Chapter 352: The Sage Archetype

Rhayne pulls the oar.

The mechanism answers with a deep click from somewhere under the statue, followed by the sound of old gears turning inside the stone. The stone vessel stays down under the weight of the seventeen coins, and no window opens in front of my eyes.

No gate opens. No alarm sounds.

The water keeps coming in through the floodgates, slowly.

I let out the chain at my waist as far as its length allows and walk from the pillar to the second statue. The eighteen North Sea coins are already separated in the vessel. I check the count again before I take hold of the spear and pull.

Another click crosses the gallery.

Veric looks my way.

"So we’re right."

"Don’t celebrate yet."

Some of the confidence goes out of his face.

"Nothing happened."

"That’s how it works. The Ferryman’s Toll only tells you that you were wrong after the last answer."

Veric looks at the water, which already covers most of our boots, then at the faintly blue chain locked around his own waist. OXI keeps draining out of all of us while the gates pour water into the gallery.

"Why?"

"What answer do you want? That Thirstfall is sadistic? It lets you pay the full price before it tells you that you screwed up. By the time we finish, the water’s higher. Move."

Veric closes his eyes for a moment.

"Cursed damn place."

Freya is already at the third statue.

Eighteen East Sea coins go down into the vessel. She checks one last time, takes the spear, and pulls. The mechanism accepts the movement with the same indifferent silence as the others.

No confirmation.

Veric goes next.

Nineteen South Sea coins.

The spear comes down.

The water is starting to come up past our ankles when Zhang Xi takes the last position. Thirty-nine coins fill a good part of the vessel in front of the old man’s statue, and she runs her eyes over all of them before she puts her hands on the spear.

I know this feeling.

It’s the worst part of the Ferryman’s Toll.

Four answers can be correct. The first can be wrong. The last can be wrong. There’s no visible difference until this exact moment.

Zhang Xi pulls.

For half a second, nothing happens.

Then the gallery answers.

Five stone impacts echo almost together.

Gates that until now were part of the walls retract into the structure, opening dark passages around the hall. The water built up behind them comes out hard, spreading across the floor and immediately increasing the flow toward the drainage ducts.

A figure comes out of the first opening.

Then another.

Five Brinekin.

"Shit."

The water starts rising faster.

I look at the statues, and the spears are still down. The chains are still locked around our waists.

’Five gates opened. So all five of us were wrong.’

"We got it wrong!" I shout. "There’s something wrong with this place!"

Freya turns her face toward me while a Brinekin comes through the water.

"Looks like your future changed enough to screw you!"

I’d like to disagree.

"If knowing what comes next solved everything, causality would be a comma, not a force!"

"That doesn’t help at all!"

Also true.

Veric raises his shield while he measures the five new enemies.

"So what do we do?"

The water is at our calves and still climbing. The ducts don’t have the strength to drag anyone yet, but I remember perfectly how fast that changes.

"We kill all of them first. Once the water is thigh-deep, you start watching everyone. If anyone gets pulled toward a duct, use Undertow before they reach the grate, Veric."

I look at Rhayne.

Two Brinekin came out of the gates closest to her position.

"Rhayne! One at a time. Hold them for me."

She responds immediately.

The Battle Ribbon cuts the air and wraps the armed arm of the first Brinekin. The monster tries to pull back, digging its feet into the already submerged floor, but Rhayne turns her wrist and runs a second coil around the torso.

Then she yanks. The Brinekin loses its balance instantly.

I already have Kraken in my hand.

I can’t reach it physically. The chain from the statue gives me a few meters of movement and nothing beyond that.

So I throw the sword.

Kraken leaves my hand with a single rotation before the blade stabilizes in the air. The Brinekin sees it and tries to raise its spear, but Rhayne drags the trapped arm down in the same instant.

The guard opens.

Kraken goes into the joint between neck and shoulder.

The point passes through wet flesh, tears the gills on the far side, and comes out covered in dark blood. The body arches against the Battle Ribbon and then goes slack.

Kraken pulls free of the flesh and comes back like a boomerang. I close my hand around the hilt as it passes.

"Next."

Rhayne drops the corpse and throws the ribbon at the second one.

This one already saw what happened.

When the Battle Ribbon comes, it backs off, turning the first coil aside with the shaft of its spear. Rhayne changes the angle without retracting the ribbon, goes under the weapon, and catches one of the legs.

The Brinekin reacts immediately, trying to cut the Ribbon.

"Now!" I shout.

Rhayne pulls.

The leg comes off the floor.

I throw Kraken again. The sword whistles through the air.

This time the Brinekin manages to get its spear between itself and the blade. The improvised metal meets Kraken with a clang and turns the point aside by a few centimeters. Its arms are still free and it adapts, which makes everything harder.

Rhayne hauls again, with everything she has.

The monster’s body twists sideways at the exact moment Kraken corrects its trajectory, and the blade lands on the neck.

It doesn’t stop there.

Flesh, gills, and vertebrae open in a single pass. The head separates from the body and hits the water first, jaw still working on reflex. The torso goes down after it, spreading blood in a dark cloud that starts to follow the current.

Kraken comes back to my hand, red drops leaving a trail through the air.

Two.

Three left.

I check the positions.

None of them are inside Rhayne’s reach, and throwing Kraken without something holding them would only give the Brinekin room to track the trajectory and deflect the blade. They’re fragile when they get hit, but they’re still Rank C.

Veric sees the same thing.

"Leave two to me."

He raises the shield.

Undertow fires.

The chain attached to the shield crosses the gallery and wraps around the first Brinekin before it understands what’s happening. Veric plants his feet and reels in hard.

The monster is ripped out of position.

It comes sliding across the water, spear trying to find purchase while the chain shortens fast. Veric doesn’t wait for it to finish the trip.

The Brinekin attacks while it’s still being dragged.

The spearpoint comes straight for his chest.

Veric leans and deflects the strike with his sword, letting the weapon slide along the surface before he pushes forward with the pull of Undertow. His blade goes in under the Brinekin’s jaw and rises into the head.

The body locks up.

Veric tears the weapon free and lets the creature drop.

Undertow’s chain releases, returning the shield to his arm.

The second Brinekin watched all of it.

Veric throws again. The shield cuts the air behind the Brinekin and the chain catches it. This time the monster doesn’t try to resist.

It comes with the pull.

"Veric!"

Undertow accelerates the Brinekin toward him, and the creature turns its own capture into a charge. The spear comes in low, using the speed Veric just handed it.

Veric turns, but not all the way. He’s caught off guard and the point goes into the side of his thigh.

Blood shows before the weapon even comes out.

Veric swears and his knee nearly gives, but the Brinekin made its own mistake by accepting the distance.

Veric lets the pain carry his weight to the side instead of trying to recover his stance. The shield, already back on his arm, hits the shaft of the spear and knocks the weapon away from center, and he pushes forward on a limping leg, inside the monster’s guard.

The Brinekin tries to back off.

"Azure Trust!"

Veric’s blade goes through the abdomen and rises in a short cut, tearing up to just under the chest. The monster still tries to hit him with its free hand before Veric pulls the weapon back and takes the neck with a second strike.

The body falls into the water.

Veric puts part of his weight on the shield, breathing hard.

"It learned fast..."

"So did you," I shout back.

Something drops off the Brinekin’s body.

A shell plate.

Veric notices and grabs it before the current takes it.

I frown.

We already collected six.

That one is a seventh.

"There’s something written on it," he says.

"Read it!"

Veric turns the wet surface toward the light.

"’The weight of experience is greater than all the seas.’"

The sentence sticks in my head, but there’s no time to do anything with it yet.

There’s still one Brinekin left.

The last one is far from all of us, close to one of the newly opened gates. It understood the limitation of the chains and is keeping itself outside our range of movement.

Freya measures the distance.

"I’ve got it."

I look at her.

"Pegasus doesn’t reach from there. You’re chained!"

"I know. I’m not a mage, but I can still kill something standing on my ice."

She drives the ice scythe into the water with everything she has.

The water splits in a straight line and in waves, spreading the cold outward.

Unlike the earlier attack, Freya has to control the ice far past a comfortable distance. A white line advances under the surface, narrow and uneven, hunting for the Brinekin.

The creature notices.

It starts running.

Freya grits her teeth.

The first spike breaks the stone behind it.

The second comes up on the flank.

It misses by inches.

Blood starts running from one of Freya’s nostrils.

She doesn’t stop.

The ice wing at her back vibrates and a small sliver breaks off the tip, falling into the water while Freya forces Permafrost a few meters further.

The Brinekin jumps.

The floor under it explodes into ice.

Three stakes come up almost together.

One enters the thigh and exits through the hip. Another goes through the abdomen. The third catches the chest and keeps rising until it comes out near the shoulder.

The creature hangs there.

Blood runs down the translucent spikes in thick threads before dripping into the water below.

Freya empties her lungs and wipes her nose with the back of her hand, dropping to her knees.

"Told you I could."

She looks about ready to lie down from exhaustion just to keep the right to have said it.

Before I can answer, the statues start to move.

The four spears return slowly to their original position. The child’s oar follows right after. The chains lose their blue glow and the rings around our waists open at the same time, finally cutting off the OXI drain.

The water, though, keeps coming.

The five gates are still open.

By the time I can get away from the statue, the level is at my knees.

"We get another attempt," I say.

"And a lot less room! Move, Sands!" Veric answers.

Zhang Xi has already reached him and is starting to work on the wound in his leg. The water makes it hard to see how bad the cut is, but the blood spreading around him makes it clear it wasn’t shallow.

I go back to the statues.

The lineage was right.

It has to be.

’It worked like this before. So what changed?’

Five clues built a coherent genealogy. The sixth closed an impossible cycle. The seas matched the positions of the pillars, and the sculptures aged in exactly the direction we used.

’So where was the error?’

"Dryden," Freya calls. "The water isn’t going to wait for you to philosophize inside your own head."

"I know."

I keep looking.

Child.

Youth.

Adult.

Older man.

Elder.

We read that as age.

The most obvious interpretation available, and the same one I used in my first life.

Veric finishes letting Zhang Xi work on his leg and lifts the seventh shell.

"’The weight of experience is greater than all the seas.’ That has to mean something."

"I know that too."

"Excellent. Then figure it out fast."

I ignore him.

My attention goes back to the child.

The oar.

The young face.

And the crown on its head.

I saw that before and dismissed it as part of the symbolism. The youngest carried the legacy of the lineage, and a crown could stand for inheritance, continuity, succession.

Except there are stones set into it.

Purple.

Amethysts.

’There were no stones in the other timeline.’

I keep looking.

The seventh shell surfaces in my head again.

The weight of experience.

Amethyst.

I know that symbol.

"Shit."

Rhayne turns toward me.

"What?"

I point at the crown.

"Amethyst."

Nobody seems to understand why I’m almost smiling.

"That statue is the Sage archetype. Amethyst stands for accumulated experience."

I look at the child again.

The youngest figure is carrying the exact symbol that should belong to someone defined by knowledge gathered over time.

The contradiction isn’t there for decoration.

We were the ones asking the wrong question, with me trusting what I already knew. Chaos Theory told me something had changed.

"It isn’t biological age," I say. "The sequence measures time lived. Experience."

Rhayne looks at the water, which is already close to her waist.

"Meaning what?"

I point at her.

"You said you’re seventeen. But you’ve completed two more living in Thirstfall. For this room, that adds up to nineteen."

Her eyes go wide.

Veric understands immediately.

"So we have to redo the whole sequence!"

"Yes."

I look at the first statue.

"I start. I’m eighteen, and no additional years."

’At least not in this timeline.’

The thought holds me for a second.

’Could it...? No. I went back in time. Those ten years don’t exist anymore.’

Rhayne does the math out loud.

"Seventeen plus two. Nineteen."

"Twenty!" Veric shouts. "Nineteen plus one."

Freya wipes away a little more blood from her nose.

"Twenty-one in my case."

Zhang Xi finishes the rune over Veric’s leg, takes a deep breath, and looks at the old man’s statue.

"Forty-five."

Excellent.

The order changes completely in the middle.

Me, eighteen.

Rhayne, nineteen.

Veric, twenty.

Freya, twenty-one.

Zhang Xi, forty-five.

"Central with me. North with Rhayne. East with Veric. South with Freya. Deep stays with Zhang Xi."

The coins we separated are still beside the statues, but the amounts are wrong now. We need to add one to Central and to North, two to East and to South, and six to Deep before we activate a single chain again.

We start moving.

That’s when I see how much worse the situation got while we were thinking.

The water is already at Rhayne’s stomach.

She tries to cross toward the North pillar and gets two steps before the current takes one of her legs. Her body turns sideways, and the Battle Ribbon fires toward a column, but the tip passes without catching.

Rhayne loses the floor.

The flow starts carrying her toward one of the ducts.

"Rhayne!"

Veric reacts.

Undertow fires off his arm.

The shield and its chain cross the water and lock onto her body. Veric reels in hard, planting his good leg while the freshly closed wound on the other one threatens to give under the strain.

Rhayne stops moving away for a moment.

’She’s shorter than the rest of us. Damn it.’

The water keeps rising around her and the pull of the drainage grows stronger every second. Veric hauls on Undertow’s chain like he’s hooked something far too big, trying to bring Rhayne back while she searches for footing.

I look at the ducts.

Then at the level already reaching her stomach.

We still have to reorganize the coins, switch every position, and complete an entire second attempt.

If this keeps up, we’re going to lose Rhayne before we get the chance to try again.