100% DROP RATE : Why is My Inventory Always so Full? - Chapter 323

Chapter 323: Chapter 323 – Strike
The battlefield did not pause to mourn.

The mage tightened his grip around his staff.

He spoke in goblin speech. A vow that tasted like iron and ash.

The staff answered.

The ground shuddered once.

Then every drop of blood spilled from the fallen goblin kings trembled, rose, and streamed toward the staff as if gravity had reversed.

It flowed like ownership being reclaimed.

The blood struck the artifact and vanished inside it.

The air turned wrong.

Chaos thickened into a visible haze as if reality had become a poorly mixed paint.

Lucien felt the effect immediately.

Edges lost certainty. Distance gained lies. Cause and effect loosened.

The goblin mage’s shoulders hunched as the stolen essence flooded him. Miasma flared like a cloak catching fire. His scars lit in spiraling patterns and his eyes clouded over with a churning, feverish madness.

He looked up and smiled at Lucien.

“You have forced us into the final scripture,” the mage said. “Now behold the debt of blood made manifest.”

Behind him, the remaining goblin kings did not retreat. They drew in sharp breaths and activated their own last measures, each one burning essence with deliberate cruelty.

Their auras ignited the way torches do when soaked in oil.

One king drew a blade across his tongue and painted the steel with blood. The weapon’s runes opened like hungry eyes again but wider now, swallowing heat from the air until frost formed around the edges of flame.

Another clenched both fists and forced chaos through his bones until his joints began to grind. His movements became unpredictable in a way that was not skill but sabotage, as if he had chosen to become a living error. Corrosion swelled into a crown around him.

They were spending tomorrow for one more minute of today.

Lucien’s blood-red eyes brightened.

“Same old tricks,” he said. “Fine then. Show me your teeth.”

The goblin mage lifted his staff and a second halo of disorder unfolded across the field. The blood he had taken from the dead did not become strength alone.

It became permission.

The artifact began to impose a simple, horrifying condition.

Anything that bled within its radius would be taxed.

Every wound would feed it. Every death would charge it. Every spilled drop would become fuel for Collapse and Chaos to deepen.

Lucien understood at once.

A battlefield that rewards carnage.

A butcher’s shrine.

His smile widened.

“A fine altar,” he murmured. “I will fill it.”

Then his gaze sharpened.

“And then I will break it.”

He stopped hiding.

Cosmic attribute magic stirred.

The air split.

Figures stepped out beside him, each bearing the same dragon-scaled frame and the same blood-stained grin.

They were not perfect duplicates. They were partitions.

Lucien’s intent divided into facets.

He fed Reflection through the cosmic split and gave each echo a different law-thread, a different rhythm, and a different temperament. Their eyes were wilder than his and that made them dangerous.

One clone crackled with Fire. One carried Darkness. One held Stillness.

Each clone roared as if born from the same madness.

Each one moved like it did not expect to survive.

Lucien pointed Morphis toward the goblin mage.

His clones fanned outward.

His allies surged with them.

The Serpentiles did not hesitate. Constriction tightened the air around a goblin king’s knees until movement became expensive. Molting shed a corrupted layer and threw the discarded imprint into an enemy’s face, staining his focus. Venom followed like judgment as corruption defined, tainting intent and rotting effects where they began.

The two humans moved with ferocity.

The woman drove forward with her chaining ignition knuckles, every strike stamping a brand that made the next hit explode harder. The man raised walls and angles, herding targets into kill zones, refusing them clean approaches.

Lucien stayed on the mage.

The goblin mage did not flinch as Lucien closed.

He slammed the staff into the ground and shouted an edict.

“Collapse. Kneel.”

Reality tried to fold Lucien’s charge into nothing.

Lucien did not dodge.

He let the collapse hit his dragon scales.

It shrieked. It bit. It failed to find purchase.

The mantle across Lucien’s shoulders dimmed once, absorbing the range of the effect, reducing it to a lesser nuisance. The Eclipse Gloves drank the remaining magic like water and returned it in a brighter, sharper burst.

Lucien’s counterstrike came like judgment without ceremony.

Morphis cut.

The blade did not only sever flesh, it severed outcomes. It carved through layers of rune-work and left gaps where the goblin mage’s formations had expected continuity.

The mage staggered, eyes widening.

He hissed and rotated his staff.

Blood-tax activated.

A ripple spread outward. Lucien felt it brush his skin like a cold finger, hunting for wounds to exploit.

Lucien laughed.

“You want blood,” he said. “Then choke on it.”

He stepped in again, relentless.

Decisive strike followed decisive strike.

His madness did not make him sloppy. It made him simple.

Close distance. Deny breath. Break structure. Repeat.

The goblin mage retreated, slippery as rot-smoke. He slid behind circles that unfolded too quickly for normal eyes.

Lucien chased anyway.

He did not slow. He did not hesitate. He moved as if the world owed him the mage’s throat.

Meanwhile, the field became a storm of deaths.

A goblin king tried to press the Serpentile woman from the blind side and found darkness waiting. Lucien’s clone with Darkness swallowed the angle, turning the attack into a stumble into emptiness.

The Serpentile woman’s Venom landed.

“Let corruption return to its author,” she declared.

The goblin’s own corrosion turned traitorous again, gnawing at his joints and eroding the reliability of his strikes. He screamed and forced chaos into it to break the judgment.

Stillness answered.

Lucien’s stillness-clone stepped forward and smothered the surge before it could bloom into unpredictability.

Chaos did not explode. It fizzled.

The human woman took the opening without asking.

She drove her knuckles into the goblin king’s sternum and detonated every brand she had planted in the last ten seconds.

The explosion did not throw him away.

It threw him inward.

His ribs collapsed. His breath left. His weapon fell from hands that no longer remembered how to grip.

He tried to speak an edict.

The man cut him off.

A plane of flame struck his mouth and burned the words before they could become law.

The goblin king died with surprise in his eyes.

The clone that had helped took a blade in the shoulder did not move aside. It accepted the strike like a shield, held the enemy in place, and then laughed as if pain was only confirmation that it existed.

Lucien’s fire-clone charged in with reckless joy and slammed both palms onto the goblin king’s chest.

And then—

The clones… detonated themselves.

Fire blossomed.

The goblin king screamed as his blood-fed blade tried to swallow the flame and found it too dense. The sword cracked like an overfilled vessel. The goblin king cracked with it.

When the light cleared, only scorched ground remained.

Only one goblin king stood.

Only the mage.

Lucien’s allies drew breath. Thier shoulders rose and fell with the slow relief of survivors.

For half a heartbeat, it felt like victory was near enough to touch.

But the goblin mage was still smiling.

Not because he was winning.

Because he was stubborn enough to refuse dying cleanly.

The artifact on his staff pulsed again, now swollen with the blood of his dead. Chaos crawled over his skin like living ink.

He stepped backward and slipped through a half-formed circle.

Lucien lunged.

He cut.

The blade met empty air.

The mage was always half a step away from where his body should have been.

Slippery and elusive. As if Chaos had taught him how to exist slightly beside the truth.

Lucien’s claws flexed around Morphis.

He prepared to change methods.

But then…

The world screamed.

A force like a falling continent slammed into the battlefield from above.

The space-seal, the lattice that had trapped them all, shattered like glass across the sky.

The cage the goblin mage had built disintegrated into drifting fragments of light.

Wind howled into the breach.

Lightning followed.

A massive shape crashed through the broken boundary and struck the earth hard enough to make the entire field lurch.

Astraea’s Storm Roc form skidded across the ground. Her wings carved trenches.

She was breathing hard.

And behind her, stepping through the shattered seal with deliberate calm, came the cause.

The Covenant-Breaker.

His staff burned with wrath. His eyes were bright with fury, and his presence felt like a sneer in the fabric of reality.

Astraea lifted her head, saw Lucien, and light gathered around her.

She refined herself again, returning to human form in a burst of controlled brilliance.

When she stood, her posture was still proud but her expression was grim.

“I miscalculated,” she said.

The Covenant-Breaker’s gaze swept the ruined field, the dead goblin kings, the scorched brands, the broken circles, and finally settled on Lucien.

He smiled.

Not amused.

But offended.

“So,” the Covenant-Breaker said softly, “this is where my kin went to be harvested.”

Lucien’s grin did not fade.

The madness in his eyes sharpened.

Astraea stepped to his side.

The goblin mage exhaled like a man who had just been rescued by a calamity.

The battlefield had been a hard fight.

And now it became something else entirely.

An emperor arrived to take back control.

A storm arrived to correct a mistake.

And Lucien, drenched in victory and hunger, looked at them both as if deciding which catastrophe to kill first.