Chapter 216: The Fallen Angel
A faint sound echoed through the area, almost like a creak, but deeper, and it came, without a doubt, from the door itself, as it began to tremble.
A small crack appeared in the middle of the massive door before it slowly began to widen, but no one had time to even look toward it, because in that exact instant, a crushing pressure slammed down over the entire space.
Almost immediately, the two members of Elena’s group felt their legs give out. Before they could even react, they lost consciousness and collapsed to the ground.
Elena, standing right beside them, didn’t have time to worry about her companions, because she too felt a sudden, violent sense of danger coming from the door, not an immediate physical threat, but something else entirely. It was as if something inside her was reacting violently to whatever lay beyond that door.
She felt an icy sensation cut through her very soul, while for some reason she sensed death drawing closer and closer.
’What the hell is happening?!’ she screamed internally, fighting with everything she had to keep her own consciousness from slipping away, but she was losing. Her grip on her own senses was growing fainter by the second.
The light in her eyes dimmed, and just as she too was about to collapse, a gentle touch seemed to reach her, not physical, something else entirely. She suddenly felt a sensation of warmth begin to spread through her body, revitalizing it, while that feeling of death she’d been sensing began to weaken.
In an instant, she went from the verge of collapsing to being completely fine.
Her weakened senses returned at once, and she saw her own body wrapped in a pale yellow energy that formed an outer layer, shielding her from whatever had struck her.
She understood immediately what it was, the same energy that had kept her from dying under the strange influence of this city.
Her gaze immediately shifted to the two members lying on the ground, and she saw that they too were now wrapped in it, still unconscious but breathing normally now. Then her gaze shifted forward, and she saw the woman behind this energy, but she wasn’t looking toward them at all. No, she was already moving further ahead, the massive door, now split into two halves, nearly fully open.
The terrifying girl who had been the first to step through seemed to have already gone in, and now the woman who had brought them into this castle was doing the same.
Elena didn’t move as she watched her go in, and for a moment she just stood there, as if deciding what to do. Eventually she seemed to make up her mind, and with a step forward, she moved to enter as well.
The moment she stepped inside, she immediately noticed that the place was dark.
It was vast, yet almost completely swallowed by darkness. She could barely make out her surroundings, but she could tell that it was a massive circular hall.
She didn’t pay much more attention to any of that, though, not because she didn’t want to, but because something else immediately seized her attention.
’What in the world...’
Her heart seemed to stop as her eyes went wide with shock and terror, her gaze locked on the center of the chamber.
That was the only part of the place that wasn’t dark, or at least, not entirely.
There was a source of light there. Not an object. Not a flame. No, the source in question was a figure, one she could now see clearly but couldn’t understand how it had escaped her notice even for a moment.
That was because the figure was enormous, at least ten meters tall, humanoid, feminine, kneeling on the ground while her body remained motionless in place, bound by countless dark chains, not physical in appearance, more as though they were made of living shadow, chains that emerged from countless points throughout the chamber, all converging on her, binding her hands, her torso, and even her neck.
Behind her, three pairs of white wings spread out, frozen in place, each one pierced clean through by those same shadowy chains.
She looked, in every sense of the word, like a fallen angel, kneeling on the ground and bound in chains. Not a single breath, not a single tremor. The entire figure looked like something that had been lifeless for an unimaginable span of time, a body held in that position only by the rigid will of the chains, not by its own.
At the center of her chest, right where her heart should have been, an enormous dark sword pierced her clean through, a blade forged, from the look of it, not from metal but from something closer to solidified shadow, shadow that pulsed with an aura of death so dense it seemed almost visible, thickening in the air itself.
And it was that exact same aura of death that Elena had felt the moment the door had opened.
The scene before her was the kind of thing that would have made anyone’s eyes go wide in shock, both for how terrifying and how brutal the whole sight was, but none of that was what struck her with horror.
’Wait, w-why is she...’
Her breath caught in her throat for a brief moment.
Her thoughts grew harder and harder to hold together as her eyes settled on the motionless face of the massive feminine figure.
Those features, delicate, fine, yet almost divinely perfect, giving her an angelic appearance, she had seen them somewhere before.
Her vision wavered for a moment as it dropped down toward the woman standing before her, who in the middle of her shock, had already moved closer alongside the terrifying girl, right up to the enormous figure.
Her expression at this point was complicated, because that enormous figure looked exactly like the woman standing in front of her.
No, she didn’t just look like her.
It was her.