La Rocha became crazed. Things had escalated far beyond his control. He had made the terrible mistake of underestimating his opponent.
In a last desperate move, he started taking all sorts of items out. Explosives, volatile potions, poison, everything he had gathered so far in his lifetime. He started throwing these things in bulk at the chaotic anomaly growing exponentially.
However, to his dismay, every single thing was literally absorbed, and not even a scrap was returned. Soon, his own avatar started leaking.
La Rocha froze as he looked down.
Cracks had appeared on his arms, thin, glowing lines where mana was bleeding out of his avatar’s form. The edges of his robes fluttered unnaturally, the color draining as if the very concept of his presence was being unmade.
"No... not me... not me!" he howled, voice cracking with panic. He slapped a talisman onto his chest, trying to stabilize the leak. It fizzled. Dissolved. Useless.
He turned again, eyes frantic. "This is not possible! I have lived for centuries! How could this mere insect destroy me?" He couldn’t believe what was happening.
How did things come to this? He was the one toying around with these insects, and now the tables had completely turned!
He stared at the abomination in front of him in sheer horror. The vortex of blood and mana pulsed with primal hunger, each beat of its shifting heart dragging the last remnants of the fortress toward oblivion.
Pipes snapped and vanished. Entire platforms crumbled to dust. Even the mana-reactive stone lining the inner chamber flaked away, pulled into the scarlet tide.
La Rocha fell to one knee, his body trembling violently. His legs were already gone below the knee, fading into smoky fragments. He looked up, mouth twitching.
"Noooooo!!!!" La Rocha screamed. If things continued this way, then even he might be completely absorbed! He needed to put an end to this at all costs. He did not understand how things escalated so much, but he no longer held back.
Without any hesitation, he triggered his own core reserves.
BOOOOOM!
A second explosion, far more violent than the first, erupted from deep within the fortress. A wave of white-hot mana burst outward, obliterating everything it touched. Stone turned to vapor. Steel melted like wax. The metallic fortress that once stood indestructible was now disappearing chunk by chunk.
La Rocha stood at the eye of it all, his arms spread wide, face twisted with fury and desperation. His body blazed with raw energy, overclocked beyond safety, beyond sanity. The air around him screamed as it collapsed inward. He had turned himself into a living bomb.
"If I die," he spat through clenched teeth, "then so do you."
Unbridled power covered every inch of the fortress as the entire thing was blasted apart. In the end, even La Rocha’s face disintegrated completely. "I win, insect." He smiled as everything disappeared.
The explosion swallowed him whole and kept going.
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