Chapter 9: Minor Conflict
The conceptual hum of the Absolute Seal was a vast, silent symphony in the MC's mind. From his throne of black glass in the center of the Forbidden Zone, he felt the distant, violent crescendo of Tala's victory in the river city. He felt the sudden, terrifying spike of his own violet-gold chakra as she manifested the cloak, followed by the abrupt termination of the Vanguard Deviant's corrupted signature.
She survives, the MC noted, his pale lavender eyes fixed on the empty air before him, processing the telemetry. The Vassal Node is stable. The baseline human form can withstand a fractional manifestation of the chakra coat, provided the Yin-Release matrix manages the thermal and kinetic blowback.
It was a successful proof of concept. He now had a functioning, highly lethal operative embedded within the heart of prehistoric human civilization.
However, the localized cosmic disturbance caused by Tala's fight—and the sudden severing of the Vanguard's connection to the Hive mind—did not go unnoticed by the enemy.
Deep within the Zagros Mountains, the massive Warlord Deviant reacted. It did not possess the intelligence to understand what had killed its Vanguard, but its corrupted algorithms recognized a threat boundary. The anomaly in the west was no longer just a passive leak; it was actively destroying high-value assets.
In response, the Warlord did not send another solitary giant. It sent a swarm.
The MC's Kagura Shingan tracked the movement instantly. It was a dense, rapid cluster of chaotic, sickly gold-and-black energy signatures separating from the main Hive. They poured out of the subterranean caverns, cascading down the rocky foothills like a wave of necrotic fluid.
Forty-seven minor units, the MC analyzed, overlaying their trajectory onto his mental map. Pack hunters. High mobility. Low individual mass. They are not heading toward the city. They are sweeping the plains, following the scent of my Acolytes who have been harvesting their scouts.
He shifted his focus, locating Ur and his strike team.
The seventeen enhanced humans were currently thirty miles northeast of the Forbidden Zone, navigating a dense, archaic forest of towering conifers. They were exhausted, dragging the massive, severed head of a quadrupedal Deviant scout behind them on a crude sled woven from vines.
They were completely unaware that an avalanche of cosmic teeth and claws was descending upon them.
The MC did not warn them.
Warning them would prompt them to flee, to break formation and attempt to outrun a threat designed by Celestials to hunt across continents. More importantly, warning them would ruin a perfectly viable experimental control group.
Tala was a scalpel, carefully engineered for precision. Ur and the Acolytes were a blunt instrument. Until now, the Thrall Contracts placed upon them only provided a passive, microscopic trickle of raw chakra, enough to enhance their baseline physical strength and cellular regeneration.
The MC needed to know the absolute limits of the Absolute Seal's distribution network. If the time ever came when he needed to wage a planetary-scale war against the Celestials or the cosmic entities of this universe, he could not be everywhere at once. He needed an army capable of channeling his apocalyptic power simultaneously.
He needed to test mass-routing.
Let them engage, the MC decided, leaning back against his obsidian throne. Let us see how much of my fire the clay can hold before it cracks.
In the ancient conifer forest, the ambush was sudden and brutally silent.
The Deviant swarm did not roar. They communicated through high-frequency bio-luminescent flashes, their chromatic skin bending the shadows of the forest to render them practically invisible. They were roughly the size of large dire wolves, but possessing six multi-jointed legs and elongated, eyeless skulls dominated by rows of serrated, crystalline teeth.
The first indication Ur had of the attack was the sudden, sickening sound of flesh tearing.
One of the Acolytes dragging the sled at the rear of the formation was abruptly jerked upward into the canopy. There was no scream, only a heavy spray of arterial blood that rained down on the pine needles, followed by the dull thud of a severed, obsidian-armored arm hitting the forest floor.
"Circle!" Ur roared, his enhanced reflexes snapping into action. He drove the butt of his heavy obsidian spear into the dirt, his eyes wide, the faint violet luminescence of his irises scanning the dark treeline.
The sixteen remaining warriors instantly collapsed their loose formation into a tight, defensive ring, their bone and obsidian weapons raised, their backs pressed against each other. They were veterans of a dozen skirmishes, enhanced by the blood of a god, but the sheer predatory malice pressing in on them caused their hearts to hammer against their ribs.
The forest around them seemed to ripple.
Then, the swarm descended.
They dropped from the branches and burst from the undergrowth simultaneously. They were a blur of shifting, chromatic armor and gnashing teeth.
Ur thrust his spear forward, channeling a burst of his passive chakra into his arms. The obsidian tip caught a leaping Deviant square in the chest. The kinetic force shattered the beast's ribs, sending it crashing into a tree trunk. But before Ur could retract his weapon, two more Deviants scrambled over the corpse of their kin, their crystalline teeth sinking into the thick bark armor on Ur's left shoulder.
The armor held for a fraction of a second before cracking under the immense pressure of their cosmic biology. Acidic saliva burned against Ur's enhanced skin, drawing a hiss of pain through his clenched teeth.
All around him, the Acolytes were being overwhelmed.
They were strong, capable of shattering boulders with their bare hands, but they were vastly outnumbered by creatures that defied natural physics. Spears were snapped. Skulls were crushed.
Within thirty seconds, three more Acolytes fell, their bodies torn apart by the relentless, chaotic tide of the swarm.
Ur drove the butt of his spear into the face of a Deviant, crushing its sensory pits, and violently kicked it away. He was bleeding from a dozen minor wounds, his chakra reserves rapidly depleting just to keep his muscles firing fast enough to deflect the lethal strikes.
"Hold the line!" Ur bellowed, though he knew it was a hollow command. They were going to die here. They were going to fail their Master, their bodies left to rot in the mud rather than feeding the great Refinery.
Master, Ur prayed in his mind, a desperate, final plea directed at the black tomoe seal burned into his forehead. We are broken.
Miles away, the MC heard the prayer.
"You are not broken," the MC's voice resonated simultaneously in the minds of the thirteen surviving Acolytes, echoing with the crushing weight of a collapsing star. "You are merely unlit."
Sitting on his throne, the MC raised his right hand, his index and middle fingers crossed in a universal sign of focused chakra manipulation. The golden-flecked black tattoos covering his body flared to life, illuminating the dark crater with a blinding, divine light.
[System Protocol: Wide-Area Energy Routing Initiated.]
[Target: Thrall Nodes (Quantity: 13).]
[Bypassing Passive Filters. Initiating Direct Yang-Release Injection. Commencing Elemental Reformatting...]
He didn't give them Yin Release. They lacked the cognitive capacity to manage the delicate conceptual balance of shadows and form. He gave them the raw, burning essence of physical destruction. He gave them fire and lightning.
In the forest, the transition was cataclysmic.
Ur felt as though a volcano had erupted within his veins. The tomoe seal on his forehead burned with a searing, absolute heat. The black ink did not remain confined to his brow; it rapidly expanded, crawling down his face, across his neck, and down his arms like a living, fractal virus.
Ahhhh! Ur screamed, but it was not a scream of fear. It was the primal roar of a vessel attempting to contain the ocean.
All thirteen Acolytes erupted in columns of dense, boiling chakra.
The sudden shockwave of localized atmospheric pressure threw the attacking Deviants backward, scattering them like leaves in a hurricane.
The Acolytes were no longer simply enhanced humans. They were conduits.
Ur's eyes snapped open. The faint violet glow had been replaced by a blinding, solid crimson. The intricate black curse-mark patterns covered his entire body. But more terrifying was the energy radiating from his weapon.
The Absolute Seal had forcibly downloaded the conceptual framework of rudimentary Katon (Fire Style) directly into his nervous system, bypassing years of required training.
Ur gripped his obsidian spear. The dense, violet chakra flowing from his hands into the weapon suddenly ignited. A roaring, superheated blade of pure, violet-tinged fire erupted from the tip of the spear, extending its reach by five feet. The heat was so intense that the surrounding pine needles instantly turned to ash before the flame even touched them.
Beside him, another Acolyte, a lean hunter named Kael, was surrounded by a violently crackling aura of blue and golden lightning. The Raiton (Lightning Style) chakra hyper-stimulated his nervous system, causing his muscles to twitch with terrifying, kinetic potential.
The Deviant swarm recovered quickly. Their corrupted algorithms did not process fear; they only registered a sudden, massive spike in the anomaly's energy signature. They charged again, all forty of the remaining beasts rushing the thirteen glowing humans.
This time, the Acolytes did not form a defensive ring.
They attacked.
Kael vanished. There was a sharp crack of displaced air, and he reappeared in the center of a cluster of five Deviants. He didn't use a weapon. He drove his lightning-wreathed fists directly into the chromatic armor of the beasts. The high-frequency chakra acted like a localized EMP, violently short-circuiting the corrupted cosmic energy animating them. The beasts convulsed, their nervous systems frying instantly as blood boiled within their veins. Kael moved from one to the next in a blur of blue light, a localized thunderstorm of blunt-force trauma.
Ur met the main charge head-on.
He swung his blazing spear in a wide, horizontal arc. The violet fire did not just burn; it consumed. It fed on the ambient chakra and the very oxygen in the air.
Three Deviants leaped at him. The arc of fire cleaved through them mid-air. The extreme heat flash-vaporized their bodily fluids. The creatures were bisected, their upper halves hitting the ground as charred, smoking husks before their lower halves even stopped moving.
The forest became a slaughterhouse bathed in strobe-light flashes of fire and lightning.
The Deviants, designed to hunt physical prey using brute force and acidic biology, were entirely unequipped to fight elemental physics. The Acolytes fought with zero regard for their own safety. They were completely subsumed by the violent, intoxicating high of the Ten-Tails' chakra surging through their bodies.
An Acolyte manifested a crude Doton (Earth Style) technique, slamming his hands into the dirt. Jagged, dense spikes of hardened earth erupted beneath a pack of Deviants, impaling them instantly. Another Acolyte, his arms coated in concentrated, pressurized wind chakra (Futon), sliced through the shifting armor of a beast as easily as a hot knife through fat.
It was an absolute massacre.
The swarm was eradicated in less than four minutes.
As the final Deviant—a small, six-legged horror—was pinned to a tree and incinerated by Ur's flaming spear, the silence of the ancient forest rushed back in, broken only by the crackle of burning timber and the heavy, ragged breathing of the Acolytes.
Miles away, the MC lowered his hand.
"System," the MC commanded. "Terminate Wide-Area Routing. Re-engage passive filters."
The connection snapped shut.
In the burning forest, the columns of dense chakra instantly vanished. The black curse-marks rapidly receded from the Acolytes' skin, pulling back into the single tomoe seals on their foreheads. The elemental fire and lightning guttered out.
The physical blowback was instantaneous and horrific.
Without the immense density of the MC's chakra holding their bodies together, the baseline human biology of the Acolytes violently rebelled against the strain they had just endured.
Kael, the lightning-user, took one step forward and collapsed. His heart, hyper-stimulated beyond its absolute biological limit, simply ruptured in his chest. He was dead before he hit the ash-covered ground.
Three other Acolytes followed immediately. One began vomiting a torrent of black blood as his internal organs, cooked by the sheer heat of the Fire Release he had channeled, failed simultaneously. Another's chakra coils essentially detonated, causing a massive, fatal aneurysm in his brain.
Ur dropped to his knees, his massive frame shaking uncontrollably. His obsidian armor clattered to the ground, shattered from the inside out by the expansion of his own muscles. His skin was blistering, peeling away in large patches where the heat of his own weapon had seared him.
He coughed, spitting a glob of blood onto the charred earth.
He looked around. Out of his initial squad of seventeen, only nine remained alive, including himself. And of those nine, several were critically injured, their bodies permanently scarred by the raw power they had wielded.
Yet, as Ur looked at the forty-seven smoking, mutilated corpses of the cosmic beasts surrounding them, he did not feel despair. His primitive, fanatical mind processed the event not as a tragedy, but as a divine revelation.
His god had reached into the sky, filled them with the fire of the stars, and allowed them to walk as titans, if only for a few minutes.
Through the faint, passive link of the Thrall Contract, the MC's voice echoed one final time in Ur's mind. It was completely devoid of sympathy for the fallen. It was the voice of a scientist noting the results of a successful trial.
You have survived the fire, Ur. The clay is stronger than anticipated.
Master, Ur wheezed, bowing his head toward the direction of the Forbidden Zone.
Gather the corpses of the beasts. Gather the bodies of your fallen brethren. Their energy will return to the source. Bring them to the Refinery. The harvest must continue.
The telepathic presence vanished, leaving Ur alone with the groaning survivors and the burning forest.
In the Forbidden Zone, the MC closed his eyes, analyzing the massive influx of data.
[Experiment Concluded. Wide-Area Routing viable.]
[Data Logged: Baseline human vessels (enhanced) suffer a 40% mortality rate upon deactivation of active combat manifestation. Severe localized tissue degradation observed in survivors.]
It was an acceptable margin of error.
He had proven that he could weaponize a human army dynamically, granting them elemental jutsu without years of training, simply by overriding their nervous systems with his own chakra matrix. They were fragile, temporary weapons—glass cannons that shattered after firing—but they were functional.
If Arishem arrived tomorrow with a host of Celestials, the MC knew he could conscript thousands of primitive humans, turn them into living, elemental bombs, and hurl them at the cosmic gods to buy himself time.
The system was expanding perfectly. The Deviants were providing the raw cosmic material, and humanity was providing the disposable hardware to refine his network.
The MC stood up from his throne and walked toward the edge of the massive, dormant geometric sealing array etched into the crater floor. The Conceptual Refinery Matrix was hungry, and Ur was bringing it a feast.
The prehistoric board was set, and the Ten-Tails was firmly in control of the pieces.