Chapter 37
Chapter 37. To the Absolute Limit
The moment Minos thrust his blade deep into the earth, a repulsive pressure surged out, forcing Minjun’s face into an involuntary grimace.
The pitch-black expanse surrounding them instantly shifted, giving way to a slaughterhouse of an ancient battlefield strewn with broken armor, shattered weapons, and dead bodies.
From the deeply planted sword, thick tendrils of blood-red mist curled upward, gradually assembling themselves into armed foot soldiers.
‘I recognize these figures.’
Their plate armor, heavy swords, war mounts, and ornate leather gear were the exact relics Minjun had observed immortalized in the ancient record magic etched onto the dungeon walls.
The crimson vapor continuously churned out one warrior after another, showing no sign of slowing; in fact, the haze only grew heavier by the second.
Before long, the mist broadened past human forms and started weaving monstrous creatures like wyverns.
In mere moments, a suffocating flock of wyverns congested the heavens, blotting out the sky from edge to edge.
Minjun felt his eyes widen in horror at the sheer scale of the gathering host.
Had that immense army focused its genuine, lethal malice on him all at once, he would possess zero chance of coming out alive.
As though sensing the panic flashing through him, Minos offered a calm reassurance.
“Just what… are you trying to force out of me?”
Could this be a penalty for violating the sanctuary of the mausoleum’s ruler?
Yet had that been the motivation of Minos, the rest of the raid team should have been dragged into this bizarre dimension alongside him.
Emperor Minos dismissed the idea with a tilt of his head, answering, <Have All Dragon I Tongue. a birth clear? desire flawless frame give is it made mortal not to watch>
There was no punitive malice in this trial; the emperor genuinely wished for nothing beyond witnessing another individual master the supreme Dragon Tongue that had remained out of his own grasp throughout life.
The issue was that his chosen training method was entirely deranged.
“I grasp what you desire, but did you really have to push things to such an extreme…?!”
He had trapped Minjun without warning, asserting that freedom was impossible until the language of dragons came forth.
What purpose could this infinite legion of soldiers and wyverns possibly serve other than torment?
Minos offered no reply to Minjun’s enraged outcry.
The spectral soldiers delivered the answer instead, unleashing a torrent of lethal blade sweeps.
Ducking beneath their crossing edges, Minjun responded with a wide, sweeping slash of his own sword.
A dozen troopers dropped nearly simultaneously, dark fluids spraying from their lips.
Yet before they even settled on the ground, their fallen shapes dissolved into red haze, recombining into fresh combatants who immediately charged him anew.
‘Curses.’
Just like the Sword Wraiths he had faced upon entering the Dungeon, these spectral ranks were bound to rise relentlessly, directing their blades right back at him no matter how often he cut them down.
The same grim rule clearly governed the wyverns darkening the heavens, which were already unleashing volleys of fiery breath straight down toward him.
“This is utterly unhinged.”
Taken one by one, the infantry posed little threat, yet their endless replenishment was absurd, and worse still, they simply could not be truly slain.
The airborne beasts were a far nastier dilemma.
Given Minjun’s current stage of ability, avoiding or deflecting every strike raining down from high above was a physical impossibility.
“Ghk!”
He threw himself aside desperately, yet a substantial barrage of breath blasts still crashed directly into his frame.
Had these monsters been genuine flesh and blood, then despite every protective artifact Minjun carried, he would have suffered devastating trauma.
If fortune ran against him, he would have been obliterated instantly.
Yet true to the promise Minos had made, Minjun neither perished nor retained any lasting disfigurement.
Gaping lacerations sealed themselves shut in an instant, and severed limbs reknitted with fresh sinew and muscle within heartbeats.
Even so, the agony was entirely genuine.
For the very first time, Minjun found himself writhing violently under the unbearable sensation of being charred to a crisp, his flesh tearing apart and getting shredded into ribbons.
“What on earth are you expecting me to achieve like this?”
Minjun yelled in raw frustration while the relentless ranks reassembled on all sides. Regardless of how many foes he butchered, they rose like reanimated corpses to resume their offensive.
If this cycle continued unbroken, he would be subjected to the endless torment of having his physical form destroyed and rebuilt for eternity.
‘I refuse to let that become my fate.’
No matter why Minos had chosen to trap him here, Minjun resolved to break out of this nightmare realm through any means necessary.
As a sea of blade points converged on him once more, Minjun launched himself upward, evading the initial thrusts.
Slaughtering a thousand or ten thousand of these phantoms changed nothing.
His sole task was to heed the instructions Minos had set forth: channel Dragon Tongue, tear down this construct from the inside, and walk free.
Spending his stamina trying to eradicate an endless wave of attackers was entirely pointless.
Disregarding their blows to the best of his ability, Minjun began retrieving every magical trinket and relic stored within his dimensional space.
“You aren’t the only ones who can overwhelm with sheer volume.”
Unleashing his artifacts, he began pinning down the soldiers and grounding the wyverns in rapid succession.
Since ending them permanently was out of the question, keeping them pushed back far enough to prevent constant disruption was more than enough.
Simultaneously, Minjun stripped away the restricting seal that Rokan had placed upon his body, aiming to focus his energy entirely on invoking Dragon Tongue.
Rokan had warned him never to remove the regulator unless backed into a corner, as unsealing it prematurely could allow his raw inner energy to consume him.
Yet this nightmare scenario was precisely the sort of emergency Rokan had anticipated.
Because he hadn’t worn the regulator for very long, the amount of compressed power it held was relatively modest.
Even so, when attempting to manifest the voice of dragons, Minjun could not afford to waste a single drop of the mana sealed inside.
Having finished all possible arrangements, Minjun focused his inner determination and attempted to invoke Dragon Tongue.
[Shatter.]
He willed this despised domain that sought to cage him forever to crumble to dust, leaving nothing behind.
Minjun bellowed the command with a concentration of will far heavier than any he had ever summoned.
Yet despite the sheer intensity of his intent, the world remained unchanged.
To make matters worse, several wyverns exploited the brief pause, crashing through the defensive barrier erected by his artifacts and slamming their massive weight right over him.
“Gahk!”
In the waking world, the crushing weight would have shattered every bone in his frame and ruptured his internal organs beyond repair.
Yet Minjun knew this trial was fundamentally a construct of illusion where true death could not touch him.
A ragged gasp tore through his teeth as excruciating torment flared across every nerve, but he pulled his focus back together and shouted once more.
[Shatter!]
Yet again, the command yielded no reaction, and as if sneering at his futile effort, the ground infantry swarmed through the rupture the wyverns had carved out.
Minjun swung his blade, attempting to hold them off, yet the ocean of enemies vastly exceeded what a lone warrior could repel.
Foot soldiers tackled him to the dirt, while the cavalry drove their heavy steeds directly across his pinned body.
“Aaaaaagh!”
Even if his physical frame suffered no enduring harm, the full brunt of the agony registered with razor-sharp clarity.
The shock was so immense that he feared his mind might fracture and plunge him into complete madness.
Even while thrashing in pure anguish, Minjun dragged himself upright and reclaimed his sword hilt.
On the surface, he seemed unmarked, yet the lingering trauma made merely keeping his footing an ordeal, to say nothing of holding a blade steady.
‘I never assumed this would click on the first try.’
Manifesting Dragon Tongue was never going to be a simple feat in any scenario.
The punishing pattern played out again and again without pause.
Minjun would fail to ignite the Dragon Tongue, the spectral army and aerial beasts would seize the opening to crush him, and he would endure another round of agonizing torment before rising to challenge the void once more.
His physical vessel never carried a single scar, yet the accumulated torment settled deeply into his psyche.
Gradually, his awareness began to slip and blur around the edges.
Several times, he came close to yielding to the sweet escape of unconsciousness to flee the pain, but each time, Minjun locked his fingers around the grip of his weapon and refused to fall.
Clenching his jaw, he forced every ounce of his burning resolve into yet another invocation of Dragon Tongue.
[Shatter!!!]
One subtle tactical shift had entered his approach since that first failure.
Now, with every attempt to channel the speech of dragons, he directed his blade to strike the weapon Minos had driven into the earth.
This entire reality had taken shape around that single embedded sword.
Perhaps dislodging it, cracking its steel, or sparking any disturbance in it whatsoever might trigger an opening.
Driving forward like someone possessed, Minjun struck Minos’s weapon repeatedly while continuing to bellow the draconic commands.
The sword in Minjun’s own hands was undeniably a masterwork, but the emperor’s weapon was forged from Dragon Bone.
The blade rooted in the dirt refused to yield, and every heavy clash sent a jarring vibration echoing through Minjun’s skull.
Then, after countless collisions, a faint, shifting aurora-like radiance began to pulse from the blade of Minos whenever their steel met.
‘That radiance…’
The iridescent sheen felt intimately recognizable, matching the shimmering rainbow brilliance Minjun’s own blade had once radiated when battling the syndicate villains within the Gate.
Strictly speaking, the luminescence seeping from the emperor’s sword wasn’t completely identical.
While undeniably striking, it lacked the full splendor that had once bloomed across Minjun’s own edge.
Its glow was somewhat subdued, and the spectrum of colors within it was far less rich.
Yet as that shimmering aurora crept outward from the blade of Minos, Minjun registered an extraordinary change within himself. While the pain did not vanish, the foreign resonance saturating this entire realm began flooding into his veins, awakening an overwhelming surge of force throughout his physical frame.
The sensation was astonishing, completely unlike any power he had previously touched.
His entire vessel surged with vitality, far grander and more potent than the energy he had wielded during his clash against the villains inside the Gate.
Could this truly be the manifestation of draconic power?
Until now, the concept of dragon strength had been little more than words to Minjun, devoid of genuine comprehension.
Yet immersed in this state, he finally felt the first true grasp of its reality.
Surging through the lingering agony came a roaring exhilaration, paired with an absolute conviction that every law of nature could be subjugated to his command.
His awareness stretched into an entirely alien realm of perception, catching nuances far beyond the limits of mortal senses.
‘If I am wielding this power now…’
Then the impossible feat of awakening true Dragon Tongue might genuinely be within reach.
Even as blinding agony caused his vision to roll back, Minjun refused to let his weapon slip from his fingers, screaming out with everything left in his chest.
[Shatter to pieces without leaving a trace!]
He could no longer count how many times he had cried out that command.
His vocal cords were torn raw, and his own ears recoiled from the ragged, ruined sound scraping from his throat. Yet through the haze of total exhaustion, one absolute truth burned brighter than anything else.
‘The boundary is right here.’
The surrounding world had not yet fractured, but Minjun knew it instinctively.
If he drove his will just a fraction deeper, just an inch further beyond his limit, the genuine voice of dragons would finally take form.
Gathering every ember of draconic force churning through his flesh, as though wringing the final drops of life from his marrow, Minjun brought his blade crashing down upon the sword of Minos.
[Shatter to pieces without leaving a trace!!!]
At that precise heartbeat, the entire dimension convulsed violently, drenched in an explosion of radiant aurora light.
Faint, spiderweb fractures began to crawl across the spotless blue firmament.
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