Chapter 43: Tell me what you need my king

Gideon watched them. "You really have your hands full, kid. But keep your eyes focused, The air is changing ahead."

The narrow tunnel abruptly opened up, leading onto a terrifyingly vast subterranean ledge.

Dante stopped at the edge, looking down. The space was enormous—a volcanic cavity filled with a literal lake of bubbling, white-hot molten stone forty meters below. The heat coming off the pool was immense, creating a distorted, shimmering screen in the air. Cutting directly across the center of this lake was a single, ancient stone bridge made of obsidian blocks, ending at a dark archway on the opposite side of the mountain.

But the bridge wasn’t empty. Sitting right in the middle was a colossal mound of hardened black stone. It looked like a small mountain crusted with glowing veins of liquid fire. It had no face, no eyes, and no arms—just a massive, irregular shape that radiated a suffocating pressure.

"The blind elemental," Gideon whispered, his face turning grim as he stopped behind Dante. "It uses the acoustic vibrations of the stone to track targets. The moment you hits that bridge, it will register the weight signature and flatten everything on the path."

Dante pulled his right hand out of his pocket, his fingers settling smoothly onto the invisible grip of the Seven-Sins Asura Blade. His chest was still tight from the toxic air, but his eyes remained completely calm, locking onto the massive stone entity.

Dante stood at the edge of the stone ledge, looking down at the massive obsidian entity sitting in the middle of the bridge. The heat coming off the boiling lake below was rising in heavy sheets, making the air distort.

"How do you want to handle this, kid?" Gideon asked, his voice low as he gripped his bone staff tightly. "The moment we step on those stones, that thing will feel the weight signature. It doesn’t have eyes, but its hearing through the stone is perfect."

Dante didn’t look back. His right hand remained on the invisible grip of his sword.

’My stamina is already down by about ten percent from the sulfur air,’ Dante calculated internally. ’If I try to fight it head-on in a prolonged brawl, the gravity and the heat will drain my physical energy before we even reach the northern fortress. I need a clean distraction to close the distance without triggering its full aggro loop.’

Dante turned his head and look at Esabella eyes "Can your whip reach the upper canyon walls on the left?"

Esabella’s entire posture shifted into a chilling serious battle stance as she hear dante.

"It can," Esabella replied. She uncoiled the long, dark whip from her hip with a slow, smooth movement of her long red nails. "Tell me what you need, my King."

"First can you stop calling me king everytime ?" Dante said and looking at her adorable eyes looking at him.

"Haa ! Forgot whatever. Stand on this ledge and strike the upper rocks every three seconds," Dante said, "Create enough vibration to pull its attention away from the center track. The moment it turns its frame, I’ll move."

"Understood," she said.

She stepped to the absolute edge of the cliff, ignoring the burning wind that blew against her corset and the high slit of her wrap skirt. Her tail extended straight out behind her, the switchblade bone-shards popping completely outward, clicking sharply as she balanced her weight on the stone.

Without another word, she raised her arm and snapped her whip toward the ceiling.

SNAP! BOOM!

The thorned vine slammed violently into a massive boulder on the left canyon wall, breaking the stone into pieces and sending a loud, echoing vibration through the entire chamber.

The colossal mound of black stone in the middle of the bridge reacted instantly. The glowing red veins of liquid fire across its torso flared brightly, and its massive basalt head snapped toward the left side of the cavern. It let out a hollow rumble that sounded like tectonic plates grinding together, its massive torso shifting weight to face the source of the noise.

Void Step—

The moment the elemental turned its flank, Dante launched himself forward. The vibration was small, but on the quiet track, it was a clear signal.

The blind elemental’s head immediately twitched back toward the center path, its core pulsing with a dangerous red light as it detected a secondary weight signature.

Before the monster could lunge, Esabella delivered a second, even more violent strike to the upper left ridge. A massive cascade of rocks fell into the boiling lake below, creating a huge acoustic distraction that completely confused the elemental’s senses. The beast roared in frustration, its giant stone arms slamming into the side guardrails as it tried to track both positions at once.

Dante didn’t waste a single second of the opening. He executed two more rapid Void Step sequences, his body blurring across the dark obsidian blocks until he was standing just three meters below the creature’s towering chest.

He willed his left hand to move, activating ’The Asura’s Eye of Fate’.

Buzz.

The stone eye on his middle finger cracked wide open. Instantly, the red glow of the lava lake and the smoke vanished from his sight, replaced by the clean, grayscale matrix of lines and energy paths.

Dante tracked the energy flowing through the monster’s core. Because the beast was constantly shifting its weight to process Esabella’s acoustic traps, its internal matrix was fluctuating wildly. Right in the center of its massive stone sternum, a tiny, glowing red dot appeared—the absolute structural weakness holding its entire basalt body together.

’Found it,’ Dante thought.

He crouched low, his leg muscles bulging as he prepared to lunge for the final cut. But just as his foot left the stone, the elemental let out a deafening shriek. Bypassing the acoustic distractions entirely through sheer instinct, the monster raised a colossal fist of hardened volcanic rock and brought it crashing straight down toward Dante’s head with world-crushing force.