Soulless Soul

Chapter 61: Scattered Into the Void

The Royal Rumble had begun.

The transition didn’t feel like a normal portal jump at all. It wasn’t the familiar, semi-orderly dismantling of molecules that occurred when transitioning from a cleared sector back into the amber warmth of the Living Room lodge.

The exact moment the massive army of thirty-plus Awakened stepped in unison through the threshold, the world completely tore apart at its conceptual seams. A massive, deafening static scream—a chaotic chorus of roars—filled Sky’s ears, vibrating his eardrums until they felt ready to burst. Then the world went dark.

Sky woke with a sharp, ragged gasp, his lungs burning as they violently rejected a wave of dense, suffocatingly foul air.

He immediately tried to roll to his left out of basic survival instinct, but his arms and legs were completely pinned, restricted by an immense pressure.

Instead, he hung suspended five meters above the damp ground, tightly and thoroughly encased in a thick, sticky white cocoon of high-density spider silk that bound his limbs flat against his torso.

Around him stood towering, colossal trees with gnarled, dark-purple bark that pulsed with a slow, sickly rhythm. Their enormous, interlocking branches blocked out nearly all the ambient light from above, while their massive roots twisted through the cold ground like giant serpents, tearing through the ancient cobblestones.

"Damn it," Sky spat, his raspy voice tight with immediate frustration as he struggled frantically against the elastic threads.

The sticky webbing wasn’t just a physical barrier. The silk was draining his physical strength, a localized status alert flashing in the corner of his blurred vision as it reduced his Armor by one full point every ten seconds.

Worse, his eyes tracked down to his left forearm—his newly acquired Repeating Crossbow was completely missing from its leather mounting straps. The matte-black weapon, engineered with such pride by Chloe from Arthur’s high-grade raw iron, had been completely ripped away from his body during the violent, inverted spatial distortion of the portal jump.

All he had left in his current possession was his Blood Blade, hanging precariously at his right hip, its crimson hilt barely accessible through a narrow, accidental gap in the tight webbing.

Skrrrrt.

A sudden, sharp scratching sound moved along a massive gnarled branch directly above him.

Sky looked up, A giant, chitinous monster crawled slowly and methodically down the dark-purple bark of the tree trunk. Eight glowing, bulbous violet eyes stared directly down into his cocoon, reflecting his trapped silhouette in their glossy surfaces. Its long, jointed legs ended in sharp, piercing points that were as black as solid obsidian, clicking against the wood with a sickening cadence.

It was an F-Rank Trench Spider, a verminous denizen. The creature raised one of its heavy front legs, the sharp obsidian tip aligning precisely with Sky’s exposed neck for a fatal piercing strike.

Sky didn’t hesitate for a single millisecond.

He forced his right hand downward through the resistance of the silk, his callused fingers wrapping tightly around the coarse leather of the Blood Blade’s crimson hilt. There wasn’t even an inch of clearance to properly swing the sword or build up kinetic momentum to cut the threads.

So, he bypassed the physical plane entirely, focusing his mind on his remaining Energy reserves.

He activated his attribute.

His physical form dissolved instantly into a formless, incorporeal mass of midnight shadow.

The thick spider web lost its grip entirely, the sticky threads passing harmlessly through the dark smoke as Sky phased straight through the structural boundaries of the silk cocoon and dropped vertically toward the forest floor.

Mid-fall, the brief skill duration expired, and he snapped back into reality.

His body twisted gracefully in the air, his boots skidding across the slippery, moss-covered ground as he absorbed the impact of the five-meter drop. The moment his feet touched the damp earth, he didn’t stop to draw a breath. He used the residual momentum to launch himself upward in a secondary, horizontal shadow dash.

Slash!

The edge of the Blood Blade sliced cleanly and beautifully through the center of the spider’s primary eye cluster, the dark energy of his attribute amplifying the physical cut. The spider released a shrill, grating screech that echoed through the purple canopy before exploding violently into a foul pool of green acidic blood.

Sky landed softly on his knees, rolling across the dirt before quickly pushing himself back to his feet, his blade held in a low defensive guard. He expected another wave of arachnids, but instead, he heared a familiar voice.

[Your title has been fully formed.]

[You are entitledtoa title name.]

[Title information was delayed due to your Imperfect status]

[You are a titled one]

Sky froze, has he awaited for his verdict.

"Curses"

[THE LIVING PANDEMONIUM]

A haunting title bestowed upon an anomalous existence that should never have survived the initial extraction.

During your very first Dungeon Run, your soul was forcefully ripped from your physical vessel by the unfeeling logic of the core. By the laws of the array, you were supposed to decay. Your consciousness was supposed to dissolve into nothingness.

Instead, you became something the Dungeon Array could not comprehend.

You turned your hollow, empty flesh into a cosmic cage, forcing fifty wandering, fractured souls into a lightless void that should have collapsed beneath their collective weight.

You are Imperfect. A walking graveyard. A soulless existence permanently severed from Heaven and utterly rejected by the natural order of the world.

You possess no true soul of your own, yet within your empty vessel resides the highly chaos and conflicting power of fifty plus souls, trapped within an endless, churning underworld.

[Your Judgementhas been passed.]

[YOU ARE THE LIVING PANDEMONIUM.]

A beautiful and tragic crisis that refuses to die.

Sky stared at the runes for a long, heavy moment, his chest heaving against the humid air of the forest. The sheer narrative of the title felt like an anchor dropping into his mind, a confirmation of the horror that had made him what he was.

Then, his cynical eyes shifted away from the runes, tracking down to the empty, torn leather straps on his left arm where his beautiful weapon should have been. "A fancy title doesn’t replace a repeating crossbow, you broken array," he muttered bitterly, his voice raspy and sharp.

A thunderous, guttural roar suddenly shook the entire gnarled forest, vibrating the purple bark of the trees and causing a shower of dark leaves to cascade over his shoulders.

Sky’s expression changed instantly.

The thick, thorny bushes ahead violently parted with a loud snap of breaking timber. Three mutated, six-legged Savage Beasts charged out of the darkness in a tight, uncoordinated pack, their eyes glowing with a mindless, feral hunger. Their heavy bodies were completely covered in jagged, crystalline bone armor plates, and thick, toxic saliva dripped from their enormous jaws, hissing as it struck the mossy stones.

Sky immediately assessed the situation, his [Danger Sense] flaring with a sharp warning at the base of his neck; he didn’t have enough Armor to fight a high-defense pack head-on in an unmapped terrain without his ranged loadout.

He turned on his heel and sprinted at maximum speed into the dark, twisting forest path.

The Savage Beasts roared in unison, their six legs tearing up the damp earth as they gave immediate, aggressive chase. Sky activated [Dark Blade] in short, bursts, allowing his incorporeal shadow form to phase cleanly through low-hanging branches and jagged rocks as he dodged their deadly, lunging bites.

One of the larger beasts nearly caught his flank, its massive jaws snapping shut with a sickening crunch mere inches from his left shoulder.

Sky twisted his upper torso sideways mid-stride, the wind pressure of the near-miss brushing past his cheek as he continued running through the dense brush. He didn’t panic; his mind remained Composed. Whoever lives another day lives to fight another day, right? For the next twenty agonizing minutes, the unmapped sector became a brutal, fast-paced game of cat and mouse through the dark foliage. Whenever the three beasts managed to trap or corner him against the massive purple roots, Sky fought back with cruelty. He used a single, precise shadow dash to slash cleanly through the primary leg tendons of the lead beast, slowing its velocity down significantly before he immediately retreated deeper into the dense tree lines. He used the massive trunks to break their line of sight, forcing the Savage Beasts to stop and rely on their secondary senses to track his movement.

But Sky knew one thing for certain as he paused behind a massive root to check his interface.

This wasn’t a normal Dungeon Run anymore.

Thirty-plus elite Awakened had proudly stepped through that obsidian portal together as a unified raid team. And now, they were completely, scattered across a massive, unknown battlefield biome.

Somewhere out in this dark, terrifying forest, Vesper, Chloe, Arthur, and the rest of the vanguard order were currently fighting for their literal survival against anomalies they hadn’t prepped for. And Sky had absolutely no idea where a single one of them was located.

The true Royal Rumble had officially begun.

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