The guns fired in controlled bursts rather than a single volley, the altered soldiers moving through a sequence that Jake recognized from a previous life as a tactical suppression pattern—two firing while two advanced, leapfrogging positions to close distance while maintaining continuous pressure on the target.

They weren’t shooting randomly; instead, they worked like a trained unit.

"What in the holly fuck is this shit?" Jake laughed, though it wasn’t out of amusement.

Ankerita, still looking at the soldiers shooting at them, said, "Must be those damned gods playing with us. I’m sure they are messing with us by creating them."

Jake looked at her and his expression turning blank. He said, "This was the reason why no one made it alive. With such military power, small fries would definitely get killed right here."

The barrier had been pretty strong, blocking their bullets. Others found the strange things as mechanisms of the dungeon, and also they didn’t have time to question the odd objects firing at them.

The barriers absorbed the first volley with a sound like hail hitting glass, the magical shielding distributing the kinetic impact across its surface rather than any single point.

Maudlina’s mages held their positions, but the effort of maintaining barriers against projectile weapons operating at this velocity showed immediately in their faces; the sustained drain of blocking something the barriers hadn’t been designed to account for pulling at their reserves faster than conventional weapon fire would have.

Unlike the mages, those odd beings don’t have to rely on mana. They have artillery to do things for them.

"They’ll breach it," Maudlina said, her voice carrying the focused calm of someone running calculations while actively working.

"Three minutes, maybe four. The velocity is wrong for what these barriers were built to handle."

Jake reached for his Serpent King authority and pushed it toward the squad across the floor with the focused intent he’d used on serpents since he was twelve years old.

He had to try and see for himself.

As expected, nothing happened.

Not resistance, not partial effect and not the friction of a creature fighting the command—complete absence of response, the authority passing through them without finding anything to grip.

The control of those corrupted beings was beyond what his authority could take over.

Serpent’s Command is useless. Jake thought to himself.

Another volley hit the barriers.

One of the mages made a sound through clenched teeth.

Jake looked at the squad continuing their advance through the ground floor’s open space, moving with the disciplined patience of soldiers who trusted their weapons to do the work that swords would have required bodies to do, maintaining their formation despite the barriers denying them visible results.

They were waiting for the shields to fail, progressing through a protocol that assumed barriers eventually broke under sustained fire because barriers always eventually broke under sustained fire.

Their gaze was unwavering, like they were some robots operated under one control.

To kill.

The system pulsed, and a screen appeared that hadn’t appeared before.

[ WARLOCK ABILITY BRANCH - PARTIAL ACCESS GRANTED ]

[ TRIGGER: COMBAT NECESSITY + BLOODLINE THRESHOLD MET ]

[ MANA POOL DETECTED ]

[ CURRENT MANA VOLUME: 4,847 UNITS ]

[ AVERAGE CLASS II MANA POOL: 200-400 UNITS ]

[ ASSESSMENT: MATERNAL BLOODLINE CONTRIBUTION - SORCERESS HERITAGE -MANA GENERATION RATE EXCEPTIONAL ]

[ WARLOCK ABILITIES NOW ACCESSIBLE: ]

[ — CHASM GRASP: Mana-driven compression force.

Targets a single entity or object.

Crushes or displaces depending on application.

Cost: 45 mana.

— DARK PULSE: Area-effect mana discharge.

Releases compressed mana outward from the bearer in a radial wave.

Non-lethal threshold adjustable.

Cost: 120 mana per use.

— MANA SIGHT: Passive ability.

Reveals mana signatures, structural weaknesses, and magical composition of

targets.

Cost: 8 mana per minute.

— SHADOW INFUSION: Merges shadow matter with mana output, amplifying both.

Effects on shadow serpents and shadow abilities significantly enhanced

when active.

Cost: 60 mana to initiate, 25 per minute sustained.]

[ NOTE: 4,847 units represents approximately 12x average Class II mana pool. The bearer’s maternal bloodline produces mana at a rate that the current Class designation cannot fully account for. Expect additional abilities to surface as control develops. ]

Jake read through it in the two seconds he had before the third volley hit the barriers and one of the mages dropped to a knee with a cry that said the barrier on his section had thinned to the point of personal cost.

Four thousand eight hundred units.

He had no reference for what that number meant in absolute terms, but the system’s comparison against the Class II average made it clear enough - he was carrying a reservoir that shouldn’t exist at his current development level, the maternal bloodline’s, his mother’s heritage generating mana in volumes that his formal classification had never captured because nobody had bothered to check underneath the combat abilities to see what else was there.

His mother’s blood alone had given him such an amount of mana, and it was limited because of his class and there was his father’s, which he still hadn’t unlocked. Once it does, he would be a monster walking the land of humans.

He activated Mana Sight first because understanding the targets before hitting them was the principle that had kept him alive.

The altered soldiers’ internal structure revealed itself in the sight’s perception - and what Jake saw stopped his breath for a moment.

Their mana signatures were wrong in the way their physical appearance was wrong; the normal biological distribution of mana through living tissue was replaced by something artificial and uniform, channels carved or forced rather than grown, and where a human’s natural mana signature had individual variation, theirs were identical.

Whatever process had created them had standardized their internal architecture the same way it had standardized their appearance.

And embedded in each of them, deep in the chest cavity where the mana concentration was highest, was a small crystalline structure.

Command crystals.

Smaller than the mounted versions. Personal ones. Each soldier carried their own command crystal internally, which meant they weren’t receiving orders from an external command network—they were the command network, each one a node, all of them connected through the crystals embedded in their bodies, thinking collectively the way the formation had been fighting collectively.

Break the crystals and the collective thinking broke with them.

Getting to the crystals required getting through the altered soldiers, or getting through their armor, or finding something that could reach the crystals without requiring physical contact at close range.

Chasm grasp could.