Chapter 92 SHAPE

"Painful"

The word echoed in Dante's mind as his expression remained unnervingly calm. The agony coursing through him was excruciating, like a thousand wires threading through his flesh, shredding his nerves with terrifying accuracy. Yet, even as he felt every inch of his body shouting in desperation, somehow, it didn't feel... painful.

The sudden loss of such vital parts for his body to function would have deterred or instantly killed any single other average player, but Dante and Katley underestimated a critical factor.

Dante may be a person who barely has control over his life and decisions, with body and personality problems, stupid, erratic, impulsive, hypocritical, irrational, greedy, drunk, addicted, and silly; he may be that and more.

But, if there were bodies that could thrive in the nonsense of reality-breaking abilities, then one of them would be those of a toon character, "MADA MADA!" A few shiny Japanese words appeared above him, and then he recovered his shape with an optimistic jump

Dante pulled his disintegrated form and created something similar to a living patchwork to keep his body tangled together. He didn't completely understand what he had done, but the closest thing to relate was how a plastic man used his own body as clothes.

A barely perceptible frown tugged in Katley's face, "Hey...-" but she stopped herself at the start of the sentence, sighed, and threw to the trash the monologue she created, and simply said, "I'm just gonna finish this quickly to go back to my job, probability..."

Dante's eyes narrowed. Probability? What was she playing at or had to even do with this situation? Before he could decipher her intent, she spoke again with a cold and unyielding voice.

"Shape!"

In an instant, Thalassa's lower body detonated in a rush of mechanical parts and synthetic blood, the force of the explosion so sudden that no one had time to react.

With the ground beneath them splattered with a grotesque mixture of metal and gore, Katley said while looking straight at Dante's eyes, "That was a warning, and now... for the love of everything that can perceive a concept, accept it and sign before my team comes looking for me or I kill someone."

Dante's heart pounded in his chest; he knew he couldn't take on this enemy, not with his current power. But even as shock threatened to paralyze him, his mind raced. Thalassa's robotic body had survived death before; perhaps she could do it again. But there were others to save, and time was running down.

'What should I do…' The thought clawed at him until the idea hit him like a bolt of lightning. Why doesn't he just teleport everyone without touching them?

The act of touching someone allowed him to facilitate the process, saving a lot of energy; it craved a path so he didn't have many problems; the things that could go wrong if he teleported wrongly because he was tired would be part of its body being lost, but that wasn't a worry anymore.

In a flash, Dante teleported his remaining friends into his hands, ignoring the strain and cost. He prepared to teleport as far as he could many times, but as the energy enveloped them, the world warped, and they were back in the exact same spot. "Why everything feels the same-"

A faint word reached his ears, spoken with a dismissive tone. "Distance," Katley said, followed by, "And here I was trying to save mana... Teleportation!"

*SNAP*

Something crucial within Dante snapped.

He didn't know what it was, but he felt it break; a critical piece of his essence shattered beyond repair. It was as if a part of his very soul had been torn away.

Katley's eyes widened slightly as if she had felt it, too. 'I expected it to be costly,' she thought, 'but this… this is too much for someone who isn't even at their peak.'

Dante stood there, dumbfounded. His escape route, his one and only chance to survive, had been extinguished in a flicker. Instinctively, he knew that teleportation was now forbidden, more exactly like it stopped existing.

Katley reached into her inventory, pulling out another item of strange origin, as she mumbled to herself, "If plan A doesn't work, go for B! Shape!"

Without warning, Dante, Thalassa, and Su Yuan's bodies burst in a visceral explosion, flesh and blood scattering in all directions. Dante's toon physics allowed him to survive the brutal carnage, with his form comically trying its best to reconstruct.

"Eh…" The sheer brutality and speed of the moment left him reeling, with his mind struggling to comprehend the scene as the deafening white noise drowned out all other sounds like a tidal wave.

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Katley swiftly latched her fingers onto the girl's neck. A sharp twist echoed with a sickening crack as the aspect's body became like gelatin. Without hesitation, Katley shoved her to the ground. "Resistance, weight," continued by "You know... I should've gone for you the second I entered this event instead of waiting to see your abilities. Perhaps he was right."

Dante's eyes flickered, catching a glimpse of a delicate purple butterfly with soft pink wings floating through the air like it didn't belong in this hellish scene.

It carried a thin red string, swaying as it fluttered past. He reached out instinctively, drawn to it like a moth to the fire, but his arm refused to obey him.

Finally, Dante understood the strange kinship he felt toward Kaiden, 'I'm quite lucky...' the thought echoed in his mind, tinged with bitter irony. 'since I got to this place, I've always had a small advantage, destiny helped me to walk sculpting a path, guiding my steps with gentle hands, sometimes playful or sometimes cruel. Sure, it chuckled and threw a few pebbles in my way that made me stumble, but I knew- Dante's thoughts sharpened with a grim resolve: 'I knew that I'd reach my final destiny.'

Another voice echoed inside him, 'B U T W H A T I F Y O U R D E S T I N Y I S T O D I E H E R E ?'

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Authors stuff:

'Quite funny how when everyone is special, you just become normal once more...'

So, first thing!

Kaiden Katley's ability is quite interesting...

It's like something that Araki would write.

With all the stuff she has done, you probably know what her ability is.

But its limits are quite interesting...

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Mmh?

That I just killed. 3 of the main characters? Well... 'You knew this was a one-way wacky track🎵~

I mean... you knew what you were getting into

I killed half of his companions at the start.

Then again...

Then I did it again...