Chapter 124: Back door into the dark
The pressure inside the narrow volcanic fissure was nothing like the open trench above. There, the ocean currents had swept and rolled in great, living rhythms, a constant push and pull that at least reminded a body it still belonged to the world. Here, the weight came from every direction at once. It pressed inward, thick and unyielding, heavy with the sulfurous stench of subterranean thermal vents that had never known the clean taste of open water. The air itself felt old, trapped, as though it had been held in the stone’s lungs for centuries and only now exhaled in slow, poisonous breaths.
Vince leaned his back against a jagged ledge of cooling basalt, the rock still faintly warm beneath his shoulders. His chest rose and fell in slow, deliberate cycles inside the soft emerald glow of Lyrielle’s wind-grid. The forced regression from his Man-Beast form had left a deep, bone-deep ache radiating through his marrow—an intimate, private agony that no amount of conditioning could fully mute. It felt as though every muscle had been stripped from his skeleton, stretched across some invisible frame, and then stitched back into place with rough, impatient hands. His human frame, absurdly conditioned though it was, remained locked in strict physical cooldown. Charging back into the amphitheater to tear through Nerissa’s inner guard was not an option. Not yet. The body demanded its price, and for the moment he could only pay it in silence and controlled breath.
Beside him, Vetra crouched low, her long reptilian tail coiled tightly around her ankles like a living spring held under tension. Her amber, slit pupils darted continuously toward the mouth of the fissure, tracking the distant, sweeping shafts of bioluminescent blue light as Nerissa’s search patrols began locking down the trench above. The faint thrum of their movements carried even through the stone—ordered, methodical, closing.
"Patrols are tight," Vetra growled in a low whisper, wiping a streak of black silt from her snout with the back of one clawed hand. The silt left a dark smear across her scales. "They aren’t just searching for us. They’re sealing the entire sector."
"Let them search," Vince replied, his voice rough and grit-laced. He rolled his broad shoulders, testing the recovery rate of the dense muscle fibers that still trembled with residual strain. "They’re hunting a black dragon-beast. They aren’t looking for three figures hiding in a crack in the stone."
Lyrielle floated a few inches off the uneven floor, her wind-shield casting a soft, steady green glow across the claustrophobic stone walls. The light caught the fine mineral dust that drifted in the still air, turning each mote into a tiny green star. She reached out, her fingers hovering near the rock face without quite touching it, as though the stone itself might answer if she listened closely enough.
"Vince," Lyrielle said. Her voice had lost its usual sarcastic edge, replaced by a sudden, sharp coldness that cut through the close air. "Look at the walls."
Vince turned his purple-eyed gaze toward the stone face. He activated his sensory perception, sharpening his sight through the gloom until the darkness peeled back in layers. What he saw settled into him with quiet certainty.
The fissure was no natural volcanic fault line.
The passage was too uniform. The floor, though cracked and buried beneath centuries of mineral deposits, had been leveled with mathematical precision. Spanning the height of the tunnel walls were deep, geometric grooves carved directly into the high-density basalt—vast, spiraling runes that stretched far down into the dark abyss, vanishing into shadow like the coils of something that had never finished dying.
"These aren’t natural," Vetra muttered, stepping closer to inspect a massive, three-foot-wide carving that resembled a weeping eye surrounded by coiled serpents. Her claws hovered just above the stone, not quite daring to touch. "And they weren’t cut by Vanguard chisels either. The stone was liquefied and molded."
Lyrielle traced the outer curve of the rune with a thread of her wind-mana. The green light slid along the ancient lines like water finding a familiar channel. Her dark eyes widened with recognition, and something colder than the trench’s pressure settled into her expression.
"These are Pre-Cataclysmic abyssal seals. I studied fragments of this script in the high archives of the canopy. This isn’t Nethros architecture." She paused, her breath catching slightly, the sound small and sharp inside the wind-sphere. "These markings are older than the current Nethros dynasty. Much older."
Vince stared down the sloping, ancient tunnel. The air drifting up from the depths did not carry the salt of the ocean. It carried an ancient, static dryness, as if a massive pocket of vacuum lay buried miles beneath the sea floor—air that had never known tide or current, only the long, patient dark.
A seal, Vince thought, his internal monologue sharpening as the pragmatic gears in his mind turned. The sirens aren’t just running a military empire from the throne room. They’re sitting on top of something. The question is... are they aware?
He raised his hand, tapping the air to bring up the translucent quest interface. He wanted only to check the remaining cooldown timer on his transformation—to measure how much longer the ache would own him.
Instead, his eyes narrowed into tight slits.
[ACTIVE WORLD QUEST: The Sovereign Transcendent Elixir — Final Phase]
[QUEST TARGET: Nerissa, Tide Caller of Nethros]
[TARGET LOCATION: UPDATING...]
A translucent purple compass needle floating in the center of the interface flickered violently. It did not point upward toward the dragon-skull throne room where Nerissa had ushered the abyssal nobles.
It tilted straight down.
The glowing crimson beacon pulsed steadily, locked onto a coordinate thousands of meters beneath their boots—directly at the end of the ancient, runic tunnel.
What the hell? Vince thought, a cold, calculating curiosity rising in his chest, sharp as a blade drawn in the dark.
"The marker shifted," Vince said aloud, his voice flat.
Vetra looked over, her brow furrowing. The amber of her eyes caught the green light and held it. "Shifted? To where?"
"Beneath us," Vince answered, pointing a claw-like human finger down the dark incline of the ancient passage. "The quest isn’t tracking Nerissa to her bedchambers or her war room. It’s pointing straight into the bottom of this trench."
Lyrielle looked from the glowing green aura of her wind-shield down into the pitch-black abyss of the tunnel. Her expression was deeply unsettled, the usual sharp edges of her composure softened by something closer to dread. "If the target is down there... then Nerissa didn’t retreat to hide from us. She retreated to defend whatever is locked at the end of this road."
Vince let out a low, grim chuckle. The dull ache in his bones was already fading, his body rapidly absorbing the cooldown phase as his baseline physical stats recalibrated. Strength returned in quiet increments—the familiar weight of power settling back into muscle and bone like a predator reclaiming its den.
He did not care what ancient horror or forgotten relic was sleeping in the dark beneath Nethros. The quest demanded the Tide Caller, and the final ingredient for the Sovereign Transcendent Elixir was waiting down that path. Everything else was secondary. Everything else could burn.
Vince cracked his knuckles, the sound echoing sharp and clear inside the wind-sphere.
"Looks like we found a possible back door," Vince growled, stepping past Lyrielle into the dark incline. The green light of the wind-shield stretched ahead of him, painting the first few meters of runic stone in soft emerald before the abyss swallowed the rest. "C’mon. Let’s see how deep this fissure goes."