When lava erupted from a volcano, it tended to flow slowly enough that most could outrun it on foot. Less than four kilometers per hour, Yu had heard somewhere. So it was no exaggeration to call the jets of molten rock spurting towards Devicer Three a little bit unnatural. They exploded from all over the massive giant, miniature superspeed eruptions, aimed straight for the black and gold warrior.
Yu groaned as he strained himself to weave through it all. The Mark III’s warning sensors blared nonstop.
The lava torrents were clocking in at over seven hundred kilometers an hour, but even that was trivial to the Frame. What gave him trouble was the fact that they were unpredictable. They could come from anywhere—the face, the neck, the shoulders, arms, chest, stomach, back. It was relentless in its onslaught.
As Yu struggled to dodge the barrage, he soon realized that things were not as bad as they could have been. Because they were about to get worse.
“You’re kidding me!” he shouted.
The lava giant raised its molten arm and threw its fist at him. Despite how beautiful a jab it was, the Asura Frame could have dodged it with time to spare...had Yu not already been preoccupied with avoiding the searing geysers.
He took a direct hit and screamed. No single word could succinctly describe how horrendously hot it was. Yu imagined Hell was rather temperate by comparison.
Rudra sank into the fist of liquid rock, and the sensors indicated the inferno boiling the nano-armor had skyrocketed to 1,069 Celsius. But still the ADAMAS suit held strong, refusing to melt even as Yu endured the pain. He couldn’t do it forever, though.
“Come on, Mark III!”
Yu activated the body-wide jet stream thrusters, and the Frame shot skyward out of the lava, returning once again to the amber curtain in the clouds. He looked down on Wakayama Bay and the giant wading within it. Its face bubbled and ejected three more streams of lava.
“Enough of this!”
Yu accelerated—fast—but he wasn’t dodging this time. He plummeted straight towards the fast-approaching geysers, picking up velocity at a speed only made possible by the anti-gravity lifters. In seconds, he shattered the sound barrier, then exploded past Mach 2, then Mach 3, 4, 5, and beyond. The jet streams hissed, and the air rolled with the deafening roar that trailed in the wake of a sonic boom.
He and the Mark III became the center of a supersonic shock wave. The black and gold armor collided with one of the lava geysers, scattering the stream of bubbling rock effortlessly. Yu didn’t slow down.
“Holy Shroud! Gimme a hand!”
Tearing off a piece of the cloth around his neck, the Shroud changed to Excalibur Mode in Yu’s hand as he plunged towards the lava giant. And then, the human, sword-wielding shock wave pierced the colossus. Yu turned back around and impaled it again, and again, and again, blasting away the Anomaly’s liquidy and fleshless form at random, perforating the monster.
“Where is it?! Something’s holding this thing together, but I can’t catch it! It keeps moving!”
Rudra’s autonomous awareness had produced several windows in Yu’s visor, including aerial shots from numerous angles. In the one depicting its back, there was a blue indicator labeled in English as “Mystical Core,” accompanied by an annotation explaining that destroying this would break the spell. But by the time Yu circled around to the giant’s back, the core had already moved to its waist. He darted down there, and then it shot to its flank, then to its right shoulder. The Holy Saber was useless without a target to plant its edge in.
“You fight as churlishly as your name, warrior!”
“That voice,” Yu murmured. “You’re the archmage! Scullchance!”
His sonic rush attack was losing steam. He exited the creature and hovered in the sky above, glancing around warily. There was no sign of the mage, but her sinister chuckle echoed across the amber aurora-tinted firmament.
“I went to great pains to provide you with a suitable welcome. Do not insult me by thinking you can fell my pawn so easily!”
“What, you’re just going to let your minions do the fighting for you?!” Yu shot back fearlessly. “Face me yourself! Let’s pick up where we left off!” He spoke boldly, with a booming voice. Devicer Three would not be afraid.
“You truly are a fool if you think me, Keeper of the Pride, base enough to stoop to such tedium! In all that I do, it is for the thrill that I act. For the exhilaration of battle. The exaltation of conquest. That is why I fight!”
“Those are some sick hobbies you’ve got there,” Yu spat.
If this were a soccer match, no doubt he would be the playmaker, or what Italian players called “fantasistas.” The person everyone counted on to handle the ball like magic and make fantasy into reality on the pitch. As one of the most well-known fantasistas famously said, “I’ll kick that ball like a rainbow after the rain.”
But this wasn’t just a game. And the rain was a war for life on Earth as they knew it.
“I need to somehow get us on the same level as last time,” Yu muttered. “Mark III—Rudra, I need you to prepare the Doomsday Book.”
More and more, Yu found himself drawn to the Mark III’s true name over the impersonal serial number. He and the Asura Frame were melding, and they’d never been closer than in that moment. As Yu came to understand Rudra, Rudra came to accept Yu.
Still, though, the Doomsday Book was a trump card. It needed time to initialize, and the lava giant was recovering. Slowly, the numerous holes in its liquefied body were already starting to close up.
The geyser attacks commenced once more, and Yu resumed his acrobatic evasive maneuvers all over again.
“Three, I think we can help!” Aliya suddenly transmitted.
“Aliya and Natsuki discovered something incredible!” Ein exclaimed. “You’ll stand alone no more, Yu!”
“Six!”
Natsuki swung the Mark VI Asura Frame with audacious confidence, and as long as she held it in her hands, the anti-gravity lifters allowed her to fly freely through the air. Although, to be honest, weightlessness didn’t actually lend itself to martial arts very well.
She dove onto the back of a dragon as it darted by the tower and plunged the guandao into its neck. The defenseless reptile’s cervical spine snapped like a twig. With Natsuki still clinging to its back, the dragon plummeted to the earth, landing with a great boom. The girl nimbly leaped off at the last second, completely unfazed.