Chapter 374: Can’t move
Zenith was silent for a moment. Then she said, "A wish strong enough to pay for itself."
Elion frowned again. He was not some kind of philosophical old sage; how was he supposed to interpret something so indefinite!? "That sounds terribly cryptic."
"It is."
A distant explosion shook the chamber, making dust drift from the ceiling.
Zenith looked toward the sealed door. "The battle above is worsening."
"Elion," she added quietly, "if he returns before this opens, is it safe to say we both die?"
She gave him a small laugh, "Hey now, you are supposed to give your wife some motivation."
Elion’s brow twitched, "Wife, huh? You already consider yourself my wife. That’s good to know. You know your husband has been deprived of some action for the last few agonizing days." He stepped close and tried to slip a hand around her slender waist, only to have his hands quickly slapped away with a loud crack.
’Ouch!’
She snorted in derision, "Focus, if you do well, maybe I might even reward you with a kiss."
Elion felt his knees go weak. "Oh my, I can’t wait." His body was suddenly overflowing with excess power. He eagerly raised Kurogoroshi. "Tell me where to cut."
Zenith gave him an amused smile, but then she had to focus on the task at hand. She looked at the seal closely; her eyes flashed with an odd, bright red hue. "Not yet. The pattern changes every nine breaths. If you cut during the wrong cycle—"
"We fail, and then we die, yes, I understood the first time."
She ignored him as the chamber shook again, and they waited patiently.
One breath.
Two.
Three.
....
Zenith’s fingers twitched.
Six.
Elion’s grip tightened around his blade.
Seven.
Eight.
"Now," Zenith whispered.
Without wasting a single breath, Elion swung kurogoroshi in a clean, precise slash.
The blade’s edge passed through the first symbol, then the second, then the third, tracing the line Zenith indicated with perfect accuracy. The seal trembled as golden light flared violently across the door, flooding the chamber until Elion could barely see.
The light suddenly turned red, and Zenith’s face twisted in horror.
"No..."
Skreee!
The door suddenly screamed, but they couldn’t even be sure if the sound was coming from the door or from the other side of it.
The sound tore through Elion’s skull like a blade being dragged across his soul. He staggered with his teeth clenched, but Kurogoroshi pulsed hard in his hand, forcing the spiritual backlash away before it could sink deeper.
Crack!
The seal cracked, but did not open. From the walls, black veins began crawling over the gold.
Zenith’s eyes widened. "Asmodeus tied his own blood ward into the original seal."
"So cutting it woke his part up?"
"Yes."
"Fantastic."
The black veins spread faster as pressure in the chamber spiked.
A shape began forming above the door, made of blood, shadows, and golden fire. The vague outline of a face was formed last once the figure was standing on its feet.
"It’s just a projection," Zenith said with a breath as its eyes opened slowly with a sharp red glint.
"Elion," she said softly, "You should be able to handle this one on your own."
That was all he needed.
Temporary Stat Conversion.
[Strength +]
Elion stepped forward and struck.
Kurogoroshi carved through the forming face before it fully opened its mouth. The projection split apart with a roar, bloodfire bursting across the chamber. The force threw Zenith backward, but Elion planted his feet and cut again, this time across the black veins crawling over the golden seal.
He struck three times in succession to finish it off; killing a projection would not be so easy since it was not supposed to be alive, and just as he had expected, it fought back, but he had an easy time cutting it into ribbons on the second try, but that was not the end ot it.
Black chains suddenly erupted from the door and wrapped around his sword arm, digging into his armour with enough force to dent the plates. The Legendary set flared, resisting the crushing pressure, but the chains tightened, dragging his arm toward the seal.
Zenith raised both hands. Pale magic struck the chains, freezing them for half a heartbeat.
"Cut the centre!" she shouted.
Elion pulled against the chains, but they held strong. His muscles strained, and his shoulder screamed at him
However, his eyes remained calm. Now he found that staying calm and analytical, even without enhanced cognition active was a simple task for him.
"Move."
He activated Presence and directed it toward the seal.
’I hope this works.’
The invisible pressure slammed into whatever entity was attacking them from beyond the seal. The black chains trembled in response to the attack, stopping completely in their tracks.
The air inside the chamber eased and exploded outward as Elion took that breath. He stepped in, twisted his wrist, and drove Kurogoroshi straight into the centre of the seal.
The blade sank in easily. A second later, the entire chamber went silent, and then the door split open. A beautiful and warm wave of golden light poured out.
Elion raised an arm to shield his eyes, with Zenith standing beside him with a profound feeling welling up in her heart.
Hope.
Beyond the door was not a room but a vast underground hollow. At the centre, suspended above a circular altar, floated a stone the size of a heart. It was cracked all over, red and gold in color, pulsing faintly.
The Philosopher’s Stone.
Elion stared at it.
Even from the doorway, he could feel the power inside it.
It did not feel like something that could be explained through simple concepts like mana, power, or divine.
It felt like the culmination of desire, possibility, sacrifice, and potential. Elion didn’t even know where he was getting such ridiculous thoughts to explain what he was feeling, looking at this enigmatic object, but it felt like, just looking at it, he was being fed these exact thoughts directly into his mind.
It was like he was being told, this stone was an object that could either grant untold miracles or ruin the hands that dared reach for it with greed.
Zenith took one shaky step forward. She was so close now.
"We found it," she whispered.
Far above them, something roared; the entire underground hollow shook. Elion looked up.
Zenith’s hope vanished from her face.
Elion stepped forward without another word, his gaze locked onto the floating stone as though everything else in the world had ceased to exist.
They both reached for it, but Elion was the furthest forward already.
The Philosopher’s Stone pulsed in the air above the altar, red and gold light folding over itself in slow, hypnotic waves, each pulse tugging at something inside him, not just his mana, but deeper than that, as though the thing was calling to some hidden hunger inside his soul.
He lifted his hand toward it with his fingers spread, and when his hand was only inches away, the air suddenly froze as everything stopped around them.
One moment, there had been sound, motion, breath, tension, and the next, all of it was gone. The world lost all color.
Zenith had been about to use a movement ability to zoom ahead of him, but her body flickered, only to return to the same exact spot.
"What!?"
The golden glow of the chamber drained away into a dead, ashen stillness. The red of the Philosopher’s Stone vanished. Zenith froze where she stood. The dust in the air stopped drifting. Even the light itself seemed to have stopped moving.
Elion’s eyes widened. He tried to move his fingers, his arm, his body, but nothing answered him. He couldn’t move at all, and yet somehow, he was aware. His thoughts still worked, his eyes could still move, even just barely.
’Huh,’ he asked himself inwardly, ’why can’t I move?’
And then he saw it. Right in front of him, reality itself looked like it had been sliced in two.
There was no better way to describe it. It was as if an invisible blade had passed through the world itself, leaving behind a line so thin, so impossibly sharp, that it only became visible because the space around it trembled and misaligned unnaturally.
It ran across the chamber at an angle, right through the space where his arm was extended. His pupils shrank.
’What the fuck!’
A second later, color returned, and sound returned.
The distant rumble above, the pulse of the stone, the faint crackle of mana in the air, Zenith’s sharp intake of breath, all of it came back at once.
And then the impossible happened. Elion’s outstretched arm slid off near the elbow.
It was so clean, so smooth, that for the tiniest instant, his mind failed to understand what he was seeing. His severed forearm dropped through the air in a slow arc, the fingers still half-curled toward the stone, before it hit the floor with a loud thud that echoed obscenely in the chamber’s silence.
’Huh?’ Slowly, Elion looked down at it before looking back at the stump where his arm used to be.
