The air burned like lit coal in my nostrils.
I turned my face one last time behind me...
And all I saw was the end.
The darkness behind the summit of the sixth mountain wasn't shadow. It was absence—a void devouring everything like a black hole shredding reality, consuming the dungeon out of sheer existential hunger.
Fragments of stone, dust, bodies, memories everything was being ripped from the world without sound.
There was no room for doubt.
No time left.
The sharp blade of survival cut through my thoughts.
And my instincts blazed like flames devouring dry paper.
My pupils dilated.
Every fiber of my being awakened.
I floated.
Light as a killing whisper.
Gravity didn't dare hold me back.
The seventh mountain awaited me.
My bare feet touched the metallic ground gleaming, alive.
Like solid mercury.
Cold as the absence of hope.
The chill crawled straight up my spine, dug claws between my ribs, and laughed.
But I smiled.
My energy exploded.
Electricity tore through the air. Arcs crackled across my shoulders, arms, spine—like furious serpents in ecstasy.
Red prana surged over my skin like a river of liquid blood, pulsing with every heartbeat.
My muscles swelled.
Tiny ruptures healed instantly.
My body screamed: go.
I stepped forward with my right foot.
The left anchored behind.
My eyes locked on the summit.
I smiled at the humorless absurdity of the moment.
And there was no plan B.
"BOOOOOOOOOOM."
I tore through the mountain.
A golden lightning bolt with a demon inside.
The staircase blurred—steps shattered beneath my passage.
The ground crumbled with each stride, forming steaming craters.
I reached the summit in a blink.
I saw the Guardian turn its head.
The twin jaws opened into a grin far too wide, with teeth like obsidian needles.
Twenty violet eyes stared at me.
Some followed me.
Others looked into the future.
Two of them... were already weeping.
I roared.
Raised Dórian's sword.
Rolled my shoulder.
And brought down the first strike.
And then...
The brawl began.
The blade trembled in my hand.
Not from fear, but from power.
Lightning poured from my body into the sword, flooding the metal with incandescent yellow glow.
The edge extended nearly a meter of pure concentrated electricity, humming, vibrating, thirsting for blood, craving freedom.
A rift split open in the air before me, as if space itself couldn't contain my urgency.
I entered without hesitation.
On the other side, I was face-to-face with the Guardian's eyes.
Twenty violet orbs all staring at me at once—each one knowing I had come to kill.
I brought down the strike.
A vertical slash—merciless—everything I had left. The world trembled.
But the response came before the final impact.
One of the Guardian's six blade-arms was already there, as if time itself had warned it.
The black, chitinous blade—curved and jagged like a hellish scythe—intercepted my strike with inhuman precision.
The shock tore the world apart.
My arms groaned—every muscle twisted against the force.
My bones shook, cracked, splintered under the strain.
The mountaintop exploded.
Stone, molten metal, and smoke erupted like a volcano spilling the underworld's guts.
I was launched like a meteor.
'There's no way to fight this thing head-on!'
The air split into sonic booms around me. The world spun, and the sky seemed to collapse.
But before my body hit anything solid, another rift opened behind my back.
My mind had already leapt ahead of the impact.
I passed through the warped space and emerged beneath the creature's belly—its eyes still locked on the fractured sky from the blow.
The thrust came from the belly of the earth.
A spear of lightning and steel a straight line drawn by sheer power and brutality.
The strike landed.
"BOOOOOOOOOOOOM."
The Guardian was thrown six meters into the air.
But... no scar. No scratch.
Nothing.
The black chitin absorbed the discharge, the slash, the fury—
As if I were nothing.
My eyes shook, but my legs didn't hesitate. I exploded toward my true objective.
My entire body launched toward the chalice.
The pulsing heart at the end of the mountain—the crimson chalice with black veins—the source of the corruption.
I raised the sword.
It fell like a vertical bolt from heaven.
I was centimeters away.
Centimeters from the blade.
Centimeters from ending it all.
But...
It couldn't be that easy.
In front of the chalice, space tore silently.
A spatial rift I hadn't conjured.
On the other side,
a violet eye stared at me.
Expressionless. Unnatural.
And then came the bolt.
An explosive blast.
A thunderclap with no sound.
The world split in two.
The energy struck my swing.
The sword was torn from my hand.
I was flung backward like a broken doll.
Everything exploded.
My vision darkened.
For a second.
Just one.
But it was enough.
When the light returned, my instincts screamed.
Six blades hovered millimeters from piercing my chest, neck, eyes.
I didn't think. I didn't need to.
My Nexus blazed.
The runes on my gloves lit up with near-white intensity, and the pre-programmed spell detonated at full force.
"BOOOOOM."
A gravitational shockwave burst out like a divine dome of pure force, pushing the world away.
I flew. So did the Guardian.
The black, ravenous blades missed by mere millimeters.
Millimeters.
My feet slid across the metallic ground, still molten in some places. But before I could stabilize.
The lasers came.
Violet. Hot. Lethal.
Tearing through the air like plasma needles, they exploded around me in rapid-fire bursts.
"Pah! Pah! Pah! Pah!"
My arms, protected by Dórian's artifact, held strong.
But my legs...
My legs started to scream.
Burns. Layers of skin shredded. The smell of seared flesh filled the cold air.
I swallowed the scream.
Stabilized.
Took a deep breath and raised my hand.
Six lightning orbs formed, floating above my head.
Like miniature collapsing stars.
They expanded.
Lines of electricity interconnected like a spider's web, covering the mountaintop.
A lightning storm began.
And, like divine mirrors, the bolts started intercepting the lasers.
Magic against annihilation.
Desperation against logic.
I exploded at full speed.
Now there was no time for finesse or elegant tactics.
I opened ten dimensional rifts around me. That was my current limit.
But not for movement.
I began firing charged bolts—buzzing, wild.
Each bolt passed through one rift and emerged from another—chaotic serpents of light targeting the Guardian from every angle.
Beneath the head.
Above the tail.
Under the belly.
Behind the eyes.
But one... one in particular—
Aimed for the chalice.
Each discharge carried my rage, my urgency, my soul.
Every bolt was a scream of liberation.
But the Guardian...
The Guardian was a tremendous son of a bitch.
Like an evolving war machine, it adapted.
And soon, black rifts began to form around it.
Antitheses to mine.
Spatial fractures in counterflow, like invisible claws tearing into reality.
My attacks began to fail. Those aimed at the chalice were blocked by the bastard, while the rest were intercepted by violet lasers, deflected by dark cracks, or disintegrated by distortions.
Before I could breathe, the Guardian came after me again.
Maximum speed.
Each step it took shattered the ground, cracked the world.
Every attempt I made to escape became part of a deadly dance.
Its blade had just missed my face by inches, and just the wind from the strike left a deep gash across my cheek.
And I, with scorched legs, a body pulsing in agony, and a head on fire,
was fighting against a clock that bled away with every heartbeat.
The Guardian lost its patience.
The annoying insect that should've been crushed in the first few seconds
was still alive—persistent, offensive, and determined to destroy the chalice.
And that was unforgivable.
The scorpion tail, once still like a throne of contained death, pulsed with purple light.
And then...
Hell descended.
From the stinger, it wasn't a simple strike.
It was a continuous beam. Massive. Destructive. Uncontrollable.
Unlike the previous lasers, this blast was alive, constant, with the heat of a star and the force of nuclear fission.
Where it touched, it tore the mountain in two.
The seventh mountain, once a gleaming metallic altar, began to crack like rotten fruit. The world was splitting apart.
I ran.
There was no time for plans, no time for thought.
I ran. For survival.
The electric web still vibrating with life was devoured by the scorpionic beam, shredded like paper.
And then, with no other option, I activated the suicide mode.
Not the official one.
The one I knew would kill me.
Blue lightning began to flicker across my body.
Not sky blue. Not deep blue.
Collapse blue.
End blue.
Insanity blue.
My speed increased exponentially.
My spells tore through the air like dry-lightning strikes.
My burning sword now hummed with more energy than it could contain.
But with every attack... every use... my body crumbled.
Skin splitting.
Veins bursting.
Muscles trembling in pain.
And my consciousness... flickering.
Still, I pushed forward.
The Guardian met me with fury. Its black blades, sharp enough to cut through space itself, clashed with my sword.
But now...
Now they were repelled.
The power of the blue lightning infused into the weapon was too insane, too intense.
The impact created craters of pure energy across the mountaintop. The ground trembled.
But... the real problem was the beam.
That continuous stream of violet energy from the stinger.
It didn't stop.
Never stopped.
It advanced.
Exploded.
Devastated.
Like a world-cutting blade.
Wherever it went, it destroyed everything.
Metal columns, residual sculptures, remnants of what this place once was—reduced to ash.
And as if that wasn't enough...
From the Guardian's scales, a greenish cloud began to glow.
Poison.
Not ordinary gas. It was death. Vapors that burned the senses, corroded magic, and dissolved reaction time.
I pulled back.
Not out of fear.
But because it was the only way to stay alive for a few more seconds.
My rifts kept harassing the chalice, now with no attempt to hide my intention. All ten I could manage were bombarding it with high-intensity blue lightning.
Some even collapsed from the energy overload.
The mutant chimera bastard of a Guardian attacked me with three different types of assaults simultaneously—and still managed to repel every single one of my attempts to strike the chalice.
But in the middle of all that chaos, a spark of light shone in the darkness, and that's when I realized it.
The farther I got from the chalice...
The less accurate the Guardian's portals became.
Before, its black rifts appeared with surgical precision.
Now... they missed by centimeters. Millimeters.
Just enough.
It was overloaded, trying to kill me and protect the artifact at the same time.
But it knew that too.
And that's why it kept pushing me.
Every move.
Every step was an effort to erase me as fast as possible. It had become a real all-or-nothing dance for both of us.
But I didn't come this far to dance.