{Chapter: 173: Consciousness Battle And Consciousness Damage}
In the Battlefield of Consciousness
Within the invisible realm where thought reigned supreme and will collided with will, a battle was unfolding—vicious, surreal, and unrelenting.
This was not a battlefield made of dirt and stone, but of raw psyche, pure intent, and unstable identity. Here, appearances were shaped not by flesh and blood, but by self-perception and belief. Every combatant cloaked themselves in forms of their own design—phantoms of pride, fear, or delusion. Yet as time dragged on, even these forms began to blur under the strain of combat. Their shapes twisted, fragmented, and bled into one another. In the end, the only thing any of them could truly recognize was the malice of their enemies—undisguised, cold, and vicious.
And in the midst of it all stood Dex.
Surrounded. Alone.
As usual.
There was no concept of allies for him. No banners to fight under. No comrades at his back. His existence was one of isolation—an eternal adversary to whatever team the world threw at him. It had always been that way. Since his very first appearance in the grand theater of conflict, Dex had played the villain—the unwanted, the unnatural, the threat everyone instinctively turned against.
Perhaps that was his role. Perhaps that was his destiny.
His enemies, this time, were demigod-level mages—powerful, coordinated, and blessed by a complex ritual of empowerment that linked their minds like a choir singing in perfect unison. Dex, by comparison, stood on a tier beneath them. His strength was gaie, stolen, or worse—cheated—from a evolution system, a loophole in existence that gave him tools beyond his station. Even so, his stolen strength paled next to the genuine might of his adversaries.
But raw strength wasn't everything.
Dex was a master of conscious combat, honed not by study, but by experience—battle after battle, loss after loss. He had long since learned how to bend the rules of mental warfare. While the enemy wielded clean, righteous power, Dex wielded chaos—ugly, unstable, and terrifyingly effective.
Despite being outnumbered and outmatched, he held his ground with grotesque elegance. The waves of psychic assaults aimed to crush him—yet he weaved through them like a shadow, slipping past mind-lances, redirecting psychic force, and disrupting thought-patterns with disturbing ease.
And in a flash of opportunity, he struck.
A well-timed counterattack sent one of his attackers tumbling out of the psychic realm, their consciousness fractured and thrown from the battlefield. The price of failure in this kind of war was no mere bruise or scrape—it was the maiming of the soul. To lose meant, at best, a coma-like retreat; at worst, a total collapse of self.
The demigod who fell would not be returning.
Yet even after achieving this small victory, Dex did not allow himself to relax. He stared at the remaining opponents—still fierce, still unshaken—and clicked his tongue in silent frustration.
This is bad... they're still fresh. Still fully powered.
Soul battles were rarely elegant. There were no beautiful martial arts, no clever tactics, no armies or formations—only instinct, fury, and willpower. It was like wild beasts tearing at each other in the dark. And Dex, though cunning, was just one beast facing down a pride of lions.
He couldn't afford to slip.
Meanwhile, his enemies hesitated—not because they lacked courage, but because they didn't understand what they were looking at. In the warped mists of this mental realm, Dex's true form began to bleed through. And what they saw was… wrong.
If consciousness had eyes, theirs would be tearing up in horror.
What stood before them was no longer something that could be called human.
Dex's soul, if it could even be named that anymore, had twisted into something vile. His essence exuded a kind of malignancy that defied logic, like an open wound filled with venom. Just by perceiving him, their minds recoiled. He wasn't just a threat—he was contamination. Madness given shape.
"What in the Nine Hells is this thing…?"
That unspoken thought rippled across the minds of the remaining demigods. There were no words to define what they sensed, only fear.
Dex had become a font of corruption—his very presence leaked toxins into the collective psyche. Those who brushed against him were infected, their thoughts fraying at the edges. Even the strongest among them felt it: ideology warping, instinct degrading, identity unraveling.
It was like facing the concept of pollution itself.
They could not leave such a thing unchecked.
They had to end him.
Silently, the demigods reached a grim agreement. No words were needed. Their minds, sharpened by ritual and discipline, aligned in purpose.
This could not be allowed to persist.
And so, in chilling silence, they made the ultimate sacrifice. Each one ignited a portion of their soul—a permanent offering of their own essence—and transmuted that power into luminous, barbed lances of psychic energy.
They permanently ignited a part of their own power source, transforming it into countless sharp spears of consciousness that stabbed directly at Dex.
A storm of spears exploded into existence, hurtling toward Dex in a divine barrage of punishment.
Faced with this holy slaughter, Dex could only mutter something deeply respectful.
"...Grass."
Then the storm consumed him.
A cacophony of thought and agony followed. Blood spewed from his mouth in a sharp, wet splatter.
"Pooh!"
Staggering back, he opened his three eyes—each one pouring blood like tears. His breath came ragged. His body—if it could still be called a body—twitched unnaturally.
Then, with eerie calm, Dex raised his right hand and pressed a finger against his temple.
And without hesitation, he pushed.
His finger drove inward, piercing his skull as if the bone offered no resistance. A grotesque sound echoed through the physical realm—wet, unnatural, final.
The wound was perfectly precise, neither shallow nor fatal. But it exposed a horrific truth: Dex's brain had long since lost all resemblance to a living organ. What remained was a quivering, oozing pulp—something between liquefied meat and sentient decay.
It pulsated softly, like it was thinking. Like it was aware.
One could even see inside his skull that his brain, which was supposed to be tightly protected, had somehow turned into a pulpy substance like a pile of mashed mud, a disgusting sight.
"Puff…"
With the hole in his skull angled downward, he smacked the side of his head several times in the opposite direction—just like one might shake loose a jammed trash bin. With each jarring slap, chunks of broken brain matter tumbled out, splattering onto the ground of the physical world.
His eyes rolled lazily for a moment as he shook his now hollowed-out cranium like an empty gourd. After a few minor adjustments to his neck and spine, a twisted grin crept across his face. It wasn't the kind of smile one gave in amusement—it was the cold, calculated leer of a predator who'd tasted his own blood and hungered for the one who dared spill it.
There was no doubt in his mind—he had been bested in the realm of consciousness.
All of them, against all odds, had used their own willpower to forcibly breach his mind and obliterate it from within. The sheer recklessness of such a move was both insane and brilliant.
If it hadn't been for the tenacious resilience granted by the [Evil Undying Body], he would have died right there and then. The blood-lock enchantment had triggered automatically, halting the tide of death just inches away.
Even for a demon with near-limitless vitality and regenerative powers, this particular assault had nearly pushed him past the brink.
A shattered conscious was not something that could be brushed off as a mere scratch—not even in the infernal playbook of monsters.
As the splattered brain tissue began regenerating at a rapid pace, reforming structure and function in a grotesque ballet of flesh and will, the demon extended his long, forked tongue—serpentine and slick—and licked the blood trailing from his temple. The metallic tang danced across his taste buds as he silently reflected.
"I was too careless… Far too careless. I underestimated the strength of the native defenders of this world. How amusing."
While his expression remained cold, his thoughts were already racing. He began mentally replaying the final moments of the encounter again and again, searching for the moment it all went wrong. A mistake like this couldn't be allowed to repeat itself.
Even if he wasn't one of those armor-clad Saints who climbed constellations, he wasn't the type to fall twice from the same blow.
*****
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