That chill light, which instantly painted the heavens and earth in a flawless, pale hue, was no ordinary illumination. It felt more like a visual execution, a forceful deletion of all color, texture, and the very passage of time. The Old Welder felt every photoreceptor cell in his retinas scream silently, melt, and recombine within that overwhelmingly fierce white glare. The coldness did not come from the ambient air; it was an absolute freeze spreading outward from his very bones, from the depths of his soul. In this space declared by the Cleaner Matrix to be a "Severe Contamination Zone," pure "white" became the sole physical law.
Had time stood still for a thousandth of a second? Or for an entire century? Senses were stripped away completely, consciousness floating and struggling within a pure white void, like an unlucky air bubble plunging into a frozen deep sea.
When vision and feeling finally struggled back, the Old Welder and Windthroat simultaneously emitted a pained gasp—not a sound, but a nerve-wracking spasm as if their throats were being torn apart. They discovered that their bodies were floating half a meter off the ground! No, the entire battlefield area—every bit of matter not yet completely dissolved, from ice chips, scrap metal, and blocks of solidified Corrosive Melt, to fragments of the Ice-Cast Colossus tossed into the air and frozen mid-flight, and even those Cleaner units suddenly locked in place during high-speed impact—was frozen as if trapped inside…
Chapter 68