Chapter 179: The Blind Abyss and the Reverse Hunt (Part 2)
The violent restructuring of the Secret Realm didn't push them; it swallowed and spat them out into a corner of hell where gravity had no fixed axis.
Dante, Ren, Joren, Elara, and Mira fell through a torn spatial rift, their bodies spinning in the void. Around them, absolute nothingness stretched in all directions, punctuated only by massive architectural debris—pieces of shattered palaces, inverted towers, and decapitated statues—floating lazily in the darkness like asteroids in a belt of dead rocks.
"Contact!" shouted Ren, twisting in the air with the agility of a feline. His boots found the surface of an obsidian slab the size of a battlefield levitating in the abyss.
One after another, the five assassins of the Morningstar Clan landed on the floating platform. There were no crashing sounds; their stealth movement techniques absorbed the impact, dissipating the kinetic force into the air. They were Squad 2. The team purely designed for infiltration, assassination, and psychological warfare.
Dante slowly stood up, his dark dagger already resting in his right hand. His gray, cold, and calculating eyes scanned the surroundings.
"Keep a tight formation," Dante ordered through the [Soul Nexus], his mental voice lacking any inflection of panic. "Space is broken. If you fall off the edge of this slab, you could fall for a century before hitting bottom."
Joren twitched his pointed ears, tuning his hearing to catch any reverberation on the nearby floating rocks. Elara and Mira positioned themselves back-to-back, their weapons ready. Ren closed his eyes, allowing the air around him to caress his skin, calibrating the wind flows in the abyss.
The silence was heavy, oppressive. It felt like a temporary refuge, a respite the labyrinth had mistakenly granted them.
It was a lethal illusion.
Mira took a step toward the center of the slab to get a better viewing angle. Her boot stepped on a small, amorphous black stain that looked like a natural imperfection in the obsidian stone.
There was no sound, no Qi fluctuation. But the instant Mira's sole touched the stain, the ambient light seemed to shrink.
"Mira, duck," Ren murmured. It wasn't a warning born of sight, but of his Precognition. His mind had seen the future half a second before it happened.
Mira dropped to her knees out of pure survival instinct. A millisecond later, something sharp and freezing sliced the air exactly where her throat had been. A lock of her amethyst hair fell to the ground.
The five geniuses scattered in a burst of speed, adopting combat stances, searching for the invisible attacker. There was no one. There were no assassins hidden in the walls, no beasts flying above them.
Then, Joren let out a grunt of pain, grabbing his left arm. A deep, clean slash had just appeared on his bicep, bleeding profusely, even though no one was within ten meters of him.
Dante looked down, his Gray Interface Pupils spinning frantically. And he saw it.
On the smooth surface of the floating slab, the shadows cast by the bodies of the five youths were moving on their own. Joren's shadow held a dark dagger and had just made a slashing motion toward the shadow's own arm.
"They aren't attacking our bodies," Dante transmitted through the Nexus, realization freezing his thoughts. "They are attacking our reflections on the ground. It's a conceptual attack!"
They had awakened The Shadow of the Deceased King.
The remnant will of the Primordial Era did not have a physical three-dimensional form. It was a two-dimensional parasite, a flat stain slithering across the stone. By connecting with the invaders' shadows, the monster took control of them, bringing them to life and forcing them to strangle and cut their own masters. If the beast's shadow decapitated Dante's shadow, Dante's real head would fall.
Elara leaped into the air, trying to disconnect her shadow from the ground, but the darkness at her feet stretched unnaturally, like a viscous glue, chasing her up the wall of a shattered statue and smashing her silhouette against the rock. Elara coughed up blood as the impact on her shadow was transferred directly to her internal organs.
"We are being used against ourselves!" hissed Mira, throwing poisoned needles at the ground. The needles bounced harmlessly off the obsidian stone. Poison couldn't kill something with no cellular mass.
Dante gritted his teeth, channeling the Qi of his Slaughter Dragon Bloodline into his legs, preparing to leap and escape the slab.
But the Demonic Saint King controlling the labyrinth hadn't thrown them into that corner to give them a quick death. He wanted to plunge them into terror.
Before Dante could jump, the sound of thousands of wings beating like a hurricane of old leather echoed in the abyss. From the cracks in the floating debris surrounding their platform, a black tide emerged. They were small birds, no larger than common crows, but their feathers didn't reflect light; they devoured it. Their empty eye sockets oozed a grayish mist. They were the Crows of Perpetual Twilight.
The flock, made up of tens of thousands of undead birds, didn't immediately swoop down to peck their flesh. Instead, they began flying in concentric circles around the obsidian platform, cawing in unison.
The cawing wasn't loud, but it activated the Primordial Law of the [Eclipse of the Sea of Consciousness].
In a single heartbeat, the world ceased to exist for Squad 2.
The meager light illuminating the obsidian stone was instantly snuffed out, plunging them into a darkness so absolute and dense it felt liquid. But the horror didn't stop there. Dante tried to expand his spiritual perception, the basic Qi radar every Saint-level cultivator possessed to "see" without using their eyes.
He felt nothing. His Spiritual Sea was crushed, caged inside his own skull. They were blind. They were deaf to energy. The flow of their own Qi became a distant, unreachable murmur. It was a total sensory void, leaving them like mortals abandoned in deep space.
Vertigo struck Elara, forcing her to her knees in the darkness, completely vulnerable. And in that total darkness, The Shadow of the Deceased King continued its carnage. Ren felt a tearing pain in his right leg; his shadow, invisible in the gloom, had just been stabbed.
Any other group would have collapsed mentally. But the Soul Nexus flared in their minds like a divine beacon in the middle of a black storm.
"Calm down!" Ren's voice cracked through the telepathic link, cutting through his comrades' hyperventilation. "Light and Qi are blocked, but the wind is still here. The air is my domain. I will be your eyes. Listen to my voice!"
Ren closed his useless eyes. His Wind Viper Dragon Bloodline awakened and his consciousness expanded, merging with the air currents within a one-kilometer radius. The air became his own skin. Every flap of the crows' wings, every microscopic shift of the two-dimensional stain on the ground, reverberated in his mind.
"Elara, turn to your left and block at neck height. Your shadow is raising an arm," Ren ordered with inhuman speed.
Elara obeyed blindly. In her hands, she materialized the [Phantom Fangs]. The daggers, forged in Lament Steel, pierced the air in their intangibility phase before she solidly "anchored" them in reality just to her front left. She didn't feel a metallic impact, but the action of her physical body forced her shadow to perform the same defensive movement, blocking the lethal conceptual attack on her neck.
"Mira, jump back, three meters," Ren continued transmitting. "Joren, they're surrounding us. The crows are swooping down to attack our souls. Clear the air!"
Cloaked in absolute darkness, Joren smiled. His Qi perception was nullified, but his Zephyr Dragon Ears scanned the black dome, acoustically mapping every bird in the air through the friction of their wings.
It was his turn. From his belt, he drew the [Absorbent Void Daggers]. The two blades, which looked like cutouts in reality with no shine or reflection, began sucking matter toward their center with a sinister hiss. Joren clashed the hilts together, activating the [Banshee's Scream Stone] embedded in the pommel.
An infrasound wave swept the platform. The thousands of crows heard nothing, but the frequency directly attacked their senses of orientation, plunging them into a catastrophic vertigo that made them lose their balance mid-flight. Immediately, the void of the daggers created a zone of absolute silence that sucked away the air resistance around them.
In the midst of that perfect void, Joren opened his mouth and unleashed his Banshee Vocal Cords. The critical-frequency sonic pulse—inaudible to the human ear but devastating to biological matter—traveled through the dead zone and slammed into the disoriented flock. The sound of thousands of glass panes shattering in unison filled the abyss. A rain of pulverized bones and black feathers fell on the platform. In a single second, Joren had disintegrated nearly a thousand crows using his Mute Void Fall combo, creating a brief breach in the suffocating pressure of the eclipse.
But the flock was immense, and the crows quickly reorganized their formation, closing the gap.
"Leave the birds to me," Dante whispered through the Nexus, his tone icy and devoid of humanity. "Ren, keep the girls safe from the shadow on the ground. Joren, support them. I'm going to clear the sky."
Dante stood up. His Asura Eye didn't rely on light. In total blindness, his world was a black tapestry crossed by thousands of glowing red dots and lines, revealing the conceptual weakness of every enemy.
Dante bent his knees and leaped into the blind sky.
His dark dagger moved like a maddened brush. He sliced the void. Every time his blade crossed a floating red line, a Twilight Crow was split in two, its soul instantly eradicated. Dante wasn't crashing into them; the crows were crashing into the inertia of their predestined deaths.
It was here that the true terror of the Slaughter Dragon awakened.
With the first slain crow, Dante's internal System registered the fresh kill, triggering the Soul Counter Accumulation.
1 Crow. 200 Slaughter Points.
5 Crows. 1000 Slaughter Points.
Dante spun in the air, stepping on the falling bodies of the birds to propel himself higher.
50 Crows. 10,000 Slaughter Points.
As the counter climbed dizzily, Dante's body began to emit a crimson and black aura. It wasn't light; it was the physical weight of harvested souls. His aura grew dense and viscous, and the gravity around him began crushing the crows before they even touched him.
150 Crows. 30,000 Slaughter Points.
The True Soul Damage attribute imbued his dagger. Now, he didn't even need to accurately cut the lines. A mere brush of his killing intent caused the birds to evaporate. Dante had become an aerial meat grinder, farming the undead army to grow exponentially stronger with every passing second.
However, on the ground, the war of attrition was taking a heavy toll.
Ren was sweating profusely, his mind pushed to the limit processing the air currents. Joren continued sucking up the strafing attacks with his Void Daggers, but The Shadow of the Deceased King was relentless. Elara was bleeding from superficial cuts, and Mira was panting from the exertion.
"We can't keep dodging," Ren transmitted. "It moves in two dimensions; it doesn't have a core Joren can shatter. If we don't find its anchor point, we'll die from a thousand cuts."
"It has to have a real body," Elara reasoned, stifling a groan. "Every shadow needs a physical object to project it. A stone, a piece of bone... something on this slab is its conduit."
"Find it," Mira grunted. "I'll slow it down."
Despite the darkness, Mira pushed her bloodline to the max. She exhaled her [Amethyst Mist]. An odorless gas poured from her pores, glowing with a ghostly purple light, expanding a Zone of Lethargy. When The Shadow of the Deceased King slithered across the stone and entered the mist, the sedative effect attacked the will animating it. Its movements grew heavy and sluggish, as if swimming in molasses.
"It's contained. Now, Elara," Mira ordered, spitting a thread of blood.
Elara closed her human eyes and activated her [Silver-Gray Dragon Eyes]. Her vision shifted to a Thermal and Vibrational Spectrum map. Blindness no longer mattered. She saw the warm bodies of her comrades and scanned the immense obsidian slab, filtering out the cold rocks and spilled blood.
And then, near the northern edge, she detected a discordant heartbeat.
"Got it!" Elara yelled through the Nexus. "Fifteen meters north! A piece of charred bone embedded in the obsidian! That's the anchor!"
Elara dashed forward, but The Shadow of the Deceased King sensed its weakness had been discovered. Ignoring the lethargy, it slithered across the ground at an unnatural speed and rose in front of the bone like a two-dimensional wall of cutting darkness. If Elara touched it, her soul would be split in two.
"Joren!" Ren shouted.
"I'm too far away, Elara is in my sonic impact radius!" Joren replied, frustrated.
From the sky, a voice sounding like thunder in hell descended.
"Step aside."
Dante, massacring crows in the vault above, had reached the critical point. His Soul Counter surpassed one hundred thousand slaughter points. Time around him seemed to stop as a violent crimson red notification flooded his retina.
[DING! Skill unlocked.]
[Evolving Void Slash -> Creating new skill. Requirements met: 100,000 harvested souls.]
[Execute evolution? YES / NO]
Dante was briefly stunned in mid-air, but he knew the traditional Void Slash couldn't annihilate a Conceptual Law.
Yes.
Dante plummeted like a meteor of absolute shadow. The one hundred thousand freshly massacred souls materialized as a veil of dark specters that were absorbed by the edge of his dagger. The weapon ceased to be made of metal; it became necrotic plasma that stole photons from the air.
Dante didn't attack the two-dimensional shadow. His Asura Eyes locked onto the tiny death line connecting the dark wall to the small charred bone. He landed with a force that caved the obsidian slab into a concave crater and unleashed his new technique.
[Asura Art: Anchor Rupture of the One Hundred Thousand Souls]
Dante swung his dagger. There was no thunder, no golden explosion. Only absolute silence as the necrotic blade severed the death line.
The rupture was instantaneous. Space around the charred bone "pixelated" into lines of gray static. The immense two-dimensional wall of darkness stopped dead, let out a mute sonic scream, and cracked like an old mirror. Losing its right to manifest, the monster imploded, turning into particles of withered Qi that dissipated into nothingness. The Shadow of the Deceased King had been erased from existence.
Squad 2 fell to their knees, panting, but alive. Dante slowly stood up in the center of the crater.
"Joren. Clear the ceiling," Dante ordered, sheathing his dagger as the System updated his markers.
Joren smiled, baring his fangs. He filled his lungs and released the entirety of his dragon larynx in a single supersonic pulse directed at the vault. The acoustic wave swept the sky like an invisible scythe. The remaining crows burst in a chain reaction, triggering a grim black snowfall of feathers and bone dust that lasted a full minute.
With the death of the last bird, the Eclipse of the Sea of Consciousness broke.
The faint reddish light from the distant abysses once again illuminated the platform. The sense of Qi returned to their meridians. Ren blinked, adjusting to the light. Joren fell backward, coughing blood, but chuckling under his breath. Elara and Mira leaned on each other, healing their wounds with basic salves.
The telepathic connection was fully restored without interference. Kael Morningstar's voice echoed through the Nexus.
"Squad 2, confirm status."
Dante wiped a drop of blood from his cheek. His mental voice replied, resonating with the cold calm of an unsatisfied monster.
"Threats eradicated, Commander. The sky is clear and the shadows are dead. Send the next coordinates. We're hungry."