Eternal Master: Path to Godlike Status-Chapter 31: Seal Part 2

Rain kept pace behind her, two steps back.

The corridor stretched long and cold, lit only by lumen stones mounted at intervals along the walls.

Somewhere ahead, the bronze resonance still hummed faintly through the floor — a dying vibration that had not yet fully faded.

"The seal. What exactly are we talking about?"

Alicia didn’t slow. Her white robe whispered against the marble, the gold-leafed collar catching the light as she rounded a corner.

"Something the Founders locked away before this cathedral had a name."

"That’s not an answer."

"No," she agreed. "It isn’t."

She stopped at the top of a wide descending staircase, her hand resting on the stone balustrade.

Below, it opened into a vast darkness.

The ceiling vaulted so high, the shadows swallowed it entirely — a depth that felt less like architecture and more like the area had simply swallowed a piece of the earth whole.

BOOM.

The floor shuddered. Dust rained from the balustrade in thin curtains.

Alicia looked over the railing into the dark below, and for a moment, she was completely still — reading something in the vibrations the way a person read text.

She let go of the railing, stepped onto its edge, and jumped.

No hesitation. No announcement.

Rain trailed behind, eager to witness whatever came next.

The drop was longer than it looked.

He landed beside her in a controlled descent, the impact absorbed cleanly through his legs.

"This place is huge."

Huge didn’t cover it. Whatever space surrounded them dwarfed what the staircase implied.

Alicia was already moving.

A tunnel opened ahead. Wide enough for four people walking side by side, walls smooth and carefully finished.

Torches lined both sides, their light colder and dimmer than the ones above — as if the deeper you went, the more serious things became.

Neither of them spoke.

Sound built as they moved through it. Not volume — texture. Impact.

Energy cracking against warding structure and failing to fully break it.

Rain heard enough battles to read audio the way others read faces. Whoever was fighting ahead had been at it for several minutes, holding, but not comfortably.

Without warning, the tunnel ended.

Rain stopped.

Vast was insufficient for what opened before them. Floor: gone entirely. Walls: distant enough to be theoretical.

Floating midair were stone cubes.

Dozens. Each one roughly the size of a small house, rotating slowly on axes that ignored gravity.

Around them, white robes clashed against dark-colored ones.

"Heretics!" She bit her lip in annoyance.

The intruder moved in loose scatter, each channeling dark purple energy — thick and spreading, hungry in a way light simply wasn’t.

Stone walls crumbled wherever it grazed them, dissolving in layers. Against the cubes, it met resistance. But barely.

"We need to stop those Heretics before they reach the seal!"

She clasped her hands together. Light poured out of her body like a dam breaking — and a giant translucent hand formed in the air above the chamber, white and blazing.

It was bigger than anything she summoned before, large enough to swallow three floating cubes whole.

Below, priests scrambled out of its shadow. Heretics stumbled, several dropping to one knee just from the pressure rolling off it.

"High Priest Alicia," an aged man’s voice echoed from one of the cubes.

His robes were as dark as the others, yet he carried himself differently — unhurried, unbothered, the kind of presence that drew the eye.

Absolute confidence burned in his brown eyes, strange and unsettling on a man who looked halfway to the grave.

He tapped his dark cane. "You should fight someone on your own level."

Dark mist uncoiled from the floor around him — not the scattered purple bursts the other Heretics were throwing. This was different.

It took shape as it rose, narrowing, lengthening, scales forming along its body until a serpent the size of a pillar. Translucent. Black at its core, deep purple bleeding outward from the edges.

It opened its mouth and lunged straight at Alicia and Rain.

"My level?" she sneered. Her giant translucent hands shot up, intercepting it.

Light and darkness collided before the sound hit everything at once — a concussive wave that cracked two nearby cubes and sent every person on the chamber floor stumbling.

Neither gave.

"Rain, handle the rest," she commanded.

"Are you sure? This battle... it’s not going to be easy."

"Stop playing around," she tilted her head. "You’re more than capable of ending those garbage heretics."

He didn’t argue anymore. A black katana materialized in his right hand, sleek and deadly.

"Handy." He clenched the weapon, adjusting its weight perfectly to his grip. The Veil of Gluttony was proving far more useful than he expected.

20%... 30%... 40%... 50%.

Reaching half his power, his body hissed as heat radiated off him. Then he shot forward, a dark blur toward the floating cubes.

They unleashed a series of deadly curses to slow him down.

Rain didn’t move to dodge. He jumped straight into it.

Dark energy struck him twice across the chest. Whatever they were throwing, his body simply refused to acknowledge it as a reason to stop.

By the time they realized it wasn’t working, he was already inside their range.

The katana came out once. Clean arc, low angle. Two men down before the sound of the draw finished.

He shifted left without looking, elbow into a third man’s jaw, katana reversing into the fourth.

No pause between movements. No reset. Each action fed directly into the next like he was solving a problem he already memorized the answer to.

A Heretic raised his hand to fire.

His wrist hit the floor a moment later. The rest of him followed.

By the time the others turned to look, there was nothing left to look at.

Alicia’s eyes sparkled with approval. She realized just how deadly Rain could be with a weapon in hand.

His sword technique outmatched even the strongest paladin she had ever known.

Three Heretics broke from the main group, leaping toward another cube.

Rain tracked them without slowing.

One of them pressed both palms flat against the stone floor. The other two knelt beside the first, their hands joining his, dark energy flowing down through their fingers and into the ground.

CRACK!

A clean fracture ran in a straight line toward Rain’s feet. From it rose something that wasn’t quite smoke and wasn’t quite liquid — a dense, sickly purple vapor that moved against the air current, crawling upward with intention.

Around it, two nearby Heretics immediately pulled their robes over their faces and stepped back.

Even Alicia, locked in her struggle with the old man, glanced down for a fraction of a second.

Rain stopped advancing.

The vapor reached him and wrapped around his legs, climbing fast.

Within seconds, it swallowed him entirely — a dense toxic cloud where he stood, obscuring everything.