121: Chapter 121 All beings are equal before Arya

The turret on top of the battle fortress rotated slowly. The muzzles of the three main cannons began to glow with a deep blue light. The light grew brighter and brighter, gradually turning scorching white. The space around the muzzles began to distort, and fine red electric arcs danced in the air.

"Charging complete."

"Fire."

Three scorching white beams, each over three meters in diameter, shot out from the cannons. Crimson, lightning-like energy streams coiled around the center of the beams. Where they passed, the air ionized, leaving behind three persistent plasma trails along their path.

The cation beams crossed the two-kilometer distance at one-tenth the speed of light, aiming straight at the Ultralisk's chest.

Then, about fifty meters from the Ultralisk's surface, they came to an abrupt halt.

The front of the beams exploded into fan-shaped ripples of energy. The scorching white cation streams violently collided with some sort of semi-transparent, pale yellow barrier, emitting a teeth-gritting "hissing" sound. Red electric snakes slithered wildly across the surface of the barrier, trying to bore through, but they were unable to advance even a fraction of an inch.

The bombardment lasted for thirty seconds.

The light from the energy output gradually dimmed and finally extinguished.

The barrier remained intact.

The Ultralisk... didn't even twitch an eyelid.

The observation deck was silent.

Laya opened her mouth, but no sound came out. Elia's ice-blue eyes were filled with shock. Li Yuan stared at the air that clearly demarcated the boundary fifty meters outside the Ultralisk—

The bombardment had left three scorched, deep trenches in the ground, but the trenches ended neatly fifty meters away from the Ultralisk. Within that fifty-meter radius, not even the fuzz on the surface of the creep had been stirred.

"So tanky?" Li Yuan muttered to himself.

He had been mentally prepared for it to be unkillable. After all, it was a unit capable of withstanding bombardment from battleship secondary cannons; if a battle fortress's main cannon could easily pierce it, then the Ultralisk wouldn't deserve to be called the "ground overlord."

But "not even being able to hit it" was a bit beyond his comprehension.

He had seen energy shields before; the Brood Host's shield could also withstand indirect bombardment. But the one in front of him... was on a completely different level.

The output of the complex phase cation siege cannon was already close to the level of a light destroyer's secondary cannon, yet it couldn't even weaken the shield?

"Let me try too."

Li Yuan walked to the center of the observation deck and condensed his light bow once again. This time, he constructed the most penetrating combination possible in his current state—[Gold Element Enchantment] to provide armor-piercing properties, [Wind Element Enchantment] to accelerate and grant cutting power, [Fire Element Enchantment] to add high-temperature burning, and then fired with [Song of Battle - Multiple Shot].

An energy arrow shimmering with gold, cyan, and red light formed on the bowstring.

He released it.

The energy arrow split into twenty. The arrows turned into streams of light, emitting a piercing shriek in the air, and shot toward the Ultralisk even faster than the cation cannon.

The impact point was still chosen at the seam of the chest carapace—theoretically the position where the shield was relatively weak.

"Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom—!!!" A chain of explosions rang out.

The twenty arrows hit almost simultaneously; the Gold Element tore, the Wind Element cut, and the Fire Element exploded. The light from the explosion illuminated the surrounding few kilometers as if it were daylight. The shockwave lifted the creep and gravel, blasting deep pits dozens of meters in diameter into the ground.

The smoke and dust slowly dissipated.

Li Yuan narrowed his eyes.

Then he fell silent.

With the Ultralisk as the center, the land beyond a fifty-meter radius looked as if it had been plowed by heavy artillery, covered in scorched craters and radial cracks. But that invisible boundary line still existed—

Within fifty meters, the ground was as flat as before; not even a patch of creep had been blown away. The Ultralisk's shield hadn't even rippled, as if the attack that had cleared a several-kilometer battlefield when fighting the host earlier was nothing more than a gentle breeze.

"It's that strong?" Li Yuan was truly shocked.

This defensive power had already exceeded his understanding of "biological units." One had to know that the power of that volley of arrows had already been proven in the previous battle against the Brood Host, yet now it couldn't even weaken the Ultralisk's shield in the slightest.

"My turn, my turn!" Laya was interested. She switched back to her angel battle form, spread her light wings, and flew into mid-air.

She raised both hands high, and holy light converged.

A scorching white light sword, a hundred meters long, formed above her head. Sacred runes flowed along the blade, emitting an aura that purified all filth.

"Holy Judgment: Sword of Heaven!"

The light sword descended, its tip pointing straight at the Ultralisk's head.

Then, fifty meters from the Ultralisk, it came to an abrupt halt, like a bird hitting a pane of glass.

The holy light and the pale yellow barrier fiercely consumed each other, light splashing everywhere, emitting a piercing, sharp sound similar to metal grinding. The light sword continued to press down for three seconds, but the holy light grew dimmer and dimmer, finally shattering into a sky full of light particles with a "pop."

The barrier remained unmoved.

Laya landed back on the observation deck, her little face sagging: "It's useless..."

She pouted and muttered: "Who said a Tier 4 could win against this thing? With this shield strength, even a Tier 5 would struggle, right?"

Li Yuan didn't speak, but the same question arose in his mind.

He clearly remembered that when he was rescued at Edge Seven, he had seen with his own eyes the white emperor mecha's beam saber decapitate an Ultralisk with a single strike. But the strength of this shield... how high must the output of the white emperor mecha's beam saber have been to be able to break the shield and behead it in one blow?

Or rather...

Li Yuan looked at the still-sleeping Ultralisk, and a thought suddenly arose in his mind.

This Ultralisk wasn't normal.

"Elia," he turned to look at the girl who had been silent all along, "why don't you give it a try too?"

Elia was slightly taken aback.

"We'll leave after you finish," Li Yuan said. "We can't have made this trip for nothing; we have to try everyone's methods."

He paused and added: "Besides... I keep feeling like something isn't quite right."

Elia pursed her lips. A flash of hesitation appeared in her ice-blue eyes.

"I'm only Tier 3," she said in a very soft voice, clearly lacking confidence, "I probably... won't be able to break the defense either, right?"

Having been stuck at the peak of Tier 3 for too long—clearly feeling her power growing, clearly feeling the power within her becoming increasingly full, yet always unable to touch the threshold of Tier 4. This feeling of stagnation made the once-proud genius girl begin to doubt herself.

"It's fine." Li Yuan patted her shoulder, his tone relaxed. "At worst, you won't break the defense; none of us could. Just treat it as... saying hello?"

Laya also came over and linked her arm with Elia's: "Yeah, yeah, give it a try, sister Elia! Just treat it as playing!"

Elia looked at their encouraging eyes, took a deep breath, and nodded.

She walked to the edge of the observation deck, facing the sleeping mountain range two kilometers away.

She raised her right hand and gently pointed her index finger.

"Moonlight!"

The action was understated, as if she were just touching some invisible dust in front of her. But the moment her fingertip pointed out—the world suddenly changed.

First, it was the light. The pale daylight of Planet G-77-3 seemed to be constrained and gathered by some invisible force. With the Ultralisk as the center, the sky within a radius of two kilometers suddenly darkened.

Then, a pure beam of moonlight with a diameter of two kilometers shone down vertically from an unknown height in the sky.

Inside the beam of light, countless fine ice crystals danced, rotated, and refracted, giving the entire beam a semi-solid, liquid-crystal-like texture. Wherever the moonlight shone, frost flowers condensed in the air, a white frost covered the surface of the creep, and even the temperature outside the battle fortress's portholes plummeted by more than ten degrees.

The moonlight precisely enveloped the entire body of the Ultralisk. Because the next second, an ice sword formed within the moonlight beam. Its tip pointed downward, and it fell rapidly.

The pale yellow barrier on the Ultralisk's surface, which neither the cation cannon nor the holy light sword could shake, seemed not to exist in front of this moonlight ice sword. There was no obstruction, no cancellation, no collision.

The ice sword just "passed" through, as if passing through a phantom, and then gently sank into the very center of the Ultralisk's head.

Time seemed to stand still for a moment. Frost began to spread from the point where the ice sword had entered.

It was a freezing from the inside out. Ice blue covered the Ultralisk's carapace, bone spurs, appendages, and mouthparts at a speed visible to the naked eye... Wherever it passed, the heavy biological tissue lost its color, becoming crystalline, transparent, and fragile.

One second. In just one second, this thousand-meter-tall behemoth, from head to tail, from outside to inside, completely turned into a flawless ice sculpture.

Then, "pop."

A very light sound. Like the crisp sound of a crystal glass falling to the ground and shattering.

The thousand-meter ice sculpture collapsed with a roar.

It shattered into the finest ice crystal powder. Countless crystalline particles danced, swirled, and refracted billions of starlight within the moonlight beam, then slowly dissipated with the beam of light, drifting away with the wind.

There was no debris, no bloodstains, no energy dissipation.

There was only a circular clearing with a diameter of two kilometers—in the center of the clearing, the creep, rocks, and even the surface layer of the earth had been "erased" by several meters, revealing the fresh soil beneath. The edge of the clearing was as neat as a knife cut, forming a sharp contrast with the surrounding gray-green creep-covered land.

In the center of the clearing floated a mass of life essence so dense it was almost solid—it was the condensation of the Ultralisk's entire life energy, no larger than a basketball, yet it emitted terrifying fluctuations that caused the surrounding space to distort.

The moonlight beam dissipated.

The sky returned to its original pale color.

Inside the battle fortress, there was dead silence.

Laya's mouth was open, her ice-blue eyes widened to the limit, and her jaw was almost dislocated. She stared blankly at the empty flat ground outside the window, then stiffly turned her head to look at Elia, who was still maintaining the posture of pointing her index finger.

Li Yuan stood in the center of the observation deck; the light bow in his hand had dissipated at some point. The expression on his face was frozen in a state between "shock" and "absurdity," his lips slightly parted, but he couldn't make a sound.

Elia slowly lowered her hand and opened her eyes. A trace of fatigue flashed in her ice-blue eyes, but there was more of a dazed feeling that she herself hadn't noticed. She looked at the clearing outside the window, then looked at the index finger she had just used to point, and said softly:

"...It seems... I broke through the defense?"

As her voice fell, she belatedly realized what had happened and turned her head sharply to look at Li Yuan and Laya.

Li Yuan and Laya remained in a petrified state, not answering.

Elia looked back at the clearing outside the window, her mind blank.

Tier 3?

This is Tier 3?!