Chapter 80 - 76: Culling of Karakorum
Arthur Vance’s execution order didn’t trigger a bomb. It triggered the rest of the roster.
The heavy loading ramp of the cloaked dropship lowered further, the hydraulics hissing sharply in the freezing air. Three figures walked to the jagged edge. They weren’t massive, spliced juggernauts like the carnivore bleeding out on the concrete below. They were sleek, clad in tailored black tactical weave that looked more like high-end corporate athletic wear than armor.
They dropped from the ramp into the ruins of the 101 Highway. They didn’t crater the asphalt. They landed silently, their armor absorbing the kinetic descent. They radiated the arrogant, bored energy of star athletes being forced to get off the bench because the rookies blew a massive lead.
"Goliath always was a blunt instrument," the woman in the center said. Her hair was cut brutally short and dyed an unnatural, glowing ember-red. She casually rolled her shoulders, and a white-hot corporate flame crawled up the length of her steel longsword. "Embarrassing that we actually have to clock in for this."
To her left stood a woman with flowing, deep-ocean blue hair, holding a translucent Trident made of hyper-pressurized water. On the right, a man with stark, windswept white hair lazily gripped a curved bow.
Maddie didn’t wait for them to finish their assessment. Using her kinetic energy to accelerate to a terrifying speed, she kicked a rusted sedan chassis directly at the blue-haired woman as a massive distraction. Maddie followed right behind the flying steel, winding up a devastating, overhand strike with the electrified highway sign. The iron vibrated with a terrifying, localized buildup of raw kinetic energy designed to shatter whatever it hit.
Simultaneously, Elizabeth violently clapped her hands together, expanding a massive, suffocating dome of prehensile shadows over the kill-box to isolate the three corporate assassins and drown their sight.
Relying purely on his Faction HUD in the sudden darkness, Don raised his repeating crossbow and unloaded a relentless, horizontal rain of heavy armor-piercing bolts. He didn’t pause to emote; he screamed a breathless, desperate tactical call that doubled as their signature Hopepunk defiance: "Testing hitboxes—Elizabeth, blind ’em!"
Using the absolute chaos of the shadow-dome and Don’s suppressing fire, Elyas bounced off the ruined highway pillars. He whipped his hands outward, stretching his elastic arms twenty feet through the darkness to strike the red-haired woman from a completely blind angle.
It wasn’t a fight. It was a simultaneous, clinical deconstruction.
The blue-haired Trident wielder didn’t flinch at the flying sedan. She slashed upward, creating a razor-thin blade of hyper-pressurized water that neatly bifurcated the rusted car mid-air. As Maddie burst through the two falling halves, the assassin seamlessly caught the kinetic sign with the shaft of her Trident. She didn’t try to block the force; she redirected the devastating shockwaves straight down. The highway bedrock shattered perfectly beneath Maddie’s boots, ruining her stance in an instant. The Trident wielder stepped into the opening and drove the blunt end viciously into the Vanguard’s ribs, cracking bone.
Ten feet away, the white-haired Air Bow user expanded a localized vacuum. It violently tore the oxygen out of the air, instantly shredding Elizabeth’s magical shadow-dome like smoke caught in a hurricane. With the exact same motion, the vacuum sucked Don’s heavy iron bolts right out of their trajectory, letting them clatter harmlessly to the ground. The archer didn’t even aim before firing a tightly compressed vacuum-arrow straight into Don’s chest. It literally stole the oxygen Don had just used for his quip. The sudden, brutal equalization of pressure instantly sucked the air and blood straight out of his lungs in a fine red mist. Don hit the asphalt in silent agony, his hands frantically clawing at his throat, suffocating on dry land.
As the shadow-dome was ripped away and oxygen rushed back into the kill-box to fill the vacuum, the red-haired Fire Sword wielder exploited the sudden draft. She flash-ignited her blade into a roaring inferno just as Elyas’s elongated daggers reached her neck. She stepped straight inside his extended guard and wrapped the white-hot steel entirely around Elyas’s stretched forearm. The flesh flash-cauterized, physically anchoring him to the burning steel. To save his hands from being amputated, Elyas had to brutally kill his own momentum, crashing face-first into the asphalt to snap his elastic arms back to his chest in pure, screaming agony.
They dismantled the entire Vanguard in a ten-second meat grinder.
Will dragged himself across the fossilized asphalt, his mind racing through the agonizing math of a dead man. His lungs burned, and his muscles misfired under the sheer physical torture of his empty core and his crippling systemic debuffs. Worse, he felt the terrifying internal math of his Faction members’ vital signs violently crashing through their psychic tether.
Sixty feet to the dropship ramp. Three Admin-level monsters standing in the way. He felt the cold, phantom ache where his twenty Luck used to be. He was completely tapped out.
Then, above the chaotic din of shattering concrete and rushing air, Will heard Allison’s voice physically crack as she screamed for Vance to stop. The specific, agonizing sound of his family breaking in pure terror shattered Will’s paralysis completely.
The silence in his head broke.
It didn’t feel like a radio transmission. The psychic weight hit Will like a physical blow. The sudden, overwhelming taste of century-old dust and rusted iron coated his mouth. A massive, crushing pressure seized his central nervous system, forcing his broken spine to snap straight, puppeteered by an external, ancient willpower.
The three members of Project X paused, their eyes narrowing. The bleeding, twenty-year-old anomaly kneeling in the dirt had just changed his posture. The desperate panic was gone. The cold, dead eyes of a historical conqueror stared back at them.
"Get up, boy," Khan growled.
Will choked on a ragged breath. We’re empty, Khan. The core is dead. I have nothing left to give.
Khan didn’t offer a motivational speech. His intent was pure, practical iron, rejecting the System’s math entirely. He forced Will’s gaze down to his own mangled right hand. "The System says you are empty. Let it. You are bleeding, Will. Use the blood."
Prompted by the ancient king, Will looked at the Warlord’s Stigmata. He realized the melted copper of the Mycelial Ring hadn’t just scarred his flesh. It had parasitized his circulatory system. The Warlord’s Wreath was no longer a magical artifact; it had evolved into a biological, necrotic root network woven directly into his veins.
Will slammed his right hand into the asphalt. He didn’t cast a spell; he weaponized his own central nervous system as a physical conduit, deliberately pushing the necrotic network down into the earth.
His actual veins bulged against his skin, turning a diseased, necrotic black all the way up his arm to his neck. He physically felt the claustrophobic friction. His extended nerves scraped blindly through the jagged rebar and fossilized bones of the ruined Los Angeles crust. He pushed deeper, feeling the crushing weight of the earth pressing against his raw nerves as he pierced the dense, magical bedrock of the Labyrinth. Every inch downward felt like a muscle violently tearing.
His nerves finally broke through the ceiling of Deep Karakorum and plunged into the freezing, pressurized depths of the Black Pool.
When his necrotic roots touched the Level 92 Abyssal Leviathan, it was like plugging a frayed auxiliary cord into a nuclear reactor. Will physically spasmed on the surface. Blood blew out of his nose and ears from the sheer, agonizing telepathic feedback of touching a mind that massive.
The massive, three-eyed beast woke. Its presence in Will’s mind was ancient, alien, and unbearably heavy.
I taste the dead copper in your blood again, little parasite, the Leviathan communicated, the sheer volume of its thoughts making Will’s ears bleed. You should be thankful I did not crush you in the dark the first time.
Will stabilized the hemorrhage just enough to bargain.
There are human invaders on your ceiling, Will projected down the roots, his body trembling. They are burning the domain. They are trying to claim the deep.
The Leviathan processed the intent. It recognized the necrotic signature in Will’s blood. It remembered the Sky-Reef. It remembered how the Watcher of Enoch had sacrificed its own divinity to power this fragile human. Deciding the corporate invaders were a plague that needed to be scoured from its roof, the ancient god agreed to assist.
The connection locked.
Back on the surface, Arthur Vance’s flawless composure cracked into a frown. The atmospheric pressure in the kill-box multiplied instantly.
The temperature plummeted in a fraction of a second, flash-freezing the ambient humidity directly onto Project X’s tactical weave. The portable corporate floodlights surrounding the staging ground imploded, the glass shattering under the sudden, crushing barometric pressure of the deep ocean manifesting on dry land.
"Finish it," Vance barked into his watch, losing his polite detachment. "Stop playing."
Project X fought against the suffocating pressure.
"Very well," the red-haired Fire Sword wielder said, raising her blade.