Chapter 563: Dire Straits

With only one limb remaining, the Blacksilver Knight was in a terrible position. Sure, the strength of the Blacksilver creations was their rapid regeneration, but could it regrow its whole body before falling a dozen feet into the swirling lake of lava? Not a chance.

On the other hand, their trip here had given Sage some ideas.

The Second Skin Barrier disappeared and Sage threw all of his Spirit Power into pulling things out of the Inner World. Huge boulders appeared rapidly, one after the other. Stones the size of a small car were tossed out beneath the Blacksilver Knight. They were at the verge of destruction, deep inside the body of a mountain sized tortoise, trapped in a huge cavern filled with lava. A cavern the size of a large sporting arena, yet could it compare to the immensity of an entire planet?

Faced with the giant lake of lava, Sage took the most wasteful and inefficient path to success. Filling it in. So what if the tortoise could melt stone and turn it into its liquid state. That burning lava beneath him was quite intimidating, but there was still a limit to its size! Wind can fan flames, making them larger and stronger, but if the winds were overwhelmingly stronger, the flames would be snuffed out. So what if the Heart of Eruption could melt stone into lava. As long as he threw out enough stone there’s no way it could keep up!

More and more stones flew out of him, he told Ruanfu to smash up a mountain and due to the time difference, it was done almost instantly. They poured out in an endless tide, releasing the next stone as soon as the last one had fallen far enough for gravity to make room for it. The Blacksilver Knight had to push off the stones that he released beneath them, hopping upwards to stay nearby the Heart of Eruption. Sage kept on pulling rocks out and dropping them nearby wasn’t enough so the Knight got involved, using its one good arm to hurl them into the distance. Even then, that wasn’t enough to keep up and the Soul Clone flew out to join in, using the Third Hand technique to hurl the rocks out into the lava lake.

At first, it seemed just as effective as dropping a handful of gravel into a lake. The stones plopped into the lava, disappearing under the surface like it was water. The splash sent a wave of heat upwards, but he persevered. The aqueduct-like lava slides had already converged around them, but the Blacksilver Knight and Soul Clone focused their thrown stones on them. The boulders smashed into the supports of the lava chutes and broke apart the shapes that channeled the flow towards them. Sage could feel the Heart of Eruption controlling those slides to try and protect itself, but he disrupted its efforts while continuing to release huge stones.

Bringing things out of the Inner World wasn’t effortless, far from it in fact. Even so, he’d gone all in and was burning through his reserves at rapid speed. He started to grow nervous, his Qi ran dry and he was burning it as fast as he could regenerate it. The Blacksilver Knight was no longer healing and the heat started to melt it down. The Soul Clone stopped and disappeared back into the Inner World, having used up everything it had and fleeing just as the Second Skin Barrier failed.

The stones were released in far smaller volume now, just enough for the Knight to leap off one, and then toss another, hopping back and forth off of the platform-like boulders that appeared in thin air. Most of the lava chutes were smashed apart in a few hundred foot radius, preventing the streams from reaching him, while a small island had formed down below. Hah! It can’t keep up! A stupid turtle can’t beat me, even with a Heavenly Material!

The rocky island continued to grow larger, each stone the knight kicked off of fell down and rolled into the molten lake, every so often one of them stuck and the lake was just a little smaller. Just as Sage was about to start laughing, the swirling lake of lava stopped moving. The whirlpool like motion ended abruptly and the Blacksilver Knight jumped straight upwards. It stopped throwing the rocks and jumped on them as fast as Sage could release them. The lava lake had been maintaining a whirlpool effect, and the ‘water’ level was lower in the center than at the outsides. Now that that motion suddenly stopped, the liquid wanted to level itself out, and that meant a wave coming from every direction. Thankfully, the chamber was large enough that he had time to react, but the twenty foot high lava wave washed over his stony island and concealed the Heart of Eruption.

Sage couldn’t stop releasing stones, knowing that if he did the Heart of Eruption would recover and that damned tortoise would help. At that moment he cursed, since his rapid escape from the wave had brought him close to the wall of the chamber and it suddenly swung towards him, making him feel he was on a ship in an impossibly rough sea. The stone wall smashed against the Blacksilver Knight, cracking the armored shell and sending pieces of oil-black ‘flesh’ flying from the explosive collision. The Knight flew through the air, but Sage tossed a stone out upwards and the Knight flipped over and propelled itself downwards by pushing off of it. The walls swung around and smashed the flying stone to bits but the Knight was already diving back towards where the Heart of Eruption had been.

For just a few seconds Sage didn’t throw out any rocks, building up some Qi and then releasing a flood of rocks once they reached the surface of the lake. The Knight pushed off the falling stones and halted its dive in time to watch the boulders plopping into the lava again. The increased depth put a hamper in their plans, but for Sage it just meant it would take longer. Just give up, little jewel. This stupid turtle is not deserving of you.

The Knight returned to its previous pattern, hopping off one stone and then tossing the other at the lava spouts to keep them from reforming properly. They engaged in an aerial battle in a room of stone and fire, but the Heart of Eruption didn’t have any more tricks. It had already blown off one of the Blacksilver Knights' arms, but its other two defensive mechanisms were defeated. One of them was constantly getting interrupted, and the other was expended. Sage didn’t know if the Heart of Eruption could detonate like it did last time, but in order to test that again he had to find the obsidian heart again.

The lake slowly filled up once more, and the island appeared once more. It continued to slowly increase in size and the Knight leapt down to it. Now on solid ground, it didn’t have to keep leaping off stones and threw every one he brought out. The island didn’t grow as quickly, but the stone chutes were devastated. Not just wrecking the ends as they reformed, the Knight started targeting the support pillars and the connections to the walls, causing the stone slides to start falling down, one by one. As the island grew larger, the heat in the chamber started to drop, which was good because the Blacksilver Knight was only half the size it started at. The interval between stones had also lengthened, because Sage had to redirect energy into regenerating the Blacksilver Knight.

There was only one problem. Where was the Heart of Eruption? With the island covering where that obsidian core had been, he was forced to start excavating. He had to slowly make the island large enough to become a mound, and then the Soul Clone came out to psychically smash the rocky ground up. He was worried there would be lava just beneath the surface, with the Heart of Eruption just waiting to melt him, but there wasn’t. Bashing their way into the ground, he found the piece of heart shaped obsidian just where it had been, but now completely surrounded by rock. It was in a perfectly spherical chamber, which had molten lava at the bottom of it.

“Trying to burn yourself out again, huh? Too bad. Now be a good little jewel and come with me.”

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