Chapter 159: The Descent of the Kings and the Sovereign's Gaze
The immense Throne Room of the Upper Palace was bathed in the warm, perennial light of the runic sun. Unlike the oppressive, bloody, and frigid atmosphere of the previous months, where the desperation for survival dictated every order, today the air vibrated with a solemn and majestic expectation.
On the Obsidian Throne, Samael Morningstar rested with a deceptively relaxed posture. His unfathomable violet eyes denoted the frigid calculation of an emperor about to move his master pieces on the world's board. His mere presence, without the need to release any aura, subtly distorted the fabric of space around the dark armrests, while the metallic, dense scent of spilled blood was a latent, overwhelming promise that permeated the air they breathed.
To his right, standing with an elegance that transcended mortal comprehension, was Seraphina. The First Wife and absolute right hand of the Patriarch was a vision of inscrutable beauty. Her skin, perfect as lunar porcelain, radiated a soft, comforting cold. Her silvery-blue hair fell in cascades over her shoulders, and her dark eyes reflected a deep, millennial loyalty. Although her past memories of ruling worlds remained locked beneath heavy seals, her Empress instinct was undeniable, natural, and regal. They had grown up together, giving meaning to their love step by step amidst the carnage, and the gaze she directed at Samael in the stillness of the room overflowed with a warm, silent, and absolute affection.
To the left of the throne, Vexia, the Grand Marshal, reviewed a floating crystal panel that projected the bloody holographic metrics of the labyrinth.
The doors of the hall swung wide open.
Twenty-one figures marched in in unison, their footsteps echoing like the heartbeat of a single heart of steel. The Imperial Sequences. They were not promises in training frightened by death. They were Kings, absolute veterans bathed in the blood of countless wars of expansion.
Kael, at the forefront, wore his imposing red and black tunic, his dark red hair framing the golden eyes of a born leader who had seen cities burn. Behind him walked the inseparable twin sisters, Violeta and Eris, both sharing an imperceptible but suffocatingly heavy aura. Violeta walked with the deadly serenity of a blizzard; while Eris, with the tips of her hair dyed red and her gaze, radiated the unspoken promise of absolute ruin. They were followed by Cedric, aristocratic in bearing, Xylia, Elara, Elowen, Lyra, and the rest of the monsters that formed the undisputed pinnacle of the Morningstar Empire.
They all stopped before the obsidian steps and knelt as a single entity, striking the left side of their chests with their right fists. The unified sound was identical to a siege hammer striking a celestial anvil.
"Rise, Kings of my Empire," ordered Samael, his deep voice resonating in every corner of the marble walls.
The twenty-one stood up. Their suppressed auras made the space of the hall crackle; the vast majority were at the absolute peak of the Half-Saint Realm, with Kael subtly shining with the transcendence of a true Saint.
"You have fought my most bitter battles since this clan was nothing more than a forgotten name in the ashes," Samael began, stepping down one step, his violet gaze sweeping over his veterans. "You have massacred armies and purged heresies. Your control of the laws has been forged on the battlefield, with your feet in the mud, not in the comfortable academies of hypocritical sects. You are the deadliest and sharpest edge I possess."
Samael paused and shifted his gaze toward the crystal bridge visible from the immense windows, in the direction of the Pagoda.
"But an edge needs a handle to hold it. And light, no matter how pure and bright it is, always casts a shadow to lean on. The Void Sequences have spent real months—an entire year in their mental perception—rotting alive in Sienna's personal hell. They have ceased to be talented human children. They have become conceptual assassins."
Samael turned his gaze back to the leader of the vanguard.
"Kael, you lead the light of the clan. Dante leads our shadow. Today, you will not go to the labyrinth to learn how to kill or to strengthen your bodies. You already know how to do that. You will go to teach the Void how true Saints fight in an open war, and they, in return, will teach you how to survive when brute force is not enough and the world turns its back on you."
Samael smiled, baring the edge of his fangs in an expression that mixed anticipation and cruelty.
"Seraphina, Vexia... let us escort our Kings to the slaughterhouse. I want to see this spectacle with my own eyes."
The procession toward the imposing Pagoda of the Infinite Mirror was absolutely silent. The Imperial Sequences walked with the unbreakable confidence of true veterans. There was not a single trace of doubt or fear in their eyes. They had faced real death in the Family Crisis; a simulated training, no matter how sadistic, was not going to break their minds.
Upon arriving before the enormous sealed crystal doors, Vexia stopped.
"The labyrinth has been structurally reconfigured," the Grand Marshal warned them, adjusting her glasses with a finger in a calculating gesture. "The beasts that the Void rookies face would be nothing more than a nuisance to you. So Sienna has escalated the simulation. You will enter under a times-three multiplier. The entities you will face inside will have a base power equivalent to the Saint Realm. Do not throw away your valuable lives out of sheer arrogance."
Kael nodded in silence. Slowly, he unsheathed the "Reborn" Magma Fang. The heavy, broad blade of stellar obsidian, with its vein of liquid ruby pulsing in the center, hummed with a dull, overwhelming bloodlust.
"We are the Patriarch's vanguard," Kael said, his golden eyes fixed on the liquid mirror of the door. "No illusion will stain our pride today."
Samael, standing beside Seraphina, raised a hand, giving the silent command.
"Enter. Show the glass how a world is broken."
The twenty-one veterans advanced with a firm step and crossed the quantum threshold of the doors. Exactly as had happened to the Void a year ago, the solid floor simply disappeared beneath their boots. But the Imperials did not scream, did not curse, nor did they panic.
Kael, plummeting toward the immensity of the abyss, stabilized his descent in mid-air in a millisecond, using a controlled pulse of his Fire Qi as a thruster. Beside him, Violeta did not bother to fall; she simply narrowed her bi-colored eyes and took a step into the void, teleporting herself and her sister Eris to a floating mirror platform before even feeling gravity. Cedric, falling backward, moved his fingers at an imperceptible speed and wove a golden levitation matrix in a microsecond, catching the sorceresses Aylin and Altair in a net of glowing runes that deposited them gently on the nearest floor.
They were professionals. They were the absolute elite.
But the labyrinth, with its artificial malevolence, was not going to let them group up so easily. Space tore violently around them. The twenty-one Kings were separated and sucked in by rotating crystal vortices.
The war of integration had begun.
Kael Morningstar appeared standing in the center of a vast, silent plain of black crystal. The sky above him was an immense concave mirror reflecting his own solitary figure, with the heavy sword resting in his hand.
But he was not alone.
In front of him, the dense matter of the labyrinth began to condense and take shape. They were not the fragile Crystal Hounds that Dante had faced. The labyrinth, responding to the pressure of Kael's aura, summoned something terrifying: Dead Prism Knights.
They were ten humanoid figures reaching four meters tall, mounted on grotesque steeds of sharp crystal, carrying heavy lances that distorted the light around them. Each of those ten riders emitted a suffocating aura of pure oppression, equivalent to that of a human warrior in the Stage 1 Saint Realm.
"Ten Saints..." Kael murmured, his golden eyes sharpening as he evaluated the density of the threat. "Lady Sienna doesn't play child's games."
The ten knights lowered their lances and charged in unison. The sheer inertial force of their cavalry cracked and caved in the crystal plain beneath their hooves. A combined frontal charge of ten Saint-level powerhouses was enough to pulverize the walls of an imperial capital in the outside world.
But Kael was not a warrior who let himself be carried away by panic or who wasted energy in useless explosions. He was the Sword King.
Kael did not retreat a single centimeter. He did not summon an expansive sea of fire. He simply exhaled softly and released his true Intent.
The entire world around Kael lost its saturation, turning a pale, deathly gray. From the imposing body of the redhead and the burning edge of his sword, a fine, glowing white ash began to detach and float upward, defying gravity. The deafening roar of the cavalry charge cracking the ground simply faded away, replaced by the distant, absolute echo of a zen bell.
Kael took a serene step forward and raised his heavy sword, whose blade now seemed made of stagnant water.
"Solar Slash: Judgment Day."
There was no great explosion of magma. There was no roar of fire. Kael executed a single horizontal slash, clean, perfect, and effortless. The infernal fire of his bloodline did not expand; it condensed into a hyper-thin crimson crescent that traveled at the speed of light.
The attack did not seek to break armor; it sought to extinguish cause and effect. The crimson line cleanly passed through the lances of light, the thick armors, and the immense crystal horses of the ten Dead Prism Knights. The fire did not burn their inorganic flesh; it simply "disconnected" their existence from reality. In a silent second, the ten Saint-level knights crumbled into harmless gray crystal ash.
Kael lowered his sword. He had used exactly the amount of Qi needed. Not a single gram more.
"This is a brutal war of attrition training," Kael calculated, analyzing the dust in front of him. "They're not looking to kill me with a single overwhelming blow; they seek to suffocate me and slowly empty my Dantian by forcing me to kill false gods."
Suddenly, the ground flickered at his feet. The Roulette activated with its relentless cruelty. Kael felt the violent spatial tug, but he relaxed his muscles and did not resist.
He appeared materializing in a completely different biome: a claustrophobic labyrinth of narrow walls and mirror corridors. But this time, he was not alone.
At his feet, leaning heavily against the crystal wall and covered in his own black blood, was Dante. A few steps further back, Ciro and Vania were panting desperately, surrounded by twenty Dead Prism Knights identical to the ones Kael had just killed. The beasts had them totally cornered. The swift daggers and sonic attacks of the Void Sequences were at their limit, bouncing off uselessly, unable to break the absurd conceptual density of the Saint-level armors.
Kael evaluated the chessboard in a fraction of a second.
"Ciro, hit the floor!" the Sword Saint ordered with a voice that demanded absolute obedience.
Dante and Ciro, instantly recognizing the unmistakable voice of their superior military leader, did not hesitate a millisecond. They threw themselves face down against the crystal floor.
Kael stepped over them and launched a piercing thrust. A compressed, deafening pillar of volcanic fire erupted from the tip of his sword, devouring the ten vanguard knights in the narrow corridor, melting their armors and reducing them to boiling slag.
Dante, coughing up black blood, looked up at Kael as he leaned on his dagger to sit up. The Asura and the Sword King locked eyes amidst the smoke.
"They've absurdly raised the structural level," Dante said, wiping the blood from his chin with the back of his only healthy hand. "Those things have heavy conceptual shields embedded in their matrix. My daggers bounce off their necks."
"Your daggers bounce because you keep insisting on using refined assassination cuts against heavy siege armor, idiot," Kael replied. He extended his free hand and grabbed Dante by the forearm, pulling him up to help him stand. "Their armor is dense and stupid, but their internal joints and cores are fragile. From now on, I will break the heavy shells and absorb the vanguard. You, Ciro, and Vania slip through the blind gaps I open and cut their fucking core."
Kael looked Dante in his cold gray eyes.
"Today you are not the butcher of this squad, Dante. Today, you are exclusively my scalpel."
Dante nodded slowly, his dark Asura Eye shining with renewed murderous coldness. Ego did not exist in that gaze. The pride of being the lethal Rank 1 of the Void had been crushed months ago. He accepted being the secondary weapon if it meant the death of the enemy.
The true synergy of the Empire had just been born.
Countless corridors away, in a vast room where the laws of gravity were capriciously inverted, Violeta and Draven fell violently from the false ceiling toward the sky.
Draven, the immense colossus of blue ice, did not try to slow down. He landed heavily on his knees and fists, shattering the mirror floor into a massive crater.
"Haha! This disgusting place is pure madness, princess!" Draven roared, dusting the crystal powder off his shoulders, immensely amused by the sudden drop.
Violeta did not touch the ground. Using her fine, absolute control of spatial laws, she floated a few centimeters from the surface. Her cold, beautiful bi-colored eyes scanned the immense spherical room. In front of them, a hundred Saint Mirror Gargoyles—colossal, lethally upgraded versions of the ones Voltar had faced, now firing thick lances of condensed light instead of simple feathers—hovered orderly in the air, blocking the only exit.
"Do not break formation under any circumstances, Draven," Violeta ordered, her voice soft, sharp, and devoid of all human emotion. "A hundred flying Saints are too many for a stupid frontal charge."
Draven smiled and brutally slammed his immense armored fists together.
"I am the fucking glacier, princess! They are the ones who will break against me!"
Draven roared and activated his Wall of the North. He placed both hands on the floor and an immense, opaque, colossal wall of blue ice, thirty meters thick and of absolute density, rose violently in front of them, absorbing all the scarce moisture from the pressurized air to solidify even further.
The hundred Gargoyles fired in unison. A hundred thick lances of solid light impacted the ice with the force of siege missiles. The monumental wall trembled, cracking on its surface under the bombardment, but the brutal, absurd regeneration capacity of Draven's primordial ice stoically withstood the simultaneous punishment of a hundred Saint-level attacks.
"I have all their attention," Draven grunted, the veins in his neck standing out as he physically pushed the massive wall with his immense arms so it wouldn't yield. "Now what, Your Highness?"
Violeta closed her eyes, exhaling a small cloud of freezing breath.
"Now... they cease to exist."
The heiress did not launch a loud, massive magical attack. She slowly unsheathed her extremely fine rapier, the Absolute Zero Needle. The transparent blade, which seemed to contain the vacuum of deep space within it, hissed hungrily.
Violeta traced a perfect, clean, and immaculate circle in the air in front of her. She did not create a vulgar block of physical ice. She executed her Astral Frost Prison.
An invisible, conceptual dome expanded at the speed of light, covering the airspace above the hundred furious gargoyles bombarding Draven's wall. In the exact, imperceptible instant the invisible dome covered them completely, the very fabric of time and space around the beasts simply froze and died.
The bombardment ceased abruptly. The hundred colossal inorganic creatures were completely paralyzed in mid-air, suspended in unnatural attack positions, with their lances of light stopped mid-flight, immobilized like pathetic flies trapped in eternal amber of absolute zero.
Violeta sheathed her rapier with a soft, metallic click.
"Draven. Throw the wall on them."
Draven let out a thunderous, bestial laugh. He canceled his shield's runic defense and, using his pure, overwhelming brute physical strength, charged and pushed the thousand tons of his own glacier forward, toppling it and crushing the hundred spatially frozen gargoyles, grinding them against the floor until they became harmless diamond dust under the weight of the ice mountain.
The floor flickered quantumly once again. The relentless Roulette mixed them up on the board.
They appeared suddenly in a gloomy cave covered in sharp, dark stalactites. Violeta and Draven did not land alone. Right beside them, falling clumsily and breathing heavily, appeared Cassius, Jareth, and Tormund.
The three members of the Void were covered in superficial wounds, panting and sweating. They had been fighting ruthlessly for their lives for hours.
"Well, well," Violeta said, looking at them over her shoulder with a small, dismissive, classic Tsundere smile. "You look like a bunch of wet puppies lost in the woods."
Cassius, the feared Parasite God, stood up slowly, his immense spear Yggdrasil, the Thorn of Rebirth, dripping thick crystal blood. He did not take offense at the insult; there was no room for wounded pride in the slaughterhouse.
"Lady Violeta," Cassius greeted, bowing his head slightly, deeply respectful, but returning the gaze of an insensitive veteran who had experienced a thousand real deaths. "I advise you not to lower your guard to insult us. In this damp biome, Sienna's beasts do not charge head-on. They attack from the shadows."
Before Violeta could frown and respond to the insolence, three immense Mirror Leviathans emerged silently from the darkness of the ceiling, opening monstrous maws filled with obsidian teeth capable of swallowing the immense Draven in a single, horrifying bite.
Draven, reacting late, was about to raise his ice wall, but Tormund, the impassive Wall of Flesh of the Void, took a single, heavy step forward. His thick knees anchored to the cave floor, adopting his Basalt Intent.
"Step aside and leave it to me, big guy," Tormund grunted at Draven.
The first Leviathan crashed head-on into Tormund. The impact was seismic, the shockwave kicking up dust in the cave, but the Void colossus didn't even blink. He was the unmoving incarnation of the earth.
Violeta, her sharp eyes evaluating the flawless opening created by Tormund's suicidal, perfect defense, did not hesitate. Her body distorted optically, folding inward, and disappeared in a blink.
She dimensionally materialized directly inside the damp, immense mouth of the Leviathan biting Tormund. Without hesitating, she brutally stabbed the beast's soft palate with her Needle. Twelve flashes of cyan light, cold as death, erupted from the inner void of the monster's throat, injecting the absolute zero singularity and stopping the movement of its atoms. The immense creature froze from the brain outward in a microsecond, dying before it could swallow, and Violeta teleported back beside Draven before the ice could trap her.
Cassius, moving with terrifying parasitic coldness, took advantage of the immense body of the newly frozen beast. He sank the sharp roots of his Ironwood spear deep into the crystal Leviathan's neck, greedily draining its core of inorganic energy.
With a fluid motion of his weapon, Cassius took that fresh, stolen Qi and aggressively injected it into Violeta and Draven's system, instantly restoring the slight Qi exhaustion the Imperials had suffered after invoking their costly Saint-level techniques.
Violeta felt the invigorating, forced infusion of life energy coursing through her meridians. She blinked, surprised by the healer's brutal efficiency.
"Efficient..." Violeta acknowledged, looking at Cassius with a new, genuine, and silent respect.
The hunter and the prey, the pampered Kings and the hungry Shadow; the two faces of the clan were beginning to mesh.
In another distant section of the immense simulation, Eris Morningstar, the chaotic Flame of Ruin, was supremely bored.
She had landed on her feet in an abyssal valley of mirrors, accompanied only by Cedric, the elegant Emperor of Seals. Endless hordes of grotesque crystal beasts charged incessantly at them from all directions, but surprisingly, they never even managed to touch them.
Cedric sat in the air, three meters above the ground, with his legs elegantly crossed as if he were having tea in a parlor. His sharp steel-gray eyes peacefully watched the horde's avalanche. His delicate fingers moved at an imperceptible speed, weaving master formations in the air without the need to use vulgar physical flags or blood.
Around them, a silent, invisible Saint-level net acted as an industrial-scale meat grinder. The beasts ran blindly toward them and, upon crossing the invisible perimeter, were simply dismembered, crushed by augmented gravity matrices, or sliced to pieces by golden Qi guillotines that Cedric orchestrated with gentle flicks of his wrist, like a bored orchestra conductor.
"Cedric, I'm bored to death," Eris complained.
The lethal warrior was leaning loosely on the shaft of her immense halberd, the Sun Devourer. Her dangerous eyes, one red and one violet, shone with pure impatience and bloodlust, watching the beasts die before she could even lift her weapon.
"Let me burn something, please. Just a little."
"Patience, Princess Eris," Cedric replied, his tone always polite, always calm, always calculating three steps ahead. "We are in an environment of continuous attrition. We must conserve every ounce of energy. Gently let my seals do the dirty, boring work until the simulation decides to throw a real threat at us."
As if Sienna's sinister labyrinth had heard him and accepted the challenge, the valley floor trembled violently.
A monumental Titanic Prism Golem, an absurd hundred meters tall, emerged, tearing up the valley's mirror floor. Its massive body was deeply engraved with dense, intricate runes of physical and magical immunity that glowed with their own light.
Cedric stopped the movement of his fingers and frowned slightly.
"That aberration possesses conceptual immunity to cutting seals," Cedric murmured, mathematically analyzing the structure in milliseconds. "And it has a physical density equivalent to a small mountain range. Breaking it would wear down my matrices too much. Princess Eris, the stage is all yours."
Eris smiled savagely, baring her teeth.
"It's about damn time."
The girl with white hair and crimson tips leaped into the void with a force that cracked the ground. In mid-air, she did not channel a vulgar, gigantic sea of destructive fire to burn the giant; she understood that heat was inefficient against mass. She understood true destruction.
Eris spun her halberd and executed a single downward slash. The weapon did not leave a trail of fire, but a dark, silent, tearing scar of nonexistence in the air. The blade, wreathed in black fire with a burning white core, did not burn the Golem's impenetrable surface; its absolute property of Ruin simply ignored the dense physical and conceptual defenses.
The black fire penetrated the titan's sacred defensive runes like a hot knife through butter and began to break down its immense matter from the molecular level, "forgetting" and erasing its atoms' command to exist. The unbeatable hundred-meter inorganic giant took barely three slow, heavy steps toward them before collapsing silently in on itself, crumbling into an immense, harmless mountain of black and white dust.
"A truly exquisite use of the concept of annihilation, my lady," Cedric clapped softly from his floating position, nodding respectfully.
But before Eris could turn around and boast of her destructive power, the Roulette dragged them both away in a blink of white light.
They appeared materializing at the bottom of an extremely narrow, dark pit. The difficulty suddenly spiked to absurd levels. Beside them fell Orion, the sadistic Puppeteer; Eira, the White Witch; and Iris, the Weaver.
Before they could greet each other, they found themselves completely surrounded by dozens of Saint-level Fracture Amalgams, horrific, immortal beasts bristling with blades that regenerated in milliseconds simply by absorbing the scarce ambient light of the environment.
Eris, confident, aggressively raised her halberd, ready to summon her immense black fire again, but Iris's cold, calculating voice shouted from behind:
"Do not use your expanding fire, Lady Eris! The massive thermal expansion will break the delicate support seals of this damn room and the collapsed dimensional pressure will crush us all! Cedric, I need you to place a reverse refraction matrix exactly at the coordinates I'm going to send to your mind!"
Cedric, a general accustomed to dictating strategy and giving orders to entire armies, raised an eyebrow, genuinely surprised at the sharp audacity of the Void girl to give orders to an Emperor. But his keen strategic mind processed Iris's flawless survival calculation instantly. She was absolutely right.
"Understood," Cedric nodded, swallowing his ego.
In a blur of speed, the Emperor wove a complex golden matrix in the air exactly where Iris's mind indicated.
With the stage set, the Void acted. Eira, her eyes turning white, channeled her absolute zero domain, creating a deep, static thermal vacuum in the area to slow down the beasts' regenerative functions. Orion, letting out a demented laugh, did not sink his macabre spiritual threads into the elusive beasts; he anchored them firmly to the immovable edges of Cedric's golden matrix, using it as an indestructible anchor and pulley to weave a net that tangled and bound the legs and necks of the frantic Amalgams into a single, dense knot.
"Now, Eris, destroy them!" Iris shouted, her amber eyes shining with lethal equations.
Eris, accepting the little Weaver's flawless plan without complaint, did not use her lethal, expanding black fire. She ran her bare hand down the length of her halberd and coated the blade in a dense cloud of Ash of Oblivion.
She did not execute a physical cut; she performed a swift, wide horizontal sweep through the air, sending the lethal cloud of gray particles over the immobilized Amalgams trapped in ice and threads. The suffocating gray ash touched the beasts, and its terrifying destructive property did not burn them; it simply permanently erased and made the universe "forget" the magical effect that allowed them to regenerate. Deprived of their conceptual immortality, the powerful Saint-level Amalgams dropped dead, reduced to fragile, inert normal crystal.
Cedric, his robes intact, landed softly beside Orion and little Iris.
"Your tactical capacity under this kind of mortal pressure is... genuinely admirable," the proud Cedric admitted, giving a slight, respectful bow toward the Weaver.
Orion, his pale arms stained with dark blood and a grim smile on his face, let out a hoarse laugh.
"We've been dying repeatedly down here for a year, Emperor. We have learned to count, measure, and use every last tile of hell to our advantage."
Far away in the outside world, the Throne Room was in absolute silence, interrupted only by the faint static hum of the immense holographic screens that Vexia kept floating in the air.
Samael watched the crystal holocaust from the immovable comfort of his throne. Seraphina stood beside him, her dark eyes reflecting the lethal flashes of light and death from the monitors.
On the screens, the initial, disorganized chaos caused by the brutal extreme difficulty was rapidly stabilizing into a rhythmic purge.
They saw Aylin, the subterranean witch, impaling lethal enemies from the dark underground, while Magnus, acting as a divine anvil, simultaneously crushed them from above to leave no escape. They saw Altair and Jareth combining their disgusting poisonous miasmas and degenerative entropies to create vast clouds of dark rot where nothing organic or inorganic could survive. Lyra danced on the battlefield, using her overwhelming dream illusions to deceive the precarious vision of the labyrinth bosses, docilely drawing them toward the brutal showers of homing electric arrows from Varian and Sylas.
They had ceased to exist as two proud, independent factions. The haughty Imperial Sequences provided the devastating power, the destructive brute force, and the hierarchy of Saints. The malnourished Void Sequences provided the sharp animal survival instinct, the creative suicidal tactics, and the absolute, sociopathic synergy that can only be forged in absolute misery.
Seraphina gently rested a delicate, cold hand on Samael's shoulder. Although her past memories as a ruler of ruined worlds were sealed, her ancient, profound intuition for war was overwhelmingly sharp.
"They are truly beautiful," Seraphina murmured, watching the grotesque, yet synchronized massacre with an unsettling calm. "They move, cover each other, and kill like the bloodied gears of a perfect clock. You have managed to create a living war machine that knows no mercy, doubt, or fear, Samael."
Samael covered Seraphina's small, cold hand with his own, feeling for a fleeting instant the peace that only the Empress transmitted to him in the midst of his chaotic existence.
"They are not truly ready yet, my queen," the Patriarch replied, his ruthless violet eyes fixed on the images of Kael and Dante, fighting side by side, covering each other's backs in a lethal dance of fire and invisible cuts. "They have been forced to learn how to cooperate. They have learned to kill efficiently what does not bleed. But they still have to take the last and most painful step."
Vexia, adjusting her glasses with an expression of pure professional intrigue, turned toward the obsidian throne.
"And what exactly is that step, Patriarch? They have mercilessly massacred endless waves of Saint-level creatures and bent the laws of the environment. Their current combat synergy approaches 90% lethal efficiency."
Samael leaned heavily forward, resting his elbows on his knees, his eyes burning with a terrifying darkness.
"They have survived the blind environment of the simulation. But now... now Sienna will cease to be a simple, bored observer in her own kingdom."
Samael raised his right hand and, with a sharp movement, snapped his fingers. He sent a piercing, heavy telepathic signal that crossed space and directly struck the immense runic core of the Crystal Pagoda.
Tell Sienna to get down into the mud for once, Samael's voice ordered, reverberating in the Guardian's mind. It is time for the Blood Bell Trial. I want to see, with my own eyes, if these supposedly perfect assassins can even manage to touch a God.
In the brutal depths of the labyrinth, the immense, illuminated mirror sky suddenly darkened from end to end, plunging the dimensions into an oppressive gloom.
The sound of battle abruptly ceased. Thousands of violent crystal beasts that still harassed the groups spontaneously disintegrated, turning to inert dust, as if someone, somewhere, had gotten bored of the game and turned off the board.
Amidst the heavy, thunderous silence, a single, delicate figure gracefully descended from the dark dome.
She floated toward them slowly, serenely, and inevitably, dressed in an impeccable, pristine white dress that hadn't been stained by a single speck of dust. The only sound in the vastness of broken mirrors and spilled blood was the soft, tinkling, and eerie sound of a small, solitary metallic bell, tied securely to her pale wrist with a thin, worn red thread.
The forty-five bloody and exhausted elites of the Morningstar Empire, feeling the genuine primordial terror of the abyss descend upon them, raised their nicked weapons toward the sky in a deathly silence.
The warm-up had ended. The final hunt of the gods had begun.