The heavy iron bars of the subterranean cell cast long, dark shadows across the cold stone floor.
Down in the deepest levels of the dungeon, the air was completely stagnant, filled with the thick stench.
The captured soldiers of General Roric Vale’s private division sat in total silence, their bodies slouched against the stone walls, their spirits crushed by the heavy trait-suppressing locks clamped around their necks.
Kenji sat perfectly still in his isolated section of the cage, his hazel eyes fixed on the dim corridor outside.
To any guard walking past, he appeared to be completely neutralized, his mana pathways entirely frozen by the dark iron manacle.
Suddenly, a tiny, translucent blue insect erged smoothly from his left ear canal.
Ayla deactivated her miniature bee form the mont she slipped past his hairline. Her liquid mass did not drop to the filthy ground.
Instead, she reshaped her biological structure into a thin, nearly invisible layer of blue fluid that slid down Kenji’s uniform jacket, gathering silently in the deep shadow behind his back.
As she stretched her senses out into the damp dungeon, her primitive monster instincts began to ripple with a strange sensation.
She looked through the iron bars at the dozens of decorated vanguard soldiers sitting in the adjacent cages.
She felt a deep, chilling wrongness vibrating from these people.
It was a feeling she had never encountered before, not even when she was hunting the most corrupted beasts in the inner rings of the forest simulation.
When she looked at normal humans, her Emotiona Weaver trait usually picked up a chaotic soup of fear, anger, despair, or lingering loyalty.
But when her senses brushed against these captured soldiers, she felt absolutely nothing. It was like looking at hollow patches of empty space that happened to be shaped like n.
And yet, beneath that eerie silence, her mouth began to water.
Her primitive brain stems picked up a scent that was entirely separate from their human flesh. It was a cold, quiet fragrance that slled incredibly delicious, far tastier than the raw brains of the regular Crusaders she had harvested before.
Ayla did not hesitate. Moving like a silent puddle of dark blue water, she slid effortlessly through the gaps in the iron bars.
She navigated the shadows of the floor, moving directly toward the corner of the cell where Lieutenant Maren was slouched.
Maren’s sharp, disciplined eyes were wide open, staring blankly at the stone floor. Her breathing was slow and chanical.
The mont Ayla neared the Lieutenant’s boots, her sli mass rippled. She didn’t sense Maren’s conscious mind at all.
Instead, she found a distinct, dense pocket of absolute emptiness floating right around the Lieutenant’s spiritual pathways.
It was a small, parasitic foreign entity that had burrowed deep into the woman’s soul container, systematically eating away her thoughts to ensure her body remained a perfectly compliant shell.
’No wonder her mind is empty, just like that Marshal.’ Ayla thought.
Her liquid mass surged upward along Maren’s leg like a striking viper. She did not harm the woman’s physical flesh or tear her uniform.
She simply opened a small, translucent blue vacuum right over the coordinates of that spiritual anomaly and swallowed the absolute emptiness whole, ripping it away from Maren’s soul with a clean, predatory snap.
The cold entity dissolved into her core within a millisecond, triggering a sudden flash of white text inside her mind canvas:
[YOU HAVE DEVOURED A VOIDLING...]
[BIOMASS CONSUD: VOIDLING][RACIAL FORM ACQUIRED: VOIDLING]
[TRAIT ACQUIRED: EMPTINESS (COMMON-F )]
Ayla’s gold pupils blinked in surprise as the new data settled into her core architecture.
The entity she had just eaten did not possess a standard biological brain or a dense mana core. It was a creature constructed out of pure, unyielding non-existence.
In her surprise she didn’t noticed how Maren’s eyes beca foccused as the Voidling in her body was eate away.
She quickly slid back across the iron bars, pooling behind Kenji’s tattered boots once more. She did not reform into her silver-haired human slate.
Instead, she chose to experint with her newly acquired racial trait.
Her liquid body shifted, her translucent blue color fading away until she beca a perfectly localized patch of absolute nothingness sitting right in Kenji’s shadow.
"Kenji," a soft, multi-layered voice sounded directly inside his brain stems.
Kenji’s body went slightly rigid, his hazel eyes widening a fraction of a second as he looked down at his own shadow.
The voice didn’t co from his left ear canal this ti. It didn’t rely on acoustic vibrations or physical proximity.
It was echoing directly within his conscious thoughts, completely clear and perfectly balanced.
"Ayla?" Kenji replied ntally, testing the link. "You can speak through my mind now?"
"Yes!" Ayla yapped happily inside his head, her thoughts vibrating with a cheerful excitent that completely contrasted with the dark environnt of the dungeon.
"The new trait I just got is very funny. It is called Emptiness. It lets hide my entire presence inside a pocket of nothing, and it lets speak directly to your mind because it completely ignores the physical distance between our soul containers. It is so convenient!"
Kenji’s clinical mind imdiately began to process the operational value of this developnt. "What did you eat down there? I felt a sudden shift in Maren’s aura a mont ago."
"I ate a little monster that was sitting inside her head," Ayla explained, her ntal voice trailing off as she analyzed her internal logs.
"The system called it a Voidling. But it was very disappointing, Kenji. When I digest ordinary humans or forest beasts, I get to see all their delicious mories, their secret fears, and their favorite foods.
But these Voidlings don’t have any mories at all. They don’t have a single personal thought. Their minds are completely blank, so I couldn’t get their actual purpose or find out where their main nest is located."
Kenji ground his back teeth together, his clinical focus dropping into a deep, calculating pattern as he stared at the damp stone floor.
A Voidling.
His extensive knowledge of the Crusade registries and the historical logs of the Solgrace sector ran through his head at lightning speed.
There was absolutely no record of a race known as Voidlings operating within the lower rings of humanity’s territories.
If these hollowed-out entities were actively burrowing into the souls of the soldiers, it ant the Ghouls weren’t the only ones involved in this massive internal purge.
An entirely foreign, un-registered faction was operating outside the system grid, using the Ghouls as a front to clear out humanity’s background assets.
"Ayla, how many of those things are currently inside this room?"
"They are inside everyone, Kenji," Ayla replied, her golden eyes flashing through the dark shadow as she scanned the rows of slouched soldiers.
"Every single soldiers from your grandpa’s division has a little pocket of emptiness sitting in their chest. They sll so delicious. Can I eat the rest of them too? If I leave them there, those humans will turn into hollow dolls permanently."
Not that she cared about that, rather she liked to eat Voidlings.
"Do it," Kenji commanded silently. "Clear the infection from the entire division. But do not reveal your presence to the guards at the main gate. Operate completely beneath their detection paraters."
"Hehe, okay!"
The small patch of nothingness slid out from behind his boots once more. Utilizing her newly acquired Emptiness (Common-F ) trait, Ayla operated like an invisible, absolute vacuum.
She did not make a single sound as she glided from cage to cage, her liquid mass sliding up the legs of the unconscious vanguard officers with chanical efficiency.
She targeted the spiritual pathways of each soldier, opening her core to swallow the parasitic Voidlings one after another.
She ate the entity inside the first squad leader, then moved to the second lieutenant, then the heavy armored vanguard captains.
Each parasitic shell she swallowed dissolved instantly into her light blue soul core, sending a continuous stream of system notifications flashing through her visual matrix.
[BIOMASS CONSUD: VOIDLING]
[SOUL DENSITY INTAKE MATCHED...]
[BIOMASS CONSUD: VOIDLING]
[TRAIT PARATERS EXPANDING...]
As she devoured the tenth Voidling, she felt the internal restrictions of the trait suddenly buckle and expand.
The cold, quiet energy inside her core grew significantly denser, allowing her to warp the local space around her sli mass with even greater precision.
By the ti she completed the circle, clearing the infection from all eighty decorated soldiers inside the subterranean block, a final system notification locked into her mind:
[TRAIT UPGRADE: EMPTINESS (COMMON-F ) -> EMPTINESS (COMMON-D )]
Ayla slid back to her anchor point behind Kenji’s legs, completely settling into her enhanced Voidling form.
At the Common-D tier, her concealnt was so absolute that she didn’t even cast a physical shadow anymore.
She was a literal hole in reality, entirely invisible to the physical and spiritual senses of the Crusade realm.
Only Kenji could still feel her presence. That too because Ayla allowed it.
"I finished cleaning them, Kenji," Ayla chirpped happily inside his brain, her ntal voice bouncing around his consciousness with absolute satisfaction.
"They are all clean now. But my belly feels very cold. These monsters don’t have any blood or at inside them. It is like eating cold ice cubes."
Kenji looked through the bars. Across the cells, he could see the subtle changes taking place in the soldiers’ physical fras.
Lieutenant Maren’s chest gave a sudden, deep heave as her lungs took in a massive gulp of the damp air.
The flat, chanical blankness in her bloodshot eyes was rapidly disappearing, replaced by a flickering spark of raw human confusion and exhaustion.
The heavy, suffocating silence that had locked down the room was finally beginning to shatter, allowing their true human emotional signatures to return to the themselves.
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