Chapter 165: His Dying Oracle

Raziel did not bother denying the accusation.

He stood in the middle of the courtyard with stolen holy magic venting from his bleeding knuckles.

He calculated the exact distance between his boots and the wooden crosses erected outside the main gates.

Mordecai raised his bare left hand and swiped it across the empty air.

A massive section of the courtyard floor between them ceased to exist.

The stone tiles and the dirt vanished in a fraction of a second and left a flat, gray void in the earth.

The unrendered gap possessed no texture and cast no shadows.

Bright red digital static crawled along the jagged edges of the missing ground and chewed on the remaining grass.

Raziel sprinted forward.

He jumped over the gray void.

The sudden absence of physical matter created a vacuum in the air, and the rushing pressure popped his eardrums.

He hit the grass on the other side, rolled to absorb the impact, and kept running toward the gates.

“Keep them off me!” Raziel yelled over his shoulder.

Lucian and Gideon engaged the remaining elite Inquisitors.

The noble and the street thug clashed with the heavy armored guards in the dirt.

They swung their weapons and drew the enemy attention away from the center of the courtyard, buying Raziel the exact seconds he needed to reach the perimeter.

Zorya’s silver counter-shield hummed in the air ahead.

The architectural dome held back the worst of the Silencer’s deletion frequency, but the execution crosses stood outside the safe zone.

Mirael hung from the center cross, trapped completely inside the red digital static.

Raziel crossed the threshold of the silver shield and stepped into the static.

The corrupted air burned his exposed skin.

The sub-audible frequency from the black artifact screamed in his skull and vibrated his teeth.

The physical world rejected his presence in this specific sector.

The blue interface erupted in his vision, and the text bled in frantic red pixels across his retinas.

[CRITICAL ALERT: PACKET LOSS DETECTED.]

[ENVIRONMENTAL DELETION IN PROGRESS.]

[PHYSICAL INTEGRITY COMPROMISED.]

Raziel dismissed the screens with a mental command.

He ignored the burning pain spreading across his arms and reached the wooden cross.

Mirael looked half-dead.

Thick layers of dried blood coated her white tunic and stained her bare feet.

Heavy iron chains wrapped around her waist and wrists to lock her to the wood.

The master sealers carved deep suppression runes into the metal links to prevent any magic from breaking the restraints.

Raziel bit down on his thumb and tore the skin open with his teeth.

He activated Anchor Blood and burned his own physical blood to fuel his core.

Gold and black energy flared through his veins and generated an intense, boiling heat in his chest.

He used the raw fuel to amplify the Devourer to its absolute maximum capacity.

He grabbed the heavy iron chains with both bare hands.

He pushed his Umbral Paragon core directly into the cold metal. He drained the holy suppression magic right out of the iron links.

He pulled the raw energy into his own channels, repurposed the flow, and forced it straight back into the chains with devastating kinetic pressure.

CRACK.

The heavy chains shattered into jagged pieces.

The broken metal fell into the dirt and dissolved into the red digital static.

Mirael collapsed forward.

Raziel caught her. He wrapped his arm around her waist to support her dead weight and stopped her from hitting the ground.

She coughed up a mouthful of dark blood onto his shoulder, then grabbed the collar of his tunic with her ink-stained fingers and held on with desperate strength.

She locked her blind, milky eyes directly onto his face.

VMMMM!

The ambient magic spiked and shoved the red static away for a single second. Mirael forced her Gift of Prophecy straight into his mind through physical contact. She bypassed his mental barriers and injected unfiltered future sight directly into his brain.

The vision hit him hard.

Raziel saw Elector Mordecai standing in a white, empty space.

The supreme commander of the Inquisition lacked a human soul. He lacked standard mana channels and biological organs.

The pristine white robes and the human flesh peeled away to reveal the truth underneath.

Beneath the skin, Mordecai consisted entirely of jagged, shifting black code.

He was a localized string of commands written by the Architect.

Beneath the skin, Mordecai consisted entirely of jagged, shifting black code.

He was a localized string of commands written by the Architect.

The vision ended and shoved Raziel back into the physical world.

Mirael gasped for air and loosened her grip on his collar.

“He has no soul,” Mirael whispered. Her voice sounded hoarse and scraped raw from weeks of screaming.

“He is the hand of the weaver. He sweeps the board clean.”

Raziel dragged her backward and pulled her away from the wooden cross.

“I know what he is,” Raziel answered and forced his legs to move through the red static.

“Hold on to me.”

“He exists to wipe away our sins,” Mirael cried and her blind eyes searched the empty air.

“He hunts the old magic. He unmakes the foundation of the world.”

Raziel stared at her bloody face.

The Architect built an administrator directly into the world of Phaedra to regulate the server from the inside.

Mordecai existed to delete anomalies and erase broken code.

He hunted the forbidden magic of the Primordial Pantheon to ensure the game rules remained completely intact.

Raziel dragged the Oracle backward.

He pulled her away from the wooden cross and forced his legs to move through the red static.

The glitching polygons chewed through the wood behind them and erased the execution structure completely, leaving another unrendered gray void in the dirt.

They crossed the threshold of the silver dome and collapsed onto the stone tiles inside the main courtyard.

The architectural shield washed the deletion magic away from their skin and provided a barrier of breathable air.

Raziel breathed hard and wiped the sweat from his eyes.

He looked back through the iron gates.

Mordecai stood on the dirt road and watched them escape.

The red digital static intensified around the Elector’s boots.

The unrendered gray voids spread across the grass and started eating the outer walls of the academy.

The physical bricks vanished and left holes in the reality of the building.

Raziel tightened his grip on his iron dagger. He understood the real threat now.

Mordecai just initiated a server wipe, and Raziel was standing right in the middle of the trash folder.

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