dkrc Chapter 119 - 1/8
Chapter 119 - 1/8
And Eugen felt it.
Not pain, but dissolution. As if the armor was forgetting what it was. The enchantment on the pauldrons creaked, golden metal losing temperature, consecration beginning to undo layer by layer.
"If I get any closer... the armor stops existing."
"Then me."
He took a step back.
The sphere stopped.
They stayed like that, man and mist, separated by ten meters of charged air, like two predators measuring distance.
"Smart. It knows I’m evaluating it."
Eugen looked at the helmet in his hand. It had come off by itself when the mist got close, consecration failing first on the peripheral pieces.
He threw it away.
He opened his inventory, took out a potion, and drank it without ceremony. Then another.
"Advanced revitalization. I’m going to need a lot of these."
He took out the first scroll.
He tore it.
His aura changed, imperceptible to the common eye, but the air around him became slightly denser, elemental affinity increasing.
•-•-•⟮ Scroll: Amplifier ⟯•-•-•
Blood dripped from his nose.
•-•-•⟮ Scroll: Latent Mana ⟯•-•-•
He continued.
•-•-•⟮ Scroll: Elemental Tuner ⟯•-•-•
Second scroll. Third. Fourth.
•-•-•⟮ Scroll: Elemental Tuner ⟯•-•-•
•-•-•⟮ Scroll: Elemental Tuner ⟯•-•-•
The sphere changed color, amber turning golden, then white, then something that had no name in any cataloged spectrum.
It recognized what he was doing.
It waited anyway.
"At my current rank, I can only do this after overloading my body with elemental tuning. It costs time. It costs tissue."
"But it’s Light Compression tuned four times..."
Eugen spread his legs slightly, one behind the other. He stretched his arm back, mana concentrating in his palm, light condensing into a pinpoint the size of a pinhead.
Then growing.
"Sun Lance!"
He launched it.
It was too fast to see, not a projectile, a beam, crossing the entire room in the blink of an eye.
The mist rose like a protective curtain, layer upon layer of condensed dissolution, blocking.
The Lance pressed against it.
Eugen stretched out his hand, controlling the distance, pushing, slowly spinning the lance.
The core responded, waves of energy pulsing, the hall growing brighter, pressure increasing in all directions.
"AAAAHHH..."
•-•-•⟮ Scroll: Elemental Tuner ⟯•-•-•
The lance spun faster like a perfect screw, piercing the mist.
It reached the core.
And stopped... Like touching fabric, the Sun Lance, condensed four times, tuned to the limit of what Eugen’s body could sustain...
It stopped.
The core absorbed it. Returned double.
The beam came back, twice as big, twice as fast, straight toward the center of Eugen’s chest.
He smiled.
His left hand rose, fingers spread, palm forward.
"It’s light."
"I control light."
He caught it.
The beam stopped ten centimeters from his chest plate, absurd energy pressing, trying to pierce through, heating the air around until the stone began to sweat.
It cost him. Blood dripped from his nose again, a vein in his left eye bursting, red spreading across the sclera.
But he held it.
•-•-•⟮ Scroll: Elemental Tuner ⟯•-•-•
The lance changed, transformed, doubled in power, now in the hands of someone born to manipulate photons.
The rigid beam turned into a whip, light folded and tense like a string that wants to be straight but cannot.
"That was it."
"I needed it to return double."
"Because doubled... I can hold you."
The mist advanced, first wave, fast, coming from the flank.
Eugen didn’t retreat, he just moved his hand.
The light whip cut horizontally, passing through the mist without touching it.
The heat of condensed light passing centimeters from the mist was enough. The mist retreated, dispersing at the edges where the heat reached.
**TSSSSSK.**
Second wave, from above.
Eugen jumped, backflip, whip spinning in an arc over his head, landed on top of the mist itself for half a second before it dissolved like a trampoline.
He leaped.
In the air, weightless for two seconds, he moved both wrists.
The whip spun double, two turns, three, accelerating, heat increasing with each rotation.
The mist tried to rise to reach him.
The whip came down first.
Each impact without contact, only heat, only proximity, snow dissolving at the edges that couldn’t reform fast enough.
He landed.
He spun on the ground, mist coming from the right, rose on one knee, wrist turning, whip sweeping horizontally close to the ground.
The mist split, not destroyed, separated. For three seconds there was a hole in the dissolution field.
Eugen didn’t wait the three seconds.
He ran through the hole.
The mist closed behind him, fast, furious, trying to catch up.
The core stayed still.
Watching.
"He is learning that the heat of tuned photons dissolves the mist."
"And that I never stop moving."
"Because stopping means it reaches me."
Whip in his left hand, he spun his body, added hip rotation, launched diagonally.
The mist retreated to the right.
Eugen went to the right, not chasing the mist, using the space it opened.
Three steps. Sideways somersault over the tongue of mist that came from the ground. He landed, crouched, whip scraping the ground in a semicircle around himself.
Bubble of safety, heat keeping the mist at a distance.
Five seconds of breathing.
Blood running down his chin. Nose, eye, somewhere on his scalp that he hadn’t processed yet.
"I’m spending more than I expected.... But the core too."
"Look at the edges."
The edges of the mist were irregular, where the whip had passed close, the dissolution wasn’t fully reforming. Small gaps. Imperfections accumulating.
"It has a regeneration limit."
"And I’m reaching it."
Eugen stood up.
The mist condensed above, forming a heavy platform, falling.
Eugen didn’t dodge.
"If the dissolution depends on the activity of the photons..."
"Then maybe it depends on heat."
"Photons aren’t just light... but unfortunately I won’t have the strength to maintain the whip while I do the [inverse]."
The whip disappeared, [Inverse: Luminous] as soon as he inverted the function...
Instead of amplifying the heat of the surrounding photons, it began to suck, pulling temperature from the air, from the scattered photons, from the mist itself descending.
•-•-•⟮ Scroll: Mana Control ⟯•-•-•
The falling mist froze in the air.
It didn’t stop, it froze. Literally. Crystals of dissolution solidified, a structure that existed to undo things becoming rigid, unable to move, unable to absorb.
The entire hall turned white for seconds, frost forming on the walls, on the floor, in the still air.
Silence of absolute cold.
Eugen ran with force, each step cracking the thin layer of ice that had formed on the ground.
The frozen mist around him, a statue of dissolution, suspended, harmless for counted seconds.
The core ahead. Five meters. Three. Two.
"Almost there." He felt it.
The mist was thawing, photons from the environment reheating the structure, heat returning faster.
"Too soon."
The dissolution returned.
And Eugen’s body no longer had the strength for that. The Luminous Cold had sucked what remained of the thermal reserve from his own body to work.
His knees buckled before the mist reached him.
He fell two meters from the core.
Hand stretched out... The mist enveloped him.
And the dissolution began.
A force field born from the core, invisible walls closing, squeezing.
**CRRRR.**
Armor protesting. Ribs protesting more.
Eugen’s mana began to drain, actively sucked away.
•-•-•⟮ Scroll: Mana Boost ⟯•-•-•
•-•-•⟮ Scroll: Mana Boost ⟯•-•-•
•-•-•⟮ Scroll: Mana Boost ⟯•-•-•
"It’s not enough. It doesn’t recharge as fast as I lose it."
The field tightened, the sword coming out of the armor, launched to the other side of the room by the torque of the force.
The core exploded.
Eugen was thrown... he rolled, hit a wall hard and ugly... the mist came like a spike, piercing the wall where his head had been half a second before.
He drank a potion while running.
He dodged the second, jumped, spun, used the wall to change direction.
The third came from below. It hit him.
"Shit..."
He flew, out of control, accelerated, the ceiling coming fast.
He took out a potion while rising.
The core exploded below, the wave reached before the ceiling.
Eugen hit the ceiling with the potion in his mouth and went to the ground again, faster, harder.
"Bolia Proteket"
It surged by instinct, a sphere of condensed mana around his body, cushioning the impact.
The earth from the ground rose, the core manipulating the environment, enveloping the bubble, squeezing.
Inside, Eugen spat blood.
A lot.
Armor breaking, right pauldron giving way, left greave bending.
"If this essence is this strong it’s because someone already took one or more before me."
"In the game the difficulty increases as fewer remain."
"So I’m not the first."
"And yet I need to be the last."
The bubble exploded. Eugen chose to explode it, repelling the earth in all directions.
Without waiting for the dust to settle, he extended both hands, raised the earth around him and protected himself from the core, earth against earth.
"I just need this delay."
"And the stupid will of the core to kill me... it’s now or never."
Dash.
Maximum speed, all the remaining mana converted into movement, body going faster than damage could register.
The core hadn’t moved from its place.
It was there.
Finger centimeters away.
The smile fell.
"I don’t feel heat."
The hand passed through.
Speed calculated only to get there, no way to stop.
Eugen went through the sphere, came out the other side, slammed into the wall with all the inertia of a dash that had no brakes.
Wall cracking. Wrist breaking. Vision blurring.
... silence
Hand in the inventory, fingers finding the potion by touch because his eyes weren’t working properly.
The core appeared in front of him.
Not where it had been, in front of him.
The little potion bottle exploded, the core did that, simply did it.
"Learned [Photon Step]." Eugen said in the voice of someone who respected the enemy too late. "You fooled me well."
The sphere shone, fervent, intense, heating the air around until the stone began to melt at the edges.
Eugen’s body wasn’t responding, how many organs damaged he didn’t know, didn’t want to know now.
He raised his hand, slowly, trembling, fingers spread.
The hand fell and he fell with it.
and when the core wanted to explode
"Imago Dei." Was Eugen’s last thought.
...
everything became complete white, the kind of white that is not color but absence of premise.
And then the dungeon disappeared... vaporized
as if the floors, the creatures, the corridors, had never been there.
Silence.
Open night wind.
Stars.
Eugen in the center of a flat field, grass growing where stone had been, as if the dungeon was a dream the earth forgot.
And the core on the ground.
Intact, dark amber, pulsing weakly.
The only thing Imago Dei didn’t erase, because it couldn’t erase the essential, only the context.
And the core was essential.
Eugen was on the ground.
Not dramatically, he simply was, because his body had no more argument to stay standing.
The core rolled across the field until it touched his blood.
And disappeared.
Longer silence.
Eugen began to levitate, centimeters off the ground, involuntary.
The body absorbing the essence through the blood, integrating, healing from the inside out, tissue by tissue, organ by organ, armor by armor.
Not fast. Slow, like a scar forming in accelerated time.
and when he regained consciousness he was standing.
He stretched his arms, joints cracking back into place, back settling, neck turning.
He breathed deeply.
"Aaaaas."
He looked at the sky, open night, stars, cold air without the smell of sulfur.
"How fantastic... Kitsune Essence 1 of 9... only 8 left for me."
Voices among the debris.
Custodians emerging from the smoke that remained at the edges where the dungeon had been.
As if they had been there the whole time.
Waiting.
"See?" Eugen said without turning. "I told you it would take a while."
None answered.
One of them approached, extended a clean cloak and water.
Eugen took the water. Drank half and returned it.
He looked at the empty field where the dungeon had been, grass, night, wind.
He walked.
The Custodians closed formation around him without him asking.
"Worth spending the Imago Dei."
He thought.
"This time... next time it will be in the Hacker’s body."
worried about Haru, where did I fail?