized out of thin air.
It radiated a blinding, skin-blistering heat and erratic energy fluctuations. This was no shield. It was a miniature, unstable sun on the verge of going supernova.
From his distant vantage point, the commander witnessed the apocalyptic sight. A block of pure ice slid down his spine, freezing the blood in his veins.
“That monster… could it be…” A horrifying realization clicked in his mind, and he screamed into the comms, his voice cracking with terror.
“Evade!!! Everyone eva—”
He never finished the warning.
The “little” flying shield was coming.
“BOOM——————!!!!!!”
The Boss hurled the massive lava sphere with the brutal, sweeping motion of a discus thrower.
The instant it left his hands, the sheer velocity of the projectile punctured the air, forming a massive, visible ring of vapor. The deafening sonic boom actually lagged behind the visual impact, ringing out like a delayed funeral bell long after the artificial meteorite had crossed the battlefield.
There was no time to run. No fraction of a second to deploy energy shields.
One moment, the destructive sun left the giant’s grasp.
The next, it descended upon the Columbia military line like the wrath of a god.
Impact.
Time seemed to freeze.
Then came the light, followed instantly by a heat that devoured everything it touched.
A catastrophic roar drowned out the screams, the engines, the explosions. A violent shockwave expanded outward in a flawless, terrifying sphere, vaporizing steel, decomposing earth, and erasing every living thing caught within its radius.
Where the heavily fortified military line had stood just seconds ago, a massive, glowing crater of molten glass now remained. A churning mushroom cloud of ash, fire, and vaporized debris punched into the stratosphere.
The intense electromagnetic turbulence radiating from the blast scrambled Rhine Lab’s distant surveillance systems, causing the emergency lights in the facility to flicker wildly.
The chaotic, deafening battlefield fell into a sudden, absolute silence.
Every bullet, every shouted order, every ounce of human resistance had been reduced to atomic dust in a single strike. The commander and his elite troops were dead before their brains could even process the flash of light.
The Lava Troll stood amidst the burning ruins, maintaining the posture of his throw. His molten chest heaved violently, exhaling plumes of scorching black smoke.
Deep within the secure bunkers of Rhine Lab, the senior management watching the surveillance feeds fell into a suffocating, terrified silence.
The reality of the situation finally crashed down on them. This was no longer an “abnormal biological intrusion.”
This was a Catastrophe-level crisis.
The shockwaves of the Lava Troll’s roar, heavy with agony and an insatiable urge to destroy, rolled across the entire urban expanse of Trimount.
Miles away, terrified citizens pressed against their windows or froze in the streets, staring at the colossal, burning silhouette towering over the Rhine Lab sector. They watched the blinding flash that wiped an entire military battalion off the map.
Panic swept through the city like a plague. Screams echoed through the avenues, vehicles slammed into each other as drivers tried to flee, and civil order began to disintegrate by the second.
Saria stood alone in the center of the devastated ruins. The shockwave of the blast washed over her, harmlessly deflecting off the thick layer of calcified armor plating her body.
She raised her hand and silently tapped her earpiece, connecting directly to the encrypted line of the Director’s office.
Kristen’s voice answered almost immediately. It was chillingly calm, entirely stripped of emotion, cutting straight to the absolute core of the issue.
“Saria, the situation has exceeded all controllable parameters. Abandon your current sector immediately and fall back to the designated safe point.”
“Rhine Lab’s true core is its knowledge and its personnel. Facilities can be rebuilt.”
Saria’s armored fingers tightened slightly around the comms unit. She ignored the retreat order, her voice dropping into a low, dangerous register.
“Kristen… that Fiend. There might still be a window for negotiation.”
“I have been observing it. It exhibits brief periods of lucidity, very similar to Ifrit’s behavioral patterns after an Originium rampage. Its actions are not driven by a pure, mindless will to destroy.”
Kristen’s response was immediate, her tone unyielding.
“Director Saria, your observation is compromised by subjective bias.”
“According to the hard data, the target has caused incalculable structural damage. Its energy output and threat level are climbing exponentially, and it just annihilated a fully equipped military battalion in a single strike.”
“The risk of attempting any form of negotiation is astronomical, and the projected success rate is infinitely close to zero. I will not authorize you to gamble your personal safety, or the future of Rhine Lab, on a statistical anomaly.”
Listening to Kristen reduce the situation to cold efficiency and risk management, the heavy emotions Saria had been suppressing finally cracked her stoic facade.
“Kristen! Efficiency and risk! Is that all you ever see anymore? Just cold, dead calculations?!”
“When did you… when exactly did you become this hollow?!”
The line went dead silent. Only the faint, suffocating hiss of static filled Saria’s earpiece.
Just as Saria began to think the connection had been severed, a bitter knot tightening in her chest, Kristen’s voice finally returned.
For the first time, a faint, almost imperceptible trace of exhaustion bled into the Director’s steady tone.
“…Outline your plan, Saria.”
Saria exhaled sharply, her mind racing as she laid out the strategy.
“I need you to use every channel you have. Contact the highest echelons of the military, or bypass them and go straight to the President’s office. You have to force them to cease fire immediately!”
“Any kinetic or Originium-based attack is just being absorbed and converted into its own mass! They are actively making it stronger! If we want to stop this, we have to let it calm down!”
Kristen countered smoothly, laying out the brutal political reality.
“The military will not listen to me. Especially not after losing an entire elite battalion.”
“They cannot afford to show weakness or halt an operation in full view of the public. It would be perceived as a catastrophic humiliation.”
“You saw the yield of that last strike yourself.”
Saria’s tone grew heavy, laced with desperate urgency.
“That thing is not an entity conventional weapons can kill! Throwing more soldiers at it is just feeding lives into a meat grinder! They are gambling the lives of their men and the safety of millions of civilians on a fight they mathematically cannot win!”
“We cannot let this senseless slaughter continue!”
Silence reclaimed the channel. Saria could hear the heavy, rhythmic thud of her own heartbeat echoing in her ears.
She closed her eyes, gripping the earpiece tightly, swallowing her pride. The indomitable Director of Defense, a woman who never bowed to anyone, spoke in a quiet, fragile tone she had never used before.
“…Please, Kristen.”
A soft, barely audible sigh drifted through the static.
When Kristen spoke again, the mask of the cold, calculating Director was back in place.
“…I understand. I will initiate an emergency secure line with the President.”
“But Saria, you need to understand that bureaucratic intervention takes time, and I cannot guarantee a positive outcome. Until you receive my explicit confirmation… focus on your own survival.”
The line clicked dead.
Saria lowered her hand. She tilted her head up, her complex gaze locking onto the towering, suffocating presence of the Lava Troll in the distance.
She didn’t know if Kristen’s political maneuvering would work. She didn’t know if her desperate gamble to save the creature—and the city—would end in her own death.
But she knew she couldn’t just stand in the ashes and do nothing.
‘You will bring Ifrit… back with you, right?”I promise!’
Saria stood silently amidst the burning ruins, her resolve hardening into steel.