NOVEL NEXT Chapter 249: Were
The Trial of Plundered Luck began not with thunder, but with silence.
The golden realm that stretched around them was vast and surreal, an endless sky beneath their feet and a flowing ceiling of starlight above. Colossal floating platforms drifted in the distance, each connected by thin, glowing bridges made of rotating fate runes and beams of compressed light.
Suspended in the air like lanterns were spheres of swirling energy, faintly translucent, each one pulsing with a peculiar rhythm. They flickered in soft hues of gold, violet, and pale blue, floating just out of reach, too real to be dismissed, too insubstantial to grasp.
Damien narrowed his eyes. Above each participant, barely perceptible, hovered a thin, shifting thread of light. Some were thick, golden, burning like coiled suns. Others were dimmer, flickering and frail, like dying stars.
Ancient luck. Visible not through the eyes, but through the soul.
It wasn't just a measure of energy. It was recognition. The more a cultivator possessed, the brighter their fate burned, drawing others to them like moths to flame.
Damien looked above Nyxara's head and saw a heavy plume of silver-blue luck curling slowly behind her. She noticed it too and exhaled slowly, her eyes darkening.
"We're glowing much more than the others." she muttered.
"They will come for us." Vathrian replied coldly. "Be ready."
And he was right.
The moment the drow regrouped into formation, a meager cluster of thirty surrounded by vastness, the skies around them distorted. Three groups descended at once, their formations sharp and cruel. They did not hesitate. They did not speak words of diplomacy. They had been waiting for this.
The Celestial Blaze Sect came first, one of their small groups consisting of 20 powerful fighters streaking downward like meteors.
Their fire-path cultivators shrouded themselves in armor of crimson flame, their weapons curved and glinting with solar inscriptions. The leader, a tall, sneering man with eyes like molten stone, extended his halberd and called out with a grin.
"Burn the shadows from the sky. Let the drow be our first offering."
From the east came the Soulweavers of the West, floating downward on platforms of screaming souls. Their presence warped the air, turning it heavy, quiet, oppressive. Ghostly chains snaked out ahead of them, searching, tasting. One of the Soulweavers, a woman with a porcelain mask and a fan made from flayed spirit skin, let out a laugh that sounded more like a weeping child than anything human.
"And here I thought we would have to hunt. You gathered yourselves so nicely."
The third group arrived with a silence so sharp it cut the air: the Twilight Blade Sect. They moved in shadows, vanishing and reappearing in flashes, swords already drawn. They didn't speak. They didn't need to. Their presence alone was a sentence of death.
Damien's mind sharpened to a needlepoint.
Thirty against more than sixty.
Although they were merely overwhelmed two to one, real battles weren't like the long and drawn out fights of comics and web novels.
Long fights only occurred during evenly matched battles.
Once the strength of one party reaches a certain tipping point, defeat will come extremely rapidly.
A single mistake will result in death, regardless of how many trump cards the victim had unused.
"This will be dicey." Damien thought.
The enemy was coordinated, deliberate. They had planned this, timed it. The drow had been marked the moment they stepped into this realm, recognized not just as competitors, but as threats. And threats had to be erased early.
"Formation." Nyxara ordered, voice taut.
But it was already too late.
The first bolt of soul energy screamed through the air, slamming into the chest of a drow from House Mirath. He didn't scream. His body simply withered, his luck thread snapping with a sickening sound like old parchment tearing.
Thalvia reacted a heartbeat too late, throwing up a defense just as a Twilight Blade cultivator slipped through her side, his blade exiting her back before she had even turned.
Vathrian roared and unleashed his shadow chains, tangling three of the fire cultivators and ripping one into pieces, but he too was struck—twice—once in the arm and once across his ribs.
Sylea managed to dodge the first few strikes, but when she retaliated, it was too slow. A Soulweaver's spirit blade sliced through her ankle, sending her tumbling to the ground.
Damien moved.
He stepped forward, his spear of eternal storm already forming in his hand. Its shaft gleamed with lightning-forged silver, its head crackling with arcs of death-infused thunder.
He didn't hesitate.
The first enemy that came within reach, a fire-path cultivator surging forward with twin blazing sabers, was impaled instantly.
Damien twisted the spear as it pierced through the man's chest, and with a sudden pulse of lightning, he exploded from the inside out. Damien spun, deflecting a soul chain with the shaft, then thrust forward with pinpoint precision, piercing the throat of a masked Soulweaver before she could raise her fan.
The Ancient Luck of his victims surged into him, causing the coil of light above him to brighten and become slightly more opaque.
But for every one he killed, another struck down a drow.
Within minutes, the drow formation broke.
Damien's vision flared red as Nyxara was struck hard in the shoulder and forced to her knee. Vathrian screamed as he was overwhelmed, his back torn open by a blade of compressed wind. Lyrisa stayed close, dancing in and out of reach, her scimitars flashing in perfect rhythm, but even she had taken a blow to the ribs.
Damien didn't blink.
"Soul Flicker." Damien said softly as he raised his hand and unleashed his most powerful spell.
From the corpses around him, from the very moment of their deaths, he drew forth their final instincts, their last strikes, their ending intent. Spirit fragments burst from the ground like shadows given form. A scimitar strike. A soul scream. A desperate defense spell.
All unleashed as ghostly echoes behind him, lashing out at their killers with precision.
He turned his palm upward.
The Deathlight Mantle flared, glowing faintly with threads of silver and violet.
"Rise." Damien whispered.
And the world of the dead obeyed.
The recently fallen drow stirred.
So did the corpses of their attackers.
They rose, not as shambling corpses, but as pristine, reanimated echoes.
Fully formed, death-bound reflections of who they had been just moments before. Their eyes glowed with unnatural clarity, their luck threads dim but visible, their weapons still warm from the fight.
The battlefield shifted.
What had been an ambush became a trap, Damien's trap.
The reanimated drow moved first, their minds still locked on their final emotions. Rage. Grief. Revenge. They fell upon the enemy with no hesitation, no fear, no need for preservation.
The resurrected ambushers followed, flawless copies of themselves, now under Damien's command, launching attacks with all the same techniques and tactics they had used moments earlier.
The enemy groups recoiled.
"This isn't right!" one of the Celestial Blaze warriors screamed, throwing flame desperately toward a reanimated version of his own senior brother. "They're dead! They're dead!"
Damien's eyes were calm, unreadable.
"Were," he corrected.
The battlefield ignited.
Flames collided with lightning. Spirit chains lashed and snapped. Sword shadows flashed and clashed with flickering illusions. Screams tore through the golden sky. Blood, real and remnant, splattered across the shining platforms.
Damien stood at the center of it all, unmoving, his spear humming beside him like a caged storm.
The trial had begun.
And if the other factions had thought to extinguish the drow with one coordinated strike, they had forgotten one truth.
Death is not the end.
Not when Damien was watching.