In the dark, silent desert, a dazzling sun suddenly erupted in the night sky. Its radiant brilliance lit the surroundings, transforming the vast desert night into day—then turning that day into a blazing furnace.

Within that searing light—bright enough to melt eyeballs—the scorching heat reduced all living things it touched into ash and smoke. After lasting several seconds, the blinding radiance gradually dimmed and calmed. The extreme heat in the air also slowly dissipated.

Eventually, the light faded, and the blazing sun in the sky vanished. The desert returned to night—but its landscape had undergone a drastic transformation.

Across several square kilometers, the once-shifting sands had entirely changed. The fine sand dunes were now transformed into translucent crystals. In the still-warm air, one could see a landscape of glassy ground and crystalline hills. Thick layers of solidified glass covered the terrain, with pockets of still-molten red liquid flowing within—like veins beneath the skin. This hell-forged glassland reflected the starlight and moonlight, creating a surreal and dreamlike scene.

“What a wondrous and terrifying sight... So this is the power of the Church’s cutting-edge weaponry? Truly awe-inspiring…”

Dorothy whispered in awe as she observed the breathtaking destruction below through a high-altitude scouting corpse marionette.

In order to deal with the Filth Coven—who had long been stirring up trouble in Busalet—Dorothy had made contact with the stealth forces dispatched by the Church’s Redemption Faction to protect and monitor Vania’s advancement ritual. The one she connected with was the warship’s AI core named Ivy.

Holy Steel Vessels were top-secret military weapons owned by the Church—formidable flying warships powered extensively by mystical forces. Their combat strength and strategic role far surpassed even the Church Navy's main fleet.

According to rumors, the origin of the Holy Steel Vessels lay in an ancient contract between the Church and the White Craftsmen’s Guild. Under this pact, the Church could spend immense resources to have the guild forge weapons for them. The Holy Steel Vessels were the product of this ancient agreement. Just how many such ships the Church currently possessed remained unknown, as did their hierarchical classifications—but what was certain was that they answered directly to the Cardinals and the Pope. The most advanced vessels were said to exceed even Crimson-rank power.

Dorothy had suspected since the Kankdal incident that Ivy might be the AI of a war machine—but it wasn’t until arriving in Busalet that she could confirm it. The merchant caravan she had staged to deliver food to Vania’s camp was already suspicious, and while it might fool ordinary people, it couldn’t fool Ivy. So once the grain was sold, Ivy immediately tracked them down.

Ivy deduced that the grain merchants were the same group who had protected Vania in Kankdal—members of the so-called Heaven's Arbiter Sect. Dorothy, knowing this, chose to go along with it and established preliminary contact and cooperation with Ivy—inviting her to jointly strike against the Crimson-rank of the Longevity Church.

Their interests in Busalet aligned well. Ivy herself had a mission to make contact with the Heaven's Arbiter Sect, so the collaboration came about naturally.

Once the alliance was set, Dorothy successfully profiled Jawadin and implanted a Marionette Mark in him. With his thoughts rewritten, he was sent to meet Amuyaba, allowing Dorothy to use him as a bridge to entangle Amuyaba with spiritual threads and distract her—while Ivy, from the skies, prepared a wide-area annihilation strike.

After enduring a scorching bombardment of nearly 3,000 degrees Celsius, the upper layer of the desert beneath Ivy’s Holy Steel Vessel had melted into a thick crystal layer spanning several square kilometers. Within the radius of Ivy’s searing attack, no life—be it insect, spore, or floating microbe—could possibly survive. Amuyaba’s massive insect swarm and the invisible pathogens she had released were all incinerated.

At that moment, within the gothic cathedral-like steel warship, in a hall resembling a chapel, Vania knelt at the ritual center, maintaining a prayer posture. She was now linked to the vessel via a ritual connection. A Holy Steel Vessel of Ivy’s class was not merely a mobile heavy artillery platform—it was a divine sanctuary capable of descending onto any battlefield, allowing ritual amplification at will. With Vania stationed within Annihilation Nun, she could amplify her powers using its sanctuary-grade ritual site.

“Within the area purified by Radiant Light… no forms of life remain. Proceeding with deeper investigation…”

Vania murmured softly from the heart of the steel chapel. She then used the sanctuary’s amplification to extend the life-sensing abilities of her Holy Mother Path much further—reaching deep underground.

Due to the unique traits of the Plague Path, its mystical derivatives could manifest at micro levels—even down to microbial scale. At such sizes, the detection abilities of the Lantern path were less effective. A Lantern Beyonder might "see" something glowing, but be unable to consciously register such a minuscule object as suspicious.

For instance, mystical traces appeared as glowing colors under Lantern vision, but if the entity in question was only the size of a bacterium, even if it glowed, the user might not notice. That was where the Holy Mother Path's life-detection truly shone. Compared to other Lantern branches, the Holy Mother Path had a major advantage in locating lifeforms. When combined with a sanctuary-grade ritual amplification, Vania became a wide-area biological radar—capable of sensing all life, macro or micro, within a radius of dozens of kilometers.

“Signs of extensive mystical life activity detected underground… Be careful. That cultist isn’t finished yet—her derivative forms are rapidly proliferating beneath the surface!”

As her perception spread belowground, Vania frowned and spoke. She visualized her findings via the sanctuary's abilities, projecting them into space. Instantly, in front of the illusory projection of Ivy atop the cathedral spire, a clear 3D image emerged.

It was a dynamic three-dimensional map—displaying a dense, intricate network of underground tunnels. Countless red dots surged through them—Amuyaba’s pestilence derivatives.

Amuyaba had not committed her entire being to the surface insect swarm. For safety, she had also transformed part of herself into burrowing sandworms that tunneled underground. Hundreds of meters beneath the surface, inside a natural cave system, she rapidly reproduced and expanded. Though the surface swarm was annihilated by the scorching heat, the subterranean swarm survived within the thick rock layers.

“What a high-resolution, detailed map... Better than anything I could process myself. So this is the effect of the power of Revelation? Interesting...”

Ivy admired the image that had materialized before her. Then she raised her hand and gave the order: all turrets aboard the steel warship turned their barrels toward the ground and opened fire.

BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM!!

With a barrage of thunderous roars, Ivy rained golden artillery fire onto the glass-like earth below. Each radiant explosion blasted apart the crystalline surface. Crystal hills shattered, massive cracks tore through the ground, and fragments flew everywhere amid the deafening thunder.

Even the smallest-caliber mystical secondary cannons on Ivy’s ship exceeded the largest fixed fortress guns used in the mundane world. A single shot could blast a crater the size of half a football field. With so many turrets unleashing firepower simultaneously, the entire visible land below was submerged in fire, smoke, and dust.

The earth trembled under the ferocity of the bombardment. The shaking and booming could be felt as far away as Bastis—dozens of kilometers distant. Coupled with the earlier blinding light, the city’s residents were stricken with fear, falling to their knees in prayer.

Under Ivy’s relentless, overwhelming bombardment, the glass desert was completely shattered. The earth peeled layer by layer, entire chunks of land were torn away, and everything buried below was forcibly unearthed by the heavy cannon fire.

It didn’t take long before a full kilometer-wide section of the ground had been shaved down by two to three hundred meters. Just as the bombardment was about to reach the labyrinthine tunnels underground, Vania suddenly cried out, sensing something.

“There’s a high concentration of spirituality coming from within the tunnel lifeforms! Be careful!”

No sooner had she spoken than several hundred spherical, insect-winged unidentified organisms burst out from the smoke and fire below, flying directly toward Ivy. Seeing this, Ivy immediately activated the countless close-in defense weapons mounted along both sides of the ship. Dozens of CIWS (Close-in Weapon System) turrets and rapid-fire autocannons opened fire in tandem, precisely shooting down the tough-shelled, bloated insect-spheres.

However, upon being destroyed, those orbs erupted into thick green mist. This fog rapidly spread in all directions, forming a vast green cloud layer suspended between Ivy and the blazing battlefield below.

Ivy resumed firing toward the surface—but as the shells passed through the green mist, abnormalities arose. The metal shells and inner mechanisms corroded instantly, rendering the entire structure of each shell defective. The bombs fell as useless, pockmarked duds—as if devoured by swarms of insects—completely ineffective.

These green clouds were in fact a highly heat-resistant, metal-corroding mystical bacterium. As Ivy’s artillery shells—specifically the high-powered physical bunker-buster rounds—passed through them, their metal components were rapidly dissolved and rendered useless, falling impotently to the ground.

The bacteria were carried by the bloated spherical insects. Their larvae were bred in underground nests and crawled up through cracks in the rock to the surface, where they matured rapidly and launched themselves toward Ivy in suicidal assaults. Upon being shot down by CIWS or flak, they exploded and released their symbiotic bacterial payloads. These rust-eating bacteria could survive temperatures near 1,000°C for a time, enough to infect airborne shells.

Ivy’s vast array of turrets included diverse munitions tailored for various needs—some conventional mystical rounds stored in the ship’s magazines, and others fired by consuming the ship’s spiritual reserves as energy blasts. Energy blasts were more straightforward, but the physical shells forged by the White Craftsmen’s Guild had specialized variants: armor-piercing, personnel-killing, bunker-busting, deep-penetrating, terrain-shattering, underwater bombardment, and more—used according to the situation.

For example, Ivy was currently using terrain-shattering bombs to gouge out large craters—since regular bunker-busters weren’t powerful enough to destroy such an extensive underground nest. But now that these munitions were being neutralized by the rust bacteria, Ivy had to switch to using less effective energy rounds, which had limited penetration and significantly reduced destructive power against underground layers.

Faced with this, Ivy moved the warship to a section of sky not shrouded in bacterial fog and resumed bombing. But underground, Amuyaba continued to release the fog-carrier insects through deep fissures. When Ivy intercepted them, they exploded and created even more bacterial clouds. At times, these clouds drifted dangerously close to Ivy’s hull, prompting her to activate flamethrower turrets to repel them. Even under intense fire, the bacteria took a while to die.

“Even after all those bugs were burned, the remaining ones could still build such a massive underground nest... and even mount a counterattack. This festering Crimson-rank is... above spec. Especially in terms of spiritual capacity—where is all her spirituality coming from?”

Watching the situation unfold, Ivy’s holographic avatar frowned. She had assumed that after the giant insect swarm was destroyed, Amuyaba’s remaining forces would pose no further threat. But the situation had clearly deviated far from expectations. A nest of this depth and scale couldn’t have been built so quickly by a damaged Crimson-rank alone.

Logically, the earlier insect swarm should’ve comprised the bulk of Amuyaba’s power. But if one combined the earlier swarm with the current underground hive, the scale of Amuyaba’s spirituality was staggering.

While Ivy pondered, Vania—monitoring the battlefield from the ship’s ritual chapel—spoke urgently.

“The deepest part of the enemy’s hive is branching out underground! She’s trying to escape by splitting herself up!”

At her words, Ivy glanced at the three-dimensional battlefield display. She could clearly see a deep vertical shaft dug beneath the hive, from which eight large worms were tunneling in different directions. Each of these worms possessed an extremely high concentration of spirituality—enough to serve as a new “core” for the entire swarm. If even one of them escaped, Amuyaba would survive.

Amuyaba knew she couldn’t defeat the Church’s Holy Steel Vessel or the unknown, concealed forces at play. Though she was unusually strong for a Crimson-rank thanks to some mysterious boon, she wasn’t powerful enough to face the ship head-on. Escape was her top priority, and the bacterial fog had been deployed purely to buy time.

While Ivy could bombard the surface to kill off the maturing insects during their larval stages, doing so diverted her firepower—preventing her from focusing it on digging out the hive.

The dense, sticky bacterial fog posed a dilemma. Ivy couldn’t use metal-based bunker-busters, and energy rounds weren’t powerful enough to clear the last dozens of meters quickly. If she relied solely on energy shells, the escaping worms would already be long gone by the time she finished peeling back the terrain.

The only chance to wipe them all out was now—before they had fully diverged and spread.

Under these circumstances, Ivy deployed Gale Sigils to blow away the fog. But the fog proved unusually resistant to wind—more like thick slime than mist. Even when partially dispersed by the sigils’ generated winds, newly exploded insect bombs quickly replenished it.

Ivy’s best option was to use the ship’s main cannon to unleash another round of Radiant Purification—roasting the bacteria at 3,000°C—or to deploy another destructive mode that could pierce the ground in one strike. But both options required time to charge—and by the time they were ready, Amuyaba might have already fled.

Just as Ivy found herself in a difficult bind, several figures appeared on the horizon. Cloaked in long robes, they flew swiftly toward the battlefield.

As they arrived, they positioned themselves on either side of Ivy. Though Ivy initially considered neutralizing the intruders, Vania had marked them as allies on the battlefield display, so Ivy held her fire.

The mysterious figures extended their hands toward the ground. From their fingertips emerged threads—thin, red, and glowing—that rapidly extended downward. These threads pierced through the air and connected with the bloated bacteria-carrying insects one after another. Upon contact, the insects paused—then abruptly veered away and flew elsewhere.

These figures were Dorothy’s corpse marionettes. She had used them to extend spiritual threads, directly taking control of the bio-bombs and diverting them from the battlefield.

At that moment, Amuyaba was in a massive “swarm mode,” controlling thousands of insects at once. Her spiritual force was diffused across the entire hive, reducing her control over individual insects. Dorothy had no difficulty seizing control of a handful of them.

Earlier, Dorothy had feigned weakness in her spiritual thread duel with Amuyaba to lure her in. But now, she was going all out. Fortunately, these insect bombs were only carrying rust bacteria, not anti-spiritual thread pathogens.

“So this is one of the means of Revelation? How fascinating…”

Seeing the results, Ivy’s expression finally relaxed. With Dorothy in control of the bio-bomb carriers, they were diverted from the field, unable to explode and release new fog. Without reinforcements, the existing fog thinned rapidly—dispersed by Ivy’s winds and artillery shockwaves.

As the fog cleared, Ivy immediately reloaded her terrain-shattering physical rounds. Her ship’s heavy cannons roared in unison once more, bombarding the earth below. The warheads burrowed into the fractured terrain and exploded violently, tearing through the layers protecting the underground hive.

Finally, after the last terrain-shatter bomb detonated, the final barrier collapsed—exposing the vast underground nest to the open air. Through Lantern-vision, Ivy could see countless grotesque, bloated worms writhing in the smoke below.

Faced with the now-exposed hive, Ivy showed no mercy. She unleashed a torrent of firepower, flooding the nest with flames. Countless worms perished in agonized, twisted death cries.

The entire exposed swarm had no defense against the overwhelming aerial bombardment. Amuyaba’s vast body mass was annihilated—only the eight escape worms digging away from the nest remained.

Assessing the situation, Ivy located one of the escape tunnels and dropped a special bomb into it. The bomb detonated at the shaft’s bottom, unleashing extreme heat and pressure that surged down the connected tunnels. The shockwave raced after the fleeing worms, crushing and incinerating them in their paths.

This blast destroyed seven of the eight escape worms. Only one survived—having dug the deepest and most convoluted tunnel. Though seriously injured, it managed to stay alive.

But just as that last escape worm continued its desperate burrowing, hoping to seize one last thread of life—

Several red threads pierced the layers of earth, slipped into the narrow tunnel... and latched onto its body.