Chapter 156: The Lesson of Weakness: Devoured Alive (Part 4)
Phase 2: The Prism Oven (The Massacre of Group 4)
Hell is not always a dark, cold, and damp pit. Sometimes, the most absolute damnation and the most paralyzing terror do not hide in the shadows, but in the light. Sometimes, hell is a clarity so absolute, pure, and inescapable that it does not allow sinners to hide from their own arrogance.
While Group 1 was being devoured by crystal beasts and Group 3 was being dismembered in a room of geometric gravity, Group 4 was thrown into an ecosystem specifically designed by Sienna to punish and turn the very essence of their immense destructive power against them.
Aion (Rank 3), his twin Aia (Rank 2), Ignis (Rank 12), Korg (Rank 16), Vorian (Rank 11), and Selene (Rank 14) did not fall into a square room or a labyrinth of claustrophobic hallways. After the flash of translation, they found themselves standing on an immense curved surface. They were trapped at the exact bottom of a gigantic sphere, nearly five hundred meters in diameter, built and lined entirely by millions of perfectly polished concave mirrors.
There were no corners. There were no edges. And, above all, there were no shadows.
Vorian, the gloomy Tamer (Rank 11), let out a sharp, muffled groan as soon as his boots touched the glass. The man of skeletal build, who always wore a blindfold to see through the Hive Blood Bond, brought both hands to his face, stumbling.
"Too much light!" Vorian hissed, stepping back uselessly, slipping on the curvature of the room. "My beasts... the bond is burning my mind! There isn't a single angle of shadow to anchor my Qi!"
Deprived of darkness, his bloodline was blind and deaf, his summons shrieking and terrified within his own Spiritual Sea, unable to materialize under the scrutiny of the reflective mirrors.
A few steps away, Ignis, the pyromaniac of the Yang Flame (Rank 12), landed with one knee on the floor. Normally, the immense and destructive heat of his body dissipated naturally into the air. But here, the laws of thermodynamics were his executioners. The heat he emitted bounced off the concave surface of the mirrors and returned focused directly back at him. He began to sweat profusely, something biologically unthinkable for a Volcanic Dragon.
"It's hot in here," Ignis murmured, his eyes of fire scanning the blinding white sphere. "Too hot. I'm roasting from my own fucking presence."
Aion, the immense Immovable Hammer, ignored the complaints. He planted himself heavily in the exact center of the sphere, his face stoic and hard as obsidian. Beside him, flowing like mercury, his beautiful twin Aia, the Fluid Mirror, drew her Low Saint Grade artifact, the [Vector Needle]. The fine, rapier-like spear shone with starlight.
"Heavy defensive formation. Now," Aion ordered in a deep voice. He gripped the [Void Anvil], his gigantic black iron hammer forged from the core of a dead star. Upon gripping it, his Black Hole core stabilized the curved gravity around him, creating a zone of immovable inertia. "Korg, Ignis, outer vanguard. Selene, upper center. Vorian, stay behind me, hide in my physical shadow."
"Don't give me orders, little pebble!" laughed Selene, the sniper of the Whistling Wind (Rank 14), though she complied instantly.
The air swirled around her, lifting her unusual pink hair as she floated gracefully several meters in the air. In her hands, she materialized the [Zenith of the Cloud's Sigh], a translucent crystal bow that she drew using not a physical string, but a thread of liquid air.
Korg, the gigantic Iron Skin (Rank 16), smiled brutally. His enormous fists armored by the [Tyrant King's Crucible] gauntlets rose. To prepare for combat, he slammed the thick black metals of his fists together, activating his Boiling Blood Reactor.
CLANG!
The clash created a bright, dense shower of burning sparks. His volcanic blood began to boil, pressurizing his veins.
That was Group 4's first, catastrophic, and lethal mistake.
The crackle of the sparks and the heat released did not generate an acoustic echo; the perfect geometry of the room turned it into a thermal echo. The millions of mirrors acted like titanic magnifying glasses, bouncing the heat energy of Korg and Ignis and amplifying it. The ambient temperature of the immense sphere rose three degrees in a single second.
From the shining immensity of the curved mirrors, the solid glass began to ripple and liquefy silently.
"Your own strength is your absolute doom," whispered Sienna's voice, echoing from all directions, amplified by the concave curvature until it became a deafening hum. "You don't know how to add. You don't know how to divide. You only know how to multiply power upon power toward the most absolute disaster."
From the liquid walls emerged the Solar Prism Wyrms.
They were not organic beasts. They were colossal biomechanical serpents, thirty meters long and three meters wide, composed entirely of thousands of carved crystal facets. They had no mouths or eyes. They were mobile prisms, optical engines designed with a single purpose: to absorb, refract, and amplify any energy that touched them.
"I'm sick of this! Fire at will!" Ignis roared, losing all patience.
The red-haired boy extended both hands. He activated his Atmospheric Combustion and released the [White Sun Singularity]. A massive torrent of Pure Yang Fire, a fifteen-hundred-degree flamethrower capable of melting solid granite, impacted directly against the colossal Wyrm slithering toward him. Ignis let out a maniacal laugh, expecting to see the crystal beast melt.
But the Prism Wyrm did not melt.
Its thousands of hexagonal scales eagerly absorbed the fire. The beast, previously transparent, lit up from within with a blinding orange glow, like a caged sun. Ignis's fire circulated through its interior, bouncing between its internal facets, exponentially compressing and multiplying its heat energy.
A single second later, the Wyrm reared up and did not spit fire. It fired a hyper-concentrated, coherent thermal laser, ten times hotter than the original attack.
The lethal laser beam swept the curved floor. Korg, who had launched himself to the vanguard charging his [Stellar Anvil Impact], took the direct hit of light squarely on the breadth of his armored chest.
"GAAAAAH!" howled the blonde giant.
He was thrown backward. The impregnable alloy of iron and stellar bronze of his armor, capable of withstanding heavy artillery, heated beyond its melting point in a millisecond. It turned red-hot, then brilliant yellow, and began to melt onto his own body. Korg fell heavily to the floor, and his own molten organic armor mixed horribly with the mirrors on the ground, leaving him glued to his back like boiling wax, cooking his lungs from the outside in.
"Korg!" Selene screamed from above.
In an act of panic, she drew the air string of her bow and fired an incessant volley of compressed wind arrows, using her [Tearing Zephyr Pulse] hoping to shatter the crystals of the Wyrms.
The swift sonic arrows crossed the room in absolute silence due to the Zero Friction Void. But upon impacting the bodies of the Wyrms, the pure, rich compressed oxygen of Selene's wind did exactly what physics dictates in a massive fire: it fed the inferno to apocalyptic levels.
The Wyrms absorbed the gigantic kinetic energy of the wind and fused it with Ignis's trapped fire. The breathable air in the entire room ionized and turned into burning plasma.
Ignis fell to his knees, choking, bringing his hands to his throat. His own fire, now refracted and returned by five air-boosted Prism Wyrms, was cooking him alive. His red hair began to burn. His skin erupted in horrible, gigantic blisters that burst from the heat.
"No... I can't control it!" Ignis screamed, trying to reabsorb the flames into his core, but the beasts were perfect reflectors and the ecosystem was sealed. He was trapped in a divine microwave oven and he was the fuel.
Aion and Aia watched the elite formation crumble in barely three seconds of combat.
"Aion, put out the damn fire!" Aia yelled, her stellar voice tainted with a panic uncharacteristic of her.
Aion nodded, his face covered in soot. He activated his Dark Density core to maximum output. His body became infinitely heavy, like distilled dark matter. He raised his enormous hammer and tried to create an expansive high-gravity field to crush the Prism Wyrms against the ground and, simultaneously, extinguish the fire by crushing the oxygen molecules.
But Group 4 didn't have an ounce of synergy; they were a physical disaster waiting to detonate.
Aion's lethal gravity needed perfect spatial calculations and dimensional stability to aim. But the spherical room was now at over two thousand degrees Celsius. The extreme and violent thermal expansion of the air severely distorted space, bending and breaking the gravity waves like light through murky water. Worse still, Korg, melted into the crystal floor, was emitting a chaotic electromagnetic field because his enormous volume of iron and volcanic blood was turning into unmagnetized magma.
The gravitational well of Aion's Black Hole Shield was brutally deflected.
Instead of crushing the distant Wyrms, the inertial wave curved like a whip and caught Vorian head-on. The skeletal Tamer, who was already kneeling on the floor suffocating and agonizing from sensory blindness, was suddenly crushed against the curved glass with a crushing force of fifty Gravities.
"Aion... you're breaking me...!" Vorian spat, thick black blood gushing violently from his mouth and nose.
His lungs collapsed instantly with a wet snap. His own ribs splintered into dozens of fragments, piercing his heart and vital organs. Aion, plunged into panic upon hearing his comrade die under his own power, tried to deactivate the hammer's gravity, but the magnetic distortion had him anchored and out of control. Vorian was quickly reduced to a repulsive, flat puddle of crushed flesh and pulverized bones by the leader who was supposed to protect him. First catastrophic friendly death.
Aia saw her brother lose control and her fluid mind cracked. Her gray eyes became white stars of pure terror. She saw two of the Wyrms charging their thermal lasers, aiming directly at the paralyzed Aion.
With the [Vector Needle] in hand, Aia used her Kinetic Flash. She moved in front of her twin and tried to use her spear of light to redirect, "touch", and bend the immense incoming thermal lasers from the Wyrms, hoping to make them hit each other.
But the beasts were made of millimeter prisms, and Aia manipulated light. When the tip of her Liquid Silver weapon touched the colossal superheated beam to change its vector, the Wyrm simply reacted by subtly rotating just one of its crystalline scales.
The laser beam did not deflect; it refracted wildly. The immense energy exploded upon colliding with the spear, instantly splitting into seven different lethal beams that shot off at random angles at the speed of light.
One of the intense refracted beams cut the air cleanly... and passed straight through Selene's abdomen in the sky.
The agile pink sniper dropped her crystal bow. The laser had been so hot, so absurdly fast, that it cauterized the wound instantly without spilling a single drop of blood. From her right hip to above her left shoulder, a glowing, incandescent orange line cut across her body.
Selene blinked stupidly, and the upper half of her beautiful body slid off with a wet sound and fell into the void, horribly separated from her legs, which remained floating a second longer before falling too. There was no time for a single scream. Her eyes went dark before her shattered torso touched the curved glass. Second humiliating friendly death.
Aia stepped back, her mind fragmenting. Her pale hands trembled uncontrollably, dropping her divine spear. She had killed Selene. Her own beautiful protective skill had been manipulated by a blind prism to slice her comrade in half.
"No! Heavens, no!" Aia screamed, a howl of madness, losing what little passive concentration she had left.
The Prism Wyrms didn't give her a millisecond to mourn. Without Selene's wind to distract them and without Aia's light deflecting shots, the five colossal cybernetic beasts converged on the center.
Ignis, trapped in the vortex, exploded.
His Yang core collapsed, unable to contain the immense ambient plasma the beasts were forcing him to swallow. The thermonuclear detonation swept the center of the room. It completely blew off Korg's head and torso, who was still embedded in the floor, giving him an agonizing but merciful death. And since his own body was instantly vaporized without leaving embers, the pyromaniac died absolutely and definitively, burning himself and his friends in his own sacred fire.
Ignis's infernal white flames expanded like a tsunami and enveloped Aia. The beautiful girl of light screamed piercingly, her fine skin burning, carbonizing to white bone under her comrade's power.
Aion, the immovable tank, seeing his beloved twin burn in front of him, lost the little sanity that anchored him to humanity. The Mountain's blind and unbearable protective instinct overrode his logic. If the heat hurt his sister, he would simply destroy everything that existed in the universe.
His core spun violently, reversing itself. He forced his Collapsed Mass Dragon and became an immense, actual human black hole. He activated the suicidal [Binary Star Collapse].
The immense, crushing, and gravitational suction force was absolute. It swallowed the blinding light, Ignis's fire, the bodies of the Wyrms, and the corpses of his friends. Everything was brutally dragged toward Aion's dark chest.
But Aia was also there.
"Aion, I can't anchor myself!" Aia cried through sobs, her tears evaporating in the flames.
Wounded and burned, her light gravity was being devoured by her brother. Aion's body was the anchor of the singularity, but the force unleashed was monstrous. Aia was violently and irremediably dragged toward him.
Her delicate bones crunched and splintered sickeningly the moment she collided against her brother's heavy chest, the atmospheric pressure crushing her. Aion, weeping thick tears of black blood, tried desperately to stop. He tried to close his core, shut down his life so as not to hurt his twin, but the quantum bond was destabilized by pure terror.
Knowing he couldn't save her, Aion hugged Aia tightly, trying to cover her, while the gravity he himself originated crushed, pulverized, and fused them both into a painful and horrifying point of infinite singularity. They looked into each other's eyes one last time, sharing the horror, the guilt, and the unspeakable atomic tearing, until the invincible twins collapsed inside one another into a sphere of crushed mass the size of a fist.
Silence.
A miserable second later, the quantum white flash returned them all to the starting point in the center of the spherical room.
Vorian fell to his knees, coughing for air. Selene touched her waist, crying hysterically, checking that her torso was attached. Ignis pounded the curved floor, shivering from the cold.
But the most devastating scene was that of the twins. Aion backed away from Aia abruptly, fleeing from her as if she were made of radioactive fire. He looked at his large hands, hyperventilating with bulging eyes.
"I killed you..." Aion whispered, his deep voice broken by childish weeping. "Gods, I crushed you alive."
Aia, sitting on her knees on the floor, hugged herself sobbing, unable to look up. The most beautiful and strongest spiritual and martial bond in the Morningstar clan had just been fractured by the trauma of physics.
From the liquid walls, the Solar Prism Wyrms emerged again, transparent, cold, and threatening, ready for the next cycle.
Sienna spoke, her icy voice cutting through the cries of the broken warriors.
"You are exactly like an orchestra of frightened children where everyone plays a different instrument at maximum volume to drown out the others out of pure ego. Ignis, your blind fire feeds them. Selene, your wind stokes the inferno. Aion, your stupid gravity turns you into the disgusting executioner of the people you swore to protect."
The Guardian paused, savoring the humiliating silence.
"Your immense, divine, and undisciplined brute force is your own killer. Learn to be silent, or you will continue dying and tearing each other apart for eternity in this labyrinth."
Ignis gritted his teeth, swallowing his pride. The beasts approached, opening their prism bodies.
"No fire! Nobody uses their magic!" Aion suddenly ordered, standing up and wiping away his tears. His dark eyes became hard, empty, devoid of compassion, even for himself. "Korg, Ignis... fight bare-handed. Hand-to-hand. Selene, use the physical bow to block or the string to strangle. Aia..."
Aion swallowed hard, the lump in his throat evident. He didn't turn to look at her.
"Aia, don't trust me in this place. Stay away. Do not come near my shield."
Group 4, the beings with the most massive and destructive power in the clan, let out a hoarse war cry and charged against thirty-meter cybernetic beasts using solely and exclusively the precarious strength of their human muscles, renouncing their divine bloodlines out of pure terror of murdering each other.
They were massacred in twelve brief and painful seconds. Crushed, split in half by crystal whip-strikes, and smashed against the curved mirrors. But this time, they didn't die from the ignorance of friendly fire. While their bodies were ground down by the beasts and not by their siblings, they had taken the first, agonizing, and minuscule step toward true martial discipline.
Phase 3: The Truth of Enlightenment (Dante's Awakening)
In the cold and silent vastness of the dimensional control room, Sienna watched the monitor of the crushed Group 4, taking cruel and clinical mental notes on their inevitable psychological evolution.
Vexia, standing firm next to the floating platform, analyzed the biological metrics and vital signs projected on dozens of blue holographic screens.
"Their neurological responses to pain are beginning to mutate," commented the Goddess of War, pointing to the agitated brain graphs of Groups 2 and 3. "In the first ten death cycles, the massive adrenaline spike in their nervous system provoked blind panic and motor paralysis. They acted like cornered beasts. Now, crossing cycle fourteen, the paralyzing terror is mutating into cold fury and a microscopic focus on survival. They are stopping their retreat. They are slowly becoming lethal tools."
Sienna nodded softly, though her pale gaze of silver mirrors was already fixed and rigidly focused on the large central screen. The screen monitoring Group 1's bloodbath.
"The sharpest tools are a useless piece of metal if the hand that wields them lacks purpose and will," Sienna said, her ethereal voice devoid of empathy. "Look at them. They are, theoretically, your Patriarch's perfect spearhead. And yet, ironically, they are the ones who die fastest in my simulations."
On the dark monitor, Dante, Ciro, Ren, Goran, Borg, and Voltar were fully immersed in their fiftieth consecutive death.
The floor of their immense and once-pristine hexagonal room was now a disgusting, slippery sea of thick phantom blood and the remains of their own shredded viscera. Unlike the other squads, Group 1 did not suffer or die from a lack of synergy or elemental incompatibility. They suffered because they lacked martial refinement. They relied purely on their savage instinct and genetic advantages.
Sienna slid her pale finger through the air and enlarged the holographic image of Dante.
The feared Rank 1 of the Void was leaning pathetically against the sharp base of a broken mirror. He was panting, using his left hand as a makeshift tourniquet over the huge, bloody open wound where his right leg used to be, having just been cleanly amputated from the thigh. A few meters away, an immense and disgusting Dark Crystal Hound with three drooling maws stalked him, preparing to devour him.
"The Patriarch has pinned his hopes on this boy's potential," murmured Vexia, adjusting her glasses, frowning as she watched the beating. "His growth in cultivation levels is statistically aberrant. But seeing this... his raw technique is that of a frightened black market butcher, not that of an Imperial Assassin."
"It is infinitely worse than that, Marshal," Sienna corrected coldly. "Even the roughest, stupidest butcher instinctively knows the anatomy of the pig he skins. Dante does not fight in the philosophical sense of the word. He simply 'plays'. He plays at being god because he has programmed cheats."
The Guardian pointed at Dante's pale, bloodied face in the hologram.
"His brilliant Asura mind is divided and numb. He relies blindly and fanatically on an external crutch."
Sienna leaned forward. "But my amorphous beasts do not have traditional vital points. By erasing those markers from his interface, his precious internal 'guide' has gone blind and mute. Right now, your precious Rank 1 is just a terrified child waving a knife in absolute darkness. And until he internalizes profound death in the vastness of his own soul, rather than in the insipid reading of his left retina, he will die as an Origin Rank disappointment."
Vexia smiled weakly and coldly, understanding the nature of the forge. "Should I increase the aggressiveness and mass of the beasts in his sector to accelerate the breaking point?"
"Do it," Sienna ordered, her mirror eyes gleaming with sadistic pedagogy. "Break him. Force him to look inward."
In the center of the deafening glass room, Dante spat a heavy clot of black blood. It tasted of iron and bitter despair.
He was on his fifty-eighth cycle. His squadmates were broken. Voltar, the loud and fast lightning boy, jumped tremblingly on the defensive, terrified of using his hyper-speed out of panic of smashing into an invisible mirror and turning to pulp. Borg swung his enormous mace with agonizing slowness, using it as a shield to cover Ren's body, who had lost his actual physical vision due to the psychic trauma and relied purely on his bleeding ears to evade the lethal slashes.
Dante wiped the cold sweat and blood from his heavy eyelids. The world around him, suddenly, felt strangely muffled, hollow, and terrifyingly normal.
Existential horror took shape. The usual, safe, and luminous blue interfaces of his divine [Slaughter System]—those sweet boxes of light that always provided him with green numbers, damage percentages, and gleaming red vector attack paths on the monsters' skin—were completely and resoundingly shut off.
Everything was dark and silent in his mind.
The System, confronted with the primal laws of Sienna's Labyrinth, had entered a deep coma and forced hibernation due to a critical data reading failure.
Dante felt the oxygen leave his lungs. A piercing and insufferable digital withdrawal syndrome and primal panic suffocated him in a millisecond. He felt blind. Deaf. Naked before hell.
Before his human eyes, the grotesque three-jawed Crystal Hound leaped violently, lunging straight for his neck.
Dante's automated and dependent mind did not analyze the beast's muscles; it did not calculate the parabola of the jump. His stupid, conditioned brain instinctively, uselessly, and desperately searched for a luminous flash in the air; a convenient red System marker on the beast's throat telling him "stab here to win."
But there was nothing. No text. No color. Just a hungry multi-ton crystal monster falling upon him.
Dante hesitated. His mind, accustomed to receiving pre-processed answers, froze in the face of chaotic organic information. And that minuscule, unforgivable fraction of a second of tactical cowardice was all the predator needed.
The Hound's disgusting and heavy upper jaws didn't go for the neck. They slammed shut, like a steel trap, directly onto Dante's right arm. With a horrifying and loud, dull crunch, the hydraulic pressure of the crystal teeth ripped and cleanly amputated his arm from the shoulder.
The pain was a cosmic explosion, thick, sharp, and blinding; a whiplash of liquid fire that snuffed out all his senses. His faithful dagger, the Dagger of the Fallen Asura, fell uselessly from his severed hand and clattered onto the blood-stained crystal floor. Dante fell to his knees, his lifeblood gushing from his mutilated body.
He squeezed his eyes shut tightly, waiting to surrender. Waiting for death, the chewing of his skull, and the lying, warm, saving white flash of the labyrinth's reset to try again.
But this time, kneeling in the puddle of his own blood, at the lowest and darkest point of humiliation, something profound, ancestral, and metaphysical broke inside his mind in complete silence.
It was not his sanity that gave way. It was the violent and beautiful breaking of an immense and pathetic artificial limitation.
Why? Why do I cowardly depend on a fucking magic light to dictate how I must cut the soft flesh of my enemies to kill? Time seemed to slow down, painfully dilating as the green, acidic saliva of the howling beast fell heavily toward his impassive face.
I do not use murder as a numbers game. I... I am and embody Slaughter itself. And Slaughter is not a cold, stupid computer calculation that shuts down. Slaughter is... and will always be a perfect Law of nature.
His dark and lethal Demon Dragon Bloodline, in its terrifying Asura variant, was not a simple, cheap blood mutation or a spell. It was forged by fire into the very matter of his primordial soul. And the soul does not need a stupid, insipid blue interface and computer graphics to know when, how, and with what absolute fatality it must reap a useless life.
Dante slowly, coldly, and icily opened his gray eyes.
He no longer frantically searched or begged for the pathetic floating numbers of the assist System. He didn't uselessly look for red "Health Point" bars. His vision shed the cybernetic filter and connected to the raw, brutal, and mathematical real physical universe.
He saw the monstrous Crystal Hound falling toward him. But this time, he observed it with an absolute, microscopic, and clinical predatory coldness.
His retinas caught how the thick, transparent, and heavy bands of crystal muscular tension in the beast's hindquarters contracted to the millimeter. He heard, with an ear divinely tuned by pure adrenaline, the minuscule, dull, and crunchy friction of cheap glass in the immense lower jaw, logically determining that this part was asymmetrical, uselessly heavy, and milliseconds slower than the upper one. He felt on the pores of his pale skin the light and heavy displacement of the wind on the left flank, indicating the airborne monster's lethal blind spot of uncontrollable inertia.
It was no longer the cold, safe, and fake software of the [Slaughter System] analyzing abstract data.
It was uniquely, exclusively, brutally, and wonderfully him. Dante. The pure Martial Artist, opening his eyes to the true world for the first time, casting off the digital crutch.
The amorphous, hungry beast lunged head-on.
Dante did not retreat a single, cowardly, or pathetic centimeter from his position. He did not have his right arm to perform complex blocks, so he did not try to stop the attack with brute force. Instead, he impassively, clinically, and sadistically used the immense and overwhelming pain of his recent amputation, not as a brake of terror or a justification to flee, but transmuting it into pure, black, lethal fuel.
He took a lethal and subtle half-step forward and to the left, ignoring fear, stepping fully into the beast's exposed guard, brushing past death and the descending jaws by scarce, millimeter-thin, devastating centimeters.
With his intact left hand, he grabbed the black Fang of the Rat King dagger from the slippery floor with a swift, fluid, and accurate pull, in a single continuous motion. Perfectly using the colossal monster's own heavy inertia as it plummeted toward him, he stabbed upward and diagonally.
He didn't aim for the throat, nor did he aim for the heart (which the beast did not possess). Dante, reading and understanding the universe, aimed his black weapon directly at the heavy creature's exact kinetic center of gravity in mid-air.
The lethal dagger slid smoothly between the intricate crystal facets of the enemy's belly, surgically finding the single, millimeter-small, inscrutable defective mobile joint in its heavy translucent exoskeleton. Dante twisted his left wrist with absolute coldness, without using an ounce of force, utilizing the falling monster's own raw inertia to mechanically force the beast to irreparably and catastrophically disembowel itself against his immovable edge.
SKREEECH!
The disgusting, dry sound of tons of thick crystal shattering to pieces was deafening. The Crystal Hound, destroyed at its structural core of balance, was cleanly split into two perfect halves in mid-air, which fell dead and inert on either side of the assassin.
Dante stood up very slowly, panting heavily. His thick black blood stained the pristine glass beneath his feet, but the pain had ceased to rule his mind. He looked at the bloodied dagger in his left hand. For the first, genuine, and authentic time in his life, he truly felt the cold weight of the weapon, the rough texture of the leather, and the millimeter-perfect metallic balance of the blade.
He had murdered a perfect Origin-level creature not through a cowardly game advantage, not through an external artificial calculation, but with pure, raw, overwhelming, and unquestionable technique. With Dagger Intent. He had gone in a second from being a lethal but vulgar black market butcher, to becoming a divine surgeon of death.
Ten meters away, through the bloody mist, Goran and Ciro witnessed the lethal strike in a state of massive shock, paralyzed by the demonstration.
"How... how the hell did you just do that, Boss?" Ciro asked, trembling, lowering his own guard, feeling a chill of atavistic terror creep up his spine.
Dante did not answer. The aura around him mutated. The chaotic, dispersed, and stupid red of his Raw Slaughter began to condense swiftly, adhering to his skin like an invisible armor of a crimson so dark it bordered on absolute black. His presence no longer emitted an oppressive pressure of massive Qi that crushed the body; it emitted a lethal, cold, and absolute sensation of inescapable finality that directly oppressed the soul.
He closed his eyes for an instant in the middle of the slaughterhouse. The entire enormous geometric room vibrated in unison with the heavy beat of his dark heart.
And then, deep within his newly liberated psyche, silver text—no longer a glowing assist blue, but a dark, molten metal fused into his own brain—ignited:
[SLAUGHTER SYSTEM: MANUAL CONTINGENCY REBOOT]
Organic Fusion with User's Cerebral Cortex 100% complete.
External Visual Assist Interface and markers: Deactivated and Permanently Erased.
New Execution Paradigm: Pure Killer Instinct Biologically Assimilated into the Sea of Consciousness.
ENLIGHTENMENT RESULT: You have understood, distilled, and internalized 1% of the Universal Law of Slaughter. The System no longer guides you; you are the System.
Dante did not need to read a single one of those words in his mind. He felt them flowing in his bloodstream, lodged heavily in the very marrow of his black bones.
When he opened his eyes again, the gray pupil of his lethal Left Eye, the Asura Eye, had torn, cracked, and contracted permanently in a sharp vertical line. It was no longer a disgusting artificial camera lens scanning tactical data like a radar; it had become the unfathomable, dark, abyssal, and perfect cold eye of a true apex predator that had finally understood the raw, elemental laws of the food chain in its own ecosystem.
Ten immense and hungry Dark Crystal Hounds turned their triangular heads simultaneously, the sound of grinding glass echoing, and detected the new, oppressive, and lethal anomaly in the center of the hall.
Dante raised his face. And, slowly, a terrifying, languid, empty, and sadistic smile spread across his blood-stained lips. An expression of absolute lack of mercy and infinite murderous confidence that chillingly and perfectly mirrored the face of Samael Morningstar about to execute a traitorous king.
He coldly twirled the Dagger of the Fallen Asura between the agile fingers of his solitary, powerful left hand, bright blood dripping from the empty sleeve of his amputated right shoulder, without the pain managing to erase a single millimeter of his terrifying smile.
"Come here, you beautiful blind crystal doggies..." Dante whispered in an extremely low, deep, and lethal tone. His voice completely lacked the slightest trace of fear, anxiety, or effort; it overflowed with a cold, sadistic, beautiful, and clinical promise of absolute annihilation. "Now I'm going to teach you, slowly, delicately, and painfully, how flesh is truly separated and cut from bone."
The true carnage had just begun, and the feared Assassin Phantom, after hell and dismemberment, had finally learned to walk without crutches and hunt with open eyes in the most absolute darkness.