"Instant Dungeon?!"

The moment the words left his brother’s mouth, Ricky’s expression shattered. The blood drained from his face, leaving him looking more like a corpse.

He knew what that term implied. "That means... Someone who has already won a Blood Carnage is here..."

He moved his eyes around frantically, searching for a gap, a way to escape their encirclement, anything. But his back was pressed against the unyielding grand building, and his front was a crescent of sharpened steel and malicious intent. He had no way out.

Driven by a sudden burst of survival instinct and genuine fear of what awaited him, he lunged forward, his two swords blurred in a desperate attempt to carve a hole through the line. But every strike was met with an iron-clad wall of defence.

They worked with a cooperation he had never seen from his ego-driven brothers. They didn’t aim for his heart or his throat; they whittled him down, opening shallow cuts on his arms and legs to force a retreat. They weren’t aiming to kill him, which was much weirder in his eyes.

The more time passed, the more defeats he got, the more hopeless he became. Ricky’s anxiety spiked into true terror.

After half an hour of this agonising cat-and-mouse game, after sustaining ten more bleeding wounds that made his grip on his hilts slick, the world suddenly shook. The ground beneath his boots trembled with a violent quake.

All around them, the towering buildings of the city started to vanish. It looked as if a giant, invisible brush was sweeping across reality, painting over the urban decay with a blinding, flat white colour.

The sky flared into a brilliant flash, then extinguished into nothingness. This was the unmistakable, terrifying sign of the Instant Dungeon activation.

In the blink of an eye, Ricky was no longer cornered in a filthy alley. He stood in the middle of a vast plain. High, rolling grass grew over small hills that rose and fell like the breathing of a giant, stretching toward a horizon that didn’t exist.

He looked as if his death sentence had just been read aloud. The activation of the Instant Dungeon meant that this space had been detached from the world of Athanasia. He was in a pocket dimension governed by the rules of the ritual. There was no escape route anymore.

If he wanted to get out of here, if any of his brothers wanted to get out of here, then only one should kill and absorb all, be the sole winner of the Blood Carnage.

"I can tell your mentor taught you well, little brother."

As the void settled into the grassy landscape, seven distant silhouettes appeared on the horizon, perfectly surrounding the group in a massive septagram.

One of them, a man who looked to be about twenty-five with a cold, aristocratic bearing, spoke. His voice carried across the hills without effort. Ricky didn’t need to ask; he knew this was the mastermind who had orchestrated the trap.

"Why are you teaming up with machines?" Ricky narrowed his eyes, his gaze locking onto an extra figure standing beside his eldest brother. It was a middle-aged woman with a vacant stare. She shared none of the Kraken PARIES features. She was an outsider.

Linking everything his brothers learnt about his deeds in the pocket trial, that woman’s identity was glaring and bare to him like the sun in mid summer day.

Ricky recalled the final battles of the pocket trial. He remembered John’s warnings about Mark and the ability to hijack humans from the game and turn them into cyborgs.

"Nice eyes, little brother," the mastermind laughed, a sound of pure, chilling evil. He seemed genuinely amused by Ricky’s desperate situation. "But your little smart brain won’t save you today. Don’t fret; I won’t be personally joining the fray unless it’s absolutely needed to maintain the stability of the ritual."

Ricky’s eldest brother stopped at a distance and sat cross-legged atop a grassy knoll, watching like a spectator at a colosseum.

"The deal is sacred in this ritual. I will let them compete to absorb you, and to absorb each other. Then, the last one standing will fight me, and the winner takes the entire collective souls.

Isn’t that a bit more efficient than how Father planned things? Hahaha! I find it so fair and entertaining that I might adopt this method permanently when I finally replace the old man and ascend to the Paragon seat."

Ricky could only grit his teeth, the metallic taste of blood filling his mouth. He looked at his twenty-eight brothers, the foolish puppets who got themselves played perfectly by the cunning mastermind on the hill. Every strategy he had was being countered before he could even voice it.

"Now let’s have some fun," the mastermind called out from his spot on the hill.

As the primary threat sat comfortably far away, the twenty-eight enemies, the brothers who had been hunting Ricky, moved at the same time, taking one heavy step at a time.

They adjusted their formation to surround him from every conceivable angle, tightening the noose until the rolling green grass of the Instant Dungeon felt as small and suffocating as the alleyway he had just escaped.

They left him no room to manoeuvre, making it clear that even if he chose to run, there was nowhere in this infinite plain to hide. Even if he ran, he couldn’t escape this dungeon without winning the ritual.

"If you are so desperate to die, then I shall gladly grant you your wishes," Ricky said coldly. His features shifted, the masks of fear and worry melting away to reveal a chilling cruelty and a deadly seriousness. He reached for his storage device, intending to fight with everything he had.

The air around him shimmered as he began to take out his arsenal. Huge steel walls slammed into the soft earth, followed by the heavy thuds of cannons and the rising silhouettes of defensive towers.

"Ah, I forgot about these little toys I was told about," the mastermind on the hill snorted. Just as the gathered brothers were startled by the sudden appearance of Ricky’s weapons, and just as Ricky began frantically snapping the pieces into a defensive perimeter, the eldest brother snapped his fingers with a sharp, echoing crack.