Arc gasped.
He woke once more.
His fists clenched instinctively as his eyes lifted toward the rings of gleaming metal surrounding the arena. Two glowing slits stared back at him like eyes, mocking him as the crimson flames within the enormous braziers flared higher.
"This is bullshit."
He pushed himself upright.
Then he moved.
Again.
And again.
Arc charged the Antare representing the Herald of Strength, throwing himself into close combat while desperately avoiding its point-blank attacks.
He could not match its speed.
Not directly.
His only advantage was experience.
Years of combat had taught him to recognize patterns before they fully developed, the slightest shift of a shoulder, the rotation of a wrist, the movement of a trigger finger.
It was similar to how a person might evade a gunshot not by reacting to the bullet itself, but by predicting where the weapon was already being aimed.
Arc was doing the same thing.
Except the weapon was a fifteen-meter monster.
And every mistake meant death.
The strain was immense.
It felt like trying to race a minivan against a Formula One car.
His body was simply not built to keep up.
Yet, with enough effort, he managed to crack the armor.
A tiny fracture.
Barely visible.
Arc stared at it.
These things were too durable.
Far too durable.
The experience reminded him of an ordinary human trying to punch through a reinforced bank Vault.
A single strike would accomplish almost nothing.
But that did not make the first strike worthless.
Nor the second.
Nor the tenth.
Nor the forty-ninth.
If a rock finally broke on the fiftieth hit, that did not mean the previous forty-nine had been meaningless.
Each one had contributed.
Each impact had weakened the structure.
Each blow had brought the final one closer.
Arc understood that now.
He drove his mangled bloody fist into the damaged section.
The fracture widened.
The armor gave.
His knee crashed into the weakened joint, forcing the Antare off balance as Arc slipped past it.
The other Antare immediately converged.
Long-range attacks erupted across the arena.
Arc sprinted through the barrage, weaving between beams and shockwaves until he reached the immobile statue at the far end.
There.
One of the missing emblems.
The gold ornament embedded within Onslaught's fists.
He reached for it.
A blur passed through his vision.
A massive glaive tore through him before he could react.
Dodging had been pointless.
Trying to avoid something moving that fast was like attempting to evade a sniper's bullet after it had already been fired.
There was no reaction window.
No chance.
Only death.
Death Counter: 3.
Arc awakened at his designated rebirth point.
Again.
And again.
And again.
The farce continued.
Every time he died, he returned to the same place.
Every time he returned, the counter remained.
There was no clock.
No indication of how long he had been trapped.
Minutes meant nothing.
Hours meant nothing.
Days meant nothing.
An eternity was easier to comprehend.
The glowing slits within the rings continued to burn, their crimson light spreading across half the arena.
But Arc remembered.
He remembered everything.
His photographic memory recorded every death.
Every attack.
Every mistake.
Every location.
Every corresponding marker on the rings.
The flames around the arena resembled percentages on a loading screen that never reached completion.
Only two of the fifteen emblems had been returned to the incomplete statue.
Two.
That was all.
Just be cause he knocked them loose.
Arc looked across the arena floor.
Thousands of broken remnants of his previous attempts remained scattered across the stone.
Evidence of every failure.
Every time he had fallen.
Every time he had risen.
Every time the Antare had killed him.
Yet they refused to stay dead.
"Why won't you die?"
The words came out quietly.
His eyes twitched.
Something had changed.
The light within them began to distort.
Norvanite leaked across his face, glowing white.
Arc had stopped thinking rationally.
He began using himself as a weapon.
A self-destructive technique.
If death only reset his body, then his own destruction could become ammunition.
Whenever he reached the edge of death, he would trigger it.
And it worked.
Barely.
During one attempt, Arc managed to tear the hand from one of the Tribunal-class Antare.
Absalon.
The victory lasted seconds.
The other two Tribunal representations—Chilean and Armmon—destroyed him almost immediately afterward.
Arc's broken body fell.
Then he respawned.
The next time he encountered Absalom, the missing hand was back.
Fully restored.
Arc stared.
Silence.
They had regenerated.
All that effort.
All that sacrifice.
Reversed.
Every wound restored.
Every loss erased.
His sacrifice meant nothing to them.
His power meant nothing.
His suffering meant nothing.
They came toward him at the spawn point.
Their glowing emblems seemed to mock him.
Arc needed their cores to restore the representation of Jura.
Otherwise, this would continue forever.
He watched as they stepped over the remains of his previous bodies, crushing them beneath their feet.
They were changing.
Their presence intensified.
Their eyes burned brighter.
Their bodies grew larger 15m, to 20m to 30m overtime.
Their armor darkened.
The more he fought them, the more imposing they became.
And then they attacked.
Again.
And again.
And again.
Arc was thrown through the arena.
The Antare of Perception smote him beneath a blinding imitation of holy light.
The Antare that embodied Space erased him from the battlefield.
Onslaught battered him into the ancient metal walls.
The impacts shook the colosseum.
Pillars cracked.
The walls shattered.
The arena itself seemed to groan beneath the endless violence.
Arc kept returning.
His blood began to pool across the arena floor.
It spread farther with every death.
A dark red tide beneath the crimson flames.
He had never experienced anything like this.
Not pain.
Not even death.
It was repetition.
The complete removal of meaning from both.
He was killed.
He returned.
He was killed again.
He returned again.
The cycle continued until even anger began to disappear.
Arc finally awakened once more.
His spawn point was surrounded by his own blood.
The pool reached his knees, considering the sheer size of the place with the walls being far enough that a county would fit inside it stood as a testament to the violence.
He stood within it surrounded by traces of his own ashes ground bones flesh and viscera.
The Antare approached.
Arc did not move.
The light had disappeared from his eyes.
He looked empty.
Steam began to rise from his body.
Stabbing pains tore through him as his nerves fired erratically. His hands twitched.
His body felt cold.
Numb.
He stared at the approaching Antare.
Then he spoke.
"I have been unmade before."
His voice was quiet.
"Reduced to base components. Torn apart until only the function of my existence remained."
He lifted his head.
"I have been killed."
A faint smile crossed his face.
"And I have come back."
The Antare continued forward.
"You think this means something to me?"
Arc's eyes remained empty.
"Despair is a luxury."
A pause.
"Hope is a disease."
His fingers slowly curled.
"I have no need for either."
His body began to glow.
"I am what remains when pain ceases to mean anything."
The steam around him thickened.
"I am what is left when suffering is the only constant."
His eyes sharpened.
"I am not lost."
A surge of energy rolled across the arena.
"I am not broken."
The Antare stopped.
"I am not weak."
Arc's silver eyes began turning white.
"And even without my stockpile..."
His fist tightened.
"...I damaged you."
He looked around at the arena.
At the rings.
At the countless deaths recorded within them.
"My stockpile."
"My harvest."
"Reduced to nothing."
His expression hardened.
"Freedom is all I want."
"All I need."
"The world is shit."
"This Arena or Altar is shit."
His aura intensified.
"All of this is shit."
"Nobody is free in this damned system."
"Everything is governed by what is essentially fear."
His eyes darkened.
"The way I see it, only the strongest survive."
He looked directly at the Antare.
"So if overwhelming every being that will ever oppress me is the only solution..."
The air began to tremble.
"...then I will usurp them."
His body began to destabilize.
"I will erase them."
His voice grew louder.
"With my body itself."
The Antare attacked.
Arc was struck into the air.
Blood scattered from him as his body twisted through the crimson light.
His hand sparked.
He smiled.
A minute spark of cyan energy fell from his fingers.
It landed in the pool below.
A single spark.
Then another.
The blood began to react.
Energy spread through it.
Arc's smile widened.
There was one technique he had sworn never to use again.
A final gambit.
A technique born from absolute desperation.
CRITICAL FUSION.
The name echoed through his mind.
This was how he had achieved his false ascension state.
[AMBER].
Originally, Critical Fusion had required him to consume the resources of an entire high-ranked biome—the LUX-EN-TENEBRIS.
Its resources had provided enough power to force his body into a state beyond its normal limits.
An ascension built on borrowed abundance.
But Arc no longer had those resources.
He had himself a whole lot of himself.
That would be more than enough.
He looked around the arena.
The enormous red ring stretched for kilometers around him, documenting every death.
Every failure.
Every reset.
His silver eyes turned completely white.
His body destabilized.
Energy poured into the blood surrounding his feet.
Then Arc noticed the number.
The number his photographic memory had recorded.
The number of times he had died.
99,999,974,234.
Nearly a hundred billion deaths.
In that moment, time seemed to slow.
Within Darium, the Antare were pushed backward by an overwhelming force.
Arc's expression twisted into something almost manic.
The blood filling the arena began to move.
It flowed toward a depression at the center of the battlefield, pouring inward as though pulled by an invisible gravity.
Energy accumulated.
Pressure increased.
The arena shook.
The crimson flames bent away from him.
The Antare braced themselves.
Arc's body began to fracture beneath the force he was generating.
He did not care.
The pressure peaked.
A shockwave erupted.
Pure power.
Pure energy.
Pure destructive force.
Arc disappeared within the blast.
Then,
He emerged.
His body reassembled through sheer momentum as he drove himself forward.
Onslaught raised its fists.
Too late.
Arc's punch connected.
The impact detonated across the arena.
The upper half of Onslaught's body shattered beneath the force, its armor breaking apart as its form was blasted backward.
For the first time in a very long while.
The Antare had been genuinely damaged.
Arc remained standing.
His body smoked.
His eyes burned white.
And his voice thundered across the arena.
"AND I WONT CEASE TILL YOU ALL ARE NOTHING!!!!!!"