Chapter 111: Deafened SteelKael dragged air into his chest like it owed him money, the breath scraping through his ribs as pain flared and then dulled under the System’s ever hovering interference, because the man in front of him was, by every possible metric, an absolute cunt to fight.Light condensed around Kael’s palm as he twisted his wrist and released Piercing Light, the spell screaming forward as a compressed lance of brilliance that bent the air and burned white lines across his vision, yet the result was the same as every attempt before it, deflected, redirected, or somehow bullied off course by a pair of daggers that should not have been capable of interacting with refined mana constructs at that level.Kael did not know how the man did it, because Piercing Light was designed to be fast, narrow, and difficult to perceive until impact, yet the bastard kept swatting it aside as if Kael were throwing glowing stones rather than weaponized intent.The

C113: Ashes on the Way Home“ Astraea… what exactly are you doing down there?”Kael’s voice broke the quiet as he stepped closer, his shadow stretching across the uneven ground, and only then did he realize she was sitting cross legged on the stone floor, fingers stained with dust as she carefully traced lines and symbols into the surface with a level of focus she rarely showed so openly.At first glance, it looked like messy scribbling, the kind a bored child might draw while half asleep, because Astraea had never been particularly talented when it came to anything resembling art, yet the longer Kael stared, the more he felt a strange discomfort settle in his chest, because mixed within those crooked lines was a short string of text that tugged at his memory in an unsettling way.It was not a language he recognized from the temple, nor any script he had learned since arriving in this world, and yet it felt familiar, like a distorted reflection of something sacred, similar but undenia

C115: The SaintKael descended from the sky in a slow, controlled drop, his boots touching the ground with a dull thud that nonetheless sent a ripple of shock through everyone present, because nobody had expected someone to arrive from above so suddenly, let alone someone whose presence carried an unmistakable weight that pressed against the senses. Several people flinched hard enough to stumble back, and only then did Kael properly notice that a portion of the gathered awakened were wearing crude gas masks strapped tightly over their faces, the filters wheezing faintly as they worked to keep polluted air from destroying their lungs.At first, Kael did not understand why such precautions were necessary, because from his perspective the air, while unpleasant, was nowhere near lethal enough to warrant this level of fear, especially not for awakened individuals who should have possessed bodies far stronger than ordinary humans. That confusion surfaced instinctively, a

Chapter 121: Glass Souls“So how do we reset it this time, same old ritual, same old cosmic headache?” Kael asked while trailing behind Baldor, his steps echoing faintly against a ground that felt solid yet sounded hollow, as though reality itself had been layered over something else and nobody had bothered to sand the seams.The space they had entered was wrong in a quiet, deeply unsettling way, because although a massive gate clearly marked the separation between outside and inside, the scenery beyond it mirrored the exterior almost perfectly, down to the texture of the air and the way light bent across invisible surfaces, creating the uncanny feeling that the world had simply folded in on itself and pretended nothing had happened.“More or less,” Baldor replied, his tone distracted, as if his mind were already several steps ahead and none of them involved small talk, “Adonai ordered a final evaluation of the two subjects. After this, a decision gets mad