Evolving My Undead Legion In A Game-Like World

Chapter 792: Arvens

Silence stretched between them.

The air of Hell seemed to grow heavier.

Caelum did not move.

"That will not be happening," he said flatly.

Arven’s eyes gleamed.

"Oh?" he said softly. "Then I suppose we have reached the interesting part of this conversation."

Caelum moved first.

There was no warning.

The moment Arven’s words fell, the air itself collapsed inward. Invisible pressure surged forward like a tidal wave, space compressing and folding under Caelum’s will.

Layers of compressed force stacked atop one another, converging on Arven’s position from every direction.

To use his law this openly meant only one thing.

Caelum was going all out.

Arven’s smile did not vanish.

Instead, his body split.

The space he occupied fractured, and in the span of a heartbeat, five figures stood where one had been.

One was the original Arven, still smiling, though the madness in his eyes dulled slightly, replaced by an unsettling calm.

The other four were wrong.

Each carried the same face, the same presence, yet their auras were wildly different. One looked vacant, eyes unfocused, as if barely aware of the world. One radiated cold detachment. One trembled faintly, lips twitching.

And the last.

The last looked insane.

That Arven grinned wide, teeth bared, eyes burning with manic delight as chaos rippled around him. His aura surged violently, unstable and wild, clashing against the compressed air bearing down on them.

Flames erupted.

The fire Arven raised was erratic and feral, twisting against Caelum’s air pressure, burning without pattern or restraint. Where the compressed atmosphere should have crushed everything flat, the flames tore through it instead, dispersing the attack in violent bursts of heat and distortion.

The clash detonated outward.

Caelum’s face tightened.

He remembered now.

More details surfaced from the fragments he had once dismissed as rumors.

Director Arven’s law was said to be tied to the greater Law of Chaos.

One that allowed his split personalities to manifest physically, each drawing upon a different aspect of his power. Each personality wielded something different.

The one standing against him now, the mad one, was the embodiment of destruction.

Fire.

Caelum reinforced his stance, air condensing around Michael protectively as he absorbed the backlash. His gaze flicked across the remaining Arvens, noting how the others simply observed, unmoving, as if this battle did not concern them at all.

The original Arven watched with quiet interest.

The mad Arven laughed.

Caelum exhaled slowly, eyes cold.

The laughter had not even finished echoing when the others moved.

The trembling Arven stepped forward.

His shoulders were hunched, arms drawn slightly inward as if bracing against something only he could feel. His eyes darted once toward Caelum, then immediately away, filled with a raw, instinctive fear that felt almost contagious.

The temperature dropped.

Frost spread across the air.

Pale mist rolled outward, carrying a biting chill that sank far deeper than the skin.

Ice.

But it was not the clean, cutting cold of simple elemental force.

The moment the frost expanded, Caelum felt it.

A subtle tightening in his chest. A faint hesitation, uninvited and unwelcome, tugging at the edges of his thoughts. The fear radiating from that Arven did not merely exist. It bled outward, seeping into the environment itself.

Emotion given form.

For a moment, Caelum felt like killing himself.

Caelum’s eyes sharpened instantly.

His will flared, air roaring around him as he crushed the creeping sensation before it could take root. The pressure field around Michael thickened in response, shielding him not only from the cold, but from the emotional influence threaded through it.

The trembling Arven flinched as the resistance hit him, frost cracking beneath his feet.

"I... I don’t like this," he muttered, voice barely audible. The ice wavered, but did not fade.

At the same time, the vacant Arven lifted his head.

His expression remained blank, eyes dull and unfocused, as if nothing in front of him truly existed. He raised one hand slowly, fingers loose and careless.

The space in front of him thinned.

The air itself seemed to lose substance, becoming hollow and weak, as though reality had been scraped away and left fragile in its place.

A narrow corridor of emptiness formed.

Everything caught within it was pulled forward

and launched ahead in a silent surge. There was no explosion, no roar, only sudden acceleration as matter was dragged along the line of least resistance.

Straight toward Caelum.

Caelum twisted his wrist, air condensing into dense barriers that slammed shut across the corridor, but the precision of the attack still drew a thin line between his brows.

The cold Arven moved next.

The surrounding air stilled.

Motion itself seemed to still.

The heat from the flames dulled. The drifting frost slowed. Even the chaotic Arven’s fire flickered.

Caelum felt his own air law resist instinctively, layers of pressure grinding against an opposing stillness that sought to flatten everything into quiet compliance.

Four manifestations.

Four expressions of the same fractured will.

The original Arven finally spoke, voice calm, almost gentle.

"Careful now," he said mildly. "If all of you pull at once, you’ll hurt the boy."

The mad Arven ignored him, flames roaring higher as he lunged again, laughter spilling freely from his throat.

Caelum drew a slow breath.

He was starting to regret coming to hell at all. At least if he wasn’t around, there’d be no sense of responsibility and what was happening now would be another man’s problem.

Unfortunately, he just happened to be available.

Caelum thrust his hand forward, aiming at the space between them. The compressed pressure detonated outward in a wide, indiscriminate burst, a collapsing dome of force meant to disrupt everything.

Before any of the Arvens could fully adjust, Caelum moved. Space warped around him as he seized Michael more tightly, the pressure field locking into a single direction.

Retreat.

He vanished in a violent surge, air folding inward as his figure blurred toward the far edge of the floor. The battlefield fell silent.

The original Arven watched the empty space, smile slowly widening.