Chapter 166: The Echo of the Crystal and the Siphon of the Soul
The immense obsidian plain was completely unrecognizable. It had been carved with slashes, melted by burning suns, frozen at absolute zero, and shattered by pure brute force until it became a Dantean, apocalyptic crater.
In the center of the destruction, the forty-five warriors panted, covered in their own blood, leaning on each other's shoulders so as not to fall. The Soul Nexus pulsed with frantic intensity in their chests, pumping Elowen and Cassius's restorative, luminous Qi directly into the army's broken arteries.
They had reached the longed-for peak. The Imperial Sequences shone, exuding the majestic and heavy authority of Stage 3 Saints. The Void Sequences, having crossed the existential abyss, radiated the dense, dark, and lethal Qi of Stage 1 Saints. Working together, their immaculate synergy generated a consolidated pressure equivalent to that of an imposing Stage 1 Great Saint.
Before them, the fearsome figure who had tortured and humiliated them relentlessly for an entire year finally fell to his knees.
The "Samael" before them looked shattered: his chest was cleanly pierced by Kael's immense incandescent plasma sword, his right arm completely frozen and rendered useless by Violeta's absolute zero, and his throat slit from side to side by Dante's swift and invisible dagger.
But the Patriarch's body did not bleed.
Instead of spilling the thick crimson liquid of dragons, his skin began to crack and splinter like a broken mirror, emitting a blinding silver light from within his wounds.
Kael Morningstar lowered his Magma Fang, breathing with profound difficulty, sweat mixing with the ash on his face.
"We did it..." whispered the Sword King, his exhausted golden eyes fixed on the fallen deity. "We broke his defense. It's the end."
The crystal "Samael" slowly looked up. Despite his physical throat being shattered, a smile chillingly identical to the true Patriarch's formed on his expressionless, fragmented face.
"A truly admirable coordination," the clone spoke, his voice resonating not from vocal cords, but with the screeching echo of a thousand rubbing crystals. "You have managed to corner me, completely empty my immense reserves, and execute the coordinated final blow without my Law of Space deflecting you."
Dante frowned. The Asura Eye on his face spun violently, detecting for the first time that the intricate energy network of that crumbling body was not remotely organic.
"But do not celebrate just yet, my arrogant little monsters," the clone continued, his imposing form beginning to irremediably dissolve into mirror ash floating towards the sky. "I am just a copy. A simple, hollow shadow forged by Sienna's hands, endowed with barely a minuscule fraction of my true base power. Surpassing me means only one thing: you have completed the Second Trial."
Samael's clone disintegrated completely with a sharp tinkle, leaving only glowing dust floating in the dense, burning air of the labyrinth.
Absolute and crushing silence fell over the forty-five. The euphoric triumph they were savoring instantly turned into an icy terror that paralyzed their guts.
If what they had agonizingly faced throughout all of Year 5, that invincible monstrosity that massacred them daily, was just a fucking crystal clone... what awaited them now?
The false, placid sky of the Labyrinth of the Infinite Mirror suddenly darkened. The projected stars went out at once, like candles blown out by death.
The gravity in the immense room multiplied by a hundred in a single millisecond. Several Void warriors were forced to drive their weapons deep into the obsidian floor and bite their lips so as not to fall face-first and be crushed by the inertia.
From the absolute black vault, a solitary figure floated down slowly. There were no tricks of light, no mirages or illusions. It was Samael Morningstar in his base and true form.
His dark, armorless tunic fluttered majestically without a single gust of wind. In his right hand rested the immense Odachi Kurohime, purring and humming with a deranged bloodlust that made the very souls of those present tremble in their Dantians.
Samael touched the cracked obsidian floor. His dark violet eyes swept over his exhausted army. There was no disappointment in his gaze, but it also harbored not a single drop of pity. At a slight wave of his gloved hand, the reality behind him rippled.
Sienna, the immaculate Maiden of the Mirror, obediently emerged from the shadows. With an elegant, choreographed movement of her pale fingers, she made the pure crystal of the dimension rise, flow, and twist rapidly, forging before them a perfect and ominous replica of the Obsidian Throne of the Upper Palace.
Samael walked with the elegance of a predator toward the throne and sat down, crossing one leg over the other. He rested the lethal Kurohime against the armrest and closed his eyes, exhaling softly.
"You have killed my shadow," the Patriarch said, his calm, deep voice echoing at the end of the world. "That grants you the legitimate right to face the Final Trial. You have exactly one day. Rest. Heal the flesh of your wounds. Recharge the Soul Battery to the max. Tomorrow, at the exact hour, you will not fight a fragile machine of Sienna's. You will fight me."
No one dared utter a word. The pressure was too much. Kael nodded slowly, swallowing saliva tasting of rust, and ordered the 45 to fall back with a wave of his hand.
For twenty-four hours, the tense silence in the obsidian coliseum was absolute and all-consuming. Elowen and Lys channeled massive healing, their emerald and golden lights illuminating the shadows. Cedric sat cross-legged, his fingers moving feverishly to weave complex Qi recovery matrices. They prepared physically, mentally, and spiritually for the impending end of the world.
Exactly at the stroke of the twenty-fourth hour, the suffocating stillness was broken.
The forty-five warriors were already standing, in perfect military formation. The immovable colossi at the front forming a barrier, the archers and mages in the protected rearguard, the assassins skillfully dissolved into the dark corners of perception. Their individual auras, combined through the pulsating Soul Battery, created an imposing and blinding Great Saint energy pillar that illuminated every corner of the labyrinth.
On the throne, Samael Morningstar opened his eyes.
The usual violet of his pupils had acquired a deep abyssal crimson tint, a latent and lethal reflection of his Blood Primordial Dragon bloodline. His long white hair fluttered.
Samael stood up slowly. He took Kurohime by the black silk-wrapped hilt, but he didn't deign to raise it to adopt a guard. He let it drop heavily, allowing the tip to scrape and drag across the crystal floor.
"It is time the dance began, little dragons."
Kael tightened his grip on his boiling magma sword.
"Defensive Alignment! Do not let him...!"
Kael never finished the sentence.
Samael did not use ordinary, predictable spatial teleportation. He used the tyranny of the Law of the Void. He completely erased his presence, his physical mass, his kinetic trajectory, and his Qi signature from the universe itself. He simply ceased to exist at point A beside the throne, and appeared at point B. Not even the precognitive reading of Dante's Asura Eye or the Absolute Precision of Varian's sight could register or comprehend the movement.
Samael was directly in front of Kael's face. Face to face. A millimeter away.
The stoic Sword King, a Stage 3 Saint genius, the group's indisputable strongest pillar, only had the miserable biological time to dilate his golden pupils in pure shock. Samael didn't even raise his sword. He clenched his left fist and, with a sharp movement, devoid of aura or magic, struck the center of Kael's chest.
The sound was not a glorious boom; it was the repulsive, suffocating crunch of an indestructible divine rib cage collapsing onto its own lungs. The monstrous brute force of Samael's base form pierced Kael's hyper-dense magma armor as if it were simply wet rice paper.
Kael shot backwards inhumanly, breaking the sound barrier with a white bang, and brutally crashed against a gigantic wall of mirrors two hundred meters away. He was embedded in the hard wall, spitting a fountain of golden blood and instantly losing consciousness.
The invincible leader had fallen in a microsecond.
"KAEL!" roared Draven, the immense and stoic blue ice tank, losing his composure.
The Imperial Rank 11 charged blindly from the right flank, covered head to toe in his massive Stage 3 Saint frost armor. He raised his massive shield like a glacial battering ram to crush the Patriarch.
Samael didn't even turn his head to look at Draven. He simply pivoted gracefully on his own axis, using the fluid inertia of his first strike, and launched a side kick directly at the geometric center of the colossus's shield.
The physical impact was so devastating that the unbreakable shield of eternal ice shattered into a million sharp, glowing splinters. Samael's leg continued its unstoppable trajectory and sank deep into Draven's broad chest. The two-meter colossus was lifted ridiculously into the air by the kinetic force of the impact, his eyes rolling back instantly, and he was thrown like a lifeless ragdoll, tearing through and knocking down three warriors of the Void formation in his blind flight.
On the exposed left flank, Violeta and Eris, the inseparable imperial twins, reacted out of pure animal survival instinct.
Violeta tore reality, altering the fabric of space to freeze Samael in absolute immobility, while Eris unleashed, with a howl of fury, an annihilating pillar of Flame of Ruin point-blank, aimed directly at the Patriarch's skull.
Samael opened his fingers and let go of Kurohime's hilt. The immense sword floated docilely in the air beside him. The Patriarch raised both bare hands. He completely ignored Violeta's violent spatial freeze, appealing to the pure and dense force of his cultivation, and passed through the barrier of Eris's fire of Ruin without the edges of his dark tunic suffering a single burn. His swift, gloved hands closed relentlessly over Violeta and Eris's faces, gripping them firmly by the face and cutting off their breath.
"Too slow," whispered Samael, the cold breath of the abyss hitting their faces.
With a fluid movement, devoid of effort and brutally humiliating, Samael lifted the two proud Stage 3 Saint girls off the floor with one hand each, and threw them with titanic force towards the other end of the coliseum. Their bodies bounced violently against the hard obsidian floor as if they were flat skipping stones thrown over the surface of a lake, destroying the terrain on each impact until they were completely buried under a mountain of black crystal debris.
Samael lowered his hands, his breathing completely unaltered, and grabbed Kurohime's handle in mid-air again before the sword had time to fall to the floor.
All this chaos, the annihilation of the first line of defense, had occurred in the tight space of three heartbeats.
Absolute panic and confusion seized the Soul Nexus network. Cedric desperately tried to transmit new repositioning orders, but Samael did not grant them that luxury.
The Patriarch instantly became a blur of fluid darkness. Using extremely short bursts of the Law of the Void, he began to jump, blinking erratically among the vulnerable ranks of the rearguard. He did not use costly, massive destructive abilities; it wasn't worth it. He used only the sharp steel of Kurohime and the strength of his own free hands.
Slash. Crack. Thud.
Sylas was cleanly split in two from his right shoulder to his left hip before he could raise his bow. Jareth was decapitated with a flawless horizontal slash before he could exhale the first cloud of his toxic miasma. Tormund was brutally crushed against the ground with a physical gravitational pressure that reduced him to a grotesque red bloodstain. Goran, Ren, Ciro, Joren, Altair fell one after another in a whirlwind of blood and viscera.
In less than five agonizing seconds, ten key members of the elite had been physically "killed" in the most brutal way, their shattered bodies miraculously dissolving into protective mirror light thanks to Sienna's kind passive rules, which would regenerate them hours later in the dome's safe zones.
"Separate right now!" shouted Cedric through the Nexus, sweating cold and trembling, feverishly weaving dozens of golden runic containment disks around himself, his fingers moving like a crazed pianist. "If we stay together in formation, he will massacre us all in a chain due to proximity! Tactical dispersion deployment!"
The thirty-one warriors still standing desperately jumped in all directions, using every ounce of their Qi to get away from Samael's melee annihilation range, attempting to surround him and harass him with ranged magical attacks.
Samael, standing amidst the craters and the massacre, elegantly shook the fake blood from Kurohime's long curved blade.
"Do you genuinely believe that physical distance will save you from me?" the Patriarch asked the air, his draconic eyes shining with a dense and deep sadistic amusement. "In my domain, I decide where you exist."
Samael did not move a single centimeter. He remained static, half-sheathing the weapon. He simply imposed the tyranny of his will over the entire dimension of the coliseum.
The very fabric of three-dimensional space fragmented suddenly like an immense crystal mosaic struck by an invisible hammer. The environment flattened into two dimensions for a sickening fraction of a second. The thirty-one warriors, who were running at hypersonic speeds toward their new strategic positions, felt the universe blink. Their bodies "distorted," losing cohesion and turning into gray smoke.
A sonic boom of vacuum tore through the plain. Reality spat them out violently, forcefully reconfiguring them.
Samael had teleported all of them in a single move. And he hadn't thrown them randomly, but with a mathematically, geometrically, and painfully calculated cruelty.
Cedric was spat out and appeared on his knees, completely isolated fifty meters away from any possible ally, instantly locked in a small cell of four unbreakable walls of smooth obsidian that appeared out of nowhere. Elowen, the vital healer, was completely separated from the range of the wounded, appearing stuck to the unreachable ceiling of the labyrinth, her personal gravity inverted. Dante, who was trying to slip through the shadows to approach from behind, was abruptly teleported fifty meters away, left standing, exposed, and blinking right in the Patriarch's direct frontal line of sight.
The perfect formation had been meticulously destroyed. Their immaculate geometric synergy of mutual protection, completely ruined. They were separated by exact distances, unable to watch each other's backs or physically assist one another.
Dante gritted his teeth, spitting blood, his Asura Eye burning with pure rage. He readied his black dagger to run towards the walls enclosing Cedric and protect the strategist.
But Samael did not allow it. In a blink, he appeared directly in front of Dante. A swift, invisible upward kick struck like a cannon against the Void assassin's chin. Dante's neck made a sickening sound, and he went flying upward like a rocket, brutally crashing against the distant crystal ceiling. Without missing a beat, Samael bounced off the air itself and dove like a dark meteor onto Borg's broad back, stomping on him with such downward force that the seismic wave split the obsidian and broke both legs of the siege giant.
The one-sided beating continued without quarter. Samael was humiliating them using only his overwhelming physical prowess, his incomprehensible speed, and his absurd brute force as a Great Saint, forcing them to painfully understand that, without the structure of their formation, they were easy prey playing at being gods.
Cedric, from the dark interior of his narrow obsidian prison, closed his eyes and concentrated desperately, ignoring the claustrophobia. His fingers flew, weaving feverish golden mandalas in the air, desperately trying to control and rewrite the code of space to open breaches.
"The damn physical distance doesn't matter!" transmitted Cedric, bleeding profusely from his nose at the immense mental processing effort. "The Nexus's Soul Battery still connects us! Channel your maximum Intents through the network! Attack with everything you have! Aim blindly at your own nearby spatial coordinates, and I will organically redirect the energy toward him!"
The battered and isolated survivors nodded. Despite being bruised, scattered, and with broken bones, their Dantians lit up like beacons in the night. Ignis, Xylia, Vania, Maren... they all quickly prepared their most lethal and destructive attacks to fire them through the secure spiritual connection of the Nexus.
Samael stood placidly in the geographic center of the coliseum's crater. The strong connection of the Nexus pulsed rhythmically in the chests of everyone present. The Patriarch looked up at those preparing their attacks. He smiled, baring his teeth, and his violet eyes narrowed with ancient malice.
"I taught you the concept of the Soul Nexus," Samael whispered, his voice filtering into every corner of their minds. "And I showed you months ago that I could easily turn it off by invading your fragile minds with my terror. But today... today I have no intention of turning your toy off. Today I am going to use it to my advantage."
Samael extended his left hand toward the void, opening his fingers slowly.
He did not invoke the lethal laws of the Void. He did not invoke the cold Space. He did not invoke the weight of Blood. Samael closed his grip on the immaterial threads of the Soul Nexus network. But he didn't do it to inject paralyzing panic. He did it to extract.
Violeta, who was just regaining lucidity staggering among the crystal debris, felt an agonizing pull; she felt an invisible hand forcibly tearing the very essence of her Law of Ice from her. Fifty meters away, Eris felt her sacred absolute concept of Destruction violently and irreversibly sucked through the thick thread of the Nexus in her chest.
Both twins fell to their knees and screamed in genuine terror, feeling a painful, deep, and dark momentary void deep within their Dantians.
In the exact center of the room, floating above Samael's open palm, the stolen pure energy abruptly condensed and materialized into a gigantic, heavy spear of solid crystal. But it was no ordinary magical spear. It was a perfect glacial blue, emanating the deadly Absolute Zero expropriated from Violeta, and in its unstable inner core violently burned, struggling to escape, the chaotic black and white Flame of Ruin snatched from Eris.
Samael did not organically possess those elements in his primordial core. He did not have the natal affinity to use them with the refined mastery of the twins. The absurd combination of annihilating fire and static cold was monstrously imperfect, chaotic, and trembled in his hand threatening to explode and erase half the continent. But, forcefully propelled and contained only by the immense, oppressive, and tyrannical cultivation strength of a Peak Stage 7 Saint, that unstable combination had become a weapon of massive, unnatural catastrophe.
The logical rules of magic and affinity did not apply to the Sovereign.
"Return to stupid sender," Samael said with disdain.
The Patriarch thrust his arm back and hurled the immense hybrid spear directly toward the coliseum's false sky.
Upon reaching its highest point, the unstable spear of Ice and Destruction collapsed in on itself and burst into hundreds of thousands of lethal, sharp, bicolor fragments. A terrifying, blinding torrential rain of annihilating frost began to plummet down upon the thirty-one remaining warriors. Samael was mercilessly raining the elite's own venerated, stolen elements directly onto their unprotected heads, returning them with an overwhelming force impossible to block.
"Raise shields! Damn it, cover the healers!" Kael shouted.
The bloodied Sword King had awakened, barely emerging from his tomb of debris. With a harrowing scream, he raised his hands, trying to erect a gigantic, thick wall of boiling magma toward the sky to desperately protect Aylin and Lys from the impending rain of ruin.
The obsidian coliseum instantly became a devastated orbital bombardment zone. The frightened, exhausted warriors fought pathetically for their lives against their own magnified abilities, being crushed without mercy by the absolute tyranny of their own Patriarch's base form.
Samael stood immaculate and static in the exact center of the chaos, hands clasped behind his back, watching the storm of destruction he himself had orchestrated.
He waited patiently for his children to adapt to the impossible, or die trying.
The true hell of the Final Trial had barely just begun.