100\% DROP RATE : Why is My Inventory Always so Full?-Chapter 325 - Plan

The goblin mage tried to speak again.

Lucien acted first.

He reached into his inventory and pulled out a reed-thin object that looked like a piece of dried plant and a piece of metal had been braided together into one.

Stillvoice Conduit. A Legendary Drop from Heartmurmur Reeds.

He crushed it in his palm.

The battlefield changed in a way no eye could see.

Sound did not vanish. Sound became property.

Lucien chose who could make it.

The goblin mage opened his mouth and no noise came out. Not even the shape of a syllable.

An Edict required reality to hear it.

Reality heard nothing.

The goblin mage’s eyes widened in genuine alarm.

His lips moved in goblin cadence.

Silence answered him.

The allies felt the shift immediately like a weight lifting from the air.

The human woman barked a laugh, fierce and crude in the best way.

"Finally," she spat. "Shut your mouth and fight like a coward properly."

The goblin mage recoiled, furious, and began building formations instead.

But the Covenant-Breaker did not slow.

The void around him changed again.

Miasma bloomed from the staff’s head and the space around the emperor became a kind of deafness that was not silence.

It was corruption.

A void-thrum that did not travel by sound.

It traveled by stain.

Lucien felt it immediately.

The staff was corrupting the air around the Covenant-Breaker so thoroughly that even Stillvoice’s control could not "own" the phenomenon.

The emperor did not need to speak loud.

The staff made reality listen to him through rot.

Lucien clicked his tongue. Irritation sharpened into hunger.

"Again," he muttered.

Astraea’s voice cut through their pact.

[That artifact is an annoyance. Were my treasures still in my possession, I would not suffer resistance from a mere staff.]

Lucien’s grin sharpened.

[If I cannot silence him, I’ll try to make him run out of things worth saying.]

He stopped hiding his Laws.

There was no point now.

Fire flared from one palm as he struck, not as a projectile but as a blade of manifestation.

Darkness pooled behind him, to conceal the exact timing of his next movement.

Reflection turned his angles into lies, bending strikes just enough to make a perfect defense look like a mistake.

Inversion snapped outward when the Covenant-Breaker tried to tax his wounds through the staff. Lucien inverted the "feeding" direction so the tax became a leak, forcing a portion of the blood-tax to bleed away into nothing.

Stillness laced his next step. To stop the moment and to turn a lethal strike into an action that would happen later.

Life and Death manifested in a thin thread across Morphis’ edge.

Decay did not melt flesh. Decay targeted effects.

It chewed at the corruption’s persistence the instant it appeared, forcing the staff to work harder to keep its rot coherent.

The fight became brutal.

Astraea hammered the emperor with Tempest in disciplined crescents, forcing him to answer pressure with Collapse and answer Collapse with Chaos, over and over.

The clash rewrote the terrain into a ruin that did not resemble land.

Lucien danced through it like a predator in a storm. Teleporting, striking, withdrawing.

He always aimed for the mage and always being denied by the emperor’s presence.

For the first time in a long time, Lucien felt something that was not excitement.

He felt strain.

His dragon scales began to chip under concentrated strikes that carried Collapse’s full malice. The Covenant-Breaker’s staff did not merely hit him. It attempted to corrupt the void around his body and turn the space inside his armor into a wound.

A lance of concentrated wrongness tore through his defenses and took his hand clean off at the wrist.

Blood sprayed.

The Covenant-Breaker smiled.

Even so, Lucien did not even flinch.

His eyes were so red now that the whites looked painted with violence.

He used his skill: Genesis Command.

The stump surged with divine light and regrew bone, tendon, flesh, and scale in a heartbeat.

He flexed the new fingers once. The Eclipse glove reappeared in his new hand.

Then he lunged again, faster and more aggressive as if losing a limb had only offended him.

The allies fought like survivors at the edge of a god’s duel.

Molting shed corrupted imprints into the ground to keep his core clean.

Constriction tightened the movement of any spell that tried to flank them, forcing chaos to spend more effort to be unpredictable.

Venom landed judgments that made corrosion betray its author whenever it dared to bloom too boldly.

The two humans burned. Together, they created overlapping fire fields that punished any attempt to close distance, and whenever the goblin mage tried to create a formation, a wall of flame went up to distort it.

Still, the goblin mage kept working, building with hands when he could not build with words.

Lucien needed the battlefield to tilt.

So he used a darkness that was not meant to blind.

He drew out a vial that looked like liquid night trapped in glass.

Essence of the Infinite Night. A mythical drop from the Varkhaals.

He shattered it.

Darkness poured across the field like ink across parchment, blotting out the sky inside his domain. It was not just an absence of light. It was also a presence of Law.

It was almost identical to the domain of the Varkhaal Eternal.

The Covenant-Breaker’s eyes did not falter. Astraea’s sight did not dim.

But the darkness gave Lucien what he needed.

A medium.

A stage.

He stopped blinking.

Blink left traces in space, and the Covenant-Breaker could read space-disturbance like a hunter reading footprints.

So Lucien shifted to another method.

Slip Through Shade. A skill he got from Varkhaals.

He began teleporting through shadows instead of tearing space.

To the others, it looked random.

To Lucien, it was geometry.

He was placing himself in points, repeating patterns, aligning distances, and laying something down with every "random" step.

He attacked as feints. He withdrew before the counter landed. He took strikes he could afford to take.

When a "Collapse" wave came toward him, Lucien did not dodge.

He spoke with Stillness integrated into his skill: Procrastination.

The wave froze mid-arrival, suspended in a delayed moment.

It was then that Lucien reached for an epic drop from the Chronoslumber Thistles. The Timefold Capsule.

The capsule unfolded in his palm, opening into a small void-pocket that swallowed light.

Lucien stored the suspended effect inside it, sealing it away as if he had shoved a falling boulder into a box.

Again and again, he did it.

Not every strike. Only the ones that mattered.

The most vicious Collapse arcs. The most chaotic distortions.

The heaviest blows Astraea could not afford to take while guarding him.

He stored them.

He kept moving through the shadows, laying down his pattern, building something invisible.

Astraea understood before anyone else did.

Through their pact, she felt his intent tightening into a single line.

So she became relentless.

She threw herself at the Covenant-Breaker with Tempest that did not care about terrain.

Wings of storm-light tore through wrongness. Lightning clawed upward, downward, sideways, punching at the edges of the staff’s dead-air boundary and forcing it to work constantly.

The Covenant-Breaker answered with Collapse that tried to fold her strikes into nothing.

Astraea laughed at him.

"You break oaths," she thundered. "But you cannot break the sky. The sky was here before your species learned to lie."

The Covenant-Breaker’s voice dropped into something poisonous.

"I have watched skies die," he replied. "I have watched storms beg. You are nothing but noise."

Astraea’s eyes flared white.

"Then drown in noise," she hissed.

In truth, Astraea was only drawing his attention away with small talks, giving Lucien more room to move.

The battle dragged.

Not because either side lacked power. But because both sides were too lethal to grant an opening.

The Covenant-Breaker stopped playing.

His strikes became direct, meant to kill.

Lucien’s allies held, battered but synchronized.

The goblin mage assisted with formations and silent signals, trying to trap movement, trying to force a decisive misstep.

And Lucien kept moving through darkness, collecting, storing, aligning.

Then at the heart of the chaos... a tiny sound happened.

A click.

It was small enough that nobody would have noticed it if sound had belonged to the world.

But sound belonged to Lucien.

He heard it perfectly.

His eyes narrowed.

His grin, for the first time in a while, became calm.

Astraea felt it through their pact and her next strike came heavier as if she was buying him half a heartbeat.

The Covenant-Breaker noticed the shift anyway.

He had lived too long not to recognize the moment an enemy finished building something.

His staff rose.

The void around him rotted deeper.

His eyes locked on Lucien, sharp with fury and calculation.

"What have you done," he asked softly and the question carried the weight of an edict even before he spoke it as one.

Lucien did not answer.

He only opened his palm.

The shadow-geometry he had laid tightened into a pattern that did not look like anything a goblin would recognize until it was already too late.

And in the dark behind his blood-red eyes, Lucien smiled.

The final move was ready.