Chapter 58: The First Step Into Our Hell
I surfaced slowly, in a gentle warmth, with the feeling of being held.
Something soft against my cheek. A scent I knew by heart. Fingers running through my hair over and over, patient, steady, as if it had been going on for a while already.
I opened my eyes and jolted upright.
My head had been resting on Alice’s lap, her face leaning over mine, close enough that I could feel her breath. She was smiling at me, that smile she kept only for me, the one that would have melted anyone.
"Morning, sleepyhead~"
I sat up all at once and looked around.
This wasn’t the white hall anymore. No more display stands, no more glass domes, no more light coming from nowhere — I was back in the tower’s entrance hall, the one the seven of us had arrived in before the trial, with its grey stone and its columns too tall to see the tops of.
With one difference.
At the far end of the room, where there had been nothing but bare wall the last time, an immense staircase climbed into the dark, wide enough for an army to march up abreast, its steps disappearing into a black that no light reached into.
The second floor.
I got to my feet, propping myself on one hand, and in the motion, without really meaning to, I moved away from Alice. Nothing abrupt. Just a little space, the time it took to stand, the natural drift of someone waking up.
Except there was nothing natural about it, and I knew it.
Her fingers, left hanging in the air where my head no longer was, closed gently on nothing before dropping back to her lap. Her smile didn’t shift a millimeter.
But it didn’t reach her eyes.
"Took your sweet time, man."
Leon, leaning against a column, gave me a look that was half amused and half tired. The others were there too, scattered around the hall — Gabriel sitting on a step, Evelyn standing beside him, Yanshu checking the edge of his blades, Seorin off to one side.
"We’ve been out of there a while," Leon went on. "So, what did you take?"
Damn it.
I froze.
I’d fallen asleep. I’d stretched out in the middle of an aisle with mythic relics within arm’s reach and I’d fallen asleep, and judging by the fact that I was here and not there, someone or something had decided in my place.
I looked down at my hands.
There was a ring on my right index finger. Dull metal, neither gold nor silver, without a single engraving, the kind of thing you’d find at the back of a drawer and pay no attention to. I’d never seen it before in my life.
The window opened the moment I looked at it.
[ ??? — ??? ]
??? Effects: ??? Activation condition: ???
I stared at that for a long moment.
Seriously?
A mysterious ring with unknown effects, obtained by pure chance because the hero had dozed off in the wrong place. Cliché stacked on cliché. If I’d read that in one of the novels I used to write, I’d have left a scathing comment underneath.
That said.
In those same stories, it was precisely this kind of object that ended up toppling empires. The dull thing with no description that nobody understands for two hundred Chapters and that turns out to be the linchpin of the whole narrative. I’d pulled that thread more than once myself, and I knew exactly what it was worth.
What bothered me was the rest of it.
Because it took a strange run of coincidences to get here. I fall asleep. There happened to be a time limit nobody had told me about. The draw is random. And chance hands me precisely the most intriguing object in the entire hall, the one the tower itself seems incapable of naming.
That’s a lot, for chance.
Two arms closed around my chest.
Alice had pressed herself against my back, her cheek to my shoulder blade, and I felt her whole body lean into mine with that soft insistence she had whenever she wanted something.
"Look what I got~"
She swept her white hair aside with one hand and tilted her head to show me her ear.
An earring hung there, a fine ring of tarnished gold with a drop of amber suspended from it, no bigger than a pea, and inside the amber something moved — a filament of bluish light turning slowly on itself, never once stopping.
[ Tear of Theos — Mythic ]
A drop of amber that fell from the sky the day a storm god lost a son, and in which a bolt of lightning has remained trapped without ever going out. +50% mana, +50% intelligence, and grants [Verdict of the Sky] (active): the bearer may designate a target and pronounce its sentence; the imprisoned bolt is then released and strikes that target wherever it stands, with nothing material able to come between them. The amber takes a year to fill again.
I read the line over.
Fifty and fifty, and a bolt that goes through anything.
Alice already had a mana pool that bordered on an abyss, the ability to recharge in a loop, and a striking power that had made my head spin more than once when I looked at her through the Eye. Multiply that by one and a half. Add a blow that can’t be blocked.
"Well?" She tipped her chin up at me, eyes bright. "It suits me, doesn’t it~?"
There’s a version of me that would have known what to say. That would have complimented her properly, said something about her hair or the amber against her skin, seen what she was waiting for and given it to her.
Except that in that white hall I’d spent hours turning a question over from every angle until I drew a conclusion from it, and that conclusion was still there, crouched somewhere behind my ribs, and it changed the way I looked at her.
"It’s beautiful," I said. "It suits you."
It was true. It was even sincere.
But it was flat, and I heard it at the same moment she did.
Her arms stayed locked around me. Her smile didn’t move. Only something passed through those red eyes, a tiny contraction, and I felt her fingers tighten on my tunic before easing off again.
"Thank you~"
She doesn’t know what it is, but she’s understood there’s something.
"Kuro."
Seorin had stepped forward.
She’d gone back to her usual bearing, straight-backed, both katanas at her belt, her black hair pulled back, and there was nothing left on her of all the blood she’d shed back there. Nothing at all. As if none of those deaths had ever happened.
"I’m not going up with you."
The others turned toward her.
"What do you mean, you’re not going up?" Gabriel rose from his step. "We did the first floor together, we—"
"My kingdom is in the hands of someone who shouldn’t have it," she cut in, with that calm she never lost. "The eighth hero, Lucas Pierce, has taken Norelia, and he’s holding people I know by threads they can’t even see. I can’t keep climbing floors knowing that."
A silence fell over the hall.
"So I’m counting on you to clear this tower in my place," she added, looking at each of them in turn. "Climb as high as you can and do your best, because whatever you find up there will end up serving all of us."
"We’ll manage it," Gabriel answered after a moment. "You handle your kingdom, we’ll handle the rest."
"Thank you for everything you did back there," Evelyn added. "Without you we’d still be running that loop over and over."
The others nodded, each in their own way — Yanshu with a bow from the waist, Leon with a wave of the hand — and Seorin returned their farewells with that same unshakable calm.
Then she came over to me.
"Thank you," she said, more quietly. "For everything you did down there. Without you, none of us would be here."
And she leaned in and put her lips to my cheek.
Her hand had come to rest lightly on my arm for balance, and I felt the warmth of her mouth against my skin, then the cold when she drew away.
"I’m glad I met you," she said, looking at me. "Truly. Far more than anything the tower could have given me."
I stood there like an idiot for a moment.
Then it all came back at once — the white hall, the hours spent turning that question over, what I’d concluded and what it implied, and above all of it, the very distinct sensation of two red eyes planted in my back.
I put my hands on Seorin’s shoulders and eased her back.
"Seorin—"
Too late.
The air changed.
First a smell, that dry metallic smell that comes before a storm, and then the hair rose on the back of my neck. The columns began to vibrate. A stone tore loose from the floor three meters away and hung there before dropping.
Damn, it’s that bad.
I turned around.
Alice stood in the middle of the hall, and she didn’t quite look like Alice anymore.
Her white hair floated around her, lifted by a wind that didn’t exist, snaking through the air like living things. Blue arcs ran along her arms, over her shoulders, jumping from one strand to the next with a crackle. The floor was cracking beneath her feet in a star pattern.
And her eyes — her eyes weren’t red anymore. They were full of electricity, saturated with white light, two blinding points in a face that was still smiling.
Because she was smiling. That was the worst of it.
The others had gone still. Yanshu had a hand on his scabbard. Evelyn had taken a step back without realizing it.
"Alice." I took a step toward her, hands open, plainly visible. "Alice, listen to me."
Another step. The heat was becoming unbearable, the air itself seemed to sizzle, and every hair on my arms was standing up.
"It’s nothing at all, all right? It’s nothing. Look at me."
I reached toward her cheek.
CLIIIIIIIIIIII—
A high, immense whine that filled my whole skull and erased the rest of the world.
My brain went somewhere else. There was no more hall, no more floor, no up and no down, just that white screaming in my ears and the absurd sensation of floating — and somewhere in the middle of it, very far off, the detached observation that I was flying across the hall.
BAAAM.
The tower wall caught me.
The stone gave behind me with a crash, my lungs emptied all at once, and I hung embedded there before sliding down to the floor.
I coughed. A thread of blood ran down my chin, which I wiped away with the back of my hand.
Through the ringing, I heard blades leaving their sheaths. Seorin, who had turned back, already had a hand on one katana. Gabriel had set himself, his skin turning to dark stone. Yanshu was advancing.
"NO!"
My voice scraped in my throat, but it carried.
They stopped.
In the middle of the hall, Alice was disappearing beneath the electricity. Arcs were pouring off her continuously now, gutting the floor, biting into the columns, leaving black streaks across the grey stone. The roar covered almost everything.
I got up, one hand on my ribs, and looked at her.
Then I turned my head toward Seorin.
"SEORIN, DON’T TURN BACK!" I had to shout to cut through the noise. "You have a country to save, do you hear me? Go! I’ve got this!"
She hesitated, her hand tight on the grip, then something passed across her face — understanding, maybe, or regret. She nodded and stepped back.
I turned to the others.
"Let me handle this! Go up!"
"But—" Evelyn gestured toward Alice, her face tight. "Kuro, she’s going to—"
"Please." I met her eyes. "This is between us. It never concerned anyone else."
They looked at one another. Gabriel was the first to lower his guard, his stone shell receding under his skin, and he nodded slowly before heading for the staircase. Leon followed. Yanshu sheathed his blades, gave me a brief sign, and went after them. Evelyn lingered a little longer, then gave up and fell in behind the others.
And there was no one left in that collapsing hall but her and me.
I walked forward a few paces and set my stance, arms at my sides.
I didn’t draw.
Naia and Laia stayed where they were, and I kept my hands open and plainly visible, because the one thing in this world not to do at that moment was give her any reason to believe I was against her.
"I take it," I said, "that you don’t want to just talk anymore?"
She didn’t answer.
She was looking at me, and beneath that white light devouring her eyes, two drops slid down her cheeks and evaporated before they reached her chin, swallowed by the electricity covering her.
Then she raised her hand.
And a bolt of lightning came down on me.