Chapter 157: The Broken Board and the Awakening (Part 1)
In the vast, frigid, and silent dimensional control room, the delicate jasmine tea in Sienna's porcelain cup had completely cooled, forming a thin, bitter film on its surface.
Her inscrutable silver eyes, which looked like two pools of liquid mercury devoid of pupils, observed with absolute and immutable stillness the thousands of holographic screens floating and orbiting around her like a solar system of light and blood. In the outside world, under the real sun of mortals, barely a few hours of an ordinary afternoon had passed. But inside, in the twisted and merciless mathematical bowels of her domain, the young Morningstar disciples had been enduring almost a full week of uninterrupted psychological and physical agony.
Hundreds upon hundreds of recorded deaths. Thousands of painful dismemberments assimilated by their cerebral cortexes. A cycle of massacre and forced resurrection that would have broken the sanity of any orthodox army.
Vexia walked slowly across the solid light platform. Her steps made no sound, her hands, sheathed in immaculate white gloves, rested crossed behind her back in a strict military posture. Her sharp gray gaze behind the lenses of her glasses stopped, almost hypnotized, on the immense central monitor.
There, in the bloody hexagonal room of Group 1, Dante had just eviscerated three colossal Crystal Hounds with a fluidity that bordered on terrifying.
The Assassin Phantom no longer moved with the desperate haste of a cornered animal. His left eye, whose pupil had permanently torn into a thin, vertical crimson slit, no longer anxiously searched for stupid and non-existent floating stats, health bars, or weaknesses highlighted in the void. Now, his cold, dead gaze read the millimeter displacement of the wind, the accumulation of tension in his enemies' fake glass muscles, and the subtle variations in the massive beasts' center of gravity.
"The Asura is finally awakening," Vexia commented, the faint echo of her voice betraying a slight but undeniable note of clinical and professional approval. "Dante has ceased to be a sad slave to his own instinct and his crutches. He no longer fights blindly; he is beginning to choreograph his own slaughter. Watch how the rest of his group is forcefully adapting to his new, suffocating rhythm."
The Marshal pointed to a section of the screen where the immense figure of Goran moved like a bulwark.
"Goran raises the heavy Shield of the Black Tortoise in the exact fraction of a second that Dante needs a temporary blind spot to hide his killing intent. Ciro, using his speed, no longer tries to slash on his own; he uses the pressure of the spectral wind to push and unbalance the beasts, steering them blindly toward the immovable edge of Dante's dagger. They have created a closed ecosystem."
Sienna did not smile. In fact, her perfect pale eyebrows drew together, frowning in a gesture of profound and glacial disdain.
"Exactly. They are adapting to his rhythm," said the Maiden of the Infinite Mirror. Her voice was not warm or comforting; it sounded like dozens of fragile glass bells shaken violently by a winter wind. "They have found a despicable and pathetic comfort zone within hell itself. They have established static roles: Dante is the absolute assassin, Goran is the immovable wall of flesh, Voltar is the suppressing and covering fire."
Sienna placed her teacup on the porcelain table with a soft but definitive clink that echoed in the large room.
"An extremely sharp knife that only knows how to perfectly and beautifully cut one single type of meat at the same angle... is a simple and boring kitchen tool, Vexia. It is not, and never will be, a divine weapon. The Patriarch did not give this generation to me so I could return twenty-four talented soloists who only know how to play their own instrument. Nor does he want four rigid and predictable squads."
Sienna stood up, her white dress fluttering without any wind.
"He wants the legendary Void Sequences. He wants it so that, if in the future you throw any six of these idiots together into a mass grave on an alien world, they come out of there operating, breathing, and massacring as a single, monstrous, unstoppable dragon, no matter who is standing next to whom."
Sienna raised a pale, slender hand. Her fine fingers traced a complex and glowing runic circle in the empty air in front of her console.
"The great, stupid problem of mortal minds is that, when they finally find a tactic that works for them and prevents pain, they cling to it fanatically, like a frightened castaway hugging a piece of rotten wood in the middle of the ocean. They become methodical. They become dependent. They become predictable. And absolute predictability, in the imminent war that approaches, is not a weakness; it is a strict death sentence for the entire clan."
Vexia adjusted the silver bridge of her glasses, her eyes widening slightly as she intuited the scale of the punishment the Guardian was about to unleash.
"Are you going to break their game board just when they were winning?" the strategist asked.
"No," Sienna replied, a shadow of infinite cruelty curving her lips. "I am going to put their precious board into a fucking meat grinder."
Without hesitating a millisecond, she pressed the glowing red runic glyph she had just drawn in the center of her mirror console.
"[Labyrinth Protocol: Spatial Fracture Roulette]. Initiating random mass exchanges. Let chaos purify them."
In the dense and claustrophobic interior of Group 1's hexagonal room, the breathable air reeked of a repulsive mixture of burnt ozone, acidic sweat, and vaporized blood.
Dante breathed with an unnatural calm. He had just dodged the lethal, heavy downward slash of a colossal Sword Spider. His human body moved with a simply perfect and beautiful economy of motion. He no longer wasted his valuable Qi or his muscular energy on long, flashy, and unnecessary acrobatic leaps. He pivoted to the millimeter on his left heel, allowing the beast's gigantic sharp leg to crash against the crystal floor mere millimeters from his boot.
Immediately, and without slowing his momentum, Dante used the crystal beast's own pinned leg as an ascending ramp. He slid the dark and lethal blade of the Fang of the Fallen Asura along the enemy limb, shooting up like a black spark straight toward the creature's central ganglion and exposed neck.
Out of the corner of his eye, his newly awakened instinct detected the overwhelming mass of a second monster, a Crystal Hound, lunging straight for his exposed right flank while he executed the thrust.
"Goran, cover my damn flank!" Dante yelled, his voice hoarse but loaded with authority, not even bothering to look back.
He knew, with the absolute certainty of repetition and shared suffering, that the immense, stoic bronze-skinned giant would be there, planted like an immovable mountain, to absorb the crushing impact with his shield. His sharp, trained ear even caught the heavy, comforting aerodynamic sound of the enormous Shield of the Black Tortoise moving swiftly through the air to cover his back.
But the colossal blow of the beast crashing against the divine metal... never arrived.
Instead of the deafening and familiar sound of crystal flesh and heavy steel clashing against each other, there was a disturbing, high-pitched, and strange hiss of a vacuum. A dull sound, disgustingly similar to an enormous mirror breaking under the pressure of the ocean.
The resilient hexagonal floor beneath Goran's heavy boots, under Voltar's swift feet, and beneath Borg's bulk, rippled violently. The solid crystal instantly turned liquid, losing all its shine to transform into a puddle of absolute and dense black darkness. The squad's three immense and fundamental physical colossi simply disappeared in the blink of an eye, swallowed by the jaws of the dimension without time to let out a scream.
Dante blinked, time slowing down macabrely.
His dagger thrust pierced and killed the spider in front of him, but the Hound attacking his right flank was already a few deadly centimeters away from his pale face. There was no bronze shield to intercept it. There was no suppressing fire. There was no mass to stop the beast.
The Assassin Phantom, caught in mid-air and without support, had to desperately contort himself, forcing the muscles of his spine to curve backward at an unnatural and painful angle that almost dislocated his own lumbar vertebrae. He managed to prevent the Hound's three spinning jaws from ripping his head off in a single, brutal bite, but the evasive movement was imperfect.
The beast's thick front leg came down like a rusted scythe. The crystal claw sliced his chest diagonally, from the base of the left collarbone to the lower right side of the abdomen, opening a deep, long, and disgusting horizontal wound.
The skin, fat, and pectoral muscle were sliced open, spraying a thick jet of hot black and crimson blood onto the immaculate crystal floor. Dante stifled a scream, falling heavily and rolling on the slippery floor, hissing in intense pain, gritting his teeth while his left hand uselessly tried to hold in his own intestines.
THUD! THUD! THUD!
Three heavy bodies suddenly and chaotically fell from the dark, high ceiling of the hexagonal room. They landed with a dull, painful physical crash in a wet pile of tangled limbs, torn tunics, and muffled groans, crashing exactly in the same geometric spot where fractions of a second before the invincible tanks of Group 1 had been planted.
Dante leaned on one knee, panting, blood soaking his clothes, and looked up, hoping it was an illusion of the beast.
They were not Goran, Borg, or Voltar.
They were Darius (The Inquisitor), Orion (The Puppeteer), and Vania (The War Siren).
The three delicate, dark, and complex long-distance tacticians who formed the core of Group 3 had just been brutally torn from their suffocating inverted gravity room and forcefully thrown into the hexagonal carnage.
Their physical and mental state was absolutely deplorable. Their avatars had just been "reset" mere seconds ago, after having suffered an unspeakable and Dantesque death by massive dismemberment and gravitational collapse. Their minds were still swimming in the agonizing trauma of cellular destruction.
Orion, the skeletal and gloomy Puppeteer, lay on the crystal floor, sobbing and maniacally looking at his pale hands, frantically touching his arms and shoulders, hyperventilating upon logically realizing that his limbs were attached to his body again, although the sharp, stabbing phantom pain of having them torn out by the roots by gravity still coursed through his nerve endings making him writhe in uncontrollable spasms.
Beside him, Vania, the beautiful Siren, was curled up in a fetal position, touching her slender throat and pale neck with absolute terror. Her psychic vocal cords were shattered, unable to emit a single articulate sound beyond an agonizing hiss.
Darius, the feared Inquisitor, was on his knees, head bowed, vomiting thick bile onto the crystal. A constant line of dark, hot blood flowed from both ears and his nostrils, his frontal lobe still throbbing, burning, and swollen from the catastrophic and suicidal mental backlash he had suffered attempting to telepathically read the unfathomable hive minds of the beasts in their previous room.
"What the fucking hell is going on?!" yelled Ren, the wind radar boy. His camouflage scales flickered unstably from panic. "Where are Goran and Borg?! We've lost the frontline!"
Dante didn't have the luxury of time or breath to answer his blind comrade.
The massive cybernetic crystal beasts designed by Sienna felt no pity, were not confused by teleportation flashes, and certainly did not take tactical pauses for the enemy to regroup.
Five immense three-jawed Hounds and three heavy Sword Spiders turned their deformed crystalline heads in unison. They abandoned the perimeter and converged at a terrifying speed directly on the three newcomers, smelling like hungry predators the overwhelming, thick, sweet paralyzing terror and total disorientation that gushed from the tacticians fallen on the floor.
"Get up and move, damn it! They're going to kill us!" Dante roared, spitting blood.
Ignoring the sharp, deadly pain in his own open chest, the Assassin Phantom forced his muscles to the limit and launched himself violently forward in a burst of dark speed. He managed to intercept with the blade of his dagger a massive Hound that was already in the air, mere centimeters from ripping Orion's confused head off with one bite.
Dante's heavy black dagger cut the air and shattered the beast's jaw, but he was just one wounded man. Without Voltar's scorching suppressing fire to blind the horde or Borg's colossal and immovable muscle mass to create a bottleneck, the other six colossal crystal beasts simply ignored Dante, ran past his left and right flanks like an overflowing river, and pounced on the easy prey on the floor.
Orion, seeing the heavy Sword Spider raise its sharp limbs over him, screamed in raw terror. Reacting purely on his bloodline's blind survival instinct, he raised both trembling hands and activated his artifacts, the dark [Soul Spider Thimbles].
"Dance of Sacrifice! Chimera, rise!" Orion bellowed, his fingers moving frantically as if playing an invisible and macabre piano.
Hundreds of sharp, intangible dragon silk threads, glowing with a necrotic and sickly purple color, shot out of the thimbles, desperately seeking to anchor themselves to something. They looked for corpses, rotting flesh, clotted blood, remnants of armor, and broken bones to execute his [Symphony of Dismemberment] and weave a shield of dead flesh to protect him from the impact.
But Sienna's ecosystem was his executioner. Orion was in the hexagonal room. The beasts attacking him were monstrosities built of cold smooth glass and inert prisms. They had no blood to manipulate, possessed no soft organs to sew together, and left no tendons and bones behind for his silk to reassemble and desecrate. The few remains of Group 1's previous deaths that stained the floor were dust and incorporeal liquids.
His necrotic threads found absolute void. In an act of total desperation, Orion tried to bind the hard crystal shell of a dead Hound at his feet to use it as an inert [Sacrificial Puppet]. His threads tensed violently, trying to interpose the inert body between him and the attacking spider.
"DON'T USE THE DAMN THREADS!" Dante yelled a warning at them, realizing the geometric tragedy, graphically remembering how the sharp edges of the ambient mirrors had cut and disabled the most delicate spells since the beginning of the labyrinth. "Their bodies are fucking diamond blades, you idiot!"
But the echo of the warning arrived a second too late.
The massive Sword Spider brought down its front legs with a force of tons. Instead of crashing against the manipulated corpse, the legs of extremely sharp crystal cleanly and loudly sliced through the dense network of Orion's intangible purple silk threads, severing them all simultaneously in the air with the same disgusting ease with which an industrial scissor cuts cobwebs.
The instantaneous, massive, and brutal kinetic and spiritual recoil of having his neural and magical network disconnected and cleanly severed traveled through the severed threads directly back to Orion's Sea of Consciousness.
The Puppeteer suffered a cerebral short circuit. His silver eyes opened so wide they almost popped out of their sockets, the veins in his neck bulged grotesquely, and he vomited a thick, disgusting stream of black bile and blood directly onto his own chest. His body arched backward in an uncontrollable spasm. He lay paralyzed, completely defenseless.
The colossal crystal beast reared up on its hind legs, its cold geometry gleaming under the pale light, ready to impale and pin the immobilized puppeteer against the glass.
"Ahhh... no!" Vania, kneeling a couple of meters away from her comrade's impending massacre, gathered every last ounce of her shattered will.
She feverishly aimed the base of her weapon, the beautiful [Scepter of the Eternal Siren], toward the crystal floor between Orion and the beast. She inhaled deeply, filling her lungs until her ribs ached, ready to invoke her [Silence of the Empress] to create an acoustic vacuum and stop the spider's kinetic movement, and then open her mouth to unleash the [Requiem of the Singularity].
But her power resided in her throat. And her throat was already broken.
In the inverted gravity room she came from, the shadow beasts had ripped out her vocal cords, her trachea, and her neck with bites in her last four deaths. The neurological trauma of that constant asphyxiation was so profound and visceral that her own mind blocked muscular function.
When Vania opened her pale lips to release the destructive beam of sound, the acoustic apocalypse did not occur. Instead, from her torn throat only escaped a minuscule, pitiful, dull, and pathetic raspy croak, a broken whisper mixed with bloody saliva that didn't vibrate a single molecule of air. The scepter in her hands remained sad, inert, and lifeless. Her ultimate defensive weapon had failed her.
The heavy downward strike of the Sword Spider's leg came down like a cold steel guillotine.
It pierced cleanly through Orion's left collarbone, puncturing lungs, breaking ribs, and exiting through his lower back, pinning him brutally, deeply, and painfully against the resilient mirror floor. The Puppeteer coughed thick clots of frothy blood, his eyes clouding over as real pain replaced phantom pain, and the beast lowered its immense glass jaws to begin methodically chewing his face and exposed shoulder.
Darius, the third member of the fallen tacticians, didn't lift a finger to help his dying comrade.
A few steps away from the crystal banquet, the Inquisitor was curled up on himself in a fetal position, frantically pressing both sides of his head with his bloody hands, tearing out tufts of his own hair in a state of temporary madness.
His brain, his delicate frontal lobe designed for Psychic Invasion, was critically and terminally overloaded. Around him, the air was saturated with Vania's visceral panic, the agonizing pain of Orion being devoured, and the deafening death howls of the beasts and his comrades, all bouncing and amplifying without filter in his open mind.
Darius, in a useless and suicidal attempt to defend himself from the pack surrounding him, instinctively activated the [Veil of Infinite Horror]. His human eyes disappeared, and the sclera turned an absolute, oily black, the pupil fragmenting into four lethal crimson slits that wept thick dark blood.
He raised his macabre gaze, trying to cast the beam of black static to connect his gaze with that of one of the Crystal Hounds. He was trying to tear the worst fear from the beast's mind to materialize it and destroy it from the inside.
But Sienna's disgusting constructs were biological nightmare machines, perfect soulless automatons. They did not possess a fragile human "Sea of Consciousness" that Darius could infect, invade, or torture. They felt no fear of death, no guilt, nor did they have traumatic memories to exploit.
When Darius's deep, sharp mental technique collided with the immense, cold cybernetic and mathematical void that dwelled within the beasts' crystal minds, the impact was like a fragile man running at full speed head-on into an immense, solid wall of cold steel.
The technique failed, and the feared and warned Feedback Effect—the Madman's Curse inherent to his incomplete book—activated instantaneously and catastrophically.
Finding no nightmares in his enemy, the dark psychic tunnel inverted violently. Darius's own immense and terrible repressed nightmares, combined with the beasts' cold, empty inorganic apathy, cascaded aggressively, like a black poison, back toward his own fragile mortal psyche. His brain literally began to boil inside his skull.
"Silence... please, gods, be silent..." Darius murmured.
His voice, broken and pleading, rose until it became a sickly, high-pitched maniacal laugh, unhinged and hilarious. Dark blood began to gush unstoppably from his ears, his nose, and from the sockets of his black eyes. His own mind, consumed and devoured by the inscrutable horror he had tried to project onto the beasts, collapsed in a massive aneurysm. He fell face first onto the slippery glass, his body convulsing violently while his frontal lobe melted, drooling dark blood and laughing uproariously until a Hound cleanly bit his head off in a single bite.
Dante watched the unspeakable and humiliating chain collapse, powerless, squeezing the handle of his dagger until his knuckles turned white.
They were absolutely and definitively dead. He knew it with the cold, undeniable analytical certainty of his Asura Eye. He knew it not because of a stupid health bar, but because of the inevitable law of physics and statistics.
In a tactical blink, the labyrinth had stripped them of their roles. They didn't have a single immovable tank to absorb the punishment and draw the mass. They didn't have a lethal AoE warrior to burn and scatter the horde, forcing bottlenecks.
All that remained standing of the supposed elite of the clans was him, a lethal short-range assassin bleeding profusely and limping; Ren, a sensory contortion expert who had lost his sight; Ciro, an agile wind phantom with no room to run; and the sad, chewed-up, and humiliated corpses of three tacticians who had broken mentally before casting their first spell.
A lethal second later, the immense, howling, sharp horde of colossal Crystal Spiders and Hounds swallowed them completely.
Ren and Ciro didn't last three seconds, cornered, tripping over the remains of their own useless comrades and impaled by the glass legs. Dante fought like a furious demon, managing to clinically dispatch two more beasts with his dagger before the staggering, raw, and overwhelming weight of tons from four monsters falling on his broken body finished crushing him.
He felt, with cold and inscrutable lucidity, how the dozens of cruel, sharp teeth of boiling glass penetrated his flesh and slowly crushed his femur and his spine, splitting him in two while blood filled his lungs.
The pain was massive and all-encompassing, but this time, his Asura mind did not yield to panic. He simply assimilated the knowledge of defeat, stored the anatomical lesson in his soul, and allowed the sweet, pale, cold darkness of death to cover him completely before the white flash of the imminent resurrection reset them all once again.