Lucen followed close behind, boots cracking faint glyph dust underfoot as Varik stepped into the corridor beyond the corpse.
The wall that had once marked the limit of the rift’s mapped zone was cracked wide open now, broken not by battle, but by age and pressure, as if the deeper layers of the drift had grown impatient with containnt.
The stone had peeled outward, like a wound that had finally burst.
The sll hit him first. Not rot. Not blood. Just sothing dry, copper-sweet, laced with ozone and sothing stranger, like the scent left behind by dead circuitry.
Lucen’s mana flicked up as they passed through.
[Zone Depth: Unclassified]
[Thread Drift: Unstable]
[Adaptive System Scan Initiated...]
[Result: Glyph Logic May Behave Unpredictably]
He narrowed one eye and muttered, "That’s new."
Varik didn’t slow. "It’s not a drift anymore. It’s a foundation layer."
Lucen stepped through the breach after him. The pressure difference was imdiate. His body didn’t feel heavier, but the air around him did.
Every step echoed longer than it should’ve, and the light from Varik’s trace-glove stretched shadows out in impossible directions, like it didn’t know where to fall.
The corridor opened ahead into a vast chamber. The floor here was smoother, intentionally carved.
Archaic spell-lines still glowed faintly in the cracks, pulsing with a rhythm too slow to be natural, too alive to be chanical.
Lucen stared at the far wall.
It moved.
Not like sothing was behind it.
The wall itself pulsed, a slow ripple through stone that shouldn’t have been able to bend.
Varik held up a hand to stop him. "There are things here that still sleep. Don’t wake them."
Lucen made a tight circle with two fingers and murmured, "Got it. No shouting, no fireworks."
Varik moved along the edge of the chamber, hands moving through a rapid sequence of glyph flicks. His pace was asured. Efficient.
Lucen recognized so of the sigils, suppression threads, silence envelopes, a few containnt barriers. All elegant. Fast. Brutally exact.
’I could watch this all day,’ Lucen thought. ’Or steal half his technique and sell it as a workshop.’
He followed behind, watching carefully for mana shifts. Then, without prompting, he flared a trace of [Soundlash] into the upper right corner, not loud enough to echo, just enough to disrupt.
Varik paused and glanced at him.
Lucen pointed upward. "There was a lens node in the architecture. Old scry-point. It was still live."
Varik studied him for a second longer than necessary. Then nodded once and kept moving.
That small nod felt like a rare stamp of approval. Lucen didn’t react outwardly. But internally?
’One coffee off my debt to anyone.’
They advanced deeper. The terrain underfoot turned glassy in places, lted by old battles or collapsed zone cores. So surfaces still sparked as they stepped.
A glyph beneath Lucen’s heel flickered briefly before fading into nothing. The system couldn’t even interpret it.
The silence was starting to feel personal.
After ten minutes of slow descent, the corridor narrowed again—and that’s when the hum started.
Low.
Wrong.
It didn’t co from any one direction. It ca from all of them.
Varik’s hand snapped up again.
This ti his voice was sharp. "Stay behind ."
Lucen’s system flared at the sa mont.
[Proximity Alert: Rift Entity — Tier Black]
[Class: Warden]
[Combat Viability Rating: 0.4%]
[Suggestion: Evade]
Lucen read it once.
Then, muttered under his breath, "Wow. That’s generous."
The ground cracked open ahead. Not a collapse. A reveal.
The floor peeled back in angular seams, glyph-lined plates retracting into stone. Sothing rose slowly from beneath, massive, plated, and humming with a frequency that made Lucen’s teeth ache.
It wasn’t a creature in the usual sense. It was armor and energy. A living construct, shaped like a humanoid, but not built for people. It had no face.
Just a triangular head, no eyes, and a chest marked with a vertical glyph that shimred with unstable mana. Both arms ended in blade-like structures, curved and segnted, humming faintly.
Varik didn’t hesitate.
He stepped forward.
No words.
No callout.
He simply vanished mid-step.
Lucen barely tracked the movent, one fra gone, the next one halfway up the wall, blades clashing against the construct’s wrists. Sparks flew. The entire room flexed with the impact.
Lucen saw what real power looked like.
Varik fought like soone who had nothing left to prove, every motion asured, every strike placed with surgical force. His spellwork wasn’t showy. It was lean. Direct. Weaponized geotry.
Still, Lucen wasn’t about to be dead weight.
He flared [Shockweave Bolt] and angled it not at the enemy, but at the wall behind it, sending a rebound pulse across the construct’s rear flank.
It connected.
No damage.
But the flicker of electricity drew its attention, forcing it to split its targeting vector.
Varik used that mont.
In one spinning motion, he launched himself upward and drove a point-cast beam, tight as a thread, into the exact seam of the creature’s upper shoulder.
A flash.
Then nothing.
The Warden twisted, but it was already falling. The light in its chest glyph dimd, flickered once, then sputtered out.
Varik landed in a crouch and exhaled slowly.
Lucen jogged forward, watching the now-dead construct crumple into a neat heap of shell plating and inert stone. The thing was easily three tis his height.
He glanced at Varik. "Tell there’s only one."
Varik didn’t answer.
Lucen frowned. "There’s more, isn’t there?"
Varik straightened and finally spoke. "The system pinged that one as a Warden. There are always more than one."
Lucen flexed his fingers, then looked down at his interface.
[Mana: 61 / 120]
[Recovery: 2.6/sec]
[EXP Gained: 0]
He hadn’t earned anything. No assist XP. No spell bonus. The system knew he hadn’t actually helped.
He stared at the empty notification for a second.
Then looked back up.
"Next ti," he said, "let do the dramatic finisher. Just for morale."
Varik raised an eyebrow. "That would imply survival."
Lucen grinned faintly. "Let pretend."
The air around them pulsed again, faint, but sharper now. The zone was responding to their presence. Not with hostility.
With curiosity.
And sowhere deeper inside this forbidden stretch of space, sothing very old... began to stir.
Reviews
All reviews (0)