Chapter 87: Before the Cosmic Gaze
The rhythmic, twitching pattern of Amran’s fingers suddenly snapped into a rigid, down-pointing fist. The signal had been given.
High above the stone plaza, along the massive parapets of the southern gatehouse, thousands of glazed-eyed city guards squeezed their triggers in perfect, mechanical unison.
The synchronized thwack of thousands of heavy military crossbows releasing their tension cut through the air like a single, massive crack of thunder.
A literal wall of black iron bolts rained down upon the unsuspecting crowd of two thousand low-tier students huddled in the courtyard below.
Because the students were tightly packed together and had drawn a complete, false sense of security from the presence of the guards, absolutely none of them had raised their defensive barriers or prepared their beast summons for an internal assault.
The initial volley was a scene of unmitigated, one-sided slaughter. Heavy iron bolts tore through linen uniforms, leather armor, and fragile human flesh with terrifying velocity.
"What—" A young boy with a low-tier rabbit summon didn’t even manage to finish his cry of confusion before three bolts punched directly through his chest, pinning his body flat against the stone tiles.
Beside him, a group of first-year girls were instantly mowed down, their blood spraying across the grand stairs as the heavy projectiles shattered their bones.
"The guards! The guards are shooting at us!" a student screamed in pure, unadulterated terror, clutching a severed arm as he tried to scramble toward the gatehouse doors.
But there was no sanctuary to be found. The controlled vanguard officers standing at the exit ways calmly drew their heavy broadswords, their expressions entirely vacant behind their iron visors as they began systematically hacking down anyone who tried to flee the killing zone.
Brandon Cole’s eyes widened in absolute shock. He stood near the front of the plaza, his high-level soul power flaring instinctively as a dozen bolts deflected against the localized wind barrier generated by his Bronze-ranked Razor-Feathered Hawk.
"What is the meaning of this?!" Brandon roared, his voice booming across the plaza through the mana-amplified speaker.
"Stand down! I am Brandon Cole of the top twenty! Who gave the order to fire?!" His predatory bird let out a piercing screech, launching itself into the air to attack the nearest battlement.
But before the hawk could even reach the top of the wall, a volley of massive, ballista-sized iron spears, fired by the heavy defensive turrets normally reserved for giant forest monsters, punched directly through the bird’s torso, exploding its avian form into a cloud of blood and scattered bronze feathers.
"No!" Brandon gasped, his soul line violently snapping as his primary contracted beast was annihilated. He stumbled backward, coughing up a mouthful of dark blood, his high-level pride completely shattering as a dozen controlled city guards closed in on his position with raised spears.
Throughout the entire unfolding massacre, Kenji remained perfectly still against his corner of the stone wall. His arms hung completely slack, his iron sword and light wooden shield resting loosely against his thighs as his hazel eyes maintained the empty, milky film of a brainless thrall.
Inwardly, his mind was entirely calm, his heartbeat resting at its steady, clinical rhythm despite the sprays of warm blood painting the stone tiles mere inches from his boots.
He easily could have shattered his simulated compliance within a fraction of a millisecond. With the physical conditioning gained from fifty brutal loops of death, he could have used his standard sword to parry the incoming bolts, blitzed across the courtyard, and severed Amran’s head before the parasite could even register his movement.
But Kenji chose not to break free. He deliberately allowed his body to follow the puppet script, tracking the precise flows of dark energy humming through the hive-mind network. He wanted to understand exactly what this anomaly wanted. He wanted to see the end point of the simulation’s corruption.
If the Enders were behind this targeted slaughter, they wouldn’t just stop at killing a few thousand first-year students, as there had to be a primary objective, a terminal sequence they were trying to trigger by collecting this specific concentration of human souls.
So, Kenji let himself be swept along with the current. When a stray crossbow bolt hissed through the chaotic air and grazed his shoulder, cutting a deep line into his flesh, he didn’t dodge.
He simply let his body sway back slightly against the masonry, his face remaining a perfect, vacant mask of obedience. Within less than twenty minutes, the chaotic sounds of screaming, crying, and clashing steel began to rapidly dwindle.
The heavy scent of blood and gore hung thick and suffocating over the southern gatehouse. The wide stone plaza was completely painted in crimson, covered from edge to edge with the lifeless bodies of over two thousand low-tier students and the remnants of their low-grade summons.
Brandon Cole lay near the central stairs, his master-grade gauntlets shattered and his throat pierced by a standard-issue guard spear. The arrogant ranker had died without ever understanding why his dream of becoming a captain of the city guards had turned into his execution.
Everything went entirely silent. The only sound left in the massive courtyard was the wet, rhythmic dripping of blood sliding down the stone drainage channels.
The ten thousand city guards stood perfectly rigid along the high walls, their weapons lowered, their glazed eyes staring blankly at the mountain of dead flesh they had just created. Then, the final phase of the script initiated.
Through the dark data streams vibrating inside his head, Kenji felt a sharp, sudden shift in the hive-mind network. The parasitic entity inside Amran didn’t seem interested in maintaining its massive army of sleeper agents anymore.
The harvest was complete, and it was time to clean the slate. Suddenly, the controlled human nodes began dying one by one. Along the top of the battlements, a guard officer’s body violently stiffened.
A fraction of a second later, his eyes rolled back into his head, a thick black smoke pouring out from beneath his iron visor as his brain stems were instantly fried by a massive, internal surge of corrosive soul power.
He collapsed over the stone parapet like a sack of rocks, tumbling hundreds of feet down into the courtyard below with a heavy, metallic crash. The phenomenon spread through the gatehouse like a rapidly advancing plague.
Ten guards, fifty guards, five hundred guards, they all began dropping dead in perfect, sequential order, their souls systematically extinguished and reabsorbed into the central network.
The invisible threads of the spiderweb were snapping, drawing all the accumulated spiritual energy back toward a single point. The line of death rapidly approached the ground floor, moving across the stone plaza toward the outer edges where the low-tier sentries stood.
Kenji watched it happen through his faked perception, counting the seconds. The node directly to his left, a low-tier student who had somehow survived the initial crossbow volley only to be puppeted later, suddenly gasped, his chest caving inward as his life force was violently ripped from his vessel.
The boy slumped against the masonry, dead before his knees could even hit the floor. Next, the invisible scythe of the parasite finally reached Kenji. Kenji didn’t flinch. He didn’t tighten his grip on his sword.
He silently braced his mind, fully prepared to let the physical body die too, knowing that outside the walls, Ayla was already looping time periodically. If his body expired here, the trait would simply register his death and allow him to anchor back into the next loop.
He relaxed his chest, waiting for the massive surge of black smoke to fry his nervous system. But the lethal surge suddenly paused. The invisible thread of dark energy that had effortlessly snuffed out thousands of able men hovered directly over Kenji’s soul line, vibrating erratically.
The parasitic connection inside his head began to hiss and spit with intense, erratic static, as if a computer script had just encountered a massive, unresolvable logic error within its coding.
Before Kenji could decipher the glitch, his entire consciousness was violently jerked away from his physical senses. The bloody stone plaza, the quiet gatehouse, and the mountains of dead bodies instantly vanished.
His mind was pulled into a vast, absolute, black expanse, a void devoid of light, gravity, or time. There was no system interface here, no ringing alarms, and no physical sound. Right in front of his floating consciousness, the darkness split open.
A pair of colossal, molten orange pupils manifested out of the void, burning with the ancient, terrifying weight of a cosmic entity that had witnessed the birth and destruction of a thousand worlds.
The heat radiating from those orange eyes was suffocating, threatening to incinerate his very ego just by existing in the same mental space. The gaze pierced directly through his simulated mask, bypassing his faked compliance, and locked straight onto the tiny, ancient bone fragment resting beside his soul line.
The entity stared at him for what felt like an eternity, its massive pupils contracting in a mixture of profound shock and ancient, lingering dread.
The void trembled as a deep, echoing voice vibrated directly through Kenji’s core consciousness, uttering three heavy words that seemed to shake the very foundation of existence.
"The Unknown..."
"You are the unknown..."
"And you... you... how is that possible? How could you and her..."
