Chapter 132: Stay Alert

The crystal bridge narrowed as they stepped across the void.

Purple stars floated in the dark void below. Ahead of them stood the massive polygon fortress, its dark violet mirrors reflecting the starlight at unsettling angles.

Evren stepped through the archway with his Frost-Bane Cleaver, with Amber and Zephyra right beside him.

A huge hexagonal arena opened up before them.

The floor was made of polished black stone that stretched nearly a hundred yards wide. Surrounding the perimeter were six towering mirror walls, each rising fifty feet into the air. The air inside smelled of ozone, frozen metal, and dark void rot.

"Stay alert," Evren whispered. "The pressure here is on another level."

Amber gripped her dragon-bone sabers tightly, feeling the air press down against her shoulders. "It feels like the whole room is holding its breath."

Zephyra crouched near a perimeter pillar, her fingers resting lightly on the trigger of her whip-blade. "There’s no cover in here. If the boss attacks from all sides, we have nowhere to run."

CRACK.

A loud, thunderous fracture split the ceiling above.

The pitch-black void above the arena tore wide open like ripped fabric. Thick plumes of oily purple miasma poured through the crack, hissing as they touched the cold floor.

ROOOAAAR!

A deafening roar shook the entire fortress, vibrating so violently that the smooth floor tiles groaned under their boots.

From the tear above, a massive shape dropped from the sky.

The creature slammed into the center of the arena, sending a shockwave of wind and purple sparks across the polished ground.

Evren braced his feet, his dark coat whipping in the gale as he locked eyes with the beast.

It was a sixty-foot monstrosity.

Its segmented body resembled a massive armored serpent, covered in heavy plates of jagged black void-glass that interlocked like dragon scales. Along its spine ran rows of sharp amethyst crystals that hummed with unstable dimensional mana.

Its head was crowned with four curved horns, and where its face should have been, a swirling vortex of black gravity spun like a miniature black hole.

The S-Rank Mutated Void Devourer.

Deep inside its armored chest, the dark catalyst they had come for was already radiating a suffocating void pulse.

"That thing is massive," Amber said through gritted teeth, solar fire flaring along her blades.

Before anyone could move, the Devourer raised its horned head.

HUUUUM!

The six towering mirror walls surrounding the arena lit up with dark violet light. Instantly, the beast’s reflection appeared in every single mirror. But instead of remaining flat glass images, the reflections moved independently.

Six identical, sixty-foot Void Devourers reared back simultaneously, opening their gravity maws wide.

ROOOOOAAAR!

Six deafening roars echoed through the arena at the same time. The sound was so intense that blood nearly leaked from the ears of anyone listening.

"Which one is real?!" Amber shouted over the noise.

"All of them are firing!" Zephyra warned.

From the gaping maws of all six beasts, crackling spheres of purple void energy began to form. Six massive beams of concentrated void light shot across the arena, intersecting in a deadly crossfire aimed straight at their position!

"Up!" Evren shouted.

Amber didn’t hesitate. Her radiant wings exploded from her back. She grabbed Zephyra by the waist, launching straight up into the air just as the beams crossed.

KABOOOOM!

The center of the arena detonated in a violent explosion of purple flames and flying crystal shrapnel.

Amber banked sharply near the ceiling, angling her golden wings downward. A shimmering kinetic shield flared from her feathers, deflecting a barrage of razor-sharp glass shards that whistled past them.

"Thanks, Amber!" Zephyra called out, steadying her breath.

"Hold tight!" Amber replied, banking in a wide arc. "I’ll draw their high-angle fire. You find a vantage point to watch Evren’s back."

She swung Zephyra toward a high crystal support beam near the wall.

Zephyra flicked her wrist. The whip-blade shot out, its diamond-steel wire wrapping tightly around the beam. With a sharp tug, Zephyra pulled herself up onto the narrow ledge, crouching fifty feet above the ground.

Down below, through the swirling smoke of the explosion, Evren walked out completely unscathed.

He hadn’t run, and he hadn’t dodged. His SS-Rank Titan Body Forge had absorbed the concussive shockwave without leaving a single scratch on his skin.

The Devourer’s six copies hissed in fury, their spines rattling like blades. The beast coiled its body and slammed its tail against the floor.

The entire arena began to warp.

Under immense spatial pressure, the six towering mirror walls groaned as they slowly tilted inward. Space itself bent like folded paper, attempting to crush all three of them inside an inescapable prism trap.

"Evren! The walls are closing in!" Amber shouted from the air, firing crescent waves of solar fire at the mirrors, but the flames deflected off the warped spatial barrier.

"Let them close," Evren said in a chillingly calm voice.

He planted his boots wide in the center of the arena.

He closed his eyes for a split second, feeling the kinetic flow of the room. He didn’t care about the six optical copies, and he didn’t care about the folding space.

"You want to play with gravity?" Evren opened his eyes, a cold blue light flashing across his irises. "Let me show you how it’s done."

BOOM!

Evren unleashed his skill: SS-Rank Gravity Domain!

There was no flash of fire, and no sound of magic; only a terrifying, invisible weight that dropped from the ceiling like a falling continent.

A fifty-meter circle centered on Evren instantly transformed into a crushing high-pressure zone, multiplying the local gravitational pull by fifty times!

With a muffled boom, the air violently imploded.

The immense downward weight slammed the tilting mirror walls back into place. Under the force, the warped space flattened out like wrinkled paper smoothed by a press.

Across the six towering mirrors, deep spiderweb cracks exploded across the glass. The illusionary reflections couldn’t withstand the sudden fifty-fold gravity surge and shattered into millions of falling shards!

SCREEEEEECH!

A single, agonized shriek echoed from the right side of the arena.

With the fake reflections destroyed, the true S-Rank Mutated Void Devourer was pinned flat against the stone floor.

Its sixty-foot serpentine body was smashed onto the stones under fifty times its own mass. The heavy black glass plates along its ribs groaned and cracked under the weight, pinning its massive claws flat against the floor so hard it couldn’t even lift its head.

"There you are," Evren murmured, stepping forward.

High on the ceiling ledge, Zephyra looked down at the pinned beast, her violet eyes widening with sudden recognition.

"Chairman! Look at its chest!" Zephyra shouted, pointing down with her blade. "The core between its ribs!"

Beneath the cracked glass plates on the monster’s chest was a fist-sized, dark purple crystal.

It didn’t reflect any light. While the thousands of glass shards around it glittered like stars, this single stone swallowed every ray of illumination, creating a pitch-black void at its center.

The Umbral Heart-Stone.

The final catalyst needed to purge the last twenty-five percent of shadow rot from Zephyra’s veins and restore her mana channels.

The S-Rank beast thrashed violently, realizing it was pinned. In a final burst of rage, the black vortex inside its mouth began to spin at terrifying speed, gathering all its remaining void mana to unleash a self-destructing singularity burst!

"It’s trying to blow the room!" Amber called out, diving downward with both sabers blazing.

"It won’t get the chance," Evren said as he tightened his two-handed grip on the five-foot Frost-Bane Cleaver, raising the dark steel blade.

A sub-zero mist exploded from the edge, instantly frosting the polished stone floor beneath his boots into white ice.

Evren gathered his SS-Rank kinetic strength into his right arm, locking his eyes on the beast’s exposed neck.

"Time to end this."