Chương 156: Ghosts That Do Not Sleep (Part Two)

The air inside the healing chamber was heavy with the powerful fragrance of healing incense and the ancient magic pulsing from the walls of the World Tree. The faint green illumination lent the place an air of sanctity. Lumia lay in peaceful stillness on a wide bed fashioned from enormous interlocking emerald leaves, her face appearing serene and gentle despite the profound pallor that had blanketed her complexion, her chest rising and falling with extreme slowness.

On an adjacent bed no more than a few steps away, Dex lay, his exhausted body covered entirely in transparent herbal bandages that glowed with the light of slow healing, attempting to stitch back together the burnt mana channels within him.

"The man represents an unpredictable and variable threat, but my energy analysis confirms he is now completely depleted. His magical core is in a state of maximum dormancy and may be on the verge of autonomous collapse," the commander whispered through the mental link, gesturing with precise tactical hand signals.

"End the man's life with speed and absolute silence. Take the girl and open the shadow portal for withdrawal." One of the killers separated from the group and approached Dex's bed with soundless lightness. He raised a long dagger, its blade as black as a starless night, reflecting no light at all.

This wicked blade was enchanted with the Poison of Silence and rapid dissolution: a terrifying magic that prevented the victim from even screaming in the moment of death, dissolving the vocal cords the instant it made contact with blood. The killer leaned over Dex with complete coldness, directing the sharp blade toward his heart directly, ready to end a life with a single cowardly thrust.

But in the precise instant the black blade began its descent to pierce his chest, something happened that was not in the calculations of even the world's greatest and coldest killers. Dex opened his eyes. They were not the eyes of someone who had just woken from a deep coma, there was no sleep-haze in them, no fog of exhaustion, no panic of a victim awakening to its own death.

They were eyes blazing with a devilish light, the eyes of an experienced wild wolf that had been feigning sleep with consummate skill for several hours, enduring the pain, waiting for the perfect moment when the arrogant prey would draw close enough to its jaws.

The truth was that Dex, by virtue of his bitter past in the bowels of dark prisons, and his deep and detailed study of the Shadow Organization's methods and tactics as a reader of the story in his previous life, had never trusted the quiet that followed the battle, and had never believed that victory over an army meant the end of the war.

He knew with absolute certainty that the Organization was like hungry hyenas, they never attacked at the height of a fight when swords were bared, but hid, watched, then returned to feed on the valuable remains and stab the victor in the back while he celebrated. Dex had not moved his shattered body by a single millimeter, because any muscular movement, however small, would have alerted the professional killers' senses and made the dagger descend faster.

Instead, in a fraction of a second, he activated the mana trap he had secretly laid with the last drops of his strength and consciousness hours before losing awareness. He had used his own blood, saturated with the heat of the phoenix, to draw precise magical symbols beneath the green sheets he lay on. [Perimeter Ignition: Red Pulse]! Dex had no need to speak the incantation aloud.

A small magical circle, drawn in his blood on the wooden floor beneath the bed, suddenly blazed with a brilliant crimson light like a dying sun. The trap was no lethal assault, he lacked the energy for that, but a mechanical repulsion enchantment. An explosion of hot atmospheric pressure and a concentrated repulsive force erupted from the circle, striking the killer bent over him.

The pressure drove the killer violently backward, hurling him through the air to slam against the solid wooden wall of the sacred tree with a force that shattered his silent white mask and exposed part of his disfigured face beneath.

"I knew it, I knew with absolute certainty you would come," Dex said in an extremely weak voice, a voice emerging from a scorched and torn throat, as he struggled with every last remnant of human will to sit up on the edge of the bed. Bright red blood was trickling from his nose and from the corners of his eyes from the immense mental effort required to activate magic and manipulate mana in his near-dead state. He smiled a twisted and frightening smile as he wiped the blood from his chin.

"Hyenas. They always return in the dark to feed on what's left, don't they?" The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

"You are dead, boy, dead without question, and this pathetic little trap of yours will not save you," said the Collectors' commander, regaining his balance with breathtaking speed befitting his rank. With one sharp gesture of his hand, all five killers drove toward Dex simultaneously from different corners of the room, their black blades cutting the air in terrifying silence, severing every possible path of escape.

Dex understood completely, by cold, logical calculation, that he lacked the physical strength to fight, or even to move his arm to deflect a single dagger blow. He was nothing but a shattered body. But he possessed the greatest weapon available to him: his restless mind, and the lethal war spoils he had taken pains to salvage from the battlefield before he fell.

From beneath his herb-stuffed pillow, Dex drew his hand out with extreme, deliberate slowness, to reveal his surprise: a small black mana crystal the size of a fist. It was no ordinary crystal, it was the central unstable shard he had retrieved from the heart of the wrecked Eclipse Cannons. The crystal pulsed with a disturbed and sickly purple light and produced a muffled buzzing sound resembling the friction of stars against one another, indicating that its internal energy was in a state of absolute chaos.

"Do you know... what happens... when you detonate a completely unstable matter-disintegration crystal in a sealed space saturated with pure magic, like the heart of this great tree?" Dex asked with a mad and terrifying smile that lit his pale face, as he placed his thumb with excruciating slowness over the crystalline pressure point at the center of the shard.

"The result will not be an ordinary thermal explosion you can deflect with your armor. It will be a small, temporary black hole that will swallow everything within a hundred cubic meters. It will swallow this room, and this tree, and me, and Lumia, and naturally, it will swallow you and those ridiculous cloaks you're wearing." The five killers stopped in their places with sudden finality, as though their feet had been nailed to the wooden floor, or as though they had been struck by paralysis.

Their stopping was not born from any fear of death itself, they were soldiers programmed for sacrifice. It was the fear of absolute failure. They knew technically, through their expertise, that this mad human sitting before them was not bluffing. The energetic pressure radiating from the crystal in his trembling hand was real and destructive, and his mentally unstable state after the battle made him entirely capable of going through with it, of ending himself with them, without a particle of hesitation.

"You're bluffing. You are too weak to end your own life, and you will not kill the girl you fought so ferociously to protect mere hours ago," said the commander, struggling to find a crack in Dex's composure or any sign of fear.

"Try me," Dex replied in a tone that chilled the blood, his eyes unblinking, his gaze piercing through their white masks to reach the hollow spaces where their souls should have been.

"Death is an old and intimate friend of mine. He shared my company for years until we became companions, drinking toasts of despair together. For me, right now, dying with dignity and destroying you with me to rid this world of your filth is a victory a thousand times greater than living as a test subject in your damned Organization's laboratories. One more step, and we'll see who reaches hell first."

A terrifying tension took hold, a suffocating, heavy silence that lasted seconds stretching like an entire age in the room. The killers were first-rate professionals, but they were not purposeless suicides. Their primary mission was to collect and preserve, not to perish and waste assets. The logical calculations inside their minds shifted swiftly: the potential loss, the destruction of Lumia's precious bloodline, and their own deaths, far outweighed the expected gain from this confrontation.

And in that decisive moment, when nerves were on the verge of snapping, the room's wooden doors shattered with tremendous force, splintering into fragments. Okonnor stormed in with eyes blazing with fury, accompanied by dozens of dark elf elite warriors, having sensed the first magical explosion from the trap Dex had laid. Glowing spears and drawn bows were aimed and ready to tear flesh apart.

"Immediate withdrawal! Activate the Grey Protocol!" the commander ordered in a sharp, rapid voice through the mental link, acknowledging the tactical defeat. In the blink of an eye faster than the flutter of a lash, the killers' gray shadows dissolved into the chamber's floor and slipped back into the Shadow Dimension.

They disappeared as though they had never existed at all, leaving behind nothing but a cold ozone smell, a shattered white mask, and a silent threat reverberating through every corner of the place, promising they would return. The moment Dex confirmed that the lethal auras had gone, his stiffened fingers relaxed. The black crystal fell from his violently trembling hand and rolled slowly across the emerald leaves of the bed without detonating, for in truth, he had never actually pressed the internal trigger.

Dex exhaled hot, ragged breaths and fell back once more onto the comfortable bed. Darkness began creeping toward the edges of his eyes a second time to carry him back into unconsciousness, but this time, it was not a terrifying darkness. A pale and genuine smile was spreading across his bleeding lips. With the knowledge of a reader and the cunning of a shattered human being, they had won another night, at least one more night of life in this world that showed no mercy to the weak.