Dante stared at the prompt.

Mythic classification. It was a tier above the SSS-Rank containment quests. It was exactly what he had been looking for.

A class that would undoubtedly scale perfectly with his broken talents and massive base stats.

He looked back at the glowing, translucent man.

Dante had 100 points in his hidden Intuition stat. It allowed him to read the flow of combat, detect ambushes, and sense hidden traps.

Right now, his Intuition was screaming at him in absolute, unfiltered panic.

The remnant wasn’t offering him a gift. The aura radiating from the purple ghost was intensely, overwhelmingly malevolent.

It felt like standing in front of a starving predator holding a piece of meat. The man didn’t want a student; he wanted a host.

He wanted to hijack Dante’s highly optimized, anomaly-dense avatar and use it to escape his ten-thousand-year quarantine in the bone wastes.

"I appreciate the offer," Dante said, keeping his voice steady and completely calm.

He reached out and tapped the red ’Decline’ button on the system prompt.

"But I don’t wear hand-me-downs," Dante finished.

The prompt shattered into digital dust.

The welcoming, majestic aura of the remnant soul instantly vanished. The bruised purple light glowing around his translucent form turned violently, aggressively red.

"You decline?" the remnant hissed. The telepathic voice lost all its smoothness, turning into a harsh, scraping shriek that physically vibrated Dante’s skull. "You are a fool. You cannot survive the coming cycle as a baseline Warrior. The system will purge you. You need my power."

"I need you to get out of my way," Dante corrected him.

He didn’t wait for the ghost to argue.

Dante triggered [Meteor Stride].

He vanished, intending to teleport directly past the NPC and sprint for the exit tunnel on the far side of the basin. He wasn’t going to fight an un-scannable entity in a sealed arena while heavily debuffed.

[Error: Spatial displacement failed.]

[Localized Coordinates Locked.]

Dante materialized exactly where he had started, stumbling slightly as his momentum was abruptly canceled. The teleport had failed completely.

"You cannot run from this," the remnant sneered, raising his glowing, translucent hand.

The red energy pulsing from his form flared violently.

The entire arena shifted. The towering mountains of colossal bones groaned loudly, and the air pressure multiplied exponentially.

It wasn’t a standard, systemic gravity spell like Lila’s. It was raw, unadulterated, overwhelming telekinetic force, backed by tens of thousands of years of accumulated cosmic weight.

Dante felt the crushing pressure instantly. It slammed into his avatar, forcing him down to one knee. The [Sun-Forged Cuirass] whined loudly under the immense structural strain, the gold plating actually beginning to buckle.

[-5,000 HP]

A massive chunk of his health was instantly deleted by the sheer atmospheric pressure.

He tried to draw [Voidsever], but his arm was completely pinned to his side. He was mathematically paralyzed by a force that entirely bypassed his defense stats.

"I offered you a choice," the remnant said, floating slowly toward Dante, his red eyes burning with absolute malice. "You rejected it in your arrogance. Now, I will force the inheritance upon you. I will shatter your existing options, suppress your ego, and your avatar will serve my purpose."

The remnant didn’t just target Dante.

He raised his other hand, pointing it toward the towering piles of bones surrounding the arena.

The intense telekinetic force wrapped around the colossal skulls and ribcages of the fallen Emperors and Gods of War that the remnant had bragged about suppressing.

With a sickening, deafening crunch, the remnant violently crushed the ancient bones into fine, white powder.

[System Alert: Potential Class Advancement Triggers Destroyed.]

[Available Paths Restricted.]

He was literally destroying the environment to ensure Dante had absolutely no other options for a class upgrade within the zone.

The remnant stopped directly in front of Dante.

"You are mine, Outworlder," the ghost whispered, raising his glowing red hand, preparing to plunge it directly into Dante’s chest to initiate the forceful data overwrite.

Dante couldn’t move. He couldn’t swing his sword. He was completely pinned, his health slowly ticking down under the crushing pressure.

He didn’t panic. He didn’t close his eyes.

He glared up at the remnant.

"You want my avatar?" Dante growled, his digital jaw trembling under the strain. "Come and take it."

The remnant smiled, a cruel, victorious expression, and drove his hand directly into the center of Dante’s gold armor.

The remnant’s glowing red hand plunged directly through the armor as if the Gold-tier armor didn’t even exist.

Dante didn’t feel physical pain. The telekinetic pressure pinning him to the bone-paved floor vanished instantly, replaced by a sensation that was fundamentally, terrifyingly worse.

His vision violently snapped from the red-misted basin to absolute, pitch-black nothingness.

[System Override: Hostile Data Infiltration Detected.]

[Warning: Ego Subjugation Initiated.]

Dante was thrown into his own mindscape. It wasn’t the quiet, localized void he had experienced when binding [Voidsever]. This was a raging, apocalyptic warzone.

A tidal wave of raw, unfiltered emotion crashed into his consciousness. It wasn’t just anger. It was a suffocating, bottomless despair, layered with a bloodlust so intense it felt like physical heat. Millions of fractured, screaming voices echoed in his head, demanding violence, demanding vengeance against a system that had wronged them.

Kill them all. Burn the Orthodox. Shatter the system. Blood for blood.

The voices weren’t separate entities. They were a single, unified consciousness actively trying to overwrite Dante’s own personality.

The remnant wasn’t just giving him a class; he was pouring the accumulated, concentrated malice of ten thousand years of slaughter directly into Dante’s neural link.

The Asura.

The name didn’t appear in a neat blue system prompt. It was branded directly into his thoughts, burning with dark, cosmic authority.

Dante felt his identity start to slip. The cold, calculating, analytical mindset he relied on to survive the Zenith Protocol was actively melting under the intense heat of the blood frenzy. He wanted to draw his sword. He wanted to completely vaporize the entire server, starting with the immediate area.

His avatar in the physical world began to change.

Standing in the center of the bone basin, Dante’s body violently seized. The glowing gold plating of the armor turned completely, aggressively black. The heavy, pitch-black fabric of the [Mantle of the Void-Dragon] flared wildly, tearing at the edges, transforming into a tattered, crimson cape that looked like flowing liquid blood.

His eyes, visible through his visor, turned a solid, glowing red.

The remnant pulled his hand back, floating slightly higher in the air, watching the transformation with absolute, triumphant glee.

"Yes," the remnant hissed telepathically. "Let the Asura consume you. Give me the reins, Outworlder. I will use your anomaly status to break this quarantine and wash this server in blood."

Inside the mindscape, Dante was drowning.

The ocean of bloodlust was actively pulling him under. He could feel his memories of Silas’s betrayal, the death of his parents in the First Cycle, and the sheer frustration of the system’s unfair mechanics being weaponized against him. The Asura was using his own anger to fuel the overwrite.

Let go, the Asura whispered in his mind. It is easier to destroy. Give in to the rage.

Dante stopped fighting the current.

He stopped trying to suppress the anger. He didn’t build a mental wall to block out the bloodlust.

He opened his eyes in the pitch-black mindscape.

"You think you’re the only one who’s angry?" Dante asked. His voice didn’t echo. It was a quiet, absolute statement of fact.

He didn’t reject the Asura’s power. He grabbed it.

Dante had spent three months in Aethelgard managing a guild of thousands, constantly suppressing his own desires to play the perfect, noble hero. He had died for it. Since waking up in Overture, he had operated with a cold, terrifyingly calculated precision. He had humiliated Guild Masters, executed gods, and manipulated the server economy without ever losing control of his emotions.

He possessed an absolute, diamond-hard willpower forged in the fires of betrayal and constant, high-stakes survival.

The Asura wanted a puppet. Dante decided to make it a battery.

He focused every single ounce of his immense willpower, grabbing the raging, chaotic tidal wave of bloodlust and forcibly, violently funneling it into his own structured, analytical combat logic.

"I am the Vanguard," Dante roared in the mindscape. "You don’t drive. I do."

The chaotic voices screaming for blood abruptly silenced.

The ocean of despair didn’t consume him. It froze, entirely subsumed by Dante’s overwhelming, localized ego. He didn’t become the Asura.

He absorbed it, ripping the ancient power away from the remnant’s control and binding it directly to his own digital soul matrix.

In the physical world, Dante’s avatar stopped seizing.

The frantic, wild flaring of his crimson cape settled into a slow, heavy ripple. He stood up straight.

His eyes were still a solid, glowing red, but they weren’t the erratic, manic eyes of a blood-crazed monster. They were sharp, focused, and completely lucid.

The remnant soul floated backward, his translucent face twisting in absolute, horrified disbelief.

"No," the remnant stammered, his telepathic voice cracking. "That is impossible. The Asura’s malice is absolute! No mortal mind can withstand the total assimilation of that much slaughter! You should be a hollow shell!"