Chapter 38: Omen

CLASH!

Steel rang against steel, spear and sword catching each other mid-air with a force sharp enough to sting.

"Did you really think I wasn’t watching you two the whole time?"

Yunxi’s voice cut clean through the clash. She’d clocked the two of them the moment they’d started circling toward her, tracking every move they’d made without either of them realizing it.

The four guards, still locked in their fight against Zoria, shouted for her to fall back, promising to handle Alayna themselves the second they broke free.

Yunxi refused outright.

Her gaze had gone cold, the crimson-black blade drawn now from wherever she’d kept it hidden, and everything about how she held it marked her as someone who needed no help handling this alone.

Alayna, realizing her ambush had failed the moment steel met steel, wrenched her spear back and swung again from the side, voice raw with fury.

"Give me the staff. That crystal was never yours to take!"

A heavy sword-stroke answered her instead, no explanation offered, nothing but violence in response to the accusation.

Yunxi’s expression made her intentions plain enough: she had no intention of surrendering the crystal, not when returning with it was the entire purpose of her mission into the Red Lands. Failing meant consequences waiting for her back home, consequences she clearly wasn’t willing to risk.

She fought with everything she had, spear and sword locking again and again, sparks and pulses of mana tearing off with every exchange.

They matched each other blow for blow, close enough in skill that neither gave ground, even with Yunxi wielding her blade one-handed the entire fight.

Miyu watched it unfold with rising panic, twelve stars still circling overhead, and she pushed forward, desperate to reach her friend.

But two of the four guards still locked against Zoria caught sight of her moving to help, and broke away without warning, falling back to reinforce Yunxi instead. Kai’s formation collapsed the instant they pulled out, and the shock of it cost him precious ground.

Zoria seized the opening. His Crimson fluid surged and condensed into something sharp and merciless, hurled through the air straight at Kai and Rhaiven.

Kai barely managed to block it, throwing himself in front of Rhaiven to take the brunt of it. The two guards who’d stayed weren’t so lucky. Zoria’s crimson strike tore through them both before they could react.

"Damn these fools. I told them not to break formation."

Kai’s strength drained visibly with the blow, and Rhaiven’s grip on his own body began slipping further, Zoria’s stolen blood tightening its hold with every passing second.

The two remaining guards near Yunxi wasted no time either. One of them drew a blade wreathed in black flame, angling it straight for Alayna’s body.

Miyu screamed for her to move.

But.

SLASH!

The blade came too fast. Alayna, locked in her exchange with Yunxi, never saw it coming in time.

Then.

A single drop of blood struck the floor, audible even over the chaos. When the blade tore free of her flesh, more followed, a steady stream now, and Alayna’s hand flew to her stomach where the wound had opened.

A moment later blood surged up her throat and spilled from her lips in a thick, dark rush.

The spear of light in her grip flickered and dissolved. Her body followed a heartbeat later, crumpling to the floor, the stone beneath her already going cold.

A flood of memory tore through Miyu all at once, every moment, every gesture Alayna had ever given her.

The warmth in the way she’d always looked at her.

The steady, unwavering firmness she carried in everything she did.

The quiet kindness underneath all of it, given without ever asking for anything back.

Something in Miyu understood, with brutal clarity, that she would never feel any of that again.

The dark mana inside her, and the mana bleeding out around her, began to shudder violently, a tremor that rippled outward and dropped everyone nearby into open terror.

Even Kai and Zoria stopped fighting entirely, both of them turning to watch what Miyu was about to become.

Her breath came fast and shallow, her eyes wide and unblinking, locked on the friend she’d known for as long as she could remember, disbelief and grief tangled together into something unbearable.

"ALAYNA!!"

The scream tore out of her with a force that struck Lucian like a physical blow, dropping him hard onto one knee, his whole body caving under the sheer weight of it.

Whatever this pressure was, it came from Miyu’s fury itself, raw and undiluted, and it pressed down on Lucian with a reality no memory should have been able to inflict.

Then came a sound like glass fracturing, sharp and unmistakable, echoing from directly above him and Lumina.

CRACK!

That sound didn’t belong to the memory at all. The fracture was happening now, tearing through the ceiling of the space they stood in, real and immediate.

Lumina’s expression sank into something close to disappointment, one hand pressed to her cheek as she stared upward.

"It looks like this is as far as we go. We’ve reached the edge of what this memory can still hold."

"Such a shame. If we’d opened this memory before the Kirana crystal ever cracked, we might have actually found Zoria’s trail."

According to Lumina, the entire domain they stood inside had reached its limit, growing unstable now because the crystal itself had already been damaged when this memory first formed.

A piece of it had gone missing entirely, the same fragment still fused to Lucian’s own sword. It lined up with what he’d already seen through the blue door, someone had stolen part of that crystal when he was twelve years old.

Lucian barely registered any of it, though. His attention had already turned upward, tracking the widening web of cracks spreading further and further across the ceiling above them.

Ahead of them, inside the memory itself, both Kai and Zoria had gone still, staring at what Miyu had become. Her face, gentle only moments ago, had shifted into something far older, something stripped bare of any expression at all.

The dark mana gathering around her only kept growing, weaving thin, glowing threads beneath her feet, threads that stitched themselves together into the shape of a massive black gate.

Kai’s face drained of color the instant he understood what stood behind it.

"Shit. Your Grace, we need to leave, now."

Yunxi had no idea what had triggered him, but the dread in his voice was enough. Whatever waited behind that gate, it was something none of them could afford to fight. They broke for the tower’s edge at a dead run.

They were already too late.

The staff still gripped in Yunxi’s hand began to move on its own, wrenching against her grip as though it had a will entirely separate from hers, straining toward Miyu, who stood watching their retreat with an expression carved from stone.

Miyu’s hand rose, calling it forward across the distance without a flicker of feeling crossing her face.

Yunxi fought to hold it, both remaining guards throwing their strength into helping her, and still it wasn’t enough. The staff tore free of all three of them at once and shot straight into Miyu’s waiting hand.

She drove it downward, hard, into the floor.

The massive black gate behind her answered the strike instantly, shuddering, groaning, its doors beginning to peel open on their own.

Every inch that gate opened sent a fresh wave of tremors tearing through the memory itself, and through Lucian, still pinned beneath the crushing weight of Miyu’s fury, the pressure from the gate now bleeding into it, holding him frozen in place, unable to move at all.

Lumina’s expression had gone deadly serious, fixed on the gate.

"That child carries an Omen just like yours, Lucian. But this one looks far more ready to fight than whatever you managed to summon that day."

An Omen like mine? What does she mean by that?

Even crushed beneath that pressure, Lucian forced himself to think it through, chasing the memory of the one strange thing he’d ever revealed to a crowd of onlookers, that moment he’d followed the pull of those strange carved words and summoned a white, six-winged figure out of nothing at all.

Sol Invicta?