Chapter 304: The Twelve Behind The Veil!

Looking at Duke, Bruce felt something shift in his assessment.

He’d known Duke was powerful. Everyone knew that. The head of the Adventurer’s Guild didn’t hold that position through politics alone.

But there was a difference between knowing someone was strong and watching them suppress SSS-class threats from a battlefield so cleanly that a nine-kilometer perception field of Life Glance couldn’t even detect their life force.

Spatial Lock wasn’t just overpowered.

It was invisible. And in the hands of someone like Duke, patient, precise, operating with decades of strategic experience, it was the kind of skill that redefined what the word “threat” meant.

Bruce looked forward again, a faint smile tugging at the corner of his mouth.

The head of the Adventurer’s Guild, indeed.

The Everwhite Abyss stretched endlessly ahead, and somewhere within its depths, the Core trembled, and the rulers of this frozen world were beginning to stir.

But for the first time since entering the Labyrinth, Bruce felt something he hadn’t expected.

Not caution. Not wariness. Reassurance.

Bruce let that thought settle, not as arrogance, but as calculation. Duke’s presence was a law unto itself. Isolde’s aura could freeze oceans solid. And Bruce had stopped being merely a healer a long time ago.

His gaze settled on the Labyrinth Core.

It floated above a circular expanse of unnaturally smooth ice, suspended in midair like a crystallized star torn from the night sky and trapped in winter. Fractured light refracted across its surface in shifting prisms, veins of pale blue energy pulsing rhythmically within its translucent structure. Every pulse sent faint ripples through the surrounding air, like a heartbeat echoing across a silent cathedral.

It should have felt like the end.

It didn’t.

Behind the Core, space was wrong. A curtain of white mist hung like a veil, but it wasn’t ordinary fog. It swallowed light. It swallowed depth. It swallowed perception itself. Even Bruce’s sharpened awareness, refined to read vitality across kilometers, to trace the faintest flicker of life in a blizzard, slid off it like a hand passing through smoke.

That alone made his instincts prickle.

He exhaled slowly, eyes narrowing. “Duke. Did you restrict any SSS-tier beasts on the way here?”

Duke didn’t answer immediately. He studied the Core first, gaze calm, assessing, not with tension but with the quiet interest of a man cataloguing details. Then he shook his head slightly. “One.”

A faint pause.

“For a labyrinth of this magnitude, that’s strange.”

Isolde’s eyes narrowed a fraction, frost mist curling around her shoulders. “The Everwhite Abyss has multiple Domain Holders. For the Core to be exposed without a visible guardian—”

She didn’t finish. She didn’t need to.

Bruce’s frown deepened. His Life Glance expanded instinctively, pressing outward to its full nine-kilometer reach.

Nothing.

No surging SSS-tier signatures. No layered domain overlaps. No territorial beasts lurking at the periphery. The emptiness was absolute, and in a Labyrinth this dense, this overgrown with life, absolute emptiness was the most unnatural thing he’d encountered yet.

Too clean.

“This Core is sentient,” Isolde continued, her tone colder now, not temperature, but judgment. “An SSS-Ranked Labyrinth Core is not some passive crystal. It observes. It calculates. It adapts.”

“And yet,” Duke murmured lightly, “it waits.”

His gaze sharpened almost imperceptibly.

“For it to appear defenseless is either arrogance—”

“Or a trap,” Bruce finished quietly.

A light breeze drifted through the clearing, carrying frost particles in slow spirals. The air was unnaturally still. No distant roars. No territorial pressure bleeding across invisible boundaries. No layered hostility pressing against their senses.

Just silence and the rhythmic pulse of a Core that watched them the way a spider watches a fly land on the outermost thread of its web.

The comparison rose unbidden in Bruce’s mind. Claiming this Labyrinth was like trying to claim Velmora itself. A world differs from a labyrinth only in concealment. A world hides its portals. A world hides its core. A labyrinth dares you to approach.

Duke stepped forward first, boots touching down lightly upon the smooth ice.

“I know you could probably handle this yourself, Isolde,” he said casually, as if they were discussing dinner plans rather than an SSS-tier Core. “But stand back for now. I’m curious what tricks this one has prepared.”

Isolde didn’t argue. That, more than anything, revealed the depth of respect between them. She stepped back, though not far, coming to stand beside Bruce. Frost mist trailed at her heels, her presence steady but coiled like a drawn bowstring.

Bruce remained silent. His Authority hummed at nine kilometers, brushing against emptiness that felt too deliberate, too arranged, to be natural.

Duke reached the hovering Core.

He extended his hand.

And then—

Swoosh.

The sound wasn’t air being cut. It was space tearing, a lance materializing out of nothingness, diamond-bright and perfectly formed, its crystalline shaft etched with runes that flared in a single violent pulse. It crossed the distance between empty air and Duke’s chest in less than a blink.

Bruce’s pupils contracted. Even with perception honed beyond SS-Rank limits, the lance had been a blur, a streak of compressed killing intent that arrived faster than thought.

It should have pierced Duke’s heart.

It stopped.

Suspended mid-air. Frozen, not by ice, not by time.

By will.

Spatial Lock. Duke Spatial locked the attack. Bruce’s gaze narrowed.

The lance vibrated faintly, humming with compressed destructive force just inches from Duke’s chest. The air around it shimmered as if reality itself protested its immobilization.

Duke didn’t flinch. He tilted his head slightly, studying the weapon the way one might inspect an interesting artifact at a market stall.

“Hm.”

At that moment, the mist behind the Core stirred. Not parted. Stirred, as if something within had decided concealment was no longer necessary.

A silhouette stepped forward.

Then another.

Then another.

Their presence rolled outward before their forms fully emerged, heavy, layered, ancient. Bruce felt the pressure before he saw the shapes, his Life Glance pulsing instinctively.

And this time, it registered.

SSS.

Another. SSS.

Another. SSS.

Twelve.

Undeniable.

Isolde shifted beside him, her aura rising instinctively, frost patterns spreading across the ice beneath her feet in geometric fractals.

“Humanoid beasts,” she murmured as her gaze narrowed on the silhouettes before her.

Source: Webnovel.com, updated by NovelKeep