Novel Full Chapter 1095 - Taming the Wall - True Ruins - Unfair Deals
Chapter 1095: Chapter 1095 - Taming the Wall - True Ruins - Unfair Deals
The first blackened claw scraped against the stone, pulling itself out of the stairwell and descending heavily into the chamber.
Then the second.
Two of the massive, black artifacts slithered forward, surrounding the prisoners in a cage of corrupted limbs.
Then the third.
As the third massive limb cleared the entrance of the stairs without anchoring itself to block the path, Ren felt a microscopic knot loosen in his chest. It wasn’t nearly enough to drop his guard, but it was enough to marginally shift the odds.
If she betrayed them right now, fighting three artifacts in an open room and pushing only three in the stairs, with Sirius backing him up, was a vastly different scenario than fighting two with the same four in the suffocating bottleneck.
"Don’t try to run early," Selthia called out, her voice echoing as if she had plucked the calculation right out of his head. "Really, really gonna keep my word. Just wait. Let the last one come down."
The heavy, grinding scrape of the final artifact echoed through the shaft. As they waited for it to clear, Selthia spoke again.
This time, the quality of her voice changed completely. It was softer. Stripped of its strategic malice, it sounded incredibly small, echoing in the dark.
"Didn’t you ever think about the third option of staying yourself?" she asked. A lingering pause stretched between them. "We would be good company for each other... We’d have all the time in the world to talk about so many things."
Ren let out a long, weary exhale.
"Sorry... I have too many things to do."
"Ah..." The single syllable hung heavy in the damp air.
The final blackened claw slid out of the stairwell, its massive bulk settling onto the floor of the seventh chamber. The dark, narrow path leading up was finally, completely unobstructed.
"Does the offer still stand?" Selthia asked quietly. "The one you made me back down in the tenth chamber?"
Ren took a deep breath... Deep within his chest, his mana core was still visibly burning. It cast a faint, golden halo through his skin.
Sirius fell into step right beside him, his jaw set, trusting the young man’s lead.
Ren looked up into the darkness of the stairwell.
"If you keep your word this time," Ren answered, his voice steady. "Yes."
A bright, sudden laugh bounced off the stone walls.
It was the bright, musical laugh she let out when something genuinely surprised her, the kind of pure, unguarded reaction she couldn’t suppress even if she wanted to.
"It’s a promise, then," she chirped. There was a brief pause, a spark of genuine, wicked humor lighting up her final words. "But oops... You better hurry up, my other mutants are almost here."
Ren stood exactly where he was. Slowly, a grim smile curved across his bloodstained lips.
The stairs could wait just a second longer.
He had listened to Selthia’s warning about her incoming Platinum beasts with the adapted ear of someone who had spent enough time playing her twisted games.
He understood exactly how she weaponized her words. She always offered the truth to be read as is in the mana, but systematically stripped away the crucial details that defined it. She built the shortest possible bridge between a statement and a completely incorrect assumption, letting her victims walk themselves off the edge.
She had agreed to move her artifacts out of the way... She had technically kept that promise and "let them go".
But she had deliberately omitted any guarantee regarding the other Platinum beasts rushing toward them just after that.
Ren didn’t care... The final black claw had just scraped clear of the stairwell, and he still had one more move to play before he started climbing.
Because, in all their bargaining, Ren had also never actually specified how far his promises extended either.
He violently ignited his core.
The low, thrumming golden light that he had been maintaining as a passive warning didn’t just brighten...
It detonated.
He took the absolute dregs of his remaining energy and weaponized it in the most direct, aggressive manner possible. It wasn’t a gradual surge of power; it was an instantaneous, blinding solar flare.
It blinded the eyeless horrors in the room.
The ethereal, telepathic network Selthia used to coordinate the massive artifacts, the invisible web anchored to the pulsing, corrupted meat slathered across the walls, was violently disrupted. The pure, aggressive golden light forced itself into the necrotic frequencies, burning everything it touched like acid thrown onto exposed nerves.
The ethereal network snapped.
It wasn’t a permanent destruction, nor was it irreversible damage. But it bought Ren exactly what he needed: a single, chaotic second of dead air. For one heartbeat, the flawless coordination between the eight artifacts short-circuited. Selthia’s sensory input dissolved into blinding static.
One second was all he needed.
Ren’s shadow violently stretched from his boots across the stone floor like liquid obsidian, the massive, invisible jaws of the Wolverine lunging directly toward the seven bound prisoners.
He couldn’t do a spatial jump with the interference and wait he was carrying, but if he could just drag them into his shadow, the Wolverine’s internal space would swallow them whole in the fraction of time he had left and they could run.
Then, the purple network regenerated.
Selthia screamed.
It wasn’t a scream of pain. It was the raw, unhinged shriek of a predator realizing the prey had just flipped the chessboard. It was a furious, deafening roar that needed to explode out of her before her mind could reset.
"THAT IS UNFAIR! YOU LIED TO ME!"
"NO!" Ren roared back, his voice tearing through his raw throat. He had been preparing this exact counter-argument the moment the final claw had started moving. "You purposely left the Platinum beasts out of the deal when you promised to let us go! And I never agreed that I wouldn’t save the prisoners I handed over!"
A silence followed. It lasted for the exact fraction of a second Selthia needed to rip his argument apart and find the logical flaw.
She couldn’t find one.
What she found instead was a blinding, absolute fury.
The corruption in the room spiked to maximum capacity. This wasn’t the slow, controlled, torturous pressure she had used to slowly break Sirius. This was the raw, unmanaged floodgates bursting open.
She directed the suffocating, purple explosion of energy of all her artifacts directly at them, an unfiltered tidal wave of corruption.
Ren met it head-on.