Ultimate Gacha System: Reborn As A Mob in My Favorite Game

Chapter 128: Army Of Souls

The sound of the god’s cartilage giving way was loud and utterly sickening.

Bone met bone with the force of a sledgehammer.

Ryoki’s nose instantly shattered.

A heavy spray of luminescent glowing silver blood exploded from the god’s ruined face, splattering across Klaus’s cheek and the black glass below.

"Hnnng..."

Ryoki let out a muffled undignified cry of pure agony.

The impact scrambled his divine brain as his grip on the rapier loosened.

He stumbled backward with his hands flying up to clutch his completely ruined caved-in face.

The rapier slid out of Klaus’s shoulder, slick with dark blood and gray mist.

Klaus stood there, swaying heavily on his feet.

His chest heaved.

Blood poured down his arm and the gray mist leaked from five different permanent wounds.

His vision blurred, the system notifications flashing red warning signs across his retinas.

He was on the brink of death but he had hit the bastard.

He had ruined the perfect arrogant face of the tyrant...

Klaus let out a ragged pant with a smile touching his lips though that vanished shortly after.

Ryoki lowered his hands from his face.

The god was breathing heavily with his silver armor stained with his own glowing blood.

The center of his face was a concaved, ruined mess of shattered bone and torn cartilage.

Ryoki didn’t look angry anymore... He just looked amused.

The god let out a laugh.

"A savage animal to the very end," Ryoki murmured with his voice sounding quite wet through his broken face.

Ryoki didn’t cast a healing spell.

He simply drew upon the infinite battery chained beneath them.

The silver blood smeared across his armor reversed its flow.

The shattered fragments of bone in his nose instantly snapped back into place.

The torn flesh and cartilage seamlessly knit together, smoothing out until not a single microscopic scar remained.

Within two seconds, Ryoki’s face was completely pristine again.

Klaus stared at the healed god.

The smile slowly vanished from his face se the crushing weight of absolute futility dropped onto his shoulders.

He couldn’t heal a paper cut, and the god had infinite health... The math of the domain was unfair.

Ryoki looked at Klaus, examining the mortal who was bleeding out, crippled, and completely out of options.

The god sneered, raising his silver-gauntleted hand.

He aimed his open palm directly at Klaus’s chest.

"You fought well for an anomaly," Ryoki stated cleanly. "But the game is over. Your vessel belongs to me."

Ryoki stepped forward, preparing to plunge his hand into Klaus’s chest to rip his soul directly out of his crippled body.

There was no tearing of flesh and there was no spray of blood.

Ryoki’s hand simply phased right through Klaus’s dark combat shirt and muscle, plunging directly into the ethereal space where his core resided.

The physical laws of the arena didn’t apply to this kind of magic.

It was a direct completely invasive hijack of the soul.

Klaus groaned with his knees buckling slightly, but he didn’t collapse.

He just stood there, his chin resting near Ryoki’s shoulder with blood dripping from his nose onto the god’s pristine armor.

Ryoki closed his eyes.

He projected his consciousness straight down his arm, bypassing the physical world entirely, intending to find Klaus’s dying soul, snuff it out like a cheap candle, and take the keys to the body.

It was supposed to be easy...

Ryoki’s consciousness slammed into Klaus’s inner domain.

He opened his eyes in the spiritual space, fully expecting to find himself standing in a barren crumbling wasteland.

Ryoki expected to see a weak pathetic mortal soul shivering in the dark, begging for mercy before the end.

That was how it always looked when a mortal’s willpower finally broke...

Instead, Ryoki found himself standing in suffocating darkness.

There was no sky... There was no horizon and there was no smell either.

Ryoki snapped his fingers, generating a ball of pure white divine light to illuminate the space.

When the light flared, Ryoki froze.

He was standing in the middle of a massive graveyard.

It wasn’t a metaphor.

The cavernous space stretched out for miles in every direction, and it was completely packed but there were no tombstones. Instead, there were statues.

More than a hundred perhaps two hundred of perfectly detailed, life-sized stone statues stood in rigid silent rows.

Ryoki slowly turned his head, his white eyes narrowing as he took in the sheer scale of the place.

To his left, there was a cluster of ragged-looking men holding rusted axes and crude bows. Bandits.

To his right, there were massive hulking figures that looked like mutated wolves and twisted undead horrors.

Further back, he saw rows of elite soldiers wearing heavy armor, holding halberds and tower shields.

’This brute was amassing a Soul Army... no wonder his Soul Mana feels pungent.’

Ryoki recognized the terrifying truth of Klaus’s unique class.

The boy hadn’t just been absorbing raw energy when he killed his enemies.

He had been hoarding their entire existences.

Every single life Klaus had taken since awakening had been swallowed, processed, and perfectly preserved in this macabre museum.

Ryoki let out a short scoff.

"What an absolute waste..." the god muttered to himself, he was quite jealous because he had not awakened this specific skill of the Soul King.

However Ilyana had explained about the Soul King Class to hin while she was still alive... and why he was incomplete.

When a Soul King killed someone, they had to banish souls.

It was the ultimate trump card... A legion of immortal soldiers...

"A brainless, uncultured brute," Ryoki sighed, shaking his head. "Why would you house other people in your own soul? Dont you know it’s stupid?"

Ryoki ignored the frozen statues.

Instead he looked toward the center of the cavern.

There, hovering above a raised stone dais, was a pulsing blue orb of energy.

It was Klaus’s major core... The center of his existence...

It was invisible to regular people even if they could enter their soul but as the Soul King he could see it.

All Ryoki had to do was walk over there, crush the blue orb in his hand, and the body was his.

Ryoki took a step forward with his silver boots echoing loudly against the stone floor.

He walked past a statue of a heavily armored soldier.

It was one of the elite guards from Varhem’s camp.

The stone figure was frozen mid-stride, holding a spear.

As Ryoki passed it, he heard a sound.

Crack!

Ryoki paused and he glanced over his shoulder.

The stone covering the guard’s face fractured. Pieces of gray rock flaked off, falling to the floor.

Underneath the stone, a pair of eyes snapped open.

They were glowing crimson red.

The stone shell shattered entirely.

The soul of the Varhem guard wasn’t dead anymore.

It lunged forward, letting out a hollow battle cry, and thrust its spear directly at Ryoki’s back.

Ryoki didn’t even turn fully around. Instead he just sighed in sheer annoyance.

He manifested his silver rapier in his hand out of thin air, flicked his wrist backward, and casually swatted the spear aside.

CLANG!

In the same fluid motion, he drove the tip of his rapier directly through the guard’s chest.

The red eyes flickered and died.

The guard dissolved into a cloud of harmless gray mist.

"A pathetic automated defense mechanism," Ryoki muttered, pulling his sword back. "You think a single stray soul can stop a god?"

He turned back toward the blue core.

Before he could take another step, the ground beneath his feet violently trembled.

It wasn’t a small tremor.

The entire graveyard shook so hard that several of the smaller bandit statues tipped over and shattered.

A massive suffocating shadow loomed over Ryoki, blocking out the light he had generated.

Ryoki looked up.

Rising from the very back of the cavern, uncoiling itself from around one of the massive stalagmites supporting the ceiling, was a giant snake.

Its stone shell was actively cracking and falling away in massive chunks, revealing scales the size of dinner plates.

Its eyes snapped open like twomassive burning red lanterns in the dark.

"Now that is just completely absurd," Ryoki deadpanned.

The snake didn’t hiss.

It moved with terrifying speed for its size.

WHOOSH!

It lunged down, its massive jaws opening wide, completely bypassing Ryoki’s sword, and slammed its heavy, scaled body directly into him.

BAM!

Ryoki was thrown off his feet.

The snake coiled around him instantly, wrapping its massive thick body around his silver armor, attempting to crush him like a tin can.

The pressure was immense.

Even in the spiritual space, Ryoki could feel his projected armor groaning under the strain.

Ryoki gritted his teeth with his eyes flaring with real anger.

He channeled his divine mana, forcing his arms outward.

He was much weaker in another soul than in the outside world or his own domain.

"Get off me, you oversized worm!"

He unleashed a burst of pure white energy, blasting the snake’s coils back just enough to free his arms.

But the snake wasn’t done. It reared its massive head back.

Deep within its throat, a bright volatile blue light began to gather.

"Oh, you have got to be kidding me..." Ryoki muttered.

The snake fired. A massive, concentrated beam of pure blue mana erupted from its jaws, aimed point-blank at Ryoki’s face.

Ryoki threw himself entirely to the side, abandoning his dignified posture and diving into the dirt.

The mana beam scorched the air right where his head had just been, blasting a massive crater into the stone floor and completely disintegrating a dozen statues in its path.

Ryoki hit the ground and rolled, popping back up to his feet.

He looked down at his left pauldron and the silver armor was charred black.

He was genuinely pissed now.

He raised his rapier, fully intending to carve the giant snake into pieces but before he could step forward, the sound started.

It started as a low rumble then, it escalated into a deafening, overlapping sound of cracking stone.

It sounded like a landslide echoing inside a tin can.

Ryoki slowly turned his head, looking out across the vast expanse of the cavern.

Every single statue in the graveyard was shaking.

The stone shells were cracking, splitting, and shattering all at once.

From the front rows to the very back, figures began to move.

Limbs twitched, weapons were raised and then, the eyes opened.

Hundreds of glowing red eyes lit up the darkness of the inner domain.

It was a sea of crimson.

The starving bandits from the snowy roads that Klaus had killed during the two weeks... The rotting twisted abominations from the forest... The heavily armored, elite silver guards from Varhem’s slaughtered camp... and monsters, a lot of them...

Over two hundred trapped souls.

They didn’t form up into neat ranks and they didn’t march like an organized military unit.

Klaus hadn’t organized an army yet. Instead he had just trapped a bunch of violent, pissed-off ghosts in a jar.

They didn’t care that Ryoki was a god.

They didn’t care about his divine authority se they were just mindless things that wanted to kill whatever was standing in front of them.

And Ryoki was the only thing standing between them and Klaus’s core...

They charged and screamed.

The agonizing screams of a hundred different dying consciousnesses all overlapping at once.

The backlash of that much agony hit Ryoki like a freight train.

He actually staggered backward, clutching his head with his free hand.

"Quiet!" Ryoki roared, his voice booming with divine power, trying to force them into submission.

They didn’t listen.

The first wave hit him. A group of heavily armored guards thrust their spears and swung their broadswords.

Ryoki recovered instantly. He was a master swordsman so he didn’t panic.

Instead he became a blur of silver light.

His rapier moved faster than the eye could track.

He parried a spear thrust, stepped inside the guard’s reach, and severed the soul’s head from its shoulders.

He spun, slashing a cultist across the chest, dissolving him into mist.

He ducked under a wildly swinging axe from a bandit and ran his blade straight through the man’s heart.

Ten down... Twenty down... Thirty down...!

Ryoki carved through the horde with flawless efficiency.

He was a god in a room full of insects and he was barely breaking a sweat.

He cut down another heavily armored guard, turning to face the next wave but out of the corner of his eye, he saw something that made his blood run cold.

The mist...

The gray mist left behind by the souls he had just killed wasn’t dissipating. It was swirling together.

Pulling itself back into solid shapes.

The guard he had decapitated ten seconds ago formed back into existence.

The soul simply stitched itself back together, completely ignoring the fact that it had just been killed. Its red eyes snapped open again and it picked up its spear.

Ryoki’s eyes widened in genuine, unadulterated shock.

"What is this?" Ryoki demanded, stepping back as the reformed guard lunged at him again.

He parried the strike and cut the guard down a second time.

But the man he had killed right after was already standing back up, raising a dagger.

Ryoki finally realized the horrific twisted reality of Klaus’s internal domain.

They couldn’t be permanently destroyed inside the domain.

They were bound to the rules of his body.

As long as Klaus’s core was intact, the souls would just keep regenerating indefinitely.

It was an endless meat-grinder.

"This is completely absurd!" Ryoki yelled, slashing wildly to keep a pack of feral winter wolves at bay.

The horde swarmed him.

There was no finesse anymore... It was brutal attrition.

A bandit threw himself at Ryoki’s legs, grabbing his ankle.

Ryoki kicked him away, but a woman leaped onto his back, digging spectral nails into the gaps of his silver armor.

Ryoki elbowed the cultist in the face, shattering his jaw, but two more guards pushed forward with tower shields, slamming Ryoki backward into a stone pillar.

He was taking actual hits.

A rusted dagger scraped across his cheek.

A spear glanced off his thigh.

A massive wolf clamped its jaws onto his left forearm.

Every single hit was soul damage and the pain was real.

Ryoki was a god, but he was drowning in a sea of respawning trash mobs.

"Get off me!" Ryoki screamed, completely losing his aristocratic composure.

His silver hair was a mess and his armor was dented and scorched.

He kicked the wolf away and forcefully shoved the guards back.

He needed to end this right now, before they dragged him down and literally chewed his consciousness to pieces.

Ryoki raised his silver rapier high above his head.

He gripped the hilt with both hands.

He stopped trying to fight them individually... He was going to use his divine authority to simply nuke the entire cavern, wipe the respawn mechanic out entirely, and crack the blue core in the resulting blast.

The blade of his rapier began to glow with blinding pure white light.

The power radiating from the weapon forced the closest souls to step back, shielding their red eyes.

"I am the Second King!" Ryoki roared, his voice shaking the cavern. "You are nothing but filth! Disappear!"

He prepared to swing the blade down and end it all.

Before his arms even twitched downward, he felt something touch his back.

It wasn’t the clumsy scraping claw of a feral bandit nor was it the heavy bash of a shield.

It was a hand.

A smaller firm hand that pressed completely flat against the very center of his back, right between his shoulder blades.

Ryoki froze.

The presence behind him wasn’t mindless.

It felt completely different from the chaotic horde surrounding him.

Before Ryoki could even turn his head to look over his shoulder, the hand shoved forward.

It punched straight through him.

SHHHH-LUCK.

Ryoki gasped as a sickening wet sound echoed in the silence of the paused horde.

He looked down at his own chest.

Protruding directly out of the center of his pristine silver breastplate was a hand and forearm.

It looked completely solid, covered in the sleeve of a kimono.

The fingers were coated in Ryoki’s own glowing silver blood.

Ryoki coughed violently, a thick glob of silver blood splattering onto his chin.

His divine mana instantly sputtered and died.

The blinding light of his rapier completely vanished.

His legs gave out.

He dropped to his knees on the stone floor, completely paralyzed by the catastrophic soul damage.

He slowly, agonizingly turned his head to look over his right shoulder.

Standing directly behind him was Valeria but it wasn’t the tiny, translucent, Chibi ghost that had been sitting on Klaus’s shoulder out in the physical world.

Here, deep inside the inner domain where she was the undisputed warden of the soul, she wasn’t restricted by Klaus’s mana output.

She was in her full original form.

Valeria leaned in close with her face hovering inches from Ryoki’s ear.

She turned her head, and Ryoki saw her eyes.

They were practically bleeding light... filled with a hatred so pure it made the feral horde look peaceful.

What had he done to make this woman that mad?

Valeria whispered directly into the god’s ear with her voice dripping with venom.

"Fuck off."

Valeria didn’t pull her hand out slowly.

She violently yanked her arm backward, ripping her fist out of his chest and physically grabbing hold of Ryoki’s projecting consciousness as she did it.