The Oracle Paths

Chapter 1231: A Vision Shattered, A Vision Renewed

As Kaelum paced in tight circles like a caged predator, his thoughts mashed into pulp by the sheer absurdity of what he was witnessing, he finally snapped:

”This makes no damn sense!”

His voice cracked out, raw, stripped of its usual swagger. Shock, outrage, anxiety—everything crashed together inside him with a nakedness bordering on obscene. Normally, he was the one making other people react like that.

Beside him, Shadrex stood frozen, eyes locked somewhere between the writhing roots below and the torn horizon. For the first time in years, the seer didn’t dare peer into the future.

”This guy... he’s really an Oracle Knight like us?”

The words slipped out weakly, stripped of confidence. A confession—rare, almost sacrilegious.

His gaze flickered, as if a thought too dangerous to exist had just taken shape.

”At this point... maybe we should check if there is a Rank 18 or An Oracle Baron. On our side.”

Shadrex crushed the idea the instant it formed. Even he couldn’t stomach something that absurd—a Rank 18 hiding among them? A joke. A mental escape hatch. Nothing more.

Meanwhile, Weiss stood perfectly still, her eyes hollow, frozen by the realization that her ”gift” had backfired into a total disaster. Her plan was supposed to be airtight.

She had branded every soldier on the battlefield, ally and enemy alike—everyone except Jake’s loyal troops. At any moment, she could’ve seized control of both armies and forced them to tear each other apart.If Jake hadn’t been there, she would’ve just let the two sides butcher themselves to extinction.And if Jake had been the target, she could’ve isolated him instantly by stripping him of all human support.

A surgical strike. Brutal. Unstoppable.

Except Jake had wiped out the enemy army in a blink, erasing half her strategy without even realizing it.

And facing the soldiers who remained—the ones fighting for Jake—she had no idea what move was even possible anymore. Her web of influence had nothing left to cling to.

Her entire strategy depended on a predictable battlefield, on stable forces she could manipulate.

But in just a few minutes, everything had imploded.

Rebellion. Calyx’s betrayal.Anthace’s monstrous intrusion. And now, millions of warriors erupting from the white buds spreading across the land—most of them radiating a power close to that of a Saint.

In other words... close to theirs.

Weiss let out a bitter, strangled chuckle—a yellow-tinged laugh born of shock, discomfort, and utter disillusion. Everything she’d prepared had just been swept aside like a sandcastle crushed by a tidal wave.

Kaelum, meanwhile, finally responded to Shadrex’s earlier suggestion.

”What?!”

He nearly blew up, his voice cracking between fear and fury.

”That’s impossible! If someone like that existed, we’d know! And where’s our counterpart on the Lustra Plains?! Where the hell is the Game’s balance?!”

His entire worldview was collapsing.

He’d always thought he was solid—hell, maybe even superior.And now Shadrex wanted him to consider that another Player, hiding among them since the start, might be stronger than all of them, and had somehow never shown their face?

No.Even he refused to accept something that stupid.

And the worst part? The reason this terrified Kaelum so much?

Shadrex, who was smarter than him by miles, would never have suggested something that nonsensical under normal circumstances.If the Bipolar Seer—the guy who dropped verses and metaphors even in the middle of battle—was resorting to this kind of mental gymnastics to reassure himself...

Then there was only one explanation:

Even Shadrex was cracking.

And that was more terrifying than anything else.

Shadrex, of course, had no answer. Slowly regaining composure, he slid into a cold, surgical mode of analysis.

”If something impossible happens... it means we misjudged our axioms.”

And that realization opened the door to something even worse.

Jake wasn’t a Rank 18. It was worse than that.

He was a Rank 17 capable of crushing a hypothetical Rank 18.

If they wanted even a sliver of a chance, they’d have to figure out Jake’s limits, revise their plan—or admit that the only realistic goal left was simply... survival.

Before Shadrex could go further, the psychic nightmare Weiss had detected at the central battlefield slammed into their minds—a torrent of raw data and terror forcing itself into their senses.

The ground in the capital cracked open— again— everywhere, violently, without warning.

White roots from Anthace burst out like living pillars, growing, blooming, splitting open in an uncontrollable expansion.

For a heartbeat, this sparked hope among the survivors—especially the civilians who had never questioned their guardian tree.

That hope lasted all of five seconds.

The monsters surged out in exponential waves, using the new fissures as tunnels to overwhelm the remaining defenses.

Then, from the flowering buds, majestic silhouettes emerged—soldiers clad in pristine white plate armor, radiating the power of Saints, or at least nearing that threshold.

Except their Lumyst wasn’t radiant. It wasn’t warm. It wasn’t holy.

It was black. Corrosive. Destroying everything it touched.

The Light Warriors of the Lustra Plains, who’d felt a fleeting spark of hope, instantly blanched. Their breath hitched. Their hearts dropped straight into their guts.

One of them, a powerful grizzled Radiant Lord respected throughout the capital, froze as his eyes went wide. He recognized one of the figures emerging from a bud.

”Rengen?... Rengen?!”

His voice cracked apart.A shock so pure it felt like being struck by lightning.

”You’re alive? I thought you were dead! You were supposed to be dead for centuries!”

Rengen had been killed hundreds of years ago.Like all fallen Light Warriors, his body had been buried in the sacred ritual of the Radiant Conclave— near Anthace’s roots.

A holy rite...or so everyone believed.

In truth, it had been a tribute. A sacrifice. Food for the Titan Tree, which devoured their bodies, reanimated them... and claimed them for itself.

Overwhelmed by emotion, the Radiant Lord rushed forward without thinking and wrapped his arms around his old friend, tears threatening to spill.

But all he got in return... was silence.An empty void.

And then—pain.

Sharp, blinding agony erupted in his chest.

He looked down.

The ”Rengen” thing had driven its entire arm through his torso, shoulder-deep.Its hand poked out the other side, clutching his still-beating heart.

”W-why...?” were his final words.

He wasn’t the only one.

Emotion. Hope. Nostalgia.

All of it became instant death.

A woman was impaled running into her husband’s arms.A soldier was beheaded before he even realized the ”brother” he approached was wrong.Another tried to kiss the fiancée he’d lost two years earlier—and was torn clean in half by a casual backhand.

After a few of these tragedies, hope collapsed like a punctured balloon.No one dared go near these ”returned warriors” again.

*****

As for Cho Min-Ho, the Korean leader of King’s Idol Alliance—after fighting monsters for far too long while waiting for his window, his morale was six feet under.

Nothing was going according to plan.

He and his faction had already been considering retreat.It was obvious nothing good would come out of this shitshow.

But the second he thought about pulling out of the cursed capital, he noticed something horrifying:

Anthace’s roots weren’t limited to Lustris.

They were everywhere.

Exploding from the ground like an endless forest stretching as far as their eyes—and their mental senses—could reach.

Mountains. Plains. Valleys. All of it was rupturing.

He immediately called their allies on the other fronts: the central battlefield where Jake was, the Dusken capital, every outpost they had forces in. And every single one of them reported the same nightmare.

Roots. Monsters. Saint-level revenants.

All appearing with the same sickening density across the entire continent.

It only took one quick, brutal calculation to see the whole picture:

They were fucked. Fucked beyond recovery.

The continent wasn’t ”falling.”It was already sinking.

*****

At the same time, the three Oracle Knights perched on their branch wore the same funeral expression.What they were watching had gone far beyond a botched prophecy.

It didn’t even remotely resemble the scenario Shadrex had predicted.

After a heavy silence, thick with dread, the seer finally spoke:

”If we wait any longer... it won’t just be Lustris that falls.The entire continent will go down with it.Anthace will absorb everything.We can’t stay spectators.”

Weiss and Caelum kept quiet, but their silence said enough.Acting now meant accepting that every plan they’d crafted had just gone up in flames.It might even mean dying here.

But doing nothing...Doing nothing guaranteed they would lose everything.

Meanwhile, the Celestial—massive, broad-shouldered, with ageless gray eyes carved by millennia—still hadn’t moved. His silhouette seemed heavier now, weighed down by an exhaustion older than empires.

Still locked in silent conversation with Jake, he finally let out a long, weary sigh.

A sigh that resonated.

Through the air. Through the soil. Through the minds of everyone within hundreds of kilometers.

”Ah... Anthace...How long have you been plotting this betrayal?”

His gaze swept across the saints blooming from the buds.

”All these Saints...These millions of warriors...No—these billions of Light Warriors.Brave, loyal, courageous...I don’t recognize all of them, but I recognize many. Many across the thousands of years I’ve lived.”

He inhaled deeply, scanning the continent through the very airflow.

”Judging by the number of Saints our land has produced over the last few centuries...and the number of auras I feel here—auras on par with the current Conclave, or even stronger—I can already estimate how long you’ve been preparing all of this. Tens of thousands of years... at the very least.”

Then his expression hardened.

”And some of these auras... match my own. Others... exceed it. The Celestials who came before me. You even got your hands on their remains...”

His eyes narrowed dangerously.

”...even though they should have remained buried beneath the temple,in the crypt designed specifically to be inaccessible to your roots.”

In response, the entire forest of roots rippled, releasing a psychic signal sharp enough to make even the Oracle Knights flinch. A mental broadcast—impossible to decode for most.

Anthace had answered.

Jake couldn’t hear the conversation, but he could read the intention behind it crystal clear.

Contempt. Mockery. A bottomless condescension.

The kind of arrogance a timeless being would show toward a tantrum-throwing toddler who barely understood the world he lived in.

Anthace had never taken them seriously.At best, he saw them as lice hanging off his branches—parasites surviving only on the scraps of sap and the discarded limbs he no longer needed.

When the tension peaked, Jake finally broke the silence—his voice disturbingly calm amidst the chaos.

”Huh... I thought I’d prepared for the worst. Even for scenarios so screwed-up you couldn’t imagine them. But this? Yeah, no. I didn’t see this coming.

”Doesn’t matter. An enemy is still an enemy. And victory comes once every enemy is dead or wiped out.

”The situation changes. The objective doesn’t. Step up, then. I’ll slaughter you all the same.”

Those deceptively simple words sparked something fierce and electric in Weiss’s eyes.

”Yes... Yes! That’s it!”

She swung toward Shadrex, breathless:

”Your vision, Shadrex! You might not have been wrong. It can still happen!”

The seer jerked his head up. Then his face lit up with dawning realization.

His vision hadn’t been wrong. It had simply been premature. There were steps missing. Triggers he hadn’t accounted for.

He had underestimated the sequence. He had underestimated Jake.

And now he realized... he might still be underestimating him.

Because as horrific as this situation was— the monsters, Anthace’s betrayal, the resurrected Saints, the ancient auras— all of it might be exactly the reinforcements needed to fulfill the prophecy.

The three Oracle Knights traded a single look.Just one.

Then, in a low, almost ritualistic whisper:

”Very well, Jake. In that case... show us just how badly we’ve underestimated you.”