Chapter 224
"Merely by looking."
Before Ilux could reorganize the narrative of his defense, even before he realized that ten seconds had evaporated in his paralysis, a violent motion seized his body like the grasp of an invisible giant hand.
Not by his own will, his body—hardened by the essence of freezing—plunged from above and slammed into the ground with a force that rattled cartilage and bone.
The hardened earth cracked in response, swallowing his form in a burst of dust and a brief tremor.
Yet before the debris could settle, another pull, another law—subtler yet far more indisputable—wrenched him back into the air.
That momentum hurled him to a halt only a few meters from the unmoving figure of Aldraya, placing him at an intimate and inescapable viewing distance.
Ilux was trapped, not only by the rigidity gripping his joints, but within a perfect spatial calculation, a position predetermined by the Overseer who now regarded him with an emptiness sharper than any rage before.
From within the shell of his suffering, amid the freezing that clutched every nerve, Ilux's mind still writhed like a dying fish on dry land.
He knew that Aldraya could hear even the faintest inner voice, and from the depths of his wounded heart, he sent forth a bitter question, an echo of unspoken anguish.
Is this what you wanted, Master?
To torture the disciple you once nurtured, to destroy the academy you once led, merely to prove your dogma of faith, of devotion, and of betrayal?
The question dissipated within his own consciousness, a prayer steeped in despair that found no ear willing to listen.
Aldraya paid it no heed.
The Overseer simply closed the eyelids that reflected the checkered cosmos, as if severing his connection to this chaotic reality.
Then, from the writhing flesh and distortion surrounding his silhouette, a creation both grotesque and sacred emerged.
Eighteen masses of flesh formed into petals, then opened, becoming new eyes that radiated the same blue light.
The eighteen Eyes of the Overseer did not launch an attack in the conventional sense.
They did not release energy or sever limbs.
Their assault was deeper, more fundamental.
They read.
They judged.
They scanned every layer of Ilux's existence, from skin to soul, and imposed upon him an absolute evaluation.
The reality of Ilux's body began to betray him under that merciless examination.
His perception of space collapsed; distance and direction twisted into illusions that warped and bent, making him feel adrift in a wall-less labyrinth.
Pain arose from emptiness, the sensation of bones shattering without any physical cause, followed by a horrifying delay between the pain and the awareness of its source.
His muscles stiffened and slackened unevenly, some numb like stone, others burning as if drenched in molten metal.
His heart beat in an unfamiliar, broken rhythm, while the blood in his veins felt like dense mercury, drawn by a strange gravity from those gazes.
Even his memories began to feel like a book being read by someone else, page after page turned by an alien presence, cracking the foundation of his identity and leaving it echoingly hollow.
"No one would remain still."
Amid the ruins of his identity being unraveled by the eighteen judging gazes, a final flame flared within Ilux's soul.
Despair was not his end, but fertile ground for a more feral rebellion.
Within the shaken depths of his consciousness, images of victims flickered.
The innocent staff, students, and teachers who had fallen—not to epic battle, but to the dogma of a master who decided alone what constituted faith, devotion, and betrayal.
That unbearable physical pain overflowed into cosmic rage, a final rejection of all imposed judgment.
The blood that felt so heavy began to boil, and from every sealed pore seeped a dense, ancient crimson light.
This was not mere energy, but radiation from the core of his highest courage, a release of existential pressure aimed not to destroy, but to disrupt, to force the Overseer to divert that absolute attention.
The dark-red radiation burst forth like a compressed supernova, an emergency signal written in the spectrum of fury and grief.
Its purpose was singular.
To make the eighteen Eyes of the Overseer blink, even for a fraction of a nanosecond.
And within that hoped-for gap of disruption, Ilux unleashed all his remaining conceptual power.
From behind the curtain of radiation, a final manifestation emerged.
No longer a chain or a laser in isolation, but a hybrid monstrosity born of desperation.
The blueprint of the Integrated Elemental Chain, which had previously failed completely, now rose in a chaotic yet resolute form.
The five primordial elements—lethal ice, devouring fire, whispering wind, pulsing obsidian, and pulsar flares—wove themselves together not with elegance, but with savage friction, bound not by yellow authority light, but by the dark flash of Ilux's final Alteration of Perception.
The construct surged forward.
Not with elegant speed, but with the ferocity of a wounded beast, straight toward the formation of fleshy eyes around Aldraya.
Its purpose was no longer destruction, but binding and disruption.
Each elemental link sought to wrap around each overseer's eye, while the Alteration of Perception at its core screamed loudly, forcing an alternative narrative of reality.
That the eyes did not see, that this judgment was an illusion, that the Overseer must doubt.
"Betrayal."
The word fell from Aldraya's lips like a stone seal dropping to close a tomb, not with anger, but with the precision of a final decree.
With that utterance, all remaining nuances—traces of the master-disciple bond, remnants of personal conflict, even the last shreds of Aldraya's individual consciousness—evaporated completely.
He no longer acted.
He had become a pure conduit, a cold and subtle medium for absolute dogma.
The world—or rather, the domain that had fully become an extension of his will—ceased to question his actions.
Instead, all the pressure of reality that had been brought to bear now reversed and converged, not as an attack, but as a single, judging question aimed at one subject: Ilux.
The eighteen Eyes of the Overseer, which had previously conducted parallel scans, rotated their axes in perfect unison.
Their blue, checkered light merged into a single burning beam, locking not onto Ilux's body, but onto the concept of his being.
They no longer observed.
They had reached a decision.
They had agreed upon a verdict.
Within the absolute consensus of that miniature reality, Ilux had been designated the Traitor.
The consequence was not ordinary physical violence.
Ilux was not flung away or crushed.
Instead, he was fixed in place, suspended in space, because the gravity of meaning around him had collapsed.
There were no longer any laws granting him a place to stand or to fall.
This was the most subtle and yet most cruel moment.
Aldraya did not raise a hand to strike.
He withdrew the most fundamental permission Ilux possessed—the right to exist as a whole and coherent self.
From the instant of that designation, everything changed.
Ilux's existence became open, vulnerable, and "permissible" to be wounded.
The violence inflicted was no longer physical, but narrative in nature.
The first wound to appear was an identity wound.
The name "Ilux Rediona" suddenly felt foreign within his own mind, like a sequence of sounds that no longer referred to any substance at all.
To be continued…