Supporting the massive Aircraft was more than a gargantuan physical challenge for Zhou Yi; it was a defiance of natural law. This enormous craft was no longer a stable vehicle; it was a tumbling, violently unstable mass caught in a high-speed inertial nightmare.
Its dry weight alone approached 277,000 kilograms, compounded by the hundreds of passengers, luggage, and fuel reserves. Most critically, it was rotating erratically and plunging through the atmosphere at high velocity, a mountain of metal given lethal momentum.
To stabilize and lift this behemoth—to arrest its uncontrolled descent and rotation—Zhou Yi had to tap into every reservoir of his strength.
Initially, he pressed his body against the fuselage, attempting to apply counter-force, but the plane's chaotic rocking made any sustained physical application impossible. The stress points shifted too quickly, threatening to twist him under the immense, uneven load.
He was forced to unleash his full mental strength to impose stability. He wove an immense, complex telekinetic field around the entire aircraft, a massive, invisible cradle designed to dampen the rotational forces and stabilize the central axis.
Zhou Yi had never attempted to control a single, unstable object of this magnitude. The demand was instantaneous and excruciating. A searing, deep pain—not muscular, but cerebral—shot through his skull.
The deep spasms in his brain caused him to clench his teeth until his jaw ached, and even through the protective optics of his shattered helmet, his eyes were visibly bloodshot from the overwhelming mental taxation.
This level of stress was the highest physical and mental limit he had ever reached, a point of near-synapse failure. Yet, he endured. With every ounce of his consciousness poured into the task, the aircraft finally yielded to the imposed force field.
The violent spinning ceased, and the chaotic tumble resolved into a slow, sustained decline—a stable, if rapid, glide path.
Clinging tightly to the now-steady aircraft, Zhou Yi began to use his terrifying physical strength to manipulate the plane's trajectory. He intended to perform an emergency descent over the nearest safe patch of sea.
He could see the dark, churning expanse of the Atlantic below, the whitecaps visible even from this altitude, and knew that naval patrols would quickly arrive if alerted. He had to keep the giant airframe intact for just a few more minutes.
The advantage of his power was his innate ability to fly and generate immense kinetic force without physical leverage.
Even in the sky, where no human could gain purchase, he could plant his feet on the vacuum and apply pressure. With his support, the massive aircraft's nose, while still descending, slowly began to rise, converting some of the dive momentum into desperately needed lift.
The Price of Nanomaterials
The structural integrity of his Dawn Armor Type II was the first casualty of this gargantuan effort.
The armor was designed for high-speed combat, absorbing explosive impact and heat—but not for sustained, massive compressive strain between two solid objects.
The Airbus's dense skeleton was designed to handle hundreds of tons of payload; the Dawn Armor was thin, highly advanced nanomaterial covering a bio-exoskeleton.
Under the multi-hundred-ton forces Zhou Yi was exerting, the load-bearing joints and plates of the armor began to buckle and shear.
The rate of mechanical destruction far outpaced the nanomaterial's self-repair capacity. Where his hands and shoulders made contact with the fuselage, large sections of the damaged material began to vaporize and disperse into the violent airstream.
Viewed against the dark plane and the evening sky, the dispersing nanomaterials looked like a streak of dark, scintillating light, the physical manifestation of his failing defense.
"Master, the rear load-bearing armor is showing 72% structural failure in the compression zones. We strongly recommend immediate disengagement and re-prioritization of objectives." The crimson alert from Medusa echoed urgently within his helmet, her AI protocol prioritizing his life above all else.
"Medusa, acknowledge and override alert. Contact the British Coastguard. Relay that a civilian passenger plane is attempting an emergency ocean landing offshore. Initiate immediate large-scale rescue organization. Use high priority distress codes," Zhou Yi commanded, his voice strained but firm.
"Instruction confirmed and executed, sir."
He turned his gaze toward the left engine, still shrouded in a thick plume of black smoke. His current hope was based entirely on the R-variant remaining inert, digesting its new metallic prison.
The Engine's Rage
But the creature, fueled by primitive rage and pain, was not calm.
A sudden, violent percussion ripped through the engine housing. The flesh-and-blood monster, its collective will maddened by the engine's rotational force and its own inability to escape, was retaliating against the source of its discomfort—the wildly spinning turbine blades.
Its tentacles tore at the blades with impossible strength, exacerbating the mechanical failure. With a deafening, metallic shriek and roar, a secondary, far more devastating explosion erupted from the engine.
The turbine assembly completely shattered, sending countless fragments of high-speed shrapnel tearing outward. A massive, jagged section of a turbine blade, traveling like a bullet, ripped through the aircraft's outer shell and into the fuselage above the wing root.
Inside the cabin, the passengers, guided by the flight attendants and their own sheer terror, were executing emergency procedures: seatbelts fastened, oxygen masks donned, life jackets inflated. They could only pray.
But the most unforgiving force in this universe is inertia.
The turbine blade had torn a massive hole close to the cabin's interior, shearing a passenger seat from its moorings.
The sudden, violent pressure differential—the uncontrolled wind pressure ripping through the cabin—violently ejected the entire seat and its occupant out into the high-altitude air.
A woman's high-pitched scream, surprisingly clear even amidst the sonic chaos, cut through the din. Zhou Yi's helmet diagnostics instantly tracked the free-falling trajectory. A human body, still strapped into a useless, heavy chair, was plummeting toward the ocean thousands of feet below.
The True Hero's Choice
If you must choose between the security of one and the survival of hundreds, which do you choose?
The moral quandary was one for philosophers, not for the Dawn Knight. A hypocrite might preach the sacrifice of the few for the many, calling it justice.
But a true hero does not grapple with choices; he fights for every single hope. He is not a scoundrel acting in the name of justice; he is a force acting in the name of life.
Without hesitation, Zhou Yi left the plane.
He unleashed a burst of pure, focused kinetic energy, transforming his descent into a terrifying controlled dive.
The passenger, accelerated by the heavy seat, was falling fast, but Zhou Yi was faster. In the blink of an eye, the passenger was no longer a distant data point; she was a visible, terrified figure ahead of him.
He slammed into the seat, his own momentum negligible next to the force required to halt the descent. He gripped the fragile metal frame and, with a swift, powerful wrench of his armored hand, tore the seat from around her body. Then, he secured his grip around the passenger's waist, bringing her into a protective embrace.
The woman was a stunningly elegant blonde. She had long, perfectly waved hair and deep, captivating lake-blue eyes that, even wide with terror, possessed an incredible lucidity. Her slender frame was clad in a tailored women's suit, and she carried a distinct aura of refinement, an aristocratic grace suggesting a sharp intellect and cultured background.
Zhou Yi's analysis, instantaneous and professional, recognized an exceptional mind and temperament—a quiet, powerful composure that refused to descend into hysterics.
But there was no time for admiration. An unprotected human body would quickly succumb to the ravages of the sub-zero air and lack of oxygen.
"Hold on tight!" he commanded, his voice a low, vibrating rumble that she felt through his chest plate.
He pivoted, launching himself back toward the rapidly receding, completely uncontrolled airliner. Deprived of his stabilization, the plane was now in a steep, chaotic death spiral, tumbling backward, pulled toward the earth by unrelenting gravity and aerodynamic failure.
The Immovable Object
The plane's momentum was now a terrifying, almost insurmountable force. It was no longer a vehicle; it was a collapsing mountain aimed directly at them. The woman clung to his neck, her breathing ragged against the cold of his armor.
Even she, with her incredible composure, was beginning to tremble, her instincts screaming in the face of the oncoming collision.
Zhou Yi worried that the intense pressure from his sudden acceleration might snap her neck if he moved too violently. Yet, her silence—her lack of hysteria—was a significant relief.
Unlike the woman, Zhou Yi possessed the singular will to stand against a collapsing mountain. When faced with a massive, tumbling airplane, he did not hesitate.
He charged toward the diving plane, activating his telekinesis to its absolute limit, drawing force from every strained muscle and from the pulsing, painful center of his consciousness. He hurled his arms out in a defiant, impossible stance as he met the oncoming nose of the Airbus.
He did not attempt to deflect the collision, which would have violently broken the plane apart. He chose to shoulder the burden.
He planted his feet (on the air itself, via kinetic projection), stretched his arms, and placed his open palms against the aircraft's nose cone, accepting the full, unmitigated impact force that would otherwise shatter the fuselage.
The armor on his arms instantly disintegrated and shattered. Against the sheer, hundreds-of-tons of inertial force, the thin layer of nanomaterial was utterly useless, peeling away and dispersing like black smoke in the wind. The woman, eyes wide, could not see the collision clearly, but she felt it.
She felt the incredible, tectonic power radiating from the man who shielded her. His muscles seemed to swell and groan beneath the protective suit, his blood thundering through his veins like the roar of a thousand waterfalls.
His heartbeat became a deafening rhythm, a mythical war drum wielding the power of a god. Mountains seemed to crumble before him; the very air fractured around his resistance.
This was no man. This was an entity of raw, magnificent power.
Passively resisting the catastrophic impact, Zhou Yi felt an indescribable surge of pure, white-hot rage and frustration.
The force slamming into his body—hundreds of tons of violent, twisting momentum—caused his bones to ache and his core muscles to spasm violently. His heart momentarily seized. It was a pain unlike any he had ever endured, but this pain was the final key, unlocking a primal, limitless reserve of strength.
A soundless, tectonic roar escaped his chest. In that instant, a tremendous, unfathomable limitless power surged through him. Everything bowed before it. The collapsing world obeyed his will.
The massive aircraft froze.
It came to a complete, shuddering, impossibly rapid stop in mid-air. Its remaining engines still roared, providing thrust, but the aircraft itself could not move an inch. It was entirely pinned by the Herculean figure—the god in armor—standing before it.
The entire airframe screamed. The wings shrieked with a dreadful, tearing sound as the metal at the joints buckled and deformed under the impossible G-forces of the instant deceleration.
The passengers inside, thrown forward by the abrupt stop, were disoriented but immediately alive. No one complained.
The sound of the captain's stuttering, relieved voice crackled over the intercom, quickly followed by an eruption of joyous, desperate cries from the hundreds of souls saved from the void.
Zhou Yi stood, holding the still-trembling woman, his arms now bare against the cold, his armor pulverized, but the plane—for now—was stable. He had stopped the mountain. But the viper was still in the mountain's heart.