Starting With an SSS-Rank Goddess Summon!

The towering fifty-foot-high bars of the Null-stone cage suddenly flared to life.

It wasn’t a subtle activation though... It was a violent shift in the very atmosphere of the cavern.

BZZZZZT!

A deep suffocating hum filled the arena.

The anti-magic field fully engaged, projecting a dome of absolute mana suppression over the packed dirt.

To a normal human, it might have just felt like a sudden drop in air pressure but to anyone with an Awakened core, it felt like being crushed.

The Null-stone pressed down on the fighters like a physical weight. It felt like trying to breathe liquid lead.

Silas stood perfectly still near the outer edge of the dirt ring.

CLANG!

The heavy reinforced iron hatches were sealed shut behind his back with the massive deadbolts grinding into the stone.

...There was no exit.

High above, the roaring crowd sounded like a distant muffled ocean of white noise, filtered through the thick metal casing of his Oni mask.

He didn’t look up at the VIP boxes or the blinding spotlights as he kept his gaze level.

He looked around at the massive chaotic mob surrounding him on all sides.

There were over two hundred men trapped in the dirt with him. It was a terrifying menagerie of the Underworld’s worst.

To his left, a muscled brute with skin dyed entirely crimson was cracking his thick knuckles with the joints popping like dry twigs.

To his right, a twitching emaciated cyborg was desperately tweaking a pressure valve on his mechanical forearm, the hydraulic fluid hissing and leaking into the mud.

Everywhere he looked, desperate assassins, debt-ridden slum-rats, and Syndicate enforcers were stretching their synthetic limbs, rolling their thick necks and eyeing each other with bloodthirsty murder.

They were feral animals backed into a corner, waiting for the cage to open.

’I really don’t want to be here...’ Silas thought.

He let out a long heavy sigh. The breath pushed through the slotted visor of his Oni mask, vibrating the silver metal fangs.

He didn’t want to be standing in the damp, blood-soaked dirt of a criminal fighting pit.

He wanted to be sitting at his dining table, reading a book, and ignoring the rest of the universe.

’But whatever...’ Silas concluded.

His deep hardened instincts finally overrode his mundane desire for rest.

Complaining wouldn’t change his location and whining wouldn’t magically forge a World Council identity for Vespera.

He was in the cage and the gates were locked so... it was time to work.

Beneath the dark, shadowed visor of his Oni mask, Silas closed his eyes for a microscopic fraction of a second.

He ignored the suffocating oppressive weight of the Null-stone bands clamped tightly around his wrists.

The bands only stopped external projection so they couldn’t stop the internal machine.

He reached deep into his chest, tapping into the vast oceanic reservoir of his Mythic Gold Core.

He pulled a dense razor-thin needle of internal mana straight up his spinal column and he pushed the pure concentrated energy directly into his optic nerves.

’It’s time...’

He vibrated the existing biological fluid resting inside his retinas, tuning the water in his own eyes to the exact perfect frequency of his Tide-Blade Arts.

Silas opened his eyes.

His irises gained a brilliant light blue color.

It was almost imperceptible in the chaotic flashing neon lighting of the arena. It was completely hidden behind the dark shadows of his metal mask.

But the magical effect on his visual cortex was immediate.

Instantly, the entire world slowed down to a crawl.

The chaotic twitching movements of the two hundred fighters surrounding him sharpened into flawless clarity.

He didn’t just see the men anymore... he saw the physical blueprints of their bodies instead.

He looked at the crimson-skinned brute to his left. Silas clearly saw the weak, deteriorating cartilage in the man’s left knee joint, worn down from years of carrying too much upper body weight.

He looked at the twitching cyborg.

He saw the microscopic hairline fractures spider-webbing across the man’s lower ribs, poorly healed from a previous fight.

He saw the exact, exposed pneumatic cables hidden just beneath the cheap synthetic skin of his mechanical arm.

He saw every pressure point... Every vital organ and every single flaw in the entire arena.

”LET THE SLAUGHTER BEGIN!” the neon-suited Announcer shrieked from his floating platform high above the dirt.

The Announcer slammed his fist down onto a massive red button on his podium.

BWWWWAAAAAAHHHHHH!

A deafening booming war-horn blasted through the colosseum, shaking the dust from the massive stalactites on the ceiling.

The place instantly descended into a brawl. The packed dirt of the arena floor immediately erupted into massive clouds of choking thick brown dust as over two hundred men charged at each other simultaneously.

There was no strategy and there was no hesitation. It was just immediate violence.

”DIE!” a man screamed.

”KILL HIM!” another roared.

Fists slammed into jaws with wet heavy impacts as heavy boots crushed violently into unprotected stomachs.

CRACK!

SNAP!

The sickening overlapping sounds of snapping bones, shattering teeth, and tearing cartilage echoed over the deafening roar of the spectator crowd.

Silas stood his ground, he didn’t rush forward to engage.

He observed the madness swirling around him with cold detachment, letting his blue eyes process the chaos.

Ten feet to his left, the violence peaked instantly.

A massive brute that was heavily augmented with oversized industrial-grade mechanical hands designed for crushing concrete, grabbed a smaller completely normal human fighter by the shoulders.

”Hahahaha!”

The normal guy screamed, desperately clawing at the brute’s metal wrists but the brute just roared.

”DIE!” He pulled his right arm back as the heavy servos began whining with mechanical strain.

He swung the massive metal-plated fist directly into the normal guy’s face.

THWACK!

The impact sounded exactly like a sledgehammer hitting a ripe melon.

A massive spray of hot dark blood and shattered white teeth exploded into the air, raining down across the dirt.

The normal man’s face literally caved inward.

The bridge of his nose and his cheekbones were completely smashed flat against his skull as the brute released his grip, and the dead man dropped heavily to the dirt like a discarded ragdoll with his limbs completely limp.

It was a brutal environment.

Suddenly, the choking dust cloud directly in front of Silas parted.

A massive scarred street thug charged blindly out of the smog. The man’s eyes were wide and completely crazed with adrenaline.

He was gripping a smuggled jagged piece of rusted iron rebar tightly in his calloused hands.

The thug locked his crazed eyes onto Silas’s menacing Oni mask.

In the chaotic frenzy of the Battle Royale, the thug’s drug-addled brain made a fatal miscalculation.

He saw a lone stationary fighter standing perfectly still near the edge of the cage and he decided Silas was an easy distracted target.

”AAAAAGGGGHHH!” the thug roared a guttural battle cry with his spit flying through the air.

He charged the final three steps, raising the heavy rusted iron pipe high above his head as he threw his entire body weight forward, swinging the rebar down in a vicious sweeping arc aimed directly at the center of Silas’s skull.

Silas didn’t even shift his stance.

His light blue, enhanced eyes tracked the exact flawless trajectory of the swing in slow motion.

Through the lens of his Rip-Current Perception,

Silas saw the microscopic tearing strain in the thug’s abdominal muscles as he overcommitted to the swing.

’Heh... so this is how Morwenna feels...’

He saw the exact unbalanced pivot point of the man’s hips so Silas casually leaned his head exactly two inches to the right.

WHOOSH!

The heavy iron pipe whistled violently through the empty air, tearing through the space Silas’s head had occupied a millisecond prior.

The rusted metal missed the silver fangs of his Oni mask by a fraction of a single hair.

The momentum of the missed swing carried the thug forward as the rebar slammed uselessly into the dirt, burying itself three inches deep into the mud.

Before the thug could even process the complete failure of his ambush—

Before the man’s drug-addled brain could even send the electrical signals to his arms to pull the heavy weapon back out of the dirt...

Silas reacted.

He simply cocked his right hand back exactly six inches and he punched the man directly in the center of his stomach, targeting the exact microscopic weakness he had identified in the thug’s overextended abdominal wall.

KRA-THOOM!

The force of the punch was devastating... no it was more than devastating... It was a disaster.

Silas’s physical strength, completely unfiltered by any restraint or holding back, exploded violently into the man’s torso.

The thug’s bloodshot eyes literally bugged out of his skull, bulging against his eyelids.

CRUNCH!

His entire ribcage shattered instantly with the bones cratering inward to protect the spine as all the oxygen in his lungs was violently vaporized, escaping his mouth in a wet choked gasp.

The overwhelming concussive force of the Warlord blow didn’t just knock the man down.

It lifted the two-hundred-pound thug completely off his feet, defying gravity too.

WHOOSH!

He was blasted violently backward through the dusty air like a human cannonball fired from a siege weapon.

He flew backward through the air for twenty solid feet.

”Look out!” someone screamed in the dust.

BAM!

The flying thug crashed violently into a dense brawling cluster of five other fighters who were busy grappling near the center of the ring.

The impact was catastrophic. The human projectile bowled all five of them over like fleshy bowling pins.

They went down in a chaotic screaming tangle of broken limbs, shattered cybernetics, and heavy groans.

The massive impact caused a sudden violent ripple of chaos in that specific quadrant of the arena.

Silas slowly lowered his fist.

He looked down at his black leather-gloved hand. There was no pain in his knuckles and there was no strain in his wrist either.

There was only a genuine sense of disappointment settling in his chest.

He slowly flexed his fingers, testing the joints.

’Compared to the monsters in the Umbral Basin,’ Silas thought to himself, his blue eyes watching the cluster of groaning men desperately struggling to stand back up in the bloody dirt.

’Or even the trained women in my own territory...’ Silas continued his thoughts.

Tamsin, Brida, Gunnhild... any one of his people could have blocked that punch or at least rolled with the momentum.

’But this... this is just like breaking cheap fragile toys.’

These men possessed no dense refined mana shields to protect their organs and they had no lineage reinforcing their bones.

They were just regular humans wrapped in cheap, rusty scrap metal and fueled by cheap street drugs.

He wasn’t fighting an army of hardened soldiers... He was participating in a pathetic, messy playground brawl.

But his devastating physics-defying punch had drawn massive, unwanted attention from the rest of the playground.

The surrounding fighters within a thirty-foot radius suddenly stopped brawling with each other.

They lowered their fists and shivs.

They looked at the massive groaning pile of bodies and they looked at the long, dragging crater the flying man had carved into the dirt.

Then, they slowly turned their heads.

’Fuck, this is a lot of attention...’

They looked at the terrifying broad-shouldered young man standing completely calmly in the dust cloud as the silver demon mask stared back at them with glowing blue eyes.

They immediately recognized the biggest threat in the room.

In a massive free-for-all Battle Royale, the smartest move for the weak was always to form a temporary truce and swarm the strongest fighter first.

”Get the demon!” several men shouted in unison, their voices rough with panic and adrenaline.

They pointed their jagged blood-stained shivs and heavy metal-plated fists directly in his direction.

An uncoordinated gang of six massive augmented Syndicate enforcers immediately broke away from the main chaotic brawl.

They weren’t mindless street thugs like Silas expected.

’I’m surprised...’

They advanced toward Silas in a tight semi-circle, intentionally fanning out to cut off his escape routes.

They intended to completely surround him, pin him against the Null-stone cage, and overwhelm him with coordinated numbers.

’They actually have sense... though they don’t have the power.’

Silas didn’t back up.

His glowing blue eyes flicked rapidly between the six approaching men.

His Rip-Current Perception went into overdrive.

In a single second, he analyzed everything.

He read their wide combat stances... He identified the cheap refurbished cybernetics bolted to their limbs... He mapped out their exact physical flaws, their old injuries, and their terrible weight distribution.

Silas let out a quiet breath.

”Haah...”

He completely dropped his arms, letting them hang loosely at his sides as he relaxed his broad shoulders.

”Come then, I won’t hold back.”

The first enforcer reached him.

The man possessed reinforced titanium plating bolted directly over his shins.

He lunged forward, planting his pivot foot and launching a devastating high-speed roundhouse kick aimed directly at Silas’s floating ribs.

It was a kick designed to snap a man in half.

WHOOSH!

The titanium leg sliced through the dusty air.

Silas didn’t dodge backward and he didn’t block with his arms either, instead the man stepped into the kick.

He moved faster than the human eye could track as he closed the distance in a fraction of a second, raising his own knee in a flawless perfectly timed interception.

’I’m sure I look cool...’

He didn’t aim for the titanium plating as his Rip-Current Perception saw the exact millimeter where the metal armor ended and the soft vulnerable flesh began.

Silas struck the man’s unprotected femur bone just above the cybernetics by driving his knee forward with the force of solid mythril.

SNAP!