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Chapter 726: Tide of Demonic Beasts

The tremor had been building for hours.

Pasha stretched her tentacles through the stone and felt the weight of what was above her — not seen, but known, the way she knew the temperature of the rock and the composition of the soil around the passages. The Fearful Beasts of Hell had taken every entrance. The demonic hybrids behind them were doing what hybrids did when pressed from behind: tearing through anything that blocked them, creating space through the bodies of whatever was in the way. The result, by now, was a bloodbath in the approaches to every tunnel mouth, and none of it had yet reached the maze’s interior.

From the sky above the mountain, something with wings hovered. It couldn’t enter the underground ruin. It was watching.

Pasha withdrew her limbs and descended.

The passage was lit by braziers — not for her benefit, since she could read the texture of every stone without light, but for the God’s Punishment Soldiers who had adapted human bodies and retained human limitations. She extinguished them as she passed, since everyone had already moved to the maze hall. Dirt fell in sparse clumps from the ceiling, some of it smashing into the brazier stands on its way down.

The hall was loud in the specific way of people who are managing fear by remaining occupied.

“How is it above?” Alethea’s question arrived through consciousness rather than voice.

“The closest Wilderness Beast has reached the third layer.” Pasha directed the information to everyone present. “Below?”

“Nothing unusual. Only charred corpses.”

The lava river that flowed beneath the maze’s deepest level was their most reliable defense on the underside — no demonic beast had yet demonstrated immunity to fire, and the barrier it provided had spared the survivors considerable effort. Above was more complicated. The maze had multiple entry points and the Wilderness Beasts could drill through soil and stone, though slowly. The calculation was always one of time and rate.

“How long for the magic core to be ready?”

Celine’s voice carried the particular quality of someone pushing beyond their capacity and trying not to show it. “Half an hour. Perhaps an hour. Area 43 was just repaired, and Lady Eleanor still needs time to complete the calculation.”

“They won’t reach the hall that quickly,” Pasha said. She kept her voice even. “The larger hybrids are still blocked at the entrances. We’ll only see the smaller ones for now.”

“Think of it as daily training,” Elena said.

This was the right way to frame it, and several of the others appeared to accept it. One voice — she didn’t identify whose — raised the question of timing: wouldn’t it have been better to let Starfall City absorb more of the demonic horde’s strength before retrieving the relic?

“Hermes still needs defending,” Alethea said. “Without the God’s Punishment Army, common people can’t hold those walls indefinitely.”

“The walls themselves slow the beasts down. Hot oil, mangonels — they could have bought time. We could have waited in the Pivotal Secret Temple and retrieved the relic during a lull.”

“The cathedral has traps below it. A misfired trap buries us all or, worse, lets the relic fall into the demons’ hands. Neither outcome is acceptable.”

“Enough.” Pasha did not raise her voice. She didn’t need to. “The relic is here. We no longer have choices to undo. You remember what Lady Natalya said before the assault on the Queen of Starfall City.”

The hall went quiet.

Natalya had spoken those words at the moment when Taquila’s greatest internal fracture had become permanent — when she had cut all connection to Starfall City, when Alice’s path and her own had separated completely. Every witch in the underground maze had either been there or been told of it, and the specific weight of that memory was enough to end most arguments.

She preferred this organization to the old one. The rigid hierarchy of the Union had prevented exactly the kind of dissent that was now ventilating itself openly, which had made the hierarchy feel safe and had made the Union blind to its own failures. She had watched the discussions since Taquila fell and found she valued them, even when they were inconvenient.

But not right now.

The survivors turned to the problem of blocking positions, and Pasha let the discussion run while extending her perception outward again — through the stone, through the layers above, tracking the three-dimensional map of movement.

Then something hit her tentacles that should not have been possible.

A concussive impact. Not drilling. Not the patient grinding of a Wilderness Beast working through compacted soil and rock, which required time and left a trail she could track.

Falling.

Something was in free fall through the earth, breaking layers without resistance, moving at a speed that was simply wrong. The sensation reached her through thousands of neural endpoints simultaneously — a crack extending horizontally through the ground, six or seven miles of fracture opening at once, soil splitting along a line that shouldn’t exist.

She had one second to understand it before the math resolved.

The direction: the magic core.

“Prepare to fight!” She pushed the warning to every consciousness in the hall at maximum amplitude. “Direction of the magic core — now!”

The ceiling of the hall came apart before anyone had finished reacting.

The Wilderness Beast fell through the gap in pieces of itself — the impact had destroyed much of its body, but it had completed the descent regardless, and the dark blue light pulsing from its wounds told her it had been close enough to the magic core’s radiation to be changed by it. It hit the floor and something in its body moved.

From inside it — from within the wreckage of its chest cavity — hybrid demonic beasts tore their way outward and lunged for the nearest target.

Celine.

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