Chapter 155: Blood, Broken Egos, and the Dark Clones
The Realm of the Eternal Dawn breathed with a divine calm, oblivious to the biological violence that had been unleashed hours before in the Throne Room. The immense runic sun spilled a warm, golden light over the floating islands, making the crystal bridges and jade roofs of the palace gleam. The air was saturated with the vital energy of the Stellar World Tree, an aether so pure it intoxicated the senses.
But for the twenty-four Void Sequences marching single file along the wide obsidian paths, the idyllic landscape might as well have been a dark, funereal corridor straight to the gallows.
At the head of the group walked Vexia. The Grand Marshal, the relentless Goddess of War and supreme administrator of Samael's hell, did not wear her heavy battle armor. Instead, she wore her impeccable, severe, and elegant dark Victorian maid uniform, tailored perfectly to her lethal figure.
She didn't say a word. The only sound she emitted was that of her heels striking the obsidian of the path.
Click. Clack. Click. Clack.
It was a military rhythm, constant, methodical, and devoid of all emotion. A sound that seemed to bypass the eardrums of the young warriors to strike and hammer directly upon their tense nervous systems.
Behind her, the twenty-four tried to maintain their composure. At first glance, they were human again, but beneath the skin, their bodies still hummed violently with the crushing residual power of the 10% Draconic Awakening. The blood pumping through their hearts was no longer mortal; it was dragon ichor, heavy, dense, and laden with archaic concepts.
They felt a poisonous euphoria. Arrogance coursed through their new veins of metal, wood, void, and storm. Every step they took confirmed that they had left humanity behind. Magnus felt that, if he stepped a little harder, he could split the floating island in half. Voltar felt that with a simple snap of his fingers he could evaporate the clan's artificial lakes. Dante, marching at the head of the line, saw the world through his Asura eye as a matrix of weak points ready to be cut.
They were newborn gods. Calamities incarnate. Ego inflated their chests, making them believe that, having survived the pain of the Golden Blood baptism, there was no longer anything in this closed world that could stand against them.
Vexia stopped dead.
There was no warning. Simply, the click-clack abruptly ceased right in front of the enormous and majestic crystal bridge that connected to the island where the Pagoda of the Infinite Mirror stood.
The Marshal did not turn around immediately, but her voice cut the air with the aseptic and cruel coldness of a surgical scalpel opening live flesh.
"You smell of cheap power."
The insult was so sudden, so dismissive and blunt, that it destabilized the formation. Ignis, whose red hair seemed to smoke for a second, clenched his fists, the Yang Flame burning beneath his skin. Magnus's thick eyebrows furrowed, and a slight seismic tremor shook the obsidian beneath his feet out of indignation.
Vexia slowly turned around, adjusting her glasses with a white-gloved index finger. Her cold gray eyes, forged in centuries of massacres and commanding immortal armies, scanned them one by one. Under that gaze, the twenty-four felt their dragon auras shrink like frightened beasts. She stripped them down to their souls, and what she saw filled her with a deep and genuine tactical disgust.
"The Patriarch, in his infinite generosity and ambition, has ripped out your mortal hearts and installed mythic-grade dragon engines in your chests," Vexia said, her voice dripping venom. "But no matter how much your blood boils and your muscles can shatter mountains... you are still driving those engines as if you were pathetic wooden carriages with broken wheels."
Vexia took a step toward them, closing the distance.
"Look at yourselves. You believe you are invincible because your flesh is now as hard as Vajra and your Qi is as dense as a black hole. Ego is rotting your brains. Listen to me well, you lucky pieces of scum: a newborn god who only knows how to scream, charge mana, and strike blindly relying on his physical attributes is, by definition, the easiest, fattest, and most predictable prey in the entire fucking universe."
Vexia walked straight toward Dante. Rank 1 held her gaze, his Asura eye glowing red, but instinctively he felt an invisible, monstrous pressure crushing his lungs. The [Slaughter System] couldn't even measure Vexia's threat level; the interface simply displayed a blank panel.
"An old mortal," Vexia whispered, stopping inches from Dante's face, but speaking so everyone could hear, "a decrepit old man who doesn't have a single drop of Qi in his body, but who has trained with a simple wooden sword for sixty years and understands the fundamental basis of his art... could use your own immense, stupid brute strength to snap your necks in three different places before your brains even process that you need to blink."
The Marshal stepped back, turning her back to them again.
"You have no foundation. You don't have a single damn ounce of control. Your power is borrowed and you have no technique. You are, right now, a walking disgrace to the golden blood the Patriarch shed for you."
The silence on the crystal bridge was absolute. Dense. Humiliating. Vexia had just crushed their newly forged pride not with power, but with pure, inescapable, and crushing martial logic.
"Guardian Sienna is going to dismantle you," Vexia announced, pointing to the immense structure at the end of the bridge. "She's going to teach you geometry through multiple fractures. She's going to turn your Imperial-class bloodlines into a bad joke. Follow me. If you have the courage."
They walked in silence, swallowing saliva and bile, until they reached the doors of the Pagoda of the Infinite Mirror.
Unlike the rest of the majestic architecture of the Realm of the Eternal Dawn, this structure emitted no Qi. It did not shine. It was a blind hole in the fabric of space. The immense double doors were made of a perfect mirrored glass that did not reflect the light of the runic sun, but directly reflected the twenty-four warriors standing before them. But there was something deeply disturbing about those reflections; they seemed to look back at them from the other side of the glass with an absolute, cold, and mathematical contempt.
Vexia stepped aside.
There was no motivational speech. There were no tactical instructions. There were no warnings about hidden traps, the topography of the terrain, or the monsters they would face. She only uttered the phrase that would become their macabre daily epitaph for the next relative year:
"Enter. And remember only one rule in Sienna's domain: in the mirror, right is left, and life is death."
Dante was the first to move. The Path of Slaughter knew no doubt, fear, or hesitation; it only knew the ceaseless advance toward the target's jugular. He pushed open the heavy, immaculate glass door and crossed the threshold. The others followed in strict single file, with painfully tense shoulders, clenched jaws, and their Heaven and Saint-grade weapons drawn, ready to massacre anything that moved.
In the exact millisecond that Borg (Rank 24), the colossus bringing up the rear, crossed the door and it closed behind him... the world, reality, and mathematics collapsed.
There was no reception hall. There was no floor. There was no ceiling.
"What the hell?!" Voltar roared, feeling his stomach rise to his throat.
The twenty-four fell violently into the void.
An infinite abyss of spinning mirrors, inverted staircases leading nowhere, and fractured dimensions swallowed them like the maws of a crystal leviathan. Gravity changed direction every fraction of a second. Their sense of orientation was shattered and liquefied instantly. They saw their own reflections falling upwards, sideways, multiplied by a billion in an endless labyrinth.
Dante tried to summon his heavy Asura Qi to stabilize himself in the air and float, but the very space of the Pagoda suppressed his energy with a pressure that defied his stats. His vision filled with red warnings.
[SLAUGHTER SYSTEM: CRITICAL ALERT]
[Spatial Coordinate Error: Geolocation failed.]
[Life Radar Failure: Topography shifting at a quantum level.]
[Warning: Imminent squad separation. Formation protocols overridden.]
The colossal mirrors around them shifted, rotating and intersecting like the pieces of a murderous kaleidoscope, forcefully dividing the group. Dante, in freefall, reached out his hand, but saw the invincible twins, Aion and Aia, crash into a mirror panel and disappear in a flash of starlight and collapsed gravity. He saw the Inquisitor Darius try to anchor himself to a shadow, only to fall screaming upwards, sucked into a vortex of reflections.
CRASH!
Dante landed abruptly. The impact was hard, painful, and real. He had fallen onto a solid, polished, and freezing cold surface.
He was on his feet in a fraction of a second, ignoring the pain in his knees, with his black dagger, the Fang of the Fallen Asura, held in reverse grip in his right hand. His vertical Asura pupil activated to the maximum, tinting his peripheral vision blood red, frantically scanning his surroundings looking for experience points, looking for necks to cut, looking for blood to spill.
He wasn't alone in the room. Around him, literally falling from the glass ceiling like ragdolls, landed five other warriors.
Borg (Rank 24 - The Line-Breaker), crashed with his bronze rhinoceros body creaking brutally upon impact, cracking the floor, but suffering no real damage. Voltar (Rank 7 - The Walking Storm), landed on one foot and a knee, violently sputtering arcs of purple lightning out of pure rage and the humiliation of the uncontrollable fall. Goran (Rank 13 - The Bronze Shield), fell heavily, planting his feet and immediately becoming an immovable mountain, his skin taking on the grayish hue of the divine alloy. Ciro (Rank 6 - The Wind Phantom), used his intangibility milliseconds before the crash, landing without making the slightest noise, like a feather, with his two short swords, the [Twins of the Silent Penumbra], already drawn. Ren (Rank 22 - The Wind Hawk Eye), landed rolling, eyes wide open, his viper pupils vibrating erratically as he trembled.
Dante evaluated his surroundings. They were trapped in a perfectly hexagonal room, about a hundred meters wide from corner to corner. Every wall, the floor beneath their boots, and the ceiling above their heads were absolute, immaculate mirrors without a single visible seam.
Guardian Sienna had not grouped them based on elemental affinities, team compatibility, or power ranks. She had grouped them with the sadistic and meticulous purpose of maximizing chaos and self-destruction.
They were Group 1. The absolute frontal destruction group.
With the exception of the paranoid and perceptive Ren, none of the warriors present knew, nor cared, what subtlety, passive defense, or attrition tactics were. Dante wasn't a stealth assassin waiting in the shadows; he was a fanatic of the frontal clash, a hyper-aggressive hunter who needed to sink his dagger straight in and watch his victim's eyes dim for his Asura bloodline to assimilate the Slaughter. Voltar loved catastrophic explosions that wiped out regiments. Borg loved to crush and demolish. Goran was an advancing wall. Ciro was a supersonic straight-line execution.
They were a hammer, and the room was made of glass.
"Boss!" Borg shouted, his thunderous voice bouncing deafeningly off the reflective walls, lifting his massive [Black Iron Bonebreaker Mace] onto his shoulder. "This is a cage! Do we smash the damn walls and open a path?"
"Wait..." Ren whispered. The hyper-vigilant boy was breaking out in a cold sweat. His Wind Viper eyes, capable of detecting the blink of a fly from a kilometer away, were feverishly scanning the mirrors. "There's something extremely wrong here. My senses... are screaming. There are no air currents. There is no exit. The air is stagnant. It's just us in this box. And... there is something else. Something that isn't breathing."
Dante's blue and red interface blinked violently in front of his retina.
[SLAUGHTER SYSTEM: SCANNING CLOSED ENVIRONMENTS]
[Targets Detected:] 6 Entities.
[Individual Threat Level:] ABSOLUTE (Incalculable).
[Murderous Intent Detected:] 0.00%
Dante frowned, squeezing the hilt of his dagger until his knuckles cracked. Zero percent murderous intent? That was biologically and martially impossible. Even a sleeping monk radiated some level of hostility if a weapon was pointed at them. Zero percent meant that whatever was in that room didn't see them as enemies, nor as prey, nor as living beings. It saw them as mathematical equations that needed to be solved and erased from a blackboard.
From the immense mirrored wall directly in front of them, the unthinkable happened. The solid surface of the glass suddenly turned liquid, rippling outward like heavy mercury.
Six figures took a simultaneous step forward, separating themselves from the wall and stepping onto the hexagonal floor.
It was them. The Dark Clones.
They were exact replicas, down to the last pore and scar. But their skin was not tanned or pale flesh; they were made of a black, opaque, light-absorbing crystal. Their eyes had no iris, no pupils, no trace of humanity, fear, or ego; they shone with a cold, inert, and terrifying white light. They carried exact replicas of their very own Heaven and Saint-grade weapons. Their bodies emanated the same density of their respective dragon scales and possessed the exact replica of their crushing Transcendent auras.
Voltar, seeing his dark clone standing silently thirty meters away, let out a loud laugh, charged with arrogance and purple electricity that scorched the floor.
"An illusory mirror fight? By all the gods, what originality from this Guardian!" the storm boy mocked, cracking his neck. "I carry Heavenly Tribulation in my veins. Let's see if a damn glass reflection can withstand the punishment of my lightning, you cheap copy!"
"Voltar, don't do it!" Ren screamed in a hysterical tone, his forked tongue trembling. His atmospheric perception told him that those clones weren't absorbing Qi; they were existing in a state of perfect thermodynamic efficiency. Every cell of his viper body demanded he flee, dig, hide.
But Voltar didn't listen. Voltar was arrogance incarnate, overflowing and explosive power. He had withstood the lightning of God; a clone was nothing.
He launched himself head-on, without preparation, without feints, relying entirely on his brutal linear speed. His body became a blinding purple thunderbolt. His acceleration was terrifying; he broke the sound barrier on the first step, enough to evaporate an Origin Realm expert in a millisecond.
Voltar activated his supreme offensive martial skill: [Atomic Collapse Fist: Indra's Hammer]. He channeled the entire ocean of destructive plasma from his Tribulation bloodline and ruthlessly compressed it into a single point on the knuckles of his right hand. The [Vajra of Judgment: The Zenith Knuckles], his High Heaven Grade weapon, went into overdrive. The six coils of Celestial Gold on the knuckles began to spin at supersonic speeds, emitting a deafening hum that vibrated the air, compressing Voltar's untamable lightning into a small, unstable, and dense sphere of pure black and blue plasma. The air around it bent from the sheer electromagnetic charge. Voltar wasn't going to hit the clone; he was going to inject the force of a cosmic hurricane directly into its chest, collapsing and carbonizing the crystal double from the inside out.
He was heading straight for the enemy's center of mass. It was an impossible attack to dodge at that speed.
Voltar's Dark Clone did not retreat. It did not charge electricity to counter. It did not adopt a massive defensive stance, nor did it activate the Throne Shield. It did not get enraged.
Simply, in the millisecond prior to impact, the Clone took a single diagonal step forward and to the left. A mathematically measured step of exactly forty-three centimeters. Not a millimeter more, not one less. This simple action dodged the core of Voltar's trajectory, who now passed like a runaway comet by its right flank.
The Clone extended its left arm with an insulting fluidity and raised only two fingers: the index and the middle.
There was no brute force in the movement. Voltar, turned into a supersonic plasma projectile, was heading straight past it. But the Clone did not aim for the body, nor the armor, nor Voltar's muscles; it aimed, with the precision of a surgeon operating at the speed of light, directly at the intricate network of his Qi flow.
The Clone's two black crystal fingers gently brushed a specific meridian point, located just below the deltoid of Voltar's shoulder, in the micro-fraction of a second that the youth took to pass in front of it.
The effect of that brush was total, catastrophic, and absolute.
The Clone didn't use the power of lightning; it used Lightning Intent. A pure, profound, and effortless conceptual understanding of the electromagnetic law governing the Tribulation. By touching that single exposed node in the midst of the hyper-aggressive charge, the Clone introduced a minuscule pulse of energy that interrupted the circuit. It literally reversed the polarity of Voltar's own plasma containment core.
[Indra's Hammer], the monstrous compressed energy ready to destroy a city, found no outlet through the fist. It found a barrier, bounced against the blocked node, and returned violently toward its origin.
The explosion did not occur on the outside. It occurred directly inside Voltar's body.
"GAAAAAAAAK!" The scream that escaped Voltar's lips was inhuman, the sound of an animal having its entrails torn out alive.
His own purple Tribulation lightning, charged with millions of volts of heavenly punishment, unable to exit toward the enemy, burst each and every one of his internal organs simultaneously. His hyper-oxygenated lungs fried and carbonized instantly, expelling a cloud of black smoke from his mouth and nostrils. His heart, the biological plasma reactor, burst like a grenade inside his ribcage.
By the pure inertia of his failed dash, Voltar's massive body was thrown through the air like a useless, burnt rag. He crashed brutally against the polished crystal floor forty meters away, bouncing twice and leaving a horrifying and indelible trail of carbonized blood, boiling fluids, and smoking viscera in his wake. His body came to a stop, twisted at an impossible angle. His eyes, previously vibrating with the storm, completely dimmed. The smell of fried human flesh flooded the hexagonal room.
He was dead. Literally and biologically dead.
Dante felt his own Asura heart skip a beat. His breathing stopped. His interface scanned the body on the floor. [Life Signs: Zero.] He died? Did one of the relentless Rank 7s just die like a dog in the first second of combat against a simple reflection?
But before the members of Group 1 could even process the horror and the mourning, a room anomaly activated.
Voltar's horribly burned and deformed corpse did not remain on the floor. It began to glow with a cold, white light, and instantly fragmented into millions of pieces of crystal light that floated toward the ceiling. A second later, a blinding flash appeared in the farthest corner of the hexagonal room.
Voltar materialized again from the light. He fell heavily to his knees against the glass, clutching his chest with both hands, coughing, panting, and sucking in air with agonizing desperation. He was physically intact. His skin wasn't burned. His tunic was impeccable. His heart was beating strongly in his chest.
Death had been erased by the rules of the Infinite Mirror.
But the absolute, naked terror in his eyes was real. The damage to his mind was permanent.
Voltar was crying uncontrollably. Thick tears streamed down his face as he vomited bile and saliva onto the floor. His hands trembled so much that he couldn't make a fist. He had felt death in its purest and most painful form. He had felt and experienced the indescribable agony of his own lungs and heart frying to ash inside his chest. His human brain, his nerve endings, had registered the maximum and absolute agony of organ collapse at 100% realism, without censorship or blocks.
"It's not real! Damn it, it's not real, but it hurts like it is!" Ciro, the Wind Phantom, shouted, stepping back two paces, his twin swords trembling in his hands upon seeing his arrogant comrade reduced to a sobbing, broken child. This wasn't strength training; it was psychological torture designed to destroy the ego!
"IT DOESN'T MATTER IF IT'S A FUCKING ILLUSION OR IF IT'S REAL!" Dante roared, his voice tearing the air.
Fear tried to seize his mind, but his system and his Asura Slaughter instinct took complete control, flooding his brain with black adrenaline and erasing the hesitation. "IT DOESN'T MATTER IF WE RESURRECT A THOUSAND TIMES! KILL THEM! KILL THEM ALL NOW!"
Rank 1's war cry broke the paralysis of terror. Group 1, composed of the least tactical and most aggressive minds in Samael's entire empire, attacked en masse like a pack of rabid, cornered wolves, blindly hurling themselves at their respective clones.
It was, without a doubt, the worst and most humiliating mistake of all their brief lives. Brute force, blind courage, and overwhelming power were about to be dissected by absolute technique.
Borg, the bronze giant, let out a roar that vibrated the mirrors. He hoisted his massive [Black Iron Bonebreaker Mace], an iron block from the deep the size of a log that weighed tons. He activated his ultimate siege skill: [Charge of the Horizon's End: The Great Collapse].
All the oppressive bronze Qi in his body projected a meter in front of him, forming the silhouette of an immense spectral metal battering ram. Borg ran, his mass increasing with every step he took per the laws of his bloodline. He was going to ram into his Clone and, by pure extension, use his density to crush the unbreakable glass wall of the labyrinth to dust. It was an attack that ignored friction; once Borg started running, his accumulated inertia made him unstoppable. A humanoid bronze meteor.
His black crystal Dark Clone, wielding an identical mace, did not attempt to stop the frontal attack. It was mathematically impossible to stop that inertia without being pulverized. The Clone did not resort to strength; it resorted to the most ancient principles of fluid deflection and martial Aikido.
Barely two meters from impact, the Clone dropped its own heavy mace, letting it fall to the floor with a dull thud. In a fluid, elegant movement devoid of any muscular tension, the Clone dropped to one knee, leaning its torso back, and slid across the polished floor directly beneath Borg's immense legs, like water slipping beneath a falling rock.
Borg, blind from his own massive charge, passed right over the Clone. His immense, infinite mass and unstoppable inertia were now his worst enemy: he couldn't brake.
The Clone, still sliding across the floor behind Borg, raised its right arm. It did not charge a massive attack. It did not use a spectacular skill. It simply clenched its fist, extended the knuckle of the middle finger, and imbued it with the purified essence of Crushing Intent.
Using the monstrous speed that Borg himself carried in his dash to add force to the static impact, the Clone delivered a singular, precise, and sharp knuckle strike, exactly at the base of the giant's spine, in the tiny gap between the plates of the thick organic bronze scales on his back.
The knuckle strike injected the inertial shockwave not outward, but inward into the giant's bone structure.
CRAAAAAC!
The sound was deafening, like the trunk of a millennial tree snapping in half.
The internal pressure wave, magnified by the cosmic weight Borg had accumulated for his attack, traveled up his spine from bottom to top. Borg's resilient bronze spinal cord turned to dust. His vertebrae exploded into internal splinters under the pressure of the calculated blow.
The colossus instantly lost motor control of his entire body. His charge veered off. Borg fell face-first against the crystal floor, dragging and sliding from the inertia for twenty meters, his body paralyzed from the neck down, being flayed by the friction. His mace slipped from his dead hands and rolled away.
Borg tried to scream, but the nerve damage was so absolute that his lungs collapsed. He lay there, a useless bronze giant, moaning pathetically on the floor as he slowly drowned in the warm blood filling his throat, feeling asphyxiation and paralysis claim him. Before he could finish drowning, his body burst into white light and reappeared in the corner next to Voltar, vomiting hysterically and touching his lower back with pure terror, feeling the ghosts of crushed bone. Second death recorded in the room.
Ciro, witnessing the brutal efficiency of the clones, decided to leave nothing to chance. He was the Wind Phantom. He was supreme speed. No one could kill him if they couldn't touch him or hear him.
He activated the [Cloud Walker Boots], instantly eliminating his body's aerodynamic drag, and drew the [Twins of the Silent Penumbra]. He used his ultimate assassination technique: [Zero Wind Thrust: The Apex Whisper].
Ciro disappeared from the visual plane. He created a tunnel of absolute vacuum in front of him. With no air to stop him, his body and his swords reached his Clone the very instant his brain made the conscious decision to attack. He exceeded the speed of sound by an overwhelming margin; the thrust was aimed to decapitate the crystal double before the sound of the drawing could even propagate through the room. It was a theoretically undodgeable technique.
But Martial Intent does not rely on sight, nor sound. It relies on inevitability.
The fundamental and lethal weakness of the [Apex Whisper] and the absolute vacuum was zero friction. Once Ciro traced the hyper-sonic attack line and launched himself forward, the total lack of atmospheric friction meant that it was physically impossible for him to brake, rectify his course, or change direction midway. He was a bullet fired in a vacuum tube; his trajectory was predictable from the millisecond it began.
Ciro's Dark Clone didn't need to be faster. It only needed to know exactly where the attack was going to end. And it knew. It knew his own technique to mathematical perfection.
A microsecond before Ciro's inaudible swords cut its neck, the Clone activated its own passive defensive skill: the [Intangible Breeze Body]. But it didn't do it completely; it did it with monstrous, partial anatomical control. The Clone only turned the area of its neck and upper torso intangible.
Ciro's swords, bearers of supersonic death, cleanly sliced through the Clone's spectral neck, passing harmlessly through the wind without encountering resistance or inflicting damage. Ciro, carried by his hypersonic speed, physically passed through the Clone's position.
In that exact millisecond, while Ciro was "phased" passing through the Clone, the crystal double suddenly and physically materialized its right hand. But it didn't materialize it in the open air; it materialized it directly and in a solid state inside Ciro's hollow chest cavity.
Ciro stopped dead behind his Clone, the inertia breaking unnaturally. He looked down.
The Clone's black crystal hand had pierced his back and protruded from the front of his chest, firmly holding his beating, human heart between its cold fingers. The Clone clenched its fist. Ciro's heart burst like a ripe tomato.
The Wind Phantom fell to his knees, coughing emerald blood. He looked in disbelief at the empty hole in his chest, blood gushing out, before collapsing dead onto his own puddle. Third death.
Dante, with his Asura eye injected with blood and fury, saw Ciro fall. His mind was a cauldron of black adrenaline. His system was operating at maximum capacity.
[SLAUGHTER SYSTEM: MAXIMUM ATTACK ROUTE CALCULATED]
[Vital Point Identified: Neck / C3 Vertebra]
[Execution Probability by Existential Fissure: 99.9%]
Dante activated the [Void Slash: Zero Code Execution]. His body flickered, using the dark Qi of Slaughter to perform a short but devastating movement leap. He charged against his own Dark Clone, his Fang of the Fallen Asura glowing with a black light designed to erase the lifeline of anything it touched. He slashed with a savage brutality and a linear force that would have been enough to cleanly decapitate a real imperial dragon. He went straight for the red fissure his system drew on the double's neck.
But Dante's Dark Clone did not operate under an algorithmic System. It didn't see "health bars" or "weak points" on a blue screen. The Clone possessed something that Rank 1, trapped in his reliance on the cybernetic assist system, still did not understand or master in the slightest: Absolute Dagger Intent.
The pristine, naked, and perfect art of killing without effort and without wasted movement.
Dante's Clone did not attempt to dodge the super-luminal attack. It did not retreat. It did not use [Existence Dissipation] to become a shadow. It simply brought forward its own black crystal dagger to intercept the blow.
But the Clone did not intercept the cutting edge of Dante's dagger, which would have resulted in a clash of brute forces where the Asura Qi would have prevailed. Instead, with a flick of the wrist so sublime, smooth, and mathematically perfect that it seemed like a dance, the Clone struck with millimeter precision the flat, lateral side of Dante's dagger blade in mid-attack.
By striking the side of the weapon and not the edge, the Clone deflected all the herculean force and inertia of Dante's charge to the side with minimal effort. Dante, whose attack carried 100% of his weight and energy committing forward, lost his balance grotesquely. His guard was thrown wide open, his arm extended in a failed attack that sliced empty air.
The Clone, having unbalanced the original, slipped smoothly inside Dante's open guard, invading his personal space, chest to chest.
And then, with a slowness that to Dante seemed profoundly insulting, demeaning, and sadistic, the Clone raised its arm and plunged the black crystal dagger directly into the front of his neck, just below the Adam's apple.
It wasn't a quick, merciful slash. The Clone pushed the cold steel through the flesh, piercing the trachea with a precision calculated not to immediately sever the main veins, and then, looking Dante straight in his asymmetrical eye with its sockets of inert light, the Clone twisted the dagger 180 degrees inside the open wound.
Dante felt the freezing metal tearing the inside of his throat. His eyes bulged from the piercing, repulsive pain. Hot, suffocating blood quickly filled his mouth and airways. He desperately tried to breathe, pulling air into his lungs, but only managed to gurgle his own thick blood, drowning from the inside. The pain was so immensely sharp, so disgustingly visceral and real, that his system interface collapsed into red static before his human vision went dark.
Dante fell heavily to his knees, uselessly grabbing his Clone's arms. The crystal double showed no hatred on its face, no satisfaction of triumph, no slaughterous fury; it only showed a cold and absolute technical perfection, the expression of a master disappointed by a pathetic student. Rank 1, the feared Asura, died humiliated, convulsively drowning in his own blood on the cold floor. Fourth death.
CRASH!
Dante reappeared instantly in the corner of the room, next to the trembling bodies of Borg, Voltar, and Ciro. He was clutching his intact throat with both hands, coughing and arching violently, spitting large amounts of phantom blood that disappeared, evaporating before even staining his comrades' boots. He was drenched in cold sweat, trembling uncontrollably like a leaf in a storm. His mind was broken. He, the Assassin Phantom, the boy who had embraced massacre and blocked out pain with his system, was experiencing the primal terror of slow asphyxiation.
In the center of the room, Goran, the Bronze Shield, was the last active combatant to fall. True to his doctrine, he planted his feet, fused his mass with the floor, and raised his unbreakable shield, ready to absorb any impact and defend his position until the end of time.
His Dark Clone didn't even run. It walked slowly toward him, as if strolling through a park. With Absolute Piercing Intent shining at the tip of its crystal weapon, the Clone scanned Goran's immense and "impenetrable" defensive stance, and with a single, simple thrust, found and penetrated the only micro-space of geometric weakness between the top edge of the shield and the giant's armor pauldron. The pike of black light pierced cleanly through the helmet's visor and lodged deep into Goran's skull. The colossus fell like a felled tree, dead before hitting the floor.
In less than thirty insufferable and humiliating seconds, the six members of the feared Group 1, the absolute spearhead and proud destructive vanguard of the Morningstar Clan, had been systematically killed, dismantled, and humiliated. And their crystal copies hadn't even begun to sweat; they hadn't spent more than one percent of their Qi reserves.
They had been bested not by strength, but by pure, perfect, and irrefutable technique.
Three spatial dimensions away, separated from the temporal chaos of the torture rooms, in the absolute and peaceful center of the Mirror Labyrinth, Guardian Sienna was comfortably seated in a lotus position on a cushioned chair, floating serenely above a white marble platform.
The woman with mirror eyes and ghostly beauty wore her immaculate silk gi. Around her, orbiting in the empty air, hundreds of immense holographic mirror screens showed in real-time the massacre and despair of the four groups in their respective hexagonal rooms, being dismantled systematically and mercilessly.
On one of the screens, Sienna observed the pitiful performance of Group 2. Cassius, the Jade Lancer, was desperately trying to use his Ironwood roots to heal and stabilize his comrades' mortal wounds; but beside him, the uncontrollable entropy of Eira's ice was freezing his vital vines until they became brittle and dead, while Jareth's poisonous miasma melted the defenses that Cassius himself tried to raise. Their incompatible elemental powers and lack of coordination were killing them faster than the clones themselves.
On another screen, she watched the pathetic spectacle of Group 3. The dark scholar Darius, the authoritative siren Vania, and the sadistic puppeteer Orion were discovering in the worst and most painful way possible that their refined tricks of mental illusion, sonic domination, and psychological manipulation of soul threads were absolutely and comically useless. Their crystal Clones had no egos to break, no organic minds to deceive, no fear to devour. Stripped of their mental tricks, the three support sorcerers were being forced into close physical combat against ruthless killing machines, receiving devastating physical beatings, their bones broken and their faces disfigured by blows.
On the top screen, she watched the invincible and arrogant Paradox Twins, Aion and Aia, in Group 4. The masters of the Singularity were being systematically torn apart. The reason was shameful: the overwhelming and uncontrolled emanation of volcanic heat from the giant Korg (Iron Skin), placed in their same group, was violently altering the local environment, modifying the atmospheric variables, and ruining the millimeter precision of Aia's light refraction calculations and Aion's gravitational control. Their black holes failed and exploded prematurely, taking chunks of their own bodies with them.
Sienna observed the repeated deaths and the silenced screams on the screens, and with an imperturbable calm, raised a fine white porcelain cup to her lips and took a slow, elegant sip of hot green tea. The soft steam of the tea ironically contrasted with the blood and viscera spilled in the images.
Her pale, inexpressive face showed no maternal pity, nor did it reflect the classic sadism of the cultivation world's executioners. Sienna was not a killer; she was, in its purest conception, a martial master observing the poor performance of preschool students who still didn't know how to properly hold a pencil.
"They barely have a single, measly death on their records," Sienna murmured to the serene air, lowering the cup. "And they stupidly believe that by dying just once they will understand their mistake and be able to correct it. What immense, ignorant arrogance mortals have."
She gently stroked the porcelain edge of her cup with her bare thumb.
"The true Enlightenment granted by the Mirror is not a prize given away at the first frustration. I will not bestow the blessing upon them, I will not allow their brains to process the advancement of their Martial Intents, until their souls break, splinter, and rebuild for the fourth, fifth, or twentieth time. Until the unspeakable pain of being dismembered and killed is so common and familiar that, out of sheer boredom, they stop fearing and screaming, and finally begin to analyze coldly and logically why they die with every thrust."
Sienna looked up. Her silver eyes, devoid of pupils, locked onto the gigantic runic hourglass floating immovably above her head. The fine golden sand fell at a rhythm that defied outside time.
"One absolute month of ceaseless physical suffering, of repeated deaths in this labyrinth, will be the exact equivalent to an uninterrupted year of solitary meditation for their brains to understand and forge the Dao and the Intent of their weapons," the Guardian decreed to herself. "And they will have to endure it deeply and completely alone. I am only the mirror that shows them their pathetic mistakes."
Sienna let out a very slight sigh, recalling her own massive promise to Patriarch Samael in the throne room.
"Twenty-four arrogant monsters today... and I have been informed that, in a few months, the twenty-one Imperial veterans will also fall into this web of mirrors, with the difficulty level multiplied by three. Forty-five bloodthirsty demons to forge and tame through humiliation and blood. The Patriarch has, indeed, given me an extremely exhausting task."
Back in the claustrophobic and glowing hexagonal room of Group 1, reality was much less philosophical and much more visceral.
Dante, his neck still throbbing from the ghost of the steel tearing his trachea, slowly stood up, leaning heavily on his black dagger as if it were a cane. His entire body trembled spasmodically from the immense shock of the psychological trauma. His mind, mechanically conditioned by the System for years to seek quick "Slaughter Points" and numerical weaknesses, was collapsing under the weight of a paradigm where stats didn't matter against concept and perfect technique.
Thirty meters away, his clone and the other five crystal doubles were back in their rigid starting position, standing, immovable, lowering their weapons, patiently waiting for the next attack with a passivity that bordered on divine mockery.
Dante looked around. The panorama was bleak.
Voltar, the lightning boy, was curled up on the floor, sobbing in a thick silence, clutching his chest where his heart had burst. Borg, the immense bronze colossus who thought himself a god of destruction, was looking at his own trembling hands and desperately feeling the base of his spine over and over again, as if fearing his back would break again at the slightest movement. Ciro was on his knees, paralyzed, touching the spot on his chest where the ghost of the enemy hand had ripped out his heart. Goran simply stared into the void, unable to process that his impenetrable defense had lasted a second.
"Get up," Dante growled.
His voice sounded harsh, raspy, and unnatural, distorted by the persistent and terrifying somatic memory of the blade twisting inside his throat. It was a pitiful sound, but loaded with the undeniable authority of Rank 1.
"We can't beat them!" Ren suddenly screamed, hyperventilating wildly, backing up until his spine hit the freezing mirror of the room's wall. "My senses... they are useless! They are perfect! They don't breathe, they don't hesitate, they don't make the slightest miscalculation! If we attack, we die!"
"I said get up, damn it!" Dante roared, his voice breaking into a howl of fury, and his oppressive Asura aura erupted violently, dyeing the room's crystal walls a sickly blood red. "We die, yes! So what? Our bodies resurrect in this corner! If death in here is a fucking temporary illusion, then we don't have the remotest human excuse not to get up and try again until the last drop of our fucking sanity bleeds dry!"
Dante squeezed the hilt of his dagger until the wood creaked under his white knuckles.
He had no idea how to defeat an opponent who wielded lethal, perfect Dagger Intent. He didn't know how his flawed, binary [Slaughter System] could process or decode something that had no stats to read, but operated with pure, sublime philosophical concepts and martial flows impossible to parameterize. He felt blind, useless, like a child throwing punches at the air in front of a grandmaster.
But if he had learned anything since being picked up by Samael Morningstar, it was that the Path of Slaughter did not retreat in the face of fear. The Path of Slaughter only advanced over corpses, even if those corpses were his own on repeated occasions.
Dante raised his bloodied dagger and stared fixedly at the black crystal copy that had slaughtered him.
The six Dark Clones, detecting the renewed hostility of their targets, raised their immaculate weapons in unison, assuming perfect, economical, and seamless combat stances.
The second round of the endless hell had just begun. And Sienna's relentless hourglass barely marked the first ten minutes of the start of the longest, bloodiest, and most tortuous year of their immortal existences.