Chapter 86: Land of Null
The end of the battle was unlike anything the adventurers could have prepared for. More than half of the knights died in the confrontation, refusing to allow themselves to be disgraced by monsters.
The few that remained realized that their lives were worth far more than the fight they were currently in, and so they fled, along with the adventurers who remained. They had no reason to be here, where the odds were stacked heavily against them. They were all low-ranked adventurers with a lot to lose, so this was not worth it.
The settlement remained safe, but it was only a matter of time before someone came again. Until then, they had won the victory.
[....]
Ren rushed back to the cave at full speed, his eyes locked on the system notification running in his peripheral vision.
The counter was at ten minutes and dropping.
He clicked his tongue and cursed under his breath, not breaking stride.
"Can’t believe it gave me ten minutes only" he muttered.
He hit the cave entrance and went in fast, moving through the main chamber and deeper.
Remu noticed him first.
Then Ragna. Then Ezra. All three of them reading his pace and his expression before he said anything, and all three of them moving to intercept with the instinct of people who had learned that when their master moved like that, something significant was happening.
Ren stopped and turned to face them.
"I am going to evolve again," he said. "Right now. I do not know how long it is going to take, or what it is going to look like while it is happening." He looked at each of them in turn. "I need you to run things while I am out. Keep everyone safe. Keep the settlement running. If anything comes for us while I am down, handle it."
The three of them went still.
Remu was the first to recover, and even his recovery took a moment longer than usual, the weight of what Ren had said settling.
Ragna said nothing, but the look on his face carried everything. His master had only recently finished tearing apart a squad of royal knights, had fought a Tempest to a standstill, and was now telling them he was about to become something beyond even that.
Ezra looked at him with wide eyes that she brought under control a breath later.
All three of them bowed their heads simultaneously.
"We will protect everything," Remu said. "You have our word."
Ren looked at them for a moment.
"Good," he said simply, and turned toward the back of the cave.
He walked to the furthest section, the deepest point, and shifted.
The Sovereign Shell dissolved, and the dragon came back in its full form, his size expanding outward until he filled the back of the cave completely, his wings folded tight against his body, his tail curled around himself, his head coming to rest on the cave floor with the weight of sixteen feet of Chaos Devouring Dragon settling into stillness.
He watched the counter in his peripheral vision.
Three minutes.
Two.
One.
Zero.
[Evolution Trial Beginning]
[Consciousness transfer initiated]
The pull came before he finished reading it, something enormous and directionless wrapping around his awareness and yanking, not painful but total, the kind of force that did not negotiate with what it was pulling. The cave, the settlement, Remu and Ragna and Ezra, and everything that had been real a moment ago dissolved into nothing, and the nothing that replaced it was complete.
Then he opened his eyes.
The sky above him was wrong.
Not dark in the way of night, but dark in the way of something blocking the light entirely, thick clouds and smoke layered so densely that no point of brightness existed anywhere above him. The ground beneath him was bare and cracked, its surface split into irregular sections by a drought so deep that the earth had given up trying to hold itself together.
The smell reached him a moment later, and he understood immediately why his lungs registered it as a warning, the particularly heavy scent of death accumulated over a long time in a place that had seen a great deal of it.
He straightened up and looked around.
[Welcome to the Land of Null]
[Your evolution trial will begin shortly]
He read it and looked out at the landscape stretching in every direction, desolate and still, with nothing moving anywhere he could see.
Then something at the far edge of his vision caught his attention.
A mountain.
It rose in the distance, the only vertical thing in a landscape that had nothing else standing, and the moment his eyes found it, something in his chest responded, a pull that had no obvious source, the sensation of being drawn toward something.
The system activated again.
[Objective: Free the being at the top of the mountain]
Then it went silent.
Ren looked at the mountain.
Looked at the distance between where he was standing and where it was.
Then the ground around him began to move.
Not the earth shifting the way it did under the Earth Knight’s ability, but something breaking through it, multiple somethings, pushing up from beneath the cracked surface in sequence, the ground splitting and crumbling around each emergence point as the shapes forced themselves through.
They were dragons.
Or close enough to dragons that the distinction required a second look. No wings. Their forelimbs were heavy and low, built for running rather than reaching, the kind of limbs that drove into the ground with each stride and pushed everything else forward.
Their scales were not the glossy, layered kind that Ren carried but something closer to rock itself, thick and overlapping and so dense that the word armor felt inadequate for it. Their bodies were broader than anything that needed to move fast, built for the kind of collision that ended things rather than the kind that outlasted them.
They pulled themselves out of the ground one after another, shaking debris from their backs, and arranged themselves in the space around him without communication, their eyes settling on him with attention.
Ren counted them.
Looked at the mountain in the distance.
Looked back at them.
"Well," he said. "This is shit. I’m about to get fucked."