Facing a Tier 9 Ascendant in a fair fight was suicide for anyone still within the Tier 7 threshold. It wasn't just a matter of mana reserves or physical power and speed; it was a conceptual Authority mismatch. True Ascendants move according to the private laws of their own Inner Worlds, ignoring the basis of Conceptual reality. Facing three of them at once, regardless of whether I possessed a Hybrid Soul forged in the Void and tempered by the Fla, was pure insanity.
But I had never once intended to play a fair ga.
The three streaks of silver light grew larger against the grey obsidian sky of the siphoning floor. As they approached, I could feel their collective authority attempting to preemptively colonize our Domain. It was an imperial presence — the heavy scent of cold lavender and stolen quintessence turning the air into a suffocating velvet noose. My [Void Emperor's Omnipresence] humd a warning, a frantic vibration in the sub-space layers of my consciousness.
"Don't let them set the tempo," I whispered, the weight of the dark silver relic heavy in my pocket. I reached deep into the center of my core, activating my most desperate fail-safe.
[Glimpse of a Path.]
I waited a few minutes until they arrived within the vision. It was difficult to perceive their true Souls without shattering the Glimpse but I used a new thod where I integrated Sylvaris teachings to try to subtly detect it without overwhelming my senses. As I widened my perception within the simulation, I looked not at their weapons, but at the "Strings" connecting them to the simulation.
And that's when I noticed the flaw — the blue, shimring threads of systemic clamping.
[System Logic Synchronization Validated.]
[Environntal Protocol: Regional Parater Threshold enforced.]
[Enemy Constraint: Tier 9 Authority clamped to Nodal Aspirant standard. Inner Worlds Contained.]
The realization hit like a burst of dopamine. The Pri System wasn't making it easy, but it was being fair to its "lab rat." By anchoring the Ascendants' absolute Authority to my own, it had locked their Inner Worlds behind a door. They couldn't pull into their private heavens where they could rewrite physics on a whim. They were stripped of their primary advantage, left with Tier 9 techniques and vast mana reservoirs, but physically constrained to the Tier 7 ceiling.
A jagged grin touched my face. I could see a route where I didn't end up as a sar on the floor.
I attempted to peer deeper into their cores, to see the source of their rcury-light or mind-scrambling mist without triggering any divination or Ti manipulation contingencies they might have. But the mont my [Void-Lattice Perception] attempted to catalog their high-tier Essence patterns within the vision, my mind scread. The Glimpse was straining. It couldn't render that much high-end conceptual data without collapsing.
The silver light flared into a blinding monochromatic roar, and the vision shattered. My consciousness snapped back to reality, reeling from a massive sensory overload that left my eyes bleeding silver tears and a three-day clock ticking in the corner of my vision.
"Vision's gone," I grunted, blinking away the static. "But the ga is on."
The silver streaks were five seconds from impact.
"I need those empty slots filled right now," I hissed, blood dripping from my chin onto my null-steel collar. The psychic toll was pushing , but I reached into the partitions of the [Vault of the Void], retrieving two ancient, dark-silver skill-scrolls I had bought during the Celestial Auction for this exact mont.
I utilized the Zeroth-Tier [Symphony of the Animus Arch] to act as the glue. Instead of a brute-force system download, I used the harmonic resonance thods I'd perfected on Crystal City and mana thods from Sylvaris. I "listened" to the frequency of the skill crystals and tuned my internal conduits to mirror their shapes, integrating them with the subtle elegance of Sylvaris arts.
[Skill Acquired: Abyssal Stillness (Epic) (Altered).]
[Skill Acquired: Titan's Bone-Density (Epic) (Altered).]
The first, [Abyssal Stillness], felt like a mountain of ice dropping into a boiling sea. It was a passive ntal and soul-ward that "Quietened" my interface. It wouldn't just resist a ntal attack; it made my consciousness invisible to it. My soul-scape beca a transparent vacuum, making it nearly impossible for psionics to latch onto.
The second, [Titan's Bone-Density], surged through my fra with the weight of liquid lead. It used my neutron-heavy biology to anchor . I wasn't just heavy; I was unmovable. My bones beca conceptual anchors of the material world.
The silver streaks hit the floor with a concussive boom that sent basalt shrapnel flying like bullets through the Veresian ranks.
The smoke cleared to reveal three monsters.
The woman, who introduced herself in the Glimpse as Pharia, had hair of liquid rcury that slithered over her shoulders and faceted, insect-like silver eyes. Beside her was Xylex, a literal monolith of a man with skin resembling cracked shale and limbs that radiated planetary mass. Between them was Orobus, the Mind-Weaver, his slender fra draped in a veil of humming athyst smoke that slled like ozone and forgotten nightmares.
"Class is in session," I whispered.
I used [Omnipresence] to simply exist directly above Xylex. I swung the two massive obsidian blades wreathed in the screaming Fla. I didn't have to hide it anymore. My dual nature exploded into the air — the Fla of Entropy mixed with the silence of the Void.
I brought the blades down with enough kinetic energy to pulverise a country. Xylex roared, attempting to manifest a shield of compressed gravity, but my flas instantly deleted the "Permission" for his mana to hold form within the Lattice.
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The blades bit into his granite-hard shoulders. Golden blood — dense, hot, and tallic — sprayed across my face. It tasted like wealth and stolen stars.
"He is warded!" Orobus scread.
The Mind-Weaver flared his purple veil, sending a massive ripple of psionic malice toward my soul. It should have mind-wiped a planet.
The psionic wave struck and... was lost. It found nothing to grip, disappearing into the infinite emptiness of my internal continent. Orobus' facets flickered in a microsecond of genuine mortal confusion.
Pharia, the rcury-mage, lunged. She touched the floor, and ten identical copies resembling her erupted from the stone. They seed to share her stats, her aura-signature, and had dark, rcury-slick reflections of my swords.
The clones lunged in a synchronized wall of my own potential violence.
The battle-mania I'd been repressing for subjective years burst its gates. I could fully unleash. I could finally beco nothing but claws, teeth, and biting nothingness. I parried three decapitating strikes from the clones, used a micro-gravity pulse to trip a fourth, and then took a brutal cross-slash from a fifth that opened my chest from collarbone to hip.
I felt the agony — the visceral, red-hot thrill of my own heart beating against open air — and I laughed. I was covered in a mix of my own blood and the liquid starlight Pharia was bleeding.
Alecton, watching from the periphery, let out a unified, guttural roar that matched the Drums of Wrath. He saw being shredded — my left forearm severed at the wrist by Pharia, my lungs collapsed by a backhand from Xylex — only to see grinning through the gore.
"Let's dance!" I shouted, grinning through bloodied teeth.
Using [Syntropy], I reversed the effect of all of their strikes. Reality warped backward two seconds. My forearm zipped back onto the bone; my lungs re-inflated with a wet hiss; my chest-wound vanished. I drew on the spent energy of their attacks to refuel my fire.
Suddenly, the cavern's atmosphere turned a dark, pulsing crimson. The divine approval of Wrath was no longer a hint — it was a literal ocean of atmospheric force. The planet itself recognized a struggle of sufficient Vengeance and offered a buffet. My white-gold fire roared, absorbing the ambient rage until it turned a deep, blood-gold hue.
Alecton, seeing laughing while being forcefully disassembled by hostile gods, couldn't hold back and stay on the sidelines. He discarded his broken spear and launched like a crimson cot.
"FLA BROTHER! LET US RECLAIM THE SKY!"
He provided the anvil. Alecton crashed into Xylex, pinning the monolith giant in a wrestling grip that would have atomized a regular human. He drew so deeply from his Wrath-Ring that his own skin charred to the bone as they tumbled through the obsidian pipes.
"I'll anchor him!" Alecton spat through a jaw half-burned away.
I manifested a focused sphere of Void directly inside Xylex's chest cavity, utilizing [Omnipresence] to ignore his mana barriers and physical density entirely. Then, using [The Void-Star's Hunger], I didn't just drain mana — I began drinking everything. His physical structural Essence, his entire Core, his cultivated Body, even his own Soul.
I fully intended on making them feel how the people they've kept starving and hopeless felt for so many centuries.
Xylex shrieked — a high-pitched grinding sound of glass on stone — before he imploded inward, his Tier 9 structural data filed away into my inner library. His mass collapsed into a pebble that I crushed into grey soot.
Pharia and Orobus looked horrified.
A few more minutes of desperately using many of the cards they held only to be rebuffed by my naturally high resistances due to the [Hunger] and newly acquired skills. The little that did get through got reversed by [Syntropy] right away.
After realizing that I was not running out of mana any ti soon, they tried to escape into the sub-layers of the Lattice. They were Apex predators who had suddenly realized they were just the biggest fish in a small tank.
"Where are you going?" I asked, smiling.
Using the spatial authority of [Omnipresence], I hardened the vacuum. The strings of reality went rigid, forming an inescapable net. Pharia slamd into a wall of invisible force where a door to the void should have been.
I appeared behind her and caught her rcury-neck in my left hand and engaged [Gluttony]. The black bracelet on my arm didn't just vibrate; it shrieked in excitent, sohow converting the atmospheric Fury into raw power. It latched onto her conceptual light and began to drink like it was starving.
She flaked away into starlight-dust before she could finish a prayer.
Only Orobus was left. The mind-specialist huddled on the floor, his smoke dissipating, his facets dim and weeping ichor. I walked toward him slowly, the sound of the planetary drums reaching a bone-shaking crescendo in the background. My tattered armor hung in scraps, exposing my roadmap of Syntropy scars and the terrifying white-gold engine rotating in my ribs.
"You are not gods," I told the Mind-Weaver, his ntal shields fluttering like wet paper. "You're just parasites with big piles of essence."
I opened my hand and let [The Void-Star's Hunger] take him. I inhaled his centuries of ditation, his intricate ntal traps, and his high-tier light-speed cognitive fraworks. It was a dizzying rush of Tier 9 Concepts that almost overwheld my Soul before the [Symphony] smoothed the ripples.
The cavern finally, truly fell silent.
The siphoning cables gave one final, spasming throb — a massive backflow of essence as the local grids failed — and then went stone cold. The drain on the Veresian world had been severed.
I stood in the center of a wrecked cathedral of iron and glass. My breathing was a jagged, tallic rasp. I felt weighted down — not by injury, but by the raw volu of three Tier 9 Ascendants currently being partitioned and stored within the obsidian continent of my Soul.
Alecton was lying on his back near the base of the spire. He was a horrific sight — most of his tattered mantle gone, his torso half-incinerated from drawing too hard on his ring. Yet, a serene, terrifying peace rested on his obsidian face.
I walked over and sat on the stone beside him, leaning my back against the basalt.
"In flas... and fire," Alecton wheezed, blood bubbling on his lips as he offered a shattered, proud grin. "They died like vermin... did you see it, Eren? They couldn't even put up a fight against whatever you used…"
"I saw it," I said, placing a blood-stained hand on his shoulder. I used [Syntropy] one final ti — not to restore his youth, which I had tried and found out was Soul related — but to solidify his remaining spirit so he wouldn't go out in the dark.
I looked up at the ceiling. The lavender hues of the Aegis were being devoured.
The sky above the central spire surrendered to an Indigo darkness so dense it made my soul-ward hum in defensive preparation. The true Master of the Planet had arrived — the Architect of the siphons. A Peak Tier 9 presence manifested in the air, landing fifty yards away with a pressure that caused several Veresian soldiers at the far end of the cavern to vomit from the re atmosphere of the being.
He wore robes of void-silk that rippled like oil and held a staff carved from the bone of a universe-shaking beast.
"Big boss is here," I whispered, reaching into my soul. My Fla instantly reacted, the grey Entropy converging with the deep blood-red of Wrath.
The Lord of the Shattered Chain hauled himself to his feet using his glass spear as a crutch. He leaned into , sharing the burden of standing. He grinned at the approaching god, a predator that had finally seen the king bleed.
"Burn them all," Alecton whispered.
"Every last one of them," I promised.
I flared my Domain, the white-gold light illuminating the abyss for miles, pushing back against the Indigo shadows of the Tier 9 Lord. Class was about to end, but I was going to make sure the master didn't survive the graduation ceremony.
Round two began with the sound of thunder.
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