Chapter 179: The Labyrinth of Reflections and the Scar of the World (Part 7)
The fall was a direct descent into the jaws of delirium. When Squad 8 was spat out by the violent spatial anomaly, they didn't find an open battlefield, nor an oppressive cavern of flesh or stone. They landed with agility on a surface of polished glass, the impact of their boots resonating with a metallic, sharp, and infinite echo.
Eris, Bren, Elian, Tamsin, and Rowan immediately stood up, forming a perfect defensive star, covering all blind spots.
The place was a psychological aberration designed to break the mind. They were trapped in the center of an immense labyrinth composed entirely of rusted mirrors twenty meters high. The glasses were not clean; they were disgustingly stained with what appeared to be dried blood and patinas of an unfathomable time. But the truly disturbing thing was not the claustrophobic architecture, but the reflections that inhabited the dead silver.
When Eris instinctively looked to her left, the enormous mirror did not return the image of the fierce and indomitable warrior of Ruin. It returned an emaciated version of herself, on her knees, with empty, dead eyes, prostrated over an immense puddle of familiar blood, holding a broken crown between her trembling hands. Bren, looking out of the corner of his eye, saw himself with his face disfigured by terror, crushed under tons of obsidian rubble, clawing at the stone, uselessly begging for air. Elian saw his own body completely dehydrated, turned into a fragile mummy of abyssal salt scattered by the wind.
The mirrors did not show material reality. They showed grotesque and cruel distortions, the worst subconscious fears of each warrior projected in horrifying high definition, creating an environment of psychological oppression so dense and toxic that it made the simple act of breathing difficult.
"Do not look at the glasses," Eris ordered sharply, violently averting her gaze from her own withered reflection. Her voice was loaded with an iron authority that cut through the fog of panic. "It's a mental warfare matrix. Keep your eyes fixed forward and Qi circulating through your meridians."
They began to advance slowly through the narrow, suffocating corridor of mirrors, their senses on edge. The sound of their own footsteps crunched on the glass floor like breaking bones.
Suddenly, the surface of the largest, most rusted mirror to their right began to ripple, losing its solidity as if it were a puddle of stagnant water.
There was no shatter or broken glass, but a wet, viscous sound. From the flat surface of the mirror emerged a colossal giant. It wore heavy armor corroded by millennia of entropy, and in its massive hands, it wielded a battle axe the size of a house.
Eris and Bren, being the natural vanguard due to their brute strength, positioned themselves at the front like a wall, raising their heavy weapons to intercept the imminent attack. But upon crossing gazes with the face of the emerging giant, both froze dead in their tracks.
The monster had no fixed face. Its face was a horrifying mass of boiling flesh that changed every second, showing the agonizing faces of the thousands of victims it had murdered and assimilated in the Primordial Era. However, upon making direct eye contact with the two Morningstar geniuses, the monster's twisted Law activated, adapting like a parasite to their exposed minds.
For Eris, the mass of flesh ceased to exist. The giant's face sharply transformed into the figures of Violeta and Samael. The illusions were so perfect they breathed. Samael, the Patriarch, the man to whom she owed her life and absolute loyalty, looked down on her with an expression of contempt and disappointment so profound that it tore her soul in two. Violeta, standing beside him, slowly shook her head, whispering with her own voice how useless, pathetic, and weak the bearer of Ruin truly was.
The emotional impact was a devastating blow straight to the core of her being. Eris, the indomitable Berserker who feared no physical death, felt her knees give way under the weight of the illusory betrayal. Her heavy halberd trembled in her hands, on the verge of falling.
Beside her, Bren experienced his own personal hell. The giant's face showed him his most primal terror, a childhood trauma rooted in total helplessness. He felt the very earth he dominated betraying him, burying him alive in a stone coffin, the absolute darkness crushing his lungs as he screamed until his throat tore without anyone hearing him.
Both warriors were petrified. Their minds were trapped in a closed loop of terror and failure. They were unable to raise their weapons, unable to channel a single spark of their Qi, completely defenseless and given away as the giant raised its colossal axe, preparing to split them in two.
The immense edge of rusted steel descended, splitting the air of the labyrinth with a lethal whistle.
But Rowan was impeccably covering the flank. Like the wind itself that he governed, his mind was free, ungraspable, and unanchored to the solid ground of traumas or the past. Seeing that his stoic vanguard comrades didn't move a millimeter and that the axe was going to cleanly decapitate them, Rowan didn't hesitate.
He spun on his heels and unleashed a localized hurricane of brute force. The Zephyr gust was not directed at the invulnerable monster, but straight at Eris and Bren's backs. The compressed wind hit them like an invisible battering ram, pushing them violently and throwing them across the glass floor just out of the weapon's lethal trajectory.
The colossal axe smashed into the floor right where they had been standing a millisecond before, creating a tremendous shockwave that made the entire labyrinth of mirrors vibrate and grind.
"Do not look at its damn face!" Rowan yelled through the Soul Nexus, his voice acting like an icy blade cutting through the fog of terror in his comrades' minds. "It's a purely spiritual and visual attack! If you look at it, it paralyzes you with your own memories! Close your eyes!"
Eris and Bren, barely emerging from the illusory loop after the painful impact against the floor, didn't think twice. They squeezed their eyelids shut tight. Tamsin and Elian, understanding the threat, did the same.
The entire squad plunged into voluntary blindness. In a labyrinth of infinite mirrors where vision was the enemy's ultimate weapon, absolute darkness was their only reliable shield.
"We fight blind," Eris transmitted through the Nexus, her voice trembling slightly from the dark remnants of Samael's illusion, but quickly recovering her homicidal ferocity. "Elian, Rowan... be our eyes."
Elian, the Abyssal Asphyxiator, extended both hands in the gloom of his closed eyelids. From the wide sleeves of his tunic sprouted torrents of heavy water that quickly spread across the smooth glass floor of the labyrinth, creating strategic, thin puddles covering the area.
"The heavy water is directly connected to my neural perception," Elian murmured telepathically, his mind processing the information like a marine acoustic radar. "I can precisely feel the vibrations of its heavy footsteps in the puddles. It is exactly ten meters to the right, approaching fast."
Rowan, for his part, silently expanded his control of the wind through the area. "The displaced air currents tell me exactly where its mass is and how it moves. It's raising the axe at a forty-five-degree angle for a cross slash. Eris, side step to the left. Now!"
The pitched battle transformed into a macabre, lethal, and perfectly synchronized game of cat and mouse.
For twenty agonizing minutes, Squad 8 dodged, rolled, and blocked blindly, entrusting their lives entirely to the precise sensory readings of water and wind from their support comrades. The giant launched devastating, blind slashes that shattered the gigantic mirrors, sending deadly showers of sharp glass in all directions, but always, guided by the mental network, struck empty air.
However, dodging eternally was not winning.
Guided by Rowan's cold instructions, Eris nimbly slid along the monster's exposed flank. She channeled her immense and destructive [Flame of Ruin] into her halberd's blade and, with her eyes firmly shut, delivered a brutal horizontal slash intended to disembowel and empty the colossus.
But the sound that followed was not the satisfying sizzle of burning flesh, but a strident, violent, and painful metallic screech. The giant's immense rusted armor passively repelled the dark fire of Ruin. The immense cutting force of Eris's weapon was brutally deflected by the pronounced curvature of the enchanted breastplate.
Eris leapt backward, clicking her tongue in frustration. "Its armor is magically designed to deflect sharp cuts and pure energy. My halberd bounces off its surface."
Bren, who was crouched patiently a few meters away, feeling the immense vibrations of the ground through his boots, flashed a savage, fierce smile amidst his blindness.
"If blades bounce off its chest, let's use a damn hammer," Bren transmitted through the Nexus, his knuckles cracking. "Elian, give me the weight of the world."
Elian didn't need it repeated or the physics of inertia explained to him. He understood the assault instantly. He raised his hands and manipulated his orb, the [Heart of Mercury]. The lethal silver liquid flowed through the air and densely enveloped Bren's hands.
The mercury solidified around Bren's [Behemoth Core Knuckles]. The heavy, matte black tectonic obsidian gauntlets throbbed. On the backs of his hands, the spheres of crystallized magma—the [Heart of the Mountain]—went from a faint red to a blinding, incandescent white that scorched the air around them. Elian's hyper-heavy mercury adhered to the obsidian, granting the seismic warrior's fists an immense, unreal gravitational mass.
Bren felt the immense, crushing weight in his arms. With his eyes closed, he blindly trusted the three-dimensional map that Elian and Rowan updated in his mind millisecond by millisecond.
"Exactly two meters ahead, Bren. Its guard is completely wide open after missing a downward slash," Rowan dictated with mathematical coldness.
Bren sank his steel boots into the stained glass. His Behemoth Dragon bloodline roared in his veins. He didn't break into a clumsy run; he detonated a seismic wave directly into the floor beneath his own feet to propel himself forward like a massive missile.
He covered the distance in a millisecond. Instead of trying to penetrate with a magical attack or a fine cut, Bren delivered a simple, brutal, devastatingly purely physical ascending uppercut straight to the giant's thick armored torso.
The impact sounded like the collision of two planets. It was cataclysmic. The monster's ancient armor, perfectly designed to repel edges and disperse elemental magic, was completely useless against the crushing blunt force and high-frequency resonance trauma. Elian's abyssal mercury-bathed gauntlets had given Bren's incandescent fist the literal mass of a meteorite.
The colossal blow did not break the outer breastplate; it ignored it entirely. The unbearable crimson seismic wave penetrated cleanly through the metal using the armor as a conductor, and erupted with geological fury in the very center of the giant's interior.
The monster didn't have a single microsecond to react. The sickening sound of each and every one of its enormous internal organs bursting, liquefying, and exploding simultaneously echoed like a vacuum bomb in the labyrinth. The giant spat a torrent of thick black blood through the joints of its helmet and, a second later, the immense tectonic pressure trapped inside its body made it violently burst from the inside out in a grotesque, wet, and massive shower of rusted metal pieces, bone splinters, and rotting flesh.
The rain of macabre remains clattered loudly as it fell upon the surviving mirrors and the glass floor. The tense silence returned to the corridor.
"Threat neutralized," Bren said hoarsely, shaking the black blood and brains off his burning knuckles while Elian withdrew and dissolved his precious mercury.
The five warriors slowly opened their eyes, blinking to adjust to the confusing flashes and fractured light of the immense broken mirrors surrounding them. They had overcome the trauma through blind trust.
But the false god's tomb did not allow the luxury of relief.
Before they could even process the tactical victory and secure the perimeter, the dark ceiling of the mirror labyrinth—which seemed to stretch into an infinite, grayish mist—darkened even more. A horrifying sound, identical to a hundred enormous steel swords sharpening in unison against a giant grindstone, flooded and pierced their ears.
From the dizzying heights, a colossal, unnatural insect plummeted toward them. It was a giant centipede, but its twisted biology was an authentic martial heresy. Each of its a hundred articulated legs was not made of chitin or bone, but was an immense, sharp, Saint-grade rusted steel sword, exuding a dense, reddish, suffocating aura of millennial slaughter.
The repulsive monster did not land to fight a conventional melee combat. Exactly three meters from the glass floor, it halted its fall and began to spin rapidly on its own axis at an insane, incomprehensible speed.
The beast's profane Conceptual Law fully activated. The enormous centipede turned in a matter of seconds into a tornado of absolute steel, a three-dimensional sword shredder that began to furiously expand. The whirlwind of a hundred rusted blades spinning at hypersonic speeds began to shred, absorb, and pulverize the giant mirrors around it as if they were mere sheets of paper. The glass, the hard floor, and space itself were gravitationally sucked in and sliced into nothingness by the terrifying centrifugal force.
"Get back!" Eris roared, pushing Tamsin.
Rowan took a bold step forward, his hands enveloped in gusts of pressurized air.
"I'll stop its spin. [Zephyr Hurricane, Maximum Compression!]" Rowan launched a brutal, opposing cyclone, attempting to use the friction force of the wind to counteract, slow, and nullify the centrifugal rotation of the steel monster.
But when Rowan's destructive hurricane clashed against the beast's outer wall, the hundred vibrating swords simply cleanly sliced the wind. They undid the aerodynamic technique in seconds, slicing the cyclone and absorbing the draft to spin even faster.
Elian tried next. He launched thick, massive whips of liquid mercury, trying to entangle the monster's metallic legs and jam its gears from the outside. However, the very instant the dense, heavy black mercury touched the exterior of the tornado, it was sliced into micro-drops and violently dispersed into a fine silver mist, rendering it completely harmless.
The invincible spinning shredder approached relentlessly, devouring the labyrinth's structure and sucking them toward death.
Tamsin took a few steps back, her cold eyes fixed on the impenetrable barrier of spinning steel blades. She activated the secrets of her dangerous poison bloodline. Her human eyes disappeared, replaced by her icy [Basilisk Eyes].
Her vision tore through the illusion of movement. Her [Toxicity Vision] completely altered the battlefield in her mind, revealing the points of lowest immunological resistance, the defensive "filters" of the technique, and the true material nature of the hundreds of menacing legs.
"It's pure rusted steel. Highly porous and extremely vulnerable to chemical degradation," Tamsin quickly transmitted through the Nexus, coldly evaluating the biological threat. "My pure Basilisk poison can rot, melt, and turn those swords to ash in a matter of seconds. But there is a serious physical problem: the tornado's overwhelming centrifugal force acts as an absolute vacuum defense. If I launch my acid from out here, the wind pressure and rotation will disperse it, diluting it in the air before a single drop even manages to touch the metal."
Eris, listening to her combat medic's lethal analysis, didn't retreat a single millimeter. Her features hardened, her eyes darkened, and she unreservedly unleashed the true, catastrophic nature of her destructive gaze.
She activated the dreaded [Eyes of Ruin].
Her right eye turned a bright, bloodshot crimson red, the pupil dilating unnaturally to observe the molecular structure and the threads holding together the "breaking points" of matter. Her left eye erupted in a neon violet glow crossed by fine, red, venous lines, detecting the latent Void Fire and the hidden combustion potential of the rigid physical laws governing the enemy tornado.
Eris observed the violent physics of the sword storm with absolute coldness and calculation. Her red eye mathematically broke down the beast's rotation, searching for the inescapable structural flaw.
"I see it perfectly," Eris said, her deep, grave, and distorted voice resonating in her team's minds. "The exact center. Every hurricane of force, regardless of its power, has a central eye where the pressure warps physics and there is no wind. The axis of rotation is an absolute dead zone. If we manage to put Tamsin directly in the exact center of the centipede's back, the expansive centrifugal force won't affect her at all, and the monster, lacking internal weapons, won't be able to defend against an expansive toxic attack fired from the inside out."
"But getting in there is damn suicide. It will slice us into fillets before we manage to cross the wall of sucking swords," Bren objected, his knuckles still smoking.
"Not if we do it falling from above," Eris replied.
And the instant she uttered her death sentence, the primordial bloodline of Ruin reacted to her immense, dark homicidal intent.
With a dull, disturbing crunch, the skin on Eris's forehead tore cleanly and from her skull emerged the fearsome [Igneous Obsidian Horns]. They were immense, imposing, rugged like miniature mountains, and through the deep cracks of the black stone flowed a pure, blinding white fire that burned the sight. The horns were not an ornament; they immediately acted as stabilizing lightning rods, beginning to absorb, withstand, and channel the terrifying excess pressure of the immense, lethal energy of [Conceptual Annihilation] that Eris was furiously condensing in her Dantian.
The temperature in a twenty-meter radius around Eris rose drastically and unnaturally. The air crackled, visibly turning into an incandescent white plasma shield as the Berserker channeled over fifty percent of her total monstrous Qi into her hands. She materialized her supreme halberd, the [Sun Devourer]. The dark collapsed star iron shaft glowed with dying, faint orange constellations. From the spear's pommel, ethereal links of black fire and molten gold began to sprout and intertwine, forming the unbreakable [Chain of the Dusk] that fused with her forearm in the shape of incandescent rune tattoos.
"I will finish off and erase the beast. Tamsin, you will destroy its weapons first to clear the path to the core for me. Elian, Bren, Rowan... execute the assault. Put us up there."
Squad 8's combat synergy erupted into a beautiful, lethal choreography of millimeter-perfect destruction.
Elian was the first to take the board. He unleashed the oppressive power of his Abyssal Dragon bloodline. He raised his Orb, the Heart of Mercury, and activated the [Authority of Crushing Inertia].
An invisible wave expanded from his pale body in an exact one-hundred-meter radius, imposing his domain. He generated an inescapable aura of absolute Liquid Gravity. The air around the sword tornado changed drastically; it turned a suffocating deep marine blue, becoming thick and absurdly heavy, as if the labyrinth had been sunk ten thousand meters below the deepest trench of the cosmic ocean. The dizzying rotation of the steel centipede, which depended on the freedom, zero friction, and lightness of the airspace, crashed head-on and violently into this new, colossal liquid atmospheric mass. The hundred rusted swords began to emit a screech of infernal friction as they cut through "heavy water," and the shredder's monstrous spin speed dropped drastically by thirty percent.
With the target slowed by the weight of the ocean, Bren sprang into action like a meteor.
He sprinted forward, ignoring the thousands of deadly mirror fragments flying through the air trying to cut him, and struck the glass floor with a monumental punch loaded with raw seismic energy. He wasn't looking to destroy the floor, but to mold the glass's geological faults. An immense, solid pillar of sharp glass and rock erupted from the ground, rising rapidly at a perfect diagonal angle like a massive ramp that aimed and ended exactly above the top opening of the sword tornado.
"Go up!" Bren shouted, his knuckles bleeding.
Tamsin and Eris didn't waste a second and sprinted at top speed toward the ramp. But the incline was absurdly steep and they needed to reach an impossible speed, greater than the centripetal suction, to surpass the monster's upper cutting radius without being devoured mid-air.
Rowan closed his eyes and, upon opening them, his human pupils had completely disappeared, replaced by two perfect liquid silver mirrors. They were his [Liquid Silver Eyes].
[Frames-per-Millisecond Processing] activated in his frontal lobe. To Rowan's divine eyes, the chaotic sword tornado, the thousands of deadly flying mirror fragments, and his two comrades running up the glass froze into a sharp sequence of static images. His silver eyes perfectly read the lethal micro-air currents generated by the beast, the vacuum suction, and the gentle zephyr currents he himself could manipulate.
Rowan mentally mapped the exact, aerodynamic, and safe wind "lane." He raised both hands and, instead of using his technique to move himself stealthily, he conjured the [Steps of the Invisible Breeze] directly as an external buff.
He enveloped Tamsin and Eris's bodies in a cushion of hyper-compressed air, almost invisible and devoid of any physical friction. Then, concentrating a Zephyr gust of maximum power on their backs at the exact millisecond they stepped on the base of Bren's ramp, he detonated the wind.
The boost was a supersonic burst.
Tamsin and Eris were launched upward at breakneck speed up the glass ramp, like two invisible cannonballs. Rowan's wind mantle acted as a perfect aerodynamic shield, forcing them to slip through and pass intact through the dangerous suction currents of the deadly tornado.
They flew cleanly above the menacing cutting radius of the enormous rusted swords. For a second that seemed to stop in eternity, the two Morningstar assassins were suspended in the air, floating exactly vertically above the monstrous spinning steel aberration.
And then, their own gravity and Elian's did their inescapable work.
Both plummeted in a vertical dive, dropping like two vengeful meteors exactly into the hollow "eye" of the steel tornado; the peaceful, deadly geometric central axis where the centipede lacked weapons and the wind was in a deceptively absolute calm.
They landed with a thud on the centipede's disgusting, exposed black back.
"Now, Tamsin! Strip it!" Eris shouted, raising her Sun Devourer halberd high, the immense obsidian blade already vibrating and glowing with the tragic instability of a dying star about to collapse.
Tamsin didn't use poisonous daggers or fine needles. Standing in the exact center of the lethal whirlpool, she unfurled her elegant fan carved from dragon bone and iridescent raven feathers: [The Toxic Sigh]. The artifact opened with a crackling sound, akin to a million insects rubbing their wings. She unleashed all the overwhelming power of her bloodline.
Her skin glowed with an unnatural, almost sickly emerald green hue, and she released an omnidirectional explosion of pure toxin. She executed her ultimate conceptual offense: the [Reality Infection].
Tamsin fanned the air violently. She emitted the heavy, dense, corrosive [Breath of the Ancestral Poison Dragon], perfectly mixed with her own [Primordial Acid Blood]. The lethal emerald green and purple gas, heavier than oxygen, didn't need to travel slowly; being at the very axis of rotation of the beast, the spinning monster's own gigantic centrifugal force tragically worked against it. The tornado mechanically sucked Tamsin's poisonous smoke outward instantly, spreading the glowing spores and primordial acid over the entirety of its hundred rusted steel swords spinning around it.
The corrosive annihilation was immediate, silent, and absolute. Tamsin's powerful ancestral poison, designed by evolution to "sicken" laws and melt solid magic, met the high porosity of the rusted metal, fed on its movement, and devoured it from the inside out. In less than two astonishing seconds, the hundred immense Saint-grade swords that formed the fearsome lethal tornado rotted, dissolved like hot wax, and fell apart into a colossal, thick cloud of orange dust and completely harmless metallic slag.
The invincible Infinite Steel Storm stopped dead in its tracks, its hundred "arms" ripped out by the roots by chemistry.
Suddenly stripped of its only weapons and defenses, the gigantic insect's naked, soft, repulsive body fell heavily and off-balance against the floor of broken mirrors, letting out a deafening, pitiful, shrill shriek of pure agony.
Tamsin, with glacial coldness, snapped her fan shut with a sharp crack and nimbly jumped away from the dying monster's back, leaving the Berserker Eris alone, standing like a demon of death, over the throbbing creature.
The Igneous Obsidian horns on Eris's forehead glowed with such excessive intensity that the air around her had turned into a brilliant, destructive force field of absolute white plasma. The mutilated monster tried desperately to writhe on the floor to crush her under its own weight, but her cruel Eyes of Ruin had already fixed, at a molecular and spiritual level, the exact point of conceptual annihilation on the beast's back.
All the unfathomable thermal and magical pressure channeled and stabilized by her horns poured out all at once, like a waterfall of catastrophe, into the crystal blade of her weapon. Eris had recklessly emptied more than half of her vast, colossal ocean of internal Qi solely and exclusively for this single, definitive strike.
"Return to the dust and ashes from whence you came," Eris whispered. Her voice no longer sounded human; it was deep and distorted, loaded with the irrevocable authority of absolute cosmic destruction.
Eris plunged the halberd.
[Black Supernova].
There was no vulgar explosion of conventional red fire. It was a universal collapse contained within ten meters. The obsidian tip of the halberd pierced the centipede's soft flesh without any resistance and released the Flame of Ruin directly into the wet interior of its dark Dantian. The lethal void fire, guided by Eris's infallible heterochromic vision, sought out the threads and instantly broke down the immovable fundamental physical laws that held the monster's biology and existence together on the earthly plane.
A blinding white flash rivaling the death of a star shone for a millisecond, violently illuminating every corner of the labyrinth. Immediately following the light came an expansive sphere of absolute, perfect darkness. A five-meter black hole was born in the center of the beast's corpse, devouring light, devouring matter, and devouring sound. The immense insect was neither burned nor cut; it was simply erased from the fabric of reality, conceptually disintegrated down to the last atoms. Not a drop of black blood, nor disgusting viscera, nor a single handful of ash remained on the smooth glass of the mirrors.
And then, the [Wound of Reality] occurred.
After five seconds of voracious vacuum suction, where the mirror debris flew into the blackness, the universe inside the tomb reacted to heal itself. The hazy sky and the glass floor began to vibrate violently. From the ceiling descended heavy, glowing chains of golden laws, and from the glass floor rose immense roots of pure, white light. The world itself had detected the intolerable hole in its existence left by the Ruin, and the natural laws acted like relentless white blood cells attacking a deadly infection. With a deafening sound of shattering cosmic glass and clashing celestial metals, the space sutured and closed in on itself, crushing the black hole and leaving only an ugly, smoking, perpetual scar of gray ash on the floor and a boiling heat distortion in the air.
The universal whiplash for defying and breaking the laws of existence punished its bearer. Eris fell heavily to her knees, using the heavy shaft of her Sun Devourer halberd to support herself from collapsing. She breathed with extreme, hoarse difficulty, her chest violently rising and falling, cold sweat soaking her raven hair. Fine, glowing threads of golden light and divine blood bled profusely from the corners of her eyes and her nose. The immense obsidian horns on her forehead cracked slightly under the residual pressure and slowly disappeared, retracting beneath her skin, withdrawing the scorching plasma field. Her red right eye and violet left eye blinked, slowly and docilely returning to their natural color. She had pushed her mortal body and her core to the brink of collapse, but the eradication of the enemy had been flawless and absolute.
Bren, Elian, and Rowan ran hurriedly and in complete silence through the smoking rubble of the immense shattered mirrors until they reached the center of the crater, where Eris and Tamsin were.
Tamsin put away her lethal fan and firmly offered a hand to Eris, helping her to her feet. The imposing Berserker nodded silently, accepting the help with gratitude, wiping the golden blood from her lips with the back of her gauntlet.
Elian, the master of the abyss, after meticulously checking with his liquid gravity that there were no more threatening anomalies hiding in the immense puddles of water around them, closed his eyes and fully connected to the telepathic hive mind that encompassed the entirety of the tomb's fractured dimension.
"Squad 8 reporting final execution," Elian transmitted, his cold, steady, and heavily liquid voice resonating clearly in the immense Soul Nexus. "Mirror labyrinth purged of all threats. Colossal enemy of lethal psychosomatic trauma and dangerous mechanical aberration of steel tornados eradicated to nothingness. Commander Eris is currently at forty percent of her total Qi reserves and has suffered a slight whiplash from reality following the Supernova, but all members are unharmed, whole, and operating at maximum capacity. Combat area secured."
Kael Morningstar's response arrived swiftly, firm, majestic, and heavily loaded with a bloodthirsty anticipation that made those present smile.
"Annihilation report received, Squad 8. Flawless work. Each and every one of the assault groups has brutally cleared their respective sectors of the tomb. Iris has just mathematically fractured the impassable base barrier of this dead god's illusory labyrinth. Keep your guard up and your weapons drawn. We're going to gather the family, and we're going to hunt them down."
Eris leaned heavily on her dark halberd, looking up at the oppressive ceiling of the dark labyrinth of broken mirrors. A deeply tired, but undoubtedly savage, dark, and predatory smile crossed her ash- and blood-stained face.
They had been separated, ambushed, and forced to blindly descend into the gloomy tomb of a vengeful false god. They had been mercilessly thrown into the darkest and most dangerous corners designed by the beasts of the forgotten Primordial Era.
And the glorious Morningstar Clan, divided, but never broken, had responded to the cowardly ambush with the only currency they knew: pure, surgical, and absolute annihilation.
Now, amidst the silence of the dead, all that remained was to march together to claim their ultimate prize and the head of their captor.