Dungeon Diver: Stealing A Monster’s Power

I watch a bright white and blue glistening blade pierce through Samir’s back and come out the front of his chest in my direction.

By the time he realizes, I’ve already closed the distance between us as well and shove my blade right above the icy one in his chest.

An unfathomable amount of ether commands are activating as I pierce through the thick armor. However, up close, I can analyze them with much more detail. They’re not all fully activating. Compared to the commands I just witnessed him release in the memories of the past, this armor has exhausted a large amount of its power.

I can’t tell if this was old imprinted power used up by a limited-time use, if they’ve degraded over time, or simply if his attention is fractured and his will is broken too much by the sudden attacks that he cannot activate them all in time.

Whatever the reason may be, both Maria and I are bursting with more strength than ever before.

I slice right through his already fractured cores and thrust upward. Maria twists and slices down.

The entire bird cage is filled with a bright white flash.

The most violent and explosive burst of light comes out of Samir’s armor as our blades slice through more and more of it. I can feel Primordial Aura pooling into my sword and battling against the stored energy in this Royal Demon’s armor. Yet, with every few million kilometers I slice through, the weaker his connection to this energy gets.

Soul ties are being broken and devoured in front of my eyes, which only makes the depth of my Primordial Aura deeper.

I follow through and break upward through the Demon’s chest and slice his head in half with almost no resistance at all by the end of it.

Maria slices through all of his vital organs, freezing them to ice and shattering them to mist.

Two halves of the Royal Family Head, Samir Vanguard, breaks apart in the explosion.

Countless strands of ether attempt to connect the armor pieces back together, and inside his flesh, even tries to reconnect with tendrils of demonic essence and dense strands of dark blue divine energy.

Yet, his cores have shattered, and the life is leaving his eyes.

He yells out using a telepathy wave despite the two halves of his brain being over half a billion kilometers apart now.

“This cannot happen. There’s no more time! the Imperials will seal us all out now! But I guess… that was how it was always meant to be anyway…”

As the shock, fear, confusion, and vitality itself leave this Demon’s eyes, a wave of nostalgia and acceptance is the last thing I witness in its gaze. The two parts of its armor still try to pull each other back together, but Maria and I make sure that does not happen.

Zigzags of blue and red light appear through the bright flashing white as we slice through the pieces of armor and destroy every remaining part of it on the spot.

Some pieces are denser than others, and they release built-up ether commands, many of medium quality, and many of high quality that have degraded over the eternity of waiting. They are nowhere near as intricate as the strange arrays the Void Creeper used in the Ravine, but some of the symbols and commands are similar, using a weaker version to summon stored Primordial Aura within these ancient crafts.

In fact, a lot of the stored-up energy cannot be fully constrained or destroyed, and I get caught in the shockwaves, tearing holes in my Royal Sacred Body. They aren’t a problem and heal up even faster than the hits I took during our fight.

Every passing moment now, waves of potent energy are flowing into my body and cores, and my Primordial Aura maturity is rising even faster. The massive gashes heal up before the whole shockwave can even make its way through me.

Maria is caught up in the blast too, but instead of taking damage to her Arch Angel’s Celestial Body like I have, there are pathways of Source Resin that flare up as Primordial Aura hits her. They absorb the blast and even begin taking in High-Quality Ether commands like it is raw energy.

Her entire angelic form begins to turn into what looks like pure diamond, reflecting bright rainbow light back at anything that beams into it for a moment.

My own body starts to absorb everything from that blast too, but the High-Quality commands just flood through me. I can’t fully sense or digest them. To my Celestial energy, they still seem far too foreign. However, all of the compacted Royal Vibrations, Demonic Essence, incredibly refined Celestial energy, and raw Primordial Aura are absorbed directly into my soul, celestial fire, and dark corruption.

Not only from this Demon, but from the Sentinels below him too. Lots of the excess rust and bronze-colored energy in the air have not been fully absorbed yet.

Now that I no longer have to put up any defenses, I can let my aura explode outward with the sole purpose of growing stronger. Maria’s expands with me, and our fire and ice overlap to collide with the countless beams of ether commands held together by a team of demons outside collecting data on our fight.

Without an anchor to Samir Vanguard, all of their devices and arrays lose their sturdy connection and shatter to harmless random glyphs in the open air.

This birdcage is devoured, and all of the Demons holding it together are killed and disintegrated by our shockwave on the spot.

At first, the crater in the sea explodes outward even further, spreading over 4 trillion kilometers in diameter from our aura’s natural blast, but the moment all of our enemies are dead, the flash is gone.

The raging Celestial Sea flows back in, and we float upward in the sky to let the waves crash and settle.

Blaring notifications from this battle are still going off like alarms in my head. They contain scattered alerts from the tens of thousands of Demon’s we’ve killed along with Samir and his Sentinels, but the most important ones float to the top.

[Level Up] x 241,826

[Celestial Emperor’s Soul Sword has Reached Lvl. 6!]

Just as my gaze scans my status to read I’ve reached [Lv. 489,336] , and all of my blood bonded gear and soul armor has skyrocketed in strength, my attention breaks away from these numbers.

“Our time to fulfill the Legacy is near…” echoes deep in a part of my mind I did not even know existed.

It is a deep voice. One that feels wise, yet naive. It is filled with compassion, but burning with anger and hunger.

The longer I try to hold on to its essence, the more convoluted it becomes, and I question if the voice was even real…

I stare down at the sword in my grasp that I swear just spoke to me.

Swirling deep in its core, I watch it digest the final pieces of Samir’s Armor, then move on to the Souls left behind from the Sentinels.

I drained their pure Celestial energy into my own being, but there is a portion of them I cannot fully consume. Oddly, neither could Maria. Her waves of source resin flowed through both sentinels’ souls like they were not even there.

All that remains are two white orbs. They spin around in the core of my sword, and the longer I stare at them, the more I remember them falling down into the battlefield from somewhere else… Once they collided with these beasts, I could tell they had an importance linked to the race of the Hydra and the Tortoise, like an amplifier, but could not tell how…

Now, as I watch the orbs dissolve into the soul of my own amplifier, I remember the intricate commands Ember placed on their souls in the past.

As my eyes widen, another notification rings in my inner ear.

[Celestial Emperor’s Soul Sword has Reached Lvl. 7!]

[Accept New Evolution: Primordial Emperor’s Soul Sword]

[YES] [NO]

The notification starts to waver, and the two orbs start to spin violently in the depths of my sword.

For some reason, this notification appeared without it draining any extra essence. It’s like the sword itself forced it to pop up in my mind. Even as I wait, the reaction seems to be getting worse and worse, creating an instability in the soul of my weapon.

“I must evolve quickly…” rings into my consciousness with the same deep voice again, so I click yes.

The textbox fades away, and profound change ripples through the blade, making it almost invisible in my hands yet hundreds of times heavier. The reaction suppresses the two white orbs in its center, and I watch them fade into its depths just like every other crafting material in the past.

A shockwave of Primordial Aura bursts out of the blade, then it returns to its natural red state, matching my Royal Sacred Body like nothing happened at all…

“What was that…? How can you speak? Can you hear me?” I yell through my Telepathy link straight into my blade, targeting the point where I heard its words come from.

Yet, there is no response. I am deeply connected to its soul. I can tell that it cannot even hear me now, like it is in a dormant sleeping state. I can’t even activate my Primordial Aura inside it; the blade is not cooperating or responding to my thoughts.

I let out a sigh and turn around.

Maria shines bright like a diamond not too far away, and the waves below us calm down very quickly to settle into a flat sea.

There is silence, only the buzz of our vibrations and hum of Celestial energy cycling through our bodies making any noise.

No memories from Samir Vanguard flood into my mind either…

It feels like there was some kind of invisible seal placed on his mind. Just as he died, I felt a glimmer of memories start to surface, but they just passed through me with all the other High-Quality Ether commands.

I look up toward the sky, as flashbacks of the memories from the past war in this zone resurface of the purple demon opening it up with massive claws… but in present day it’s calm and silent too.

I’m happy we won, but slightly suspicious if this is our only threat.