"Luckily, I came prepared."

The moment the mastermind’s fingers snapped, a pulsing purple crystal ball materialised in the air in front of him. It hung there for a heartbeat before plummeting to the grass and shattering into a cloud of violet dust.

Ricky froze. He was standing in the centre of a half-finished base, his hand outstretched to pull the next turret from his storage device, but nothing happened.

Ricky was stuck with the handful of towers, walls, and cannons he had managed to deploy in those few seconds.

"Don’t give me that look, little brother," the mastermind laughed, clearly amused by the way Ricky glared at him with murderous intent. "I just have to make sure this fight is equal and fair. Your toys are really annoying, even for me. I’d rather watch a show of blades and blood, not a desperate fight against useless weapons, hehehe!"

"You bastard!" Ricky lowly roared. He shifted his gaze from the brother on the hill to the silent, middle-aged woman standing beside him, the cyborg. "Even if I fall today, John will tear you apart! He’ll hunt you to the ends of the world!"

"Mr Mirage? Hahaha!"

As if she had heard the most amusing joke in the world, the cyborg laughed in a theatrical, high-pitched way that didn’t quite match her age. "He is a bit busy handling the little gift I left for him. What was her name? Ah, Cissel... Hehehe! By now, he’s probably staring at the pieces of her that he personally cut away."

Hearing Cissel’s name ignited a fresh wave of agony and rage in Ricky’s chest. He clenched the hilts of his swords until his knuckles turned bone-white.

The gravity of the situation was finally clear. This wasn’t just a family competition over the Paragon seat, or a random machine encounter. It was a coordinated strike. Mark was dismantling their group piece by piece, him, Cissel, and even John.

Realising that his fate was most likely sealed, the small, flickering flame of hope in Ricky’s heart finally went out. He settled into the cold reality of the outcome. All he had left was the pride of a Kraken PARIE and the burning desire to take as many of these bastards with him as possible.

"If I’m going to die," he shouted, turning his eyes toward the twenty-eight brothers surrounding his meagre fortifications, "why don’t we work together to bring him down first? Look at him, sitting there like a king. If we kill him, one of you ends up with sixty soul fragments instead of the scraps he’s promising. Don’t be his pawns, don’t be this stupid!"

"Hahaha, nice try, dude! Really, a valiant effort!" The mastermind laughed, pointing a mocking finger at the group.

"But the Blood Carnage rituals are strict and cruel. We’ve already sworn the oath. If they don’t oblige by the order of combat we agreed upon, a deadly soul-backlash will follow. They aren’t going to help you, Ricky, no one does."

"Stop it, Ricky," one of his brothers said, sounding almost bored as he raised a dagger. "We’ve already settled it. We fight you first. Then we fight each other. Then, the strongest of us fights him. That is the way of the Blood Carnage we agreed upon."

"Then come and die!" Ricky roared.

He instantly jumped, his boots climbing one of his towers till he reached the very top. He ascended the fifty-meter structure in a few agile leaps, looking down at his enemies from the height of his limited defence.

"I’ve fought against deadlier foes and won! I survived the pocket trial! Let’s see who is going to emerge from this place with his head still on his shoulders!"

Ricky still held a core of confidence in his remaining defences. Even if he hadn’t been able to build a proper, sprawling outpost, the few weapons he had managed to deploy were enough to stall and kill.

His plan was grimly simple: he would crush their confidence by raining fire from above, driving them into a frenzy of despair. Once they realised they couldn’t reach him without massive casualties, the inherent greed of the Kraken blood would take over.

They would turn on each other, hoping to absorb a brother’s soul to gain the power needed to break his defences. Then, and only then, would he act, absorbing their souls himself to grow strong enough to challenge the monster on the hill.

Yet when Ricky expected a massacre to begin at the hands of his little defences, something unbelievable happened. This time, the counter-move didn’t come from his big brother, the mastermind of this trap. Instead, it came from the silent, cyborg woman standing by his side.

"Let me fulfil my promise then," the woman said. An evil smirk stretched across her face, a gesture that looked entirely too wide for a human mouth. Without a moment of hesitation, she pulled a knife and cut her own throat, killing herself in the most shocking and brutal way imaginable.

Ricky’s mind froze. He had seen death before, but that suicide was haunting. He didn’t see that coming. And for a reason, he felt like this wasn’t a simple suicide at all.

What happened next froze the very blood in his veins. The blood that erupted from the twitching, slumped body of the cyborg wasn’t fluid in nature; it was light. It was rays!

Crimson blood-rays erupted from the woman’s neck like a pressurised explosion. They travelled with impossible speed, arching through the air and falling all over his defences. The walls, the cannons, and the towers absorbed the red rays greedily, as if they were being painted by a laser.

Then, one by one, the lights on the weapons flickered and died. The towers groaned, their internal gears locking up as if someone had pulled the master plug on his defences.

It felt like that cyborg just used an electromagnetic bomb to shut down all his defences in one move.

"Hahaha, it worked as promised!" the distant mastermind laughed. He looked down at the dead, leaking woman by his side without a hint of disturbance or remorse. He nudged the body with his boot as if it were a spent battery.

"Now he is devoid of any defences on his side, isolated from the outside world by my Instant Dungeon. He is a cornered, lonely, dead man, as I promised."

Ricky looked around, his mouth agape. He couldn’t tell what sort of techno-sorcery Mark had just pulled, or how a sacrifice could shut down his defences so effectively. All he knew was that his deadly defences had lost their function and were nothing more than expensive piles of scrap metal.

"Don’t get scared already, little bro," one of the surrounding enemies said sinisterly, taking another slow step forward. "We are just getting started. The real horror will happen once we attack. We’re going to savour every soul-fragment we pull from your dying body, hahaha!"

CRACK!

The boastful words were cut short by a sound so violent it felt like the sky itself was splitting open. Before the twenty-eight enemies could close the distance to launch their final assault, the entire world trembled and shook.

This time, it wasn’t the thrum of the Instant Dungeon activating. This was different. This was a tectonic shudder, a sign of someone breaking through the dungeon’s layout and structure, forcibly tearing their way into this private pocket dimension, uninvited, not part of the Blood Carnage.

"This..."

Just as the first shockwave ended, another came, twice as powerful. This time, visible cracks appeared in the oppressive whiteness of the horizon. The mastermind, who had been sitting cross-legged and enjoying the spectacle, suddenly had a change of face for the first time.

He stood up abruptly, his poise shattered. With every subsequent shake and every new crack spreading through the grassy world, his body jerked in sympathy, as if he were being struck by an invisible hammer.

"Hahaha!"

Seeing the mastermind’s reaction made Ricky burst into a sudden, hysterical laugh. The fear that had been suffocating him evaporated in an instant. He knew what was going on. He knew who was coming, and he understood why his eldest brother looked like he was suffering a heart attack.

"You activated the Instant Dungeon using your own soul fragment as the anchor? Hahaha! I can’t believe it! Hahaha!" It was Ricky’s turn to relish the twist of events. The irony was delicious.

"You wanted to make sure no one could betray you or escape, so you linked the dungeon’s existence to your own soul. A nice move, big brother, truly. But, unfortunately for you, you picked the wrong enemy to fight!"

Ricky’s face shifted, looking like a cornered beast who had just been handed a loaded gun. He looked utterly amused, the long minutes of anxiety replaced by a savage glee.

With every subsequent crack and tremor that tore through the artificial sky, the distant mastermind fell to his knees.

He began to twitch violently, clawing at his chest as if he were experiencing the most agonising pain imaginable. His own trap was being dismantled, and because it was tied to his soul, he was being tormented with it.

"W... What is happening?!!" one of the twenty-eight brothers finally managed to shout, his voice trembling as he looked at the sky and then back at Ricky.

"It’s your doomsday," Ricky said, his savage expression promising blood. He knew the dungeon was getting breached. He knew their scheme was collapsing. Before any of them could respond, the eldest brother on the hill roared out in a voice filled with cracked defiance.

"This can’t be happening! The Instant Dungeon is an absolute force of nature! It is an isolated space! No one—NOTHING—shall have the power to crush it from the outside!"

"Hahaha!" Ricky’s laughter echoed across the plains, mocking the desperate shouts.

"You just haven’t met my friend yet. John? He can’t be measured by any laws or facts of this world. If anything, he can be summed up as the anomaly that destroys every fixed rule we know.

He doesn’t follow the rules; he breaks them! John is a legend! And he is coming here right now to kill you, and then he’s going to kill every last one of you! Hahaha!"