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He went with sixteen points of contact. Two drills for each "corner" of the cage. Eight inside and eight outside, each pair drilling toward each other. Massive sparks flew off the cage immediately, which was no doubt the result of the drills being being rapidly worn down.

Then the walls got abruptly closer, squeezing the inner drills into a much tighter space, to the point where he was forced to shrink them down.

Still, it was better than being completely squashed. Sermung was going easy on him, Hector knew.

The outer drills were wrapped in crystal and halted, so Hector just dematerialized them and tried again. Same story, though. Wrapped and stopped. Only the eight inner drills were being allowed to work, which Hector found curious but didn't have time to worry about.

If he wanted the outer drills to work, he'd have to be more creative.

A multi-pronged approach formed quickly in his mind, and he didn't hesitate to put it all into action.

First, make the outer drills move all around. Zip about the battlefield. Avoid capture via non-linear routes. Then come in for a big drilling strike. If they got captured anyway, remake and try again.

Second, distract Sermung. Annoy him again. However possible. The little pinging tubes he'd used earlier. Bring those back. And bugs. Tiny iron bugs. Buzzing around Sermung's head.

Unfortunately, he couldn't materialize them that close to the Titan. The man's field density was way too strong for that. But he could have them launch even tinier iron pellets at the guy.

Specifically, at his eyes.

They wouldn't hurt, but they might obscure vision and take his attention away from the drills. That was enough.

Third, start coating the cage in his iron, too. Not at the contact points with the drills, of course, but everywhere else. Obscure the cage's view from the outside so that maybe he could pull a fast one later.

It was a mess. The aerial field in downtown Andeyal came alive with a frenzy of materialized movement. Drills turned into little iron rocket ships with spiraling tips, zigzagging to and fro before slamming into the crystal cage and either digging into its cracking frame or simply exploding into iron chunks on impact. It was tough to calibrate the amount of force to use, but Hector didn't have the luxury of letting the failures discourage him.

He just kept pressing.

Next page on the 9th

Thanks for reading, everybody.

Page 4138

But hold on. Maybe this wasn't as bad as it seemed.

The shield had new functionality that he'd been waiting for an opportunity to use. Not to mention, it was already reshaping itself to flatten out the giant dent in it.

Abbas had wanted him to test it out, hadn't he? Well, here we go.

In his personal practice with the shield, he'd discovered that heat absorption and release were entirely new features. It sure would've been helpful if Abbas had actually bothered to inform him about that ahead of time, especially since Hector only found out accidentally, but whatever.

It was a matter of manipulating certain soul-based "pressure points" within the shield itself. While Hector knew that he still wasn't old enough to be sensing soul power and ardor like reapers could, his ability to sense aura made up for it, at least in this particular instance.

Hector pressed his own soul power into the center of the shield, where the flattening bend currently was.

Then the rising temperature in the crystal cage began to stall. He didn't yet know how much heat could actually be absorbed, but he supposed there was no better time to find out.

That still wouldn't do anything about the crystals themselves, though. Even if he could prevent melting to death, he and Garovel were still trapped in here.

But perhaps the heat could be useful there, too. To his mind, the only hope of breaking through that crystal was to leverage the geometric advantage of acute pressure applied on a wide surface area.

Or in other words, drills. As powerful as he could make them.

And heat--at least theoretically--had a softening effect on hard surfaces, too. So maybe the combination of those two things could save their asses here.

He didn't see much choice but to try. Unless, maybe, the Amir-22 secretly had a teleporting function that Abbas also forgot to tell him about.

Which, honestly, wasn't outside the realm of possibility.

He set to work on his drills as the shield grew hotter and hotter on his armored arm. He wanted as many points of focused contact with the crystal cage as possible, but he also wanted the drills to be as powerful as possible, so there was a certain balance that needed to be struck.

There was actually considerable space in here to work with, so the drills could be pretty big, too.