Chapter 199: System True Identity
It detonated between the knight and Apophis mid-dive, dragging both of them in for a split second. Apophis beat her wings hard, breaking the pull. The knight stabbed into a gravity well to hold position, cracks forming under his boots.
Ben shot through the aftermath like a spear. His fist struck the knight’s jaw. appendages stabbed toward Apophis’s chest. Both blocked, but barely.
He spun, grabbed Apophis mid-air, and slamd her into the knight. Both enemies reeled. But they didn’t fall.
The knight countered with a thrust, piercing Ben’s side. Blood exploded outward.
Apophis struck with a claw, ripping across Ben’s back. He scread, but instead of pulling away, he drew in their energy. The mont the wounds connected, his appendages latched on.
Consu.
Aether and system-light poured into him again. It was unstable, violent, but he drank it anyway. His muscles bulged. His skin cracked, black veins crawling up his neck.
The battlefield cracked again. The floating landmasses began to collapse inward. Storms of gravity pulled everything to the center. Reality twisted, bent, and began to break.
Above them, the sky itself fractured.
Ben stood, chest rising and falling, dark matter spiraling behind him. “You wanted a god?” he rasped. “You made one.”
He raised both arms. The battlefield shattered.
Conflicting energies swirled violently, dark aether, divine light, warped gravity. They collided at the center of the battlefield, and for one terrifying heartbeat, the world held its breath.
Then it exploded.
BOOM.
The blast was unlike anything before. The gravitational core ruptured in a pulse of raw force, shredding what was left of the terrain.
Floating landmasses were pulled in, crushed, then flung apart like shrapnel. Ti twisted. Light bent. Reality folded into itself and scread.
From the heart of the chaos, the knight reerged, dragging himself free of the shockwave, his armor glowing with fading system sigils.
He planted his sword into the fractured stone beneath him, breathing hard.
“No more holding back…”
He extended his hand, and the ground around him ignited, flas surging up from deep earth, molten and wild. Thunder cracked overhead as a second wave of divine lightning answered his call.
Earth. Fla. Thunder. His core flared as he burned everything.
From above, laughter echoed through the storm. Apophis Her wings were torn, her body scorched, but her grin had never been wider.
“Never in my life,” she said between ragged breaths, “did I imagine I’d fight alongside a guideline.”
Dark water coiled around her body like armor, shimring with warped reflections. She lifted her arms, and gravity bent again, folding space around her like a cloak.
The knight looked up at her, eyes narrowed. Then, he nodded.
Power surged between them. For a mont, their energies fused. They shot forward, side by side, toward Ben.
Ben didn’t retreat. He opened his arms, grinning as gravitational appendages spiraled around him.
“Co on then.”
The impact was world-ending.
The collision created a blinding white flash, then blackness as the space around them imploded. Sound vanished. Energy scread silently in every direction, devouring everything in a perfect sphere of destruction.
When the light faded,
Dust and fractured space drifted across the cracked battlefield.
All three float at the center. The knight’s armor was shattered, his sword cracked down the center. His arm trembled, barely able to hold the hilt.
Apophis staggered, one wing broken, blood pouring from sharp wound across her ribs. Her dark water no longer swirled, it dripped like tar.
And Ben… body torn, black veins glowing under shredded skin. Chunks of his armor had been blasted away. One of his appendages was missing, burned to nothing.
But he grinned. His eyes glead with unstoppable fire. He looked at both of them, the broken knight, the bleeding daemon queen, and laughed under his breath.
“I get it now,” Ben said, voice sharp with clarity. “You… guideline. You’re no divine being. You’re just another traveler.”
The knight’s eyes twitched.
Ben stepped forward slowly, dark aether flickering around his shoulders like a cloak.
“You were defeated. Killed. Then your soul was bound by the system and turned into a tool, a guideline.”
At first, the understanding had co in fragnts. Consuming the system had only shown him pieces, blurred mories, incomplete information.
But as the dark aether fused with system energy, sothing inside him shifted.
The two forces collided, They exploded.
What was left behind, what survived, was pure, and it was in that mont Ben saw it clearly: the knight wasn’t an AI, wasn’t a puppet. He was a soul. A person. A prisoner.
“The system… .” He narrowed his eyes. “It’s like a living machine, a massive construct layered like a magical array. Dozens, maybe hundreds of layers stacked together, like a computer too complex to understand at a glance.”
He lifted his hand.
“You can see the motherboard… but inside every chip is another circuit board. Another mind. Another soul.”
His eyes narrowed.
“Each ti the system gets a new host, it takes the soul of the previous one. Binds it.”
His tone dropped.
“And you’re not the only one in there… are you?”
The knight didn’t answer. But the silence said enough.
Ben turned toward Apophis, eyes cold.
“And you. You said the system was designed to find soone strong enough to hold your all Daemon power. But that’s not its only purpose, is it?”
Apophis raised an eyebrow, her expression unreadable.
“If it were just about transferring power, there’d be no reason to keep all those souls locked inside. But from what I’ve seen… there are dozens trapped in my system alone.”
He clenched his fists. “And I think I know why.” He looked down at the black veins crawling along his arms.
“The Hive Sovereign skill… It didn’t co from the system.”
He t Apophis’s gaze.
“It ca from one of the souls sealed inside it.”
A pause.
“That ans each soul has its own legacy. Its own skill. Like my knight here, he’s an expert swordsman. That’s not sothing you ‘program.’ That’s sothing you were.”
The knight looked down, jaw tight
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