Chapter 1430: The Irrecoverable Situation
“What have you done!?”
Hackzord’s roar filled the shattered room — or what remained of it: half a wall, a door listing on its hinges, and open sky where the ceiling had been.
If not for his realization that Silent Disaster had slipped away, if not for his arriving at the precise moment he had — she would be dead. And not merely dead. If the other side of the Distortion Door had opened onto another Red Mist Pond, if he had failed to open a second Door in time, the explosion would have taken them both. The thought sent cold sweat crawling down his back.
But survival was the smallest of his problems.
Mask might be dead. The King would learn of it regardless. Even if Hackzord bore no direct responsibility for what had occurred, that would not protect him. The King had only to request a reading of his memories, and every hesitation, every silence, every moment of deliberate inaction would be laid bare. The position he would find himself in — passive, exposed, implicated — made his fury run cold.
He had misjudged her.
When Silent Disaster refused to help him before, he had taken it for composure, for the calm calculation she was known for. He had not imagined that Serakkas’s resolution would shatter so completely after meeting Valkries.
No. She is still calm. That is why she left without a word — without explaining anything to me beforehand. She knew I would have stopped her.
“Once Plan B is activated, the situation is irredeemable.” Silent Disaster’s tone had not shifted. She spoke as though she had not just barely escaped death, as though the near-catastrophe had occurred to someone else entirely. “Doing this was the only way to stop it.”
“Who said it was the only way? If you calm yourself and think—”
Hackzord heard his own voice fade.
Is there really another way?
Some solution that prevented Mask from acting, that kept the King ignorant, that preserved the Deity of Gods as it was — such a thing might exist in theory. But theory required time. And more than time: it required him to have already made his choice, to have steeled himself to a course of action. He had done neither.
Did she see through me?
His lips moved. Then he chose a different question.
“Why?”
Serakkas looked at him and waited.
“By doing this, we stand openly against the King. Every senior lord will count us among his enemies.” Sky Lord paused. “And the humans may not spare us.”
“Because of balance,” she said simply.
“Balance?”
“The decision was not difficult.” She turned and walked toward what served as the door — a frame with splinters where the hinges strained. “We can think through the rest at leisure. But I could not allow Valkries to die like that.”
What kind of answer is that. “Are you saying Valkries matters more than our race’s fate?” His voice had gone flat. “I do not believe this was her idea. Are you certain you saw the real Nightmare Lord, and not a human deception?”
“No. She told me herself that sacrificing her was acceptable for the cause.” Serakkas’s answer came without hesitation. “This was my decision.”
Sky Lord said nothing.
The situation had become thorny. That was the only word for it.
Then — a sound.
It came from above and below simultaneously, a pressure in the chest more than a noise, a low resonant humming that had no single point of origin. It built and built until the Deity of Gods itself shuddered.
Hackzord looked down into the pit.
The Red Mist lake — crystallized, still, centuries-old in its stillness — was boiling. Something churned beneath the surface. And the Birth Tower at the lake’s center had begun to emit a faint, steady glow.
He had never seen anything like it. Not in all his centuries.
Then the cores appeared.
The magic power cores he had believed destroyed in the explosion rose from the lake one by one, blooming with blue light, ascending toward the Birth Tower in slow and deliberate arcs. He knew those structures intimately — knew their ingenious internal geometries, their peculiar fragility. A single hand could shatter them. The explosion that had gutted the main tower should have reduced them to dust.
Yet here they were. Whole.
Serakkas’s expression broke. She drew her sword and sprinted from the room, then hurled the blade with every gram of force her body could produce.
The sword struck one of the rising cores and tumbled away in ricochet, as though she had thrown it at stone. The core did not crack. Did not even drift from its course. The sword plunged into the lake below.
“How is that—” she whispered.
When the first core reached the Birth Tower, a band of light appeared between them. Then another. Then two more, as each core found its position and began to orbit the tower in slow revolution — four points of blue fire tracing their paths around the central column, the whole structure blazing now, brighter than Hackzord had ever seen it burn.
Bang—
The trembling amplified. Dust cascaded from above. Stone structures along the pit’s rim crumbled into the lake; the Birth Tower itself groaned, cracks spreading upward through its walls in branching lines that widened as he watched.
And beneath the swaying, Hackzord felt something he had not felt in a very long time.
Weight.
A pressing downward weight, as though gravity itself had remembered an old grudge.
The Deity of Gods was rising.
“It was agreed.” His voice had gone tight. “The plan would not activate until the King reached the Fertile Plains. How is it making preparations now?”
Serakkas stood very still. The expression on her face was the particular blankness she wore when something large had arranged itself, when the shape of a trap became visible all at once.
“Could it be—” Hackzord stared at her, and then seized her arm and pulled her back through the Distortion Door, down into the lowest level of the Red Mist Pond. “Remove your armor.”
She looked at him with the measured suspicion she gave all unexpected commands. But she obeyed.
Hackzord raised the multi-colored magic stone and brought it close to his eye. He found it almost immediately: a thread, vanishingly fine, woven into the beam of light that Serakkas had emitted — something that would have been invisible without the stone, something he nearly missed even with it.
“Don’t move.”
He pressed two fingers to Silent Disaster’s shoulder. She flinched — the first involuntary reaction he had seen from her — but did not pull away. He worked quickly, finding the thing by touch as much as by sight, and drew it out: a small blob of flesh that stopped squirming the moment it left its host.
Serakkas’s fists closed.
“Nassaupelle.” The name came out flat and absolutely cold.
Mask had implanted it while she was unconscious. She had felt nothing — not its insertion, not its presence through all the time since, not a single pulse of its activity.
“That was how he knew our conversations.” Hackzord dropped the flesh and crushed it underfoot. “And your meeting with Valkries. He had prepared for everything because he knew everything.”
She walked toward the door without answering.
“Where are you going?”
“To destroy the magic power cores.”
“It’s too late.” He said it plainly, without heat. “You saw it yourself. They are already in resonance with the Birth Tower. What can you do alone?”
The answer was: nothing. Integrated as they now were, those cores could not be broken by the combined strength of every senior lord remaining. Throwing a sword at them had already answered that question.
Even a miracle — even success — would only mean the loss of control of the Deity of Gods, the whole mass of it falling unguided from the sky.
He had already constructed the worst outcome in his mind, and it held.
“Inform the human that Valkries trusts.” Hackzord’s voice was steady, the steadiness of a decision already made. “Tell him to leave the continent at once and avoid what is coming. That is the only thing left for us to do.”