Chapter 161: The Trial of the Blood Bell and the Awakening of the Abyss
In the immense Throne Room, the atmospheric pressure had changed drastically. Samael Morningstar was no longer simply reclining in the cold majesty of his seat. He leaned forward, his violet eyes fixed, predatory, and calculating, locked onto the crystal projections showing the infinite reflecting lake where Sienna awaited his exhausted army.
To the right of the Obsidian Throne, Seraphina floated delicately, wrapped in her dress of divine frost, her silver eyes turning with the cadence of ancient constellations. But to the Patriarch's left, levitating in the air without any physical hand holding it, vibrated the imposing Odachi [Kurohime].
The colossal curved sword, forged in the deepest abyss and bathed in the blood of countless enemies, throbbed with a terrifying life of its own. It emanated a dense, black and crimson aura that resonated in perfect, deadly harmony with its master's Laws of Space and Blood. Kurohime was not a simple inert tool; it was a resting predator, emitting a low-frequency hum that distorted the light around it, as if the steel itself was eager to tear the holographic projection and join the massacre.
Samael carefully observed Kurohime out of the corner of his eye. He remembered a certain object he had obtained some time ago, patiently waiting for the perfect weapon worthy of bearing it. It was time to pull it from the dark.
"Come here, girl," Samael whispered.
Kurohime felt the call in her core and slowly approached, floating like an obedient ghost. Vexia and Seraphina, who were watching everything closely, were somewhat stunned by the weapon spirit's eerie growth, but curiosity about what the Patriarch would do kept them silent.
Samael reached his hand directly into a spatial rift and pulled out a scabbard. Sensing the object's presence, Kurohime, now floating in front of Samael's face, began to tremble violently, sending gusts of raw emotions through their deep soul connection.
Samael smiled, baring his fangs. He grabbed the immense Odachi by the hilt and sheathed it with a sharp, fluid motion. At first, it looked like a normal scabbard; it seemed as if nothing had happened. But Vexia and Seraphina knew the monster before them too well. Samael never did anything halfway. And they were right.
The next instant, powerful waves of gravitational distortion began to emanate from the covered metal. The air around the Throne grew suffocatingly heavy and cold. Small spatial rifts, like fine threads of broken glass, appeared around the weapon. The scabbard was a physical void; it was made of a material that did not reflect light, looking like an open cleft in reality itself. Whoever stared at it felt their vision and soul being sucked in. Its texture resembled charred dragon scales that pulsed slowly, as if the sheath were breathing. Kurohime emitted an ultrasonic hum that only Samael understood: it was a sadistic laugh of pure anticipation. The weapon had become as light as a feather in his hand, eager to devour the world's light.
Vexia sighed and shook her head at the spectacle of oppressive power, but Seraphina felt something else. Something that made her tense.
The First Wife narrowed her eyes, and what she saw left her stunned. An illusory, translucent shadow—the figure of a voluptuous woman with long black hair, small wings, and fine dragon horns—appeared floating behind Samael's back. The sword's spirit was embracing him from behind, rubbing her cheek against him with a dark, brazenly mocking smile.
Seeing this invasion, Seraphina's millennial instinct erupted. Her beautiful eyes, deep blue surrounded by a silver ring, quickly began to darken, becoming two absolute void holes, filled with jealousy, pure obsession, and an icy murderous intent that threatened to freeze the entire room.
Samael, who was admiring the edge of his renewed weapon, immediately felt Seraphina's suffocating, possessive storm through the Soul Nexus. He turned toward her, noticing where her homicidal gaze was fixed. Understanding the reason instantly, the Patriarch offered an amused smile and gave the black steel a small tap.
"Girl, stop being naughty," he ordered Kurohime in a low voice, with a tone that brooked no argument.
The sword's blade trembled with reverential fear, and the demonic shadow instantly vanished into nothingness. Seraphina, her chest still heaving with contained fury, shifted her icy gaze from the sword to Samael.
He widened his smile, extended his free arm, gently pulled the Empress by the waist, and sat her on his lap without asking permission. He began slowly stroking her silvery-blue hair. Instantly, Seraphina buried her face in her husband's neck, taking in his dark, metallic scent. Her territorial obsession calmed, and her eyes returned to a peaceful starry sky as she relaxed in her owner's arms.
Vexia, observing the entire dangerous spectacle from the console, could only shake her head in resignation and return her attention to the monitors showing the kids in the labyrinth.
"They are exhausted," the Grand Marshal muttered, adjusting her glasses as the red numbers flashed on her crystal. "They have purged all the Karmic clones, but the energy reserves of the forty-five elites have dropped below forty percent. Facing the Creator of the labyrinth in these conditions is pure statistical suicide."
Samael distractedly stroked Seraphina's hair with one hand and Kurohime's hilt with the other.
"Statistics are a limitation for mortals, Vexia," the Patriarch replied. "They possess something that the mathematics of Sienna's simulation can never calculate. Something I have cultivated deep in their bones from the very beginning."
Seraphina nodded against his chest, her voice sounding like a freezing wind.
"The Soul Nexus," the First Wife said. "The Void Sequences have learned to use their abilities in a perfect team, like the gears of a clock. But the First Heirs... the Imperials... they are not separate gears. They only need to remember how to open the door that binds them."
Samael looked at the main screen, his eyes flashing in the gloom.
"Let the final judgment begin."
Inside the Labyrinth of the Infinite Mirror, the atmosphere was sepulchral.
The fake sky was an immense vault of starry darkness, and the floor had become an immense, smooth lake of reflecting black water that didn't even ripple beneath the heavy boots of the forty-five warriors. Exactly one hundred meters away, Sienna stood on the liquid surface. Her white qipao glowed like a ghost. In her right hand, she held a very fine crystal rapier. On her left wrist, the lone red thread tied the small golden bell.
"You have one minute," Sienna dictated.
Her voice was not a shout, but the clarity of the sound resonated within the very skull of everyone present, cold and absolute. "If you do not ring this bell in sixty seconds, the lake you stand on will swallow you alive. The pain of death by crystal drowning will be multiplied by ten, and I will restart your cycle from day one."
There were no stupid war cries. There was no boasting or arrogance. The forty-five knew perfectly well that the being before them operated beyond the logic and cultivation they understood.
Kael Morningstar, his red tunic in tatters and the Magma Fang burning with fire and ash, was the first to break the stillness.
The vanguard leader flowed like liquid metal, nullifying the friction of reality itself to cross the hundred meters in a blink. His immense heavy sword, laden with the atomic weight of Nirvana Intent, descended like a divine executioner directly toward Sienna's left shoulder. It was a perfect attack; a clean cut that would have split a Saint warrior in half.
Sienna did not dodge. She didn't even bother to raise her lethal crystal sword to block.
She simply raised two pale fingers of her left hand—the same hand wearing the tinkling bell—and gently touched the flat side of Kael's glowing blade.
CRACK! Kael's immense kinetic force and annihilating fire were completely redirected and reflected at a ninety-degree angle. The Sword King lost his balance instantly, his own weight and power violently dragging him forward. Sienna took advantage of the blind inertia, spun on herself with the grace of a ballerina, and gave him a soft, almost delicate kick in the center of the chest.
Kael shot backward like a cannonball, bouncing brutally across the reflecting water like a skipping stone and spitting boiling blood.
"Kael!" Eris roared.
The Flame of Ruin leaped toward Sienna without hesitation, spinning her immense halberd to unleash a torrent of black and white fire that annihilated existence itself. Right behind her, melting perfectly into the shadows of the blaze, Dante slid close to the ground. The Assassin Phantom made no sound, his Asura Eye feverishly tracking a single blind spot in the God's defense.
Sienna let out a faint, bored sigh.
Eris struck down with her black fire of annihilation. Sienna raised her thin sword. The fire of Ruin, which should have melted and erased the crystal upon contact, was conceptually "reflected" by the universe itself under Sienna's orders. Eris's destructive energy bounced off the transparent blade and hit the princess herself point-blank in the face. Eris screamed, her own skin burning as she was thrown backward by the shockwave.
In that imperceptible, chaotic millisecond, Dante emerged silently from Sienna's shadow, launching a lethal, cold thrust, devoid of aura, toward the woman's kidney. Sienna didn't even deign to look back. She simply stepped on the water with a little more force.
A solid, thick mirror wall rose from the lake out of absolute nothingness. Dante's black dagger crashed head-on against the perfect barrier, and the immense, concentrated force of his Slaughter Intent was physically and mercilessly returned through the hilt straight to his arm. Dante's shoulder bone burst, dislocating with a dull crunch, sending him to the ground in pain.
In less than three seconds, the Maiden of the Mirror had dispatched the Imperial leader, the clan's deadliest destroyer, and the perfect assassin, without losing her breath or spilling a single drop of sweat.
"Fifty seconds," Sienna announced, slowly lowering her sword. "You are painfully slow. You are loudly predictable. You attack blindly like rabid beasts in a pack, not like the gods you claim to be."
Kael stood up with difficulty in the distance, resting his weight on his sword. Hot blood ran down his chin and stained the water. His chest burned where Sienna's delicate foot had threatened to cave in his ribs. He looked left, where Dante was popping his shoulder back into place with a violent yank and a grimace of pure agony, and then right, where Eris was healing the severe burns from her own fire through gritted teeth.
Magnus, Draven, and Korg, furious over their leader's fall, were about to charge together like an avalanche of metal and ice, blindly trying to use the Titan synergy that had worked for them against the clones.
"STOP!" Kael roared, his voice vibrating with the undeniable authority of King's Qi.
The immense colossi stopped dead, their boots skidding on the water.
Kael stood up fully, wiping the blood from his mouth with the back of his glove. His golden eyes no longer burned with anger or fire. They burned with a clear, brilliant, and absolute understanding.
He had finally understood. He had remembered the latent gift Samael Morningstar had implanted deep in their souls in the distant dawn of the Clan's founding, when they were just scared children seeking revenge.
Tactical synergy—that communication of telling a comrade where to hit and where to cover—was a crude trick of mortals. They were the Empire's vanguard. They did not share plans on the battlefield; they had to share the soul itself.
Kael closed his eyes and aggressively expanded his mind inward.
"Sequences!" Kael shouted into the void, his voice echoing throughout the dome. "Violeta! Eris! Cedric! Xylia! Elowen! Open the fucking doors!"
In the dark depths of their Dantians, and specifically in the very fabric of their souls, an ancient rune imposed by the Patriarch, latent and dormant through years of growth, began to glow and burn with a furious crimson and golden light.
The unmoving reflecting lake trembled for the first time. Thick threads of metaphysical energy, invisible to mortal eyes but blindingly bright to soul vision, erupted violently from Kael's chest and instantly, brutally connected with the cores of Violeta, Eris, Cedric, Xylia, and Elowen.
The immediate effect was an explosion of absolute sensory expansion.
Kael stopped feeling the blood in his mouth and the beating of his own heart. Suddenly, his mind housed Violeta's absolute cold and mathematical, multidimensional perception of space. He felt Eris's unquenchable fury and True Flame in his veins. His cortex processed Cedric's cold, geometric, and controlling mind, calculating millions of complex formations per second. He felt Xylia's supreme authority and the atomic speed of her thunder. And his flesh absorbed the inexhaustible, warm, and restorative flow of Elowen's World Tree vitality.
They were no longer six talented, individual warriors. They had merged into a perfect six-headed monster, sharing in real-time the same virtual bloodstream, the same strategic mind, and, most terrifyingly for the laws of physics, unrestricted access to each other's divine techniques.
Sienna, in the distance, tilted her head slightly. Her expressionless silver pupils narrowed. And for the first time since the beginning of time in that labyrinth, she gripped the hilt of her crystal sword tightly.
"Interesting."
Kael did not run toward her. Kael took a single, simple step on the water... and instantly disappeared from reality.
He didn't use his thermal friction. Through the psychic connection of the Nexus, Kael channeled Violeta's spatial talent. He materialized abruptly directly above Sienna's head, completely ignoring physical distance and folding the space of the void. His immense, broad magma sword came down with the concentrated weight of a continent. Sienna, momentarily surprised that a fire user would teleport mass in that way, raised her crystal sword horizontally to block and redirect the immense pressure.
But Kael was not alone. It was the Hive.
From her distant position, Eris didn't launch a blast of fire. She closed her eyes, smiled, and channeled Cedric's refined intellect. Instead of burning blindly, Eris forged a dense, intricate Saint-level sealing matrix directly onto the air around Sienna's free arm, using her own indomitable Flame of Ruin as the burning ink of the runes.
The black fire seal failed to crush a God's arm, but the True Flame evaporated concepts and burned the physical space around Sienna's limb, slowing and dragging the speed of her defensive block by a microscopic but lethal fraction of a second.
Kael's heavy blade was not redirected in time. It violently struck Sienna's shoulder. It failed to cut the pale flesh—the conceptual density of the woman's Qi was that of an immortal in her own domain—but the pure, absurd kinetic force of the impact finally achieved the impossible: it knocked Sienna back a clumsy step on the water. He had broken her center of gravity!
Now, Xylia! Kael thought through the Nexus.
The Thunder Empress didn't need useless words shouted at her. She felt the exact flow of the battle's inertia through Kael's eyes. Xylia launched herself forward, her body completely wreathed in fierce arcs of lightning. Her extreme speed would have shattered and melted her own fragile human muscles, but Elowen, anchored in the rearguard, was pumping torrents of pure, alchemical vitality into her through the Nexus thread, regenerating and binding the micro-fractures in Xylia's legs in the very millisecond they broke.
Xylia appeared in a sonic boom right in the off-balance Sienna's blind spot, and unleashed a lethal, thin whip of plasma aimed directly at the bell's red thread.
Sienna, regaining her unnatural balance in record time, twisted her body and waist at an anatomically impossible angle. She evaded the tip of the lightning whip by millimeters, and in a single fluid motion, launched a swift counterattack: dozens of razor-sharp mirrors shot from her sleeves toward Xylia's neck.
But the swift Thunder Empress didn't even bother trying to dodge death.
Cedric, through the Nexus, projected an immense, complex shield of Supreme Matrices made of solid gold directly onto Xylia's pale skin, absorbing and shattering the crystal mirrors on the spot.
It was a choreography and a dance of pure martial divinity. Six minds exchanging lethal abilities, impossible speeds, impenetrable defense, and divine healing at the pure speed of thought. Sienna, for the first genuine time, was completely on the defensive, forced to retreat step after step on the waters of her own reflecting lake.
The overwhelming mental and physical pressure of fighting face-to-face against a near-omnipotent being within her own absolute domain forced the six Imperials to operate far beyond the biological limits of their bodies and souls. The Soul Nexus acted as an immense resonant amplifier; the adrenaline of one fueled the epiphany of another.
The dense barrier of cultivation cracked in their spirits. The Law Seeds, those that had been painfully planted months ago by Samael's cruel hand, began to germinate and bloom violently under the boiling sun of a fight to the death.
Violeta stared intently at Sienna repeatedly teleporting through the various reflections of the black water to evade Kael. The ice girl felt in her core that dimensional space was not a physical thing you crossed with your feet; it was a fine fabric you folded at will.
Her cold bi-colored eyes shone with an unnatural light. The lake water directly beneath Sienna's feet suddenly warped upwards at sharp angles. Violeta wasn't simply freezing the water; she was violently isolating the exact spatial coordinates around the Maiden of the Mirror, locking her in an unbreakable cube of absolute vacuum and thermal zero where air, time, and temperature ceased to exist.
Sienna frowned in slight annoyance and broke the conceptual walls of the cube with a sharp slash of her sword, but the one-second distraction was all the monster needed.
Eris, watching Sienna emerge unscathed from the vacuum cube, felt her own Seed burn in her heart. Her flame wasn't just pure destruction and chaos. True fire is the ultimate purification and the birth of a new order. Eris's dark hair burned furiously in a halo of black and white fire. Her immense halberd temporarily melted in her hands, becoming an indomitable extension of pure fire that no longer burned matter; it annihilated concepts. She no longer needed to swing the weapon to strike flesh; the mere suffocating presence of her annihilating flame completely evaporated the deceptions and illusions Sienna attempted to weave within a hundred-meter radius.
Cedric, his eyes closed, processing the overwhelming constant assault and the variables through the Nexus, felt his complex matrices and shields were still too fragile against Sienna's simple conceptual cuts. They needed to anchor themselves in something that couldn't be cut. Something eternal.
The strategist raised both hands elegantly. He didn't summon fragile runes of light in the air. He infused all his imposing will and Intent into the very floor of the immense reflecting lake. The black water around him boiled and instantly transmuted into divine gold, stellar iron, and solid astral tungsten. Sienna, accustomed to gliding, felt her delicate bare feet, previously unusually light on the water, were now firmly trapped on a rough, magnetic surface of indestructible metal that clung to her like chains of gravity.
Xylia, seeing the deity anchored and immobilized for a crucial second, knew a simple fast lightning bolt wouldn't be enough to pierce her crystal guard. She needed to issue an order that the very fabric of the universe couldn't dare disobey.
"KNEEL!"
Xylia's voice echoed through the lightning, not as a sharp acoustic sound, but as a heavy, inescapable law of gravitational physics. Sienna, for the first time in her eternal existence, felt her knees tremble. The pure, crushing, tyrannical pressure of the Celestial Mandate injected into her nervous system forced her, against her will, to lower her perfect stance by a centimeter, finally breaking her immaculate defensive guard.
In the rearguard of the hive, Elowen pumped life in torrents. But her racing mind understood that healing her brothers wasn't enough to win. If Sienna's body was untouchable, she had to sicken the very energy and environment of the room.
Elowen's immense wooden roots aggressively drove into the heavy transmuted metal floor by Cedric and drastically altered the flow of ambient Qi. All the oxygen around Sienna's figure was alchemically transmuted into a poisonous, thick gas of spiritual lethargy, a green mist that anesthetized the soul and made the deity's precise movements microscopically and lethally slower.
And at the front, Kael Morningstar, feeling the immense, overwhelming power of his five siblings bloom and burn through his body via the Nexus, slowly raised his immense two-handed sword. His Sword Seed was already a lethal Half-Domain, but it lacked the engine. It lacked the weight of the earth's very core.
The Magma Fang instantly ceased to be a heavy metal sword wrapped in fire. The dark blade conceptually became the boiling, massive core of a collapsed planet. The physical gravity around Kael's body increased exponentially, sinking his boots into Cedric's metal, and a heat so extreme it melted and distorted reality itself condensed into a single millimeter of his weapon's edge.
Kael brought the stellar fire sword down toward Sienna, who had just broken through Elowen's lethargy gas and shaken off Xylia's tyrannical Mandate with sheer soul strength.
The deafening clash between the Guardian's immaculate crystal sword and Kael's annihilating magma core blade created an apocalyptic shockwave that swept the solid metal lake, raising colossal tsunamis of tungsten and liquid gold toward the starry sky. The force of the collision was so great that Sienna was violently pushed ten meters backward, her pale bare feet, now free of the metallic grip, leaving deep smoking grooves in the hardened ground.
The Maiden of the Mirror stopped, digging her sword in to brake. She slowly looked up.
Her immaculate, perfect, eternal white silk dress was dirty, stained with metal slag and hot ash. They had managed to defile her. They had hurt her pride.
"Twenty seconds," Sienna said, and her voice suddenly lost all its amiability and melodic courtesy.
Her silent aura erupted. A psychic and physical pressure so immense, oppressive, and monstrous that the six proud Imperials of the Nexus immediately fell to their knees, ribs cracking, brutally crushed against the ground by the sheer gravity of an unleashed Crystal Sword God's soul. They couldn't breathe. They couldn't raise their arms.
From the distant periphery of the battle, Dante, Cassius, the Twins, Orion, and the rest of the Void Sequences and the lesser Imperials watched the collapse, paralyzed and horrified.
Even operating with the hive mind of the Soul Nexus and having experienced the glorious, massive Awakening of Laws, Morningstar's six undisputed leaders were being subdued, crushed, and humiliated in a second by pure, simple absolute force.
Dante gripped his dagger's handle until his knuckles turned white.
"They are sharing their minds marvelously," the Assassin murmured, his dark Asura Eye narrowed, desperately analyzing the fragile, invisible threads of spiritual energy still connecting Kael and his cornered group. "But there are only six of them. Sienna's unfathomable strength is equivalent to a stormy ocean. Six fucking rivers cannot dry out an ocean."
Orion, the Void's Puppeteer, spat a thick clot of blood onto the floor and limped over to Dante. His silver eyes spun with a sickly, macabre madness, but his voice was lethally clear.
"But forty-five overflowing rivers can flood it," Orion said.
The necromancer slowly raised his pale, gloved hands. From the tips of his dark fingers hung thick, pulsating, necrotic gray spiritual threads. "Phantom... if those fine golden threads connecting them are constructs of pure energy... then my corporeal threads can splice and sew themselves to them. I can violently connect all of us to their damn hive technique."
Iris, the Equation Weaver, quickly approached them, her serene golden aura projecting complex collapse equations into the air.
"No, the power and spiritual friction will kill you instantly!" the crystal girl warned. "Our fragile Void Dantians are barely Transcendent level. If we forcefully connect to Kael's overwhelming, wide Saint-level flow, the energy overload will fry our little brains and burst our souls into ash."
Draven, the Imperial colossus who had been humiliated by his own clone, laughed brutally from behind, wiping frost and blood from his face with an iron glove.
"Then we will be the damn lightning rods, girl! We Imperials will use our Half-Saint level bodies to absorb the lethal initial shock and filter the charge!"
Dante turned his head and looked at the remaining thirty-nine warriors of both factions. No one retreated a millimeter. No one hesitated or showed fear in their eyes. They had spent the equivalent of a long, tortuous year suffering, dying, being cut and dismembered. A painfully fried brain was a ridiculously cheap price to pay to kill a God and claim the clan's absolute glory.
Dante turned back to the necromancer. "Do it, Orion. Sew us."
Orion didn't wait for a second order. He threw his hands forward and shot thirty-nine thick necrotic, spiritual threads.
One violently stabbed into the base of each remaining warrior's nape, piercing the skin and anchoring in the spine. He threw the main, thickest end like a harpoon directly into Kael Morningstar's chest, who was still on his knees, splicing and tangling it abruptly with the pulsating core of the [Soul Nexus].
The impact of the connection was apocalyptic.
Kael let out a harrowing scream, feeling thirty-nine intruding alien minds violently invade his limited mental space, shouting simultaneous thoughts. Dante fell to his knees sharply, his eyes rolling back, feeling his thin Transcendent veins forcefully filling with pressurized Saint-level magma. Vania screamed. Borg convulsed brutally against the floor. Cassius felt the very fabric of his dark soul tear in half.
They almost died in that second. But they did not break.
Cedric, operating his brilliant mind at the speed of light and bleeding from the nose, aggressively wove thousands of "Soul Filter" matrices within the very torrent of the Nexus to stabilize and redirect the immense electrical and spiritual charge. Simultaneously, Elowen and Cassius merged their supreme abilities—Pure Life and Parasitic Drain—through Orion's bloody conductive threads, creating from nothing a closed cycle of perpetual regeneration that healed and rebuilt the neurons and brains of the forty-five warriors as fast as the Nexus overload destroyed them.
In an agonizing, eternal, grotesque second, the blasphemous miracle was complete.
The forty-five elites opened their eyes in perfect synchrony.
There was no ego. There were no ranks. The silly division of the Void and the Empire had vanished. Before the eyes of the simulation stood a single, lethal, absolute hive mind, tactical and ruthless, operating forty-five resilient armed bodies and with dozens of Divine Laws at its total, complete disposal.
Sienna lowered her sword. For the first time in centuries of immaculate existence, the Crystal Goddess felt a cold human chill run down her spine.
"Ten seconds."
The Hive attacked in unison.
There were no battle cries, just a masterpiece of pure choreographed annihilation. Draven, Tormund, Goran, and Korg charged head-on like an unstoppable avalanche, creating a colossal, unbreakable unified wall of Glacial Ice, Immovable Basalt, Heavy Bronze, and Boiling Volcano.
Sienna frowned and unleashed a devastating slash of pure mirror light, a conceptual attack that would have split and crystallized the entire continent. But the Hive foresaw it. Through the telepathic connection of the Nexus, Aia and Aion leaped and applied their absolute Eclipse Sphere directly onto the surface of the Titans' shield. Sienna's annihilating attack was swallowed by the black hole's gravity and redirected harmlessly toward the starry sky, leaving the four advancing colossi completely intact.
While Sienna's blind silver eyes followed the arc of her own deflected attack for a micro-fraction of a second, Ciro, the Wind Phantom, and Joren, the Lament Banshee, grabbed Kael and Dante by the shoulders. Together, they used the Unborn Step, stepping outside the friction of space. They teleported cleanly, silently jumping over the immense Wall of Titans and materializing exactly two millimeters from Sienna's exposed back.
The Guardian felt the spatial displacement and hurriedly tried to activate her Absolute Refraction. But she couldn't.
Darius, Nylas, and Lyra, stationed safely in the rearguard, assaulted her mind directly through the Nexus frequencies. They brutally and forcefully injected her with a millisecond of pure, dreamy illusory terror, an abyssal gravitational weight on her shoulders, and phantom pain of dismemberment in her brain.
That fragile millisecond of hesitation was more than enough.
Kael Morningstar, wreathed in his majestic stellar Magma and roaring with the Flame of Purgatory Ruin, executed a colossal, two-handed vertical slash aimed directly at splitting Sienna's immaculate head in half.
Sienna, recovering her sanity and control instantly with an icy roar, raised her crystal sword and blocked Kael's heavy blade. The impact generated a deafening seismic force that shattered the air and split the liquid metal beneath her feet.
"It is useless, you cannot...!" Sienna began to dictate, her tense muscles holding back the fire.
But Kael's blade pushed no further. Kael wasn't there to kill her or hurt her Godly flesh. Kael was simply the loudest, most destructive distraction in the universe.
Dante, the Assassin Phantom, was falling silently from a totally blind angle, a visual gap created in Sienna's perception by Lyra's illusory flashes.
Through the boiling Nexus, Dante's body wasn't moving with his own Transcendent capabilities. He channeled the divine supersonic Speed Intent of Rowan and Maren. He added to his sight and pulse the millimeter-perfect geometric precision of Sylas and Varian, the elite archers. His entire arm was a simple, lethal blur of dark speed.
His terrifying pure Slaughter Intent, distilled in hell, did not aim for Sienna's unbreakable neck or heart.
It aimed solely and exclusively at the weakest conceptual line of all existence in that precise millisecond.
The worn red thread tied to the wrist of the Maiden of the Mirror.
Snik. The blackened blade of the [Fang of the Fallen Asura], thrust with the immense crushing mass borrowed from Aion and the lethal atomic sharpness of Ciro's cutting wind, imperceptibly grazed Sienna's pale wrist.
The red thread snapped cleanly in two.
The small golden bell fell in freefall.
Absolute time in the dimension came to a dead halt. Sienna lowered her crystal sword slowly, without taking her eyes off Kael. Her always cold, blind mirror eyes widened with a flash of human wonder, turning her face to watch the small golden relic bounce freely on the solid metal floor Cedric had forged, producing a high, musical, purifying chime that echoed into infinity.
Ding.
The colossal dark dome of mirrors cracked from end to end with the sound of breaking glass. The fake, beautiful starry sky and the black water floor of the heavy pocket dimension began to dissolve gently into millions of brilliant specks of golden light.
The infernal Soul Nexus abruptly disconnected, Orion's threads vanishing into gray smoke.
The forty-five elites fell heavily to their knees on the ground, gasping for air, vomiting bile and black blood. Their Dantians were absolutely and painfully dry, and their minds hung dangerously on the edge of permanent neural collapse from the obscene psychic pressure of holding the hive mind together for those ten seconds.
Orion collapsed face down in a pool of sweat, laughing hysterically. Kael drove the Magma Fang deep into the floor to avoid falling face first into his own blood. Dante, the executioner, simply let himself fall backward, eyes closed, listening to the dark starry ceiling of the labyrinth fade to reveal once again the tall, familiar interior architecture of the Crystal Pagoda in the Morningstar Citadel.
A few steps away, Sienna slowly crouched down, picked up the small golden bell from the crystal floor, and squeezed the broken red thread in her palm.
Her pale face, always adorned with a mask of expressionless courtly coldness, broke. A smile formed. An unusually beautiful, terrible, and above all, deeply proud smile.
"You have rung the bell in time," Sienna dictated, her voice losing its divine oppression to return to its usual soft, melodic, crystalline tone. "My most sincere and profound congratulations... monsters of Samael."
The immense, heavy sealed crystal doors of the Pagoda emitted a deep mechanical groan and swung wide open. The warm, natural, resplendent light of the runic sun of the Realm of the Eternal Dawn poured in, dispelling the shadows of death and bathing the exhausted warriors, who lay covered in thick blood, ash, and wounds, in its warmth.
On the very threshold of the immense doors stood the figure of Samael Morningstar, silhouetted against the light like an immovable monolith. The imposing and lethal Odachi Kurohime floated lazily at his side, vibrating with a purr of dark approval. Seraphina and Vexia flanked him, the Marshal with a smile of military satisfaction, and the Empress returning the celestial glow of her eyes.
Kael, calling upon the last, deepest reserves of his willpower, leaned on his sword, staggered to his knees, and lowered his head until his forehead almost touched the bloody floor. Dante, beside him, painfully sat up, resting a fist on the ground and lowering his face, just like the others who still had the strength to move, rendering total, unified, and absolute honor to their ruthless Patriarch.
"Patriarch..." Kael panted, his voice raspy but laden with victory. "We did it. We have completed the infernal training. The labyrinth and its trial have been... conquered by our Empire."
Samael's silence following the proclamation was as dense and heavy as lead. Kurohime's humming echo seemed to laugh sadistically in the shadows of the entrance.
Samael began to walk slowly toward them, his heavy black leather boots echoing like a judge's hammer against the broken glass shards scattered on the floor. He stopped a few meters in front of Kael and Dante, pausing his violet gaze to observe with icy scrutiny the sea of forty-five assassins purified by agony.
"You have conquered your own basic survival," Samael corrected, his deep, magnetic, grave voice caressing the trembling soul core of each one of them. "You have finally learned to stop being nuisance children on a battlefield. You have awakened and accepted your Laws, and you have forced your minds to understand the power of the Soul Nexus. It's true... today, you have graduated from being mere, pathetic mortals playing war."
Samael raised his gloved hand.
Behind him, the immense glowing crystal doors of the Pagoda began to groan, closing slowly and relentlessly. The warm, comforting sunlight was reduced to a sliver, and finally, it faded completely, leaving the interior in gloom.
"But, if memory serves me right, I warned you clearly the day I threw you in here that you would be locked up for six years," Samael said, his face darkening, and his smile became the living, terrifying incarnation of the Abyss itself. "Sienna's Blood Bell trial was just a stupid filter exam. It was only the end of the Survival Phase."
Dante snapped his head up, pure psychological horror and disbelief appearing in the dark iris of his Asura Eye. Violeta blinked several times, her perfect icy mask shattering into a thousand pieces for a second of human terror.
"That... that nightmare... was just the fucking beginning?" Voltar stammered from the back, his lips trembling.
"You have been locked in the temporal dilation of the illusions, massacring each other for the psychological equivalent of a year of tactical training," Vexia coldly confirmed from the outer threshold, her voice piercing the space just a millisecond before the door closed. "But physically, in the real time of the Realm of the Eternal Dawn... barely six months have passed."
The heavy crystal doors sealed with a deep, resonant, and final boom, plunging them once again, absolutely, into the cold darkness of the immense Pagoda, now illuminated only by the faint, agonizing, dying glow of their own exhausted auras.
Samael extended his right hand. Kurohime flew into his grasp with a snap.
The Patriarch unsheathed the weapon. The scrape of the black steel exiting the scabbard of the Twilight emitted a sharp, deadly hum that chilled the blood and bones of the Imperial Saints and Void Assassins alike.
"Sienna did you the favor of teaching you to survive the weight of your own power," Samael Morningstar declared, his inscrutable violet and crimson eyes shining alone in the absolute gloom of the immense prison. "Year One of games is over. For the next five long years... I will personally take charge of teaching you with my own hands how a God is slowly and painfully massacred."
Samael raised Kurohime's immense, dark blade, and his pure murderous Intent, so obscenely dense that space itself seemed to weep blood around him, crashed into them, mercilessly crushing the faces of the forty-five terrified warriors against the crystal floor.
"Welcome to Year Two."