Chương 142: The Space That Devours Its Own

While Dex was fully consumed in his "hot" and open battle with the giant riders, turning their armor into furnaces and spreading absolute chaos through the ranks of the Earth Dragons, other eyes, cold and dead, were watching the entire scene from within the dense shadows of the surrounding trees. These were not ordinary Imperial soldiers, nor even war mages. They were true ghosts that breathed death.

They were an extremely elite and specialized assassination unit serving the Shadow Organization, the covert body manipulating the strings of this war from behind the curtain. This unit had been hired and tasked with a single, exclusive mission: to exploit the total chaos of the great battle to assassinate the field commanders and key decision-makers in the enemy's ranks.

There were five professional killers, clad in tight suits made from a black magical material that absorbed light rather than reflecting it, rendering them almost invisible to the naked eye even in broad daylight, to say nothing of the forest's shadows. They moved without any sound whatsoever, not even the rustle of a leaf, and carried thin, curved daggers whose blades were steeped in the poison of the Black Widow Flower, a venom that paralyzes the victim within seconds before stopping the heart.

The five assassins exploited Dex's complete absorption in vaporizing the armored riders, and the immense noise produced by the raging beasts, and slipped in behind him at a speed exceeding sound and with the weightlessness of spider silk on the wind.

They moved as a single harmonized entity, planning with mathematical precision to strike Dex at the same moment from five different angles, targeting the vital mana convergence points of his body, the neck, the kidneys, and behind both knees, to ensure he would be unable to use healing magic.

"Dead and done. This is how legends fall," the assassins' leader thought with cold arrogance, leaping into the air from a low branch, employing his absolute concealment magic. His black dagger was aimed with extreme precision at a completely exposed point at the back of Dex's neck, while Dex was still looking forward toward the Imperial forces.

But before the poisoned dagger's blade reached Dex's neck by more than a few millimeters, something happened that shattered every law of nature and logic these professional killers had ever known. The world around them froze. It was not the freezing of time as certain rare legendary enchantments perform, it was a freezing and distortion of space itself.

The assassin leader, his body suspended in midair in the middle of his stabbing motion, felt that the precise physical distance between his dagger's tip and Dex's neck, which had been mere centimeters, had suddenly begun to grow and stretch in a mad, boundless expansion toward infinity. He was driving forward with all his kinetic force, expending every ounce of momentum he had, seeing his target's neck plainly before him, yet for a reason no human mind could comprehend, he was drawing no closer to it.

He was like a man running with all his strength on a treadmill, going nowhere despite every effort expended.

"Who gave you permission, or even the illusion, that you could touch him?" A feminine voice, cold and smooth as silk yet completely devoid of any feeling or human warmth, rang out suddenly and with terrifying clarity in the suspended commander's ear. Lumia appeared from nothing. She had not come running from her previous position, and she had not used a conventional instant-teleportation enchantment that leaves a magical trace.

She simply existed suddenly between Dex and them, as though she had always been there, and the universe had only now decided to reveal her. Unauthorized usage: this tale is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings. Lumia carried no visible weapon, no sword, no bow. She raised her slender hand, white as snow, with extreme slowness and regal elegance, and a cosmic, cold silver light shimmered in her wide eyes.

In that decisive moment, Lumia deployed her forbidden and terrifying celestial racial ability: [Dimensional Bend]. When the other four assassins realized their commander had been ensnared in an invisible trap, they immediately abandoned their concealment and unleashed their unified lethal enchantment. From their hands they launched four Shadow Lances, solid, sharp, and swift as black lightning, aimed directly at Lumia's heart and Dex's back simultaneously. Lumia showed no sign of alarm.

She did not move a single inch to evade the lethal lances. Instead, with the same cold, dead expression on her face, she moved her slender fingers in a precise gesture, as though pinching the very fabric of the air itself. Rather than deflecting or fleeing, Lumia folded the spatial region directly in the path of the oncoming lances.

With the skill of a cosmic surgeon, she opened four extremely small spatial portals, each no larger than the palm of a hand, that swallowed the four Shadow Lances the instant they approached. This alone was not what was terrifying, spatial transfer exists in advanced magic. What was sanity-shattering was where Lumia placed the exits of these spatial portals. In a surreal, absurd, and blood-curdling scene, the four assassins watched their magical lances vanish suddenly before them into a small silver void.

And in the same fraction of a second, each one of them felt a sharp, piercing, explosive pain in the back of his skull. Lumia had opened the portals' exits directly behind the four assassins' own skulls. The Shadow Lances, launched by their own hands, at their own full velocity, punched through the backs of their skulls with the entirety of their original momentum, shattered the bone, and the blood-and-brain-soaked black blades emerged from their open mouths in a silent scream. They had executed themselves.

With their own weapons. At the same moment. Their four bodies crumpled to the ground like hollow sacks of flesh, never understanding how or why they had died. As for the assassination unit's commander, still suspended in the terrifying state of paralysis inside the "infinite space" Lumia had created, witness to his men dying in this impossible fashion, his eyes widened in a terror that stripped him of all sanity. He tried to scream, but sound does not travel through distorted space.

Lumia looked at him with lethal calm, the look of a goddess contemplating a troublesome insect. Then, with extreme and deliberate slowness, she closed her slender fist. The fabric of space surrounding the commander's body responded instantly to the celestial's command. The physical volume his body occupied in reality contracted, space itself compressed inward with an immense, irresistible force.

"Void Crush," Lumia pronounced the two words in a quiet voice. In a swift, bloody instant, the professional commander, his armor, his flesh, his bones, and his internal organs, was reduced to a small, densely compressed ball of ground meat, blood, and shattered bone no larger than a watermelon, which then dropped onto the muddy ground with a wet, nauseating sound, plop. Lumia stood there, in the middle of the chaotic battlefield, in absolute silence and absolute calm.

Not a single drop of blood had soiled her clothing, and around her lay five corpses disfigured in ways that neither the human mind nor conventional magic could process. Her personal death dance, unlike Dex's loud and fiery combat, was a silent dance, clean, elegant, and effective to a degree that chilled the very bones of existence itself. Since regaining a portion of her memories, Lumia has also regained some of her terrifying abilities, confirming why the Celestials were a race that terrified the universe itself.

Lumia turned her head slowly and looked at Dex's back where he still stood in the distance, radiating heat and terrifying what remained of the Imperial Army. She confirmed with her silver eyes that he was safe, that his back was completely guarded, then lowered her lids and returned to her quiet watch position, as though nothing had occurred.

She was, in all her dark and radiant details, the faithful guardian angel, not one who carries a lyre of light, but one who carries the scythe of death and the fabric of space itself, ready to erase the existence of any being that dared threaten her partner.