Free Read Divine Light System #3: A Litrpg Adventure From 50th Failure to Divine Deity

Chapter 27

"Always."

"Then reach for me. Not with your body. With your power."

"But we're too far—"

"Distance doesn't matter if we choose to be close."

He reached out. Not with his hand. With his light. Let it flow across the chamber toward her.

A bridge of golden radiance spanning the impossible distance.

Elena understood. She reached back with her lunar energy. Silver light meeting gold in the middle of the chamber.

They touched.

[SUN & MOON SYNCHRONIZATION: RESTORING]

[43%... 56%... 71%... 89%... 100%]

[DIVINE RESONANCE: MAXIMUM]

[NEW ABILITY UNLOCKED: TWILIGHT BRIDGE]

[BOND EVOLUTION: COMPLETE]

[THE GODS ARE DEFINITELY NOTICING NOW]

The power that surged between them was incredible. Not gold or silver but both at once.

A twilight radiance that was somehow stronger than either alone. Like the moment between day and night when both exist together.

The shadow chains shattered like glass.

Levi and Elena ran toward each other. Met in the center of the chamber. Their hands clasped. And light exploded outward in a wave that shook the very foundations of the mountain.

Vex screamed. His form flickering. "Impossible! The separation should have broken you!"

"We're not that easy to break," Levi said.

They struck together. Moving in perfect sync like they'd trained together for years. Levi's right hand blazing gold. Elena's left hand glowing silver. When they hit Vex the impact sent the Avatar flying across the chamber.

He crashed into the machine. The collision disrupted the extraction. Sparks flew. Dark energy leaked from cracked pipes. The false Mera's screams turned to static.

"You little—" Vex started.

Aldric moved.

The professor had been standing still. Watching. Waiting. Fighting the collar's commands with every ounce of will he had. Bleeding from his nose and ears from the effort.

Now he grabbed the control panel. Started entering commands with shaking hands.

"What are you doing?" Vex demanded. "I command you to stop!"

"I'm... trying..." Aldric was crying. Blood running from his nose and ears and the corners of his eyes. "But some things... are worth... dying for..."

His fingers hit the final sequence.

The machine reversed.

All the stolen essence. All the shadow energy binding the Fragment. It started flowing backward. Into the false Mera. The copy that had been nothing but a puppet.

Her eyes snapped open. But they weren't empty anymore. They blazed with silver fire.

"What—" Vex took a step back.

The false Mera stood up. The shadow chains around her dissolved like smoke. The cage shattered. And she began to change.

Her form shifted. Grew. Became something older. More powerful. More real than anything in the chamber.

Until standing in the machine's ruins was a woman. Maybe thirty years old. With silver hair that flowed like liquid moonlight. Violet eyes that held the depth of eternity. Wearing robes made of starlight. Wings spreading wide behind her.

"Hello little shadow," she said. Her voice layered with ancient power that made the air vibrate. "Did you miss me?"

"Selene," Vex whispered.

"Not quite. I'm just an echo. A fragment of the Moon Goddess's power given form by desperation and stolen essence and a foolish old man's genius." The woman smiled. It was beautiful and terrible. "But I remember. I remember everything they did to me. To Aseraph. To all the mortals who dared to dream of something better."

She raised her hand. Pure lunar power gathered around her fingers. Condensed into a spear of solid moonlight.

"And now I'm going to make sure you remember too."

She threw the spear.

It hit Vex directly in the chest. The Avatar screamed. His shadow form began to peel away. Layer by layer. Like burning paper revealing what lay beneath.

Not a divine being. Not a servant of the gods.

Just a man. Middle-aged. Balding. Wearing torn scholar's robes from centuries ago.

"No," Vex gasped. His human voice weak. Frightened. So very human. "I can't go back. I can't be weak again. I can't—"

"You never stopped being weak," the Selene-echo said gently. "You just hid it behind someone else's power."

The last of Vex's shadow burned away. He fell to his knees. Staring at his own human hands like he didn't recognize them.

"I was... I was a teacher once," he whispered. "Before Nyx found me. Before I traded my soul for eternity and power and the promise of never being helpless again."

"I know," the echo said.

"I've done terrible things. Hurt so many people." Vex looked up at her. "Can I... is there any way to..."

"To be forgiven?" The Selene-echo knelt beside him. "That's not for me to decide. But I can give you peace."

She touched his forehead.

Light and shadow swirled together. Not fighting. Merging. Finding balance at last.

Vex's face relaxed. The fear and pain melting away. Replaced by something that looked almost like relief.

"Thank you," he breathed.

Then he simply faded. Like mist in morning sun. His last expression one of peace he probably hadn't felt in centuries.

Free Read Bite The System! #9: A Dark Academy LitRPG Adventure eBook

Free Read Chapter Vol. 8

Chapter 91

The corridor was exactly what old infrastructure looked like — pipes overhead, cables running along the walls in bundles, the kind of utilitarian construction that exists for function and nothing else. The floor sloped gradually downward for twenty meters and then leveled out.

Derek walked with one hand trailing the wall. Not leaning on it. Just keeping contact in case his legs decided to stop cooperating.

"The arena is still running," he said.

Kael had been thinking the same thing. Above them, distant but audible through the layers of concrete and soil, the crowd noise hadn't stopped. Muffled and indistinct but consistent. 

The tournament was continuing without them. Another match, another story, another two people who couldn't escape and didn't have a drone-killing trick available.

"We can't help them from here," Kael said.

"I know." Derek's jaw was tight. "I'm just noting it."

"Noted."

The corridor reached a junction. Four directions. Kael stopped.

"Your mother," Derek said. "Detention Block C."

"I know."

"The message said forty-eight hours. That was—" Derek calculated. "Maybe six hours ago. We have time. But not a lot."

Kael was already looking at the junction. North corridor had a ventilation draft coming through it — recycled air from somewhere that had HVAC. 

That meant a larger space. Administrative, possibly. South corridor sloped down further, which meant deeper into the facility, which meant further from any exit. 

East ran parallel to the direction they'd come from — probably circled back toward the arena complex.

West ran straight and had nothing notable about it at all.

"West," Kael said.

"Again with the boring option."

"The boring option kept us alive twice."

"Fair point."

They went west.

*

Eighty meters in, the corridor opened into a room that made both of them stop.

Maintenance junction. The functional heart of the facility's infrastructure — power conduits, water systems, environmental controls, data lines. 

Everything that kept a building alive ran through a room like this. It smelled like metal and recycled air and the low electrical hum of systems that never turned off.

But it also had a terminal.

Old. Industrial. The kind that facilities forgot about because they'd been superseded by better interfaces and left running because turning them off required paperwork.

Kael crossed to it. The screen was on. Basic system display — power loads, temperature readings, automated maintenance logs.

And a facility map.

Derek appeared beside him. "There."

The map showed the full structure. Kael found their location — maintenance junction, west sublevel. He traced outward.

Detention Block C was four levels up and two sections north. The path there was complicated — it went through areas that were clearly active, staffed, monitored. Not impossible. Not clean either.

But there.

He kept looking. Found the data that mattered less immediately but mattered more eventually.

The server room he'd touched briefly before the escape — it was directly above their current position. 

One level up. The processing facility where Council was storing harvested consciousness. Still running. 

He could see the power draw on the maintenance display — enormous, constant, the kind of draw that didn't fluctuate because what it was running never paused.

He thought about the signal he'd touched. The one that felt like… 

Riley.

He filed it away. Not now.

"We have a problem," Derek said.

Kael looked where Derek was looking. The map had a secondary overlay — security deployment. Dots indicating patrol routes and positions.

Between their current location and Detention Block C, there were a lot of dots.

Council had anticipated that if anything went wrong in the execution chamber, escaped subjects would try to reach prisoners. 

The route to Block C was not an oversight. It was a funnel.

"They're expecting us to go there," Kael said.

"Yes."

"So we don't."

Derek looked at him. "Your mother is in there."

"I know. We don't go the direct route." Kael studied the map. "Service tunnels. They run parallel to the main corridors. They're not on the security deployment overlay, which means they're either unmonitored or they're assumed impassable."

"Why would they be assumed impassable?"

Kael found the answer on the maintenance log. "Flooding. Lower service tunnels have had intermittent water intrusion for three months. Maintenance keeps logging it and nobody fixes it." He checked the current status. "Currently at sixty centimeters in the lowest section."

Derek stared at him. "You want to walk through sixty centimeters of water."

"I want to walk through sixty centimeters of water past the security deployment to reach Detention Block C without being shot."

"I hate this plan."

"Better than the alternative."

Derek looked at the security dots again. Looked at the water notation. Looked back at Kael.

"You're buying me new boots after this," Derek said.

"Easy."

Kael pulled up the access point for the service tunnels on the terminal. Found the nearest entry point — a floor panel twelve meters back the way they'd come, marked on the maintenance map with a small wrench icon.

He memorized the route to Block C through the service tunnels. Committed the relevant security positions to memory alongside it.

Then he killed the terminal's display. 

Not turning it off — just clearing the screen back to its default view. Anyone checking it would see normal maintenance data. Nothing to indicate it had been used.

Small thing. But small things had kept them alive so far.

"Ready?" he said.

Derek cracked his neck. The burns on his arm had closed another few millimeters while they'd been standing here. 

The temporary bridge Kael had built was doing its job. 

"No," Derek said. "Let's go anyway."

They went back into the corridor.