Chapter 141: Chapter 141: A Vortex of Blades
Dante stood in the swirling bone dust. His health bar was sitting at a precarious one hit point.
The golden invulnerability frames from [Undying Spirit] hummed across his armor, but the five-second duration was rapidly ticking away.
The Undead Phalanx didn’t hesitate.
Without the archers to provide covering fire, the remaining hundred and fifty Hoplites pushed forward at double speed.
Their bronze shields were locked tight, and their jagged spears thrust methodically.
Behind the shield wall, the seven Undead Deputy Generals rode their skeletal chariots. Their necrotic glaives were raised high as they maintained the [Relentless March] aura.
They thought Dante was finished.
The system had registered the fatal reflection damage. They were just marching in to clean up the remains.
Dante drew the [Dawn-Breaker Blade].
The Gold-tier broadsword felt impossibly light in his hands.
The [Blood Sacrifice] buff had multiplied his base attack power by an absurd 1,000%. It scaled inversely with his missing health.
His attack stat wasn’t just high. It was mathematically devastating.
But attack power alone couldn’t bypass the 100% reflection penalty of the [Phalanx Reflection].
If he hit the shields again, the resulting rebound would instantly bypass his invulnerability frames the second they expired and delete him.
He needed to break their formation from the inside out without triggering a direct frontal collision.
He opened his inventory, and his mind raced through his collection of unused low-tier skillbooks.
"I need an omnidirectional clear," Dante muttered.
He found a worn and heavy leather tome.
[Item Appraised: Skillbook - Cleaving Spin]
[Tier: Adept]
[Description: A heavy 360-degree rotational melee attack. Deals 150% physical damage to all enemies within weapon range and knocks back smaller targets. Cooldown: 15 seconds.]
It was a standard crowd-control skill for heavy warriors usually used to create breathing room when surrounded by trash mobs.
Dante absorbed it instantly.
[Skill Learned: Cleaving Spin (Adept)]
He didn’t activate the skill right away. He waited.
3 seconds remaining on invulnerability.
The phalanx closed the gap. The bronze spears thrust forward aiming directly for his chest.
They sparked harmlessly against the golden aura protecting him and failed to register a single point of damage.
Dante triggered [Phantom Dash].
He didn’t teleport backward to escape. He teleported straight up.
He launched himself twenty feet into the air directly above the center of the advancing shield wall.
He looked down at the tight organized ranks of the Undead Hoplites. From above, the phalanx looked like a solid floor of overlapping bronze plates.
2 seconds remaining.
Gravity pulled him down.
Dante gripped the [Dawn-Breaker Blade] tightly with both hands and held it out horizontally as he fell toward the center of the formation.
He activated the new skill.
[Skill Executed: Cleaving Spin.]
The anomaly triggered instantly.
[Talent Activated: 10,000x Multiplier.]
[Registering 10,000 flawless executions.]
The combat enlightenment wasn’t about a simple heavy swing.
The neural link of Dante flooded with the absolute mastery of rotational physics and centrifugal force.
He understood how to completely eliminate the friction of his own movement to turn his avatar into a localized razor-sharp top.
He felt the exact angle required to bend the ambient air pressure to draw physical mass inward before violently expelling it outward.
[Cleaving Spin has reached Master tier.]
[Cleaving Spin has reached Grandmaster tier.]
The air around Dante began to violently spin to match his rotational velocity.
[Cleaving Spin has reached Zenith tier.]
[Skill Evolution Triggered.]
[Cleaving Spin has evolved into: Vortex of Blades.]
The system interface updated and flashed a blinding metallic silver.
[Vortex of Blades (Zenith)]
[Description: The user becomes an untargetable and continuous 360-degree storm of physical destruction. Deals 2,000% Physical Damage per second to all entities within a 30-foot radius. Actively deflects all incoming projectiles and magical attacks. Duration: Sustained (Drains Stamina). Cooldown: None (Chrono-Shift Active).]
Dante didn’t hit the bronze shields.
He landed directly in the center of the phalanx. The impact was completely masked by the sheer deafening roar of the Zenith-tier skill activating.
He didn’t just spin. He became a localized metallic tornado.
The [Dawn-Breaker Blade] blurred into a solid ring of golden light.
The Undead Hoplites didn’t even have time to raise their shields upward to defend themselves. The [Vortex of Blades] expanded outward and instantly filled a thirty-foot radius.
The 2,000% physical damage multiplier combined with the absurd 1,000% attack power boost from [Blood Sacrifice] generated a raw damage output that the engine of the Zenith Protocol actively struggled to process.
The bronze shields didn’t trigger their reflection passive.
The attack didn’t register as a direct frontal strike. It registered as an overwhelming environmental area-of-effect disaster originating from inside their own formation.
The heavy bronze shields and tarnished breastplates of the Hoplites were completely shredded.
They didn’t bounce the attack. They were pulverized into metallic confetti.
[-150,000! OVERKILL!]
[-150,000! OVERKILL!]
[-150,000! OVERKILL!]
The massive and overlapping damage numbers completely blotted out the vision of Dante.
Over a hundred Undead Hoplites were instantaneously vaporized.
They didn’t fall. They turned into a massive explosion of blue and silver polygons, and their health bars completely zeroed out in the first second of the spin.
Dante didn’t stop the skill. With [Chrono-Shift] removing all stamina costs, he could maintain the [Vortex of Blades] indefinitely.
He moved.
He acted like a runaway buzzsaw. He directed his tornado of golden light through the remaining panicked ranks of the phalanx.
The perfect and disciplined military formation completely shattered.
The surviving Hoplites broke rank and desperately tried to scramble away from the spinning anomaly that was effortlessly chewing through their army.
It didn’t matter.
The movement speed of Dante, unhindered by the spin animation, allowed him to effortlessly chase them down and grind the retreating infantry into digital dust.
1 second remaining on invulnerability.
The seven Undead Deputy Generals watching their elite army get casually deleted in less than ten seconds finally reacted.
They didn’t charge into the vortex. The Gold-tier AI recognized the mathematical suicide of entering the immediate strike zone.
The generals drove their skeletal chariots backward to put distance between themselves and the spinning meat grinder.
They raised their necrotic glaives and aimed directly at the center of the golden tornado.
[Boss Mechanic Triggered: Necrotic Execution]
Seven highly concentrated massive beams of dark green magic shot from the tips of their glaives and converged perfectly on the coordinates of Dante.
The invulnerability frames expired.
The golden aura protecting the avatar of Dante vanished. He was sitting at 1 HP completely exposed.
The seven necrotic beams slammed into the [Vortex of Blades].
The Zenith-tier skill didn’t just deal damage. The passive deflection mechanic triggered flawlessly.
The solid ring of spinning golden light caught the concentrated magical attacks and violently rejected them.
The seven necrotic beams shattered upon contact. They deflected outward in a chaotic and harmless shower of green sparks that fizzled out against the bone-covered ground.
"Nice try," the voice of Dante resounded from within the spinning vortex.
He dropped the skill.
The spinning stopped instantly. Dante stood perfectly balanced in the center of a massive empty clearing.
The ground was covered in pulverized bronze and a mountain of dropped loot.
The entire phalanx of one hundred and fifty Undead Hoplites was gone.
Only the seven Deputy Generals remained. They stood in a wide semicircle on their skeletal chariots and gripped their glaives.
Their [Relentless March] buff was useless without an army to amplify.
"Seven on one," Dante noted and raised the [Dawn-Breaker Blade]. "I like those odds."
He didn’t give them time to coordinate another volley of necrotic magic.
He triggered [Phantom Dash].
He vanished and materialized directly on the back of the closest skeletal chariot right behind the first Deputy General.
The sonic boom stunned the massive boss and the skeletal horses simultaneously.
Dante didn’t use a flashy skill.
He just drove his massive 1,000% buffed attack power straight through the back of the neck of the general.
[-350,000! Critical Hit! OVERKILL!]
The Gold-tier elite boss exploded into pixels, and the skeletal chariot collapsed into a pile of bones.
The remaining six generals roared in fury. They turned their chariots to face him and raised their glaives.
Dante didn’t dodge. He triggered [Phantom Waltz].
The purple invulnerability frames enveloped him and made him completely untargetable as the six glaives swung through empty air.
He vanished.
Crack. Crack. Crack. Crack. Crack.
The five instantaneous and teleporting strikes resounded through the Mists of Carnage.
Dante materialized next to five different generals in rapid succession to deliver a flawless and lethal execution strike to each one.
The 1,000% attack power boost from [Blood Sacrifice] multiplied by the 1,000% damage multiplier of [Phantom Waltz] created a localized damage output that completely broke the display interface of the game.
[-OVERFLOW ERROR! OVERKILL!]
Five Deputy Generals violently exploded simultaneously.
The animation ended. Dante materialized back on the ground, and his gold armor gleamed.
[Passive Trigger (Dance of Death): Cooldown Reset.]
There was only one general left.
The massive undead officer stared at the empty space where his six brothers had just been standing.
The Gold-tier system completely locked up entirely unable to process how an entire elite army and six commanders had been systematically deleted by a single player sitting at 1 HP.
The general slowly lowered his necrotic glaive and took a step backward on his chariot.
"You do not get to run," Dante said flatly.
He triggered [Phantom Dash] one last time and crossed the gap instantly. The sonic boom stunned the final boss.
Dante casually swung his broadsword and decapitated the general in a single fluid motion.
The final boss exploded into loot.
[Target Eliminated: Undead Deputy General x7]
[Target Eliminated: Undead Hoplite x150]
[Experience Gained. Level Up!]
Dante watched his level tick up to 68. The sheer volume of high-tier mobs and seven elite bosses provided a massive influx of experience.
He stood alone in the Mists of Carnage. The silence returned to the bone-littered wasteland broken only by the soft jingling of thousands of dropped gold coins.
He didn’t immediately vacuum the loot.
His health was still sitting at 1 HP.
He sheathed the [Dawn-Breaker Blade] and opened his pet interface. He needed to summon Aura to heal him back to full before a random piece of environmental damage deleted him.
Before he could tap the summon icon, the thick red mist violently parted.
A chilling and sinister laugh resounded through the wasteland. It wasn’t a digitized and artificial sound. It was smooth, musical, and terrifyingly real.
"What an impressive display of violence, little Outworlder," a voice called out from the fog.
Dante didn’t turn around.
His Intuition stat didn’t ping. It completely flatlined and was overwhelmed by an entity whose stealth parameters were so incredibly high the system itself couldn’t register her presence.
He didn’t have time to trigger [Phantom Waltz]. He didn’t have time to dodge.
A hand covered in sleek crimson leather materialized from the shadows directly behind him.
A long and impossibly thin stiletto dagger glowing with a lethal dark red poison slid smoothly across the throat of Dante.
The blade didn’t hit his armor. It bypassed his mitigation entirely.
Dante froze. The cold steel rested against his digital skin.
He was at 1 HP. His invulnerability frames were gone.
"Do not move," the voice whispered directly into his ear. "I only need a single drop of blood."
