Chapter 35: Venom
Rex’s heavy, leather-clad fist connected with Gregory’s jaw for the third time, the sickening crack of fracturing bone echoing across the blood-spattered flagstones.
"Talk, you dirty bastard!" Rex bellowed, his chest heaving like a bellows as he yanked Gregory up by his torn, bloody collar.
He reeled his arm back, throwing a devastating hook that sent a spray of dark crimson splashing across the pale masonry. "What kind of filthy toxin was smeared on that blade?! What did you do to Atlas?!"
Gregory’s head snapped violently to the side, his bottom lip split wide open and oozing blood onto his neck.
Yet, despite the brutal pummeling, he let out a raspy, bubbling chuckle that vibrated deep within his chest.
He spat a thick mouthful of dark blood directly onto Rex’s boots, his bruised and swollen face stretching into that same grotesque, hollow smile.
"Hit me all you want, you mindless brute,"
Gregory choked out, his eyes gleaming beneath his swelling eyelids with dark, unhinged satisfaction.
"Break every bone in my face... it won’t stop the venom currently coursing through his veins. That weapon wasn’t forged in any academic workshop, nor was it forged for a simple schoolyard brawl..."
Rex roared, his face flushed deep red with unbridled fury. He raised his right fist high into the air, his knuckles raw and dripping, intending to cave Gregory’s nose into his skull.
Before the blow could descend, a cold, slender hand clamped around his wrist with surprising force.
"That’s enough, Rex! Stop!"
Cassandra yanked him backward, stepping directly into the space between Rex and the bleeding tamer.
Behind her, heavy, metallic footsteps thundered down the entry ramp as arena security guards and tactical staff finally swarmed the ring.
Weapons were drawn, spell-shafts humming with blue suppression mana as two heavily armored guards shoved Rex aside and pinned Gregory face-down onto the stone floor.
"Let him speak," Cassandra demanded, her voice cutting through the chaotic shouting of the arena like a sharp sheet of glass.
She glared down at the bound student, her eyes narrowing as she noticed the unnaturally dark fluid pooling from Gregory’s split lip.
"Who gave you that blade, Gregory? Who supplied a Class 5D student with an unregistered soul-corroding artifact? Who sent you?"
Gregory lay pinned beneath the heavy iron boots of the guards, his breath rattling in his throat as heavy suppression cuffs were slammed onto his wrists with a sharp, metallic clack.
"You really think this was just about class placements?" Gregory purred, dragging his face across the grit to turn his cold, bloodshot eyes toward Cassandra.
"You think I care about the departmental standings? I was given a directive... a simple test of foundation. I was told to make an example of the shadow tamer before his anchor took deep root. The poison riding that steel isn’t an organic venom, girl. It’s a living curse born from the lower abyss. It eats the soul anchor from the inside out, turning his own mana into acid."
Gregory turned his head slightly, his sickening grin widening as he locked eyes with Rex.
"Unless your precious academy doctors know how to purge an active Void Toxin without destroying the host’s central nervous system... your little hero won’t survive to see the sunset."
"You sick lunatic—!" Rex surged forward again, his veins bulging against his skin, but three tactical officers threw their shoulders against his chest, forcing him back.
"Drag him to the deep holding cells in Sector 4!" the lead arena security officer barked, drawing a heavy suppression collar and snapping it around Gregory’s neck.
"Lock him in tier-three mana restraints, confiscate all spatial storage tokens, and notify Headmaster Vane immediately! Nobody speaks to this prisoner without direct clearance from the Board!"
As the guards dragged a quietly laughing Gregory across the amphitheater floor, his feet dragging uselessly through the dust, Cassandra slowly dropped to one knee beside the discarded, dark-bladed weapon resting on the stone.
The blade was narrow, almost needle-like, forged from a porous black metal that seemed to actively swallow the ambient light of the arena.
A faint, oily purple film coated the serrated edge, issuing a tiny wispy trail of foul-smelling smoke that hissed wherever it touched the pale flagstones.
"Rex..." Cassandra whispered, her hands shaking slightly as she pulled a velvet-lined containment cloth from her pouch and wrapped the weapon without touching the bare metal.
Her face had drained of all color. "Look at the crest near the hilt."
Rex leaned over, wiping a streak of blood from his forehead with the back of his arm. Etched into the base of the dark guard was a miniature, inverted triangular seal — three weeping eyes surrounding a broken crown.
"That’s not an academy mark," Rex gritted out, his teeth grinding together so hard his jaw ached. "That’s..."
"A syndicate mark," Cassandra finished, her voice dropping into an urgent whisper as she stood up, tucking the wrapped artifact into her belt.
She turned her eyes toward the dark exit tunnel where the referee had carried Atlas away minutes prior.
"Gregory was never acting on his own authority. We need to get to the medical ward right now. If that toxin really targets the soul anchor, ordinary healing magic is going to kill him faster."
Meanwhile, in the sterile, subterranean depths of the academy’s central infirmary, the peaceful quiet of the Intensive Care Unit was violently shattered.
The heavy double doors forged from reinforced white alloy burst inward, slamming hard against the stone walls as the referee sprinted through the broad corridor.
His uniform was torn, soaked through with dark, sticky blood that wasn’t his own, and his boots left heavy crimson smears across the polished white floorboards.
"Emergency! Clear the primary trauma unit immediately!" the referee roared at the top of his lungs, his voice echoing off the vaulted ceilings and startling the attending nurses.
"I need a full surgical team! Grade-one trauma! We have a student with a dark-attribute spinal puncture and active systemic organ failure!"
Medical personnel scrambled instantly. Two senior nurses pushed a heavy, floating gurney into the corridor, its levitation runes humming with bright blue energy.
The referee carefully laid Atlas down onto the metal frame, his hands trembling as he transferred the limp, unresisting weight of the teenage tamer.
Atlas was completely unresponsive.
His skin had turned a sickly, translucent ash-gray, making his dark eyelashes stand out in stark contrast against his drained face.
Unnatural, thick blue-black veins bulged grotesquely across his neck, jaw, and collarbones, pulsing with a rhythmic, sickening throb as the dark poison writhed beneath his flesh like living liquid ink.
His breathing was shallow, wet, and agonizingly ragged, each faint gasp accompanied by a dark, frothy bubble of blood escaping his lips.
"Get him into Operating Room 1! Activate the containment barrier!" an elder physician ordered, sweeping into the hallway from the staff quarters while adjusting glowing green mana-shrouds around his hands.
"Fetch the soul-stabilizing array and hook him directly to a high-grade essence drip! Move, move, move!"
The medical team pushed the gurney down the hall at a breakneck pace, the wheels rattling against the floor as the heavy double doors of the primary surgical suite swung shut behind them with a loud, pressure-sealed thud.
Inside the surgical unit, complex magic circles etched into the ceiling and floor flared to life in rapid succession, casting a harsh, cold white-blue radiance over Atlas’s convulsing form.
Nurses rapidly cut away his blood-soaked coat and shirt, revealing the horrific entry wound near the middle of his back.
The flesh surrounding the puncture wasn’t red or inflamed; it had turned pitch-black and leathery, smelling faintly of rotted meat.
Tiny strands of black energy flickered out from the wound like miniature lightning bolts, actively resisting the ambient healing mana floating in the room.
"Pulse is dropping rapidly! 40 beats per minute... now 32!" a nurse called out, her voice trembling as she monitored the crystal diagnostics floating above the table. "His soul essence reserves are hemorrhaging! The anchor is destabilizing!"
The chief surgeon stepped up to the table, his face stern as he pressed his glowing, green-shrouded palms directly against Atlas’s lower back, right above the blackened entry point.
"Systemic purge, level three," the chief surgeon muttered, channeling a concentrated beam of high-density restoration mana directly into Atlas’s central nervous system.
The moment his diagnostic mana crossed the threshold into Atlas’s body, the physician’s eyes widened in sheer, unadulterated horror.
A sharp, violent backlash of dark energy exploded out from the wound. The green light shrouding the surgeon’s hands flickered violently before shattering like glass, forcing the senior doctor to take two quick steps backward, his fingers numb and smoking.
"Doctor!" the referee yelled, stepping up to the thick glass partition separating the observation deck from the operating floor.
He pressed his palms against the glass, his chest heaving as he wiped cold sweat and dried blood from his forehead. "What’s the situation?! Can you purge the toxin with the array?!"
The chief physician slowly looked up from the table, his hands shaking slightly as he stared down at his own blackened fingertips.
He turned toward the observation window, his face completely devoid of all color, his expression grave.
"This isn’t a biological or elemental poison..." the doctor stated, his voice tight, carrying a heavy weight through the intercom system.
"The toxin is a necro-parasitic curse. It has already corroded his central nervous system and is actively using his own soul anchor as fuel to replicate itself. The moment my restoration mana entered his system, the curse treated it as nourishment and expanded."
The physician turned back to Atlas, whose body suddenly arched off the table in a violent, involuntary spasm, his dark veins turning almost completely black under his skin.
"His body is actively rejecting our healing spells," the doctor whispered, his tone chillingly sharp.
"His vital organs are failing one by one. If we cannot find a way to isolate his soul anchor and halt the spread of this dark energy within the next ten minutes... he will die on this table, and there won’t be enough left of his soul to preserve."