Chapter 1185: A Warning of Destruction
From the frying pan and into the fire.
The corrupted area sealed off one direction entirely. The only escape was up — ten meters of sheer wall with black tentacles combing every surface, feeling for footholds, for bodies, for any purchase that might yield flesh. Everyone understood the arithmetic: catch a tentacle and it held you. No one had broken free once caught. The creature was something beyond the scale of any Fallen Evil any of them had trained against, and not all courage was the reckless kind. Some of the martialists simply could not move.
One person moved.
“Go!” Fei Yuhan’s voice came over the speaker phone — sharp, immediate, no wasted syllable. A white shadow streaked from the dark and drove straight toward the creature. Her Force of Nature was visible now across her entire body, a close soft radiance that had never before extended beyond her arms. She was burning it.
The tentacles struck at her like a bundle of serpents. She slipped between the first two, barely, and when a third forced a confrontation she took it head-on: palm strike, knife-hand, white light gathering at her fingertips into the shape of a blade. She cut through.
The other martialists ran for the walls.
Sir Youlong reached the rim first.
“Do you imagine you can escape from me?”
The creature’s arm was not long enough — and then it was, stretching thicker and faster, filling the gap between them in half a second. Sir Youlong spun and threw everything he had into the block, light exploding from both arms. The giant hand came down anyway. The sound it made hitting the ground was not a crack — it was a concussion, something felt in the chest rather than heard. The concrete shattered into powder. The pit wall dented inward.
Where Sir Youlong had been, there was only a red ruin.
The creature reached down, scooped up the sodden mass, and dropped it into the corrupted area. The stain expanded at the edges.
Roland understood immediately: it was using the martialists’ Forces of Nature as fuel. Every body it fed to the corruption made the corruption larger; every enlargement made the creature larger. It was not killing them out of cruelty. It was harvesting.
The indignity of it hit him harder than the fear.
Those Forces belonged to this world. They were his — or something adjacent to his: the world’s own energy, redirected, stolen. He felt the wrongness of it the way you feel a theft, not of objects but of something that had always been ambient and is now suddenly absent.
Intolerable.
“Your Majesty — the tentacles are nearly filling the hole.” Phyllis and Dawnen materialized at his back, voices low and urgent, pressed together. “What do we do?”
“We kill it before the second team arrives,” Roland said. His eyes were fixed on the creature’s chest — the place where the astrolabe would be. “But you cannot be seen.” He put a hand briefly on Ling’s head. “Knock out the martialists caught by the tentacles. All of them, fast. Then wait.”
“Easy.” Ling’s voice was already receding as she said it, her shape dissolving into the shadow’s edge, only a suggestion of movement remaining.
Roland watched the creature — ten meters of it, growing. He had killed one before and knew the mechanism: find the astrolabe, wrench it free, watch the thing come apart. The difficulty was closing the distance. But the geometry of an open space and a willing body made certain things possible.
He turned and whispered to Phyllis.
Her reaction was immediate. “Your Majesty, that’s—”
“Do it. This is an order.”
A pause — short, but real. Then: “As you command.”
So. The last problem.
Roland looked toward Fei Yuhan.
She had taken two direct hits from the creature and was still on her feet — barely. Blood across her arms, her stance shorter and more effortful than before, the white glow guttering. She would not quit. The Force of Nature still moved in her fingers each time she steadied, still tried to form a blade. The tentacles converged on her from three and four directions at once, making the approach to the creature almost impossible; the creature itself was occupied with the fleeing martialists or she would already be down. She held on anyway, with a stubbornness that was either extraordinary courage or a refusal to weigh odds at all.
“Your Majesty.” Ling’s voice came through the speaker phone — everyone’s speaker phone, the whole team channel still open. “Everyone was knocked out.”
“Good job—”
He stopped himself, but not fast enough.
On the channel, Ling’s voice was unmistakable — a girl’s voice, calling him Your Majesty, where no such person had any business being. He saw Fei Yuhan’s stride break. A fraction of a second, no more — but the creature’s arm was already swinging, and the third blow took her off her feet and threw her ten meters across the floor. The white light went out entirely. She did not get up.
“Now.”
The plan had slipped sideways, but the opportunity was still there — Fei Yuhan unconscious, the creature’s attention distributed, the hole briefly clear of tentacles near the center. Whatever happened next had to happen now.
“Forgive my impertinence, Your Majesty,” Phyllis said, and her claws closed around his ankles.
She spun him — one full rotation, two, the world dissolving into color and his stomach pressing up into his ribs — and at the apex, when the momentum had nowhere left to go, she released him.
Roland crossed the gap like a loosed arrow.
The moment he left Dawnen’s Invisibility Veil, the creature registered the motion. Something moving fast, trajectory direct, no Force of Nature signature it recognized. It turned from the scattered martialists. Its arm rose. The hand came down toward him the way a hand comes down on an insect.
They met.
Roland passed through the arm as though it were smoke. The creature’s body — all that mass, all that terrible size — was illusion over emptiness. He hit the chest and kept going, into it.
The astrolabe was there: a spinning disc of compressed force, crimson at the edges, the corrupted energy orbiting its core in tight loops. Roland closed both hands around it and pulled.
The creature screamed.
Not a roar — a scream, high and furious, and under the fury: comprehension.
“It was you!” The voice tore through the pit. “You didn’t listen to my advice!”
Roland wrenched harder. The interface shifted — scarlet bleeding to a cool bluish white as the corruption reversed — and he felt his own power rise in answer, a deep reciprocal surge, as though the world recognized what was being returned to it.
“Was the monster I killed last time your brother?” He kept his voice even, hands still working at the astrolabe. “I’m sorry — he wasn’t very clear. I didn’t catch the advice.”
“We are one — we are united—” The creature’s voice was fraying, losing cohesion at the edges, the words coming slower. “Stop this foolishness. This is my last warning. If you continue, you will carry the guilt of a horrific atrocity — everything will be reduced to nothingness, all our work across thousands of years gone. You cannot bear that weight. You can’t — you don’t understand what you are — ”
The astrolabe separated.
Silence, absolute and sudden, where the voice had been.
Blinding white light flooded up through the hole, bleaching the concrete walls, filling the corrupted area until the red-black stain had no room left. Roland landed in the ruins, standing. The warmth he had felt before — diffuse, subterranean — came back full and certain, and this time it did not recede.
He stood still a moment. He could feel the ground beneath him as something distinct from mere surface — a rhythm, measured and slow, moving through the soles of his feet.
For a moment he had the clear sense that he and this world were the same thing.
In the chaotic Realm of Mind, the Nightmare opened its eyes.
A heartbeat — regular, rhythmic — cut through the disorder like a signal through static. Valkries had tracked legacy shards before and followed threads like this into nothing, the complexity of minds swallowing every trail before it could be walked to its end. But this was different. The beat was close. The signal was strong.
Everything seemed, for once, to be clear.
She grinned.
She had found the traces of the mysterious man.