Chapter 157: The Broken Board and the Awakening (Part 2)
Phase 4: The Dimensional Roulette and Thermodynamic Collapse
Hundreds of sealed dimensions away from Dante's bloody hexagonal room, the situation was not a test of martial instinct, but an agonizing and heartbreaking war of attrition.
Cassius Morningstar (Rank 10, The Jade Lancer) was kneeling in the mud, coughing up thick luminescent green sap mixed with his own red blood. His squad, Group 2, had been thrown into a putrid and suffocating dimensional swamp where the stagnant water was a mixture of reflective mud and highly corrosive acid.
With both hands gripping the shaft of his Saint Grade spear, [Yggdrasil, the Thorn of Rebirth], Cassius kept it driven deep into the swamp floor. He was channeling every last drop of his Qi to keep an immense, dense defensive dome of thick Ironwood roots upright, desperately trying to halt the relentless siege of a pack of colossal Acid Crystal Crocodiles.
But the dome was yielding. And Cassius's bloodline, the Guardian Dragon, was slowly killing him.
His [Blood Harvest] technique was designed to impale enemies, drain their organic vitality, and redistribute it to heal his allies. He was the perfect support. But Sienna's cybernetic crocodiles had no organic blood, no flesh, no longevity to steal. Unable to parasitize his enemies, Cassius was being forced to use his own [Eternal Sap Marrow] to maintain the protective forest and heal his team, consuming his own lifespan in the process.
Beside him, Jareth (The Toxicologist) and Magnus (The Iron Titan) were covered in horrible chemical burns and deep bite wounds that Cassius barely managed to close with flashes of emerald light.
"The barrier won't withstand another assault!" Magnus roared, desperately slamming his thick metallic fists against the snout of a crystal crocodile that had managed to stick its jaws through a crack in the wood. "Cassius, I need you to heal the tendons in my damn right arm so I can hit with my full weight!"
"I'm using absolutely all my Qi to maintain the roof so it doesn't rain acid on us!" Cassius replied, his beautiful apple-green eyes bloodshot, the veins in his neck bulging from superhuman effort.
Then, reality itself flickered.
A sharp, dull, unnatural vacuum suction sound filled the dense swamp air, identical to the snap of a huge mirror breaking under the ocean's pressure. In a single, lethal blink, the liquid ground beneath the feet of Magnus, Jareth, and Sylas (the group's archer) turned jet black.
The three warriors disappeared instantly, swallowed without a trace by the reflective mud.
"Magnus! Sylas!" Cassius yelled, his voice cracking, feeling the links of his healing aura abruptly sever upon finding no targets in the dimension.
Before his fatigued brain could even begin to comprehend the spatial anomaly, the dimension's ceiling tore open and violently spat three new, disoriented figures directly into his fragile root dome.
They were Ignis (The Yang Pyromaniac), Korg (The Volcanic Iron Skin), and Aia (The Fluid Mirror).
Sienna's [Spatial Fracture Roulette] had just injected the worst possible chaos into an enclosed space. The newcomers were not fresh warriors ready to relieve the fallen; they were traumatized survivors fleeing their own personal hell of solar prisms.
Ignis landed heavily on the mud. His mind was still trapped in the previous cycle, where he had been cooked alive inside his own microwave oven. His red hair was singed, and his eyes burned with blind, animal panic. As soon as he touched the swampy ground and saw the shadows of the crocodiles moving outside the dome, his survival instinct ordered him to eradicate the threat.
His hands instantly ignited with the purest, whitest, and most destructive Yang fire, reaching fifteen hundred degrees Celsius in a heartbeat.
The result was immediate, irreversible, and catastrophic.
The dense Ironwood roots that formed the dome, which were soaked in acidic mud, were extremely vulnerable to extreme heat.
"TURN THAT OFF, YOU IDIOT!" Cassius howled, his eyes bulging with terror.
But it was useless. Ignis, deaf from panic, released an instinctive blast of flame that impacted squarely against the internal walls of the protective dome.
The Ironwood wasn't a simple inert shield; it was intimately and biologically connected to Cassius's central nervous system through his spear and his [Harvest Bond].
When the roots began to violently burn and crackle, devoured by the insatiable Yang Fire, Cassius felt exactly the same effect as if burning white phosphorus were being poured directly onto his skin.
The stoic Jade Lancer dropped his weapon and fell to his knees in the mud, screaming in a high-pitched, harrowing tone. The skin of his own arms and face began to carbonize and fill with repulsive third-degree burns due to the sadistic sympathetic damage of his magic. The defensive dome collapsed in a shower of smoking ash, leaving the group completely exposed to a dozen drooling Acid Crocodiles.
Aia, who had just been violently and surprisingly separated from her twin brother's deadly embrace, staggered to her feet in the corrosive mud.
"Aion! Aion, where are you?!" the silver-haired girl screamed, spinning around, tears dirtying her beautiful face.
Deprived of her brother's massive inertia to anchor her core, control over her starlight and direction vectors was completely erratic. The [Vector Needle] trembled pitifully in her pale hands, useless as a bent wire. Her mind was broken.
A gigantic crystal crocodile leaped straight toward her, its jaws wide open, ready to bite her in half.
Korg, despite the trauma of melting against the floor in the previous room, reacted with the nobility of a born tank. The golden-skinned giant abruptly threw himself into the trajectory, taking the immense, crushing bite directly on his armored right shoulder.
"Wake up already, girl!" Korg roared in Aia's face, spitting saliva, as the enormous beast tried to rip his metallic arm off with a jerk. "Your brother isn't here to protect you!"
To break free, Korg activated his [Boiling Blood Reactor] to the maximum. The thick black gauntlets on his fists, the [Tyrant King's Crucible], turned red-hot, emitting dense clouds of violently hissing metallic steam, preparing to strike and incinerate the beast.
A few steps away, Ignis, seeing Korg struggling, tried to help. He compressed his Qi and launched an immense ball of Yang Fire toward the crocodile latched onto the tank.
But Ignis forgot where he was standing. In the enclosed, humid space, the massive thermal explosion didn't just hit the beast; it instantly boiled thousands of liters of the stagnant water and acidic swamp mud surrounding them. The entire swamp erupted upwards, creating an immense, opaque, suffocating cloud of toxic, corrosive steam at hundreds of degrees that enveloped the four warriors, blinding them and burning their lungs as they breathed.
In that exact millisecond of chaos and white blindness, Eira (The White Witch), who remained from the original swamp squad, succumbed to thermal panic.
Finding herself suddenly surrounded by Ignis's unbearable Yang heat, Korg's magma, and the deadly cloud of boiling steam melting her porcelain skin, Eira resorted to her most extreme preservation instinct. She drove the [Scepter of the Sovereign of Absolute Zero] into the ground and simultaneously released her ultimate defense and attack: the [Snow Lotus Sanctuary] and the [Automatic Piercing Dance].
Twelve Imperial Ice crystal petals shot out like satellite blades around her, and an immense white lotus flower emerged to try to freeze and stop the deadly steam, forcing the ambient temperature to unnaturally and violently drop toward Absolute Zero.
But the physics of the universe does not forgive ignorance.
Ignis's immense residual Yang heat, combined with the red-hot metals of Korg's biological armor, collided head-on, in milliseconds, against Eira's cryogenic vacuum in the exact center of the tightly knit group.
The thermodynamic explosion caused by the brutal clash of extreme temperatures wasn't magical; it was purely scientific, atrocious, and relentless.
The violent and sudden extreme cooling caused the dense cloud of boiling steam to solidify into an expanding storm of sharp, deadly ice shards. Worse still, the drastic and violent shift from thousands of degrees of heat to absolute zero caused the heavy, invincible metal alloy scales and boiling blood of Korg to instantly lose their structural integrity.
With a sharp, horrifying sound akin to an enormous crystal bell shattering, Korg's unbeatable body armor became as fragile as cheap glass and simply shattered to pieces. His entire body cracked and burst into thousands of shards of frozen flesh and brittle metal under the pressure of the crocodile's jaws, killing the elite tank in the blink of an eye without him being able to defend himself.
The brutal shockwave of sharp frost and ionized steam swept over the survivors. Cassius, who was still writhing on the ground from the third-degree burns on his arms, didn't even have time to raise his shield. He was pierced clean through by dozens of "boiling ice" stalagmites formed by the collision, impaling him against the toxic mud.
Eira, Ignis, and Aia were thrown through the air, their own spells tearing them apart internally from the energy rebound.
Sienna's colossal cybernetic crystal beasts, standing at the edges of the smoke crater, didn't even have to exert themselves, bite, or launch a final attack. They remained static, watching with cold cybernetic patience as the new generation's most feared and destructive group annihilated itself, massacred and shattered in the mud by the pathetic and humiliating ignorance of elemental incompatibility.
An agonizing silence descended over the broken corpses. And, a miserable second later, the flash of quantum light enveloped them all, dragging them back to life for the next cycle of the Dimensional Roulette.
Final Phase: The Broken Board and the Asura's Awakening
In the suffocating and infinite room of Concave Mirrors, Aion, the immovable Dark Mountain, stood paralyzed. With his enormous hand extended, his thick fingers only managed to catch the hot, empty air.
Right before his eyes, Aia, his twin and his other half, had been ripped from existence by Sienna's dimensional roulette, replaced with a loud spatial snap by three bruised bodies that fell heavily onto the curved glass: Tormund (The Wall of Flesh), Jareth (The Toxicologist), and Sylas (The Archer).
Aion's mind collapsed, and his body reacted in the worst possible way. His massive Black Hole core, which since birth had always been balanced and anchored to reality by his sister's fluid, stellar light, suddenly lost its tether. Without the light to define his edges, Aion's Dark Density became erratic, violent, and self-destructive.
The curved floor began to crack and splinter beneath his boots as wild, uncontrolled gravitational fluctuations crushed the air around him. The pain in the twin's broad chest was sharp and tearing; it wasn't a physical wound, it was the atrocious withdrawal syndrome of a severely mutilated soul bond.
"Damn it, I can't see anything!" Sylas yelled, squeezing his eyes shut and covering his face from the absolute, blinding white glare bouncing off the concave walls of the shadowless room.
Tormund, who was barely regenerating from the repulsive necrotic wounds suffered in the previous room, ignored the glare. He planted his heavy boots on the crystal, hardening his muscles until they became an impassable wall. "Heavy defensive line," he grunted, preparing to take the first charging impact from any lurking beast.
But there were no charging beasts in this room. There were Solar Prism Wyrms.
The gigantic and colossal cybernetic crystal serpents, which minutes ago were happily feeding on Ignis's thermonuclear heat, now moved in confusion, scanning the environment upon failing to detect an extreme heat source to absorb.
Jareth, the Toxicologist, stood up laughing with a maniacal hysteria that betrayed his own mental fracture. Without stopping to analyze his enemies' inorganic anatomy, he inhaled deeply and exhaled his thick, lethal Purple Miasma.
"Smell fucking death, you glowing crystal earthworms!" he bellowed, as the dense cloud of poisonous, corrosive gas expanded rapidly across the curvature of the room.
The toxic cloud covered the Wyrms. The beasts didn't cough or suffocate. Instead, their hexagonal scales acted as always: they absorbed the chemical and physical energy touching them. Their gigantic transparent bodies became tinged with a sickly, glowing purple from within. For a second, Tormund smiled, believing the toxin was dissolving them.
But the Wyrms were perfect prisms. They refracted the energy given to them. They couldn't "burn" the organic poison, so they did the only thing their optical programming dictated: they returned it concentrated.
The Wyrms opened their faceless maws and didn't fire white thermal lasers. Instead, they began to fire intense, thick, lethal beams of solid light charged to the limit.
The purple lasers swept and crisscrossed the room in an inferno of lethal lights. Vorian, the blind Tamer, was cleanly sliced in half at the waist by a toxic beam; before the two halves of his body hit the floor, the cauterized edges of his wound began to instantly rot and dissolve. Selene, without her bow and without room to maneuver her wind body, tried to dodge a second beam, but the light pierced her right knee, necrosing and rotting her entire leg up to the hip in three agonizing seconds.
Aion looked at the carnage around him with completely dead eyes. The gravitational fury that had threatened to destroy the room died down, replaced by an unfathomable and mournful apathy. He was disconnected from the universe. Without Aia, he didn't know who to protect. His mind and body didn't register Tormund or Jareth as allies; they were just background noise.
The immense black colossus dropped to his knees on the curved glass. He voluntarily deactivated his gravity well and simply bowed his head, closing his eyes, embracing the void, preferring to submit to the massacre's simulated death rather than endure the physical and existential pain of fighting without his other half. A swift toxic laser cleanly decapitated him a millisecond later, disintegrating his skull in the air.
In the suffocating hexagonal room, Dante woke up for the eighteenth time since the start of the Dimensional Roulette.
The quantum flash threw him face first. He rose slowly, turning his face away from the puddle of his own illusory blood. He breathed with a metallic heaviness. His chest rose and fell rhythmically, assimilating the trauma of being chewed to death once again.
Around him, the tactical group's morale had ceased to exist. Orion, curled in a corner, cried while hugging his own knees. Vania blindly pounded the crystal floor with her bare fists until her knuckles bled, mute and frustrated by her acoustic impotence. Darius was in a fetal position, the sclera of his eyes completely black, babbling nonsensical equations and bleeding profusely from his ears. Ren and Ciro, the last vestiges of original speed, were exhausted, leaning back-to-back, trembling from fatigue. They had been massacred eighteen times in less than two real hours.
The crystal vibrated beneath their boots. The dense cracks in the dark mirrors announced that a new pack of Crystal Spiders and Hounds was emerging for the nineteenth round.
Dante didn't let terror settle in. He moved with spectral coldness. He grabbed Darius by the collar of his fine tactical tunic and yanked him off the floor with a brutal pull, slamming him back against a mirror wall hard enough to knock the wind out of him.
"React, damn it!" Dante roared. His Asura Eye, now a vertical crimson slit devoid of humanity, gleamed threateningly mere millimeters from the Inquisitor's pale, hysterical face.
"I... I can't..." Darius sobbed, drooling black blood that stained his chin, his mind broken by the psychic rebound. "They have no minds. I can't read their fucking fear. There's only a void, a cold void in their crystal skulls. It burns me."
Dante released him just a second before striking him across the face with a colossal slap that echoed dry and hard throughout the hexagonal room, turning Darius's head with a violence that almost dislocated his jaw. He grabbed him again, this time by the shoulders, digging his fingers into his collarbone.
"Then don't read minds!" Dante barked at him, each word striking like an ice hammer. "You're a damn clan scholar, act like one! If they don't have a mind, read their primitive instinct. Read the direction of their inorganic hunger, their weight, their magnetic intent. You are the damn radar I need now that Ren is blind! Give me coordinates or I'll slit your throat myself before the beasts arrive!"
Dante shoved him without waiting for an answer and spun on his heels, walking with a predator's stride toward Orion. The Puppeteer hid his arms against his chest, terrified.
"Orion," Dante said, his voice suddenly dropping from a roar to a dark, dangerous, and purely pragmatic whisper. "Your necrotic threads get cut because you stupidly try to use them as physical barriers. These fucking mirrors are razors. Don't bind the beasts. Use the threads to bind us."
Orion blinked, the trembling of his lower lip stopping, the madness in his silver eyes yielding for an ephemeral second to the raw curiosity of tactics. "Bind... you?"
"Make a taut net right above the floor," Dante ordered, pointing at the hexagonal tiles. "If the beasts step on it, the weight will tell you exactly where they are through pure mechanical vibration. And I want you to tie Ciro and me. Turn us into your fucking puppets, Orion. Pull us like leashes to yank us out of the path of a slash when we're in the air. Do what you do best and save your life."
Dante didn't even wait for confirmation and turned to Vania. The War Siren stared at him with wide, desperate eyes, uselessly touching her shattered throat.
"Vania. The Word of Domination is over. Don't try to give them majestic orders; they have stupid crystal bodies and ears. Break the glass." Dante leaned in, staring intently at her. "Use your voice not like a king giving a speech, use it like a raw percussive sonic bomb. Scream. Shriek until their glass joints burst and they lose their balance."
The sound of shattering glass announced that the beasts were fully emerging. Fifteen immense Sword Spiders and ten dark Hounds. A numerical horde that should have torn them apart in four seconds.
Dante did not back down. He gripped the black blade of [Fang of the Rat King]. His chaotic Slaughter aura ceased to be a dispersed red miasma in the air; it condensed and clung directly to his skin, dense, dark, heavy, and lethally controlled.
"Darius. Where do they attack first?" Dante demanded, his voice like steel cutting the wind.
Darius, trembling, but with an expressionless face from shock, closed his black eyes. He no longer tried to violently and piercingly project his mind toward the beasts. Instead, he expanded his neural network like a passive membrane in the room, simply feeling the shockwaves and the primitive intent of massive movement.
"Three at two o'clock. They're Spiders. They want Ren's soft body," Darius said. His voice was no longer broken; it was flat, monotonous, clear as a cold computer.
"Vania. Now."
Vania closed her eyes, clenched her fists, and opened her mouth. She didn't utter a single word of authority. She didn't channel a royal decree. She emitted from the depths of her guts an ultrasonic, sustained, and guttural shriek.
The pure, devastating sound of the remnants of her Leviathan cords didn't seek ears, it sought physics. The powerful shockwaves collided head-on against the three incoming Sword Spiders. The heavy beasts didn't stop, but the smooth glass of their intricate joints and knees splintered and cracked under the sound pressure. Their rapid, lethal movements suddenly became clumsy, unbalanced, and asymmetrical.
Orion, with a twisted, genuine, and sadistic smile finally returning to his pale face, dug the sharp nails of his thimbles into the floor of the room.
Hundreds of gray and purple spiritual threads spread at the speed of thought across the tiles, creating a tactile and imperceptible spiderweb. Two thick, resilient necrotic threads shot upwards and anchored firmly onto the spines and the clothes on Dante and Ciro's backs.
"Then dance for me, Phantom!" Orion laughed uproariously, his nimble fingers beginning to move in the air like lightning controlling the keyboard of the universe.
Dante launched himself like a black arrow straight toward the three colossal spiders unbalanced by Vania's scream. He leaped into the air with lethal grace, dodging the first whip-slash of a sharp leg. But, in mid-air, lacking friction momentum, his body was physically exposed to the lethal downward thrust of the second three-meter-tall spider.
But before the immense crystal spear could impale him, Orion, reading the danger from his position, clenched his fist and sharply pulled his spiritual thread.
Dante was yanked physically and violently backward and downward mid-inertial leap, evading the monstrous crystal thrust by millimeters, feeling the wind of the attack brush his nose. Instead of fighting the unnatural pull, Dante assimilated his puppeteer's kinetic energy. Using the incredible momentum of Orion's pull like a slingshot, Dante landed flawlessly on the slippery back of the second spider that had just missed and, in one single fluid motion, plunged his black dagger into its central ganglion. The crystal turned to dust. One dead.
"Ciro, your turn!" Orion yelled, simultaneously pulling the second thread.
Ciro, who had activated his semi-tangibility to become useless, cornered wind, felt the tug. He was physically launched across the room like a stone from a human slingshot straight into the pack of Hounds. The Wind Phantom materialized into solid flesh for just the exact, sufficient millisecond to decapitate a blind Hound with his [Gale Slash], before Orion immediately yanked him back to the safety of the perimeter, sliding him over the floor like an ice skater, right before four jaws snapped shut on the air where he had been.
"Two more Hounds! Left flank, coming in low!" warned Darius, his eyes tightly shut, operating as an omniscient radar reading the inorganic intentions.
Dante didn't hesitate for a heartbeat. He slid across the blood and broken-glass-stained floor, blindly, absolutely, and sociopathically trusting Darius's cold vocal coordinates and Orion's corrective pulls saving his life second by second.
Group 1, rebuilt with blows, insults, and blood, was no longer a solid, elegant, and orthodox wall. They were a frantic, brutal, and dantesque macabre dance woven with invisible threads, supersonic shrieks, and black surgical cuts. They weren't protecting each other out of loyalty or love; they were using each other, like bloody gears in a meat grinder, with cold and terrifying efficiency.
In the deathly silence of the dimensional control room, Sienna watched with absolute fascination as Dante's patched-up, chaotic group, composed solely of a magic-less assassin, a traumatized radar, a mute girl, and a sadistic puppeteer, managed to clear the immense room of twenty-five heavy beasts without suffering a single casualty, and in record time.
The Guardian's blind, silver pupils gleamed slightly.
"They did it. They have survived, adapting to their environment in the first real exchange," she murmured, her voice exuding something dangerous akin to respect.
Vexia nodded slowly, her gray eyes analyzing the Qi synchronization metrics spiking on the screens. "Have they learned their lesson? Do we return them to their original groups and formations so they can rest?"
"Return them?" Sienna tilted her head slightly, her mirror eyes focusing on Vexia as if the Goddess of War had just asked the stupidest question in the universe. "Oh, Marshal... my poor, beautiful disciples are barely warming up their muscles."
Sienna smiled, and with the tip of her index finger, she repeatedly pressed the glowing red runic glyph on the console. Once. Again. And again.
"[Central Protocol: Continuous Shuffle]. Activated. Forced exchanges programmed. Cadence: every three minutes."
Throughout absolutely the entire abyssal crystal labyrinth, chaos multiplied exponentially, defying sanity.
Dante had just buried his dagger into the inert head of the last beast when the solid floor simply disappeared from beneath his boots. Vertigo assaulted him, and he appeared in mid-air, plummeting toward a damp, suffocating swamp of boiling acidic mud, falling right on top of Cassius (his face burned), a reassembled Korg, and a colossal crystal crocodile.
But before his knees even touched the toxic mud, his dark Asura Eye was already mathematically analyzing the new tactical environment.
His mind no longer thought in the obsolete concepts of "My Group" or "My Leader." The barriers of pride had disintegrated. His cold mind processed exclusively: "Who is here with me? What can they do to survive? And how do I use them right now to massacre that?"
At the other end of the dimensions, in the blinding concave mirror room, Aion materialized abruptly, his massive body landing in front of a shivering Eira on the verge of lethal hypothermia and a maddened Ignis seconds away from exploding into a nuclear fireball.
The tank swallowed hard. He mentally and painfully forced himself to forget his twin Aia's absence for a second. He gritted his teeth. His massive Black Hole core ignited with a dull roar. He used his massive inertial field and absorbed into his own black titanium body Ignis's excess fire and the uncontrollable absolute zero cold of Eira, brutally stabilizing the room's lethal temperature through pure gravitational compression.
Hours ceased to exist. They had begun to assimilate the sadistic, true military purpose of the Guardian's labyrinth. The stupid ego of belonging to a specific technique or a fixed role had shattered into a thousand pieces. Now, in hell, everyone was a lethal, disposable tool in the hands of the others.
Thirty days passed. Thirty suns rose and set in the outside world, but in the internal time of Sienna's infinite pagoda, every minute felt like a decade of war.
Violent exchanges had become a relentless constant in their lives. Every three minutes on the clock, without fail, the floor flickered with white light and their realities changed. Sometimes they fell into dense corrosive swamps; sometimes into black zero-gravity abysses; sometimes into crystal hallways so narrow and claustrophobic they couldn't wield long weapons and had to bite their way out.
And, every three minutes, their combat companions changed completely.
Pain and death ceased to be tragedies, becoming simple transactions of time. Their beautiful young gods' eyes had lost all human sparkle; pity, disgust, and terror were eradicated from their souls and replaced by a sociopathic, ultra-efficient apathy toward violence. They no longer screamed if they lost an arm; they simply grabbed the weapon with the other, or used the bleeding stump to strike.
Dante painfully learned to flow and assassinate immersed in Eira's paralyzing cold, using the cryogenic stasis as cover. He learned to run over the back of Tormund's immovable body, using it as a filthy flesh springboard to reach the highest throats. He learned to calculate the perfect moment to kill by taking advantage of the milliseconds when Aia's erratic light completely blinded the horde.
In the rearguard of the constant massacre, Cassius learned like an automaton to sew and heal with jade light the shattered people suddenly falling from the ceiling on the verge of bleeding to death, never pausing to look at their faces or ask their names. Magnus, the brute titan, learned through friendly fire to hold back the destructive force of his immense hammer strikes if he detected the fragile bodies of Jareth or Darius nearby, controlling his strength to the millimeter so as not to destroy his weak paper allies.
By the thirtieth day, four isolated squads no longer existed.
Under the infinite, bloody pressure grinder imposed by Sienna, a terrifying and perfect instinctive hive mind had been born, forged in the anvil of the purest, absolute despair. The Void Sequences were being born.
And then, at the dawn of the thirty-first day in hell, in the center of a titanic transparent spherical room where all twenty-four warriors were massively and simultaneously thrown into a dimensional holocaust to face a combined Army of a hundred colossal Prism Wyrms and a thousand Fracture Amalgams... the first, sublime, true fissure in the physics of their stagnant cultivation occurred.
The chaos was a ballet of blood and colors.
Dante was suspended in the air, falling in a descending parabola straight toward the open jaws of a massive thirty-meter Prism Wyrm. Behind him, Ignis released a thin, controlled stream of white fire to kinetically propel him through the air. To the right, Aia curved her trail of starlight like a liquid mirror to blind the cybernetic beast's front sensor. From below, Aion increased the crushing gravity localized solely on the Wyrm's head, forcing it to bow its snout and expose the back of its neck.
It was the most majestic, dehumanized teamwork possible.
Dante raised his left hand and firmly gripped the worn, nicked hilt of the [Fang of the Fallen Asura] dagger.
But his human body was at the physical limit of biological collapse. His muscles were torn. His Sea of Consciousness was a dry puddle; his Qi was so absolutely and painfully depleted that he could barely breathe. He didn't have a single ounce of raw physical strength left to pierce and penetrate the hardened diamond crystal scales with a short knife, no matter how exposed they were.
But in that exact critical instant, at the peak of the fall, suspended in mid-air and surrounded by indiscriminate slaughter, Dante experienced a second of pure, abyssal, and absolute mental void. His mind simply went quiet.
The immense mirror wall in front of him, wiped clean of blood by the trail of fire, shone with a blinding light. But Dante's Asura Eye didn't focus on the disgusting reflection of the gigantic beast roaring toward him.
He focused on his own reflection in the glass.
The Dante in the mirror wasn't falling with his face contorted in terror or the superhuman effort of an agonizing warrior. The assassin staring back at him held the black dagger with an almost divine stillness, relaxation, and apathy. The reflection wasn't squeezing the hilt trying to inject brute force to break the crystal; simply, with the grace and inevitable certainty of death itself, he was sliding the thin black blade along minuscule, undetectable "lines of death," invisible cracks woven into the atomic plane and the causal fabric of the universe itself.
Time stopped completely for Dante. The universe froze in a white silence.
During what, to his expanding soul, felt like an entire year of immovable, silent static meditation, his mortal mind processed, devoured, and assimilated the philosophical image of his own reflection in Sienna's mirror.
He suddenly understood why his frantic previous cuts always bounced off the heavy shields. He understood why he uselessly wasted seas of energy trying to decapitate with fury.
He understood the Dao.
The true and purest [Slaughter Intent] did not require brute force. It never had. It required, purely and exclusively, the most absolute inevitability. Armored glass is not hard, the mountain is not immovable, flesh is not tough, if the hand holding the dagger, and the soul guiding it, understand that in the future fabric of the universe... that glass is already broken and dead. He wasn't cutting to kill; he was sliding the knife to confirm a death that had already occurred in the concept of space-time.
Time returned to its chaotic normal flow. The roar of battle returned like thunder.
Dante landed on the thick, armored crystal back of the solar Wyrm. But he didn't stab with force. Barely, with the lightness of a feather falling on water, he grazed the beast's indestructible massive crystal skin with the blackened edge of his small dagger.
He didn't apply a single gram, not a single spark of raw Qi. There was no aura explosion, no war cry, no flash of magic.
He only applied [Pure Slaughter Intent].
An extremely fine black line, thin and absurd as a single, languid dark hair floating in the air, appeared silently drawn across the air and the crystal, exactly along the microscopic path where Dante's dagger had caressed the Wyrm.
A single, minuscule second of silence later, the colossal cybernetic beast—thirty meters long and weighing ten tons, the same killing machine that had required thermonuclear explosions and milliseconds of gravitational and starlight coordination to barely be scratched—simply, and without making a single sound of pain, slid apart and divided along that thin black line into two asymmetrical, perfect halves. The two monumental pieces of crystal instantly crumbled into a fine, soft rain of harmless, glowing dust before even touching the ground.
Dante landed softly and silently on his feet, sheathing the dagger in an imperceptible motion. His breathing was astonishingly rhythmic and calm. His gray eyes were dark, tranquil, and unfathomable, like two abysses of black water.
There was no massive explosion of energy in the room. Dante's level didn't magically rise; Sienna kept everyone's cultivation floodgates hermetically sealed on Samael's orders. His brute strength, his magical energy, hadn't increased by a fraction. But, despite that, the overwhelming conceptual lethality, the inescapable and mournful darkness of his mere presence in that mirror room, had multiplied a hundredfold.
Around him, the roar of the massacre of the other twenty-three warriors stopped for a static fraction of a second. From Goran to Eira, from Korg to Cassius. All the exhausted young gods lowered their weapons for an instant and stared, mouths agape, at the glowing dust of the Wyrm's titanic corpse, and then stared at Dante's upright, impassive back.
They had witnessed the undeniable miracle. They had seen, with their own bloodstained eyes, the terrifying divinity that manifested when human technique, polished by pain and purified by hell, reached and easily surpassed the crude level of raw draconic power.
From the ethereal safety of the great dimensional control room, Sienna leaned over the console. For the first and only time since she had dragged the clan into her hell, the Maiden of the Mirror smiled. A tiny, sharp, beautiful smile, almost imperceptible, curving her pale lips.
"The first of the blind has finally crossed the threshold," Sienna said softly, nodding to herself, with the satisfaction of a master watching her student not die. "Twenty-three souls remain to awaken and comprehend the inevitability of their elements."
Vexia crossed her arms, feeling a shiver of anticipation run down her spine as she saw Dante standing amid the stardust.
"Double the structural difficulty," Sienna ordered, her cold voice retaking command of the labyrinth. "Rip away their last drop of hope and comfort from everyone. Force the other twenty-three to stare at themselves in the mirror until they break, or drown in it."
The intricate millions of mirrors of the Labyrinth of Deities spun violently once again. The infinite orchestrated hell continued its merciless march, but now, in the deepest part of the soul slaughterhouse, the young heirs possessed a thin, dark, and lonely ray of hope woven entirely of their own blood, constant suffering, and pure technique.
They still had three hundred and thirty-four brutal days remaining trapped in the dimension. And the feared Morningstar Clan, piece by piece, tear by tear, was being forged into the perfect weapon to slit the throat of the Heavens.