Chapter 105: Do You Wish To Become Stronger?
The group pushed deeper into the Tomb for hours, and the ruins kept changing shape the further they went.
First came collapsed towers and drifting sand. Then came water, an underground sea lit from below by something that pulsed like a heartbeat. Then came stairs, endless stairs, carved into a cliff face that shouldn’t have existed inside a door.
Elowen counted the steps under her breath for a while, gave up somewhere past four hundred, and settled for muttering about architects with more ambition than sense.
"Not everything here was built to be lived in," she said. "Some of it was built to be survived."
"Comforting," Isolde said.
Somewhere around the fourth hour, Tom went rigid on Aidan’s shoulder again.
[Tom: Big thread. Very big. Down there.]
He pointed a paw at a crack in the cliff wall, barely wide enough for one person to slip through sideways.
"Course it’s the tiny scary crack," Aidan muttered. "Never the nice open door."
"Whatever it is, it should be worth it since Mr. Tom pointed at it." Ordun laughed.
...
The passage past the crack wasn’t a passage. It was a throat, narrow and dark, sloping downward into a vault that had been built to kill anyone who reached it.
The floor gave first.
Not all at once. A section under Veshan’s boots simply stopped being floor, and he dropped through into a lower chamber with a shout that cut off fast. Kyrsa went in after him without a second’s hesitation, chains already unspooling.
"Careful," Elowen called, already moving toward the gap. "The whole floor’s like this. I can feel it."
She was right. The stone here wasn’t stone at all, just an illusion layered over open air, and picking a safe path meant testing every step with power first and weight second.
They lost twenty minutes to it. Sella took a bad fall trying to catch Isolde, landing wrong on one shoulder with a crack that made everyone wince.
"I’m fine," Sella said, through her teeth, clearly not fine.
"You’re not," Ordun said, already pressing healing energy into her arm. "But we keep moving."
Past the false floor came the spores.
They bloomed out of cracks in the walls at the first vibration, fine grey dust that ate through Divine-rank armor plating like it was cloth if it sat too long. Beatrix caught a lungful before anyone could shout a warning, doubling over with a cough that brought up flecks of grey.
"Move," Aidan barked, and Wind answered him without needing to be asked twice, clearing a bubble of clean air around the whole group as they ran the gauntlet blind.
Nobody spoke while they ran. There wasn’t breath to spare for it, and every one of them had already learned the same lesson twice over in this Tomb: talking took air, and air was the one thing worth hoarding down here.
They made it through. Barely.
By the time the passage opened into the final chamber, everyone in the group was carrying something. A cracked rib. A burned hand. Solenne’s leg dragged slightly where a spore-tainted blade had grazed her thigh earlier and never quite stopped aching. Aidan himself had a gash along one forearm he hadn’t even felt land.
’Everyone’s paying for this one.’ He flexed the arm, testing it. ’Better make it worth it.’
The chamber’s guardian met them standing in the center of a room built entirely from black glass, a construct of stitched-together armor plates with no face at all, only a single burning slit where eyes should have been.
It didn’t roar. It didn’t monologue. It simply attacked, fast and silent, and the fight that followed cost them another twenty minutes and two more injuries before Aidan finally drove Winter’s Judgment through its chest and watched it crack into motionless dark shards.
Elowen took a glancing blow to the ribs that dropped her to one knee for a moment before Isolde hauled her back up. Ordun caught one of the construct’s swings on his spear and felt the shock of it rattle all the way up into his shoulder.
Nobody complained. There wasn’t time, and complaining wouldn’t have closed a single wound faster.
Past the guardian’s collapsed body, on a pedestal of the same black glass, sat the lamp.
It was small. Almost disappointingly small, for something that had cost this much to reach, plain brass with a single low flame burning inside it that never flickered, never guttered, never once behaved like a fire actually should.
[The Sundered Lantern. Top-tier Divine-rank.]
Aidan reached for it, and this time nothing yanked him back.
The moment his fingers closed around the handle, a voice arrived, old and quiet and entirely without malice.
[Do you wish to become stronger?]
Everyone in the group went still.
It was, Aidan thought, possibly the stupidest question anyone had ever asked a room full of Hunters standing bleeding at the bottom of an Origin Tomb. He almost laughed. Almost.
He glanced at Beatrix, then Solenne, then Elowen, then Ordun and the rest. Every single one of them gave the same answer back, tired and battered and entirely unhesitating.
"Yes," Aidan said, for all of them. "Obviously yes."
[Then good luck.]
Shadow poured out of the lamp before anyone could ask what that meant, fast and total, swallowing the black glass chamber and every person standing in it in a single breath.
...
When the dark let go, they were somewhere else entirely.
A palace stood before them, vast and broken, its towers snapped off mid-height and its walls scarred with old, deliberate violence. No light source anywhere, and yet Aidan could see every fractured spire clearly, like the darkness itself had decided to let them.
Nobody said anything for a long moment.
Isolde’s hand drifted toward her sword without her seeming to notice she’d moved it. Beatrix planted her feet the way she always did before a fight, out of pure habit rather than any visible threat yet.
’Well.’ Aidan rolled his shoulders, arm still aching, and looked up at the ruined towers. ’Guess we find out what "stronger" costs.’