Chapter 181: The Gate to Hell (Part 1)
Space itself screamed in agony.
Thousands of meters away from where Violeta and her squad fought to survive, the engine room of the primordial tomb was collapsing under the crushing weight of a human mind. Iris, her eyes bloodshot and the veins in her temples throbbing so violently they threatened to burst, kept her slender fingers plunged into the core of the central matrix. Beside her, Cedric channeled all of his immense ocean of runic Qi to stabilize the furious dimensional rifts that the girl was forcing open through sheer willpower.
"I've got it!" Cedric yelled, cold sweat soaking his face as the immense cogwheels of the room screeched with an agonizing sound and ground to a halt. "We have absolute control of the central matrix! All Sequences, prepare yourselves! Initiating spatial convergence! The labyrinth is collapsing on our anchor point, we're going to reunite. I'm coming to you, Violeta..."
Iris gave the final mental pull. The reality of the tomb folded like a fragile sheet of paper.
There was no physical journey. The coordinates of all the isolated quadrants of the labyrinth were brutally torn out and overwritten by the matrix, forcing the scattered squads to converge on a single point in space-time.
Kael Morningstar, with his heavy sword [Magma Fang] tightly gripped in his hand and his armor severely scorched from the previous combat, appeared amidst a burst of runic light. Beside him, Ignis, Tormund, Vania, and Sylas materialized out of nowhere, weapons drawn and eyes burning, ready to massacre whatever crossed their path.
The cold air of the colossal fossilized calcium corridor began to flicker incessantly, spitting out dark silhouettes as Iris's portals slammed shut.
The Assassin Squad emerged from the shadows like wraiths. Dante landed without making the slightest sound, his aura still overflowing, black, and terrifyingly heavy after his recent genocide of crows in the abyss. Ren, Joren, Elara, and Mira appeared at his flanks, wiping the dark blood from their dagger blades.
With a heavy thud that made the bones of the floor tremble, the heavy vanguard dropped into reality. Magnus, Korg, Goran, and Borg stood at their full height, their immense, muscular bodies exhaling boiling steam and exhaustion after literally lifting the weight of the world in their trial.
Gusts of hurricane wind and flashes of light announced the final arrival of Varian, Selene, Lia, Nylas, and Lyra.
Little by little, in a matter of seconds, the entire Morningstar Legion gathered in the immensity of the underground corridor. The forty geniuses were severely injured, their reserves exhausted, and soaked from head to toe in the blood of primordial horrors, but their eyes shone with an unwavering ferocity. They had survived purgatory. They had rightfully earned their place there.
But the celebration died before it was born.
The Soul Nexus, which until then had been transmitting everyone's safe positions, suddenly threw a terrifying reading. Kael raised his face and looked ahead.
Barely a hundred meters away, cutting the colossal bone corridor in half, stood an immense, smooth, dark, and pulsating wall. It wasn't common stone or human architecture; it was black obsidian mixed with red veins, and it was enveloped in a thick, impenetrable crimson mist that reeked of ancient death.
Behind that wall, Kael's perception through the telepathic link caught the horror. The Qi signatures of Violeta, Voltar, Lirael, Ciro, and Jareth were fluctuating wildly. Kael felt the echo of their desperation as Eris, Cassius, Elowen, and Lys, already kneeling and pale among the ranks of the legion, desperately transmitted torrents of their own vitality and healing power through the Nexus to the other side of the wall.
They were fading under the suffocating oppression of an infinitely superior presence. The Demonic Saint King of the tomb was massacring them.
"Tear open that damn wall!" Kael roared. His voice completely lost the cold, stoic calm of the commander, breaking with an irate urgency that made the mist itself recoil.
The four absolute pinnacles of brute force in the legion didn't need a second order.
Magnus, Korg, Goran, and Borg looked at each other for a fraction of a second, nodded in perfect synchrony, and charged forward like shooting stars of flesh and bone. The entire corridor rumbled beneath their footsteps.
Magnus forced his Liquid Vajra skeleton beyond the biological limit, channeling the dense weight of a mountain directly into his golden fist. Borg, flanked by the overwhelming mass of Korg and Goran, activated his Battering Ram bloodline, turning his immense body into an unstoppable kinetic missile.
The four colossi connected their punches simultaneously, unleashing a combined shockwave directly against the center of the obsidian wall.
The coordinated impact should have pulverized an entire city to its foundations. Instead, the sound that echoed in the corridor was a dull, dry, and pathetic clink.
Neither Magnus, nor Korg, nor Goran, nor Borg even managed to crack the polished surface of the wall. Worse still, the immense kinetic force and destructive Qi they applied did not disperse into the environment; they were devoured by the wall and instantly returned with a mathematically multiplied violence.
The sickening crunch of shattering bones rang through the air. The four giants of the clan were sent flying backward like fragile rag dolls. Their arms hung at impossible angles and their bodies crashed brutally against the colossal fossilized ribs of the walls, spitting large mouthfuls of blood from the catastrophic impact of their own rebounded force.
"Stop!" yelled Cedric, stepping in and invoking a runic shield to halt Ignis and Kael, who were already igniting their swords to launch an inferno of fire. "Don't use brute force! My Architectural Eye can barely process the formulas of that thing... That wall isn't normal matter!"
Iris stumbled forward, wiping the blood that was already gushing from her nose. Her Fractal Amber Eyes spun frantically, breaking down the layers of reality. She materialized her [Stellar Jade Chessboard] in front of her. The tiny quartz pieces began to move on their own, projecting a dome of runic light as her mind connected to the wall's matrix.
"It's a pure Law block," Iris panted. Her [Divine Probability Processing] operated at millions of calculations per millisecond, forcing her brain to bleed. "The old fossil on the other side has imposed an unbreakable conceptual rule upon that barrier. It has 'Infinite Mass'. Any physical, kinetic, or raw energy attack that collides with it will crash against the fucking concept of infinity and bounce back to kill us."
Kael gritted his teeth, his jaw's fang threatening to splinter. Through the Nexus, the agony arrived in waves. Violeta, his Frigid Executioner, was using her last drop of energy. Ciro had broken bones, Voltar was mutilated. They were exact seconds away from being completely erased.
Icy panic threatened to infect the heart of the legion, but Kael Morningstar was the Commander and the Crimson Dragon of the Spiritual Edge. He closed his eyes for an imperceptible fraction of a second, stifled the desperation threatening his throat, and replaced it with an icy, mathematical, and absolutely destructive fury.
"If we can't break it with brute force, we'll gut it with laws," Kael declared. His voice resonated with a sovereignty that admitted no reply. He raised his sword, Magma Fang, whose interior pulsed with a volcanic red. "Iris, give me the exact resonant frequency of that mass. All created matter, even conceptual matter, has a vibrational breaking blind spot. Find it."
Iris didn't hesitate. Her fractal pupils dilated until they covered her entire eyeball. The world around her slowed to a halt. Her mind penetrated the atomic structure of the red obsidian, processing trillions of abstract vectors. Blood began to flow freely from her eyes and ears, sliding down her neck from the agonizing effort of calculating the weight of infinity. After three seconds, she flashed a savage, bloodthirsty smile.
"I have it. Dissonant frequency located in the lower left and upper right corners, simultaneously. Transmitting coordinates through the Nexus... now!"
The information flowed into the minds of Vania and Joren.
"Vania, Joren!" roared Kael, pointing his sword at the wall. "Destabilize the molecules! Tear the skin off that concept!"
Vania, the War Siren, and Joren, the Ultrasonic Assassin, didn't hesitate. The absolute masters of destructive acoustics planted themselves in front of the immensity of the wall.
Vania inhaled deeply. She slammed the quartz base of her staff, the [Sovereign's Tuning Fork], violently against the bone floor. The three star-song pearls at the apex aligned and began to spin at a maddening speed. Her crimson-gold vocal cords tensed, and she unleashed the roar of the [Song of the End of the World].
It wasn't a boisterous attack. It was a sonic note so deep, heavy, and perfect that the sound didn't travel through the air; it traveled through the Qi itself. No one heard the scream, but the leviathan vibration made the marrow in the bones of the entire legion tremble, seeking to match the vibration of the "infinite mass" to force its disintegration by sympathy.
In perfect synchrony, Joren unleashed his own sonic atrocity. He activated his [Banshee Vocal Cords] and violently clashed the edges of his [Absorbing Void Daggers]. The Banshee Stone embedded in the hilts emitted a soul-deafening ultrasonic shriek. An infrasound that attacked gravity itself.
The two frequencies, one rising from the oceanic abyss and another tearing from the empty sky, collided exactly at the nodes calculated by Iris in the center of the obsidian.
The wall of infinite mass convulsed.
It didn't break, because its conceptual weight forged by a Saint King was too dense, but its structure began to vibrate erratically and painfully. The black and red surface ceased to be a smooth wall and became a disgusting rigid gelatin, losing its atomic stability.
"It's vibrating, but the conceptual mass is still there!" reported Cedric, his hands bleeding as he helped Iris hold the chessboard.
"Eris! Altair!" ordered Kael, his voice cutting through the sonic distortion. "Rot the concept!"
Eris, the Berserker of Ruin, whose eyes were already tearing up with murderous worry for her twin Violeta, and Altair, the Entropy Tank, lunged toward the trembling barrier. They didn't raise their fists to strike.
Altair arrived first. He seized the space with his dark gauntlets, the [Embrace of the Void], and pressed both open palms directly onto the red obsidian. He unleashed the entirety of his passive death intent and channeled the [Touch of Withering].
Altair didn't seek to break the stone; he sought to inject a thousand years of aging into it in a millisecond. His bloodline imposed absolute decay. The obsidian at the point of contact reacted with a sickening crunch, losing its polished gleam. The surface became opaque, porous, and ashen gray, like a millennial bone rotting under the desert sun. The Demon King's tyrannical concept of "miasma" began to pathetically expire under the supreme Law of Entropy.
At the exact same instant, Eris threw her Eyes of Ruin wide open, the crimson and neon violet glowing with apocalyptic fury. She found the exact focal point where Vania and Joren's sonic frequencies crossed with Altair's accelerated rot.
She raised her High Saint-grade halberd, the colossal [Sun Devourer]. The stellar obsidian tip was enveloped in black static and its sacred fire: the black and white [Flame of Ruin]. Eris plunged the spear directly into the epicenter of the decay.
The black and violet fire didn't burn the outside of the wall. It seeped like a virus through the withered pores Altair had created and devoured the Law of mass from the inside. Ignoring any physical resistance, the Flame of Ruin consumed the bonds of the barrier's very existence. The unbreakable "Infinite Mass" was degraded, corrupted, and humiliated until it became simple, mundane, brittle stone within a three-meter radius.
The impenetrable conceptual lock had been picked. All that was missing was the divine battering ram to kick the door down.
Kael took a step forward, raising Magma Fang above his head. He knew that his own physical strength, even with the degraded wall, might not be enough to break through the massive thickness of a structure forged by a Grand Saint. He needed a superlative edge that would ignore matter and directly cut the soul of the Demon King's magic.
A hand, colder than the winter void itself, rested gently on the burning blade of his sword.
It was Dante.
The Asura's Executioner appeared beside him. His eyes were sunken, surrounded by lethal shadows, and the aura he gave off did not belong to the world of the living at all. Dante had just massacred over fifteen thousand Saint-grade horrors in the blind darkness. He had accumulated more than three million Slaughter Points on his infernal counter. His soul was an ocean of boiling blood on the verge of overflowing.
Dante would never waste such a bounty; he needed those points to ascend to the pinnacle. But faced with the imminent threat of losing Violeta, Ciro, Lirael, and the others... he didn't hesitate for a fraction of a second to burn his reserve.
"Cut the world, Commander," Dante whispered.
Without an ounce of hesitation, Dante immolated one million Slaughter Points in a single, catastrophic strike. He activated the zenith of his inheritance: the [Art of Asura: Severance of the Anchor of a Hundred Thousand Souls].
The abominable energy released darkened the colossal calcium corridor. The runic torches flickered and died. The deafening, agonizing shriek of a million phantom souls howled in the silence as Dante channeled all that cosmic terror directly into the blade of Magma Fang. Kael's sword was enveloped in a crimson and black aura so dense, heavy, and lethal that it began to devour the surrounding light. Dante had handed his commander a blade capable of cutting concepts, destroying karma, and decapitating immortal souls.
Kael felt the crushing weight of absolute death in his hands. His eyes glowed a fiery red.
He unleashed his maximum power: [Nirvana Sword Intent].
Level 3, Absolute Mastery, awakened in his dragon blood. The heavy blade ceased to be a simple piece of obsidian and became a physical extension of his tyrannical domain over life and death.
Instantly, Kael channeled the forbidden [Sword Sutra of the Infernal King]. This heavy technique did not generate its own fire; it converted his Qi into the devouring "Flame of Purgatory". When Kael's black flame touched the blade of his sword, it clung to the Demon King's immense miasma that permeated the destabilized obsidian. The Flame of Purgatory used the enemy's own power as fuel, burning with an uncontrollable ferocity, enhanced a thousandfold by the aura of Dante's million souls.
Kael tensed every muscle in his perfect body. The sword was now a black and crimson sun of pure annihilation, supported by the acoustic physics of his comrades, the entropic rot of the vanguard, and the incarnate death of the Asura.
"Ultimate Move..." Kael roared in the absolute silence of his mind, the echo of his indomitable will shaking the very roots of the labyrinth.
[Solar Slash: The Day of Judgment]
The monstrous blade of Magma Fang descended and struck the exact point that his brothers had conceptually shattered.
There was no sound of metallic impact or breaking stone. There was a fundamental tear in reality itself.
The immense, absolute, and perfect red obsidian barrier, the eternal prison forged by a Primordial Era Grand Saint, could not resist the equation of the Severance. The acoustics had loosened it. The entropy had withered it. And Kael and Dante's True Soul Damage, fueled by Nirvana and Purgatory, simply cut its right to exist.
A colossal crack, boiling with magmatic fire and howling lost souls, split the immense wall in two, from the vaulted black ceiling to the smooth white bone floor.
The two immense halves of the infinite barrier collapsed outward. They instantly turned into gray dust and red mist that dissipated like cheap smoke under the relentless assault of the united vanguard.
The incandescent light of the Song of Judgment violently flooded the sealed hallway.
And what Kael saw on the other side made the cavern's temperature drop to absolute zero.
Barely twenty meters away, the Demonic Saint King, with his left arm still frozen in stasis by Violeta's ice, had his back turned. His rotting fingers, black and sharp as blades, brutally held Violeta by her pale neck, strangling her in the air as thick drops of golden blood trickled down the grip.
On the floor, surrounding the monster's feet, Ciro, Voltar, Jareth, and Lirael lay immobilized, their faces distorted by agony as thick, sadistic threads of living blood writhed deeply inside their exposed bones, broken ribs, and open abdomens, anchoring them like tortured marionettes.
Upon sensing the absolute collapse of his Law of "Infinite Mass", the millennial monster froze. He turned his head sharply toward the source of the explosion.
His yellow eyes, for the first time in the entire bloody battle, shot wide open, his pupils shrinking. All the ancient, overwhelming arrogance of the deity evaporated upon sensing the abominable, colossal, and destructive killing intent that had just erased his wall.
Through the obsidian dust, the entropic ashes, and the black flames of purgatory raining from the split ceiling, the forty geniuses of the Morningstar Legion emerged.
They were not forty individuals. Their fierce auras, their synchronized furies, and their void bloodlines resonated in a perfect frequency, intertwining to form the monstrous illusion of an immense, primordial black dragon with crimson eyes roaring directly at the false god.
At the head of the overwhelming formation, leading the march of death with his sword dripping the lava of hell, Kael Morningstar took a heavy step into the corridor. His eyes, red as pools of boiling blood, locked exclusively onto the rotting old man who dared to hold the throat of his Executioner.
"My turn," Kael sentenced.
The Crimson Dragon's voice was not a shout; it was a promise of absolute extinction.
The Demon King was no longer hunting isolated prey in the dark. He had made the supreme mistake of unleashing the united wrath of the forty-five dragons of the Primordial Void. And the immense primordial tomb was about to become claustrophobically small for the massacre that was approaching.