Chapter 98: The Void and Invisible Bonds

The gates leading to the one hundredth floor of the Wild Dungeon beneath Crossgard did not open with a roar or the dramatic screech of rusty hinges. They shattered silently. The monumental basalt slabs, coated in ancient runic insulation, simply buckled under the thickening pressure of the area, crumbling into fine black dust that settled on the floor like sand.

Dave’s step was quiet but firmly grounded. His hands rested deep in his trousers pockets, and his sapphire irises – stripped in this second of any camouflage – scanned the space in immediate tactical priority. Right beside him, with a readied rapier of Celestial Silver and raised guard, walked Shnee. On her right shoulder, Kaede raised her antennae, transmitting digital frequency noise directly into the elf’s neural nodes. Karys walked on the left side, knees bent, her elastic Black Fenrir armor adjusted, and her tentacle-tail whistling just above the floor in a deadly, uninterrupted balance.

And then the world lost its color.

It wasn't ordinary darkness known from damp caverns or forgotten cellars. Within a fifty-meter radius from the center of the giant ancient amphitheater, the air literally ceased to let photons through. The red accents on Karys’s armor, the platinum sheen of Shnee’s hair, and the navy fabric of Dave’s coat wilted in a single millisecond into dull, monochromatic shades of gray, white, and deep black. The ambient noise vanished as well - a sterile, dead silence descended upon the chamber.

"Dave…" Shnee whispered, her voice sounding muffled as if under a thick layer of ice. "My mana… the resonance is dropping. Something is snuffing out the light and choking the weaves."

"It’s not a silencing spell," Dave replied coldly, without slowing his pace and adjusting his coat collar. "It’s absorption. The environment has nothing to reflect waves off of. Maintain your structure and don't waste mana on wide barriers."

Right at the center of the cracked basalt arena hovered a figure. Four meters of pure physical pressure. The body possessed no solid skin – it was cloaked in liquid, viscous void-mercury (Void Tar) that ran down broad shoulders and disappeared into the cracks of the floor, devouring the very texture of the stone. His face was covered by a smooth, cracked mask of black obsidian. From the fissures around his eyes and mouth, no fire burned – instead, a slow, cadaverous, cold violet seeped out, resembling an exhausted yet core-alive reactor of ancient power.

And there were collar cuffs.

Thick, heavy, gold-copper cages bound around the titan’s neck, wrists, and ankles. The chains themselves were not visible in the air. From every link ran a line of tension that vanished into empty space after a few centimeters – anchored directly into the fabric of the dimension.

When the God made a minimal twitch with his hand, a terrifying metallic screech tore through the air around him. Invisible anchors strained in the void, and golden spatial sparks snapped at the boundaries of visibility, dying instantly in the sticky blackness.

"Power suppressor..." Dave muttered, triggering Sapphire Yomi I.

His senses descended to a micro-level in a fraction of a second. Yomi I was not a terrain radar; it was a razor-sharp perceptual scalpel, scanning kinetics, density, and tension within a few meters of his own body. And what he saw in the structure of the God’s black mercury caused a red warning light to flash in Dave’s mind.

The Exarch on the ninetieth floor was simply a giant, burnt ektoplasm with high tonnage and hard armor. He could be pushed, outsmarted, and crushed with tonnage.

This here? This wasn't a monster. This was a condensed, localized anomaly with mass and density that broke the law of conservation of momentum. The collar on his neck and wrists sucked ninety-nine percent of his divine authority out of him, but what remained… was still denser than anything Dave had faced in this life.

"Warning!" Kaede’s voice echoed in Shnee’s and Dave’s heads in English, interrupted by a sudden spike of static. "High-density kinetic displacement! Get off the line, now! Boss, this hits like a train!"

There was no time for discussion. The God had no intention of giving speeches.

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The bound figure whipped his right hand up. The invisible chains screeched in the void with the force of a snapping bridge, and from the liquid mercury enveloping his arm shot a black whip of darkness. It didn't flow like liquid – it moved at speeds exceeding the speed of sound, generating a vacuum sonic boom that instantly tore open the stone floor across twenty meters.

"Karys, side!" Shnee barked, freezing the ground under her feet and executing an immediate, flawless dodge to the left.

Karys didn't retreat an inch. With a wild roar, driven by predator instinct, she stiffened her tentacle-tail, drove it like a drill into the basalt, and launched herself forward. Her claws, coated in black KAI hardening, struck directly at the incoming whip of darkness, intending to tear it to shreds.

Experience with the Exarch suggested that the Fenrir armor and concentrated physical strength would parry any blow.

That was a mistake.

When Karys’s claws collided with the void mercury, there was no explosion or sparks. The liquid Void mercury simply absorbed the entire momentum of her strike. In a fraction of a second, the mass of darkness hardened to the density of solid titanium, and Karys’s accumulated momentum was turned against her.

The impact thundered through the entire hall. With a loud grunt, Karys was hurled through the air like a ragdoll. Her armor on her left shoulder cracked, and her tentacle-tail left a deep trench in the stone before she managed to brake fifty meters away, coughing blood onto the gray floor.

"Karys!" Shnee shouted, instantly erecting a triple barrier of Heaven’s Silver before her.

"He doesn't deflect blows!" Karys spat, getting up with difficulty and wiping blood from her chin. Her predatory eyes burned with pure fury, but her left arm hung limp along her torso. "The darkness… that black stuff has its own mass! I hit something that weighed a hundred tons!"

Czernobog ignored the girls. His cracked obsidian mask turned slowly, mechanically toward Dave.

Dave stood in the exact same spot. His coat fluttered lightly from the vacuum gust, but his feet hadn't shifted by a single millimeter.

In his mind, his processor was running at absolute top speed. Yomi I registered every micro-movement of the black mercury. This wasn't a battle where he could afford careless ease and keeping his hands in his pockets to show off. This old man – even bound by invisible shackles – possessed raw potential that could tear the Vessel of any of them apart with a single clean hit.

"Good," Dave muttered. His deep, cold tone was devoid of any panic, but a cold, deadly sapphire flared in his eyes. "Fuck, really good."

Dave removed his right KAI hardening and took one short step forward.

Laminar Flow of his pathways reached a full hundred percent. Inside his energy conduits, pure force surged without any friction. In the same fraction of a second, he activated Intermittent Phase Switching of Gōtai – the black, gleaming shell of KAI hardening did not cover his entire body, but concentrated exclusively on the edge of his right palm and the joints of his right hip.

Czernobog raised his other hand. The invisible chains in the void shrieked with a metallic grind, and the entire space of the amphitheater underwent a violent contraction. Air was sucked from their lungs, and from above crashed down a Void Wave – a wall of black mercury ten meters wide, rushing like a battering ram.

"Shnee, keep Karys back!" Dave called out.

He leaned his hip back. Sapphire Flash fired directly into the motor pathway of his right thigh. An involuntary muscle contraction gave him superhuman acceleration.

Dave didn't run away. He leaped directly under the descending wall of darkness.

Just as the black mercury was about to crush him, Dave delivered a short, straight strike from zero distance. He didn't cast magic. He didn't construct complex telekinetic vectors in space. He used a pure, concentrated pulse of KAI striking the resonance point of the black mass.

A kinetic explosion tore open the monochromatic zone.

The black Void mercury shattered into thousands of sticky droplets that splattered across the amphitheater walls. The shock of the blow traveled along the God’s invisible chains, forcing him to take his first violent step backward. The gold-copper collars on his wrists flashed with the blinding, golden light of the suppressor, causing hissing clouds of burned darkness to rise.

Dave landed on bent legs. A narrow stream of dense white steam escaped his mouth. His right arm trembled slightly from the recoil – the reaction force was so immense that even with flawless Gōtai, he felt a microscopic tear in the muscle tissue of his forearm.

For the first time in thousands of years, the God spoke.

The voice did not come from his mouth. It resonated in the bones, teeth, and spinal cords of everyone present in the hall. It was a low, rough bass steeped in heavy cynicism:

"Pure willpower without the backing of the Pantheon… An Aetheric anomaly in a mortal body." The cracked obsidian mask tilted higher, and the cadaverous violet in the fissures flared more fiercely. "Do you think you can shatter the authority of darkness with a simple little pulse, boy?"

Czernobog yanked both hands violently. The invisible chains screeched so terrifyingly that the basalt floor across the entire hall began cracking and floating into the air under inverted gravity. All the flowing mercury of darkness retreated and condensed around the titan, forming a giant, whirling sphere of negative pressure around him.

Dave adjusted his coat collar, steeled his posture, and smiled charismatically, his sapphire eyes locked onto him.

"Not with a simple little pulse..." he replied softly. "But this old man finally gave me something that actually makes me sweat a little, hehe."