Chapter 156: The Lesson of Weakness: Devoured Alive (Part 1)
The air in the claustrophobic hexagonal room of mirrors weighed like molten lead. The atmosphere was so thick with tension that breathing felt like swallowing shards of glass.
Dante Morningstar, the acclaimed Rank 1 of the infantry, the Assassin Phantom who had assimilated the lineage of an Asura to control his own pain, was on his knees on the polished glass. He coughed violently, spitting up large clots of residual blood after having experienced his first and humiliating virtual "death" at the hands of a mere reflection. He was trembling. His mind desperately tried to process the somatic trauma of having his throat slit and drowning in his own fluids.
In front of him, thirty meters away, his black crystal Dark Clone hadn't moved from its initial position. It wasn't breathing. It showed no fatigue. But something fundamental, something on a quantum and spiritual level, had changed in its posture.
The clone, moving with a mathematical and inexorable slowness, raised the exact replica of the [Fang of the Fallen Asura].
Dante, his breathing ragged, looked up. His human gray eye and his mutated crimson pupil met the white, empty, and inert sockets of his copy directly. And in that exact and endless second, Dante Morningstar, the boy who had made death his tool, understood for the first time in his life what true and absolute terror was.
The Dark Clone released its aura.
It wasn't a simple release of Qi. It wasn't a pressure of Transcendent or Saint-grade spiritual energy. It was Killing Intent in its purest, most primordial, and maddening state. But it wasn't the cheap intent of a mercenary or a prodigy boy who had killed hundreds of guards and beasts in damp dungeons.
It was an ancient, abyssal, and cosmic Killing Intent. The unspeakable presence of an entity that had annihilated entire continents, that had slaughtered billions of souls over eons, until the simple act of killing ceased to be an action and became a fundamental law of the universe. It was the distilled Dao of Slaughter.
The physical world cracked before Dante's eyes.
A red mist, thick and sticky like arterial blood, began to seep from the Dark Clone's body, flooding the hexagonal room. The illusion of the Intent was so overwhelmingly powerful that it overwrote the reality of the Pagoda. The crystal floor disappeared, replaced by a vast and infinite ocean of rotting corpses, mutilated bodies, and faces frozen in expressions of eternal agony, crawling over each other in a sea of viscera.
Dante felt the air grow dense; upon inhaling, his tongue was coated with the unmistakable and disgusting taste of old copper and rust. His ears began to ring violently, not from the silence, but from the deafening, simultaneous screams of a billion ghosts being tortured in the Asura's personal hell.
And then, the true horror of the illusion manifested. From the ocean of bodies beneath Dante's knees, millions of bloody, skeletal, pale hands suddenly emerged. Fingers cold as ice closed like claws around his ankles, his calves, his wrists, and his neck. They dragged him toward the abyss, demanding he join the dead. The psychological pressure was so extreme, so brutally invasive, that Dante's eyeballs physically threatened to burst from inside his skull. His paralyzed lungs refused to take in air. Every cell in his body, every primitive survival instinct anchored in his DNA, screamed at him to tear off his own skin if necessary to escape that place.
In the midst of that sea of blood and dead hands, Dante looked at the Dark Clone towering over the mountain of corpses. The epiphany crushed him: he was not a killer. He, with his system, his stats, and his stoic attitude, realized that, faced with the true Law of Slaughter of this clone, he was simply a small, pathetic, and frightened child, playing at being dangerous with a butter knife smeared with jam.
Dante, sobbing internally from despair, opened his mental interface, begging his digital god to give him a way out.
[SLAUGHTER SYSTEM: SCANNING TARGET...]
[Target Identified:] Mirror Clone (Karmic Reflection of Perfection).
[Weak Points:] N/A. (Target does not possess mortal anatomy. Lacks existential fissures).
[Estimated Slaughter Points Upon Defeat:] 0.
[Critical Warning:] Environment disconnected from the Cycle of Life and Death. System rewards disabled. Trajectory analysis impossible.
"Zero..." Dante whispered. His voice cracked, sounding like the whimper of a dying animal.
There were no blind spots illuminated in a saving red. There was no health bar indicating the enemy could bleed and die. There wasn't a single reward, nor skill evolution for victory. The System, his crutch, his artificial god that had shielded him from the harshness of the world, had abandoned him. He was completely alone, naked, with his own flawed, raw skill, facing an omnipotent god of death.
Dante's Dark Clone slowly lowered its dagger. The other five black crystal clones in the room, in unison, did exactly the same.
The black crystal composing their perfect bodies began to melt, losing its humanoid shape, liquefying and meekly fusing with the mirrored floor.
A cold, distant, distorted voice, devoid of all pity—Guardian Sienna's voice—echoed from all the walls of the hexagonal room at the same time, vibrating in their bones.
"Your battle prowess is simply pathetic," Sienna decreed, contempt seeping into every syllable. "You believe you are strong because of the forced awakening of your divine lineage, but your technique, your control, and your understanding of the Dao barely brush the level of a novice in the Origin Realm. You are not worthy, not even as entertainment, of facing your own technical perfection. First, if you want the right to cross steel with the reflections, you must learn to survive the horror of your own weak flesh."
The six clones completely disappeared into the glass.
Borg, Voltar, Ciro, Goran, and Ren, feeling the murderous pressure vanish, let out a long, trembling sigh, some falling to their knees. In their naivety, they believed the trial was over, that they had failed the first exam and would get a break.
But the floor of perfect mirrors beneath their boots began to ripple aggressively, bubbling like water boiling at thousands of degrees. The pristine hexagonal walls cracked with deafening crashes.
From the immense dimensional fractures that opened in the room, a physical, nauseating, and tangible stench flooded the air. It was the smell of a mass grave left in the sun: rotting meat, bile, gastric acid, and black, rancid blood.
"Boss..." Borg babbled, stumbling backward, his immense bronze body trembling, until his broad back hit the cracked crystal wall. "What the hell is that?"
Out of the broken mirrors, from the damp and stinking darkness, they began to emerge grotesquely. They weren't technical clones. They weren't warriors. They were Mutated Mirror Beasts, the raw materialization of nightmare and punishment.
Hundreds of them began to invade the confined space. Monstrous hounds the size of cave bears leaped onto the floor; they had completely transparent skin that perfectly revealed their disgusting, beating red crystal muscles, and possessed three misaligned jaws on a single head, dripping acid. Aberrant, gigantic spiders fell from the ceiling, their legs not made of chitin, but formed by old, rusted, splintered, and bloody swords that produced a horrifying metallic click-clack as they walked. Immense worms emerged from the floor like drills, their enormous circular maws lined with thousands of rows of crushed glass teeth spinning like industrial grinders.
None of the abominations had eyes. They didn't need them. They were all absolutely famished, detecting the racing heartbeats of the six prey.
"Defensive formation, damn it!" Goran yelled at the top of his lungs, recovering his protective tank instinct.
The grayish-skinned warrior raised his immense, heavy [Shield of the Northern Black Tortoise]. Goran activated [The Wall of the Black Tortoise], burying the heavy edge of the shield into the crystal floor. A majestic and impenetrable dome of bronze energy projected around them. The [Seal of Absolute Zero] on the shield shone with a blinding white light, emanating an icy blue mist that froze the ground at their feet, creating a fortress capable of withstanding a Saint's onslaught. It was the epitome of physical defense.
But the Mutated Mirror Beasts did not obey the pathetic laws of three-dimensional physics.
An immense red crystal hound leaped with its jaws open. It didn't leap toward Goran's energy dome to crash into it. The hound leaped toward the nearest mirrored wall, diving into the reflection, only to materialize instantly and demonically emerging from the reflection of Goran's own black shield, directly inside his dome, breaking his intimate guard without touching the barrier.
The hound's three misaligned jaws clamped down on Goran's thick shoulder and neck with an irrational, hydraulic force. The impenetrable metal of his divine bronze skin cracked and yielded to the pressure of the crystal.
"AAAAAAAH!" Goran, the stoic man who never showed pain, let out a gut-wrenching roar that chilled his comrades' blood.
The beast, shaking its massive head like a dog with a piece of meat, ripped a massive chunk of trapezius muscle and collarbone from him. The hound began to chew Goran's organic metal and human flesh with a disgusting, wet crunch, swallowing his absolute defense.
Borg, seeing his comrade being devoured, let out a scream of pure fury. He raised his massive [Black Iron Bonebreaker Mace] and activated the [Charge of the Horizon's End: The Great Collapse]. His Qi projected in front of him like a spectral bronze battering ram. He was going to charge the hound and turn it to glass dust.
He planted his enormous rhinoceros boot to propel himself, but the floor beneath him opened into a dark crater.
A crystal worm emerged from the depths, its meter-long ringed body coiling like a python around Borg's thick, armored rhinoceros legs. The worm's circular maw, lined with crushed glass teeth, began to spin at thousands of revolutions per minute like an industrial chainsaw against his shins.
The worm didn't try to strike him; it began to drill. The glass teeth shredded Borg's armored bronze skin in seconds, grinding the hot flesh, breaking the dragon scales, and pulverizing the thick bones of his legs right down to the marrow.
Borg, the immovable giant, fell heavily face-first against the crystal. His mace rolled uselessly away. His scream was of pure animal agony, scratching the smooth floor as the immense worm began to brutally devour him from the feet up, slowly chewing and swallowing his mutilated limbs, sucking him down into the abyss.
Ten meters away, Voltar, completely losing his sanity at the carnage, erupted into his supreme form.
His entire body became a nexus of purple lightning. With the [Atomic Collapse Fist: Indra's Hammer] and his [Vajra of Judgment] shining like black stars, he unleashed a rain of plasma punches. He coldly, literally, and thermonuclearly turned three immense crystal hounds that leaped at him into a shower of molten glass before they could touch him.
"Die, you disgusting scum! DIE!" Voltar roared, laughing hysterically.
But for every gigantic beast he pulverized with his God-fists, the Mirror generated adaptive terrors. From the cracks in the ceiling, an immense buzzing swarm emerged. They were crystal wasps the size of human heads. There weren't three, nor ten; there were hundreds.
The swarm completely enveloped Voltar, ignoring the Thunder Throne Shield. The wasps latched onto his skin, and their massive stingers drove deep into his flesh. They didn't inject a lethal venom to kill him quickly; they injected a neurotoxic acid specifically designed to dissolve the epidermis without damaging the nerve endings.
The acid melted the skin off Voltar's arms, torso, and face in seconds, exposing the red musculature and raw nerves to the cold air. The sensory overload of pure pain multiplied the suffering of his Tribulation. Voltar fell to his knees, his massive body turned into a repulsive mass of raw, flayed meat. His screams were muffled as the crystal wasps, with their jagged mandibles, began to tear off throbbing strips of his exposed muscles, slowly feeding on him piece by piece while he still breathed and watched his own dissection.
Ciro, witnessing the apocalypse of pain, knew that standing still was death. The Wind Phantom maximized his [Cloud Walker Boots] and his intangibility technique. His body became a supersonic gust of air. He was going to dodge, evade, look for a blind spot in the room to survive.
But Guardian Sienna had left no blind spots.
Ciro moved at the speed of sound, but an immense Aberrant Spider leaped from the ceiling, intercepting his perfect route. The spider didn't try to cut his intangible body. The enormous legs formed by rusted swords dug into the floor, but in doing so, they transversely cut the invisible flow lines of wind Qi in the room.
By severing the flow of his energy, Ciro's intangibility collapsed instantly, violently materializing him mid-dash. He crashed into the spider, bouncing off its crystal belly. Ciro tried to raise his Twins of the Penumbra, but the spider was relentlessly fast.
CLACK! CLACK! CLACK! CLACK!
With disgusting and sadistic precision, the spider drove its immense rusted steel legs through the Wind Phantom's joints. A sword pierced his right wrist, another his left; then, his elbows, his knees, and finally his ankles. The rusted swords pierced flesh, cartilage, and bone, nailing firmly into the mirrored floor.
Ciro was literally crucified against the floor.
He was paralyzed by the swords, unable to move a single millimeter of his body. The only thing he could do was open his eyes in absolute terror, watching as the aberrant spider slowly leaned over his head, opening a maw full of sharp glass shards, and methodically began to eat his human face, bite by bite, tearing off his nose, his cheeks, and his eyes while Ciro screamed and drowned in his own blood.
In the center of the pandemonium, Dante Morningstar, Rank 1, the feared Asura, fought frantically and desperately.
Without the protection of his System to guide him, his movements, once perfect, were now chaotic and desperate. The [Void Slash] and his [Fang of the Fallen Asura] cut the air and sliced the crystal throats of a couple of hounds, but they weren't clean strikes. He was wasting massive amounts of vital energy with every movement. The black, acidic blood of the beasts he managed to wound splashed onto his body, burning and corroding his own [Asura Obsidian Scales] like chemical fire.
He was completely surrounded. Slaughter was no longer on his side.
An immense crystal hound leaped through his blind spot and its jaws clamped down with hydraulic force on his left hand. The sound of the bones in Dante's fingers and wrist being crushed to dust echoed sickeningly clear in his head.
Dante let out a guttural roar of fury, twisting and stabbing the beast's transparent eye with his dagger in his right hand, killing it, but the effort left him unbalanced. Before he could regain his footing, the jaws of a second hound clamped down on his right calf. The crystal teeth sank deep and, with a brutal jerk, the beast ripped his calf muscle clean off, exposing the white bone of his tibia.
Dante lost his balance and fell backward onto the hard glass.
In a matter of seconds, darkness fell upon him. He was buried alive under a mountain of jaws, sharp claws, and glass bodies.
Dante, his vision blurring, felt sharp, ice-cold teeth brutally and violently tear open his stomach and abdomen from side to side. Despite his Asura mutation and pain suppression, the trauma was absolute. He felt the unnatural cold of the room's air strike and directly brush against his exposed entrails and internal organs.
He couldn't move his arms; the beasts held them pinned, crushing his bones. A hound buried its snout into the open wound in his abdomen, clamped its teeth, and with a sharp jerk of its head, pulled back.
Dante felt the tug in the deepest part of his being. He watched, eyes bulging and paralyzed by a shock that infinitely exceeded the capacity of human sanity, as the beast pulled out his pulsing intestines, uncoiling them from inside his body as if they were a long, wet, bloody rope.
Life abandoned his cells. His final screams, muted by the blood in his throat, blended harmoniously with Voltar's shrieks of agony, Goran's moans, and Ciro's gurgling. Each and every one of them was devoured alive. Chewed. Dismembered. Swallowed and slowly digested in the transparent bellies of the monsters, allowing them to watch from the inside as their own flesh dissolved.
The pain reached its absolute zenith. The imminent arrival of black death was welcomed as the sweetest of reliefs.
FLASH!
With a blinding flash of immaculate light, the quantum space of the hexagonal room abruptly reset.
The six members of the destructive elite reappeared, collapsing to their knees in the exact center of the room. Their bodies were absolutely intact. Their armor didn't have a single scratch. Not a single finger was missing, there was no flayed flesh or broken bones. Dante quickly brought both hands to his stomach, but only found the clean fabric of his intact tunic; his organs were in place.
But the illusion was only visual. The immense psychological damage was tattooed onto their souls.
The somatic memory of their bodies vividly remembered every bite, every crushed bone, every drop of acid, and the repulsive texture of being devoured from the inside out. And worst of all: the oppressive, metallic, and disgusting smell of their own opened viscera and clotted blood still hung thickly in the air of the room.
"No... No... please, no more..." sobbed Voltar, the relentless Rank 7, the monster who commanded the heavenly lightning. He was curled up in a fetal position, hugging his head, trembling from head to toe like a terrified infant in the dark, his eyes empty from the trauma of being eaten alive by insects.
Around them, enclosing them in a perfect circle, the hundreds of mutated crystal beasts crouched. Watching them in silence. The jaws of the hounds and the teeth of the worms still slowly, lazily dripped the thick blood and scraps of flesh that belonged to the previous incarnations of the six warriors before them.
Sienna's voice, distant, frozen, and relentless as a rusted blade, echoed again, descending from the sky of mirrors.
"This is the true and only lesson of pure weakness. The world does not respect your titles, nor your pompous skills, nor your gifted lineage. The world is hungry. And you... will be the food of the beasts until trauma forces you to evolve, or until you learn not to behave like pathetic prey."
The beasts issued no prior roar. They gave no time to process the mourning or assimilate the pain.
Driven by an insatiable hunger that the rules of the room could not quench, they leaped again, all at the same time, like a monstrous wave of teeth, glass, and rot.
Dante gripped his dagger with his intact hands, terror threatening to shut down his mind completely.
The second cycle of human dissection had begun. And this macabre loop of slaughterhouse and resurrection would not end today, nor tomorrow, but would repeat incessantly during every hour of the next twelve months.
The true hell in the Realm of the Eternal Dawn had only just opened its jaws.