Chapter 72: The Nonexistent Colossus
For an instant, Hodell seemed to be out of options.
The execution blade was already at his face. The black robed squad leader had both hands locked around the greatsword, his full weight behind the strike, the edge descending toward White Crow's visor with enough force to split a man and his armor in two.
Then the blade stopped.
It halted less than an inch from Hodell's helmet, not because he had blocked it, but because the squad leader suddenly realized, in absolute terror, that his own arms no longer obeyed him.
His fingers still gripped the hilt.
His muscles were still straining.
Yet the connection between thought and motion had been severed as cleanly as if someone had sliced through the nerves inside his body. The magic field that had been flowing through his armor and weapon like an extra pair of limbs had gone dead, or rather, it had been interrupted so completely that the entire circuit had seized up.
Beneath the faceplate, Hodell slowly opened his eyes.
"Why," he said, his voice deep and metallic through White Crow's amplifiers, "do you think I let you pin my arms so easily?"
Only then did the squad leader notice what had changed beneath their feet.
The shattered stake fragments, the scattered metal scraps, even the broken spear heads from the earlier clash had been quietly repositioned at some point. Through [Energy Simulation], Hodell had arranged them into a crude but razor precise reverse induction circle, simple in structure, vicious in effect.
The gray white suppression mist blanketing the street was not just troublesome. It was highly conductive.
The moment he had been locked down, Hodell had released a trace current through White Crow's outer plating. From that point on, the mist itself had become part of his power, an extension of his control.
"How is that possible?!"
The squad leader's pupils contracted violently.
Hodell did not answer.
He simply played the next card in his hand.
[Character Summon Card: Bone Engraving]
[Undead Chains]
A thick burst of dark green mist erupted out of nowhere.
Countless chains burst from it, slick with corrosive necrotic energy and radiating a chill that seemed to crawl straight into the marrow. They wrapped around the leader's greatsword, then coiled up his arms and torso like parasitic worms clinging to a corpse.
The squad leader screamed.
"This, this is necromancy! Bone Engraving's necromancy! How could you possibly"
The freezing corruption entered his body at once. His newly stabilized magic circulation stalled again, and the skin around the chains began to hiss and blacken.
He was still trapped in the pose of the killing blow, but now it was no longer execution. It was crucifixion.
Hodell moved.
He did not waste time trading spells.
He leaned into the locked spears restraining his arms and suddenly lunged forward with brute force. White Crow's power core roared into overload. The muscles in his shoulders and back swelled beneath the armor, and with the exoskeleton amplifying every motion, he yanked the two remaining Executors who were anchoring him straight off their feet and dragged them right in front of him.
Their expressions changed.
Too late.
"Die."
His right hand closed into a fist.
The thunder fire he had compressed in his palm all this time detonated inward, compacting into a violent core rather than flaring outward.
Then he punched.
Boom.
The first Executor's chest plate caved in.
Boom.
The second followed a heartbeat later.
It was not merely raw force. High frequency vibration shattered the armor at the point of impact, and the violent thunder fire energy surged through the cracks into their bodies, turning ribs, organs, and blood into a steaming mess before either of them could even cry out.
[You killed a Hunting Team member (Lv38), gained 21,000 EXP.] x2
[Killed a target 8 levels higher, additional 190% EXP bonus. Total EXP: 39,900. Personal output rate: 100%.] x2
[You gained an additional 39,900 EXP.] x2
[You gained 9 Trial Points.] x2
The two bodies slid off the spear shafts and collapsed heavily.
Only the leader remained.
Hodell walked toward him at a measured pace.
The man was half kneeling now, half bound, his face twisted beyond recognition by pain and disbelief. Every attempt to force his limbs to move only made the necrotic chains tighten further.
Hodell stopped in front of him and looked down.
"When you came here," he said, "didn't anyone teach you a basic rule?"
He reached out and gripped the other man's throat.
White Crow's fingers glowed dull red from concentrated heat.
"Don't play this kind of crude ambush in front of a mage."
Crack.
The neck snapped cleanly.
The last member of the hunting team fell limp.
[Battle ended. Based on the difference in numbers between enemies and allies, you gained an additional 29 Trial Points.]
[[Limit Trial]: Current progress 1067/1500]
[You completed the C rank mission [Siege]]
[Reward obtained: 200,000 EXP]
[Hidden requirement fulfilled: [Leave No Survivors]. Random extraction complete.]
[Please select two of the following five abilities:]
[1. [Blood Mark] Skill: Consumes 60 energy. Marks a target within your line of sight for 10 minutes. During the mark, all damage you deal applies [Minor Bleeding], reducing 12 HP per second, stackable up to 3 layers. The target cannot enter deep stealth.]
[2. [Binding Echo] Skill: Consumes 90 energy. After you successfully control a target, your next attack deals an additional 310 (+ Mystery x 1.4) damage and extends the control duration by 15 percent. Consecutive applications suffer diminishing returns.]
[3. [Airflow Perception] Perk: Your senses have been honed repeatedly. Even in absolute darkness or enclosed spaces, you can detect movement within 10 meters through airflow changes. Agility +6.]
[4. [Bone Pattern Conduction] Perk: Physical resistance +10 percent. When you take a single instance of damage exceeding 50 percent of your maximum HP, you forcibly disperse the impact, reducing that damage by 80 (+ Strength x 3).]
[5. [Execution Moment] Perk: When a target's HP is below, or about to fall below, 15 percent, your next attack deals additional true damage equal to 25 percent of the damage inflicted.]
Hodell's eyes swept down the list.
[Blood Mark] was a decent tracking skill, but the bleeding was insignificant, and he had little interest in using a slot on something that merely helped him look at a weak enemy's panel.
[Binding Echo] was good. More than good, really. The damage was solid, and extending control could be vicious in the right hands. The problem was equally obvious. At present, he did not possess a truly reliable control chain of his own.
[Airflow Perception] would be useful in special environments, and the agility boost was generous. But its ceiling was limited, and his current sensory strength was already abnormally high.
That left the final two.
[Bone Pattern Conduction] offered immediate survivability. Ten percent physical resistance was already excellent, and the burst damage reduction would save his life when it mattered most.
As for [Execution Moment]
Hodell's eyes sharpened slightly.
True damage.
This was his first real encounter with the term, and he immediately understood its value.
Ignore physical defense. Ignore magic resistance. Ignore mental barriers. Ignore all the annoying excuses people wrapped around themselves.
Since it scaled off damage already dealt, it would never truly go out of date.
He made his choice.
[You have obtained the perk [Bone Pattern Conduction]!]
[You have obtained the perk [Execution Moment]!]
A cool, heavy sensation spread down his spine at once.
The deep fatigue left by the battle vanished almost immediately, replaced by a dense, grounded feeling, as if his skeleton had become heavier, tougher, more real. Steel bones and iron sinews. The comparison was crude, but not inaccurate.
Hodell rubbed his chin.
Sixteen perks.
That number was absurd.
A level fifty five player having six good perks was already considered fortunate. He now had sixteen, and most of them were useful rather than decorative. Refusing those strange subclass options along the way such as [Executioner], [Outlaw], [Enforcer], and [Agent] had clearly been the right decision.
He exhaled slowly and reviewed the battle.
"Whether the trap worked or not, I have to be more careful from here on."
He already had the medal. From now on, stability came first.
With that in mind, he turned, found the hidden observation device perched behind a broken wall lamp, and kicked it off the wall.
Far away, in the monitoring room, Morin stared at the feed as it dissolved into darkness and static.
The reflected noise flashed in his eyes. He sat there in silence for a long time.
"That was necromancy," he said at last, voice hoarse. "Real necromancy. A level of spellcasting an Esper should never be able to reproduce."
He could not understand it.
Was Pale really Ryan?
The Ryan he knew had been gifted [Energy Simulation] by The School. But ever since the formation had been activated, he had not displayed a single trace of the space jumping ability that should have defined him.
And yet
"Bone Engraving knows similar techniques," Morin muttered through clenched teeth. "Could Pale possess some way to plunder memories from the dead? But even then, how would the magic circuits be replicated? How could they be implanted?"
The more he thought, the worse the headache became.
Everything Pale had shown tonight pushed him further and further away from Ryan, yet none of it erased the suspicion completely. Morin had built this entire hunt around Ryan. If Pale was not Ryan, then the deaths of those four Executors became easier to explain.
That only made it worse.
He would bear the consequences either way.
"Pale," Morin whispered into the dead screen, "what are you?"
In the Lower City, stagnant water reflected broken sensor lights.
Hodell's wrist ring suddenly vibrated.
Buzz.
A translucent holographic projection unfolded in the middle of the alley. Homan appeared in it, seated in an elegant private room, a glass of red wine in hand. The smile on his face was no longer merely polite. It had gone softer than that, almost deferential.
Only the slight slip of the wineglass in his damp fingers betrayed how tense he really was.
"Mr. Pale," Homan said, voice echoing through the cold alley, "let's stop here."
Hodell said nothing.
He still did not quite understand what kind of "great organization" Homan believed stood behind him. The School? The Empire? Some imaginary titan? The conclusion was ridiculous.
Then he understood.
The energy spheres.
Purple grade equipment.
On Liuli Star, something of that quality was nearly the ceiling. It was not the sort of thing a lone wanderer should casually possess. To Homan, the logic was obvious. If Pale had access to gear and attack methods like that, then Pale must belong to an organization on par with, or greater than, the Polar Merchant Guild.
It was nonsense.
Useful nonsense.
Hodell merely stared at the projection in silence.
To Homan, that silence was far more oppressive than anger. It felt like tacit confirmation.
"Get to the point," Hodell said at last, voice heavy beneath White Crow. "My time is expensive."
Homan straightened immediately.
"First, regarding the previous wager and the asset custody agreement, the Polar Merchant Guild formally declares surrender."
Hodell almost laughed.
He had seen declarations of war, declarations of independence, broken contracts, betrayals, and reversals. A unilateral forfeit on a bet was new.
Homan kept speaking.
"Regardless of the final result, the Merchant Guild will grant you access to the Crimson Vault in the Inner City. We will not place any more obstacles in your path during the Ranking Festival. Any intelligence we possess that targets you will also be intercepted."
The logic behind it was clear enough.
Originally, the Merchant Guild wanted him dead in the first phase. Kill him, claim the wager, take the inheritance, and simplify the board.
Now?
Now he had butchered three of their agents and broken a hunting team tailored by The School. A merchant's morality was very simple. If an enemy could not be cleanly eliminated, or if eliminating him would invite unacceptable losses, then that enemy ceased to be an enemy and became an investment opportunity.
If they could not bury him, they would polish him into a gold mine instead.
There were no permanent friends, no permanent enemies, only permanent profit. Someone on old Earth had once put it well.
Homan inhaled.
"Second, and more importantly, the Merchant Guild would like to formally invite you to serve as our agent in the third phase."
Hodell rubbed his chinplate.
"Agent?"
"Yes." Homan's tone turned more serious. "The Ranking Festival may wear the face of a blood sacrifice demanded by the lunatics of the Abyssal Cult, but at its core it is a proxy war between the three great factions here: the Polar Merchant Guild, the Truth Society, and the Abyssal Cult."
"The men we sent were never only there to win glory. They were meant to secure deliberative seats in Shadow City, transportation quotas connected to the Crimson Vault, and a number of other practical interests."
He paused, swirling the wine.
"And to keep the Abyssal Cult from spreading further."
The anxiety in his eyes could not be hidden now.
"You killed our agents. You've killed other people standing against you as well. But in this place, brute force is not the deadliest thing. Structure is. Logic is. You strike hard enough to matter, Mr. Pale, and now you are standing in the middle of a pattern larger than yourself."
He leaned forward.
"Have you ever heard of the Chronicles of the Four Phase Creation?"
Hodell did not answer. He had seen the myth mentioned at the academy, but not in any depth.
Homan continued anyway.
"In the eyes of the Abyssal Cult, it is not a creation myth. It is a dismemberment record."
"The four Primordials, Bone, Spirit, Blood, and Consciousness, were not sacrificed to birth the world. They were murdered to make it."
His tone grew heavier with each sentence.
"The cult believes the world we inhabit now, the world of magic, source energy, and psychokinesis, is nothing but the rotting aftermath of the Primordials' severed corpses. Energy is the dying sigh of the Father of Spirit. Magic is the delirious babbling of the Mother of Consciousness. To them, the extraordinary powers we regard as civilization's pride are merely maggots feeding on dead gods."
The more Hodell listened, the stranger it sounded.
Lovecraft would have loved these lunatics.
Homan pressed on.
"That is why they hate all forms of energy. To them, the so called two men, two women household resonance model is just mortal trash imitating divinity. What they call 'return' is the erasure of difference. Broken bones returned to the frame. Chaotic spirit returned to silence. Boiling blood returned to the pool. Wandering consciousness returned to nothing."
"And the end of that return is the Silent Silver Disk."
Hodell remembered the theories surrounding it. The unfinished wallpaper. The exposed concrete floor beneath the world's magical paint.
"The investigators from Harax called it exposed bedrock," Homan said with a sneer. "The cult took that and made it holy. They believe the five hundred kilometer crater of the Silver Disk is the one fragment of the Father of Bone's spine that was not completely destroyed."
Absurd.
And yet maddeningly coherent in its own diseased way.
If the Silver Disk nullified abnormal energy expression, then in cult doctrine that simply meant it preserved the world's original laws. If dimensional fluctuations were locked there, then to them that was not physics, but the unmoving will of a divine corpse refusing contamination.
Hodell almost wanted to applaud.
It was such a spectacular waste of imagination.
Homan went on.
"To them, the Silver Disk is not a godforsaken land. It is the one land still favored by the gods. The only sanctuary on this noisy, diseased planet that still preserves 'purity.'"
"Then why the blood sacrifices?" Hodell asked coldly.
"Balance."
Homan traced a circle in the air.
"You know the negative pressure theory. Outside the Disk, Liuli Star's magical circulation is overloaded. Within the Disk, there is a vacuum. The imbalance causes the Silver Disk to devour active particles like a black hole."
"The cult believes ordinary death is too light to shake it. Common blood and common consciousness are meaningless. But if enough powerful people are slaughtered at the edge of the Silver Disk, then the mass of that death becomes an energy injection."
He pointed to the glowing red dots on a nearby Lower City tactical map.
"They want to fill the vacuum with blood. If enough weight is thrown into that silver silence, they believe it will resonate. They believe the sleeping remains beneath the Disk will answer."
Now Hodell truly understood why the cult attracted followers.
Not because the doctrine was clever.
Because it made a promise.
A world built around magical aptitude was a world built around permanent inequality. If you had Spirit, you rose. If you only had Bone, you carried. That was the whole structure.
The cult's myth offered the poor, the crippled, the talentless, and the discarded something intoxicating.
Equality through annihilation.
Homan clearly understood this too.
"They tell the miners, the exiles, the laborers, and every magicless wretch in the Lower City the same thing. When the Silver Disk awakens, all mages will be dragged down to flesh and sweat. All Mages will lose their privileges. No more amplifiers. No more inherited power. No more noble blood. Just labor for labor, weight for weight."
He let out a dry breath.
"To those people, the awakening of the gods is a reset button. They do not care if the world burns. They only care that the people above them burn first."
Hodell fell silent.
So called piety was just greed draped in awe.
There was no god on the throne. Only the meaning desperate people forced onto an empty seat.
Homan's tone sharpened.
"I don't know what arrangement the Truth Society has made, but the Merchant Guild's elites have been targeted badly this season. We are at a disadvantage entering the third phase. If the Abyssal Cult takes it, they will devour outer city taxation rights and expand their control further."
He looked straight at Hodell.
"As a mage who values order, I doubt you want to see Shadow City turned into a full altar."
[You have triggered a C rank mission: [Ranking Festival]]
[Mission Requirement: Place in the top three of the Ladder Finals.]
[Mission Reward: 300,000 EXP]
[Special Reward: Extract two of the enemy's skills or perks.]
Hodell scoffed inwardly.
Order? In Shadow City?
This was not a war between order and chaos. It was a war over who got the bigger share.
Even so, the more insane the Abyssal Cult sounded, the easier it became to lean temporarily toward the Merchant Guild.
More importantly, the Ladder Finals would bring stronger opponents.
He still needed trial points.
"If I'm to act as your agent," he said, "what do I get?"
Homan had clearly prepared for that.
"In addition to honoring the revised agreement, the Merchant Guild will provide detailed analyses of every opponent you are likely to face in the third phase."
He hesitated, then forced himself onward.
"And if you secure a top three finish for us, you will gain the right to personally select any one Epic grade material from the Crimson Vault."
That was not a trivial concession.
Opening the vault to him at all was one thing. Letting him choose whatever he wanted inside it was something else entirely.
"Deal," Hodell said.
He had nothing to lose.
Homan sagged, visibly relieved.
"A wise decision, Mr. Pale. From this point on, any action you take in the Lower City will be backed by the Merchant Guild. One more thing. The Abyssal Cult's agent this season is a monster called Blood Crow. He is already hunting high scoring contestants for ritual use. Be careful."
"Understood."
Hodell ended the projection.
He lowered his eyes to the wrist ring.
What had previously been a vague scattering of dots was now ablaze with layered data. The Merchant Guild's intelligence network in the Lower City had been opened to him. Routes, movement clusters, likely prey concentrations, dangerous zones, probable ambush nests. All of it.
A guide.
No, better than a guide.
A moving harvest map.
"So many walking experience packs."
He flexed his fingers. White Crow hissed softly, pale violet steam slipping from the vents in the darkness.
Now that the wager no longer mattered, and now that the Merchant Guild had voluntarily placed its own network in his hands, the path ahead had become very simple.
Hodell jumped, vanishing into the alley shadows.
High above the Inner City, on a massive viewing platform wrapped in cold wind and occult light, a robed priest of the Abyssal Cult stood overlooking the Lower City's stirring darkness.
His fingers trailed slowly over a crystal sphere.
"The Merchant Guild has found itself a variable," he said.
His voice was old, rotten, and wet with decay.
Then he smiled.
"It does not matter. The stronger the sacrifice, the sweeter the resonance when the Silver Disk wakes."
Below him, the slaughter in the Lower City was only just beginning to grow warm.
…..
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