Novel Full Chapter 451: FIGHT FOR YOUR SULTAN!
***
{Outside The Projection}
…What a cruel nightmare.
A Mithqal didn’t need sleep.
Biologically, at least.
But mentally?
They certainly did.
Malik hadn’t slept a wink in at least two hundred years.
All that time was instead spent cultivating.
He was extending his life…
Delaying his Corruption.
But now, as the hallucinations returned…
The obvious was revealed.
Malik was out of time.
The hourglass was full.
Corruption was pouring through the cracks of his soul.
No longer would he see people, but their nightmarish Corrupted versions instead.
This was it.
The end was nearing.
If Safira’s expedition didn’t arrive in time…
Their Sultan would die.
What a tragedy this was…
A tragedy that didn’t allow Layla to appreciate her daughter’s grown-up appearance.
Of course, by now she’d be much, much older than that, but…
A glimpse at how she’d looked as a child softened her heart, but the truth that her husband was soon to die hardened it just as quickly.
She couldn’t take this anymore.
No one could.
If Safira was going to take any longer, damn Sinbad…
They’d go ahead and try to destroy those chains, even if they’d all die.
Huda, who glanced at Azeem and Layla, was sure of that.
As were the rest, mentally preparing themselves.
This had taken them out of their tragedy.
Their emotions no longer mattered.
Not here and not now.
Malik…
Again, he didn’t have long.
Spectators no longer; now, finally, they would become participants.
The scene Malik had been living through alone would house their lives.
The projection showed a man nearing the end of his endurance, and where the image could have only bred despair, it wound a rope of determination through them instead.
If it failed, they understood they might all burn with him.
That possibility, they accepted.
Death was better than this.
Anything was.
***
{Fourth Layer, Al-Fawra}
“FIGHT FOR YOUR SULTAN!”
A roar echoed in an endless desert.
It ripped out across the merciless wasteland, bouncing off nothing, only to be swallowed by a sky that burned without a Shams.
The place didn’t hold sand, though.
No, this wasn’t some pretty little dunescape that poets liked to sing about.
This realm was just flat and split open into long veins of cracks of dead earth.
Gray, black, and white; bleached by things no mortal Shams could ever burn.
Something far older and more dangerous than a star.
And it stretched on and on, forever.
Beneath this burning sky were Anomalies.
Little pockets where reality itself had come undone.
Bubbles of broken Laws that popped in and out of existence.
They were scattered everywhere…
Countless… thousands, tens of thousands… maybe millions.
They tore reality apart, stitching, snapping, and undoing themselves.
The world was wrong here, and it was like watching a thousand mirrors break and mend, all at once, in no order at all… chaos incarnate.
Yet, and of course, these Anomalies weren’t alone.
Moving between them was Safira’s expedition.
They had started as a single platoon—Nasir-Al Sultan.
But when word spread, others came, and now there were thousands.
Nearly the entire population of Jinns near Al-Fawra had come.
Jinns of all walks of life.
Seekers, veterans, wandering Magi, caravan guards who had dropped their pay and run here, and even merchants who still wore their market robes, swords hanging awkwardly at their sides.
All of them, pulled here.
All of them, fighting together.
At the head was Safira—the healer.
But “healer” didn’t mean what most thought.
She wasn’t a timid figure hiding behind a shield.
Safira herself was an unstoppable storm.
Her fists crashed into a monstrosity’s limbs.
Yes, the same monstrosity that Malik played around with on his journey to Hell.
It was the protector of the sandworms, a thirteen-cored Simurgh, a Behemoth, two Major Ranks below the peak of the Cursed Hierarchy, now only much stronger than when Malik had faced it all those years ago.
What was above Elder Sandworms…
Their Venerable.
It should have been unstoppable.
It would have been, if not for her.
On contact with the shockwave from just one of Safira’s punches, its limbs met with enough force to shatter the earth beneath them for miles and miles on end. Indeed, one strike, and the shockwave rolled through the wasteland, blasting mountains of stone into the air.
The price was steep, her hand being destroyed each time.
Bone and flesh disintegrating under the strain, but in the same instant, it rebuilt itself, skin smoothing over, tendons tightening, and fingers flexing like nothing had happened.
This was the way healers fought.
Breaking themselves apart, only to knit themselves together again, over and over and over and over, faster than their enemies could kill them.
Her blows kept rattling its frame, sending blasts of wind and pressure so strong that it tore many thousands of chunks from the beast.
But she wasn’t the only one who could heal.
Unfortunately for them all, the Venerable healed, too.
Its millions of plates reformed, segments rejoined, and its colossal limbs slammed down again, hitting the ground hard enough to create entire canyons from the already broken earth.
It was a battle without pause.
If not for Safira, the expedition wouldn’t have survived for more than a moment.
Though they weren’t useless. Not to leave her alone, many of those able kept the Venerable’s other palace-sized limbs busy, hacking, burning, and blasting at them to give Safira the space she needed.
Of course, they’d also done that to help the expedition search for Holy Relics.
Above, wings and spells flared as scouts and fliers navigated the Anomalies.
Others dove through the pockets of broken reality to grab what they could.
After all, they weren’t here to fight; they were here to find something.
Because, again, from those warped bubbles in reality…
Holy Relics were forming.
They appeared as flickers in the corner of their eyes.
Objects of impossible material.
Each one had the potential to tip the balance of any war.
Yet, at this moment, all were entirely unwanted, thrown away with a mere glance.
The expedition wasn’t alone here.
Slipping between the chaos, hidden under a cloak that made the eye slide past him, was Zafar.
None of them had seen him yet; not even the Anomalies seemed to notice when he passed through them.
His hands were quick, collecting relic after relic, dozens already, hundreds.
His luck was beyond insane, but it seemed that even he couldn’t stop the Venerable from being attracted to such a large expedition, and now, it wasn’t enough for him to get anything even close to what they so desperately needed.
None of the relics were right!
Each time he felt the weight of one, his grip loosened, and it fell away.
Worthless, worthless, worthLESS, WORTHLESS, WORTHLESS!
The clock in his mind was louder than the battle.
If he didn’t find it soon…
If the right relic didn’t show itself here, now…
He’d fail again.
And this time, failure meant losing the only man he had ever called Lord.
Every second wasted was a second closer to such an end.
His teeth ground together.
“Dammit…”
The wasteland roared again.