[Recovery complete.]
[Reestablishing connection with the human race...]
"What?"
Anger left for a moment of bewilderment. He even thought he was hallucinating from being so close to death.
[An extinction-level threat to humanity has been detected... Employing emergency measures.]
[Linking to every available human being...]
The same voice rang out again… proof he hadn't lost his mind and that reality was, unfortunately, still very much real.
And he wasn't the only one hearing it. Every human stable enough to withstand the Sins without going mad was being linked in real time, each automatically assigned the sin and Thema their minds could handle.
Under normal circumstances, the system would never trample over free choice. It would offer Sins and Thema selections, grant whatever the host chose, even if their pick was the least suitable, and remind them they could sever the connection whenever they wished.
But these weren't normal circumstances. When a species stands on the cliff's edge, free will becomes a luxury. The emergency protocol reflected that with its forceful integration.
From the humans in Paradise, capital of the Lust domain, to the Wrath domain, to the main army marching for reinforcements, down to the dozen Pride soldiers currently surrounded—everyone heard the same call.
Then, two new paths of mana suddenly opened within them. Those represented the skills born from the fusion of their assigned Sin and Thema.
It didn't stop there. Those who had enough mana control and were naturally more attuned to their Sin, the system flooded with even more conceptual knowledge, advancing them further to the next step.
Every human suddenly transformed into a Sin Pathwalker with conceptual powers that took decades for others to cultivate.
For Ashen, though, it was a bit different.
[Dormant conceptual Sin information detected.]
[Integrating...]
[Granting pathway: 6th Step, Idle Chronicler]
[Granting Thema: Bellator]
Right after, Ashen felt his long-dormant skills stir awake. Dreamweaving hovered at the edge of a single thought. Somatic Autonomy answered immediately, knitting his battered body back together.
Even Trance, usually so strict with its activation, quivered in his circuits like an eager child, ready to burst to life the moment he let it.
Ashen didn't think about how and why this change happened; he didn't possess enough leeway for that. He only acknowledged the new development and immediately utilized it.
Lucid Dreamweaving—
Ashen exhaled once and let the world soften around the edges. The skill pulled part of his mind into sleep while leaving his senses wide awake.
Muscles loosened, thoughts thinned, and that familiar duality opened: body in reality, mind wandering the dream's reflection. The battlefield layered itself twice over.
He reached the Daydream state.
The Conversationalist—
His eyes narrowed. The twitch of a shoulder, the coil of a tendon, the shift of a creature's weight. Every tell became an obvious sign. The state bloomed, turning motions into words and hostility into sentences only he could read.
To anyone else, the enemies looked feral. To him, they were speaking in clear, frantic dialects of intent.
Trance—
Then, as if heaven pitied him and the stars aligned, the last tether snapped despite its stringent condition.
Thought gave way to instinct, and his body slipped into that loose, liquid state that felt almost like drifting. The dream fed him predictions; the real world answered with movement. Consciousness dulled, but precision sharpened.
He moved seamlessly, half dreaming, but still wholly lethal in a paradoxical way.
His spear moved like water, flowing from defense to offense without pause. A Narkal lunged, but he had seen it coming, stepped inside the arc, and drove the spear through its eye socket before the claws could descend.
Another came from the left. The cross-blade caught its weapon, twisted it aside, and the main point opened its throat in the same motion.
Where before he'd fought with desperation, now he fought with ease. The Conversationalist painted every enemy's intent in clear strokes. The Daydream gave him time to process, react, and adjust. Trance made his body answer without hesitation.
Three Narkals rushed him simultaneously. In the dreamscape, he watched their movements unfold in syrup-slow clarity: left one overcommitting to a swing, center one hesitating, right one moving to grapple.
Reality caught up. He ducked the swing, used the cross-blade to hook the center one's leg and trip it into the grappler's path, then thrust through both their necks with a single strike while they tangled.
The spear withdrew clean. He was already moving to the next target.
His awareness spread across the battlefield, enough to see the patterns, predict where gaps would open, and position himself to exploit them.
A Narkal tried to flank Alice's position. Ashen intercepted it three steps before it could reach her, spear point finding the gap between its ribs with surgical precision.
He moved like a ghost between her orbiting metal circles, trusting absolutely that they'd never strike him. And they didn't. Alice guided them with perfect awareness of his position, the disks weaving around him as he danced forward, even assisting his kills.
One disk would drive a Narkal toward him, and his spear would be waiting.
It was seamless coordination born of complete trust. Where he moved, she cleared space. Where she needed protection, he appeared.
But even with the integration of the system, even with Ashen's rampage, the Narkals barely reacted.
From their perspective, the sudden outburst didn't even amount to a mosquito's buzz.
Their numbers kept steadily decreasing as more bodies piled up.
A hundred survivors.
Seventy...
Fifty...
Twenty...
When the number of soldiers lowered to single digits, even Alice at the center started getting overwhelmed despite her killing circles slicing and dicing Narkals like a meat grinder.
But Ashen, even in his Daydream and Trance state, always kept an eye on her. Every time a Narkal slipped past her defenses, he was there—spear thrusting, cross-blade hooking, body moving without thought to intercept.
The same couldn't be said for the others. He couldn't be in multiple places at once.
Finally, from the three million of the human theater and the million-and-a-half of the demi-human army group, only two remained: Alice and Ashen.
The sight of a lone demihuman and a lone human standing against such impossible odds felt equal parts miraculous and tragic.
Alice stood motionless in the center, tails flaring golden, a dozen killing circles orbiting her and annihilating any monster that got close. Ashen danced among those orbiting blades, moving right and left, forward and back, defending her with everything he had.
He was a dancing ghost doing his absolute damnedest to protect her from the endless hordes. He never faltered, not even for a moment. He simply could not.
…not with the consequences right before him, Narkals dining on and defiling corpses simultaneously.
[Trance^ (Skilled)]
The notification barely registered. He just kept moving.
The picturesque scene remained for a long time. The stationary Alice, the dancing Ashen.
But with each hour that passed, Ashen's movements grew more desperate, even in his Daydream state.
He could feel it. The pitiful amount of mana in his body wouldn't allow him to continue much longer. When he eventually ran out and his skills stopped responding—
He glanced at one of the Narkals that had its head buried in a demi-human's intestines as it humped the corpse restlessly while eating at the same time.
The sight made his body erupt with renewed vigor. His eyes turned bloodshot as he kept repeating in his mind like a mantra.
'More.'
'More...'
'Keep moving...'
'Don't stop...'
'Never stop..'
'Go.'
'Go...!'
"GO!!"
He greedily inhaled more mana with each breath, desperate for each additional strand. Vital Drift worked overtime to heal the self-inflicted injuries from constantly pushing his body beyond its natural limits, with the bulk of the vitality surging to his bleeding eyes.
Because his body was technically at rest due to Daydream, Vital Drift's efficiency had more than tripled. The passive restoration accelerated dramatically, buying him time he shouldn't have had.
But Ashen was only human in the end. And no amount of willpower could rewrite that reality.
Eventually, he started slowing. His last bit of mana dried.
Even then, he kept moving and killing with every ounce of his being. But it just wasn't the same. What he would have normally reacted to with almost no thought in that godlike state now took conscious effort. Where he could read the whole battlefield and react instantly, now he could only watch as he was surrounded.
And that was only the tip of the iceberg.
Any second now, and he would be overwhelmed. Time seemed to slow as his brain registered the very last moments before everything was over.
His eyes unconsciously drifted to Alice, and he noticed that her tails had turned azure somewhere along the way. The killing circles mirrored the same color.
Everything had taken the hue of her mana from the overwhelming amount she was pouring without reserve.
'Mana... if only I had that much.'
The bitter thought barely registered before lightning struck his mind as another thought occurred to him.
'Yes. So much mana is in front of me... all I have to do is take it.'
The thought was as simple as it was crazy.
Mana refined by one person carried their will, their biological imprint. Breathing it out released toxic and unnecessary parts, creating highly adapted mana for only the person who refined it. Injecting foreign mana into another body could cause consequences ranging from complete rejection to circuit rupture or even heart explosion from the mana going wild.
On the flip side, if the individuals exchanging mana had a high enough affinity and trust toward each other, those consequences might not occur. They might even empower each other by adopting the best qualities of each other's mana and combining them. The degree of empowerment was related to both factors.
While they had absolute trust in each other, Ashen knew that affinity was a completely different matter. It wasn't affected by trust, love, or any other emotion. It was affected by personality similarity and biological function.
Since mana followed the will and will is shaped by personality, its affinity was affected by it. The same for the biological aspect—mana was refined by the body and took the body as home, so it inevitably was influenced by physical traits.
And while Ashen and Alice loved each other wholeheartedly, their personalities were nothing alike. For the biological aspect, similarity between two humans was rare, let alone between different species.
So it was safe to say that Ashen's next move was suicidal.
He dashed forward, killing as he moved until he was right in front of her. He didn't waste time and picked her up in a princess carry with one hand, using his forearm to serve as a seat.
She naturally adjusted to the position that affected his movement the least, without even questioning or being surprised by the sudden development. All her concentration remained on the disks that continued to reap lives even now.
What Ashen said next broke her concentration, though.
"Give me your mana!"
Alice blanked for a second before blurting, "What…? Do you want to die, you crazy fucker?"
"Just do it!! Can we be any deader than this anyway? Haha!" His wild laughter on top of the crazy demand seemed to cement the thought that her lover had indeed gone crazy.
Nevertheless, Alice decided to just trust Ashen as always and do as he asked. She hugged his side and poured a generous amount of mana into him.
Her 'generous' amount, though, was like a flood for Ashen.
Instantly, blood vessels ruptured, and he coughed blood from his body's violent reaction to the foreign mana. The mana itself was unusually tame despite not being his; a testament to Alice's residual will and the trust that translated to such a phenomenon.
Despite his sorry state, the now bloody smile stayed plastered on his face because as long as he didn't instantly die, he could enact his crazy idea.
{Activated Path Skill: Somatic Autonomy}
With the activation of the skill, Somatic Autonomy devoured all the mana he was receiving from Alice and worked toward only one command: Make his body accept the foreign mana coursing through him.
Even with all the chaos happening inside of him, he never stopped moving for a second, this time wholly concentrating on dodging and surviving.
"Give me more!!"
He shouted, and Alice obeyed. The killing disks fell, and her tails flared in the same azure color. This time, it was Ashen's turn to be colored in the same hue as she poured everything.
Ashen's veins burst once again, but he only kept laughing and moving through the chasing Narkals while occasionally using one hand and his forearm to brandish the spear and kill.
Unknown to him, his face and nose started gradually turning sharper, resembling the prominent features of Fox males.
Finally, Somatic Autonomy's effects started showing.
Bit by bit, his body stopped rejecting the mana. Until eventually, it felt like it was his own, even though it was refined by her.
At that moment, his bloody grin couldn't get any wider.
Daydream—