Chapter 99. Carved From the Darkness Itself
For a fleeting second, Catherine’s lips curved into not quite a smile, but a ghost of one, a rare acknowledgment of the solidarity William offered.
But the moment evaporated as they crested the final rise overlooking the eastern training fields. The sight that met them was something out of a fever dream.
Below them, the earth didn’t just look damaged; it looked violated. The training grounds, once manicured and orderly, were now a scar across the landscape.
Massive fissures spiderwebbed through the grass; the ground buckled and twisted upward in grotesque, unnatural waves as if something enormous had been trying to claw its way out from beneath the crust.
The fading evening light cast long, distorted shadows across the devastation, making the cracks look like gaping black mouths waiting to swallow them whole.
"There," Catherine whispered, her voice barely audible over the rising wind.
She nodded toward the epicenter of the destruction.
They descended into the site with the practiced caution of veterans entering a minefield. William moved with a cold, analytical focus, his mind automatically switching to the grim protocols of battlefield forensics, the same mindset that had kept him alive in the blood-soaked trenches of his past life.
He cataloged every splintered rock, every unnatural angle of the displaced earth. Catherine took point, her sword held in a low guard, her boots crunching softly on the debris.
The tremor that had seized her in Albert’s office vanished, giving way to a coiled, lethal stillness. Her shoulders were tight, her muscles ready to explode into motion at the slightest provocation.
William knelt beside a particularly deep rent in the earth, where the soil had been torn apart in jagged strips.
"Nothing active right now," he muttered, his voice low and gravelly. "Whatever unleashed this fury... it’s not still feeding."
"This looks like residual damage, the aftermath of a catastrophic event that has already concluded."
"That’s not necessarily reassuring, William," Catherine said without turning. "A predator that has already eaten is often more dangerous than one that is still hunting... It’s settled... It’s comfortable."
"No," William agreed grimly. "It’s not."
He reached out, running his fingertips along the razor-sharp edge of a split stone. The moment his skin touched the rock, a jolt of something wrong shivered up his arm.
A faint, sickly sweet hum of leftover mana clung to the stone like radioactive decay. It was cold, unnaturally cold, and it carried a nauseating frequency that made his teeth ache.
’This feeling...’ Catherine thought, a bead of sweat rolling down her temple despite the chill. ’This is exactly what I felt in that corridor eight years ago...’
’That wrongness... That sense that reality itself has been bruised, torn open by something that shouldn’t exist in this world...’
"Can you tell how long ago this occurred?" Catherine asked.
She remained standing, her eyes scanning the treeline beyond the fields, her body swaying slightly with the rhythm of her breathing.
William straightened, wiping his hand on his trousers as if trying to scrub off the sensation. "Not precisely..."
"The mana signature is faint, bleeding out into the atmosphere... I’d say at least three or four days."
"Whoever did this wasn’t in a hurry." He glanced around the wider clearing, noting how the destruction seemed deliberate, almost ritualistic in its violence. "This wasn’t some panicked magical accident... This was controlled... and it felt like it was work."
He looked up at her, his jaw setting hard. "Which either means they’re confident enough to believe nobody’s hunting them, or they simply don’t give a damn if we find their footprints."
Catherine turned to face him, the fading sunlight catching the jagged planes of her face, making her look like a statue carved from grief and iron. "Neither option offers us any comfort."
"No," William said, his hand drifting to the hilt of his own blade as the shadows around them seemed to deepen and writhe. "It really doesn’t."
They worked their way around the perimeter of the site as the light began to die, the sky hemorrhaging gold before bruising into a deep, sickly purple. The shadows stretched across the buckled earth like grasping fingers.
In that quiet, liminal stretch just beyond the primary fissures, where a cluster of ancient, gnarled trees marked the boundary of the training fields, the atmosphere curdled.
William felt it before his eyes could register a threat: a sudden, nauseating drop in pressure, the kind that makes your ears pop and your stomach twist. It was the same preternatural stillness he had experienced just before the Reaver’s arrival, a silence so absolute it felt like being buried alive.
The insects that had been chittering in the underbrush vanished mid-note. Even the wind seemed to die in terror, leaving the ancient trees standing like skeletal sentinels, motionless despite the cold air that continued to ripple across the open field.
Beside him, Catherine went rigid. Her breathing became shallow and controlled, but William could see the minute tremors running through her thighs.
Her sword rose instinctively into a high guard, the steel gleaming dully in the twilight.
"William," she whispered.
Her voice was a thread of frayed wire, low and dangerously tight. "Something’s here... Something’s... wrong."
"I know," William replied, his own hand closing around the hilt of his weapon.
His pulse was a hammer against his ribs. "Don’t panic... Don’t let the adrenaline spike too early, and... stay focused."
Then, the reality of the situation shifted. The figure didn’t approach; he simply existed.
One moment there was only shadow and twisted bark; the next, a man stood at the treeline as if he had been carved from the darkness itself. He wore a heavy, midnight-colored cloak that seemed to swallow the remaining light, and a smooth, featureless mask concealed his face, reflecting nothing.
He stood with a terrifying, casual stillness, the posture of a man who knew he was the apex predator in the room.
"Still alive, it seems," the masked figure said.
His voice wasn’t human; it was a cold, mocking rasp that sliced through the silence like a scalpel through flesh. "White Sword."
The title hit Catherine with the force of a physical assault. William watched her flinch, her entire body convulsing with a microscopic spasm of terror.
’No...! Not this... Not now!’ Catherine’s mind screamed.
The walls of her skull felt like they were closing in. ’White Sword... That name... that curse...’
’It smells like copper and burnt flesh... It smells like the screams of my squad echoing off the dungeon walls...’
’Why is he here? Why did he find me?’
’I buried that person eight years ago... I killed her in that tomb so I could live... I killed her...!’
"I assumed your guilt would have finished the job the mountain failed to," the man continued, tilting his head with a slow, theatrical contempt. "How disappointing to find you still breathing... and still playing at being a soldier after everything your cowardice cost, it seems."
’Cowardice.’ The word tore through Catherine’s psyche.
Her inner monologue became a cacophony of self-loathing. ’Coward... You ran while they died...’
’You ran while the blood pooled around your boots...’
’You left them to rot in the dark while you crawled back to the light...’
’He knows... He sees through the armor, and... he sees the corpse I’m pretending to be...
Her knuckles turned white around the hilt of her sword. The metal creaked under the pressure of her grip.
When she finally spoke, her voice was sharp enough to draw blood, though William could hear the devastating fracture beneath the bravado, the sound of a woman standing on the edge of a complete psychotic break.
"I thought your own guilt would have killed you first," she spat, each word dragged out through clenched teeth.
"Apparently monsters don’t feel enough to die from it."