Chapter 77: Hidden entities

Yenna was still sobbing. Dante stood over Elena’s broken body, his raised fist remaining completely still. His hair shadowed his eyes, his breathing slowly stabilizing into a measured rhythm. He slowly lowered his arm.

He didn’t speak a single word to Elena. He didn’t offer a dramatic speech or look for validation. His silence was absolute.

Slowly, Dante turned his head toward the obsidian rubble where the guild master was struggling to stand. His eyes locked onto Marcus with a emotionless stare.

"You," Dante said, "You will die even worse."

"How... how are you this strong?" Marcus hissed, his teeth covered in dark blood. "Your interface was glitched! You were dropped into the trash pit! You shouldn’t have any stats left!"

Realizing that his thousand-man mage army was entirely erased and his own physical limits were reached, Marcus’s expression turned into a manic, unhinged grin. He reached inside his breastplate with his remaining working hand and pulled out a pulsing, blood-red crystalline seal that radiated a cold, suffocating pressure.

’If I don’t use it now, I’m dead,’ Marcus thought, his fingers trembling with madness. ’I don’t care about the price anymore. I’ll give him everything.’

"You think you won, Dante?!" Marcus screamed, his voice cracking hysterically as he raised the seal high. "You’re nothing but a gutter rat! I’ll tear this entire floor apart before I let you walk away alive!"

With a brutal squeeze of his fingers, Marcus violently crushed the crimson crystal.

CRACK.

Instead of a standard magical explosion, a silent wave of pure red aura detonated from his palm, instantly filling the open crater. The gravity of the sector spiked violently, pressing down on the black sand like an invisible mountain. From deep within the pulsing crimson fog, an ancient, hollow echo began to resonate directly inside Marcus’s mind.

’Foolish child,’ a cold, genderless voice rasped within his consciousness, carrying a authority that made Marcus’s soul shiver. ’You summoned my seal because you couldn’t even handle a single unsanctioned exile? Your body is entirely too weak to carry my true laws.’

’Please, Lord !’ Marcus begged internally, his eyes turning bloodshot as the red aura began to violently warp his veins. ’He has an absolute reflection passive! He shattered my army! Take whatever you want—my mana, my life-force—just erase him from the mainframe!’

’The reflection is a baseline law. It means nothing to the upper floors,’ the Entity replied coldly. ’But your mortal muscle density cannot channel my concepts. To delete this anomaly, I must take absolute control of your vessel.’

"Do it..." Marcus muttered aloud, his eyes rolling back into his head as his jaw locked.

Behind him, Esabella’s eyes violently narrowed to razor-thin vertical pixels. The moment the red aura expanded, her horns radiated a dark energy to counter the gravity spike. The playful, adoring Queen was completely gone; her face was entirely empty of emotion as she felt the powerful authority in the room.

’An upper-floor administrative seal,’ Esabella thought, her tail tightening like an iron band around the stone pillar to anchor her weight. ’The lords of upper floors are actively intervening. They are trying to overwrite the baseline laws of this floor.’

She looked down at Yenna, who was huddled behind her wings. Yenna’s cat ears were pinned completely against her knotted hair, her tail trembling violently against her bruised ankles as she clutched her torn clothes.

"Dante..." Yenna whispered hysterically, her lips shaking as she looked past Esabella’s shoulder. "That aura... it doesn’t belong to the 55th floor. It’s an external override. Marcus is giving his soul away to the higher sectors... you can’t face that kind of authority alone!"

Down the corridor, Marcus’s body violently arched back. A massive eye manifested in the smoke behind his shoulders. With a succession of wet, sickening clicks, his broken ribs snapped straight, his gold armor melting and fusing into a dark red plate structure. When he lowered his head, his human irises were entirely gone, replaced by a solid, glowing red void.

The Entity possessed him fully, its robotic, layered voice echoing through Marcus’s throat. "An anomaly carrying a hundred-fold baseline multiplier. This vessel’s muscle density is too shallow to sustain a prolonged physical trade against such attributes. I require a secondary suppression line."

The red eyes slithered across the floor, targeting the unconscious Elena. A jagged thread of black lightning shot from Marcus’s finger, piercing her forehead.

Elena’s mutilated body gave a unnatural jerk. Her severed thigh muscles forcefully snapped straight under the dark current, dragging her up onto her feet like a broken puppet. Her eyes flew open, the pupils turning into a black void as a secondary, malicious female entity took complete control of her flesh.

The female entity stretched Elena’s bleeding jaw, letting out a ragged hiss. "This vessel is severely damaged, brother. The physical nerve endings have been cut cleanly by an unseen edge. It restricts my movement vectors by a third."

"It is enough to deploy your conceptual binding curses," the male entity through Marcus replied, raising his sword, which was now pulsing with a beam of destructive red light. "The anomaly relies on a physical reflection. We remove kinetic force entirely. We erase him using the high-floor laws of decay."

The mages didn’t use blades or physical strikes; they raised their hands, preparing to channel pure conceptual energy that carried zero physical mass—completely bypassing Dante’s Vajra Mirror Body calculation matrix.

Dante slowly pulled his right hand out of his pocket, his fingers settling smoothly onto the invisible grip of the Seven-Sins Asura Blade. He didn’t care about their high-floor laws. His stats from the override were already hummed with lethal density. He could fight them through pure, raw strength.

He didn’t look back as he gave his final, absolute command.

"Esabella," Dante said, his voice flat, low, and cutting through the red fog like ice. "Don’t try to involve in fight and Protect yourself and her at all costs."

Esabella’s eyes flashed with a spark of adoration as she heard his fearless command mid-crisis. She tightened her grip on her whip, her wings half-spreading to lock down the rear sector line, her face serious and deadly. "As you command, my King."