Chapter 28: Our goal wasn’t to kill you

Dante stepped out onto the floor of the thirty-fourth level.

Standing in the center of the open plaza were three human figures. They did not wear standard guild uniforms. They wore battle-scarred armor that pulsed with dark energy. These were Marcus’s top S-rank executioners, the strongest hunters in the Radiant Dawn guild.

The leader, a tall man named Robert, held a massive two-handed weapon made of black stone. To his left stood a female assassin named Lyra, her hands holding two jagged daggers. To his right was a defense specialist named Boris, carrying a three-meter-tall barrier shield.

"Kenneth was weak," Robert said. "He thought he could isolate your mana, Dante. But we know you aren’t just using mana. You have a reflection skin. Marcus told us everything. We are not here to play games."

Dante walked forward, his foot leaving zero tracks in the dust. Behind him, the twelve-meter reptile let out a low growl from its teeth, its scales tightening as Yenna stayed low on its neck.

"Three S-ranks," Dante said."Marcus is running out of names."

"We are enough," Lyra whispered.

The combat started without a single warning.

Lyra did not lunge at Dante’s chest. She knew about the Vajra Mirror Body. Instead, she smashed a small sphere onto the ground. Instantly, a massive cloud of toxic mineral fluid vaporized into the air, filling the entire floor. The fluid vapor did not strike Dante; it entered the atmosphere, instantly draining the oxygen and creating a chemical trap that began to dissolve the fabric of his hoodie through the air.

At the same moment, Boris slammed his barrier shield into the ground. A gravitational field expanded from the shield, multiplying the weight of the floor by five hundred times.

Dante’s foot sank two inches into the solid floor. The crushing atmospheric weight hit his chest like a falling mountain. Because it was an environmental status trap rather than a direct physical strike, his reflection passive did not trigger. His chest tightened, and he struggled to take a breath.

Robert lunged forward, his weapon swinging downward. He did not aim at Dante. He aimed his strike at the ground three feet in front of Dante’s toes.

The kinetic impact was immense. The weapon shattered the floor, creating a deep fissure that ripped across the stone right toward the giant alligator’s front legs. The ground beneath the reptile dissolved into flying shards, causing the twelve-meter beast to lose its balance and tilt sideways toward the toxic chemical pool below.

’Zero!’ Yenna called out through the mind link, her fingers gripping the dark scales as she tried to stay on the beast’s neck.

For the first time since his resurrection, Dante’s posture broke. He could not let Yenna fall into the toxic fluid; her tracking was his only map for the tower.

Dante used his Void Step to leap through the air pressure, his left hand catching Yenna’s arm to pull her onto a safe mineral ledge behind him. But the sudden movement to protect her left his right flank completely exposed.

Robert did not miss the opening. He swung his weapon horizontally, using the raw baseline strength of an S-rank veteran to drive the mineral edge straight toward Dante’s ribs.

Dante could not dodge in mid-air under the gravity grid. He had to take the hit.

The black weapon struck Dante’s side with a massive impact. The SSS-Rank Vajra Mirror Body initialized instantly, multiplying the force by two and blasting it back into the weapon.

Robert’s stone weapon violently shattered into pieces, and the bones in his arms cracked loudly from the feedback. But Robert did not fall. He had anticipated the reflection. The moment his weapon broke, he let go of the hilt and used his remaining strength to trigger an embedded fire rune on his chest plate, unleashing a massive wave of primordial heat that did not touch Dante, but consumed the remaining air inside the dome.

Dante hit the ground. He was actively struggling. The three S-ranks had created a perfect tactical loop that bypassed his passive defense by targeting the room itself.

"You’re a ghost, Dante!" Robert shouted, spitting red fluid onto the floor as he backed behind Boris’s massive shield. "You can’t reflect the air running out! You can’t reflect the ground dissolving under your feet! You die here!"

"What kind of bullshit is this, the same trick again?!, kenneth already did this and dead and you think this will work on me ? Do you know one thing? i was just playing with you. From the moment i enter i could kill you in instant. You think you understand my limits because Marcus gave you a blueprint," Dante said, his voice dropping to a dangerous, icy whisper.

He slowly pulled his right hand out of his pocket. His fingers closed tightly around the invisible grip of the Seven-Sins Asura Blade. On his middle finger, The Asura’s Eye of Fate opened its dark stone eye.

A bright red text dot appeared right at the core center of Boris’s three-meter mineral shield. That was the absolute structural weakness holding the entire gravity grid and toxic trap together.

Then —

Dante’s invisible blade hit the absolute structural weakness dot on the center of the barrier shield.

The three-meter barrier exploded into fine sand. The five-hundred-times gravity grid vanished instantly, and the toxic fluid vapor in the air dissolved. Boris flew backward, his chest armor cracked, crashing hard against the distant walls before slumping down onto the floor, completely still.

Robert stood alone, his arm bones broken, spitting blood onto the floor. He looked at Dante, who was walking toward him through the clearing dust, the invisible blade humming with the intent to collect the final debt. Robert knew his combat was finished. He knew his squad had failed to crush the S-rank ghost.

A desperate look entered the executioner’s face.

"Marcus was right... you are a monster, Dante. We couldn’t defeat you in a straight fight. But we didn’t need to win."

With a sudden movement of his remaining left fingers, Robert drew a dark item from his belt vest and threw it straight at Dante’s chest.

Dante’s reactions were too fast. He lunged forward and caught the flying item out of the air with his right hand, intending to crush it.

But the moment his skin closed around the surface, his eyes narrowed. He realized what the item was. It wasn’t an explosive or a magic rune. It was an ancient, blacklisted artifact.

Before he could throw the dark object away from his body, the spatial transformation initialized.

A spatial opening tore through the empty air directly beneath Dante. The gravitational pull inside the tear was absolute, ignoring his baseline strength stats entirely and locking down his movement.

Robert let out a bloody laugh from his teeth, his body slumping to the ground as his energy failed. "Our goal wasn’t to kill you, we know I can’t defeat you! That is why Marcus gave me that item! He told me to throw you into the deep demon world! Nobody leaves that alive! You are finished, Dante!"

"Zero!" Yenna screamed, her black ears pinning against her hair in pure survival terror. She lunged forward from the ledge, her claws extending to catch his clothing.

But the movement was too late. The opening violently swallowed Dante’s entire frame, leaving everything behind. The spatial tear snapped closed, leaving the plaza completely still. Dante was gone, dropped out of the tower ascension grid entirely.

Yenna hit the ground, her fingers scraping against the empty dust where he had been standing a second ago. Through the shared mental link, the matrix went completely silent. The strand connecting her brain to Dante was dead.

Terror washed over Yenna. She knew about that deep demon world from the old text archives of her world. It was a blacklisted dimension where the tower dropped ancient, violent entities—a place of absolute fire and mountains where even top-tier guilds vanished without a trace.

Before she could stand up, a sound came from the opening of the corridor behind her.

A female figure walked out into the plaza light. She wore elite crimson guild armor, her fingers holding a long, glowing restraint wire.

It was Elena—another original member of the team who had betrayed dante a year ago.

"Well, Robert did his job," Elena said, her gaze fixing entirely on Yenna. A smirk appeared on her face. "Marcus doesn’t care about the lower floors anymore. He wants you, cat-kin. Your tracking text is too valuable to leave rotting down here. You are coming with me to the upper sectors."