Chapter 71: The Price of Playing Hero

Sen watched in absolute horror as hundreds of glowing, winged figures swarmed upward from the dome.

Damn it, damn it, damn it!

A devastating rain of light-fire beams descended on him in an instant. Sen whipped his blade forward, every single spatial shard breaking apart from the hilt to form a dense defensive shell around his body.

As the burning beams struck, the shards flared with blinding light, expanding localized rifts that swallowed the incoming energy and redirected it away.

But Sen wasn’t finished.

Because of his heavy cultivation burden, he could only use his spatial manipulation through his weapon. With a grunt of effort, he unlatched a second spare blade from his system inventory.

The water around him violently rippled. With a fierce slash into open water, he forced a jagged tear open in the fabric of the ocean.

It wasn’t a stable spatial rift—he couldn’t hold it open long enough to escape—but it was enough to exploit.

Lunging forward, Sen thrust his bare hand straight through the wound in reality. A split-second later, his hand burst out of the spatial tear right behind one of the approaching dread beasts, clamping its jaws shut before slicing its head clean off with a brutal cross-slash.

[ You have slain an Amber Dread Beast. ]

The system prompt flashed, but Sen didn’t care. He ripped his hand back, pivoting to open another wound in the water, and another.

Before he could strike again, a heavy, condensed beam of light-fire struck him dead-on, sending him rocketing deeper into the abyssal trench.

Bang!

The pain was incandescent. Even submerged in freezing water, his hand felt like it was being baked alive. Sen gritted his teeth, tasting blood as a bitter thought crossed his mind: This is the price you pay for playing the hero.

Weirdly enough, he wasn’t even angry.

The scattered spatial shards snapped back, expanding to wrap around him like a protective cocoon just as a wave of light-fire beams hammered his position.

Beasts swarmed toward him from every direction, but Sen warped the distance between them. Every time a creature lunged close, space stretched instantly, sending them sliding right back to where they started.

It was pure, exhausting space manipulation.

Think of it like a ruler used to draw a line on a page. When the page is too small, you have to keep lifting the ruler to draw more lines.

But what if you could magically stretch the book to grow longer the more they tried to draw? The space around him was the book, and the charging beasts were just frustrated rulers hitting an infinite margin.

Even so, his body was burning up from the thermal bleed—a terrifying paradox in the freezing ocean.

The barrage of light beams didn’t stop. Sen knew his spatial shield wouldn’t hold much longer against hundreds of them.

Then, everything froze.

A sudden memory violently hijacked his consciousness.

He was sitting cross-legged inside a pitch-black, windowless room.

Wait, what is happening? he thought in the vision as the door creaked open. His older brother stepped inside. Sen looked up to greet him, but a jolt of vertigo hit him—his brother had no face.

No, that wasn’t right. It was as if the space where his face should have been had been completely erased from reality, leaving a smooth, blank void.

A strange, comforting warmth washed over his body just as the memory dissolved into smoke.

What... what is going on? Sen gasped in the real world, snapping back to the present. He was gripping his blade—no, the blade was—

The floodgates of his memory slammed back open.

Sen bit down hard on his tongue, forcing his mind past the crushing burden of the cursed blade. With a final, desperate surge of mental will, he commanded every single spatial shard to snap together into a tight, solid geometric shape.

Clack-clack-clack-clack!

A heavy, translucent cube locked into place, entirely enclosing him. It wasn’t just a shield—it was an isolated pocket of absolute nothingness, a discrete space completely severed and cut off from the crushing ocean around it.

A condensed beam of light-fire shot straight toward the geometric cube, but the moment the blinding heat made contact, it passed clean through the structure without leaving a single mark—as if the box didn’t exist in this plane at all.

Which, in a sense, it didn’t. The cube existed inside the physical space of the ocean while simultaneously being completely severed from its reality—one of the stranger, spatial-distorting abilities granted by the cursed blade.

And Sen certainly wasn’t about to waste breath explaining the mechanics of a weapon he hated using.

He released his grip on the hilt. Since the cube was the blade fully unfolded, simply standing inside the pocket was enough for Sen to channel his Astral energy directly into its core.

The bare hilt floated motionless in mid-air right in front of him.

Sen let out a long, exhausted breath—a luxury he had been denied while submerged in the ocean—and examined his damaged hands.

The flesh across his palms and forearms was scorched and raw, but his flexible coat armor was thankfully still holding up.

It was a solid Rank 4 piece—an upgraded variant of his old Rank 3 gear rather than a true Saint-grade defensive coat—and it had managed to keep the rest of his torso intact.

His clothes clung tightly to his wet skin, but for a guy whose life goal was to do as little physical labor as possible, he had to admit his body was in surprisingly decent shape.

Apart from the third-degree burns, he added dryly to himself.

He patted down his side pockets, feeling around for something specific until his fingers brushed against a familiar shape. He pulled it out, took one look at it, and groaned.

"Damn it... damn it all."

His vape was completely soaked through with saltwater and charred along the casing.

"So I have to do this whole fight without a smoke?"

Sen let out a heavy sigh, exhaling a long plume of warm condensation into the cube’s dry air that looked almost like smoke—though it did nothing to satisfy the craving.

He looked back up at the floating hilt.

Flash.

Another brief memory flickered through his mind: his younger sister clinging to his jacket, smiling up at him as he promised her he would come back home safe.

Sen took one last deep breath, reached forward, and clamped his hand firmly back around the hilt.

BOOM!

A massive shockwave rattled the exterior of the cube, sending a violent jolt straight through Sen’s arms as a fresh system prompt flared crimson before his eyes:

[ THREAT DETECTED ]

Classification: Gold Dread Beast.

Entity: The Burning Man’s Mini-Creation (Evolved Form)