Chapter 156: The Lesson of Weakness: Devoured Alive (Part 2)
Several spatial dimensions away, separated by the incomprehensible geometry of the Pagoda of the Infinite Mirror, Group 2 had fallen into a completely different environment than the hexagonal room.
Their battlefield wasn't a polished crystal cage, but a macabre mockery of nature: a barren, hostile swamp surrounded by twisted black crystal trees whose branches looked like petrified claws. The ground beneath their boots wasn't earth, but an unstable, treacherous mix of reflective mud, thick as tar, and sharp plates of black ice that cut like razor blades at the slightest touch.
Cassius, The Jade Lancer (Rank 10), quickly stood up, brushing the reflective mud off his impeccable tunic. His apple-green eyes, usually calm, scanned the environment with a feverish urgency. He was the support, the healer, the central pillar of the team. His analytical mind began to structure the chaos.
"Star formation!" Cassius ordered with a commanding voice, assuming his role as tactical leader without hesitation, striking the base of his spear, [Yggdrasil, the Thorn of Rebirth], against a plate of ice to draw attention. "Magnus, Tormund, you are the front, become our wall! Sylas, Eira, take the rear, keep your distance and use crowd control! Jareth, stay in the center with me and don't release your poison unless I explicitly order you to!"
Cassius looked his comrades in the eyes, aware of the real danger of their own uncontrolled powers.
"Listen to me well! Our newly awakened bloodlines are violently unstable and we lack the Intent necessary to direct them with millimeter precision. If we don't strictly control the impact radius of our area-of-effect skills, we'll massacre each other before the enemy even touches us!"
It was standard military tactics, perfect in theory, taken straight from the infantry manuals of the orthodox clans. But in raw practice, within the cruel rules of Sienna's mirror, their Origin Realm battle level wasn't remotely prepared for the unpredictable chaos of an ecosystem designed to devour them.
Cassius had anticipated attacks from the flanks or from the crystal underbrush. The fatal problem, the flaw in his tactical equation, was that the enemy wasn't in front of them. It was underneath.
The reflective mud beneath Tormund's immense boots began to bubble violently, emitting a thick, acrid smoke.
Without warning, from the viscous depths of the swamp emerged the Acid Crystal Crocodiles like torpedoes. They were massive reptilian beasts, the size of cargo train cars, whose translucent scales refracted the ambient light into hypnotic geometric patterns, perfectly camouflaging them in the mud. Their immense, asymmetrical jaws opened wide, dripping strings of a thick, smoking green liquid that melted the ice on contact.
Magnus, the immovable Iron Titan (Rank 9), saw the threat and his blood boiled with the arrogance of newly acquired power. Feeling that his Vajra body made him the most resilient living being in the universe, he roared and charged straight forward, breaking the defensive formation on his first impulse.
"Come here, crystal lizards! I'm going to turn you to dust!" Magnus bellowed.
He activated his enormous Low Saint Grade gauntlets, the [Vajra-Annihilator: The Pillars of the End]. The hydraulic and gravitational machinery of the armor hummed to life with a dull, industrial thrum. The overlapping plates locked magnetically, and the Kinetic Ignition Chamber on the back of his right hand began to glow with an incandescent volcanic red, building up pressure.
Magnus prepared to unleash the [Execution of the Broken World: The Hammer of God].
With herculean strength, he threw a devastating punch toward the lower jaw of the first crocodile emerging from the mud. He wanted to create the Pressure Void, liquefy the air, and vaporize the beast's skull in a single blow.
But the beast was unnaturally fast and Magnus was clumsy. He completely lacked the Fist Intent necessary to "lock" his target in space. The immense crocodile simply tilted its heavy crystal head at an impossible angle, dodging the heavy hydraulic blow by mere millimeters. Magnus's fist sailed past, crashing uselessly into the mud, creating a crater but failing to harm his enemy.
Before Magnus could retract his arm, the crocodile clamped its immense, asymmetrical jaws directly onto his right arm, trapping the armored forearm and the human elbow between its jagged glass teeth.
The impact was like being bitten by an industrial hydraulic press.
The acidic crystal teeth crunched horribly against Magnus's Vajra bone and the plates of the Saint Grade gauntlet. The teeth couldn't pierce the atomic structure of his divine skeleton, but Sienna's beasts didn't rely on clean cuts; they relied on brute force. The monstrous pressure exerted by the beast's multi-ton jaw simply crushed Magnus's human flesh, muscle, and nerves trapped between the Vajra and the teeth, turning his soft tissues into a repulsive, bloody pulp inside his own skin.
"AAAAAAAAAAAAAH!" Magnus howled. Accustomed to being an immovable wall that felt no pain, the terror of being overpowered by brute strength shattered his mind. His knees buckled under the weight of the crocodile, which began to drag him toward the boiling mud. "It's ripping my arm off! Eira! By all the gods, Eira, freeze it now!"
From the rear, Eira, the dazzling and icy White Witch (Rank 8), heard her comrade's desperate scream. Without hesitation, she aimed her [Scepter of the Sovereign of Absolute Zero] toward the fray.
The central diamond of her staff emitted an electric blue flash, and twelve petals of Imperial Ice crystal shot out. She wanted to use the [Waltz of a Thousand Ice Splinters] along with her cryogenic execution. The power of the Permafrost Emperor Dragon erupted, releasing an expanding wave of Absolute Zero that swept the swamp with a terrifying hiss.
The immense acid crocodile was hit squarely by the wave of entropy. Its crystal and boiling blood biology stopped dead, instantly freezing into a majestic, deadly statue of solid blue ice.
"I got it!" Eira shouted, a glimmer of triumph crossing her pale face.
But Eira lacked fine control. She didn't possess the supreme Ice Intent that would allow her to discern allies from enemies within an area of effect; she only possessed a brutal, overflowing amount of icy Qi.
The wave of lethal cold didn't stop at the beast's body; it continued its expansion, inevitably reaching Magnus, who was trapped in its jaws. The Absolute Zero temperature enveloped Magnus's right arm and crept up to his shoulder. In a fraction of a millisecond, the blood, fluids, and crushed flesh of his arm froze right down to the Vajra marrow.
The metal and hardened bone, when subjected to Absolute Zero temperatures without the protection of their owner's Martial Intent, lost all their flexibility and structural integrity, becoming extremely brittle, as fragile as cheap glass.
Desperate and blinded by the panic of seeing his arm turned into a block of pale ice inside the statue crocodile's jaws, Magnus made his final mistake. He tried to free his arm by pulling backward with all the immense, colossal, infinite gravitational force of his Titan legs.
By pulling backward with tens of tons of brute force, while his right arm was frozen and anchored to the immovable jaws of the petrified beast... simple, cruel physics did its job.
His own right arm, crystallized by Eira's ice and unable to withstand the inertial strain of his own body, snapped cleanly at the elbow joint.
SNAP!
The dry sound of the Vajra arm breaking like a dead branch in winter echoed throughout the swamp, paralyzing the rest of the team.
"AAAAAAAAAAAAAH!" Magnus fell violently backward onto the mud, his scream tearing his vocal cords. He raised his limb and stared, his eyes bulging with the purest horror, at the grotesque, splintered stump of his right arm. Liquid blood didn't flow from the wound; only red frost and frozen veins poked out like broken wires amidst the hardened flesh. "Damn it, Eira! You amputated my fucking arm! My arm!"
The fatal tactical distraction cost them dearly. While the frontline collapsed, Tormund, the gigantic Wall of Flesh (Rank 21), was relentlessly ambushed.
Three crocodiles leaped from the mud behind his back, sinking their immense teeth into his broad torso, his thick thighs, and directly into the base of his thick, bull-like neck. Tormund had activated the [Root of the Eternal Mountain], turning his skin to basalt, heavy and unbreakable. He resisted the mechanical pressure of the teeth, yes, but Sienna's beasts were biological traps.
The thick green liquid dripping from their jaws seeped into the bites. The pure, concentrated mirror acid began to melt his soft tissues with a scorching hiss, dissolving the basalt like sugar underwater.
"Jareth, help him!" Cassius yelled, desperate, driving the ferrule of his Jade spear into the ground to summon his ironwood roots and try to rip the immense beasts off Tormund's body. "Use the damn miasma, but concentrate it only on the beasts! Don't hit Tormund!"
Jareth, the skeletal and gloomy Toxicologist (Rank 20), stepped forward laughing nervously, his mind struggling not to succumb to the chaos. His dark, mantis-like eyes gleamed under his dark circles.
"It's an extremely delicate art, Cassius! It's hard!"
Jareth activated his [Poison Sutra of the Thousand Insects]. A dense, repulsive cloud of purple and emerald green smoke, teeming with billions of tiny Qi parasites, was exhaled from his pores. He directed the attack frontally; the thick cloud perfectly enveloped the three crocodiles biting Tormund.
The beasts let out sharp, unnatural shrieks as their crystal bodies began to rot, melt, and crumble under the absolute necrosis of the Fallen Era.
But Jareth, like Eira, was a novice playing at being a god. He lacked the Poison Intent necessary to tell his own attack which tissue to rot and which tissue to ignore. His miasma simply destroyed everything organic and magical it touched.
The lethal toxic gas swirled heavily in the air and, pushed by a simple, treacherous errant swamp wind, completely covered Tormund's anchored body.
Jareth's parasitic toxin was relentlessly effective. Tormund's basalt skin, which the beasts' acid had barely begun to slowly melt, started to necrose and crumble at a terrifying speed under the touch of his own comrade and ally's poison.
Tormund let out a guttural howl, a deep, harrowing sound that vibrated in the chests of everyone present. Through the green smoke, Tormund looked down and saw, paralyzed by visceral horror, how the skin, fat, and thick layer of muscle on his own broad chest dissolved like hot wax under a blowtorch flame. His flesh melted and fell in large chunks into the mud, brutally exposing his broad, hardened ribs and the pink, throbbing sacs of his lungs working frantically beneath the bare bone.
"I'm dying! I'm melting!" Tormund bellowed, coughing up black blood and falling heavily to his knees, choking on Jareth's necrotic gases.
Cassius, losing the cold composure that characterized him, physically threw himself toward Tormund and Magnus. There was no longer a formation, no strategy, only the instinctive desperation of the healer trying to save lives.
He gripped the world-tree wooden shaft of [Yggdrasil, the Thorn of Rebirth] tightly. He activated the [Vital Pulse Transmission] to its maximum capacity, ignoring the drain on his own energy core.
A thick, warm, glowing emerald-green light bathed the shattered bodies of Tormund and Magnus. The absolute power of Cassius's parasitic healing was visually astounding, a true display of an Imperial Grade bloodline.
The melted flesh of Tormund's chest began to regenerate at an aggressive speed visible to the naked eye. Raw, living red muscle fibers quickly wove themselves over his exposed ribs in violent spasms, stitching the wound from the inside out, forming new, immaculate pink skin. At the same time, on Magnus's shoulder, the cartilage, organic metal, and Vajra bone began to sprout from the amputated stump, attempting to rebuild his lost arm from scratch in a matter of seconds.
But what was intended to be salvation instantly turned into the most abject and sadistic living hell imaginable.
As Cassius poured out his immense energy to heal them, the smell of divine sap, of newborn pink flesh, and boiling fresh lifeblood attracted all the predators in the area. From the dark canopy of the black crystal trees rained down hundreds of immense Thorny Mirror Leeches like a plague. They were eyeless abominations with bodies made of sharp glass shards and funnel-shaped mouths full of barbs that sucked bodily fluids at a lethal speed.
Dozens of these dog-sized leeches instantly latched onto the motionless bodies of Tormund and Magnus.
The leeches pierced with brutal ease the tender, soft, newly healed pink flesh that Cassius was forcing to grow, and began to savagely suck their human blood, the liquid Vajra metal, and the pure Qi that the healer was injecting into them. New crocodiles leaped from the mud, lunging at Tormund and biting relentlessly, tearing off large chunks of new, throbbing muscle tissue a mere second after Cassius finished regenerating it.
Cassius, in his blind desperation, did not stop. His apple-green eyes were wide open as he channeled his entire being into the staff, stubbornly keeping them alive.
He was forcing his own friends to endure the brutal process of dismemberment and dissolution not once, but dozens of consecutive times. It was a cycle of infinite cellular torture, biologically and psychologically unbearable. The parasitic regeneration caused the flesh to be born in spasms, tender and highly sensitive, only to be devoured and chewed by crystal monstrosities fractions of a second later.
"CASSIUS, PLEASE, STOP!" Magnus begged, his screams reduced to hoarse, pitiful sobs of childish agony, as a large crocodile slowly chewed his newly formed intestines and another ripped off his half-grown arm. "I CAN'T TAKE IT ANYMORE! LET THEM KILL ME! STOP THE FUCKING HEALING!"
Tormund could no longer speak. He was covered in mirror leeches tearing pieces off his face, and Cassius would magically put them back in place, only for the beasts to greedily tear them off again. The divine healer had become, through his own tactical ineptitude and lack of understanding of when to let go, the cruelest and most sadistic torturer of his own team, prolonging the carnage far beyond the limit of any mortal's sanity.
A few steps away, Sylas, the archer, tried to support the defense. But his hands, which should have been as steady as a surgeon's, trembled so violently from the sheer terror of seeing his massive vanguard comrades reduced to inexhaustible banks of meat, that he couldn't even nock an arrow properly. His wind-charged arrows flew out at mediocre angles, bouncing harmlessly with a sad ping against the impenetrable scales of the crystal crocodiles. They were finished.
Finally, the ecosystem itself put an end to the healer's inverted mercy. An immense Thorny Leech leaped from a hidden ice branch and fell directly onto Cassius's head, its funnel full of glass blades opening over his face.
The beast's transparent tube buried itself deep through his right eye socket, destroying the apple-green eyeball and piercing directly into his brain. The beast violently sucked out the Jade Lancer's brain matter in a single gulp.
Cassius fell stiffly, dead instantly, and the connection of the [Vital Pulse Transmission] was abruptly severed. Without the healing to keep them alive against all logic, Magnus and Tormund succumbed to final death by devouring a second later, their bodies torn to pieces in the mud.
The entirety of Group 2 was butchered alive, dissolved, and massacred in a disgusting puddle of reflective mud, necrotic poison, broken ice, and frozen flesh born to die. Their inability to control the area of their own laws, their total lack of Intent, had turned them into their own executioners.