Chapter 158: The Parasite's Ecosystem and Benevolent Death (Part 1)
The absurd and perfect flash of Dante's black dagger was still burned into the retinas of the twenty-three warriors surrounding him.
They had witnessed an impossibility. They had seen an immense Prism Wyrm, thirty meters long and weighing ten tons, divided into two symmetrical halves by a wounded and exhausted boy who didn't use a single gram of brute force. Dante had unleashed an Intent so pure, so absurdly sharp, that the very fabric of space seemed to yield to him out of sheer terror of being cut.
Dante stood on the remains of crystal dust, breathing with a cold and unnatural calm. His cybernetic assist System was dead and shut down, but his human mind was clearer, deadlier, and more unobstructed than ever in his life. He had understood, in a life-or-death flash of enlightenment, 1% of the Universal Law of Slaughter. It wasn't much in the vast and unfathomable scheme of the cosmos, but for a young mortal trapped in the Transcendent Realm, it was the exact equivalent of holding a spark of the original fire of the gods themselves with bare hands.
"He has achieved enlightenment," Cassius whispered, leaning his weight on the shaft of his spear, his apple-green eyes wide with reverence.
"He has shown us the damn way," Korg grunted, spitting blood and ash from his split lips.
But the majestic epiphany lasted exactly two seconds.
In the distant and impeccable control room, Sienna observed the scene. She slid a long, pale finger over the crystal console. Her inhuman silver eyes, devoid of all pity, gleamed with relentless mathematical coldness.
"A perfectly sharp knife cannot fell an entire forest on its own," the Guardian dictated in an icy whisper. "Double the atmospheric pressure and the numbers. Let the crystal bleed until they drown."
Sienna didn't utter any spell, nor did she invoke any visible system. She simply applied her will over the labyrinth, activating the nightmare phase.
The ground beneath the disciples' feet shuddered with seismic violence. The heavy corpses of the Wyrms and Sword Spiders did not dissolve into white light this time. Instead, they melted like boiling wax, disgustingly fusing with the crystal floor itself, and the entire dimension began to rewrite itself.
Oxygen disappeared, and the air in the room became so dense and heavy that trying to breathe was like trying to swallow liquid mercury.
From the immense fractured walls came not hundreds of beasts; thousands emerged. And they were no longer simple fragile hounds or blind serpents. They were legions of Dark Crystal Centaurs, armored colossi armed with obsidian spears that absorbed ambient light, backed from the sky by lethal Mirror Gargoyles, winged monstrosities whose wings didn't beat the air, but cut it with the shrill buzz of a thousand circular saws.
The floor flickered beneath their feet. The Dimensional Roulette activated before the twenty-four could even group into a phalanx around Dante. Space fractured, violently separating them and throwing them back into the meat grinder.
Dante reappeared, materializing on a narrow, precarious bridge suspended over an infinite abyss of mirrors, suddenly accompanied by Borg, Ciro, and Voltar.
Barely had their boots touched the stone of the bridge when five immense Dark Crystal Centaurs charged head-on at them, their hooves echoing like thunder and violently shaking the fragile hanging structure.
Dante didn't hesitate. He stepped forward, placing himself between the beasts and his disoriented group. His mind had entered a state of absolute "Flow." He looked at the stampede, and his Asura Eye saw the invisible "lines of death" tracing across the anatomy of the first centaur.
With a cold and spectral grace, he dodged the immense obsidian spear seeking to impale him with a millimeter turn of his torso, and slid the black blade of his dagger across the monster's armored neck.
CRACK.
The indestructible crystal surrendered to the Law of Slaughter. The first centaur shattered to pieces in mid-air. Dante didn't stop to look; using his momentum, he spun around to decapitate the second monster, moving like a dark phantom in the middle of a glass storm.
He was lethal. He was fast. He was simply perfect.
But Dante was only a man of flesh and bone, and the hanging bridge was three long meters wide.
While the Assassin Phantom executed his masterpiece decapitating the second centaur, the third and fourth monsters simply ignored the boy's lethality, bypassed his flanks, and charged with the full weight of their cavalry directly into the exposed rearguard.
Voltar, exhausted after hours of death, with his electric Qi flickering weakly and pitifully over his skin, didn't have the physical time to react. The centaur's heavy obsidian spear pierced his stomach from side to side, lifting his convulsing body into the air like a ragdoll. Borg roared and tried to crush the beast with a downward strike of his giant mace, but a Mirror Gargoyle swooped down from the dark sky. Its circular saw wings amputated both of Borg's thick arms from the shoulders in a single, fluid, and sickening motion, spraying the bridge with hot blood.
Dante spun on his heels, his eyes wide, snapping out of his murderous trance.
He had killed his two targets to absolute perfection, but his squadmates were being dismembered behind his back simply because he didn't have a body that could cover three meters of width at once. The crushing pain of tactical guilt and physical impotence hit him harder and deeper than any enemy blade.
In his millisecond of distraction, a fifth centaur exacted its toll. The thick black crystal spear cleanly pierced his back, puncturing his left lung and pinning him face down against the flagstones of the bridge.
Dante coughed up a thick mouthful of black blood, choking as he turned his neck to look the expressionless beast in the eyes.
Individual perfection is not enough in a war, Dante thought, the dark revelation weighing more than the wound, as the beast twisted the spear inside his chest, destroying his heart and ventricles. If I am solely the damn sword... then I desperately need a damn shield. I need them to fucking wake up.
The bridge dissolved into the cold embrace of the white light. The agonizing death number seventy-three had just been consummated.
Fifty dimensions away, in a repulsive circular room that shrank exactly one meter for every passing minute on the clock, Cassius was on the verge of absolute physical and mental collapse.
Around him, forming a tight and desperate defensive circle, were Tormund, Goran, Eira, and Sylas. The living space was shrinking, and they were surrounded by a suffocating sea of Thorny Mirror Leeches crawling on the floor and Crystal Centaurs closing the net with their long spears.
Cassius, the Jade Lancer, was anchored in the center of the group. The tip of his spear, [Yggdrasil, the Thorn of Rebirth], glowed with an agonizing emerald light. His Wood Qi, his own life force, was in the red, at the brink of starvation.
Energy flowed from him like a river with broken floodgates, injecting desperate healing into Tormund and Goran's wounds in real-time, closing deep cuts so the two colossi could continue to physically withstand the incessant thrusts of the cavalry lances raining down on their shields.
"Hold the line!" Cassius screamed, his voice torn, red blood dripping heavily from his nose and ears from the immense pressure of forcing his marrow to keep four people alive simultaneously.
Eira, the White Witch, was to his left, launching desperate continuous blasts of Absolute Zero to slow the advancing horde. But the superhuman effort of channeling so much cold without rest was freezing her own meridians from the inside; her beautiful lips were blue and her skin was cracking. To his right, Sylas fired compressed wind arrows at insane speed, ignoring that the friction of the taut bowstring had flayed his fingers, exposing the white bone of his knuckles.
The pressure was too much. A colossal Centaur broke Goran's formation, slipping past his guard. Its black spear impacted violently against Eira's fragile shoulder, shattering her collarbone in an explosion of bone and ice.
"Eira!" Cassius panicked.
He abruptly redirected the entire flow of his thick vital healing sap from the vanguard to the wounded girl. Luminous ironwood fibers surged from the ground, wrapping around Eira, magically weaving her broken bones and closing the mortal wound in a second of miraculous healing.
But mercy came at an atrocious price. By diverting the dense healing network, Goran was left completely exposed on the frontline.
Three monstrous Thorny Leeches, the size of wolves, leaped onto the giant's immense back. The beasts pierced his legendary stellar bronze skin as if it were paper and began to greedily suck his Qi and his lifeblood. Goran dropped his shield and fell heavily to his knees, bellowing in pure pain as his body withered.
Cassius tried desperately to redirect the healing to the fallen giant, but he felt an icy void in his own stomach. His Dantian was completely dry. The warm, beautiful green light emanating from his spear flickered sadly twice and died, plunging them into darkness.
"The sap is gone... I have no more..." Cassius whispered, falling to his knees on the crystal, the tremor of extreme fatigue taking over his slender body.
The cybernetic monsters didn't hesitate. The horde descended upon the broken formation. They dismembered Sylas first, ripping off the arms holding the bow. Then they trampled Goran's fallen shield and crushed him to pulp beneath their hooves. Eira, still dazed by the forced healing, was decapitated by a clean slash.
Cassius was left absolutely alone in the center of the carnage, on his knees, looking at his own hands stained with the hot blood of the friends he hadn't been able to save.
He was the healer. His only sacred job in the clan was to maintain and preserve life. And he had humiliatingly failed eighty consecutive times in this damn labyrinth.
Why? Cassius asked himself, tears of frustration burning his eyes, as a Dark Crystal Centaur reared over him, slowly raising its immense obsidian spear to execute him. Why is the full weight of my life, given down to the last drop, not enough to save those I love?
In that exact and final instant, as the sharp tip of the spear descended like a black lightning bolt toward his unprotected neck, time stopped.
The polished and flawless blade of the monster's obsidian spear, stopping millimeters from his face, acted as a perfect mirror. Cassius saw his own face reflected in the dark glass.
The Cassius staring back at him from the murderous edge was not crying tears of frustration. He wasn't kneeling. And most disturbing and illuminating of all: he didn't have the face of a selfless martyr sacrificing himself to heal others.
The Cassius in the dark reflection wielded his spear not like the warm staff of a benevolent doctor, but with the cold posture of an apex predator.
The epiphany struck Cassius's soul like an existential earthquake. He suddenly understood his own Dao. He understood the pathetic philosophical error of his own kindness in the middle of a battlefield.
Mercy is inefficient in war, Cassius's enlightened mind realized, his perception expanding. Giving my own vital energy to the wounded, depleting my core, is the stupid act of draining a personal pond to try to put out a damn forest fire.
He looked at his spear, understanding his bloodline for the first time. The Ironwood wasn't a fruit tree that gave shade and life to the weak. It was a parasitic, dark, immensely dense, and brutal species that choked out the other plants in the forest to steal their sun, nutrients, and water by force.
True and absolute healing does not consist of giving compassion... Cassius thought, as an ancient and draconic coldness replaced the fear in his heart. It consists of stealing the life of others.
Time resumed its violent march.
The Centaur's obsidian spear descended, but Cassius was no longer the same kind young man from a second ago.
The Jade Lancer's warm apple-green eyes darkened radically and terrifyingly, until they became an abyssal emerald hue, deep and cold like the heart of a ravenous, ancient forest. His human pupils dilated and slitted, taking the shape of a primordial reptile's.
With his new vision, the world lost its usual color, and Cassius could see with crystalline clarity the intricate flow of artificial energy, the dense nodes, and the "circulatory network" pulsing inside the inorganic beasts surrounding him. He knew exactly where to pierce.
Cassius didn't raise his shield. He didn't try to block or dodge. With chilling calm, he simply stood still and let himself be skewered on purpose.
The thick edge of the Centaur's spear cleanly pierced his left shoulder, breaking bone and flesh, pinning him painfully to the ground. The monster neighed in a high, metallic tone of victory.
But Cassius, impaled and bleeding, looked up and gave the beast an infinitely cruel, sadistic smile, devoid of the slightest trace of the human kindness that had always characterized him. He raised his healthy arm and firmly grabbed the shaft of the enemy spear protruding from his own flesh, gripping it with his bloody fingers.
"The forest is hungry," Cassius whispered, his voice vibrating with the authority of a plague.
The young man didn't use his physical spear. He used his pure intent. From the hot green and red blood gushing from his wounded shoulder, thousands of tiny, aggressive Ironwood roots shot out like vipers at lightning speed. The dense roots frantically climbed up the Centaur's spear, infiltrated through the porosities of the beast's crystal hands, and penetrated deep into its energy core in a fraction of a second.
The gigantic Centaur froze dead in its tracks.
The roots acted like divine leeches. They violently and greedily absorbed and drained all the kinetic and magical energy, and the structural physical integrity of the beast. In a single second of suction, the imposing crystal monster turned a pale gray color, then opaque, and finally crumbled into a harmless pile of ashen dust, completely and disgustingly drained of every concept of artificial life.
Cassius stood up, grabbing the broken shaft embedded in his body, and yanked it out of his shoulder with a sharp pull.
The ugly, bleeding wound didn't have to be tended to for days. It closed and scarred instantly and perfectly in a heartbeat, but not using Cassius's own exhausted Qi, but rather using the dense, stolen energy of the dead Centaur.
The immense remainder of the cybernetic beast horde stopped dead, taking a step back. For the first time since their creation, the Guardian's monsters felt something terrifyingly similar to panic running through their programming.
The labyrinth floor flickered with white quantum light. The Dimensional Roulette dictated its sentence.
The dismembered corpses of Goran, Eira, Sylas, and Tormund disappeared into thin air, immediately replaced by the living, panting, and critically wounded bodies of Magnus, Korg, Jareth, and Mira. The four newcomers fell to the ground in the middle of the circular room, and upon looking up, found themselves surrounded by a suffocating ring of three hundred Centaurs and enormous Leeches. They were cornered.
Magnus, the Iron Titan, raised his only healthy arm, dragging the bleeding stump of the other. He saw the Lancer standing in the center.
"Cassius!" Magnus cried out, desperate and on the verge of tears. "Brother, heal us, please! I barely have any Qi left to summon my armor!"
But Cassius didn't run toward them. He didn't emit his characteristic, warm, reassuring green healing light.
Rank 10 didn't utter words of comfort. He simply raised his immense spear, [Yggdrasil], and drove it violently, with his entire body weight, into the mirror floor.
"I am no longer your personal doctor, Magnus," Cassius dictated, his voice echoing deep and terrifying, dripping with the absolute, crushing authority of a nature deity. "I am your fucking ecosystem. Death for Life!"
The crystal floor of the entire room erupted and fragmented into a thousand pieces.
A literal forest, wild and untamable, of thick dark roots, dense and sharp as titanium stakes, emerged violently from the depths of the dimension in a hundred-meter radius.
But the roots didn't form into a boring dome to protect or shield his weak comrades. The instinct had inverted. The wooden stakes acted as predators, launching themselves like spears on the offensive straight into the sea of Centaurs.
It was an absolute, one-sided massacre. The violent roots impaled fifty beasts simultaneously, skewering them in the air, lifting their enormous crystal bodies like macabre trophies.
The true grotesque miracle occurred a second later.
Cassius squeezed the shaft of his spear into the ground, using it like an orchestra conductor controlling a symphony of subterranean veins. The immense, overwhelming amount of artificial energy and vitality forcefully drained from the fifty impaled monsters flowed wildly through the root system hidden beneath the broken crystal floor... and was injected aggressively, violently, and painfully through the pores of Magnus, Korg, Jareth, and Mira's skin.
Magnus felt a power overload so immense, intrusive, and absolute that his eyes rolled back. A shriek of ecstatic agony escaped his lips when, right before his eyes, the bone, muscle, and nerves of his amputated arm were forced to grow, regenerate, and knit back together in three horrifying and disgusting seconds, forming a Vajra limb reborn with a density and strength even greater than the original, fueled by the sacrifice of the enemy.
Beside him, Korg felt his frozen lungs ignite and his volcanic blood magically boil back to a thousand degrees. Jareth's dangerous, exhausted poison glands overloaded until they ached, ready to melt crystal.
"By the gods... what is this power?!" Magnus roared, standing up, flexing his newly regenerated arm, feeling the mental fatigue of the last week of deaths completely erased, feeling like an impregnable god.
"Kill them all!" Cassius ordered from the center of his own dark forest, his emerald eyes gleaming without the slightest mercy. "As long as my spear is anchored to this earth, any lethal damage, cut, or amputation you suffer will be forcefully regenerated and healed with the inorganic blood of your enemies."
The Lancer raised his chin, looking at the horde that was now retreating in terror.
"You are absolutely immortal... as long as you never stop massacring the meat in front of me."
Group 2 had just acquired their inexhaustible perpetual life engine. Cassius Morningstar had let the benevolent boy who healed out of compassion die, and from his bloody ashes, a Parasite God had emerged, ready to devour the world to keep his family breathing.