Chương 354: The Infinite Kennel

While the city above scrambled to adjust the plans for a "No-Tier" challenge, I remained locked within the silence of my own soul. I sat at the foot of the Liquid Voidflame Pulsar in my internal continent, observing a rather bizarre structural shift in the landscape. Near the "Silos of the Void," a massive pit of boiling, pitch-black ink had formed, fed by the constant drainage from Gluttony on my wrist. I expected a secondary forge or perhaps another laboratory construct. Instead, a head appeared. Then another.

And then three more. A beast had seemingly crawled out of the excess quintessence I'd harvested on Bir-Z and Aegis. It was a Hydra, yet it bore very little resemblance to the mythological terrors from Earth's history books. Its scales were made of light-eating obsidian that shimmered like a polished pearl, and each of its five heads possessed long, velvety ears and massive, liquid-gold eyes.

It was colossal, large enough to rest a chin on top of the silvers towers I'd built, but it lacked a single ounce of predatory menace. As I approached the creature within my meditation, all five heads turned toward me in perfect, floppy synchronization.

"Are you…" I muttered, reaching up as the central head lowered itself, seeking a scratch behind its primary crystalline horns.

"Are you a manifestation of the infamous Curse of Gluttony, the consumer of universes... why do you look like a cute, oversized, five-headed dog?" The Hydra let out a resonant, three-ton whimper that vibrated the entire obsidian plain. One of the heads reached out, nudging my chest — precisely where the Ring of Wrath was tucked away in my star-core — with a look of desperate, hollow longing. Hungry, a communal thought echoed through the [Symphony]. Its first communication was a demand for more leftovers.

I reached into my storage, pulling out the condensed core of one of the demonic lieutenants I had slaughtered during the fort defense. I tossed the blue marble into the air. One head snapped it up mid-flight, while the other four whined in a jealous chorus.

"Well," I sighed, scratching another one of the chins.

"At least we don't have to walk you. And the yard is already endless."

"I think it's charming," Anna's voice chimed. I'd invited her consciousness into my meditation chamber so we could discuss our seeding. She stood beside my mental avatar, looking up at the multi-headed behemoth with genuine amusement. Beside her, Tink, the tiny glowing fairy who served as Anna's Healer Anima, was not sharing the sentiment. The sprite was hovering in an iron-grip lock behind Anna's hair, vibrating so hard she looked like a blurred LED.

The Hydra's third head leaned down, focusing its dinner-plate-sized pupil directly onto Tink. It let out a single, enthusiastic yup sound, followed by a thick glob of black mana-drool hitting the obsidian floor.

"Keep it away!" Tink squeaked, her voice a high-speed vibration of panic.

"Anna, it keeps looking at me all weird! It wants to eat me!"

"She's a fitting addition to your horror entourage, Eren," Anna teased, though she gently patted one of the Hydra's muzzles.

"Are we ready for the Well?" I withdrew from the internal world, snapping my focus back into the physical barracks where the council was waiting. The playful atmosphere of the soul-kennel evaporated, replaced by the clinical cold of a Tier 8 Sovereign preparing for war.

"No squadrons this time," I commanded. Lucas and Rexxar started to argue, but I held up a hand wreathed in a suctioning Void Flame. The atmospheric weight in the room dropped.

"The Grave-Singers chose a 'No-Tier' restriction. On Bir-Z, it was somewhat regulated. In the Trial of Deposition, they are free to bring Ascendants from their sponsors, though I doubt the teleportation fees for such large amounts of dense Essence would allow them to bring too many. And, say if a Tier 10 manifests his Inner World while you are in the engagement radius, you won't just struggle against the pressure — your souls will be crushed."

"Then let us die fighting with you," Lucas grunted, slamming his gauntlets together.

"We can't keep hiding in the basement while you play hero, Eren." After ten minutes of sharp debate, I relented. I chose a skeleton-crew. Anna, for her Time affinity and rewind, with her Anima for protection. Lucas to hold the bunker down. Silas and Freja for scouting and utility. And of course, my Anima. The rest were to stay behind to safeguard Bastion's main terminal.

"Stay at the bubble's center," I instructed as we stepped into the transportation portal.

"The moment we hit the field, you assume the defense formation. Always avoid engagement until I specifically say so. I will be taking charge and acting as bait, you must always stay behind me." The portal transition dropped us onto a world that shouldn't have been able to exist under standard physics. The Well of Echoes was a series of hundreds of massive floating discs, each a hundred miles across, suspended over a literal sun made of purple starlight.

We materialized on the Central Disc — a landscape of shattered grey monuments and columns of cold fire that reached into the starless black sky. Overlapping the battlefield were thousands of Detection Cubes — crystalline, system-run recording drones that buzzed in the air like metallic gnats.

"Scrying nodes," Leoric hissed, checking his mana detection devices.

"This entire fight is public. There's no privacy filter on a Deposition." [PROTOCOL ACTIVE: TRIAL OF DEPOSITION INITIALIZING.] [OBJECTIVE: TERMINATE CHALLENGER SOVEREIGNS.] You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story. [TIME TO ENGAGEMENT: 59: 02.] The System manifested two massive iridescent blue bubbles around the opposing factions' camps. Across the jagged landscape, roughly ten miles away, the Grave-Singer camp looked like a tomb.

It was constructed of heavy lead-slabs and bone-pillars, draped in the grey lead-silks I'd seen in the canyon. I expanded [Void Emperor's Omnipresence], expecting to meet the crushing, solar heat of a Tier 9 or Tier 10 benefactor sent to Prune the Vanguard. But as I mapped their signatures, my eyebrows shot up in genuine surprise.

"They didn't bring a God," I noted. I looked again, double-checking the density of their cores through the Lattice. There was no Ascendant presence. No Inner Worlds. The Grave-Singer squad consisted of exactly five combatants. Each one was a Peak Tier 7, wreathed in the highest-spec gear I'd ever seen outside a Zenith catalog — helmets made of planetary-shards, armor that glowed with Divine protection, and staves that bled ancient soul-magic.

"They're elites," Lucas noted, following my gaze.

"Strong enough to challenge half an empire on their own worlds. But why did they not bring an Ascendant for backup? Why bring only five Tier 7s to face a man who vaporized a Tier 8 Demon Lord?" The answer came from the buzzing drones above our heads. I watched the Grave-Singers. They weren't prepping an assault; they were calibrating their sensors. Each one of them was holding a data-shifter or a high-frequency soul-scanner. They were looking at me — but not with their eyes.

They were trying to record the frequency of my existence.

"It's not a challenge," I realized, a dark mirth bubbling in my gut.

"They saw how I won on Bir-Z by wiping the memory of the losers. They realized the Faction known as 'The Void Star' has zero public tactical records in their Hubs' databases. We are a ghost that's currently winning the sector, and that makes their 'Holy' Master very, very nervous." I laughed, a sharp sound that echoed across the stone platform.

"This is a sacrificial run," I told Anna.

"They sent five world-class heroes to their deaths purely to record five minutes of my combat patterns. They want to find my frequency so they can build a proper coffin for the final event."

"Are you going to give it to them?" Anna asked, drawing her bow.

"Not a single atom," I replied. I didn't unsheathe my black blades. I didn't ignite the Liquid Flame. Instead, I tightened the [Nullifying Veil] into an absolute, biological command, combining it with the "Quietening" arts of the Sylvaris. I turned to my team.

"The second that bubble drops, stay in Lucas' shield," I said.

"This won't take long. And you better not blink, because the data drones surely won't have the frame-rate to see what happened." The sixty-minute wait was a psychological drag, intended to build anticipation for the spectators. The Grave-Singers sat like stone statues across the disc, their sensors aimed at us. When the bubble finally burst with a thunderous pop, the Grave-Singer leader — a creature of shadows and silver robes — started a war-chant.

"IN THE NAME OF THE ARCHI—" He never finished the sentence. I engaged [Omnipresence]. I didn't move my physical body through the air. I utilized the "Lattice Slip" to use a method of Void teleportation I hadn't used effectively since learning it. While I remained standing beside Anna, multiple Veiled Void blades, engulfed by the Flame, occupied the space within the leader's throat. The scanners did not even react.

The silver-robed general collapsed into a pile of cooling clothes, his soul having forgotten how to maintain his avatar's connection. I was already gone before he hit the ground. The four remaining elites panicked, flaring their high-tier artifacts to blanket the disc in a wave of [Psychic Blinding]. They expected a Sovereign to hit them with a wave of mass or a pillar of fire — something for their sensors to latch onto and record. Instead, their comrades just began disappearing. Flicker.

A woman in planetary-steel armor lost the systemic permission to occupy her physical coordinates and fell into the starlight-sun below. Flicker. A mage's stave disintegrated into iron filings because I dictated the magnetic cohesion of its atoms was now zero. The sensors on the scrying drones were whirring at relativistic speeds, hunting for the "Vortex of Void" the previous rumors had suggested. But they found only absolute stillness. To the spectators in the Hub, the Sovereign of Ferra didn't appear to move.

They were simply looking at a camp of elite warriors who spontaneously de-materialized within minutes of the match beginning. The final Grave-Singer, a man wreathed in the power of a [Grave-Boon] artifact, screamed at the sky, his scanner glowing red.

"WHERE IS HE ATTACKING US FROM?" I manifested behind him, resting a hand on his shoulder.

"Too slow," I whispered. I didn't consume him with the Black-Red fire. I simply utilized the [Void-Star's Hunger] on his scanning device first, drinking the hardware and its memory into nothingness. Then, I let the [Void-Walk] pull him into the subspace between worlds and let him drift there until the System signaled his Fatal-wound status and ejected him into the lobby. The starlight battlefield vanished as the victory confirmation blared over my interface.

We were returned to our arrival platform in Bastion in the space of a single heartbeat. Anna, Lucas, and Silas were standing exactly as I'd left them — Lucas hadn't even had the chance to finish flaring his primary shield array. They were looking at the empty air in the hub where our enemies should have been, then slowly turned their heads toward me as I materialized.

"Well?" Silas asked, checking his dagger hilt.

"That was anticlimactic."

"I told you not to blink," I said, a lazy, clinical smile touching my lips. I pulled out a data-slate Jeeves had given me and started reviewing our planetary logistical score.

"Sorry if I took a little too long. I had to ensure their little surveillance toys were completely blind before I cleared the board. I don't think they recorded a single joule of usable Essence from our side."

"They're going to be so mad," Anna laughed, shaking her head.

"I bet the Core Sectors have a team of five thousand analysts currently trying to slow down the footage of an empty plaza."

"Let them analyze the air, sending their elites to die just so they can record a glimpse of our abilities for their Holy one…" I replied. I felt the [Symphony of the Animus Arch] thrumming with a calm satisfaction. The Ring of Wrath was quiet, and Gluttony's little 'dog' inside me seemed pleased with the brief exercise. I looked at the ranking board as the Points transferred — forty thousand from the Grave-Singers to the Void Star. Our "Crown" blazed like a second sun over the Ferran skyline.

We had survived the first Deposition. We had kept our secrets.

"Okay," I said, closing the interface.

"Twelve hours of preparation before the next wolf-run starts. I have a Geode book that needs my attention and seven ruins left to scout. I don't care how many Heroes the 'Holy One' throws away to learn my name — next time, we're the ones conducting the interview." As we walked back toward the Citadel gardens, the evening light felt lighter. But beneath that light, I felt the Pulsar of the Voidflame heating up. The games were over. The real war was about to find its focus, and I was exactly where I wanted to be.