RUMBLEEEEE!!
The heavy stone floor cracked straight down the middle under Terravarous’s knees. Librarian Jovian hadn’t cast a visible spell or chanted a single word of ancient magic. The old man simply tapped the wooden handle of his sweeping broom against the ground. The resulting pressure was unreal. It felt as if the dod roof of the Solaris Royal Library had collapsed and landed on their shoulders.
Ignis let out a choked, ragged gasp. The fierce royal pressed both his hands flat against the ground, his knuckles turning white as he tried to push himself up. Small sparks of red fire flickered at his fingertips, but the oppressive air nullified them out like dying candles.
"What... is this?" Ignis gritted his teeth, his broken ribs screaming in protest. Every breath he took felt like inhaling thick dust.
Terravarous shifted his wide stance, trying to activate his defense magic. The hardened stone of his Diamond Skin crawled across his thick arms. But the mont the armor ford, it ruptured. Tiny fissures spider-webbed across the giant’s skin. The sheer atmospheric weight pressing down on them was enough to break royal defensive magic without a single punch being thrown.
Kairos knelt beside his friends. His breathing grew shallow. He slowly forced his head up to look at the old librarian.
Jovian stood at the end of the dark aisle, looking remarkably bored. His faded grey robes didn’t even ripple in the air. He looked like an ordinary janitor waiting for kids to finish making a ss.
[SYSTEM WARNING: OVERWHELMING AURA DETECTED.]
[ENTITY ’JOVIAN’ EXCEEDS CURRENT HOST COMBAT PARATERS. SUGGESTION: STAY ON THE FLOOR. APOLOGIZE TO HIM. DO NOT PROVOKE THE OLD MAN.]
You are a coward, Blackout, Kairos thought, his eyes narrowing.
He tightened his grip on the hilt of Asteria. He refused to bow his head to a librarian in a dusty basent. If this old man wanted to crush them into the floorboards, Kairos was going to push back.
He dug deep into his chest, finding that strange space where his new title resided. He didn’t activate the full ti-stop. He couldn’t afford the infinite mana drain right now. Instead, he pulled on the sheer authority of the Conqueror of Ti.
A faint, colorless ripple washed smoothly over Kairos’s skin. The crushing weight on his shoulders vanished, rejected by the temporal distortion carving out a void of normal space around his body. Kairos stomped his boot on the cracked stone and stood up straight.
At the exact sa mont, Luna moved. The silver-haired Zephyros heir was panting, cold sweat streaming from his chin. But he rembered the void on Moonspire Hill. He rembered the drop of infinite primordial mana.
Luna opened his eyes. They burned with a piercing, ethereal light, using his newly awakened mind. Luna projected his domain outward, forming an invisible, psychic shield over himself, Ignis, and Terravarous. The crushing physical pressure slid sideways from their bodies like rain sliding off on a slanted roof.
Luna stood up next to Kairos. They stood shoulder-to-shoulder, staring down the most overwhelming aura of janitor.
Jovian’s bushy grey eyebrows jerked. Just a fraction of an inch. The old man looked at Kairos, his focused eyes sensing the disruption in the flow of ti. Then he looked at Luna, his gaze narrowing at the cosmic energy cascading faintly from the boy’s mind.
"Well now," Jovian murmured, his raspy voice echoing down the quiet aisle. "That is not sothing you see every day. A village boy who controls ti, and a lazy noble who flirts with the cosmic locks. You kids are playing a very dangerous ga."
Jovian lifted his broom off the floor. The strangulating pressure vanished evaporating into thin air.
Ignis and Terravarous collapsed against the black iron bookshelves, gasping for air. Ignis clutched his bandaged chest, coughing hard. "Are you crazy, old man? We are Royal Generals of this kingdom!"
"And I am the man trying to keep you alive," Jovian replied gently, leaning on his broom, his eyes darting across the group. "You evaded my elite guards, and even broke my warding runes. Also you ca sneaking down into the Restricted Archives looking for fairy tales. Why?"
Kairos stepped forward. He kept his hand resting on Asteria. "Because those fairy tales are hunting us. We ran into a Black Mist Knight. It spoke an ancient language that nearly killed Luna from the inside out. We need to know what they are. We need to know who they are."
For a brief second, the shadows in the dusty aisle seed to howl around Jovian. The old man’s face hardened, the wrinkles around his eyes tightening in tense. He looked like an old, weary soldier carrying a heavy secret.
"There is nothing here," Jovian said, his voice sturdy. "There are no Black Mist Knights. You had a bad dream on a mountain, boy. Go back to your academies. Go back to hunting your little D-Rank bugs in the mud. The history written down here will only get you killed."
"You’re lying", Luna mumbled smoothly. The silver glow in Luna’s eyes faded back to normal, but his gaze remained sharp. "Your walls are thicker than solid steel. A normal librarian doesn’t have psychic defenses like that. You know what is coming."
"I know that arrogant children die first in real wars..." Jovian argued back.
The old man swept his broom across the floor in a casual arc. It was an invisible wall of pure force that hit the four boys like a rushing ocean tide.
It grabbed them like a giant, invisible hand, lifting off their feet and catapulted backward down the dark aisle. They slid across the stone floor.
"Hey! Put us down!" Ignis yelled, convulsing his arms against the invisible grip. They flew past the rows of cursed books and ancient scrolls, heading straight for the iron door they had sneaked through earlier. The red locking runes flared, and the door burst open on its own to let them out.
Luna was sliding backward, his dark cloak flapping wildly around his shoulders. He kept his eyes fixated on Jovian standing far down the dark aisle.
He’s hiding the book. He knows exactly where the book is, Luna thought, his mind racing at incredible speeds.
As they neared the exit, Luna narrowed his eyes. He didn’t have much mana left after the long carriage ride, but he only needed a second. He focused all his remaining power into a single point.
He thrusted his mind down the hallway, aiming straight for Jovian’s head. Jovian’s defenses were legendary. They were layered, iron walls forged over decades of guarding cursed magic. But Luna wasn’t trying to break them down with brute force. He was acting like a master thief opening a lock. He slipped his mind through a tiny crack in the old man’s focus just as Jovian was casting the expulsion spell.
FLASH!!
For a thousandth of a second, Luna saw what Jovian was guarding in his surface thoughts.
It was the vivid image of a rotting book bound in black iron, rattling chains. The cover was nad as Fallen [Scrambled].
Luna’s photographic mory snapped a perfect picture of the text written on that page. It was a fragnt of hidden history. A terrifying truth.
Then, Jovian realized the intrusion. The old man’s mind slamd shut like a trap. He forced Luna out with a psychic shockwave that felt like a punch to the face. Luna’s head snapped back, a streak of red blood dripping from his nose.
"Out!!" Jovian commanded, his raspy voice echoing like thunder.
The four boys were tossed out into the cold, spiraling stone stairwell.
BOOM!!
The iron door slamd shut in their faces. The glowing red locking runes illuminated brightly, sealing the Restricted Archives once again.
Kairos hit the stone stairs and rolled to his feet, drawing Asteria halfway from its sheath. He stared at the locked iron door, his heart pounding in his chest.
Ignis groaned, lying on his back on the cold stairs. "Okay. That old man is definitely not a normal librarian. I think he broke my ribs again."
Terravarous sat up, rubbing the back of his neck. "His power felt ancient. I have never felt magic like that in the upper capital. Uncle Raezon has monsters hiding in his own basent."
"He is hiding the truth," Kairos muttered, sheathing his sword back. He looked over at his friend. The Zephyros heir was sitting casually on the steps, saring the streak of blood from his nose with his sleeve. Despite the bleeding, Luna had a lazy, satisfied smirk on his face.
"Are you okay?" Kairos asked, leaning next to him. "He hit you pretty hard at the end."
"He threw us out, but he made a mistake," Luna said, leaning back against the stone wall. He reached into his dark pocket and pulled out his charcoal pencil and a piece of parchnt.
Ignis rose over from his spot on the floor. "What are you talking about? He threw us like annoying flies."
"He threw us, yes. But his mind was focused on maintaining the expulsion spell. He left a tiny gap in his defense," Luna explained. His charcoal pencil moved across the paper, drawing sharp, precise lines. "He was thinking about the exact book we were looking for. The one about the Black Mist Knights. I slipped in and took a snap of a single page."
Kairos’s eyes widened in realization. "You read the book through his mories?"
"Just one page," Luna replied, finishing his sketch. He blew the loose charcoal dust off the paper and handed the parchnt to Kairos.
Terravarous and Ignis slowly pushed themselves up and leaned in to look over Kairos’s shoulder. It wasn’t written in the jagged dialect that gave Luna a headache. It was an ancient translation, sothing Jovian must have deciphered himself over the many years spent down in the dark. The handwriting was rough, but the dark aning was perfectly clear.
Kairos read the translated text aloud in the dim stairwell.
"The Monarch of the Eclipse sought the control of Infinite Vein and immortality. For his imnse greed, the other monarchs stripped his na from history and cast him into the eternal shadows. He waits in the dark. He gathers his lost knights. When the sun and moon turn black, the Fallen will rise to claim the world of light."
A cold chill swept through the narrow stairwell, dropping the temperature.
For once, Ignis didn’t make a sarcastic joke. Terravarous stayed silent, his brow furrowed in deep thought.
"When the sun and moon turn black," Kairos whispered, tracing his thumb over the charcoal words. He looked up at his friends. "That sounds exactly like a solar eclipse."
"An eclipse," Luna confird, his pale eyes losing their lazy warmth. "The perfect, natural ti for creatures made of shadows to strike. That old librarian knows a war is coming. He just thinks we are too weak to fight it."
Kairos folded the parchnt and tucked it safely into his belt. His jaw tightened. The fear of the unknown was gone, replaced by a sharp determination. The system warnings, the Black Mist Knights on the mountain, the ancient cosmic locks, everything was pointed toward one single event.
"Then we prove the old man wrong," Kairos said firmly, offering his hand to pull Ignis off the floor. "We have the fragnt of truth now. Let’s get out of this basent. We need to prepare."
They walked up the spiraling stone stairs, leaving the iron door and the archives behind them. The real war wasn’t waiting in so blurry future anymore. IT WAS COMING!!
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