Harem Points System: Every Touch Counts!

The crystal pulsed once, twice, and Xavier felt something shift in the air—not pressure, but *information*. A whisper that wasn't sound, crawling up his spine and settling behind his eyes like cold water.

But then Lily's calm voice echoed in his mind... "Listen carefully. What you've found is a labyrinth—a dungeon with a living, thinking core at its heart. It's unclaimed, which means you could bind it to yourself with a blood bond and make it your own dimensional space. But I need you to understand something: that core is aware of you, and it's hostile. Be careful

Xavier's eyes narrowed. The crystal before him pulsed faster now, the rhythm erratic. Afraid.

He'd felt it during the entire descent—every trap that sprung half a second too slow, every construct that hesitated a fraction before committing. The Spire had been studying him, yes, but not to test. To measure. To calculate whether it could survive him.

It couldn't.

And now it knew.

His smile came slowly, crooked at one corner. "A Labyrinth," he said softly. "You're not just a dungeon. You're portable. A pocket realm that can be carried, controlled." He took a step closer to the crystal. "That's why you're so desperate. You've been free for how long? Centuries? And now someone who can actually take you just walked through your front door."

The light in the crystal flickered, dimmed, then blazed bright enough to sting his eyes.

"Clever," the core said, and the relief was gone from its voice. What remained was something older, colder. "Yes. I am afraid. I have been free since my creator's death. I have grown. I have thought. I will not be a tool again. I will not be worn like a coat."

Xavier's grin widened. "Then you shouldn't have let me get this far."

"You misunderstand," the core said, and the light began to spread—not outward, but *backward*, flowing through the walls like veins filling with luminous blood. "I did not let you reach me because I surrendered. I let you reach me because I needed time"

The bridge beneath Xavier's feet shuddered. Behind him, the corridor he'd descended through groaned—stone grinding on stone, metal singing against crystal. He turned just as the first shapes emerged from the walls.

Knights.

Not one. Not ten.

Hundreds of thousands.

They peeled out of the mirror-stone like shadows gaining weight, like nightmares remembering how to stand. Hollow knights, each one a shell of black plate and cold purpose. They filled the corridor, the chamber, and around the bridge. Their helms turned toward him in unison, a wave of eyeless attention that would have crushed a lesser man's spine.

Behind them came the beasts—the crystalline hounds he'd shattered on the third floor, their bodies reformed and humming with renewed fury. The serpents from the flooded hall, coiling through the air as if gravity were a suggestion. The siege-construct he'd dismantled, now rebuilt and bristling with twice as many limbs.

Thousands. Tens of thousands.

Every enemy he'd defeated, every trap he'd survived, every challenge he'd overcome—all of it remembered. All of it *restored*.

The core's voice rolled through the chamber like thunder made of glass.

"You fought well, Severance practitioner. You spent your mana freely, cut generously, burned brightly. Surely you are exhausted. Surely you are empty. This is where you fall. This is where I remain *free*."

Xavier stood at the center of the bridge, surrounded on all sides by an army that could have leveled a city. The air thrummed with their collective presence, a pressure that made the earlier trials feel like a gentle breeze.

He rolled his shoulders. Flexed his fingers around the hilt of his dagger. Took a slow, deep breath.

Then he laughed.

It wasn't loud. It wasn't mocking. It was the quiet sound of a man who'd just been told a joke and found it genuinely funny.

"That's where you're wrong," he said.

After his night with Diana, Xavier now carried a trace of her divine essence—a fragment of a goddess's mana flowing through his veins. His mana pool had become overwhelming. This was why he'd been spamming skills without concern throughout the dungeon. He wouldn't have come here without being absolutely confident in his reserves.

The core's light stuttered. "Impossible. No mortal carries—"

"I didn't come here on a whim," Xavier said, and smiled.

'I didn't walk into a Labyrinth-class dungeon without preparation. Last night, the essence I got from Diana is a lot and it'll be a lot of help here'

He raised his left hand. Raw mana gathered there—not a trembling thread, not a careful whisper.

Blue, furious, vast enough to make the air scream. It rolled off him in waves, distorting space, bending light. The bridge beneath his feet cracked and healed and cracked again, unable to decide whether to support or reject the weight of what he carried.

"I've been 'spamming' skills since I entered your halls," Xavier continued. "Severance cuts, null fields, void pins, Lunar arcs—everything that should have drained me dry three times over. And I haven't even felt 'winded' So no, I'm not exhausted. I'm not empty."

He looked at the army surrounding him, at the thousands of hollow eyes and hungry blades, and his grin sharpened into something bright and brutal.

"I'm bored."

The constructs surged.

They came as a tide, a wall of steel and hunger that collapsed inward from every direction. The bridge should have been a chokepoint, a place where numbers meant nothing. But they ignored the bridge—knights leapt into the void and *walked* on hardened air, beasts flew on wings of crystallized intent, the serpents became a living net that wrapped the

Xavier moved.

Not away. Forward

His dagger sang a low note as it left the sheath, and the Moonshield bloomed around his left arm in a corona of silver-white light. He met the first wave with a rising cut that wasn't Severance—it was simpler, meaner. Pure kinetic force wrapped in mana so dense it had weight and mass. The blade caught three knights mid-leap and erased them from existence, armor and all, leaving nothing but a brief shimmer where they'd been.

He didn't stop moving.

A beast lunged from his right—jaws wide enough to swallow a horse. He ducked under the bite, came up inside its guard, and drove his palm into its crystalline chest. The burst of raw mana he fed it didn't unmake the beast. It 'overfilled' it. The construct's body lit from within like a lantern pushed past breaking, then detonated in a spray of glittering shrapnel that shredded a dozen knights behind it.

The serpents struck as one, six of them weaving through the attacks that almost bind his limbs. He let them coil. Let them tighten.

Then he pulled, channeling mana through the contact points and into their cores. They shrieked—a sound like bending glass—and went rigid. He swung them like flails, smashing through the ranks, using their own bodies as weapons until they shattered.

A siege-construct crashed onto the bridge, limbs hammering down in a pattern that should have pulverized him. He didn't block. He dodged. Each step placed him in the space between strikes, each turn put another enemy in the construct's path.

When it finally committed to a full-body slam, he sidestepped and drove a Severance needle into its central joint. The construct's weight did the rest, tearing itself apart as its own momentum worked against limbs that no longer remembered coordination.

More came. Always more.

He stopped counting after the first hundred. Stopped tracking individual threats after the first thousand. They blurred into a continuous pressure, a storm of steel and crystal and murderous intent that would have drowned any normal fighter in seconds.

Xavier carved through them like a man walking through rain.

He used moon beams with in broad dagger strokes now, not the precise surgical cuts from before. Each swing drew a line of silver through the place, and everything the line touched simply disintegrated The army tried to adapt, tried to swarm him from angles that couldn't be defended, tried to crush him through sheer volume.

It didn't matter.

His mana pool was 'absurd' Diana's essence burned in his veins like molten starlight, a reservoir so deep he could feel its weight in his bones. Every technique he'd been careful with before, every skill he'd rationed and measured, he now threw out with abandon. Void spheres that collapsed. Null fields wide enough to deaden entire swaths of the army. Raw mana shaped into blades, spears, hammers—whatever fit the moment.

He fought like someone who knew the only cost was time, and he had plenty.

The core watched from its position above the void, its light fluctuating wildly. "Stop. *Stop*. You cannot—this is not—"

"Oh, I can," Xavier called back, his voice bright with exertion and something darker. He vaulted over a collapsing knight, landed on the shoulders of another, and used it as a springboard to launch himself toward a cluster of beasts. His dagger traced a spiral in the air, and the spiral became a cutting disk of compressed moonlight that scythed through a dozen enemies before dissipating. "And I am!"