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Then he manipulated his soul power within the Amir-22 in order to start releasing the heat outward. He felt the temperature within the cage rise immediately, and he knew that he had to address it again. If not, he would probably melt before the crystals did.

So he had to use the shield's absorption recursively. Release heat in a blanketing, then start absorbing again, then release, absorb, release, absorb--indefinitely.

And quickly, too.

The heat buildup seemed to grow exponentially. Faster and faster. Until even a split second without the absorption being active was enough to make Hector feel like his whole body was on fire.

He couldn't even tell if that was Sermung's doing or not. Was the Titan ramping up the heat? Or was this actually a feedback loop? Was the shield actually generating extra heat, somehow? This felt like a little too much, honestly.

The cage became a very strange place. Flashing between boiling hot and perfectly temperate. Hector's vision began to obscure, bending and warping like a desert mirage that was somehow right in front of him. And without airflow, he couldn't rely on the Scarf to aid his spatial awareness for materialization outside the cage.

All he had was his aura sense now. He'd never relied on it so heavily before, especially for the purpose of harnessing materialization. He could feel his work slipping. Getting sloppier. Less accurate. The iron bugs harassing Sermung must've been missing their shots like crazy now. And the flying drills. They were going all over the place.

Very, very bad.

He had to concentrate. Focal points. Multiple thought processes. Organize. Prioritize.

The iron coating around the cage was complete. The only openings left were for corners so that the drills could still strike.

Even more heat, he decided. Not just an iron coating. A molten iron coating. The crystal was being a real bastard. Needed to soften it up. He could sense fractures in the corners, but that wasn't enough. Even just creating a small opening would at least allow a pathway for the Scarf to aid his spatial awareness again.

Multiple drill strikes connected. Heavy and hard. Enough to shake the whole cage. But after that, they were getting stopped too frequently. Isolated and caged, just like him.

Fine.

Fuck all this precision shit.

He summoned a big iron ball with a velocity state. And the target was not Sermung. It was the cage itself.

If he couldn't move because of the cage, then he'd just have to make the cage move, too.