Chapter 36: Closer to the Nightkeeper?

Question after question kept piling up in Lucian’s mind, so many that he barely registered how close this fragment of memory had drawn to its breaking point.

Zoria, who’d fought without so much as breaking a sweat until now, had finally started losing ground, the pool of people close enough for him to draw from thinning out around him.

Kai caught the shift first. He called out to Rhaiven and Yunxi’s four guards, ordering them to funnel their mana directly into him, enough to unleash something beyond what he’d already thrown.

Rhaiven hesitated, still locked in his own private war against the Crimson blood working through his system, but he complied regardless, feeding his mana forward.

A stream of ash-grey light poured out from his left hand into Kai. The four guards traded a quick glance, some silent agreement passing between them, and a moment later, deep navy light began flowing out of them as well, merging into the same current feeding Kai’s body.

The combined mana gathered inside him at startling speed, whipping up a small vortex of wind around his frame, strong enough to tear the tie from his hair and send it loose across his shoulders. The pressure across the entire altar sharpened into something closer to dread.

Kai’s eyes blazed violet, a corona of flame-like light flaring around them, and behind him, a halo took shape, a perfect ring of purple light etched with ancient script. It marked the moment his full power came online.

His body lifted two meters off the ground, his frame swelling with new strength, the mana pouring off him doubling in scale.

He looked, for the first time, like someone capable of meeting Zoria from any angle at all.

Zoria’s stare locked onto him, sharp and unflinching, no trace of fear in it. He advanced instead, closing the distance on foot, while Kai answered by rocketing forward through the air to meet him halfway. The ground beneath them buckled under the pressure of it.

THUD!

They collided in a brutal exchange of raw physical force, blow after blow landing hard enough to shake the stone beneath their feet.

In the middle of it, Kai found his opening, catching Zoria before he could bring his own technique to bear.

"Singularity: Purgatory."

The halo behind him split apart into five separate rings, each one snapping forward to lock onto Zoria’s body. Black chains tore loose from the light an instant later, wrapping around every limb he had, pinning him rigid where he stood.

Yunxi’s guards seized the opening without hesitation, all four of them summoning their own halos, deep navy light blooming behind each of their backs in turn.

"I’m joining this fight too," Yunxi said, clearly tired of standing back and watching.

Three of the guards pushed back against it, but the fourth relented, and Yunxi stepped forward before any further argument could stop her. She couldn’t summon a halo of her own, but the pressure that rolled off her instead came in a strange, unsettling blend of red and black, a shade rare enough that it unnerved everyone nearby on sight alone, close enough to dark mana to be mistaken for it, though it wasn’t that at all.

The four guards spoke something in low unison, and their bodies swelled with power, mana spilling outward around them the same way it had around Kai moments before. Their hands rose together, palms cupped as if gathering the very air itself, drawing it inward toward a single point between them.

Yunxi stood at the center of that formation, her lips moving through what sounded like an ancient incantation, words meant for no one but the people standing close enough to hear them.

Each syllable seemed to ripple the air around her, a power entirely her own, and she’d summoned none of it through any visible relic or Grimoire.

Her hand snapped forward, driving the gathered pressure of compressed air straight toward Zoria, still locked in Kai’s chains.

"Amaterasu!"

A single word, and a small black flame flared from her mouth, catching the compressed air the instant it left her hand.

The moment that flame touched it, the true force behind the attack broke loose, tearing through everything in its path like a beam of pure destruction. Rhaiven and Kai barely managed to throw themselves clear in time.

BOOM!

The blast tore through the space in front of them with a force that shook the entire tower down to its foundation.

For a moment, everyone allowed themselves to believe it was finally over, that Zoria had gone down for good.

"They’re underestimating the Crimson clan, and Zoria himself, far too much," Lumina said, something in the fight clearly visible to her that no one else seemed to catch.

"Wasn’t he already beaten?" Lucian asked.

Lumina only pointed upward, toward something moving above them that the rest of the room hadn’t noticed at all.

The Cardinals had already bent to his will were on the move, closing in fast on Kai, the nearest target within reach, even with Zoria’s own condition still unknown.

It wasn’t only the Cardinals, either. Priests and townsfolk who’d taken shelter along the tower’s edge only minutes earlier were suddenly surging inward too, converging on the same point, encircling Kai and everyone fighting beside him.

Lucian couldn’t make sense of it. Zoria had never touched any of these people with the Crimson fluid, as far as he could tell, so how could they possibly be under his control?

The answer arrived a moment later, right in front of him. Black smoke lifted off the ground where Zoria had fallen, and through it, his silhouette rose back into view, carried upward on a gust of wind. Beneath the smoke, Lucian caught the faint, dry rustle of paper.

Zoria’s legs came into view first, then the rest of him, the Crimson fluid coating his body still burning with black flame, clear wounds visible across what remained exposed. But something else floated beside him, a source of black light pulsing faintly in the smoke.

A Grimoire, black-bound, radiating something unmistakably wrong, hovered at his side.

"So that’s the Alter Ego Grimoire Isabella mentioned to me before. It really is beautiful, in its own way." Something like genuine fascination crossed Lumina’s face as she studied it.

"That’s the Alter Ego Grimoire?"

Lucian caught every word of it, Lumina clearly wanting him to understand exactly what he was looking at, a Grimoire that belonged to Zoria and carried real, terrible power in its own right.

But according to Lumina, the Grimoire’s true strength had nothing to do with brute force at all. Its raw offensive capability was minimal.

What made it dangerous was something closer to what the Crimson clan’s own bloodline could do, an effect, not an attack.

That effect was exactly what had pulled every one of those bystanders into motion, drawing them forward into the fight without any of them understanding why.

"He already carries Crimson blood. Why would he even need something like that Grimoire!"

Lucian’s assumption there missed something fundamental, though, something he had no way of understanding yet about the true nature of Crimson power.

Zoria, in truth, was putting the Grimoire to devastatingly precise use.

He understood, better than most, that once someone fell fully under Crimson control, there was no bringing them back, not as they’d been before.

But the Grimoire let him sidestep that limitation entirely, letting him seize control of a person’s mind without damaging or disrupting anything else about their body at all.

Because Zoria’s true ambition in conquering Babayaga had never been about land, or wealth, or armies at all.

What he actually wanted was Babayaga’s own body.

Babayaga’s body. What could he possibly want with that?

Lucian turned the thought over, piecing it against something Lumina had told him back in the cathedral, that the Crimson clan’s ultimate goal had always been resurrecting their ancestor, the Nightkeeper.

If their methods were built specifically to avoid damaging a body, that meant they intended to use bodies like Babayaga’s as vessels for exactly that resurrection.

Or maybe they meant to transfer a soul directly into someone else’s body entirely. Was that even possible? A Necromancer’s power only reached far enough to raise the dead through evil spirits, nothing close to true soul transference.

The thought had barely finished forming when the proof of it hit him, standing right beside him the entire time. Lucian swallowed hard, glancing sideways at Lumina, who wasn’t looking back at him.

Lumina’s own soul had traveled with him this whole time, carried inside that strange pill he’d swallowed.

Which meant soul transference wasn’t just theoretical. It was real, and it worked.

Lucian found himself hoping, quietly, for some kind of help, some clearer direction for whatever came next, because the scale of what he was up against had just become genuinely overwhelming.

That warning, the one I saw carved into stone back at the cathedral. It’s actually happening, isn’t it. Goddess, if you’re listening, I could use a little more help right about now.

Then, behind him, he caught the sound of a heartbeat.

A touch followed it, real skin brushing against his, something he’d rarely felt at all inside this strange domain, and it grazed past him hard enough to register, cutting through the stillness he’d been standing frozen in.

Whoever it was tore past both him and Lumina at a dead run, a white spear cutting through the air ahead of her at blinding speed.

Lucian didn’t recognize her at first. Then a voice, faint and female, cried out for her friend, and the memory of who she was came rushing back all at once.

"Miyu, hold on!"