Bloodbound Codex: I Grow Stronger in Secret

Atlas and Harleks were now in a completely different place from the office room they had been in just minutes ago.

The chamber around them was fully sealed, no windows, no openings, no furniture of any kind, only rows of silver coloured metal blocks making up the floor and the walls on every side, the material looking dense and deliberately constructed to contain whatever happened inside, and the sheer size of the space was immediately noticeable — the chamber stretched five kilometres wide and five kilometres in length, the scale of it making the Guild building sitting above it feel small by comparison.

Atlas looked around for a long moment, he couldn’t see or sense anything here other than Harleks and himself, with only the usual ambient Spirit present in the air around them.

Harleks was standing a few meters away, facing him directly, and spoke after seeing Atlas had taken enough of the room in, ”What I wanted to show you was not any object or relic, it’s the difference between me, an S-rank, and you, an abnormal peak A-rank who thinks he is close to S-rank.”

He continued before Atlas could respond, ”And how we are going to do it is simple — I will release all of my Spirit pressure on you, if you can withstand it you don’t even have to go through a reassessment for S-rank, I will personally give you the permit and the S-rank Guild Card, and though we don’t have equipment here capable of measuring S-rank capabilities I think a personal test from me makes those measurements unnecessary anyway.”

Atlas stood there for a moment before nodding, thinking to himself, ’Hmm, it’s a good deal, I don’t have to deal with the trouble of getting assessed in the central city and drawing that kind of attention if I can sort it out here instead.’

Harleks saw the nod and nodded back, then his relaxed posture straightened and he released it.

BOOOOOOOOM!

A massive amount of Spirit energy released from him all at once, the colour of it radiating outward clearly as it spread through the chamber, silver and golden mixed together in dense flowing waves, his slightly spread wings behind him complementing those colours as the energy moved outward in every direction and filled the massive space around them.

Atlas had no time to look at any of that properly because the pressure came down on him immediately like an unbearable weight dropping from directly above, and within just a few seconds his knees bent under it, his teeth clenching hard beneath his mask as he tried to push against it and stand upright, his legs shaking from the force of it as he groaned, ”Kheug! Ughh...”

His knees bent further until he was in a fully kneeling position, but his eyes snapped upward and he tried to lift his head even though the pressure seemed designed specifically to keep it down, as if the weight of it was communicating something — that he was something lower than it, something beneath it.

The moment that thought formed clearly in his mind his eyes turned bloodshot.

He recognised this feeling immediately, this exact treatment was the same thing he had been fighting against his entire life, being pushed down, being made to feel like he was beneath something or someone, and every single time it had happened it had only made him want to destroy whatever was causing it more completely than before.

He thought while clenching his teeth hard ’think! think damn it!’

He had Spirit yes, and as he had spoken that he had been holding back more than half of his spirit inside, he should’ve been able to counter the pressure right?

No, it was not possible, only Now Atlas understood that the Spirit reserve an S-rank carry, it was almost a Hundred times more than an A-rank, even though his spirit had doubled, it wasn’t even close enough to a hundred times spirit reserves’ pressure right?

”Kheuk!”

That was when it snapped back into his mind — he had completely forgotten about his most recently awakened power in the chaos of everything that had happened over the past few moments, but as it came back to him a small grin formed behind his mask even while his teeth were still clenched hard from the pressure bearing down on him.

Harleks noticed the shift immediately, his eyes sharpening as he watched Atlas begin slowly lifting his head upward despite the pressure, and he frowned at that, condensing the pressure tighter rather than releasing it outward, pulling it inward to focus directly above Atlas in a concentrated point, making the weight of it significantly more unbearable than it had been a moment before.

The moment that change hit Atlas he felt the surge double down on him, and he had to be honest with himself — without Null and his Active Vector factored in, he was nowhere near S-rank, not even close to the real threshold of it, and he understood that clearly now from how this felt pressing against him compared to everything else he had experienced before.

He also understood something else, the knowledge the Codex had assimilated into his mind had made this clear enough already — this world had nothing like the abilities and attributes he carried, nothing known as Traits, nothing like a Bloodline system that worked the way his did, nothing that came anywhere close to what the Active Vector could do, and he had already concluded long before this moment that the Codex should not have been inside an Eternal-Class Ruin at all, it felt wrong for it to exist there, like something had placed it there specifically rather than it appearing naturally as ruins were understood to work, but that was a thought for another time entirely.

Right now, with the crushing pressure becoming heavier by each passing second and his body reaching the limit of what it could hold against without going flat to the ground, Atlas made a decision and let it out — the Null pressure he had been keeping buried deep inside himself since the Bloodline activated, suppressing it carefully so that no one around him could detect it, which no one had fortunately, releasing it now around his body in a thin layer covering him completely like a shield with no visible form.

The Spirit crushing down on him vanished around him instantly.

Not absorbed, not redirected, not transformed into something else — simply erased, the Null making contact with the Spirit pressure and removing it from existence in the space directly around Atlas’s body, the effect invisible to the eye but the result immediately obvious from the fact that the crushing weight disappeared and Atlas stopped being driven into the ground.

He began standing back up.

Harleks stood completely still as he watched his Spirit energy, the massive amount he had been releasing continuously, disappear in the space around Atlas as if it was hitting something that simply refused to allow it to exist there, the upper portions of the energy still intact where it hadn’t reached close enough to Atlas to be affected, but everything immediately surrounding him gone, erased cleanly without a sound or a flash or any visible mechanism causing it.

”...”

He said nothing for a long moment, just staring, the speechless expression on his face something that clearly didn’t appear there often given how composed he had been through the entire conversation leading up to this.

Then as Atlas stood fully upright again, Harleks finally spoke, his voice carrying genuine and unfiltered shock, ”What did you just do?”

Atlas stood there looking at him with a grin behind his mask, but internally? He was exhausted, the strain was too heavy and most of all...

’He couldn’t sense Null...even after a full release.’

He concluded that...and then Harleks did something he didn’t expect.