Chapter 156: The Lesson of Weakness: Devoured Alive (Part 3)
Phase 2: The Broken Board (The Massacre of Group 3)
If Group 1 suffered from the abuse of brute force against technique, and Group 2 was decimated by a lack of synergy and unleashed elemental chaos, Group 3 was systematically torn apart by an absolute, purely conceptual incompatibility.
Darius, Orion, Vania, Mira, Iris, and Lia did not fall into a swamp or a clean room. They appeared teleported into a geometric monstrosity. The entire environment—the floor beneath them, the immense walls, and the unreachable ceiling—was composed of colossal cubic mirror blocks that moved incessantly, sliding, rotating, and shifting the room's gravity every second. There was no stable "up" or "down."
They were the tacticians' group. They were the manipulators of information, of psychology, of poison, and of mathematics. Their powers were designed to control complex battles from the shadows, to rewrite the brains and bodies of their enemies, or foresee movements.
And Sienna, watching patiently from her panoptic control room, punished them in the worst, most degrading, and terrifying way possible: by taking away their chessboard.
The beasts that emerged from the shifting mirror walls were not identifiable animals, like wolves or giant spiders. They were Fracture Amalgams. They were repulsive entities, surreal nightmares formed by amorphous masses of raw, throbbing flesh crudely fused with thousands of sharp mirror shards. They possessed dozens of asymmetrical limbs, oddly shaped claws located in illogical places, and multiple faceless mouths scattered throughout their mass that ground together begging for food.
They had no eyes. But even more important and terrifying for the tacticians: these biological aberrations had no central brain.
They completely lacked rational minds, formed souls, traumatic pasts to exploit, or egos to hurt. They only possessed a primitive autonomic nervous system driven by the single, basic, and binary need to consume living organic matter to grow.
Darius, the impeccable Inquisitor (Rank 15), always serene and dark, stepped forward. He adjusted the sleeves of his dark tunic and projected his immense, necrotic gray aura with profound scholarly majesty.
"They are vulgar creatures of very low intellect," Darius said, his voice dripping with coldness and analysis, though a thin drop of cold sweat slid down the back of his neck. "Fear of the unknown paralyzes the weak. I am the Abyss. I will break them from the inside before they can land a single scratch on us."
Darius closed his eyes and activated the pure essence of his Mental Abyss Specter Dragon bloodline. He executed the cursed manual, [The Eyes of the Nightmare Demon], at maximum output. His ultimate technique: [The Veil of Infinite Horror].
When Darius opened his eyelids, his sclerae had turned an absolute oily black. His pupils had fragmented into three crimson slits that spun crazily, and thick tears of black blood began to flow from his tear ducts. The air around the scholar became unbearably heavy, flooded by the inaudible sound of thousands of souls screaming blasphemies.
Darius locked his gaze on the first massive Fracture Amalgam creeping along the inverted ceiling, about fifteen meters away. From his demonic eyes, thin threads of black static, a pure vector of Nightmare Intent, shot out like dark lightning, attempting to forcefully connect with the beast's Sea of Consciousness, trying to extract its deepest fears to project absolute terror.
CRACK!
The sound was internal, echoing only within Darius's skull. The psychosomatic backlash was instantaneous and catastrophic.
Darius's invading mind crashed head-on, not against a defensive shield, but against a wall of absolute and dark inorganic void. The Amalgams had no abstract concept of fear that he could mold. They had no soul, no childhood traumas, no fear of dying. There was absolutely no consciousness for him to invade, manipulate, or break.
Upon impacting the thousands of mirror shards that made up the inert beast's body, Darius's immense and destructive mental power found no anchor. The rules of the labyrinth caused his own power, his concentrated nightmare, and his worst personal traumas—those hidden fears that the Inquisitor himself feared facing in the dark—to be perfectly reflected by the Amalgam and bounce back like a laser beam ricocheting off a mirror, striking directly and brutally back against his own frontal lobe.
Darius let out a scream that had nothing human about it; it was the high-pitched shriek of a madman in full collapse. He brought both hands to his head, tearing out tufts of his perfectly combed black hair. His eardrums, unable to withstand the immense pressure of his own returned power, burst from the inside out with two dull cracks. Thick, black, hot blood gushed from his ear canals, his fine nose, and his demonic eyes, staining his immaculate tunic dark red.
The Inquisitor fell to his knees on the shifting floor, convulsing violently and drooling red foam, his own scholarly mind, his tactical pride, and his Spiritual Sea irreparably shattered by the brutal overload of his own returned attack. He had been defeated in a second by his own reflected nightmare.
"Darius!" screamed Vania, the beautiful and imposing War Siren (Rank 5), seeing the genius of her group fall with his brain liquefied.
Vania took charge. She firmly planted the quartz base of her staff, the [Call of the Abyss: The Scepter of the Eternal Siren], against a floor block. The intricate and immense golden runes tattooed on her delicate throat and cheeks shone brightly with the oppressive light of the sun. She activated the [Song of the World's End: Requiem of the Singularity].
"STOP, SOULLESS SPAWN!" Vania roared, using the powerful Word of Domination of her Leviathan bloodline.
The immense wave of compressed, authoritative sound swept the chaotic room with devastating physical force. The sound was so dense it distorted the air, shattering several unstable mirror blocks in the surroundings into a thousand pieces of crystal.
The approaching creeping Amalgams were physically stopped for a fraction of a second, pushed back purely by the overwhelming acoustic and kinetic pressure of Vania's scream.
But the beasts didn't retreat out of submission; they felt no terror or obedience. Vania's bloodline relied on Royal Domination; the psychic and sonic command to "stop" inherently required a receptive soul and an animal or human mind that could be broken and bent by her sovereignty. Just like Darius's mental power, her command found no ears, no will, no mind. It was like yelling at a rockslide to stop falling from the mountain.
One of the amorphous Amalgams, completely ignoring the majesty and divine intent of the command, used the inertia of the scream to leap like a deformed toad toward Vania.
The War Siren, indignant at the lack of submission, inhaled deeply to scream again and use her atomic compression beam, but the beast was faster and operated outside orthodox martial rhythms.
Before the sound wave escaped Vania's lips, the Amalgam extended at whip-like speed a long, disgusting tentacle made of raw flesh braided with thousands of broken mirror glass blades. The wet tentacle coiled with immense suffocating force directly around Vania's slender neck, sinking deep into her flesh and driving the glass over the golden runic tattoos that crowned her power.
With a brutal, sharp, and purely mechanical pull from the beast to bring her closer, the tentacle completely crushed her delicate trachea.
The wet sound of breaking cartilage was subtle, but catastrophic. The precious Crimson Gold Vocal Cords, Vania's newly awakened divine organ, the one capable of emitting frequencies to assassinate kings, were simply shredded, crushed, and shattered like glass test tubes before they could vibrate.
The amorphous beast pulled Vania, throwing her heavily on her back against the hard mirror floor. The enormous monster, a trembling mass of teeth and blades, settled horribly on top of her and immediately began to tear at her armor and chest with raw swipes, shattering her collarbone and separating her ribs, seeking to bury its jaws in her beating heart.
Vania opened her terrified eyes, gasping desperately for air that couldn't enter through her destroyed neck. She drowned agonizingly in her own arterial blood, trying to kick to get the mass of flesh off her. And the final mockery of fate became evident: the War Siren, the woman whose supreme and absolute power lay in the destructive projection of her authoritative voice, was being slowly disemboweled, unable to emit a single, sad, tiny whimper of pain to call for help. She died in an absolute, choked silence.
Orion, the gloomy and sadistic Puppeteer (Rank 4), watching the cruel fate of Vania and Darius, lost the twisted smile that always adorned his face.
Raw terror had quickly broken him; he was used to playing with the lives of others, not fighting for his own. But his instinct forced him to move.
He raised both hands in the air. From the tips of the immaculate [Soul Spider Thimbles] on his fingers, thousands of spiritual Void silk threads, invisible but lethally sharp, shot out. He wanted to execute the Symphony of Dismemberment.
"Dance for me! Dance and tear yourselves apart, you disgusting broken toys!" Orion laughed hysterically, an unhinged cackle, moving his fingers with the mastery of a divine pianist playing a macabre symphony.
The thousands of spiritual silk threads flew through the air and successfully tangled around the multiple asymmetrical limbs and deformed joints of two of the largest Amalgams.
Orion felt the physical connection of his threads to the flesh. With a smile of pure sadistic triumph returning to his face, he clenched his fists and violently pulled the invisible threads of his thimbles, exerting all the pressure of his Transcendent Qi to force the beasts to turn on each other and force them to mutually dismember themselves, controlling them like pathetic slaughterhouse puppets.
But the Puppeteer made the fundamental mistake of not analyzing the body material of his new puppets.
The bodies of the repulsive Amalgams were not made solely of manipulable flesh and bone; they were organically formed by millions of small, movable mirror shards.
In the exact millisecond Orion maximally tensed each and every spiritual thread to force the creatures' movement, the beasts' mechanical defense instinct activated. The beasts abruptly rotated all the thousands of microscopic crystal scales on their bodies outward at the same time. Millions of sharp mirror edges acted and closed like infinite microscopic scissors on the taut threads binding them.
Orion's extremely fine and lethal spiritual Void silk threads, his ultimate weapon and his main anchor for battle control, were cleanly cut in one swoop and in their entirety.
Upon cutting thousands of spiritual connections instantly and violently while under maximum Qi tension, the titanic kinetic and spiritual "rebound" of losing his central network directly impacted Orion's Dantian and central nervous system.
The Puppeteer was thrown a step backward, spitting out a long, thick stream of dark blood, his lungs paralyzed by the shock of the neuronal disconnection of his divine tools.
Before Orion could even catch his breath and retreat to a safe position, the two immense Amalgams, now free from their bonds and enraged, leaped together and brutally pounced on him.
The first beast, a mass of claws and crystal blades, violently clamped one of its faceless maws exactly over Orion's left forearm and elbow. Simultaneously, the second beast did exactly the same, burying sharp mirror teeth into his right forearm and bicep.
Orion felt the cold of the teeth crushing his bone simultaneously. He opened his mouth to scream, but no sound came out.
Both monstrosities, driven by an animal hunger and lacking any sense of cooperation, planted their asymmetrical feet on the unstable crystal floor and pulled savagely backward, with all their mass, pulling away in opposite directions to dispute the human prey.
Orion directly observed his own destruction, his beautiful silver eyes completely bulging, bloodshot, clouded by the purest horror and physical paralysis. He felt, hyper-realistically, how the delicate pale skin of his arms stretched to the absolute limit, how the red and pink muscle tissue of his deltoids and pectorals painfully tore like wet paper in slow motion, and he heard the grotesque, dull CRACK of the bones in his own shoulder joints dislocating, tearing the tendons and rotator cuffs.
The pressure became immense, and finally, the mage's human anatomy gave way.
With a double, dull sound of wet flesh tearing cataclysmically, both mindless beasts savagely ripped both of his complete human arms out by the roots.
The Puppeteer's thick, arterial blood gushed violently, shooting out like two immense red geysers from the two bloody, throbbing craters that were once his flawless shoulders, profusely staining the floor and the crystalline mirror walls around him with arcs of crimson.
Orion fell to his knees, his face blank, looking alternately at the blood-filled floor and the beasts eagerly chewing the limbs still wearing his priceless magic thimbles. The puppet master had painfully, physically, and humiliatingly lost his precious tools. He bled to death from massive traumatic shock, convulsing on the floor, weeping blood from extreme pain, surrounded by his own severed arms.
In a distant and desperate corner of the asymmetrical massacre, Iris, the Weaver of the Equation (Rank 18), the supreme intellectual prodigy, was the last one standing.
She was on her knees in the exact center of a slaughterhouse, her delicate body stained with the blood of the humiliating executions of Darius, Vania, and Orion surrounding her. In front of her hung her immense and powerful [Stellar Jade Chessboard], suspended in the air and glowing faintly, her fingers nimbly moving the smoky quartz pieces at a speed impossible for the human eye.
Iris's brain operated at thousands of revolutions per second, overheating until her nose bled. She was desperately and analytically trying to use Architectural Precognition to calculate the physical vectors, the shifting gravity, and the incessant geometric flow of the chaotic room. She wanted to create an absolute defensive matrix, an Imperial-level one that would nullify the laws of motion of the mirrors and allow her and Lia (who lay impaled by her own thunder arrow on the opposite wall after a spatial refraction error) to find a miserable angle or escape vector in this cubic hell to survive one more minute.
But matrices require universal logical rules. Formation magic demands a stable physics upon which to anchor the equations and ley lines of reality. Guardian Sienna's rooms had neither. They were pure, distilled entropic chaos designed by a sadistic perfection.
An immense Amalgam, massive as a mountain of shredded flesh and crystals stained with dried blood, rose imposingly before her, completely blocking the light of the runic sun. It slowly opened an immense, deformed maw that was literally a black hole, a geometric abyss made of a thousand sharp, broken, interconnected mirrors spinning like a stellar grinder.
Iris looked up into the creature's maw. Her perfect amber eyes trembled uncontrollably, her pupils dilated to the maximum trying to find a number, a line of universal code, a tactical answer telling her where the exit was. She moved one last jade piece with blood-slicked hands and looked at the result on her High Heaven Grade board.
"No... this doesn't add up..." Iris whispered, her voice lost in the immense hum of the spinning walls. Her brilliant analytical mind, the intellect that could design siege formations for the Patriarch in seconds, was painfully and irreversibly collapsing before the crude and mathematically irrational nature of her impending biological death. "The equation... this has no solution."
The Amalgam's monstrous, incomprehensible jaws of flesh and crystal fell violently and snapped shut over the tactical scholar's golden head.
The beast's oppressive weight crushed her skull and fragile shoulders instantly, producing a loud, wet, and sadistic snap of crushed bones and bursting cranial fluids. The death of the Weaver of Group 3, a prodigy who relied on logic in a world that demanded instinct and primal savagery, closed the pitiful, disastrous circle of collective humiliation for the brains of the infantry.
A freezing, dense dead silence descended upon the bloody geometric room.
And just a single, insufferable second later... the dazzling quantum flash of white light.
Group 3 materialized in the geometric center of the mirror room. Whole. Absolutely alive. Without a single visible physical wound. No bloodstains from sliced necks, no amputated arms, or caved-in skulls on their immaculate, newly forged bodies.
But the psychological hell was not erased with divine light.
Orion fell face first, hysterically clutching with trembling hands the arms he felt had been torn off with brutal viciousness, screaming in phantom pain while hyperventilating and crying in animal terror. Vania, the unbreakable Siren who dictated laws, crawled on the crystal floor desperately touching her delicate smooth neck with her long fingers, trying to cough up the illusory blood clot choking her, her throat trembling in mute, pathetic spasms. Darius curled up like a child in a tight fetal position, crying incoherently, his immense and brilliant analytical mind fractured and temporarily plunged into the unfathomable terror of the darkness he himself had tried to control.
The Fracture Amalgams, unperturbed and immortal, slowly reorganized in front of them, their jaws still eagerly chewing the bloody, bone-crunching remains of flesh from the previous execution round, dripping the remnants of their past lives onto the pristine mirrors.
The tacticians had painfully died just one miserable time. They still had to suffer in life and experience in the flesh millions of unspeakable, horrifying deaths ahead of them.
Phase 3: The Control Room and the Truth of Enlightenment
Separated from the existential horror and the disgusting sound of bone grinding against glass that flooded the test chambers, in the center of the vast, inscrutable web of the Infinite Labyrinth, Guardian Sienna remained like a living statue of tranquility.
The immaculate Porcelain Executioner sat relaxed, her long, perfect legs crossed in a lotus position, suspended in the air, floating serenely above her pristine circular white marble platform, which contrasted sharply with the surrounding darkness of the vast operations room.
Sienna radiated an ethereal, icy, distant, and almost ghostly beauty. She was unusually tall, possessing a martial posture so absurdly majestic and purely unbreakable that the mere sight of her breathing made the formal postures of the greatest, most legendary physical and tactical geniuses of the Empires look like the clumsy, uncoordinated movements of drunken apes trying to walk.
She wore an elegant, form-fitting oriental qipao, or perhaps a refined gi, made of flawless, immaculate white silk that did not reflect the room's light, but glowed faintly and unsettlingly with its own cold, spectral light from within. The flowing fabric of the dress clung like a second skin to her undeniable curves. She boasted prominent, heavy, and voluptuous D-Cup breasts that beautifully strained the pale silk with every slight breath, dominating her upper profile without detracting an ounce from her martial dignity. Downward, the qipao draped to reveal the hips and heavy base of an Inverted Heart silhouette, extremely wide, voluptuous, and dangerously dominant, a physical presence of the most undeniable maturity and fertility of the superior race that possessed a magnetism as deadly as it was beautiful, but which no sane person would even dare look at with desire for fear of being evaporated.
She was always barefoot; her delicate porcelain feet, like her dress, never dared to touch or be soiled by the earthly floor of her platform.
Her hair was dense, thick, and absolute black like the well of the deepest cosmic ink, cut in a lethally straight line exactly at the height of her pale, sharp jaw. But, without a doubt, the most paralyzing, fascinating, and terrifying thing about Sienna was not her body; it was her alien eyes. Her flawless face housed two eyes that did not possess a single trace of humanity: they completely lacked the colored stain of an iris or the circular abyss of dark pupils. In their sockets rested two perfect orbs of liquid silver mirror. Those two unfathomable, divine orbs had the terrifying ability not only to reflect the physical image of the person who dared to hold her gaze, but they functioned as a cosmic prism capable of rawly and painfully reflecting down to the last layer of the soul, laying bare all the weaknesses, pathetic insecurities, and fatal structural and martial flaws of the fool who observed her.
As a single, tiny, extravagant anchor to absurd physical and mundane reality, on the pale left wrist of the beautiful, expressionless Guardian was firmly tied a simple, red, worn mortal thread, from which lazily hung a tiny antique golden bell that never emitted a single sound amidst the dense silence, no matter how abrupt her slightest movements were.
Sienna slowly picked up a small baked mooncake from a delicate, floral fine porcelain plate levitating submissively by her hand, and took a tiny, elegant, and lethally delicate bite, savoring the soft, earthy sweetness of the lotus seed paste on her palate with her eyes closed.
Opening them again, the thousands of holographic mirrors orbiting silently around her white platform like a digital planetarium returned her brutal reflection: they showed her the hell, the agony, the mass hysteria, and the infinite carnal horror erupting in glorious, explicit, and horrifying ultra-realistic detail from inside her forty-something closed test chambers.
Her silver eyes saw, without an ounce of disgust or visceral enjoyment, Dante's Asura being immobilized with crushed bones and painfully devoured alive again in Group 1's chamber. They saw Cassius slowly destroying his sanity from being unable to organically heal his own torn-apart friends in Group 2's swampy chamber. They saw Inquisitor Darius convulsing on the floor, drooling and screaming mute hysterics in Group 3's labyrinth.
The contrast of the scene was pure, poetic, dense, and ironic: the highest, silent elegance, calmly delighting in a sweet celestial dessert amidst the most brutal, apocalyptic, and infamous slaughterhouse of human souls.
With a slight, dull hum of displaced air, the immense double doors of the dark, silent control room opened behind her.
Vexia entered with a swift, stern, and loud step, the click-clack of her neat, immovable Victorian maid heels echoing sharp, dry, and authoritative on the immaculate marble, announcing the military invasion of the meditative room. The stoic, unbreakable Grand Marshal stopped with her feet firmly together right by the edge of Sienna's floating circular marble platform, rigidly and militarily clasping her hands behind her back in perfect combat rest.
Vexia did not look at the food, did not look at the Guardian's gleaming dress, paid no attention to the silent bell; her cold, analytical, and pragmatic gray eyes, fixed beneath the snug frame of her military glasses, focused solely on the macabre carnage broadcasting in full color and stereo sound on the solid light monitors.
"They die very quickly," Vexia commented with a clinical voice. "Their motor reflexes are clouded by panic. And their tolerance for visceral pain is surprisingly low for draconic bloodline assimilators."
Sienna didn't look at her. Her silver, iris-less eyes reflected the massacre from the screens. "They have the power of gods, but the mental resilience of spoiled children," Sienna said, her voice soft and melodic. "The Patriarch gave them the power to land Origin Realm blows, but he didn't teach them how to hold the sword. Their actual battle level, when you take away the advantage of brute force, is that of a mediocre Origin Realm disciple."
Vexia nodded. "How long will you leave them in the Beast Phase?"
"Until they stop screaming," Sienna replied. "Right now, they are reacting to the pain. When they are disemboweled, they cry. When they are bitten, they panic. They have to cross that threshold. They have to reach the point where, if a beast rips their leg off, their first thought isn't 'it hurts!', but 'now the beast's mouth is full, this is my chance to stab it in the back of the neck.'"
Vexia adjusted her glasses. "And the clones? I thought the main test was against their Karmic reflections."
"The clones will return," Sienna said, pouring herself more tea. "But a clone with perfect technique is only useful to someone who already has a martial foundation. Right now, pitting Dante against his clone is like having a farmer play chess against a master; the farmer won't learn anything, he'll just lose quickly. The beasts are the tool. The beasts will teach them instinct, survival, Qi management, and above all, to ignore the suffering of the flesh."
Sienna looked specifically at the monitor for Group 1. Dante was under a Crystal Hound, using his left arm as bait for the beast to bite, while trying to stab it with his right. Dante's left arm was being crushed to the bone, but this time, his gray eyes showed no panic. They showed cold rage.
"They are beginning to learn to use their bodies as bargaining chips," Sienna murmured, satisfied. "Perhaps in another fifty death cycles they will stop being prey."
Vexia looked at the runic clock on the wall. "And enlightenment?"
"It will come," Sienna assured. "When their minds are on the verge of irreparable fracture, the mirror will show them the Truth of their respective intents. It will show them Dagger Intent, Shield Intent, the Dao of Healing. But enlightenment is bitter, Vexia. Seeing perfection when you are a chewed-up piece of meat usually breaks the ego forever."
Sienna raised her cup toward the monitors, in a silent toast. "Eat, little mirror beasts. Chew their pride until only steel remains."
In the dimensional labyrinths, the screams of the twenty-four warriors drowned beneath the infinite roar of the hunt. The first day in hell had just begun, and the clock showed there were still 364 more days to go.