Chapter 89: Threads of Defiance
Ayla refused to let go of Kenji. Her hands gripped his tattered shirt tightly as she pressed her face against his motionless chest. The hot tears continued to flow down her smooth cheeks, mixing with the dark dust and dried blood on his skin.
She could feel his heart beating at a very slow and mechanical pace, but the spark that made Kenji who he was had vanished completely. His physical body was present, but his inner mind was entirely gone.
She closed her eyes and stopped crying. The panicked part of her mind, which had learned how to feel fear because of Kenji, began to cool down. It was replaced by a deep, dark hunger and a fierce determination.
She was a mimic slime, a creature that had devoured hundreds of beasts and humans to grow strong. Her soul core was currently glowing with a bright, light blue light inside her spiritual mind.
She had farmed so many illusionary students over the last day that her internal energy was dense and heavy.
Ayla realized she could not save Kenji by using physical strength or physical traits. Her standard skills like Gale Acceleration or Corrosive Abyssal Fluid were completely useless against an invisible threat that had stolen a soul.
She needed to use a different kind of power. She needed to look into her acquired traits and find something that could bridge the gap between the material world and the unseen spiritual plane.
She dug deep into her internal registry of absorbed traits and she found it. The Emotional Weaver. This trait did not grant her sharp claws or destructive elemental magic.
Instead, it allowed her to perceive, manipulate, and track the invisible emotional strings that connected living beings. It was a sensory trait that could edit a person’s inner thoughts and core emotional frequencies.
Ayla focused all her soul power into this single trait. She placed her small palms flat against Kenji’s temples. She did not try to shake him or wake his body up. Instead, she used The Emotional Weaver to find the faint, trailing thread of his consciousness.
Even though Kenji seemed completely erased from the physical world, a tiny, invisible string of residual emotion still lingered between his cold chest and the spot where his soul had been violently dragged away. It was a thread of pure, stubborn defiance.
That was Kenji’s signature emotion.
She wrapped her own soul energy around that tiny thread. With a sudden, powerful mental push, Ayla forced her entire consciousness to slide along the string. She left her physical human body behind, leaning limply against Kenji’s torso in the material world.
Her mind traveled through a twisting, dark tunnel of spiritual energy at a speed that surpassed the limits of time and space.
The next moment, the dark tunnel opened up. Ayla found her floating spirit standing inside a vast, absolute black expanse. There was no gravity here, no ground to stand on, and no air to breathe. It was a quiet void.
Right in the center of this empty void, she saw Kenji’s consciousness. He looked exactly like his physical self, standing tall and straight. He was completely unharmed, and his hazel eyes were filled with a cold, sharp light.
Beside his spiritual mind, a tiny, ancient bone fragment was resting silently, acting as a permanent anchor that kept him from being destroyed by the immense pressure of the void.
But Kenji was not alone. Hovering directly in front of him were a pair of colossal, molten orange pupils. They burned like two giant suns in the darkness, radiating an intense, suffocating heat that threatened to melt anything that came near them.
The moment Ayla’s spirit entered the black expanse, those giant orange eyes shifted their focus away from Kenji. They turned around and locked straight onto her floating form.
Ayla did not feel fear this time. When she looked at those colossal, molten orange eyes, her advanced trait immediately activated.
The Emotional Weaver allowed her to see past the scary illusion of the burning suns. She saw the true nature of the energy that formed those eyes. It was made of millions of tiny, glowing threads that twisted and turned like a massive spiderweb.
She recognized this entity instantly. It was the Weaver. It was the same weaver she had devoured in the apocalypse tunnel. And glancing at the expression on Kenji’s consciousness, she knew it had tried to manipulate him.
The colossal pupils contracted sharply as they looked at her light blue spirit. The deep, echoing voice vibrated through the black void again, but this time, the authority in the voice was mixed with a hint of shock and hesitation.
"You," the Weaver whispered, the sound vibrating like a heavy drum. "You should not be here. You have altered your core biology too quickly. Your soul has solidified into a foreign color. Why do you protect this unknown variable? He is a curse upon your existence."
Ayla flew across the empty space and positioned her spirit directly in front of Kenji, shielding him from the burning gaze of the orange eyes. Her small, spiritual hands curled into tight fists. Her silver hair floated wildly in the void.
"Get away from him," Ayla said. Her voice did not sound like a helpless human girl anymore. It was loud, clear, and filled with the raw, predatory dominance of an apex monster. "He is my man. He belongs to only me. If you try to erase him, I will tear down your entire web."
Kenji looked at her back, a small, subtle glint of surprise passing through his hazel eyes. He had not expected Ayla to use her own skills to force her way into this isolated space. He noticed that her light blue soul power was humming with a strange, unique frequency that seemed to directly counter the orange energy of the giant eyes.
The Weaver stared at Ayla for a long time. The molten orange pupils pulsed in and out, reflecting a profound sense of ancient exhaustion.
"And stop that fake emotion," she spat.
The entity looked at how tightly Ayla was guarding Kenji. It saw the invisible, unbreakable bond that connected the zero-soul cripple and the mimic slime across fifty loops of death and rebirth.
"You do not understand," the Weaver spoke softly, the tone dropping into a sad, human cadence. "One day he will be the end of you. His origin..."
"I don’t care about his origin," Ayla cut him off instantly, her golden gaze flashing with an aggressive, blinding light. "I don’t care about your ridiculous fake stories. I just know I will tear you away bit by bit from existence until there is nothing left."
To prove her words, Ayla unleashed the full weight of her solidified, light blue soul core. A massive wave of cold, dense spiritual energy erupted from her spirit, slamming directly into the molten orange eyes.
The blue light began to coat the invisible threads of the Weaver’s web, freezing the connections and disrupting the flow of the parasite’s network.
The giant orange eyes began to flicker and shake. The cosmic entity realized that Ayla was not bluffing. Her soul had grown too dense because of the systematic feeding frenzy she had conducted in the forest.
She had acquired enough raw power to actually damage the stability of the current simulation if she threw a tantrum.
The Weaver let out a long, heavy sigh that made the black expanse vibrate with sorrow.
"This is an error," the entity muttered, its voice fading into a distant echo. "A catastrophic error. But I cannot let you destroy what everyone planned. We will meet again."
With those final words, the colossal, molten orange pupils began to rapidly shrink. The blinding heat dissipated into the darkness, and the giant eyes melted away like hot wax until they disappeared completely. The black expanse began to crack and shatter like a piece of brittle glass.
The immense pressure lifted from Kenji’s mind. The severed connection of the Death Looper trait instantly snapped back into place, humming with its familiar, comforting frequency.
Kenji and Ayla felt a sudden, violent downward pull. Their consciousnesses were jerked out of the collapsing void and thrown back across the spiritual tunnel at an incredible speed.
The next instant, Kenji opened his eyes.
The sharp, clinical luster immediately returned to his hazel gaze. He inhaled a deep breath of cold morning air, his lungs expanding as his nervous system reconnected with his physical body.
Before he could even look around at the bloody courtyard, he felt a soft, warm weight pressing tightly against his front.
Ayla had also opened her eyes. She was back in her perfect human slate form, her silver hair spilling over his chest as she hugged him tightly around the waist. Her cheeks were still wet with real human tears, but her golden eyes were bright and filled with an immense sense of relief.
Kenji looked down at her, and his expression changed as he hurriedly looked around.
"You are naked again," he face-palmed, removing his tattered upper clothes to cover her.
"Why, don’t you like it?" Ayla breathed into his chest.
