In the chilly winter air, Hyperion held Talia's hand, hoping to share a bit of warmth with her.
"Tata, go on back first. I'll have Lanqi walk me back to the Boss Cat Restaurant later," Hyperion said, gazing at Talia with gentle consideration.
She could sense that Talia didn't want to watch this match any longer.
Though she had no idea why, Hyperion was not one to pry when someone was clearly uncomfortable.
"All right. I'll wait at home so we can have dinner together."
Talia nodded, released Hyperion's hand, stood up, and briskly walked away down the aisle.
Watching Talia's figure disappear, Hyperion let out a breath—a mix of quiet relief and wistful yearning.
"How wonderful it would have been if I'd had a mother like that growing up..."
Hyperion lowered her eyelashes, murmuring silently to herself.
Shaking her head a moment later, she turned her gaze back toward the arena stage.
Across the frigid combat plaza, the iron armor of the Demon King's Army slaughter unit clanked ominously. A lean fighter suddenly erupted with astonishing speed, his body streaking like a bolt of lightning as every muscle surged with tremendous force, ready to hurtle forward and end his enemy with his most devastating kick.
Yet the Demon King's warrior met him with a serrated broadsword already raised. Rather than parrying with the weapon, the warrior braced and took the kick head-on while the jagged blade ripped across the fighter's chest, the warmth of fresh blood and flesh snatched away in an instant by the freezing wind.
On the other side of the plaza, two warriors from the Demon King's Army cornered a fighter who had been separated from the rest while retreating. He tried desperately to dodge in terror, but a heavy greataxe and a reaper's scythe slashed toward his waist from left and right with unavoidable precision. Blood sprayed as his organs were nearly torn from his torso, and the colossal impact left it uncertain whether his spine had been snapped outright.
As crimson mist drifted across the field, the spectators could clearly see that every strike from the Demon King's Army was a gruesome carving of fear. They fought not merely for victory, but revelled in the slaughter itself, as if only this could rekindle warmth in their chaotic eyes and fill the void hollowed out within their souls.
Those five Ikerite fighters remodeled by Lanqi felt no pain—all that remained were ruthless combat directives to slaughter.
Their serrated broadswords and greataxes traced bright arcs of red through the air, and whenever they descended, a fighter was thrown back amidst shrill, agonized screams.
The white combat plaza was already soaked in crimson, trails of dark red dragged and smeared across the marble paving stones.
"No, stay away from me!"
With one of his shins twisted at an unnatural angle and tears of terror welling in his eyes, a fighter scrambled backward across the stone floor, striking desperately at the Demon King's soldier before him. Yet his blows were like an ant trying to shake a giant tree. The butcher drew closer and closer, his eyes reflecting nothing but utter contempt for life and a morbid obsession with carnage.
A sickening sound of rupturing organs echoed shortly after.
In little more than ten minutes of fighting, the fighters of the Aloran Kingdom collapsed one after another, their bloodstained weapons gleaming with a chilling sheen beneath the dim winter sky.
By now, the entire arena had plunged into absolute silence. Apart from the four fighters who had already passed out, only Kuse remained, cornered by the five fiends.
Even though every member of the Ikerite Academy's Soul of the Fighter team was heavily wounded, the smiles on their faces only grew more fulfilled.
"Finally, you're the only one left..."
The vice-captain spoke in a low rumble that sounded like a beast from the abyss.
As for the other members, it was as if their sole reason for stepping into this arena had been to slaughter Kuse from the very beginning—even butchering him ten thousand times would never be enough.
This hatred had warped into something almost resembling love: an obsessive urge to see him, to get close to him, because only from him could they find the catharsis they craved.
"Why won't you bastards go down?!"
Amidst his bewildered roar, Kuse took a step backward for the first time.
It was an involuntary, instinctive movement of his muscles.
He had knocked these men down during the fight, more than once.
Yet even with shattered bones, they kept hauling themselves back to their feet!
He had never seen such terrifying creatures in his life.
Although Kuse, his face drenched in blood, still seemed capable of fighting, the dread of facing five mad demonkin who hunted him like unkillable zombies finally struck home.
Under such overwhelming madness, he had no desire to clash head-on with these rabid dogs any longer.
Yet before the eyes of tens of thousands of spectators, after all the arrogant threats he had made, surrendering to weaklings he looked down upon so thoroughly would be worse than death!
"Do you know how many times you killed me...?"
"You must die here today..."
"I'll never let you hurt Cervini again..."
Their heads swayed, their facial muscles twitching as they muttered to themselves, scarlet eyes locked solely onto Kuse.
It was as though the beings before him had undergone horrific brainwashing, endlessly babbling incomprehensible nonsense.
"What the hell are you even talking about?!"
Watching them, Kuse finally screamed in terror.
He had never done a single thing to Cervini!
Up in the broadcast booth, even Luvishir had no idea how to commentate on the spectacle unfolding below.
Hyperion promptly vaulted over the railing of the spectator stands and ran down to the bench in the coach's box, taking a seat beside Lanqi.
The situation was far more severe than she had imagined!
The arena staff noticed a spectator jumping down and hurried over to intervene, but when Lanqi raised a hand to signal that she belonged to their coaching team, they nodded and came to a halt.
"Hyperion, I promise I'll vent all your frustration for you today," Lanqi said with a smug smile, noticing her arrival.
"Lanqi, what on earth did you make them do over the last two days?" Hyperion asked, staring at him anxiously.
Though she was slightly surprised that Lanqi openly admitted he was fighting to defend her rather than offering some high-sounding excuse, she was now desperately worried that he had gone far too far.
Hyperion felt that Lanqi, now that he had developed a taste for winning, had become even more unhinged.
It was as if anyone who met those emerald-green eyes could never escape his hypnotic sway; he could drag people down into a bottomless frenzy, leaving them all too willing to surrender everything to him...
"I had Professor Borao heavily modify a horror-themed, single-player artificial Shadow World for me," Lanqi replied, leaning back against the bench with his fingers casually interlaced over his knees as he watched the battle plaza. "I removed the rule that forcibly ejects challengers upon death, changing it so that whenever they die, they respawn at a specific point in time to repeat the scenario until they clear it."
"And then?"
"Then I modeled the villains after Kuse and his peers from the Aloran Royal Academy, made the heroine look identical to Cervini, sent the five members of the Soul of the Fighter into their own solo Shadow Worlds, and customized a tragic storyline tailored to the worst nightmare each of them couldn't bear to face."
"..."
Hyperion could only listen in silence, not daring to utter a word.
"In that illusionary yet hyper-realistic world, those fighters watched Cervini get brutally murdered over and over again, trapped in an endless loop of death and rebirth. Whenever they reached their breaking point and fell into utter despair, the Poet of Great Love would descend as a goddess, gently recounting every mistake and sin they had committed during that run, before sending them back to start anew."
Lanqi continued his explanation to Hyperion.
"You made the Poet of Great Love... play a goddess?" Hyperion swallowed hard.
"Yes. I gave her completely free rein to do as much 'talk therapy' as she wanted."
"Oh no..."
Hyperion clutched her head.
She could hardly find the words to describe what a sinfully torturous game of spiritual torment this was.
And she was the one who had opened that Pandora's box with her own hands.
"That's not all," Lanqi said, shaking his head.
What the members of the Soul of the Fighter team never realized was that Lanqi, as the administrator holding central control, would occasionally step in to play certain roles himself, artificially engineering tragedies that stoked extreme dread or fury to guide them along.
Although the ending of the story was scripted for the challenger to triumph, every single companion with whom they had formed bonds had to die, and Cervini was doomed to perish because of the challenger.
If any companion had even the slightest chance of surviving until the grand finale, Lanqi would personally step in to pull the strings and ensure they were wiped out.
"I mainly wanted to emphasize a sense of inescapable destiny. Every time I gave them a flicker of hope, I snuffed it out the very moment they thought things were turning around, driving home the reality that fate cannot be changed. When they finally returned to the real world, it felt like waking from a dream, but they also realized the gears of fate had begun turning again—and this time, they had only one final chance."
Lanqi finished recounting the two-day special training program he had arranged.
After more than thirty hours of intensive conditioning, the five fighters had finally emerged from that Lanqi-controlled artificial Shadow World.
Their mental state had undergone a complete, earth-shattering transformation.
"You..."
Hyperion's eyelid twitched violently, and she hastily looked back toward the battle plaza.
After enduring such an indelible, immersive nightmare in the Shadow World for so long, those five fighters had probably lost the ability to distinguish reality from illusion. Having witnessed Cervini slaughtered by Kuse hundreds of times, their minds were likely devoid of any thought other than murdering him.
She didn't dare imagine what those five fighters were about to do to Kuse!
Chapter 225