Chapter 108: Broken Palace Expedition
The palace’s gates hung open on broken hinges, and the group crossed the threshold together, Jovan and Finn walking manifest at Aidan’s flanks for the first time since Earth.
Inside, the halls stretched dark and endless, floors cracked into rivers of old violence. Whatever war had broken this place had burned hot enough to fuse stone into glass in patches, and nobody stepped on those patches twice.
They found the first prize an hour in, a Divine-rank artifact resting inside a collapsed vault, a small mirror framed in tarnished silver.
[The Widow’s Mirror. Divine-rank.]
"Not bad," Elowen said, turning it carefully in her hands. "Two effects. One is passive, capable of destroying all illusions and fakes. The other is active, capable of storing two attacks of Divine-rank and lower."
They kept moving, and the palace kept trying to kill them for it.
A hallway floor dissolved into acid mist without warning, and Sella barely hauled Kyrsa back before her boots dipped in. A collapsing archway nearly buried Veshan whole, stopped only by Isolde’s raised wall of gold flame. Twice they backtracked entirely rather than risk a passage that felt wrong.
Then they found the shield.
[Bulwark of the Sundered Throne. Divine-rank.]
It sat propped against a headless statue, dented and scarred, clearly having failed whoever carried it last. Ordun claimed it without much ceremony, testing its weight against his spear arm.
"Someone died holding this," he said.
"Probably," Aidan agreed. "Try not to repeat their mistake."
...
The first Wraiths found them in a hall lined with broken pillars, three shapes of solid black smoke peeling off the walls at once, no faces, no sound, just hunger given shape.
Veshan met the nearest one head on, fist crashing into its center with all his considerable strength.
His fist passed straight through.
"What," Veshan said, staring at his own arm buried wrist-deep in something that felt like nothing at all.
The Wraith answered by reaching back through his guard, and its claw found his shoulder before he could pull free. He screamed, a short, sharp sound cut off fast, and the flesh where it touched him blackened instantly, like frost eating a leaf.
"Physical doesn’t work!" Aidan shouted, already moving. "Get clear!"
A second Wraith lunged for Kyrsa, and her chains passed through it exactly the way Veshan’s fist had, doing nothing at all. She barely twisted aside in time, the claw missing her ribs by a hand’s width.
"Jovan!"
Black-gold power answered instantly, misfortune weaving into a solid dome that snapped shut around the whole group a half second before the third Wraith reached them. Its claw hit the barrier and simply couldn’t pass, the smoke recoiling like it had touched something that argued back.
"That buys us a minute," Jovan said, strain already threading his voice. "Maybe less."
"A minute’s plenty." Aidan grinned, lightning already crawling up both arms. "Anrita. Finn. With me."
The barrier dropped, and the three of them answered together.
Anrita moved first, faster than anything organic had a right to, lightning arcing off her fingertips in precise, calculated bursts that found the first Wraith dead center and tore straight through it, the smoke shrieking as it came apart.
Finn’s scales lit next, aurora fire rolling off in a wave that caught the second Wraith broadside, and it didn’t just burn, it unraveled, axioms overwriting whatever held its shape together.
Aidan took the third himself, Thunder Blitz Lord crackling across his knuckles, and where his fist had once passed harmlessly through a Wraith, this time it didn’t. Lightning bit into the smoke and held on, and the creature came apart screaming in a way none of them had heard it manage before.
Solenne caught the edge of it too, shadow threading off her own arms into the dying Wraith’s collapse, Infernal Shadow Ranger finding purchase where fire and steel had failed.
Silence settled over the hall.
Veshan sat against a pillar, shoulder blackened and smoking, Isolde already pressing healing energy into the wound with visible worry on her face.
"Lightning. Shadow." Elowen crouched beside the wound, studying it. "Or pure spirit energy, unshaped. Nothing else touches them at all."
"Good thing three of us qualify," Aidan said, though his own hands hadn’t quite stopped shaking from the strike.
...
The second encounter came two hours later, in a throne room stripped bare except for a single dead tree growing straight up through the cracked floor, and this time five Wraiths dropped from the ceiling at once.
The group had learned the lesson, at least. Ordun and Sella and Beatrix didn’t waste time swinging steel that wouldn’t land.
Instead they funneled Spirit Energy directly into their own techniques, raw and unshaped, Beatrix’s Cerulean War Requiem answering with a pulse of pure spirit-force that staggered a Wraith even without killing it, buying room for the others to finish what she’d started.
It wasn’t enough room.
A Wraith broke from the pack and came in low and fast behind Solenne, claw already extended toward her exposed back while she was mid-strike against another target entirely, too committed to turn in time.
Finn saw it first.
The little fish shot sideways in a blur, scales flaring bright directly beside her shoulder, and unleashed a bolt of destructive aurora lightning point-blank into the Wraith’s reaching claw. The creature didn’t even finish its lunge. It simply came apart mid-motion, dissolving into smoking ash a hand’s width from Solenne’s spine.
She spun, saw how close it had been, and didn’t have time to process it before the next Wraith arrived.
"Thanks," she managed anyway, breathless.
[Finn: DON’T GET CLAWED. I ONLY HAVE TWO HANDS AND THEY’RE FINS.]
The fight sprawled out fast and vicious after that. Anrita cut down one Wraith with a precise lance of lightning through its center, then took a glancing claw across her forearm for her trouble, sparks spitting from the wound instead of blood.
Jovan’s barrier flickered up twice more, buying seconds each time, his strain climbing visibly with every use.
Aidan caught a claw across his ribs that he didn’t dodge in time, agony flooding cold and total through the wound, and answered with a Fist of Judgement that ended its owner before the pain finished registering.
By the time the fifth Wraith dissolved under a combined strike from Aidan and Finn together, the whole group stood breathing hard, bloodied and scorched and very much alive.
Isolde worked frantically between Veshan’s shoulder, Aidan’s ribs, and Anrita’s smoking forearm, healing energy stretched thin across three wounds at once.
"Nobody died," she said, half question, half disbelief.
"Nobody died," Aidan confirmed, wincing as his ribs finally started to knit. "Close, though."
...
Past the throne room, in a small garden chamber untouched by whatever war had ended this place, a single plant grew alone under a shaft of impossible light, and at its center sat one seed, pale and glowing faintly gold.
[Virident Chaos Seed. Special-rank.]
"Special-rank," Elowen said slowly, staring at the designation. "Not Legendary. Not Divine. I’ve never seen that classification."
"What does it mean?" Isolde asked.
"It means," Elowen said, "that whatever this seed is, it doesn’t belong to the same ladder the rest of us climb."
Aidan reached out and closed his hand around it, feeling something patient and ancient settle into his palm, before sending it into his Inventory.
’Well.’ He allowed himself a tired grin, blood still drying on his ribs. ’Guess we’ll find out what that means the hard way. Same as everything else in here.’