Novel Full Chapter 296: Unbound!
Chapter 296: Unbound!
Duke studied it with narrowed eyes. “It’s grown, it has reached the limit of an SSS Labyrinth and can’t evolve further due to the restriction of this world, somehow, despite the agitation, it’s surprising the beasts inside haven’t yet broken outside.”
“You know a lot,” Isolde looked at Duke and said. She stepped forward, and frost formed subtly along her shoulders, rising like a mantle, crystallizing in patterns too precise to be accidental.
Another roar. Closer this time.
The portal surface convulsed as something massive struck its inner boundary. The impact sent a shockwave of destabilized mana rippling across the chamber floor, and the sigils along the walls burned brighter, straining.
Duke rolled his shoulders. “Well,” he said lightly, though his eyes had gone sharp and still, “politics was never my favorite part anyway.”
Bruce’s gaze remained locked on the portal.
Through ’Life Glance’, he could already sense what waited on the other side. An unnatural density of life, beasts layered upon beasts, ecosystems compressed and mutated and starving. Mana thick as storm clouds. And beneath it all, pulsing with the arrhythmic desperation of something breaking apart from within,
A Core in chaos.
Isolde turned to them.
“Once we enter,” she said, her voice carrying the calm of someone who had already made peace with what came next, “we move fast. The Core lies at the labyrinth’s deepest point. The path will not be straightforward, it never is with a dungeon this far gone. It will resist. It will adapt. And it will try to kill us in ways we haven’t anticipated.”
She paused, letting the weight of that settle.
Duke nodded. “I’ll lock down the outer sectors. Funnel everything inward so nothing flanks us.”
Bruce flexed his fingers once, a surgeon’s habit, unconscious and old. “Leave the weaker beasts to me. I’ll suppress what I can and keep the path clear.”
Isolde’s gaze flickered between them. Something shifted in her expression, not warmth, exactly, but the closest thing to it that a woman forged in Eiskar’s ice could manage.
“Then I leave it to you both.”
She turned toward the portal. The frost along her shoulders spread, down her arms, across her back, until she wore winter itself like armor.
“Try to keep up.”
The moment they stepped through, the world shifted.
Cold hit them like a wall.
Not the kind that brushed against skin and politely reminded you to draw your cloak tighter. This was invasive cold, the kind that sank through cloth, slipped past aura, threaded through muscle, and settled deep within bone. The air itself felt heavier here, denser, as though saturated with frozen mana. Breath left their mouths in slow, crystallized plumes that lingered longer than they should have.
Above them stretched a sky of pale, glacial white, fractured by drifting clouds that moved with unnatural lethargy, as if time itself had thickened. The ground beneath their boots was a mixture of frost-hardened stone and compacted snow, veins of mana crystals embedded within it, glowing faintly like trapped stars beneath ice. Towering trees ringed the portal clearing, their bark barely visible beneath thick layers of rime, branches encased in jagged sheaths of frost that chimed faintly when the wind stirred.
And then the shriek came.
High-pitched. Feral.
Not dozens. Not hundreds. But thousands, tens of thousands.
It erupted from everywhere at once, from the treetops, where white-furred shapes clung like predatory ornaments, from the jagged frost-rock cliffs surrounding the basin, from burrowed tunnels that split the ice-laced earth.
The forest exploded.
White and brown figures burst forward in waves, agile, lean, muscle coiled beneath thick fur. Their limbs were long and whip-fast, claws curved and gleaming. Their teeth were worse. Long, jagged, frost-coated fangs that gleamed like sharpened icicles, mist curling from their maws with each shriek.
Frost Fang Monkeys. A-Rank.
And they were everywhere.
The clearing around the portal was already theirs. The density of their population was absurd, unnatural, as if the Labyrinth itself had been breeding them without restraint. They moved in chaotic unison. Shriek, leap, tear. Their eyes burned with territorial fury and fractured instinct.
They did not hesitate.
They swarmed.
Isolde’s gaze sharpened instantly, silver eyes calculating trajectories in a fraction of a breath. Duke’s hand rose calmly, spatial mana condensing around his fingers.
But Bruce moved first.
He didn’t flinch. Didn’t draw a weapon. Didn’t chant or weave a sigil.
He simply exhaled. And invoked his authority.
’Vitality Sovereign.’
There was no flash of light. No explosion. No dramatic burst of golden brilliance.
But the world shifted.
Mid-leap, every Frost Fang Monkey lunging toward them shuddered. In a single instant, the vitality within each beast shrank violently inward, as though an invisible hand had reached into their cores and wrung them dry.
Their robust frames deflated mid-air. Fur dulled. Muscle withered. Veins receded.
The sound of impact rolled across the frozen clearing as thousands of bodies struck the ground, collapsing in heaps like discarded husks. Dry. Shrunken. Wrinkled forms that looked as though they hadn’t eaten in years. Seconds ago they had been powerful, agile predators. Now they resembled desiccated carcasses preserved in ice.
The contrast was grotesque. Absolute.
Silence fell for half a breath. Even the wind seemed to pause.
Isolde’s eyes widened, only slightly, but enough. Duke’s brows lifted.
They had witnessed Bruce’s Authority before. But not like this. Not unleashed across an entire battlefield in a single thought.
Isolde turned her head just enough to address him, composure already restored. “Remember,” she said, her voice cutting cleanly through the frozen air, “I need them alive. You only need to restrict them.”
Bruce waved her off casually, already stepping forward. “Don’t worry. Not a single beast will die in my hands.”
Duke let out a low whistle with a smile. “Remind me never to be on the wrong side of that sentence.”
The next instant, both Isolde and Duke ignited.
SSS-tier aura flared around them like compressed stars tearing open seams in the sky. Snow beneath their feet fractured outward in spiderweb patterns as gravity seemed to loosen its hold. They lifted effortlessly into the air, two streaks of condensed power that shot forward across the icy landscape, trailing faint distortions in their wake.
Duke glanced sideways mid-flight. “I’ll handle the SSS-tier signatures. You focus on the Core.”