Chapter 359: The First Jewel of the Ocean.

Zhang Xi takes another step back.

Her reaction bothers me more than the sound does.

Zhang has already faced Rahul Sharma, Brinekin, come through the flooding, and watched the guardian nearly turn Veric into a red smear on the floor. Force isn’t what’s shaking her composure. I follow her eyes to the golem’s chest and start seeing the same problem.

The beats are getting faster.

BOOM.

A pulse of OXI crosses the stone body, long and relatively weak. The heartbeat feels more like an explosion than something alive.

BOOM.

The next one comes short and compressed, at nearly double the intensity.

Another beat is born before that one finishes dispersing, and this time the energy splits along several paths inside the torso. The next runs in a different direction. Frequency, duration, amplitude, direction. Nothing repeats.

I’m looking for a relationship between the pulses and I can’t find one.

It’s like trying to break a cipher whose key changes with every character.

Zhang Xi finally looks at me, and I notice every trace of color has left her face.

"Dryden?"

She says only my name, because she doesn’t need to say anything else.

And the worst part is that I don’t have the answer either.

In the other life, the Heart was difficult but simple to understand. The guardian gathered a technique in its chest, and the job was to judge the amount of energy before the discharge and reproduce it at the pillar.

That could kill someone if you calculated wrong. But it could still be calculated.

What’s in front of us now seems designed to stop exactly that.

BOOM. BOOM.

The rhythm climbs.

I look at Rhayne.

If anyone in this room can find a structure inside that mess, it’s her. Her sensitivity to OXI has already shown me things that went completely past me, like the reading in the sterile white room on the way to Lost Ark.

The hope dies as soon as I find her face.

Rhayne is watching the guardian with her jaw slightly slack, her eyes running from one side to the other without stopping. Every new pulse turns her pupils in a different direction, as though she’s trying to follow several currents at once and none of them stays in place long enough to be understood.

She looks as lost as Zhang Xi. Maybe more, since she can see more than the rest of us.

The guardian starts to change without any warning. A crack opens at the center of its chest with a snap of stone.

The plates draw apart slowly, internal fittings sliding over each other until a compartment opens in the torso. A blue light shows through the gaps first, clean and deep, and then the structure opens completely.

There’s a gem at the center.

Blue like the Ocean’s Jewel. A kind of sapphire that will be used to defend outposts after the Tidefall.

’What is a jewel like that doing here?’

The surface is translucent, almost liquid, and the blue is an intense royal blue. Several currents of energy turn around it in orbits that change distance with every pass. In spite of everything, it’s beautiful. Beautiful in a way that doesn’t match the red eyes, the stone body, or the amount of energy starting to gather in that core.

The beats are coming from there.

BOOM. BOOM. BOOM.

The floor loses contact with the golem’s feet. A few inches at first. Then more. It starts floating slowly, completely vulnerable.

’Attacking it now would probably trigger the rage mode, and nobody here has the strength to finish it in a single blow. What do I do?’

The gem seems to pull the rest of the body up by the chest. The torso rises, the shoulders follow, and the arms drop slightly to the sides while the legs leave the floor. There’s no rigidity in the movement. The position looks like someone being lifted, the body following its own center while the head stays lowered.

For an instant the image reminds me of the statue behind it. A strange feeling of redemption.

Then I feel the volume of OXI growing around that gem, and every aesthetic association dies.

That thing is about to fire something.

And I don’t want to be in the room when it does.

I look behind me.

"We’re leaving! No—"

My voice dies before I finish. The door is closed.

The entrance we came through has disappeared behind a solid slab of stone. The second opening is sealed too, and I didn’t hear either of them move.

We were all staring at the guardian, completely blind to what was happening around us. Not taking your eyes off something that threatens your life usually produces that effect. And this room seems to know it.

And it locked us in while we did it.

"Shit..."

The golem keeps rising until it’s several yards above the floor.

Only then do its eyes come on in an intense red. The head straightens slowly.

We all expect it to look at Veric, but the gaze passes over him and stops on Zhang Xi.

Something has definitely changed, and Zhang Xi realizes it in the same moment.

Her hands come up a few inches at her sides, fingers open, an involuntary reaction that almost looks like surrender. She takes another step back without taking her eyes off the guardian.

I’ve never seen that woman move like this. It’s fear, not caution.

"Dryden..." Rhayne says.

Her voice is low.

Her eyes keep jumping between the flows.

"It’s impossible to read this. Every pulse changes before the next one. I can’t—"

The golem’s head turns with an almost instantaneous snap, and then it smiles. A chill runs down my spine in the same instant. It’s macabre.

Zhang has stopped existing to it, and now it’s looking at Rhayne with a ghostly smile on its face.

The head moved so sharply that a chip breaks off the neck and falls into the mist below. The deformation of that stone face into a smile comes with the sound of rock being scored, completely incompatible with anything acceptable right now.

My throat goes tight.

’The golem reacted to the sound.’

"Drifter Duvilin."

I wait.

Nothing.

"Drifter Duvilin!"

No rune.

No manifestation.

No presence behind me.

"Shit..."

Some strange force in this room is stopping me from drawing my trump card.

Then the red energy in the golem’s eyes starts thickening.

And this one I know.

I don’t need a puzzle to understand it.

"It’s a laser."

Veric hears me.

"A what?"

The light gets stronger.

"PROTECT RHAYNE!"

He goes.

Without asking how.

Without thinking twice.

Veric runs toward her, Undertow coming forward while Rhayne is still trapped in that impossible reading of the chest. She only understands what’s happening when he’s already jumped into the space between the two of them.

"Azure Dividend!"

And then the beam fires.

Veric is still in the air when Undertow takes the impact head-on. Azure Dividend takes the full charge of the laser and gets opened anyway, the beam coming out the other side and finding the shield right after.

For a fraction of a second, the shield holds.

The metal surface goes white at the point of contact. Then blue.

A hole appears and the laser goes through the same way it went through his skill.

The shield’s resistance turns the beam a few degrees, and that is enough.

But the light catches Veric near the shoulder, and his arm simply stops existing.

Metal, skin, and bone explode in an incandescent cloud. The rest is pulverized before my brain can catch up with the difference between arm and empty space, while the deflected laser hits the floor inches from Rhayne’s foot.

The stone melts.

A bright line crosses the floor and disappears when the beam dies. Enough saved Rhayne’s life.

Veric hits the ground, and the scream comes with him.

"Ahhhhhhhhrrrggg!"

He lands on his side and grabs his own shoulder with the hand he has left, though there’s nothing below that point to hold. No blood comes out of what’s left of the armor while he writhes. All of it was cauterized. His teeth are clenched and failing to hold back another scream while the smell of burned flesh fills the room.

Rhayne drops to her knees.

Her hands go to her stomach and she vomits onto the stone.

Blood runs from her eyes almost at the same time. It shows at her ears too, narrow lines going down her neck while she tries to pull in air between the heaves.

The Link took the hit along with Veric, and then it broke.

I don’t know whether Veric cut the Link to protect her or the connection simply reached a limit it couldn’t hold, but the effect between them disappeared immediately.

Even so, Rhayne is still conscious.

The ninety percent may have helped. It may have made everything worse and she’s just strong enough to take it.

I have no way and no time to find out.

"Zhang Xi! Veric!"

She ignores the golem. She’s already running.

Zhang Xi came out of her own paralysis the instant the laser fired, and now she’s crossing the room toward him, Suzanoo’s Love starting to form in her hands before she even arrives.

If there’s one thing that anchors Zhang Xi to a purpose and makes her override every defensive instinct she has, it’s saving someone. I admire that about her.

I look at the guardian.

The gem is still charging. The beats haven’t stopped. If anything, I’d say they’re worse.

BOOM-BOOM. BOOM. BOOM-BOOM-BOOM.

No pattern.

No repetition.

My vision goes to the corner.

[OXI: 4,992/5,000]

Full, and I need it that way.

I think of one of the memories I absorbed.

I don’t have to search for it. All it takes is pulling on the memory of a face I never really knew, on a life that passed through mine and left that fragment behind.

The Rescue memory answers.

The experience takes on presence inside my head, sharp enough to be reached.

It isn’t mine.

And right now, that’s enough.

There’s no time to be gentle with the dead, so I spend the memory without arguing with myself about it.

My eyes start burning as the yellow light takes my vision.

"Memory of Lightwaves!"

The skill activates and I barely let it finish wrapping around me.

"OVERMEMORY!"

I trigger the second stage.

The contents of the memory vanish in the same instant.

Something disappears from inside me along with it, leaving only the certainty that a moment had existed there seconds earlier.

Then Drifter Mode opens in my eyes.

The room stops being stone.

The air takes on direction. Pressure becomes surface. The golem’s weight divides into vectors, the gem in its chest starts radiating visible currents, and every pulse of OXI draws itself in front of me with trajectory, force, and consequence.

The beats are still different.

They still have no pattern.

But behind all of them, there’s a single line that never changes.

And when I see where it leads, I go cold.