Soulless Soul

Chapter 62: The Civilized Zone

After a grueling, agonizing hour of continuous evasion through the suffocatingly dark undercanopy of the unmapped sector, Sky burst forcefully into a small, ruined clearing where a massive, gnarled tree had recently collapsed under its own rotting weight. The air here was heavy with the rancid smell of shattered wood, damp moss, and ozone.

Standing perfectly back-to-back in the absolute dead center of the clearing, weapons leveled against the darkness, were Vesper and Chloe.

They were alive, but they were undeniably in terrible, ragged shape. The portal that had scattered the thirty-plus raid participants had clearly dropped them into a localized warzone. Chloe’s massive, three-meter-tall steel and copper Iron Mecha suit—the crowning achievement of her technical expertise engineered from Arthur’s high-grade raw iron reserves—was completely gone. It had been reduced to a horribly melted, twisting, smoking pile of black scrap metal resting behind her boots. She was left standing in her simple purple tunic, holding nothing but a basic pneumatic wrench, her face entirely covered in dark engine soot and grease.

Vesper’s pristine, high-born white robes were torn to ribbons along the left flank, stained with dark mud and splatters of acidic green monster blood. Worse, her newly evolved Sacred Light-Saber had completely lost its upgraded high-capacity energy batteries during the drop; the brilliant emerald circuitry runes along the flat of the iron were dead, forcing the weapon to revert to a fractured, notched silver broadsword that hummed with a dangerously unstable baseline frequency.

"Skies!" Chloe cried out, her voice cracking with an immediate wave of pure, emotional relief.

Her advanced visor was severely cracked right across the center focus lens, flickering wildly with static lines as she looked at him.

"You’re actually alive!"

"Barely," Sky responded flatly, not wasting a single millisecond as he dropped smoothly into a defensive martial stance right beside them, his eyes scanning the surrounding purple brush.

He didn’t try to play the hero or hide the state of his resources. "I completely lost the forearm repeating crossbow during the spatial drop. Looks like you guys got hit just as hard by the system inversion."

"Savage beasts," Vesper stated, her raspy voice tight with a cold, controlled fury, though her sharp gray eyes still burned with that exact same terrifying, unyielding conviction that had dragged them off the first floor. She didn’t show a single trace of physical exhaustion. "A massive pack of dungeon creatures ambushed us the very second we arrived. They ruthlessly tore the mecha’s primary power core straight out of the chassis before Chloe could even activate the localized armor-plating fields."

She glanced down at her fractured, dull silver blade, her grip tightening on the hilt.

"My armor almost got completely destroyed in the initial clash.

"We aren’t the only ones who got butchered during the landing sequence," Chloe said, her breathing shallow as she tapped the metallic frame of her cracked visor. She forced a localized, high-frequency system broadcast to activate, overriding the sector interference.

A grainy, heavily distorted, audio-only distress signal originating from the Vanguard Order’s primary communication channel filtered through the loud white static. It was all made possible by her active Attribute, [Network Link], and her unique passive Attribute, [Eyes of the Abyss].

"...Hold the line! Protect the goddamn flank! Don’t let them split the formation!" Arthur’s booming voice roared desperately through the comms speaker, punctuated immediately by the loud, deafening BOOM of his newly forged Meat Grinder axe-shotgun blasting shells at point-blank range.

"Sylvia, keep firing those plasma bolts! Don’t let up! If we’re able to survive and conquer this Royal Rumble gauntlet today, we’ll all be able to return home to reality as Uncommons! Push through the line!" The frantic transmission suddenly went dead with a loud, digital snap, leaving behind nothing but the hollow whistling of the wind.

Chloe remained perfectly silent, her shoulders trembling slightly as she stood in the center of the mossy cobblestones. Tears streamed silently down her soot-covered face, carving clean paths through the grime. She quickly and aggressively wiped them away with the back of her dirty glove, but more followed almost immediately.

It hurt. The absolute physical and mental terror of watching her hard work get vaporized in seconds, combined with the screams of the vanguard knights dying in the dark, was finally cracking her composure.

"Are you truly okay?" Vesper asked softly, placing a gentle, uncharacteristically comforting hand on Chloe’s trembling shoulder.

"I’m fine," Chloe replied, her lower lip quivering.

But her trembling, high-pitched voice said entirely otherwise.

"Escape Portal," Sky murmured, his heart skipping a single, heavy beat as he looked out into the foggy perimeter.

The words tasted like an impossible luxury on his tongue. Three days back in reality. Three days outside of this living, hell. Three days to eat actual, real food that didn’t taste like simulated paste, sleep in a real mattress bed without a five-point health bar flashing in his eye, and see the actual, physical sun again. It was the only dream that kept him moving through the meat grinder.

"Arthur and his people are fighting their way through," Sky continued, forcing his mind back onto the board.

Sky looked straight toward Chloe, his dark eyes narrowing through his hood.

"But look at the map floating in your visor, Chloe. Is the core actually sitting there?"

Chloe wiped her eyes one final time, swallowed the lump of panic in her throat, and adjusted the calibration dial on her cracked visor. Her fingers moved rapidly, tapping a frantic sequence across the glowing interface of her wrist pad.

She frowned deeply.

"No," she whispered, her voice dropping into a tone of absolute confusion.

Her eyes narrowed to thin slits behind the glass lens as she thoroughly examined the incoming data streams from the sector’s root directory. "The massive energy spike Arthur is currently charging toward isn’t a boss room at all. It’s a decoy matrix."

She rapidly zoomed in on the topographical map, her visor clicking loudly through multiple layers of encryption.

"There’s an enormous, completely isolated structural pocket sitting exactly three kilometers north of our current coordinates."

Sky’s expression hardened into a mask of pure, cynical strategy beneath his crimson scarf.

"What exactly is it registering as, Chloe?"

Chloe hesitated, her fingers freezing over her wrist console as she stared at the readings in absolute, raw disbelief.

"It’s registering on the grid as a..."

She rubbed the side of her visor, verifying the code blocks again to ensure it wasn’t a graphical glitch.

"...a civilized zone?"

An absolute, suffocating silence filled the small clearing, the wind dying down as the three independent operators processed the sheer absurdity of the news.

"That shouldn’t be possible inside but we dont know much about this world," Chloe whispered, her face turning pale beneath the soot. "A civilized zone means permanent structures, system merchants, or... residents."

Vesper tightened her right hand around the leather-wrapped hilt of her fractured silver sword, the metal clicking against her rings as she stepped out of her back-to-back stance.

"Then that is exactly where we go," Vesper stated flatly.

Her piercing gray eyes burned with a fierce, absolute determination that completely banished the darkness of the purple canopy. "If there is something else pulling the strings of the array from behind that boundary line, we march in and we purge it to the bone."

Visit and read more novel to help us update chapter quickly. Thank you so much!