CHAPTER 185: BROKEN BONDS!

Daniel watched Gideon frolicking in the gold with a strange sense of pity.

He remembered what Nicklaus had told him, that Gideon had grown up in extreme poverty. For a man who had known nothing but scarcity his entire life, this sight, this mountain of tangible wealth, was simply too much for his mind to bear.

It had broken him.

"We have to get him out of there," Amara urged, stepping forward.

But Nicklaus held up a hand, his expression grim. "No. It’s too late. He’s lost to it. Trying to drag him out by force will only make him fight us.

And a fight with a berserk Gideon in here... we can’t risk it. We have to move on."

His voice was heavy with the weight of a commander making a hard choice.

"We’ll come back for him before the seven days are up. Hopefully, by then, he will have... come to his senses."

It was a slim hope, and they all knew it.

With one last, sorrowful glance at their teammate, now sprawled in the gold, carving coin-angels with a look of blissful madness, the remaining four pressed on into the vsst field of treasure, their party already broken, their path already shadowed by loss.

The four of them walked in a heavy, somber silence, the image of Gideon lost in his mountain of useless gold still fresh in their minds.

What first seemed like an odd treasure hunt in the Silvershade Realm now felt dark and ominous.

It wasn’t a place of simple traps and monsters, it preyed on the mind, on the deepest desires and weaknesses of those who entered.

"His backstory," Nicklaus finally said, breaking the silence, his voice low and heavy with a commander’s guilt.

"Gideon... he grew up on a junkyard colony in the Outer Zones, born into a family that had nothing.

They’d sometimes go for days without a proper meal.

He joined the Vanguard Academy not for glory, but for the simple promise of a steady paycheck, a way to support his younger siblings back home."

He sighed, running a hand through his hair.

"To see all that wealth, all that security he’s craved his entire life, laid out before him, and to know he can’t touch it... it was too much for him. It broke something fundamental."

Selene, who had been walking with her arms folded, her usual cold composure restored, lowered her gaze to the ground, a hint of what might have been guilt or perhaps a trace of empathy, briefly softening the hard lines of her face.

She had mocked Gideon for his simple-mindedness, but she hadn’t known the depth of his struggle.

"We’ll come back for him," Daniel stated, his voice calm but firm, a quiet promise.

"Now, let’s keep moving. Wasting time feeling sorry for ourselves won’t help him, and it won’t help us."

They continued deeper into the plane, the halls of useless treasures giving way to something new.

They stepped into a huge circular hall, its distant walls fading into the soft, shadowy light.

And the walls... the walls were lined, from floor to ceiling, with countless glowing books, each one resting in its own radiant, protective energy barrier.

There were tens of thousands of them, each glowing with a unique color and brightness, representing every skill, martial art, and magical incantation imaginable.

It was a library of pure, raw power, a collection that would have made the archives of Astralis Academy look like a small-town public library.

Nicklaus stopped dead in his tracks, his breath catching in his throat.

His eyes, usually sharp and calculating, were now wide with a fervent, almost religious awe.

"The Skill Book Hall," he whispered, his voice trembling with an excitement that was completely out of character.

"It’s real. The legends were true."

He was, as he had once admitted, a martial arts fanatic. To him, this wasn’t just a collection of books, it was a sacred treasure, a paradise of infinite combat knowledge.

He immediately strode towards the nearest bookshelf, his gaze fixed on a book that glowed with a steady, blue C-grade light.

"[Flowing Water Fist Art]," he read the title, his voice filled with reverence.

He placed his hands on the radiant energy barrier that protected it. It was solid, unyielding.

"A test," Amara murmured, touching another barrier. "It seems we must break the barrier with force to claim the skill."

Nicklaus grinned, a fierce, predatory light entering his eyes.

"A test of strength to earn knowledge? I accept!"

He drew his energy blades, their edges humming to life.

He took a deep breath, focusing his power, and then unleashed a furious flurry of strikes against the C-grade barrier.

"Boom! Clang! Whump!"

The barrier trembled under the assault but held firm.

Nicklaus pushed harder, muscles tense as he poured every ounce of strength into his strikes.

At last, with a final, desperate roar, his powerful sweeping strike shattered the barrier.

"KRA-KOW!"

The barrier shattered into countless sparkling fragments of light.

The book dropped into his waiting hands.

He gripped it as if it were the most precious thing in the universe.

"I did it!" he panted, a wide, triumphant grin on his face.

He immediately sat down, cross-legged, on the floor and began to absorb the knowledge from the book, his entire being focused, the rest of the world forgotten.

Selene and Amara exchanged a look.

"It took him nearly five minutes of full-power attacks just to break a C-grade barrier," Selene noted, her voice analytical.

"The B-grade and A-grade barriers are undoubtedly much stronger.

It would take hours, maybe even a full day, to break one of those. And then more time to learn the skill itself."

Amara nodded. "With our seven-day time limit, this is not an efficient path for us.

We might manage to learn one, perhaps two skills, but at the cost of exploring the rest of the plane."

As a healer, her strength lay in her affinity with life energies, not in brute-force barrier-breaking.

Selene, as a mage, could likely break them with powerful spells, but the mana cost would be immense.

They tried to reason with Nicklaus, but it was useless. He was like Gideon, lost in his own personal paradise.

"Just... just one more," he muttered, his eyes already scanning the shelves for his next target.

"The [Iron Mountain Shield Technique]... I’ve always wanted to learn that..."

With a shared sigh of resignation, Daniel, Amara, and Selene made the same hard choice they had with Gideon.

They would have to leave him for now.

"Two teammates down, three to go," Daniel said grimly as they walked away from the hall, leaving Nicklaus to his obsessive studies.

The Silvershade Realm was turning out to be far more dangerous and deceptive than they had imagined, its treasures nothing more than beautiful, irresistible traps.

He could only hope that he and the two women remaining would have the strength of will to resist their own perfect temptations when they found them.