Chương 29: Final Battle Begins

The heavy double doors gave way beneath my hands. For a moment, I was completely stunned. This wasn't a sterile laboratory straight out of a horror movie, nor was it the pristine, holy chapel I had expected from the Akashic System's lore. It was an wrecked chapel out of a post—apocalyptic movie. The wooden pews had been reduced to splintered kindling, and the stone statues were obliterated into dust. The colorful murals of gods and angels that lined the walls were cracked and caved in.

The grand stained-glass window at the back was shattered, revealing nothing but a pitch-black wall behind it. Everything in the room was burning in eerie, flickering blue flames. And in the middle of it all, two massive entities lay dead. The first was Strange Toy, or at least what was left of it. Its wooden horse body was heavily scorched and destroyed, all its mismatched limbs violently torn off. I couldn't find any of its three heads among the rubble.

The second thing was the dungeon boss, a creature I had only ever read about on the wiki. The Congregation No offering to salvation was ever wasted. Every child who failed to survive the treatments, every subject whose usefulness ran dry, was never discarded—only folded in. Limb by limb, breath by breath, decade by decade, they were woven into something controllable, something loyal, something that would wait in the dark corners of the chapel until the day its master finally needed it.

Recorded in the Akashic system in the year 13701. It was massive, roughly the same size as the upgraded Strange Toy. It was a fused, writhing mass of pale limbs and half-formed faces pressed together into a single, grotesque entity. Dozens of small hands, some still unmistakably child-sized, jutted from its bulk at odd, broken angles. But it was just as dead as Strange Toy. Deep gouges tore through its fleshy mass in a dozen places, with large porcelain shards embedded so deeply they had fused with its flesh.

It, too, was slowly burning away in the blue flames. I followed the trail of the rising blue fumes, tracing them to the far end of the ruined chapel. I found Lania there. She was tightly strapped to a raised stone dais. Thick, black tubes ran from her back, connecting to a massive glass container suspended above her. A single, heavy drop of black liquid fell into the tank, sending ripples through the dark fluid that already filled a quarter of the glass.

The liquid wasn't like the gross black sludge that covered the monsters in the maze. It was an absolute, abyssal black—as if no light could escape it. It looked like a literal hole torn into the fabric of reality. Aram floated gently in the air just in front of it, staring down at me. Show-off. Aram Aram believed that humanity was not meant to simply exist within the universe, but to rule it entirely.

To him, the laws of nature, the decay of time, and the boundaries of mortal life were not inevitable truths—they were insults to human potential. He looked at the stars and decided they belonged to mankind by absolute right. When humanity's ancient immortality was traded away for fleeting superpowers, he didn't see a tragic fable; he saw a theft that needed to be rectified. He built Life's Last Hope not out of compassion, but out of a fanatical obsession to forge a flawless genesis.

He was fully willing to sacrifice thousands of innocent children, so long as it ensured humanity would reclaim its stolen gifts and ascend the throne of reality as its eternal, unquestioned sovereign. Recorded in the Akashic system in the year 13199. Taking in the destruction, I could easily guess what had happened here. Aram wanted to harvest and store the life-force of everything present, and for that, he needed Lania to overexert her powers. Aram ordered The Congregation to destroy her only friend, Strange Toy.

Lania couldn't just watch it happen. She ordered her toy to fight back, and when it began to lose, she burned everything in sight with her blue flames to keep it standing. In the end, either the two behemoths destroyed each other, or Aram stepped in to finish off the survivor to use as a final sacrifice. Either way, the outcome was exactly what he wanted.

By desperately trying to revive her toy, Lania's siphoning ability had gone into overdrive, allowing Aram to use that horrific contraption to steal and store the pure life-force she was forcefully drawing out.

"Lania," I called out to her. She couldn't answer. Her eyes were shut tight. She was completely unconscious, yet her body was still instinctively trying to output power to make her toy stand once again. This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.

"Let her go." I met Aram's gaze. Gone was the warm smile of appreciation he had worn when we first met. Now, there was only cold annoyance. He was irritated by my presence, but he didn't see me as a genuine hindrance to his grand plan. To him, I was just a fly he could swat at any moment. But he didn't know this fly was going to buzz straight into his ear.

"You... do you not want to get rid of this curse?" he asked, his voice echoing with heavy, supernatural authority.

"Get rid of the curse? Haven't you already achieved that? Aren't you doing all of this just so you can use that 'curse' while retaining your precious immortality?"

"Of course," he replied, slowly descending to the ground, his pristine white robes fluttering in the air.

"Because why not? Imagine what immortal humans armed with the power of these curses could do. Imagine how far we will progress, how many worlds we could conquer."

"You are destroying the lives of hundreds of children just because you are afraid of growing old."

"You don't understand."

"I don't need to understand." I unzipped my makeshift fanny pack—having lost my original one somewhere in the maze—and pulled out two glass vials. I popped the corks and downed the contents of both bottles in a single breath. Tundra's Water. Fulgur's Blood. My core temperature plummeted to a freezing chill, while violent electricity instantly coursed through my veins. My physical strength and sensory perception spiked to their absolute peaks. I channeled my Magika and activated Shadowstride.

My shadow didn't wrap around me like armor; instead, it sank just beneath my skin, hardening my flesh and reinforcing my muscles far beyond normal human limits. Aram did not move. Standing perfectly straight with his hands clasped casually behind his back, he simply observed me. I vanished into the darkness, stepping through the void and emerging instantly from the shadow cast by his left side, courtesy of the burning Congregation. I didn't have a sword or a heavy metal pipe anymore. I only had my fists.

I had forgotten MMA when I sacrificed the card, so there was no refined technique behind my swing—just pure killing intent. I punched him. Or at least, I thought I punched him. My fist abruptly halted exactly one inch away from his face. It didn't hit an invisible wall; it just... stopped. All the kinetic energy behind my strike vanished. He glanced at me out of the corner of his eye. He had negated my momentum. Before I could pull back, I started floating. He negated gravity's hold on me.

Distracted by it, I didn't see Aram's fist coming at me. It hit me in the chin, we no gravity to hold me down I flew upwards in great speed. I activated Shadowstride mid-air, vanishing into the darkness of the vaulted ceiling and reappearing behind a large chunk of a broken statue, safely hidden from his sight. I took a shaky breath, forcing my racing mind to analyze Aram's power. I started from Filki's earlier hypothesis: Negation. That's definitely what he had just done. He negated the kinetic energy of my punch.

Suddenly, a crushing weight slammed into my shoulders. Gravity amplified intensely, forcing me straight to my knees on the cracked stone floor. All my body weight was actively pulling me down into the earth. I would have been turned into meat paste if not for the physical reinforcements of Shadowstride and Tundra's Water. I forced myself up and hopped between the broken pews. The second I moved, the crushing sensation faded. I didn't feel like I was sinking into the ground anymore.

Crouching low, I searched for Aram. He was standing near the statue I had previously hidden behind, roughly ten meters away. I concluded that his effective range wasn't nearly as wide as Moark's. But my mind was stuck on what he had just done. He had increased gravity. That wasn't negation; that was amplification. Did he have two distinct powers? If so, I was completely fucked. Aram casually scanned the room, searching for me. He didn't do it haphazardly.

He knew I wouldn't run away, and he also knew I couldn't defeat him. I hopped to the far side of the chapel. I briefly considered teleporting directly to the dais to free Lania, but the only shadows forming up there were cast by the blue flames, right in the open and directly in Aram's line of sight. Emerging in the darkness on the other side of the room, I focused my Magika into my vocal cords and activated Ghost Laugh, then immediately hopped back behind the broken pews.

I picked up a jagged, splintered wooden stake that used to be a chair leg, and waited. The haunting laugh echoed from the far wall, successfully distracting Aram. As he turned his back toward me to investigate the sound, I stood up, pulled my arm back, and threw the wooden stake with everything I had. Because it was a Copper-rank skill, my Throwing didn't require active Magika focus—it activated automatically, correcting my trajectory. The wooden splinter flew true and struck Aran right in the back of the head.

It hit his skull, not hard enough to knock him unconscious or draw blood, but it gave me incredibly valuable information. Aram whipped around, his face twisting in absolute rage. He pushed off his feet and flew toward me at a terrifying speed. He must have amplified his own momentum or he negated something else. Before I could follow that thought to its conclusion, I had to hop away. Aram landed exactly where I had been standing.

With a single gesture, every broken pew and chunk of stone within a twelve-meter radius was instantly flattened into dust, crushed by an invisible, overwhelming weight. I sat panting in a dark corner near the entrance. I had a clear line of sight on Aram, but hidden in the shadows, he couldn't see me. My brain rapidly connected the dots, tracing back to my high school science classes. Aram didn't have two powers. He was still just negating. To cross the room at that blistering speed just now?

He didn't amplify his momentum; he simply negated air resistance and gravity, allowing a single push of his legs to carry him forward without any natural forces slowing him down. And earlier, when he squashed things into the floor? He wasn't amplifying gravity, either. He was negating the normal force—the upward push of solid matter that counteracts weight. By completely negating the structural integrity of the pews, and the internal resistance of my own muscles and bones, he removed their ability to push back.

He was letting gravity win entirely by negating the physical laws that kept objects from collapsing in on themselves, he forced everything in his radius to instantly crush under its own mass. Now I understood his range, and I understood the exact mechanics of his power. The only thing I needed to figure out now was what he could negate, and what he couldn't.