Chapter 226: Fall Of The Bone King…

As the spectral figure dropped to one knee, its head bowed low, empty eye sockets burning with faint red embers as loyalty, submission, and something close to reverence poured out of it like a tide.

It was the Labyrinth’s new will.

At that moment, a hollow, echoing voice reverberated through the space, layered with the distant whispers of countless skeletal remnants.

“Master…”

Bruce watched it in silence, his presence calm and absolute, like a sovereign standing before a kneeling world. The kneeling will of the Skeletal Labyrinth trembled before him, awaiting command, and he was just about to issue its first order when a cascade of notifications burst across his vision.

[Zorvak has cancelled the Undying Curse from your Labyrinth Boss Beast: The Bone King.]

His eyes narrowed slightly.

At that exact moment, far away within the depths of the Labyrinth, Sophie was still fighting.

She had not sensed the shift yet. She had noticed the Shadow Wolves earlier, dark shapes ripping through skeletal hordes with brutal efficiency, but she couldn’t help but frown as they had not been there when she first entered the boss zone.

Their presence unsettled her, but she could not afford to dwell on it. The Bone King still loomed before her, its towering frame radiating necrotic pressure, and worse, it was still regenerating.

She had already tried everything before. Precise decapitations that targeted it’s ligaments. Spatial slashes.

Even the necrotic core embedded in its chest had been cut more than once, yet it always reformed, pulsing with sickly crimson light as the creature rebuilt itself from ruin.

At this point, she was no longer fighting because she believed she could kill it. She was fighting because she was buying time.

Reignland was under siege. Dungeons were erupting everywhere. Reinforcements were stretched thin, and her father had personally assessed this Labyrinth and told her she could handle it alone with her current strength.

That was why she was here. Solo. This was an S-Ranked Labyrinth, and yet its monsters were strangely weak, weak but endless, grinding her down through sheer attrition. Her mana was running low now, dangerously low, and the Bone King seemed to sense it.

With a low, grinding roar, it raised both arms. Every undead skeleton in the arena shuddered as if responding to a single command. Then their bones tore free. Hundreds of skeletal bodies collapsed as their frames were ripped apart, their bones flying toward the Bone King like a storm of white shards.

They fused into its body, stacking, layering, reinforcing, its frame growing larger with every heartbeat until it stood ten meters tall, then twelve, then fifteen, a towering colossus of death forged from the remains of its own army.

Sophie slid backward across the fractured ground, boots carving furrows as she retreated, eyes locked onto the monster. And then she stopped.

She didn’t know why but she felt like should try attacking it’s necrotic core again…

She did not question it. Her arcane sword flashed and space folded around her as she vanished from where she stood and reappeared beside the Bone King’s sternum, exactly where the crimson core pulsed behind layers of bone.

A spear of jagged bone erupted toward her, but it was too slow. Sophie kicked off the ribcage, twisting in mid-air, her blade already moving, and in a single perfect arc she struck.

CRACK!

Her sword sliced through the core, carving a thin glowing line straight through it. For one heartbeat, nothing happened. Then the Bone King let out a sound that was not a roar but a scream, its massive skeletal body freezing in place before collapsing inward as every bone detached at once. A fifteen-meter titan fell apart into a lifeless pile, and all across the arena the remaining skeletons followed, their bodies losing cohesion and crashing into scattered heaps of dead bone.

Silence fell, heavy and unreal.

Only the Shadow Wolves remained standing.

At the same time, Bruce received a notification.

[A foreign Existence has defeated the Boss and cleared your Labyrinth.]

Bruce frowned. That still did not fully make sense. He had only just claimed the Labyrinth. Sophie had been fighting moments ago. There was no way she could have wiped out every undead in the entire boss zone that quickly. Then another line appeared, this one from Vaelith.

[The lesser undead skeletons are probably all spawns of the Bone King.]

His eyes sharpened.

So when the curse was removed and the Bone King fell, everything else collapsed with it. That made more sense.

With that, Bruce withdrew his will from the Labyrinth’s consciousness space. The moment it snapped back into his body, his aura surged, heavier, denser, far more refined than before. The will-battle had tempered it, compressed it, forged it into something sharper. He did not pause to savor it.

Sophie was still inside.

And he was already moving.

The ground detonated beneath his feet as Bruce vanished from where he stood, his body turning into a streak of force that ripped through the Labyrinth at insane speed. Space warped in his wake as corridors blurred into nothing, Shadow Wolves surging after him like living streaks of darkness.

Inside the ruined boss arena, Sophie stood amid a sea of shattered bone, still trying to process what had just happened. The Bone King was gone. The undead army was gone. The pressure that had been crushing her for so long had vanished in an instant. The Shadow Wolves still lingered around her, standing silently, not attacking, only watching.

She did not understand it.

Then she felt it.

A sharp, sudden twinge in her heart.

’…Bruce?’

Her head snapped up upon sensing a familiar presence…

From the deeper part of the Labyrinth, a shadow was approaching, moving impossibly fast. The air itself seemed to bend around it, the pressure changing, the space between heartbeats shrinking. Before she could even fully react, the figure was already there, stopping right beside her as if he had always been standing there.

“Bruce…” Her heart leaped into her chest, and the moment she saw him, relief flooded through her.

She stepped forward and hugged him tightly.

At that moment, the Shadow Wolves surrounding them dissolved into motion, streaking inward as black wisps that flowed directly into Bruce and Sophie’s shadows, merging with them like living extensions.

Sophie felt the shift, felt the power settled on her shadow, but she did not resist. She knew those beasts belonged to him. And she knew he was doing this for her.

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