CHAPTER 71: A SOUL FOR A SOUL

The world held its breath for a single, beautiful, and utterly silent second.

Then the universe screamed.

Michael was already moving.

His legs pumped, his lungs burned, and the cold, hard ground of the Great Lawn flew beneath his feet.

He was a sprinter, and the finish line was the stunned, twitching, half-buried god-monster at the end of the world.

"Go, Spooky, go!" Jax’s voice was a ragged, pain-laced cheer in his ear. "Run like you just stole the last slice of pizza from Jinx!"

"He wouldn’t dare," Jinx’s voice grunted back, a low, deadly promise.

The Umbraxis shook its massive head, a motion that sent a shower of dislodged boulders cascading from its obsidian scales.

It was recovering.

Way too fast.

Okay, Michael, his inner monologue panted, his thoughts a frantic, desperate scramble. This is it. The DPS phase.

The boss is stunned. Time to use your ultimate ability and get all the glory.

He drew the Reaper’s Fang, its matte black surface humming, hungry.

He poured every last, desperate drop of his remaining Void Energy into the blade.

[VE: 2/125]

Right. My ultimate ability is currently on cooldown for the next... forever.

He was a hundred feet away. It felt like a hundred miles.

The dragon’s massive, golden eye, a slit pupil the size of a city bus, began to focus.

The dazed confusion was gone, replaced by a dawning, primordial rage.

"He’s getting up!" Forge’s grizzled roar was a blast of pure panic over the comms. "The stun isn’t holding!"

Michael ran faster, his body screaming, every muscle a chorus of pure, unadulterated agony.

He was a glass cannon that had already fired its cannonball.

All he had left was the glass.

So, the plan, his thoughts tumbled over each other, was to get in close and hit it with a big, flashy Void Slash, right?

A cool, anime-finishing-move kind of thing.

He looked at the Umbraxis, which was now actively pulling its massive, house-sized claws free from the rockslide.

He looked at the tiny, pathetic, F-Rank dagger in his hand.

Yeah, his inner monologue drawled wearily. I’m gonna need a bigger knife.

The plan had failed.

It was a beautiful plan. It was an insane plan. And it had failed.

The window was closing.

"Michael, abort!" Chloe’s voice was a sharp, clean line of pure, analytical panic in his ear. "The stun duration was miscalculated! Get out of there! That is an order!"

He could run. He could Shadow Step away, save himself.

Leave The Ironhearts to be incinerated.

Leave Jinx and Jax to be hunted down.

Leave his mother’s legacy to be a ghost story whispered in the dark.

The whispers started then.

They were no longer a chaotic chorus. They were a single, cold, and terrifyingly logical voice in the quiet of his mind.

This is inefficient.

The primary objective is the neutralization of the target.

Your current method has a 99.8% probability of failure.

There is a more optimal path.

The icon for [Soul Devour] on his HUD began to pulse with a faint, insistent, dark purple light.

It was a siren’s call. A promise of power. A solution.

The easy way out.

And the darkest way down.

"No," he whispered, the word a raw, desperate prayer.

The Umbraxis let out a roar, a sound that was not of this world. It was the sound of a star being born and dying in the same, terrible instant.

It was free.

It turned its massive head, its golden eye fixing on the small, insignificant human sprinting towards it.

It saw not a boy.

It saw a fly. An annoyance.

And it prepared to swat him.

The whispers in his head were screaming now, a single, unified, and utterly seductive command.

Take it. Take its power. Take its soul. It is the only way.

"Michael, no!" Chloe’s voice was a raw, horrified scream in his ear, all of her clinical composure shattered. "Your corruption levels are too high! It will kill you! It will tear your soul apart!"

He looked at the dragon.

He looked at the terrified faces of his friends reflected in the polished surface of his dagger.

He looked at the pulsing, hungry icon on his HUD.

He was so, so tired of being weak.

"I’m sorry," he said, his voice quiet, a final, whispered apology to the boy he used to be.

He stopped running.

He stood his ground in the center of the burning, broken field, a lone, defiant figure against the apocalypse.

He held out his hand.

And for the second time in his life, he willingly, deliberately, and with a heart full of cold, hard resolve, he pushed the button.

[SOUL DEVOUR (LV. 1) ACTIVATED.]

The world didn’t just go cold.

It died.

The roaring fire of the Umbraxis, the crimson light of the Gate, the frantic, flashing emergency lights—it all seemed to dim, to gray out, as if a black hole had just opened in the very center of the color spectrum.

The vortex that erupted from Michael’s palm was not the small, hungry thing from before.

It was a maelstrom.

A swirling, silent, and utterly ravenous abyss that was so black it seemed to have its own gravity, pulling the very light and sound from the air into its greedy, empty maw.

The Umbraxis, which had been preparing to unleash a river of fire, froze.

Its massive, god-like head cocked to the side, a flicker of something that was not rage, but pure, primal confusion in its ancient, golden eye.

It had never felt this before.

It was the alpha predator. The apex. The end of the food chain.

And for the first time in ten thousand years, something was trying to eat it.

The vortex latched onto the beast.

It wasn’t a physical connection. It was a psychic one. A harpoon of pure, soul-sucking void that bypassed the scales, the flesh, the bone, and went straight for the heart.

Michael screamed.

The sound was a silent, psychic shriek that ripped through the minds of every living thing in a five-mile radius.

Hunters, monsters, DGC agents watching from the perimeter—they all cried out, clutching their heads, a wave of pure, undiluted agony washing over them.

He was locked in a psychic tug-of-war with a god.

He felt its entire existence pouring into him, a torrent of raw, primordial power and ancient, cosmic rage that threatened to shatter his mind into a million pieces.

He saw the birth of stars.

He felt the cold, patient silence of the Void between worlds.

He felt the hunger. The endless, all-consuming hunger that was the true nature of the space between the Gates.

He was a thimble trying to catch a tsunami.

He was drowning in the soul of a living Gate.

But he held on.

He gritted his teeth, blood pouring from his nose and ears, his body convulsing with the sheer, overwhelming strain.

He wasn’t trying to win.

He wasn’t trying to consume it all.

He was just a thief, trying to snatch a single, glittering jewel from the hoard of a sleeping dragon.

A new prompt flashed on his HUD, its text a stark, beautiful, and utterly terrifying crimson against the white-hot static of his vision.

[WARNING: TARGET ENTITY IS A LEGENDARY-CLASS ANCHOR.]

[FULL ABSORPTION IS IMPOSSIBLE.]

[INITIATING PARTIAL SOUL-DATA EXTRACTION.]

"GIVE IT TO ME!" he roared, the words a raw, telepathic command that was not his own, but a chorus of every hungry ghost that lived inside him.

A single, brilliant thread of pure, obsidian and crimson energy was ripped from the heart of the Umbraxis.

It was a sliver of its soul. A fragment of its power. A single line of its divine, cosmic code.

It shot across the field and slammed into the vortex in Michael’s palm.

The rush of power was not a wave.

It was a universe.

He screamed, his body arching back, his mind shattering and reforming into something new, something older, something terrible.

A final, beautiful, and damning notification burned itself into his vision, the last thing he saw before his world went completely, utterly black.

[LEGENDARY-CLASS SOUL DATA ACQUIRED.]

[BLUEPRINT: GATEKEEPER UMBRAXIS FORGED.]