Chapter 156: Chapter 156: Asura’s Descent
The execution of Danus resounded in the complete silence of the Crimson Canyon.
Ten thousand players from Vanguard’s Legacy stood completely frozen on the sheer red cliffs and the dusty basin floor.
They had just watched a man catch an armor-piercing siege bolt with his bare hand after casually, systematically torturing a high-ranking officer.
The psychological warfare was absolute.
Dante’s [Aura of Despair] passively crushed their morale, amplifying the terror of the visual display.
Up on the highest ridge, Vane was hyperventilating.
The mad architect stared at his crushed ballista bolt lying in the dirt next to Dante’s boots.
His mathematical models were actively failing. He couldn’t comprehend how a player avatar could possess the raw physical mitigation required to stop a siege weapon without activating an invulnerability frame.
"He caught it," Vane whispered, his twitching eyes wide. "He mathematically caught it."
Then, Vane snapped. The rogue Celestial’s manic obsession with systemic order completely overwrote his fear.
"Kill him!" Vane shrieked, his high-pitched voice amplified across the canyon. "Do not let him move! Fire the grid! Synchronize the bombardment! Erase the anomaly!"
The command finally broke the paralysis of the ten-thousand-man army.
They were terrified, but the sheer volume of their numbers offered a false sense of security. They were an organized, perfectly arrayed execution grid.
The thousands of archers and mages stationed on the high ridges didn’t hesitate. They unleashed everything they had.
The sky above the canyon was completely blotted out by a massive, overlapping wave of concentrated magical artillery and heavy iron arrows.
It wasn’t a standard volley. Vane had perfectly calculated the trajectories so that every single projectile would converge simultaneously on Dante’s exact coordinates in the center of the basin.
It was an apocalyptic, unavoidable rain of death.
Dante looked up at the incoming barrage.
He didn’t summon the [Aether-Blade Storm]. Even with the Zenith-tier deflections, a barrage of ten thousand overlapping attacks would overwhelm the hundred phantom swords and bleed through.
He didn’t use [Meteor Stride] to teleport. The sheer volume of the incoming fire covered too wide an area; he would likely materialize directly into another volley.
He needed to tank it.
Dante gripped the hilt of [Voidsever], the black blade resting casually on his shoulder.
He activated the primary skill of his new Mythic-tier class.
[Skill Executed: Asura’s Descent]
The system interface violently flashed a stark, blinding white, immediately followed by an aggressive, pulsing crimson.
[Physical Defense reduced to 0.]
[Magical Defense reduced to 0.]
The heavy, dark purple plating of the [Carapace of the Void-Devourer] completely lost their structural mitigation.
He was functionally naked to the game’s combat engine.
But the trade-off hit a fraction of a millisecond later.
[Maximum HP multiplied by 10.]
[Attack Power Doubled.]
[Absolute Invulnerability Applied. Duration: 5 Seconds.]
Dante’s massive 25,500 health pool aggressively expanded, overflowing the UI container and rocketing to 255,000 HP.
His raw attack power, already sitting at an absurd baseline, spiked drastically, pushing past the 10,000 mark.
A brilliant, burning golden aura completely enveloped his avatar.
The bombardment hit.
The sound was indescribable. It wasn’t a series of explosions; it was a continuous, deafening roar of absolute destruction.
The center of the canyon was instantly buried under a towering pillar of overlapping fireballs, frost lances, lightning strikes, and thousands of iron arrows.
The ground physically buckled. The red dirt was instantly vaporized into glass, kicking up a massive, blinding cloud of smoke and debris that completely obscured the bottom of the basin.
Vane watched from the ridge, a manic, triumphant grin spreading across his face.
"Perfect," Vane giggled, rubbing his hands together. "The mathematical volume of the overlapping damage is absolute.
No entity can survive that much concentrated fire without a structural reset."
The bombardment continued for five solid seconds, the Vanguard’s Legacy casters completely draining their mana pools to sustain the barrage.
Finally, the casting stopped.
The smoke and dust billowed heavily in the center of the canyon. The vanguard infantry on the ground tightened their shield walls, waiting to advance and claim the massive bounty on the anomaly’s head.
The dust slowly began to clear.
Standing in the absolute dead center of a glowing, molten crater, completely unharmed, was Dante.
The golden invulnerability frames were still actively burning around his dark armor. He hadn’t taken a single point of damage.
Above his head, a massive, overlapping cloud of red text slowly faded.
[-0]
[-0]
[-0]
"He’s still standing," a tank whispered in absolute horror, dropping his shield.
"He tanked the entire grid," another player breathed, stumbling backward.
Dante didn’t wait for the smoke to fully clear. He watched the five-second timer for his invulnerability ticking down.
He had to move.
If the [Asura’s Descent] invulnerability expired, his defense was sitting at zero.
Even with a quarter of a million health points, taking concentrated fire from thousands of players without baseline mitigation would rapidly chew through his HP.
He needed to secure kills to extend the duration of the invulnerability.
"My turn," Dante said softly.
He triggered [Meteor Stride].
He didn’t teleport to the high ridges to hunt the archers. He aimed directly for the densest, most heavily packed cluster of Vanguard’s Legacy heavy infantry blocking the northern exit of the canyon.
He vanished in a flash of white-hot light.
He materialized directly inside their shield wall, leaving a massive, ten-foot-wide trail of superheated plasma cutting through the center of the basin.
The vanguard troops panicked, desperately trying to swing their weapons at the sudden intruder.
Dante didn’t swing [Voidsever]. He didn’t want the targeted, single-strike executions. He needed massive, indiscriminate area-of-effect damage to rapidly stack kills.
He raised his empty left hand.
[Skill Executed: Cyclone of Ruin]
The F5 hurricane exploded into existence directly inside the Vanguard’s Legacy infantry formation.
Because his attack power was doubled from [Asura’s Descent] and he possessed the 100% Guaranteed Critical Hit Chance from [Predator’s Eye], the base damage of the Zenith-tier wind was mathematically catastrophic.
The hurricane roared, expanding instantly to a fifty-foot radius.
The heavily armored tanks didn’t just get sucked into the air. They were instantly pulverized.
The swirling, dark purple vortex acted like a meat grinder, shredding the players’ armor and health bars in a fraction of a second.
[-45,000! OVERKILL!]
[-45,000! OVERKILL!]
Dozens of players were deleted simultaneously. They exploded into massive showers of blue pixels, their dropped loot caught in the swirling winds.
The system interface flashed rapidly.
[Invulnerability Extended: +3 Seconds.]
[Invulnerability Extended: +3 Seconds.]
[Invulnerability Extended: +3 Seconds.]
For every single player the hurricane killed, Dante’s absolute invulnerability timer was extended.
He was instantly granted minutes of complete, flawless immunity to all damage.
He was an unkillable god, and he had just entered the meat grinder.
Dante didn’t stop. With [Chrono-Shift] removing all mana costs and halving his cooldowns, he was an automated disaster.
He triggered [Phantom Waltz].
He became an untargetable, teleporting blur. He bounced rapidly through the surviving vanguard ranks, delivering five instantaneous, Zenith-tier strikes with [Voidsever].
The primordial greatsword’s 100% armor penetration ensured every single hit was a guaranteed execution.
Crack. Crack. Crack. Crack. Crack.
Five more players deleted. Five more extensions to his invulnerability timer.
Dante materialized back in the center of the panicked infantry, smoothly chaining his skills.
He raised his hand and triggered another [Cyclone of Ruin] right next to the first one, creating overlapping hurricanes that completely locked down the northern exit.
The Vanguard’s Legacy army broke entirely.
Military discipline, overlapping formations, and coordinated magical bombardments were completely useless against an anomaly that didn’t take damage, didn’t use mana, and killed dozens of players every single second.
"Run!"
"He’s immortal! Get out of the canyon!"
Thousands of players dropped their weapons and scrambled frantically, desperately trying to climb the steep red cliffs or run back toward the entrance they had blocked.
They trampled each other in their panic, completely abandoning any pretense of fighting back.
Up on the highest ridge, Vane watched the absolute slaughter of his perfectly designed execution grid.
The mad architect wasn’t giggling anymore. He was tearing at his messy gray hair, his eyes wide with frantic, obsessive frustration.
"The variable is completely unbalanced!" Vane shrieked, slamming his fists against a rock. "He is generating infinite invulnerability frames! This is a systemic error! The Zenith Protocol is failing to mitigate his data density!"
Vane knew the army was lost. Ten thousand players couldn’t stop Dante if they couldn’t deal damage.
But Vane was an architect. He always had a failsafe.
He pulled a massive, glowing gold scroll from his robes. The parchment was incredibly thick, bound with heavy silver chains and glowing with intense Divine energy.
[Item Identified: Impregnable Scroll]
[Tier: Divine]
[Type: Ultimate Environmental Barrier]
Vane didn’t plan to trap Dante in the canyon to kill him. He planned to trap Dante in the canyon forever.
The mad architect crushed the scroll in his hands.
"If I cannot mathematically delete you," Vane snarled, glaring down at the dark-armored anomaly carving through the infantry.
"I will simply remove your coordinates from the server entirely."
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