The Extra's Rise - Chapter 979

979: Dots and Lines 979: Dots and Lines The next door opened into a wide, circular arena.

The floor was a single, unbroken sheet of polished gray stone, and the walls were smooth and featureless.

There was no furniture, no traps, no tempting handles.

There was only a quiet sense of expectation, like a blank page waiting for the first word.

As I stepped to the center, the page began to write.

A sphere of brilliant, condensed Purelight bloomed in the air before me, humming with a clean, potent energy.

A moment later, a dozen razor-sharp plates of solid Deepdark materialized around it, orbiting the central sphere like hostile moons.

The construct was simple, geometric, and utterly lethal.

“So it’s not a fight, it’s a very aggressive game of Jenga,” Valeria commented from the quiet of my mind.

“Try not to let the murder-blocks fall on you.” The plates accelerated, their orbits tightening.

Then, without a sound, one of them broke from its path and shot toward me.

There was no pre-motor tell, no shift in energy to announce the attack.

It was a perfect, zero-tell strike, the kind the tower had just spent an hour teaching me how to perform.

I moved.

Not with a Lightning Step, not with a grand evasion, but with the quiet, boring competence I had just earned.

My feet were already where they needed to be, a step I had started in the silence at the bottom of my last breath.

The plate of darkness hissed past my shoulder, missing by an inch.

Two more followed from different angles.

I met one with a short, economical parry that did nothing but turn its edge away.

The other I simply avoided by not being where it expected me to be.

My first instinct was to retaliate with a large-scale spell, a nine-circle net to bind them all.

But I knew the tower would tax the attempt into uselessness.

This was a test of my new, minimalist toolkit.

I threw a single, sharp bolt of my own Purelight at the central orb, hoping to disrupt its control.

The orb seemed to drink the light, and its hum grew noticeably louder.

The dozen orbiting plates immediately accelerated, their attacks becoming faster and more aggressive.

“Okay,” I said aloud, parrying another silent, deadly rush.

“Don’t feed the sun.” I tried a physical approach.

I waited for a plate to commit to an attack, stepped inside its line, and met it with a clean, hard cut from Valeria.

The impact was jarring, a deep thud that vibrated up my arm.

The plate was knocked back, but the shallow scratch on its surface healed in an instant.

It spun once and seamlessly rejoined its orbit.

‘The problem is a system,’ Erebus observed, his voice like the turning of a dry page.

‘The solution is to de-integrate its components before addressing the core.

Logical.’ He was right.

I couldn’t overpower the system.

I couldn’t break its individual pieces.

I had to take it apart.

The key wasn’t a bigger hammer.

It was the lesson I had just learned in the previous chamber: direct, fundamental control.

I stopped attacking.

I stopped trying to win.

I focused only on surviving.

The storm of black plates was relentless, a whirlwind of perfect, silent cuts.

I became a ghost in the machine, my feet finding the quiet spaces, my blade a minimalist argument against being cut.

I was using the zero-tell discipline from my first lesson, my body moving without broadcasting its intent.

I was a boring, uninteresting target.

While my body handled the dance of survival, my mind went to work.

I extended a single, hair-thin thread of my own Deepdark, not as an attack, but as a quiet question.

I sent it toward the nearest orbiting plate.

It wasn’t a lash of power.

It was a line of will.

‘Stop,’ I commanded it, using the same firm, undeniable intent I had practiced on the motes of darkness.

The plate stuttered in its orbit.

For a fraction of a second, its perfect, aggressive motion faltered.

It was enough.

In that instant of hesitation, I struck.

It was a simple, honest cut-first bite, shortest line, no flourish.

Valeria’s edge met the now-inert plate.

This time, there was a sharp crack.

The plate of solid darkness shattered into a thousand pieces, which dissolved into nothing before they hit the floor.

It did not reform.

One down.

Eleven to go.

The construct seemed to notice the loss.

The remaining plates adjusted their orbits, their attack patterns becoming more complex, trying to cover the new gap in their formation.

But I had the solution.

The fight became a dangerous, delicate surgical procedure.

My body was on autopilot, a dance of pure, defensive discipline, my feet keeping me alive.

My mind was the scalpel, extending fine threads of will into the storm.

It was a brutal test of concentration.

I had to maintain my zero-tell defense while simultaneously isolating and commanding a single plate, and then, in the tiny window I created, execute a perfect offensive strike.

A thread of Deepdark.

A command.

A plate’s hesitation.

A clean cut from Valeria.

A shatter of dissolving darkness.

Repeat.

It was the hardest work I had ever done.

The mental strain was immense.

With each plate I destroyed, the remaining ones became faster, their attacks more ferocious, as the central orb poured more power into them.

I took glancing blows.

A plate scraped my forearm, leaving a cold, dead line that my Harmony had to work to contain.

Another clipped my knee, forcing me into a three-step recovery that almost got me killed.

But I didn’t stop.

With each successful deconstruction, my control grew cleaner, my threads of will more certain.

I was no longer just a swordsman.

I was a weaver, unmaking a tapestry one thread at a time.

Finally, only one Deepdark plate remained.

It flew with a desperate, furious speed, throwing itself at me again and again.

I commanded it, and it fought my will, the dark energy resisting my own.

I held the command for two full seconds, my muscles straining with the mental effort.

The plate froze in midair.

I stepped in and shattered it.

Silence.

The central orb of Purelight now pulsed with a furious, stored energy.

It had poured all of its power into its now-nonexistent defenses.

It was a tiny, brilliant sun, radiating waves of pure, untamed power.

I couldn’t attack it.

That would only make it stronger, likely causing it to detonate with enough force to level this entire floor.

I couldn’t leave it.

It was the heart of the system.

I had to unmake it, just as I had the plates.

But Purelight didn’t respond to commands.

It responded to invitations, to harmony.

And I couldn’t invite it to destroy itself.

I needed to introduce its opposite.

I let Valeria rest and opened my hands.

I drew on my newfound mastery of Deepdark, not as threads this time, but as a soft, pervasive net.

I didn’t cast it at the orb.

I wove it carefully in the space around the orb, a delicate cage of quiet, hungry nothingness that didn’t touch the light, but contained it.

The orb pulsed, its light pushing against the cage of shadow.

The tower room was now a scale model of a star held in the void, a perfect, unstable balance.

Then, I reached out with one last, fine thread of my own Purelight.

I didn’t send it into the orb’s heart.

I touched it to the surface, at the precise point where the orb’s own light was pushing against my cage of shadow.

I didn’t give it a command.

I gave it a suggestion.

‘Balance.’ The orb understood.

It had been fighting to expand.

Now, it saw a path to equilibrium.

It pulled the cage of Deepdark inward as the cage pulled at its light.

The two opposites met.

For a moment, a perfect, violet sphere of balanced annihilation formed in the center of the room.

It held for a single, silent heartbeat.

Then it simply… wasn’t.

It collapsed in on itself, leaving behind nothing but the quiet hum of a room at rest.

The construct was gone.

The test was over.

I stood alone in the center of the arena, my breath coming in ragged gasps, my body aching, but my mind sharp and clear.

I had won, not with power, but with control.

Not with a shout, but with a whisper.

The door on the far side of the room slid open.

Valeria’s hum was low and satisfied.

“Okay.

That was a good answer.” I nodded, too tired for a clever reply.

I had learned to use dots and lines to unmake a sentence.

That felt like enough for one day.