Chapter 60: Lokris
What Wore a Thousand Faces
Three hours passed.
Malrik sat with the map hovering in front of him. The red dot marking their position hadn’t moved. Behind him, the black sphere kept pulsing, slow and steady.
Eight Awakened souls before we reach the Marquisate.
If we push hard, ten hours minimum.
He rubbed a hand down his face.
"I got greedy," he said. "The second I saw that EP counter, I stopped thinking about surviving this forest and started thinking about getting a stronger soul faster."
Lilith didn’t look over from where she sat sharpening a dagger she didn’t need. "Is that a confession or an apology? I’m only interested in one of those."
"Neither. A complaint."
"Then complain faster. We already agreed we don’t have time to waste."
He didn’t argue with that.
The heartbeat stopped.
Not slowed. Stopped, mid-pulse, the sphere going still for a breath that lasted too long.
Then it split.
Black limbs punched outward through the surface, human-sized, tearing the sphere open from the inside. Malrik was on his feet before he realized he’d moved. Every one of his summoned souls tightened the ring around it at once.
What stepped out was smaller.
Smaller than the kneeling giant that had bowed to him an hour ago—reduced now to something close to his own height. A slim, smooth, featureless black frame that gave no sign of what it had been.
Smaller.
And far heavier to stand near.
The air around it felt heavier. Malrik’s pulse spiked before he understood why—something in him wanted to put distance between himself and whatever was still finishing its change.
Only the soul bond kept his feet where they were.
Without it, he was certain he’d already be backing away.
Four arms had become two. Where claws had scraped at the air a moment ago, two clean, human-shaped hands flexed at its sides now, each finger tipped with a curved black claw.
The three pale masks were gone.
In their place, a single mask of dark silver had settled where a face should have been, marked with lines too precise to be decoration. They looked more like a warning.
Text unrolled across Malrik’s vision.
[ Your Rare★★★★★ soul Lokris has evolved to Epic★ Identity Devourer. ] [ Lokris has successfully advanced to the Fallen Rank. ] [ Lokris has gained the skill "Black Shroud". ]
He blinked.
Read it again.
Fallen.
The word didn’t change no matter how many times his eyes passed over it.
"...Fallen?"
Malrik stood frozen in front of the notification, mind refusing to process what he was staring at.
He had no idea how this had happened.
Class evolution had always pushed a soul toward a race with higher ceilings, higher potential—a better shape to grow into. It had never once, in his experience, actually pushed a soul across a rank barrier. Higher potential wasn’t supposed to mean an instant promotion.
And yet here Lokris stood. Fallen rank. One evolution away from a Corrupted Morveth an hour ago.
Did the evolution do this on its own? Or did it just... feed the seed of whatever law Lokris already carried, and the law did the rest?
He didn’t have a clean answer. But he was ninety-nine percent certain of one thing—Infinite Evolution hadn’t dragged Lokris up a rank by brute force. It had accelerated something already sitting inside him, some dormant potential straining to break through on its own, and simply shoved it the rest of the way.
A short, disbelieving laugh escaped him.
"I got lucky." He shook his head. "Really lucky."
Lilith’s abilities had said as much before he’d even started the resurrection. One step from Fallen. If Lokris had actually crossed that line before dying in the clearing, the soul would have been too far above him to bind at all—out of reach, gone the second Malrik tried to reach for it. But it hadn’t crossed yet. It had died Awakened, contract still within range, sealed the instant Malrik’s mana closed around it.
And now, whatever it had become since—stronger, faster, wearing a rank that would make most Awakeners quietly reconsider their life choices—didn’t matter.
A Soul Contract wasn’t a leash that could be outgrown. It was permanent. Eternal, unless the one holding it chose to let go.
Which means no matter how strong Lokris gets from here, he thought, he can’t touch me. Not unless I decide to cut the cord myself.
The excitement crept back in, sharp and electric, chasing the fear out of his chest. He pulled up Lokris’s full status window.
The first thing that caught his eye wasn’t the rank. It was the race listed above it.
[ Identity Devourer ]
He’d never heard the name before in his life—not in either one of them. Curiosity won out over caution, and he opened the description.
Description: Long before the rise of the current civilizations, there existed a race whose very existence erased the meaning of identity. They walked among kings as loyal subjects... Among saints as faithful disciples... Among monsters as their own kin. No eye could uncover them. No oath could expose them. No bloodline could distinguish them. Every face could be theirs. Every voice could belong to them. As fear spread across the world, suspicion consumed every race. Kingdoms collapsed from within. Empires turned their blades upon themselves. Wars were no longer fought against enemies... ...but against doubt itself. Unable to determine friend from foe, the ancient races abandoned thousands of years of hatred and forged the first united alliance in history. Its sole purpose... The extinction of the Identity Devourers. Their cities vanished. Their history was erased. Their names were forbidden. Today... Only a handful remain, wandering a world that has long forgotten their existence.
Malrik stared at the last line for a long moment.
Then he started laughing.
Quiet at first, then harder, one hand dragging down his face. "Every civilized race on this planet once put aside a few thousand years of mutual hatred just to make sure this thing went extinct." He shook his head. "And I just resurrected one. Personally. On purpose."
"You have a gift," Lilith said dryly, not even glancing up from her dagger, "for making terrible decisions sound like accomplishments."
"I contain multitudes."
He pulled up Lokris’s full page.
[ Name: Lokris ] [ Rank: Fallen ] [ Level: 1 ] [ Potential: Epic ★ ] [ Law Seed: Shapeless ] [ Law Rank: High Law ] [ Skills: The Silent Observer, Impostor, Black Shroud ]
His eyes caught on a line that hadn’t existed the last time he’d checked.
Law Seed.
He knew Laws surfaced the moment someone crossed into Ascended or Fallen rank—every trained soldier and half-competent scholar in this world knew that much. What he didn’t have was the faintest idea how to actually use one, or what "High Law" was even supposed to mean on a practical level.
Later, he decided, filing the Law Seed away for whenever he had the luxury of a calm afternoon and nothing trying to kill him. He moved to the skills instead.
[ Skill: The Silent Observer ] Description: The user silently observes and records the existence of a target. The recorded information includes the target’s appearance, physical structure, racial traits, mana flow, and abilities. The longer the observation, the more complete the record becomes.
An analytical skill. Made sense on paper—except he’d never actually seen Lokris use anything like it during the fight. Needs time, he thought. Sustained observation. Not something you can pull off mid-swing.
He opened the second skill.
[ Epic Skill: Impostor ] Description: The user assumes the identity of a target recorded by The Silent Observer. The copied identity includes the target’s appearance, physical structure, racial traits, and recorded abilities. The power of all reproduced abilities is limited by the user’s current rank. The user cannot perfectly reproduce abilities that exceed the user’s current rank.
Malrik sat back slowly.
The two skills weren’t separate tools. They were one machine, built in two pieces. Watch first. Become second.
And then the rest of the fight rearranged itself in his memory, click by click, into something a lot more deliberate than he’d given it credit for at the time.
Lokris hadn’t sent his subordinates out first because he’d been cautious.
He’d sent them out to buy time—cannon fodder, thrown at the Spider Queen and Lilith specifically so their real master could sit back and watch, recording every twitch of muscle and thread of mana the two of them gave away in the process of winning.
"That’s genuinely disgusting," Malrik muttered, equal parts appalled and impressed. "He sacrificed his own followers just to get a longer look at the strongest two people on our side."
One piece still didn’t fit, though.
The Hybrid hadn’t just copied the Spider Queen. It hadn’t just copied Lilith. It had worn both at once, blended into something that was neither and somehow both—web and illusion stitched into a single stolen shape.
Impostor doesn’t say anything about combining two identities into one.
Unless that’s not Impostor at all. Unless that’s the Law. Shapeless.
He didn’t have an answer yet. He filed that question next to the first one and kept moving, down to the last skill—the one he hadn’t seen until this exact evolution had handed it over.
[ Skill: Black Shroud ] Description: Transforms into living black matter capable of enveloping its master’s body as a living armor that can freely assume any shape. While Black Shroud is active, the master gains complete access to all of Lokris’s original racial abilities and skills. During the merge, all of the master’s attributes are doubled.
Malrik read it once.
Then again.
Then he simply stood there, frozen, the words refusing to finish landing.