(Content Warning: This chapter contains scenes of violence, gore, and intense combat. Reader discretion is advised.)
Level 5: Execution Grounds
There was no warning.
No build-up. There is no dream or ghost to cry through this one.
He was suddenly in the middle of a wide, cracked arena after a brutal shift that warped qi and space.
The wind blew through the black flags. No sigils. No mercy.
The sky was ash. The air was blood.
Stone stakes jutted from the ground like the ribs of giants. On each one rested shattered armor, burnt corpses, and dried bones.
The Execution Grounds.
The bell tolled once. Then the screaming began.
THUD. THUD. THUD.
Six massive figures crashed into the coliseum from the perimeter. They were Core Realm Rank 3 Berserkers, with armor fused into their skin and eyes glowing like molten brands. Their muscles were cords of hatred. Their waraxes were jagged with rust and dried blood.
They did not speak. They did not wait.
They charged like living cataclysms.
Charles didn't blink. He didn't breathe.
Raijin's Emberfang roared to life, lightning hissing across the ground as flame curled around the blade's edge like a hungry serpent. His entire body pulsed with overloaded qi, and he welcomed the pain now.
It dulled the sorrow.
"Come on, then," he spat, blood still dripping from his mouth. "You want a goddamn execution?"
He lunged to meet them.
The first Berserker's axe came screaming down. Charles ducked low, stepped into his strike, and shoved Raijin's Emberfang through the bastard's heart, letting the lightning do the talking. Flesh exploded in a fountain of plasma.
Another slammed into his side. Ribs cracked. He gasped, staggered, blood in his teeth.
"Fuck all of you!"
He spun. He roared. He let go.
Every ounce of technique dissolved into raw violence. He fought like a cornered wolf. There was nothing elegant or clean about it—only relentless, furious, and broken.
Blade met bone. Sparks kissed the air. The third Berserker grabbed his neck and lifted him like a rag doll.
Charles's eyes crackled with stormfire.
"Bad Move, Asshole."
He drove Raijin's Emberfang up through the bastard's chin. Flame burst from the top of the skull, turning brain to mist.
Another axe cleaved across his back. His coat split. His skin tore.
He screamed, pivoted, sliced through the next attacker's kneecap, then throat, then through the man's very will to live.
The fifth Berserker caught fire before he even made it halfway. A bolt of lightning shot from Charles's palm and turned his chest cavity into a lightning rod.
Only one remained.
A giant of a man, axe in one hand, a severed head in the other.
He smiled. So did Charles.
The clash was cataclysmic.
Sparks showered like stars falling from heaven as their weapons collided.
One swing.
Two.
Three.
Then Charles kicked him in the knee, spun over his shoulder, and drove Raijin's Emberfang into the back of his skull with a scream that cracked the sky.
The Execution Grounds were silent once more.
His breath came in broken gasps. One eye was swollen. His ribs throbbed. His arms were cut to ribbons.
His soul felt like it had been carved open.
He dropped to one knee, his blade stabbed into the stone to hold him up. His teeth clenched. His vision swam.
He wasn't just killing enemies. He was killing pieces of himself.
Level Cleared.
The moment he cleared the Execution Grounds, the world twisted.
Charles stumbled through an archway of flickering qi threads and blood-stained stone. His arms and legs hurt with every move as he moved on to the next stage.
The Spiral Gauntlet.
A maze of nightmares no one normally dared to venture.
The hallways spiraled in on themselves like a snake eating its own tail. Gravity twisted. Light fractured. The walls bled.
Level 6: The Iron March.
Golems of obsidian and jade lined the corridor, each ten feet tall with runes glowing like vengeful stars. They activated the moment he stepped forward.
"Fucking stone puppets," he muttered.
Their fists came like battering rams.
He moved between them with brutal precision, ignoring the pain in his ribs. Raijin's Emberfang flared like a thunderstorm given form. Lightning arced from wall to wall, searing stone, slicing joints, and overloading their cores.
He was a storm of violence.
Golem heads shattered against his shoulder. One tried to pin his leg. He screamed, spun, and detonated a burst of stormfire from his palm, melting its rune-seal and snapping its jaw with sheer force.
By the time the last construct fell, he was limping. But alive.
Level 7: Widow's Hall.
Darkness. Fog. And then, poison.
Assassins draped in violet cloaks and bone masks slid from the shadows like ghosts. Their blades gleamed with death. Their footsteps made no sound.
Charles's eyes narrowed. "Oh, it's this kind of bullshit, huh?"
The first dagger grazed his neck. He turned too late.
Another pierced his shoulder. Another nicked his thigh.
"Fuck!" he roared, twisting, slashing back. Raijin's Emberfang hissed with flame, igniting the mist. The air exploded in a violent whoosh, revealing the assassins mid-lunge.
He slashed one in half at the waist. Another turned to cinders. He caught the last one by the face and slammed her skull into the wall.
Poison burned in his veins.
He fell to one knee, vomiting blood.
His vision blurred. Muscles trembled. A snap in his right leg.
Fractured.
His lips curled into a grin. Wild. Defiant.
"Still breathing, motherfuckers."
He spat blood on the floor and dragged himself to the next portal.
Level 8: The Mirror Spiral.
He barely had time to gather his breath before the illusions began. The walls twisted. And then they appeared.
Amelia. Marcus.
Their silhouettes sharpened from the mist. Clad in Ziglar armor. Grinning like jackals.
"No..." Charles backed away, voice tight. "No, not them. Not now..."
Marcus's illusion laughed, sword drawn. "You should've stayed the family disgrace, Charlemagne."
Amelia leaned in, eyes full of venomous pity. "We had to do it. You were never going to be a Duke."
Then it replayed.
The illusion of Marcus slammed the hilt into Charles's head, blood spraying.
The gut-wrenching moment Amelia drove her attack into his dantian, the scream that tore from his lips, then went silent as everything inside him shattered.
"You bitch!" Charles screamed.
"Charlemagne Ziglar is dead!" he roared, stormfire licking up his arms, black veins crawling from his neck to his temple.
"You killed him, remember?!"
He unleashed everything. The room became a slaughterhouse of phantoms.
Amelia clones—dozens—came at him with their mocking smiles and mirrored blades.
He burned them alive. Stormfire Severance tore the walls apart.
Each illusion he killed stabbed him back in the soul, but he didn't care anymore.
He was an animal now: howling, bloody, broken.
Raijin's Emberfang became an extension of his rage. He fought with no technique. No elegance.
Just wrath.
Blades clashed. Walls screamed. Lightning devoured every dream and nightmare alike.
After everything was over, his left arm was dislocated and hung limp. His right eye was bleeding. He sputtered his breath in a choking manner.
However, he was still awake. Moreover, there is nothing in this cursed Spiral that could ever send Charlemagne Ziglar back down to failure again.
Not without a damn war.
Level 9: Abyssal Labyrinth
Teleportation arrays scrambled his sense of direction.
Every flicker of light brought vertigo. Each step felt like entering a new battlefield. Forward meant backward. Up became down. The air twisted, reality warped, and the ground shifted beneath his boots like breathing flesh.
Every corridor led to monsters.
There was no room to breathe. No space to think. Just pain. Motion. Survival.
A pack of Core Rank 4 Shadow Mages emerged from the dark, hoods drawn and eyes gleaming with voidfire. Their chants echoed like shattered memories, summoning spears of black lightning and rivers of smoke that screamed.
From the left, a Soulflame Banshee glided through the wall—skin translucent, her wail a jagged dagger against his skull.
Charles roared and lunged, Raijin's Emberfang flashing once before he spun mid-air, channeling lightning through his heel.
CRACK.
His kick landed on the side of a Shadow Mage's face, jaw snapping clean off in a mess of blood and corrupted bone.
Another mage stepped forward—too slow.
Charles reversed his grip, stabbed his blade through the mage's throat, and with brutal efficiency, lifted the body to use as a writhing shield against a barrage of soulflame bolts.
The corpse exploded in his arms. Skin seared.
His body screamed.
He didn't stop.
He charged through the smoke, scorched, coughing blood, and rammed Raijin's Emberfang into the banshee's chest, flooding her incorporeal form with stormfire.
She shrieked as her essence scattered like broken glass.
But more came.
Dozens. Their shadows multiplied. Their cries echoed louder.
And Charles, bloodied and snarling, cracked down to the soul, screamed back.
"Still not fucking enough!"
Level 10: Throne of Ash and Flame
The chamber stretched endlessly, a cathedral of ruin carved in black stone. The walls bled molten veins of lava, and above, a shattered sky spun with crimson stars. At its center sat an obsidian warlord—a creature too massive to be mortal.
Ten feet tall. Core Realm Rank 5. Built like a living fortress.
His halberd was forged of blacksteel, its edge crackling with hellflame, spitting violet sparks as if hungry to consume worlds. His armor bore the screaming faces of the damned, etched in torment.
He sat upon a black throne, serene and waiting, as if daring any fool to challenge his dominion.
Charles limped into the arena.
His robe was in tatters. One eye is nearly swollen shut. Blood soaked his abdomen. His ribs were bruised, broken, or both. His right leg dragged with every step.
Yet his gaze burned with sapphire lightning.
His voice was low. Hoarse. Daring.
"Come at me… You overgrown shit."
The warlord rose.
With a roar that split the air like an earthquake, the giant leapt forward. The ground cracked beneath his boots, the halberd spinning like a planetary blade of fire.
Charles didn't retreat.
He pushed off the stone, screaming in mid-air as he met the beast head-on.
BOOM
Metal clashed with metal.
Raijin's Emberfang, lit with wrath and stormfire, crashed against the descending halberd.
The impact shattered the air, sending shockwaves across the chamber. Pillars crumbled. The throne cracked behind them.
The warlord swung again.
CRACK.
Charles took the blow on his shoulder—his bone snapped clean out of place. He spun with the force, redirecting momentum into a fiery riposte.
The warlord rammed his blade forward. The spearhead pierced Charles's chest, slicing past ribs, ripping flesh. Blood erupted.
But he didn't fall.
He didn't scream.
He just glared through the agony, mouth twisting into a feral grin.
"You think this is pain?" he spat blood. "I've bled more watching my past burn."
He twisted his body, letting the halberd slide through just enough to bait it deeper. Then he drove his blade up with both hands, howling as his torn muscles screamed in anguish.
The Raijin Emberfang went straight into the warlord's chest.
The stormfire grew stronger. Thunder cracked. Lightning exploded.
The beast screamed, but not in anger. It was in defeat.
Charles pushed harder, stabbing the creature's cursed heart with the blade.
"For Elena!"
The warlord's huge body exploded with one last flash of lightning and flame, engulfed in a column of blue-white fire. His throne melted, and his halberd broke.
The black pyre fell apart.
And what about Charles?
He fell to his knees and started to cough up blood.
[Simulation Completed. Duration: 17 hours, 21 minutes, and 39 seconds in real time. 170 hours equivalent in time dilation. Cleared all 10 Tower Levels.]
The Trialmind Sphere faded.
Back in reality.
His breath rasped like torn bellows.
Raijin's Emberfang slipped from his hand, clattering beside him, its glow fading.
His bloodied body collapsed onto the obsidian floor. Steam rose from his skin. His breath was ragged. Cracks had formed along his arms and back, thin lines of overburned meridian stress.
[SIGMA: Warning. Core-body synchronization at 7%. Cardiovascular strain: 91%.
Fractures: 3 ribs, 1 clavicle, 1 scapula. Right shoulder: dislocated. Left femur: hairline crack.
Blood loss is critical. Qi reserves: 4%.
Mental cognition threshold breached. Subject unconscious.]
There was no response. Just silence.
A slow, rhythmic twitch in his fingers. Steam rising from his skin like a spent forge.
Then something changed.
[Emergency Lockdown: Initiated.
Backup Vital Monitoring Enabled. Sedation Protocol: Denied. No consent override available.
Deploying Guardian Asset.]
Outside the sealed chamber, Nimbus, the Azure Tempest Dragon, stirred. She lifted her head the moment the pulse from SIGMA's emergency beacon flickered through the barriers.
Her tail uncurled. Her pupils narrowed.
In the language of dragons, she growled with low fury, "He pushed too far again…"
Nimbus rose and stepped into the training chamber. She had to shift into a smaller spectral-projection form to fit through the doorway.
Charles lay there, on the cracked stone and blood-slicked floor. Pale. Barely breathing. He was a shadow of the storm he had been just minutes before.
Nimbus surrounded him like a fortress and wouldn't let him go.
The dragon said in a voice that echoed through the suite, "No one enters."
A wave of qi pressure surrounded the room, closing it off.
The note on the door still fluttered slightly with residual qi-charged air, "Do Not Disturb." Or else.
And at this point, the words sounded more like a curse than a warning.
Inside the chamber, SIGMA continued its readings, voice eerily calm yet urgent.
[Vital signs are slowly stabilizing. Intermittent cardiac arrhythmia noted. Brain waves are unstable.
Temporal blackout estimated duration: at least 72 hours.
Initiate auto-repair of neural pathways post-unconscious phase.
Log Update: Trialmind Run Status: Complete.]
Then, in a voice barely more than a whisper to itself:
[Memory bleed detected: High emotional flux. Subject Charles is… still dreaming of her.]
The flames had ended. But the storm inside him had only gone quiet.
Not gone. Never gone. Just waiting to awaken again.
Charles slept in the silence of ashes.
His body is broken. His mind... just barely whole. His soul? Still bleeding.
And Elena's memory never farther than the stormfire inside him.