The Orcus Labyrinth was not a place designed for life. It was a cosmic meat grinder, a pit of despair where darkness had weight and monsters devoured even sound.
At the deepest point of that abyss, a small campfire crackled.
Iota, the ninth avatar of the Architect, sat cross-legged in front of the fire. He slowly rotated an improvised skewer holding a piece of mutant wolf meat that dripped grease into the flames. Beside him, the gigantic Fenrir rested with his eyes closed, and across from him, wrapped in a worn blanket that Iota had stored in his inventory, the vampire princess Yue watched him with her deep crimson eyes.
Yue had been awake for hours, slowly processing her freedom. But what fascinated her most was not being outside the crystal—it was the boy who had freed her. She watched him eat monster meat with the same calm someone would use while eating an apple.
"That meat is pure poison for a human," Yue whispered, her voice still weak. "Your body should be collapsing. Your mana pathways will tear apart."
Iota took a bite of the roasted meat, chewed slowly, and swallowed.
"Poison is just information the body doesn't know how to process, Yue. If you give it time—and the correct anchor—the body rewrites its own code."
Iota closed his eyes for a moment, remembering the agony of his first days on the 100th floor.
When Hiyama's accidental spell had thrown him off the bridge to save Hajime Nagumo, Iota survived the fall thanks to Tekkai and the Falna expanded by Delta. But surviving the impact was not the same as surviving the ecosystem. To avoid starving and to acquire the abilities of the monsters, Iota had been forced to devour their toxic flesh.
The pain had been an indescribable torture.
Magic in this world of Tortus, just like the Chakra in Epsilon's world, required specific physical pathways to flow through the body. They were like a second circulatory system. When Iota consumed the mutated meat, the dense poisonous mana tried to travel through those channels, burning his nerves from the inside.
Iota could not rely on the magic Zeta used in Fairy Tail. In Earthland, mages drew Ethernano from the atmosphere and combined it with their inner power, but here that atmospheric connection did not exist in the same way, making pure spellcasting far more difficult.
Nor could he use the structure of Kappa's DxD universe. He was not a devil; his body did not naturally generate demonic power to flood magic circles and stabilize spells. In Kuoh, unless you possessed an innate trait—like Rias's Power of Destruction, Akeno's lightning, or Ravel's flames—you needed those circles as crutches to shape magic, or you depended on weapons like Sacred Gears.
And the forged-soul power used by Nu in Rakudai required environmental processing that the poisoned abyss disrupted.
If Iota had been a normal human, his magical pathways would have exploded.
But Iota was a node of the Architect.
And he possessed the key that magic itself ignored: Alpha's Ki and Theta's Nen.
Unlike magic or chakra, which needed "pipes" to travel through, Ki and Nen were life energy present in every individual cell of the body. They did not flow through channels; they existed throughout the entire being.
As Iota writhed on the abyss floor, biting his own arm until it bled to avoid screaming and to preserve his mental stability according to the Turtle Doctrine, he ordered his cells to act.
He used his hyper-dense Ki and Nen as an absolute stabilizer.
Every cell in his body embraced the burning magical pathways, acting simultaneously as shield and catalyst. The Ki stabilized the toxic mana, forcing it to purify itself and flow gently through his veins instead of destroying them.
The result was a masterpiece of metaphysical bioengineering.
His body developed divine antibodies.
He forced magic itself to circulate through pathways stabilized by his own life force. His starting class, shown on his Status Plate as Magical Combat Swordsman, had become an undeniable biological reality. It integrated elemental manipulation without requiring stabilizing magic circles, the soul-swordsmanship of Rakudai, and devastating close-combat strength.
"Hey…"
Yue's voice pulled him from his analytical memories.
The vampire looked at him with a hungry intensity. Her small fangs peeked past her lips. She had gone centuries without feeding, and the scent of Iota was driving her insane.
"Your blood… smells like something that doesn't belong to this world. It smells like storms, steel, and a deep ocean. I'm… thirsty."
Iota looked at her.
In any heroic epic, this would be the moment when the protagonist blushed, nervously offered his neck, and formed a romantic bond.
Iota sighed deeply.
"Biting necks is an extremely unhygienic and problematic cliché, Yue. If you bite my jugular by instinct, my passive Armament Haki will probably break your fangs. And we don't have a dentist on floor 100."
Yue blinked, completely disarmed by the pragmatic response devoid of even the smallest trace of heroic romance.
Iota pulled a small hunting knife from his inventory.
Without hesitation, he made a clean cut across the palm of his left hand.
Immediately he concentrated his unified energy.
The blood that flowed was not the bright liquid red of an ordinary human. It was thick, a dark almost black crimson, and emitted a faint phosphorescent glow due to the immense concentration of mana stabilized by the Ki and Nen in his trillions of cells.
He extended his hand toward her.
"Drink from here. It saves you the effort of chewing."
Yue approached trembling. She took Iota's hand with her small cold white hands and brought her lips to the cut in his palm.
The moment the first drop touched her tongue, Yue's eyes widened violently.
A powerful tremor ran through her body.
It wasn't just blood.
It was a miniature nuclear reactor.
Delta's immense vitality, Gamma's perfect cellular oxygenation, Zeta's retained mana, and Eta's indomitable will—all encoded into that liquid and perfectly stabilized.
Yue drank greedily.
Within seconds, the pale tone of her skin regained a healthy blush. The immense magical power of the vampire princess, weakened by three hundred years of imprisonment, not only returned to full strength but surged even higher as it came into contact with Iota's mutated antibodies.
The mana inside her body flowed with a stability she had never experienced.
When she finally pulled away, breathing lightly, she licked the remaining blood from her lips.
Her crimson eyes looked at Iota with absolute devotion and astonishment.
The cut on Iota's hand closed by itself in less than two seconds. The tissues reconnected instantly thanks to the vitality of the shared network and the mana integrated into his bloodstream.
"That was… overwhelming," Yue whispered, touching her chest. "You are not human, Iota. Your body processes energy as if you were the core of the world itself. You are a monster in disguise."
"I'm a high school student who wants to sleep in a bed with a mattress that isn't made of rocks and glowing moss," Iota corrected calmly. "You have your mana back. That means you can work."
Iota stood up, brushing the dust off his pants, and looked toward the immense darkness of the tunnel ahead.
Fenrir rose silently beside him.
"Here are the rules of our new alliance, vampire," Iota said, adjusting his glasses with one finger, his relaxed posture radiating monumental laziness. "You are the heavy artillery. Your magic is automatic, destructive, and doesn't need magic circles. Fenrir is our transportation, because I absolutely refuse to walk the remaining floors to the surface."
Yue tilted her head, a genuine smile appearing on her lips.
"And your role, Iota? Are you just going to sleep?"
Iota looked at her.
His expression was calm, but deep in his dark eyes burned the Black Syntax that had shattered divine laws and the unbreakable will that had subdued the abyss itself.
"I'm the emergency protocol," Iota replied. "The panic button. If there's a beast you can't pulverize, or a situation that requires too much physical effort from you, I'll erase it from existence in three seconds so we can go back to resting. In exchange, you let me sleep on Fenrir while you watch the rear. Deal?"
Yue's smile widened, revealing her fangs with unusual warmth.
She had seen enough power in his eyes to understand that his laziness was the privilege of absolute strength.
"Deal," she said, stepping closer and gently grabbing the sleeve of his shirt, forming a firm physical bond. "I will protect you so you can sleep, Iota. And you will destroy whatever threatens me."
"Efficiency is truly beautiful," Iota sighed.
He jumped lazily onto Fenrir's massive back and helped Yue climb in front of him.
"Let's go, Fenrir. And try not to step on acid traps—dodging them gives me a headache."
Iota leaned his head against the wolf's fur and closed his eyes.
As the massive beast moved through the depths of the Orcus Labyrinth, the vampire princess calmly began conjuring spheres of pure magic, annihilating any monster that dared emerge from the shadows, ensuring the explosions were quiet enough not to wake the boy softly snoring behind her.
The Architect had established his dominion over the abyss—
and he had done it without sacrificing his sacred nap.