Chapter 80: If The Vassals Should Resist Me, It Would Pose A Bit Of Trouble, But Would I Lose? Nah, I’d Win.

A brief flicker of surprise showed on his face; the chains weighed heavier than he expected. Each link caused his reinforced bones to groan lowly as he forced them upward.

The ground caved in as he infused more Resonance into every muscle in an effort to throw them forward and intercept Lorelei’s attack, but he was hit with another unpleasant surprise.

The bursting energy within him was swallowed by the chains, and their weight grew tenfold.

Lorelei’s blade stopped just inches from his neck. His survival instincts flared and he let his body drop, dragged down by the sudden weight, as the blade sliced through empty air.

But that was only the first strike.

Lorelei rolled over his back in one smooth motion, carving across it with ruthless precision. His adaptability flared; instead of flesh parting, sparks burst from the impact. She didn’t hold back in any way. A flurry of attacks followed, each swing sharper, each thrust faster than the last. The blades surpassed the 0.8-second threshold, resembling a blur of violet.

Aden clenched his teeth and yanked the chains upward, relying on pure strength to free himself from the entrapment. But the remaining four chains sprang from the ground with heavy rattles and coiled round his neck and arms, pulling him deeper into the crater.

Lorelei swung her blades with relentless speed. Slowly but surely, cuts began to form on Aden’s body. Although his natural Adaptive Resonance had fortified his skin to a ridiculously tough level, the inability to circulate his Resonance to prevent further damage was proving fatal.

The small nicks were now targeted with surgical precision, each swing aiming to widen the wounds. With each spark, a small shlick sound followed, causing the air to smell faintly of the copper tang of blood.

But strangely, Aden’s eyes were calm… eerily calm.

A small drop of blood rolled down his neck and dripped to the floor. The red droplet reflected clearly in his eyes, further illuminated by the sparks of the clashing steel.

Lorelei’s unfeeling eyes flashed in the corner of his vision as she aimed for his nape. Seeing this, Aden smiled.

’Good. I can trust them to kill me if that fucker takes over again.’

The Entity, which had been quiet all this while, roared in indignation. ’What would I gain from killing you?!’

Aden didn’t respond, but his eyes conveyed all the unspoken doubts he harbored. But that was for him alone to see.

Another flash passed his cheeks, sparks hitting close to the corner of his eye. Aden finally decided to put an end to it. Instead of pulling against the chains, Aden did the unthinkable: he stopped resisting.

He let his muscles go limp, allowing the thousands of pounds of obsidian bone to drop fully into the gravity of the cave.

The sudden change in tension caught the four Vassals off guard. They had been pulling with all their might; when the resistance vanished, they inadvertently stumbled back.

Lorelei, who had grown accustomed to the height she was attacking from, was caught off balance. She tried to readjust within those few seconds, but that was far too long.

In that micro-second of slack, Aden didn’t breathe. He focused every scrap of intent into his marrow and pulled upward.

Not with Void.

Not with Resonance.

But with sheer will and an insanely heavy skeleton.

Like a tree being uprooted, the chains groaned from beneath as more of their length was revealed. The Vassals binding him were reminded of the disparity in strength as they fell forward, reluctantly allowing their chains to be pulled out of the shadow realm.

Lorelei’s blade grew longer in an effort to slice further into the deep gash she’d painstakingly created on his back, but it was for naught as one of the chains swung backward and wrapped halfway around her torso.

Her eyes widened slightly. In the next moment, she heartlessly slammed her feet against the injury on his back, using the momentum to free herself from the threatening coil.

With heavy breaths, she skidded backward. Streams of sweat ran down her frame, causing her torn clothes to stick stubbornly to her body. Her blades flickered with weakness, but persisted.

Aden stood in a crouch, his breathing steady. His clothes hung uselessly on his body, ready to fall apart at the slightest movement, but the heavy air around him forbade it.

“You have done well, but it would be quite shameful if I lost here,” Aden’s voice, laced with pride and an excited edge, echoed distantly in the cave. The cavern stood firm despite the tremors the session invoked.

Lorelei’s heart skipped a beat. The finality in his tone planted an instinctual urge of servitude in her heart—the urge to give up and attend to his needs like the Vassal she was created to be.

But that thought was uprooted as fast as it grew. Her instructions were clear: fight to kill. If she couldn’t execute that task, she had no right to call herself the Third Vassal.

She sped forward with light steps, her eyes glowing with an intense violet hue. She planned to disorient Aden for even a split second and pierce his eyes. It was a strategy she’d learned in the Demon Continent, meant for taking down the most primal beasts.

A barrage of tiny needles flew toward Aden, but they fell flat against his back. She closed the distance, vaulted over his shoulder, and threw one of her blades toward his eye in a desperate attempt.

Aden’s eyes locked onto hers. The darkness was suffocating. Had it been any other person, they would have lost control mid-air and landed awkwardly. But Lorelei landed perfectly. The blades, however, were halted mid-air by the very chains the Vassals once wielded.

No words were exchanged before Aden swung the massive chains toward the nine of them, each one slithering with a predatory grace. The cave had transformed into a theater of kinetic violence. The seven chains, now fully uprooted and held in Aden’s grip, behaved more like an extension of his nervous system than inanimate metal.

“Break through it!” Lorelei’s voice rang out, no longer melodic, but sharp with the command of a frontline general.

The seven shadow-Vassals didn’t retreat. They leaned into the madness. The Ninth and Eighth Vassals surged forward, their bodies flickering in and out of the shadow realm as they tried to phase through the heavy arcs of the swinging chains. They moved with the desperation of cornered wolves, their own Void-energy flaring in a final, frantic attempt to regain control.

CLANG. SPARK. BOOM.

The Seventh Vassal met one of the chains head-on, crossing his arms in a defensive guard. The impact pushed him back and pulverized the ground beneath him for ten meters, but he remained standing, his shadowy form vibrating with the effort to avoid being dissipated by the sheer weight of Aden’s intent.

Lorelei, meanwhile, was a blur of violet light. She used the cavern walls, leaping from the jagged protrusions Zero was holding together, her blades parrying the secondary links of the chains with surgical strikes. Every time a chain lunged for her, she deflected it with a microscopic adjustment, using the momentum to propel herself closer to the center of the storm.

“He’s one man!” she shouted, her eyes burning with a violet fire. “The weight has a limit! Find the gap!”

The Vassals charged in a beautiful, desperate show of resistance. The Ninth Vassal managed to slide under a low sweep, his hand reaching for Aden’s ankle. The Sixth and Fourth came from above, their hands glowing with condensed Void-spheres intended to destabilize Aden’s balance.

They were inches away. The air was thick with their combined killing intent, a pressure that would have crushed a Peak Attuned cultivator to a pulp.

Aden’s smile widened, revealing teeth that gleamed like polished bone in the dark.

“The gap?” Aden whispered, the sound cutting through the roar of battle. “There is no gap in the Abyss.”

He didn’t swing the chains outward this time. He slammed them into the floor at his feet.

The Obsidian Circuitry in his arms flared with a blinding, black radiance. Instead of using the chains as whips, he used them as conductors. He dumped a massive, unfiltered surge of his skeletal Void-density into the chains and, through them, into the very foundation of the cave.

His voice vibrated the very foundations of their souls.

“Sovereign’s Domain: The Iron Grave.”

The chains sank into the stone like hot needles through wax, only to erupt a millisecond later beneath the feet of every single Vassal. The resistance ended instantly.

The Ninth Vassal was hoisted into the air as three chains burst from the rock and coiled around his torso, arms, and neck in a crushing embrace.

The Sixth and Fourth were snatched out of the air mid-leap, the ethereal links wrapping around them so tightly that their shadowy forms began to flicker and pop.

Lorelei, mid-vault, saw the trap. She tried to bank right to escape the reach of the stone-bound serpents.

But Aden was faster. He didn’t even look at her; he simply closed his fist.

A chain, thicker and darker than the rest, erupted from the ceiling— the very spot Zero was standing—and dropped like a guillotine. It wrapped around Lorelei’s waist, neck, and arms, pinning her against a stalactite.

The cave fell into a sudden, ringing silence, broken only by the heavy, rhythmic breathing of the combatants and the low, strained groan of stone against iron.

All nine Vassals were bound. Suspended in the air or pinned to the walls, they were completely immobile, their energy being slowly leeched away by the very chains they had tried to use to bind their Master.

Aden stood in the center, his chest heaving, the blood from the scar on his back beginning to dry into a dark, obsidian scab. He looked at Lorelei, who was struggling against the constriction with a mixture of fury and awe.

“Very good” Aden said, his voice returning to its calm, deep authority. “The training is over”

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