Chapter 34: Genesis

Thud!

A violent blast tore through the space behind them the instant they turned to retreat. What had been the exit doors moments ago now lay in ruin, the opening buried under collapsed stone and debris.

The Murks had done it, tearing the exits apart with brutal efficiency, and the guests who’d been scrambling to flee found themselves with nowhere left to run, reduced to darting and dodging inside what had become, for all purposes, a cage.

Only one way out remained: the sheer drop over the tower’s open edge, a fall that would kill anyone without real power the instant they took it.

"Damn it. Why can’t you just fly us out of here, Kai?"

Rhaiven’s voice had cracked with something close to panic, cornered along with everyone else. His logic wasn’t unreasonable, either, they stood at the top of an open tower, and flight seemed the obvious way out.

Kai shook his head. It wasn’t a question of ability.

Carrying every one of them airborne at once meant exposing an entirely new angle of attack, their undersides left completely open, and the Murks, agile in every direction they could think of, fought even better in open air than they did on solid ground. Worse, Kai admitted, he still had no idea what else Zoria might be capable of.

If this was a trap meant to force them into the sky, that was exactly where Zoria would want them. Better, Kai reasoned, to wound him first and buy themselves room to retreat on their own terms, whichever direction that ended up being.

Even the paladins had proven almost useless against the swarm, cut down brutally on every side, and anyone caught by a Murk’s touch had their mana drained dry within seconds.

The ordinary priests, the ones Zoria hadn’t yet bent to his will, fought back with their brown sacred Grimoires as best they could, but neither their skill nor their tools came close to matching what they were up against.

Zoria, meanwhile, wore something close to delight across his face, savoring the perfect obedience of every Murk answering his outstretched hand, driving wave after wave of them forward without pause.

Kai stepped forward to meet the next wave himself, closing the distance deliberately. He raised both palms level with his chest, fingers spread wide, and the air around him seemed to fold inward, drawn toward his hands as though something invisible had begun crushing it between his fingers.

A pinprick of pure black light bloomed in the space he’d carved out, trembling violently, wrapped in a thin ring of neon-purple light that spun faster with every passing second.

His eyes never left Zoria, tracking him through the wall of Murks between them, holding that unstable point of black light steady as he pushed it forward, and the instant it cleared the space past his own body, it shot forward on its own, gathering speed as it went.

"Singularity: Ren!"

The small black point surged the instant he called it, swelling larger with every foot it covered, the purple light spinning wider around it, slicing clean through every Murk that tried to bar its path.

Zoria’s eyes locked onto the thing bearing down on him, and he threw more Murks into its way, desperate to slow it down. It didn’t matter.

Whatever wind the sphere carried with it kept them from closing the distance at all, and it kept coming, closer, closer, until it was nearly on top of him.

KABOOM!

The explosion tore through the air with a force that swallowed everything around it.

Smoke rolled across the entire section of the altar, thick enough to hide whether Zoria had even survived the blast at all.

Then the wind picked up again, sharp and sudden, tearing the smoke apart and dragging it clear. What stood revealed in its place was the last thing any of them wanted to see: Zoria, still standing, and somehow worse than before.

The crimson fluid he’d unleashed earlier had been quietly at work the whole time, drinking in blood from every Cardinal standing behind him.

His frame had swollen, thick with new muscle, his spine bowed forward under the weight of it, hunched into something no longer entirely human.

The red fluid pooling around him had only grown thicker, and he turned on Kai with fury written plainly across what remained of his face.

"You old fool. You gathered that much mana and couldn’t even leave a scratch on him?" Kai snapped.

"You’re a full Core tier beneath me, you have no idea what that attack actually cost. That thing is worse than anything we planned for, and this is barely a quarter of what we’d be facing against Babayaga himself."

Among the truest measures of strength at the highest tiers was how tightly someone could compress raw power down from something massive into something small enough to control, while keeping every ounce of its devastation intact.

What Kai now faced, though, was an anomaly entirely outside that math, something that only grew stronger the more blood it drank from the people around it.

"And you, the one who actually owns those evil spirits, why aren’t you doing anything about them? Why is this all falling on me?"

This time it was Kai’s turn to snap at Rhaiven. Rhaiven answered by tearing his own robe open, showing them exactly why. Zoria’s earlier strike had left more behind than a wound, Zoria’s blood was actively working to seize control of him through his own Necromancer bond.

His body was locked in a war against it even now, and if he split his focus to fight Zoria directly as well, he risked losing what little grip he still had over himself.

Four strikes of deep blue light cut through the air behind Kai without warning, aimed straight at him before he’d even registered the danger.

"Can you not take this seriously, Kai?"

Yunxi’s voice cut through the chaos. The four guards flanking her had loosed the attacks themselves, backing Kai up whether he’d asked for it or not.

"Forgive me, Your Grace."

Kai spun to face her, bowing his apology quickly, before turning back toward Zoria with his expression gone cold and flat. He drew eight crimson talismans from his coat in one motion, a heavy, unsettling pressure radiating off them the instant they left his pocket.

The papers rose into the air on their own, unfolding into abstract circular sigils that shaped themselves into ancient warriors, summoned with the hope that even if Zoria’s strange fluid managed to pierce them, their nature would keep them beyond his control.

Lucian, meanwhile, was still fighting his way upright, one hand pressed to his skull, the echo of Miyu’s scream still ringing through him. He’d missed everything that had happened since, caught nowhere in the memory that had unfolded around him while he knelt there.

Confusion settled over his face as he finally took stock of where they were.

"I feel like I only went down for a second. How did everything fall apart this fast?"

"Ah, sorry about that, Lucian. I thought you’d be back on your feet sooner, so I let you be for a bit, I was a little too caught up watching these two idiots fight over something so pointless."

Lumina’s voice carried an edge of amusement even now, entirely unbothered by the chaos around them.

"Something pointless? What do you mean?"

Lucian pressed her on it, and this time, finally, Lumina gave him the explanation she’d been circling around since before they’d even entered the tower.

She started with the Kirana relic itself, the one now fused to the spear Yunxi carried. That crystal, she explained, had been the true target driving every Green Land noble in this room from the very start.

The truth was, the Kirana crystal already sat with Lucian, fused into his own sword.

He reached down and brushed his fingers over it now, and for the briefest moment, a faint light stirred somewhere deep inside the stone, flickering once before it settled again. Neither Lucian nor Lumina caught it at all.

"Is this thing really worth fighting this hard over?"

Lucian’s head dropped low, something heavy settling over his expression, closer to grief than anything else. The thing he carried at his side now sat at the center of every tragedy unfolding around him.

Even now, he could still hear it, the sound of people running, screaming, chased down by whatever remained of the Murks loose inside this memory.

"You shouldn’t let yourself feel guilty over the crystal, Lucian. You don’t actually know its true power yet. What it can really do is far stronger, and far more terrifying, than anything you’ve imagined so far."

"The real Kirana crystal doesn’t just hold onto tragic memories, or radiate Sacred Mana, or give off nothing more than light. What it can actually do goes far beyond that."

Lumina kept talking through the din of battle behind them, Kai and Rhaiven fighting together against Zoria now, their combined effort already showing signs of wearing thin.

According to the Codex of Lumielle, a record said to hold nearly every significant event the world had ever seen, the Kirana crystal wasn’t a whole relic on its own at all. It was a fragment, broken off from something called the Genesis crystal, a single stone that had once carried all four colors within it.

Its power had been too great to leave intact. Even the gods had grown envious of it, envious enough that gods of the demonic realm had joined them in trying to see it destroyed.

Neither side had managed to unmake it entirely. All they’d been able to do was tear it apart, splitting it into four separate fragments, yellow, green, red, and blue.

The yellow fragment had become Kirana.

Lucian’s expression shifted, disbelief creeping into it. Gods, and demons alongside them, working together just to break one crystal into pieces?

What kind of power does this thing actually carry, to make something like that necessary?

"Bring all four fragments back together," Lumina said, "and you could build a New Heaven."