Chương 253: Chapter 252 - Illusion of Devotion

Their collective tone was completely frantic and deeply vile. They welcomed death as a religious sacrament. One of the sisters broke away from the main group. She approached him with a reverent, shaky gait. Her movements resembled a devout worshiper carrying out an absolute act of faith or a desperate prayer. She lunged forward suddenly. She fell directly onto Lucid, closing the distance instantly. She grabbed his left shoulder with a vice-like grip. Lucid reacted purely on survival instinct.

He kicked her hard in the stomach. The heavy sole of his foot connected solidly with her ribs. She did not let go. She held onto his shoulder securely. Her fingers dug deep into his muscle through his shirt. He struggled violently against her hold. He twisted his torso and pulled backward. Her grip possessed supernatural strength. She held on relentlessly. He dropped the heavy chandelier to free his hands. He grabbed a thick handful of her long purple hair. He pulled her head back forcefully.

He bashed her skull brutally against the heavy stone wall behind him. His eyes were wide with disgust and genuine fear. He slammed her head into the masonry a second time with maximum force. The other identical sisters did not intervene to save her. They simply stood there and observed the violent struggle with gleeful contempt. They seemed to genuinely enjoy watching their sister take a severe beating. The reverent girl's head splattered against the hard stone surface with a dull, wet thud.

Her grip finally loosened from his shoulder. Her body went completely limp. She slid down the wall slowly. She left a dark smear of blood against the gray stone before collapsing onto the floor. Lucid looked back at the remaining crowd of women. He braced his body into a fighting stance. He expected an angry mob to rush forward and consume him in retaliation for killing one of their own members. Instead, they stood perfectly still.

They looked thoroughly entertained by the murder that had just happened right in front of them. Then they resumed their approach. Their pace was noticeably faster this time. One of the women lunged forward and pulled hard at his right shoulder. Lucid scrambled backward to avoid her grasp. He blindly waved the heavy iron chandelier again, having picked it up from the floor. The weapon proved completely useless against their overwhelming numbers.

As he swung the metal fixture, the hot embers from the remaining candles caught the edge of a thick decorative rug lying on the floor. The dry fabric ignited instantly. Flames began to spread rapidly across the floor of the gothic chamber. Another sister stepped neatly inside his defensive guard. She grabbed his face with both of her cold hands. She pulled him forcefully into a deep, inescapable kiss. As her lips locked with his, her jaw unhinged with a wet crack.

The identical monstrous appendage slipped out from her throat. The thick tentacle pushed deep into his mouth and down his throat. He struggled with every ounce of his remaining physical strength. The same terrifying sensation returned instantly. The highly corrosive fate essence flooded directly into his body through the fleshy appendage. The alchemical vial within his bloodstream fought the incoming toxin with all the chemical resistance it could muster. Lucid punched her repeatedly in the ribs.

He struck her soft tissue with brutal, heavy blows. She finally broke the kiss under the assault. She pulled the tentacle back into her throat. Lucid gasped desperately for air. A mixture of acidic bile and thick saliva fell from his lips onto the stone floor. He did not have time to recover his breath. Another sister moved quickly. She overpowered him from his blind left side. She shoved him hard onto the ground. His heavy frame hit the stone with a painful, bruising impact.

The decorative rug was now completely on fire. The flames illuminated the purple citadel with a harsh, flickering orange light. The heat grew intense against his skin. Lucid tried to crawl away from the encroaching mob. His limbs felt incredibly heavy and unresponsive. The corrosive essence was winning the internal battle against the healer's medicine that still lingered in his bloodstream. Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

"Lucid, why will you not listen to it?" one of the sisters asked. Her voice echoed clearly above the crackling fire. He did not reply to her question. He kept his mouth tightly shut. He refused to give them another opportunity to violate his throat with that appendage. He dragged his body across the floor. His fingers scraped desperately against the rough stone surface. He needed his divine contractor immediately. He reached deep into his soul.

He searched frantically for the familiar, commanding presence that always resided there.

'Alice,' he thought. He projected her name with all his remaining mental strength. He waited for her formal, arrogant response to fill his mind. He waited for glowing green light to manifest and push the monsters away from his body. He waited for her divine authority to freeze the room and save his life. There was nothing. The space inside his mind was completely empty. She was nowhere to be found.

'Alice,' he called again, more desperate this time, panic creeping into the edges of his thoughts.

'Where are you?' Silence answered him. The absence felt wrong, hollow in a way that made his chest tighten with something worse than the physical pain radiating through his body. Suddenly one of them fell on him. Lucid, drawing on whatever fragments of power remained accessible, though everything within him felt delayed and restricted, as if moving through thick resistant water, took hold of her. He twisted her neck with practiced efficiency, muscle memory guiding movements his conscious mind could barely track.

She jabbed her thumbs deep into his throat, the pressure immediate and violent, cutting off his ability to draw breath. Another figure overpowered him from behind, cutting off his air completely, pinning him down against the cold golden ground that had somehow replaced the burning stone floor of moments before.

"Is my story not enough?" she asked, her voice carrying something between accusation and desperation, a plea wrapped in violence.

"Maybe you simply," she started, then trailed off as she began undressing, her fingers working at fabric with unsettling calm despite the chaos surrounding them both. The faint outlines of her soft skin became visible as fabric fell away, pale and unnatural in the strange golden light that filled this new space.

"You are but a young man, inhbiting our prophet," she murmured, the words carrying religious fervor that made his skin crawl. Her body settled fully over him while she straddled his hips, pinning his arms beneath the weight of her position, her knees locked against his sides with inhuman strength. Lucid looked around, disoriented by the sudden shift in circumstances. The burning citadel had vanished. The stone walls, the flames, the other sisters, all of it had disappeared.

He looked toward what should have been a window. His eyes traveled upward, searching for any point of reference. It was purple. But different somehow. Like an illusion layered over something else entirely. Like something that was merely meant to appear purple without actually possessing that color's true properties, a mimicry rather than genuine hue. He realized he existed inside a domain within another domain, layered reality folding back on itself in ways that defied simple comprehension.

The corrosive essence had done more than poison his body. It had pulled him somewhere else entirely, somewhere separate from the physical location where his actual body presumably still lay.

'Getting outside a domain is straightforward enough,' he thought, forcing himself to focus despite the chaos of his current predicament and the woman pressing down against him.

'You kill the source generating it. Like what I intended to do with Mercyros originally.' Her fingers found his throat again, gripping with surprising strength, trying to press further into the vulnerable flesh there, thumbs seeking the precise pressure points that would end his consciousness entirely.

Lucid wrapped his arms around her instead of resisting outright, positioning his hands at the back of her neck as though embracing her, while simultaneously shifting his weight beneath her body, searching for leverage. She yielded with little resistance to his repositioning, seemingly unconcerned by the change, remaining in the dominant position above him despite his countermove, as if confident that whatever he attempted would ultimately fail against her.

He looked around again, scanning the golden expanse for other threats. She appeared to be the only immediate danger present in this particular fold of reality, isolated from whatever remained of the burning citadel and its other occupants. A cold, calculated thought pierced through his mind, cutting through the panic and physical duress with sudden clarity.

'If this is a domain within a domain,' he reasoned, 'then killing her might collapse this specific layer and return me to wherever my actual body remains.' He closed his grip around her windpipe with deliberate, controlled pressure. Her eyes began to widen, comprehension dawning as she realized the trajectory of what was happening, that she was going to die from his hands rather than complete whatever ritual or possession she had intended. But she smiled.

The expression carried something unsettling, mixing delight with what appeared to be genuine pleasure, as though the prospect of death itself carried some perverse satisfaction for her, as though dying at his hands fulfilled some purpose she had sought all along.

"Yes," she whispered, her voice breaking slightly as his grip tightened.