The distance between the Executor and Kaelen closed with terrifying speed. The Executor's charge was less a run and more a blurring surge of pure kinetic energy.
Elara's world narrowed to the machine, the distance, and the sound of its accelerating thermal core. She had rehearsed this moment a hundred times in her mind, but reality was faster, louder, and infinitely more terrifying.
The machine's attack was structured: a momentary deceleration at mid-range to stabilize the thermal energy for its final, devastating physical impact.
As the Executor reached the mid-range mark—the initiation of its final wind-up—Elara started counting, her voice shaking but clear:
"One mississippi..."
The Executor's massive fist, reinforced with anti-Aetheric alloys, began to swing forward—a terminal impact designed to crush Kaelen's core and scatter his Aether to the winds.
Elara fought the urge to scream "Release" prematurely. She watched the hand swing, the space between the machine and Kaelen vanishing rapidly.
"...point six!" she shouted, her voice cracking with the strain of the absolute, final moment of delay. "RELEASE!"
At the sound of Elara's voice, Kaelen's eyes snapped open. The massive, compressed Phase Shunt Rune—the entirety of his Blue Rank power—exploded from his core, channeled through the focusing anchor of the Codex of Echoes on the slate.
The Aether was not directed at the machine for destruction; it was directed at the spacetime surrounding the machine for displacement.
At the 1.7-second mark—the exact microsecond the Executor's fist should have connected with Kaelen's chest—the machine suddenly ceased to exist in their timeline.
The Executor's fist, still mid-swing, phased through the space Kaelen occupied. The massive, dark figure shimmered, becoming momentarily transparent and translucent. It passed clean through Kaelen's body, the physical mass of the machine existing a fraction of a second ahead of their reality.
The Executor, programmed for rigid, linear movement, was unaffected by its own phase shift. It completed its charge, its mass shifting back into the present reality after it passed Kaelen.
The machine's inertial momentum carried it forward, but the ground, being stable, did not phase with it.
The massive automaton ran straight through the slab of slate, through the ground beneath it, and phased back into reality only when its center of mass was directly over the underground concentration of the Tainted Runes Kaelen had remotely purified weeks ago—the only patch of structurally weak, loose sediment in the riverbed.
The Executor's weight, combined with the momentum of its attack, caused a massive, localized collapse.
The anti-magic machine fell twelve feet into the chasm, burying itself instantly in the earth and loose sediment. The fall, combined with the geological stress, immediately destabilized its thermal core.
A muffled, terrifying explosion shook the entire riverbed. The Executor was gone, sealed and self-destructed in a massive geothermal surge.
Kaelen collapsed onto the slate, his breathing shallow, his face bleached white by the absolute Aether depletion.
Elara ran out from the rocks, scrambling across the shattered ground to him. "Kaelen! Did it work? Are you..."
Kaelen held up a shaking hand, silencing her. He pointed to the smoking, collapsed chasm where the machine had fallen.
"We did it, Elara," he whispered, forcing a breath. "The Phase Shunt worked. The Executor is destroyed."