1.7 seconds.
For Lin Feng, crouched behind the smoking ruin of the fuel transporter, the number was a brand on his soul. It was an eternity and no time at all. It was the space between life and death. The data from the ghost in the machine was his only hope, a single, insane gambit against a god of steel.
He watched the Titan, its main cannon glowing with a terrifying, contained star. He had to make it fire. He had to survive the blast. And in the single heartbeat the universe gave him, he had to be perfect.
As if in answer to his desperate need, a new voice crackled over the open channel, a frantic, panicked cry from the fortress's outer defenses. "Commander! The west wall has been breached! The natives... the desert itself is tearing the wall apart! They've summoned... vines! Thorny, wooden things are ripping through the ferrocrete!"
Inside the Titan's cockpit, Commander Valerius's face contorted in fury. The savages were proving more resilient than projected. This insurgency had to end. Now.
"All perimeter units, fall back," he commanded, his voice a low growl. "I am sterilizing the western sector."
The Titan's particle cannon whined, its pitch rising to a feverish, unbearable scream. This was it.
Lin Feng did not wait. He did not prepare to dodge. He began to move. He broke cover, not running away from the cannon, but parallel to it, a desperate sprint across the hangar floor. He needed momentum. He needed to be a projectile, not a target.
He did not gather the lightning. He became it. The air around him turned to ozone. Blue-white energy, no longer just a crackle at his fingertips, began to arc and sheath his entire body. He was a human thunderbolt, a vessel of pure, untamed power, pushing his Awakened body to, and beyond, its absolute limit.
The particle cannon fired.
It was not a roar, but a terrible, silent flash of white that erased a sixty-degree arc of the hangar and the fortress wall behind it in a wave of pure erasure. The heat wash from the beam was a physical blow, scorching the side of Lin Feng's body, but he did not falter.
And then he heard it. Amidst the storm and the silent detonation, a faint, high-pitched click.
The vent on the Titan's left shoulder, the one from the schematic, snapped open. A cloud of superheated gas vented into the air, revealing the glowing, delicate heat-exchange fins within. The giant's heel was exposed.
Time seemed to stretch, to slow to a thick, syrupy crawl. Lin Feng saw the opening not as a target, but as the only point of reality in a world of chaos. He was no longer running. He was a projectile, launched from the bow of his own will.
He leaped, his body a streak of incandescent blue lightning, and drove his fist, now a spearhead of pure, concentrated energy, directly into the open vent.
It was not an explosion. It was a reaction. A fusion. The pure, chaotic biological energy of his lightning met the controlled, contained stellar nucleus energy of the mech's core. The blue of his lightning and the angry red of the machine's heart met and devoured each other.
The world did not go black.
It turned white.