"Get to safety! Get down and hold on!" Zhou Yi's voice, amplified by his suit's external speakers, was a desperate command over the roar of the depressurized cabin.
He spared a split second to apply a powerful, layered sheet of kinetic shielding across the now-gaping hole in the fuselage, using massive pieces of floating debris as temporary, heavy plugs to prevent the suction of any more unfortunate souls.
The hideous, retreating mass of the R-variant flesh-and-blood monster was now almost entirely outside the pressurized shell, its bulk distorting as it squeezed through the violent tear it had created. With the breach temporarily secured against further passenger injury, the restrictions on Zhou Yi's power were instantly lifted.
This was his new battlefield.
He propelled himself through the jagged opening, the cabin's sudden warmth replaced by the savage, sub-zero cold of the high-altitude air. The wind noise was deafening, a high-pitched, screaming roar that tore past the edges of his armor.
At six thousand meters, the air was thin, the stars already visible above the horizon, and the sense of exposure was total.
The massive aircraft—the A380, a colossus of the skies—was immediately beneath him, its vast white hull stretching away into the darkness. And clinging to the damaged fuselage was the monster.
As Zhou Yi had predicted, the creature's escape had been purely reflexive. Outside, the R-variant sensed only vast, empty space. The high-speed airstream flattened its enormous mass against the metal, and its primitive, cluster-based consciousness was overwhelmed by the lack of nearby sensory input.
There was no shelter, no dark corner, no immediate food. It was exposed, desperate, and immediately began to retract, using its tentacles to desperately cling to the aircraft, trying to find its way back toward the relative safety and warmth of the cabin breach.
The monster's weakness was glaring: a complete lack of strategic thought. If the sentient vampire Asa had still been in control, he would never have surrendered the positional advantage of fighting inside the plane, where he could leverage the human hostages and the hull's fragility.
The collective consciousness of the R-variant was, as Zhou Yi realized, merely the organized survival instincts of single-celled organisms: flee, hide, eat.
Zhou Yi flew directly at the enormous, flattened mass, his form a dark silhouette against the scattered moonlight on the clouds. He did not bother with telekinesis this time, moving with an acceleration that defied the thin air.
The Adamantium spear in his hand glowed, and a large sphere of bluish-green flame enveloped the tip. This flame burned at an infernal six to seven thousand degrees Celsius—a temperature high enough to cleanly pierce the monster's psychic defenses and instantly vaporize any organic material.
He slammed the spear tip down, severing one of the creature's primary anchor tentacles.
The effect was instantaneous and horrific. The tentacle did not just burn; it turned into a rapidly expanding cloud of plasma and ash. The flame, which needed only a few hundred degrees to melt the aluminum skin of the aircraft, did indeed inflict damage—a brief, localized sizzle marked the metal where the flame brushed the hull.
Zhou Yi grit his teeth beneath his helmet. He had to operate with lethal speed. The integrity of the plane, though severely compromised, was still his secondary concern; the primary was preventing this organism from reaching land.
Faced with a temperature that instantly dissolved its hyper-durable tissue, the R-variant flesh-and-blood monster finally registered the terror of true destruction. A multi-layered psychic scream, a wave of palpable, desperate fear from every individual component, echoed across the vast emptiness of the clouds.
The creature's collective will instantly recognized the severity of the threat. It refused to try and absorb or re-assimilate the severed, burning tentacle. Instead, the main mass aggressively pulled away, and the discarded appendage was reduced to nothingness by the ultrablaze. It was the first time the collective had willingly shed a piece of itself—a tacit admission that the injury was mortal.
Zhou Yi moved with savage focus. He controlled the residual heat, but not its temperature, pushing the inferno toward the fleeing monster. The creature was writhing, frantically trying to find purchase on the slick, metal surface.
Suddenly, a secondary tentacle, thicker than the others, lashed out from the main mass and deliberately struck the bluish-green flame at the spear's tip, momentarily dissipating the heat source.
But the act was futile. The instant the heat dissipated, Zhou Yi used his mental control to instantly re-ignite the molecules within the point of contact on the tentacle itself.
Tiny, controlled flames erupted, consuming the massive limb from the inside out. Such a precisely manipulated, high-energy flame could not be extinguished by mere physical force.
The fiery tentacle began to burn wildly, the blaze quickly crawling back toward the main bulk. In a desperate, self-preserving act, the collective will again made a ruthless choice. The host organism severed the burning root of the appendage.
The flaming tentacle, now an isolated column of fire, rolled and danced for a few moments like a burning snake in the massive slipstream before being swept away into the dark cloud layers below.
Zhou Yi was relentless. The monster's strength and mass diminished with every discarded piece. He swung his spear, generating and launching successive crescent-shaped blades of fire towards the monster. The monster responded by sacrificing two flattened sections of tissue to intercept the lethal plasma blades, buying precious fractions of a second.
This cycle of attack and self-mutilation began to rapidly take its toll. The immense body was visibly shrinking. To avoid being consumed by the flames, the collective consciousness was ruthlessly shedding its own tissue, preventing the internal spread of the heat.
While the monster lacked the mental capacity to comprehend the concept of diminishing strength, the collective consciousness registered the weakening of its total psychic field. It understood that it could not continue to shrink without losing the functional strength necessary to even sustain its existence.
The creature's primitive mind made a final, desperate calculation based on its most ingrained instinct: find dark, confined shelter.
The flesh-and-blood creature suddenly exploded into motion, its remaining mass transforming almost entirely into thick, powerful tentacles.
It began pulling and pushing itself across the fuselage with blinding speed, its movements now resembling a terrifying, fast-crawling carpet. The aircraft itself groaned under the asymmetrical pressure of the fleeing monster.
The creature's sensory input, derived entirely from subtle psychic energy fluctuations and raw tissue sensation, led it to a single, powerful conclusion: the largest, darkest, most enclosed opening on the entire immense hull.
With a final, terrifying surge of speed, the collective consciousness of the R-variant charged directly toward the massive, open maw of one of the aircraft's engines.
Zhou Yi's mental algorithms froze. No one capable of conscious thought would choose a jet engine as a hiding place. The intake's powerful suction, the supersonic rotation of the fan blades, and the intense internal heat made it a certain death trap.
Yet, the creature—a product of pure, illogical instinct—saw only a massive, dark hole that promised enclosure and safety.
In the brief moment of Zhou Yi's shock, the monster plunged its entire body into the roaring air intake.
The effect was instantaneous and catastrophic.
The wildly spinning turbine blades ripped into the fleshy mass, but instead of shredding it into harmless mist, the dense, highly resilient R-variant tissue plastered itself to the blades, the compressor stages, and the inner casing of the engine.
The monster did not die; it transformed, its collective will allowing it to become a living, psychic carpet of bio-matter that survived within the engine's structure.
The sudden, catastrophic obstruction caused an immediate surge. Mechanical and electrical failures compounded.
Thick, oily black smoke erupted from the exhaust nozzle, laced with angry tongues of flame. The engine—one of the aircraft's four primary thrust sources—suffered irreparable damage, instantly losing thrust and becoming a dead weight.
This was the worst news: the monster was not destroyed. It was now inside the aircraft's core systems.
The already-damaged A380, deprived of balanced thrust, a working engine, and a pressurized cabin, immediately entered an uncontrollable state of instability.
It began to violently roll and tumble among the clouds, the massive, erratic movements subjecting the airframe to tremendous, sudden G-forces. The structural compromises in the fuselage widened, and the horrible, panicked screams of the passengers poured out through the breach.
Zhou Yi had no choice but to abandon his attack. The battle had been paused by a new, more immediate threat: the survival of the entire plane.
He rushed down to the underside of the fuselage, positioning his immense armored form beneath the aircraft's belly. Gritting his teeth, he unleashed his full telekinetic power, converting his entire mental reserve into a massive kinetic lift. He pushed upward, frantically fighting the forces of inertia and the chaotic, unbalanced aerodynamics.
The strain was agonizing. He was not just fighting gravity; he was fighting a massive, uncontrollable yaw and roll caused by the engine failure, trying to impose stability on a three-hundred-ton object hurtling through the atmosphere. The forces compressed his suit, and he felt the raw mental energy drain from him like a flood.
He had to maintain the plane's balance. He had to keep it stable enough for the pilots to attempt a glide or emergency descent. He was no longer the Knight of Dawn—he was a single, human-shaped stabilizing engine, desperately holding the world together with sheer will.
He looked down at the vast, dark ocean far below. He had to act, not just to stabilize, but to find a way to kill the creature that now possessed the very heart of the plane's propulsion system.