Chapter 158: Chapter 158 - Black-Robed Goblins
Lucien stepped through the jagged threshold of the Obsidian Tower and the world behind him faded into muffled echoes. The clash of war outside dulled as though the Tower itself devoured sound.
Inside, the air was thick. It smelled metallic with the stench of blood and something acrid that burned his nose like rotting sulfur.
Monsters spilled from the shadows the moment he entered.
Morphis shifted in rhythm.
A spear that pierced. A whip that tore. A shield that shattered jaws.
Each strike was final.
And when their corpses dropped, he didn’t let their drops rot on the floor. With a flick of his hand, he enveloped the drops with divine energy. They funneled directly into his Divine Energy Core. His INVENTORY was already full but his core drank deeply.
The Tower stretched upward. Its design was both alien and oppressive. A massive spiral staircase curled around the edges of the hollow chamber. Each step was slick with dark residue.
The middle was a yawning vertical void and through it swarmed flying beasts. The winged beasts soared up and down like grotesque elevators. Their wings stirred the foul air into constant drafts.
Lucien ignored the stairs. He stepped onto the air and Skywalk carried him upward. Every time a beast swooped to intercept, he cut it from the air. Their blood and feathers rained into the abyss below.
And then he felt it... A sensation. It’s as if something above called him by name, luring him toward its nest.
But then—
As Lucien ascended through the hollow heart of the tower, he slowed. His eyes narrowed on a black-iron gate embedded into the inner wall.
From its seams miasma bled. It spilled into the air in oily currents that stung even his divine senses. The sight made him wince. Whatever lay within was steeped in corruption far beyond the battlefield outside.
Lucien extended a hand and pressed. The metal did not yield.
His eyes narrowed. ’So be it.’
Lucien’s grip tightened on Morphis. Divine energy surged, compressing into a single blade of absolute intent.
The blade fell in a single perfect stroke.
The iron screamed... and the seal shattered.
And beyond the ruin of the door... Lucien froze.
What he saw inside rooted him in place.
The stench struck him first. A cocktail of blood, iron and rotting flesh that clung to the lungs.
Lucien stepped inside and the chamber opened before him.
This place... It was a vast laboratory of nightmares.
Black crystal conduits pulsed along the walls. They funneled miasma into pods where human bodies writhed half-submerged.
Some still had faces. Some had their eyes wide with silent screams. Others were already twisted. Some have their spines bent. Some have their limbs elongated. Some have their skin boiling into green-grey flesh.
Lucien heard the rattling of chains.
From one corner, he saw failed attempts. They looked like abominations that hadn’t taken to the transformation. Bloated torsos. Too many limbs. Mouths where eyes should be.
They crawled mindlessly against their restraints, gurgling.
Lucien’s fist tightened until his knuckles cracked.
’Were these people desperate enough to abandon their humanity? Or were they nothing more than fodder, unwilling flesh fed into a machine of corruption?’
He doesn’t know.
His gaze swept deeper into the chamber and then he saw him.
Thornel Golddust.
The noble’s body floated in a half-filled capsule. His veins bulged green and his face stretched with a grotesque grin. His limbs twitched as the miasma rewrote his flesh.
Lucien’s lip curled.
"No wonder I have not seen this twerp outside... You’re still cooking in your little monster pod, huh."
Lucien leaned closer to the capsule. His lip curled into a mocking grin.
"Well, look at that... you finally grew yourself a dick. No wonder you were so desperate to turn into a goblin." He tilted his head. "Still small though..."
His words echoed in the chamber but Thornel didn’t flinch. The man or what remained of him was completely consumed by the grotesque transformation. He was oblivious to the world outside.
Lucien’s smile faded.
"Pathetic."
He then made up his mind.
Whether these husks chose this fate or not, he could not let the tower breed another army. This place was a forge of nightmares and he would be the hammer that shattered it.
With a surge of power, Lucien rampaged.
Morphis gleamed in his hand, cutting through conduits and glass. Capsules shattered in a spray of black ichor. The devices screamed as divine energy overwhelmed them. Their miasmic runes sputtered and broke apart.
The transforming humans inside the capsules were ended swiftly. The abominations too fell beneath his blade. Lucien granted them release in a single stroke. Their grotesque forms twitched only for an instant before dissolving into silence.
And Thornel...
He never finished his transformation. With a single thrust, Lucien’s blade pierced through the capsule. It cut short both the process and the life within. The once-proud heir of the Golddusts sank into eternal stillness, denied the chance to bare his claws as a goblin.
But then—
A shift rippled through the lab.
From the shadows, figures emerged.
Goblins... but not the savage kind they had fought outside.
These wore blackened robes. Their eyes glowed with cold intelligence and their aura was suffocating. Each one radiated power greater than a Tier 9.
Lucien’s chest tightened.
"So... the architects finally show themselves."
They barked guttural words. Their harsh syllables clawed against his ear. Lucien couldn’t understand. Yet the way they gestured at the broken machines, the ruined corpses, the shattered experiment... he knew.
He had destroyed their work. And they would make him pay.
Suddenly...
Lucien stepped back as his senses prickled.
From the ground where he had stood, a glowing magic circle flared to life. It seared the laboratory floor with burning light.
Lucien invoked Inspect... but the skill failed.
"Tch." His jaw tightened.
The goblins’ guttural voices echoed through the chamber. They argued among themselves but to Lucien it was nothing more than noise.
His eyes narrowed.
Then... something caught his gaze. On Thornel’s mangled fingers, a ring shimmered with a unnatural glow.
Lucien’s mind clicked. ’That Goblin ring... it might work like the Gargoyle Ring. It could make me understand them.’
With a flick of his hand, the trinket tore free from the dead man’s finger and landed in Lucien’s palm.
He slipped it on.
At once, the guttural snarls of the goblins twisted into words he could understand.
"This your fault. Should not leave them alone. We finally found vessels... and a pest ruined everything."
"The humans... perfect shells. So close to transcending. So close! And this vermin shatter our work."
"You idiots... call Magus Lord Zothrak. This one... no ordinary human. I sense it. The same resonance as the Fragment."
Lucien’s gut clenched. His instincts screamed louder than ever. He couldn’t let them summon anyone... least of all a Monster Lord.
Zothrak. Even the name curdled the air.
And then came the part that chilled him most. The fragment.
His gaze darted to the glowing pods, to the channels of miasma weaving into the transformation arrays. His thoughts raced.
’So that’s it. They’re feeding this place with a fragment of the Origin Core. That’s how they twist humans into goblins... abominations birthed by stolen divinity.’
Lucien’s jaw tightened. His pulse thundered.
He had no more time to hesitate. Every heartbeat dragged them closer to disaster.
He had entered the Black Mass using the Origin Core fragment... another could just as easily exit.
If Zothrak forced his way into their world... it wouldn’t be a war. It would be the end.
Without hesitation, Lucien raised his hand. The Gargoyle Ring flared. He upended a flask of the Gargoyle Lord’s blood and the ring drank it greedily.
Divine light flared around him. Radiant wings unfurled from his back and his muscles rippled with newfound might.
The ground trembled. The goblins hissed and raised their staffs.
Lucien’s jaw tightened.
He would kill them all before a single cry for help escaped.
And so the battle began.
The laboratory erupted into chaos.
The goblins moved with monstrous precision. Their eyes gleamed with malice and their claws wove glowing sigils into the air.
Dominion Circle. Phantom Ink.
They birthed waves of fire, chains of lightning and suffocating walls of miasma.
Lucien’s wings of divine energy beat once. They hurled him forward like a thunderbolt.
Morphis blazed in his grip. His sudden surge of strength made the floor quake with each swing.
His blade cleaved through one goblin. The blade clashed against darkened flesh... but even when wounded, the creature shrieked and forced its blood into a magic circle. Then it detonated the air with explosive force.
Lucien was flung back. He gritted his teeth.
’These freaking goblins... they’re using Dominion Circles and Phantom Ink as if they were breathing.’
Three more circles ignited beneath his feet. He darted skyward just in time as the floor below became a storm of black spikes.
Another goblin lunged. Its maw chanted a curse that turned the air into acid mist.
Lucien’s instincts screamed again.
His wings snapped wide and he vanished in a burst of light. He reappeared behind the chanting goblin, plunging Morphis into its spine. The creature howled, its body collapsed as the circle it had woven unraveled in sparks.
"None of you will leave here alive," Lucien growled.
But the goblins roared back. Their Dominion Circles overlapped in complex arrays that even he couldn’t predict.
One circle bent gravity itself, dragging him down like lead. Another rune compressed space, warping the lab into a maze of shifting angles.
Lucien roared. Divine energy burst from him in waves. His muscles bulged and his veins glowed with golden fire.
Morphis shifted into a great sword. With a savage strike, he shattered the gravity circle and hurled its caster into the wall.
But more came. Always more.
Their coordination was monstrous. Every spell was a trap and every movement was calculated.
Lucien’s breath came ragged. Still, his eyes blazed with killing intent.
Raising Morphis high, Lucien unleashed a devastating arc of divine light that tore through the laboratory.
The floor cracked. The circles and runes shattered. And goblins shrieked as their bodies were incinerated in his wrath.
And yet... the survivors grinned through their burns. Their teeth glimmered like shards of obsidian and their eyes burned with cruel intellect.
"Human... no ordinary human," one hissed. "But you will drown here. We are Dominion itself."
The air thickened as a final web of circles bloomed. Chains of light and shadow lashed out, converging from all directions to crush him like a god’s fist.
The space bent. His vision warped. His body screamed under the impossible pressure.
Lucien’s jaw clenched.
"Enough."
He surged forward.
Chains shattered as he tore through them. Morphis became a storm of blades. A thousand strikes in the span of a heartbeat. Each cut carried a fragment of annihilation.
They severed not only flesh but the circles themselves.
One goblin raised a shield of crystallized space. Lucien’s strike split it apart and cleaved the creature from crown to gut.
Another vanished into a distortion, striking from behind... only to find Lucien already there. Divine blades came out from his wings. They spear the goblin through the heart.
The others tried to overwhelm him, layer by layer. But Lucien was no longer fighting as a man. He was fury incarnate.
The lab thundered with destruction. The capsules shattered. The pods ruptured.
The screams of the goblins echoed. It rose in pitch until the last of them fell.
Their limbs were severed. Their bodies were torn. Their prided dominion circles unraveled in sparks of dying magic.
And then...
Silence.
Lucien stood in the wreckage with his chest heaving. Golden fire dimmed around his veins. Morphis dripped with ichor that sizzled against the ruined floor.
The flames of the Gargoyle Ring still licked at his arm.
Around him, nothing stirred. Only corpses and broken glass.
He exhaled slowly and his eyes narrowed.
There it was again...
That subtle tug. The pull on his very soul.
He understood what it was now. The fragment of the Origin Core.
But with that realization came certainty. ’Something that precious... will never be left unguarded.’
Lucien lowered himself onto the broken stone, letting the silence settle around him. For a moment, he simply closed his eyes and reached inward.
The fragment within his own core stirred. Its energy flowed into him, easing the strain that clung to his body.
The ache in his muscles, the burns along his veins from channeling the Gargoyle Ring, the exhaustion clawing at the edges of his mind...
They were all washed away. Soothed as though time itself bent to heal him.
A single deep breath steadied him. His strength returned.
When his eyes opened again, they burned with resolve.
Lucien tilted his head upward.
Above him, the spiraling void of the tower stretched on. The shadows thickened the higher it climbed. And somewhere at the very top... he could feel it waiting.
The fragment.
But also... something worse.
The presence above was heavier than anything he had faced so far. It pressed faintly against his senses even from here.
Lucien rose to his feet.
The true trial still waited above.
And what lay ahead... would be far scarier than anything he had faced before.