Novel Full Chapter 1064 - Taming the Wall - Preemptive Strike - 10th Chamber - 2
Chapter 1064: Chapter 1064 - Taming the Wall - Preemptive Strike - 10th Chamber - 2
The integration to the door was seamless, the boundary between the crystal and the ancient stone so perfect that distinguishing one from the other required the kind of attention Ren had trained specifically to apply.
It would be hard to take off. But first...
The corruption was consuming it from inside, slow and methodical.
The wind crystal that had been Sirius’s contribution to the door was becoming something else, and it had been becoming something else for long enough that nearly half the work was already done.
Ren looked at it for a long moment, reading everything the surface showed and what the deeper layers implied, calculating what the intervention would cost and what it would cost if he waited.
He had not come this far to wait.
Ren raised his hand to use elemental control at range.
If he could separate the core from the door before the corruption advanced further, if he could reverse even half of the damage that had already been done, if there was still enough of the original structure left to work with...
"No need to hurry... You’ve already won."
The voice came from behind them.
♢♢♢♢
Liora was on fire before she finished turning, the purplish spiritual flames jumping from her palms with the speed of a trained reflex, and what she found when she completed the turn was a figure with both arms raised in surrender, no visible hostility, wearing an expression that was somewhere between amused and tired and corresponded to none of the ways Liora had imagined this moment was going to look.
Selthia...
The white-haired figure, shifting subtly between what looked like a young girl and an adult woman like something that existed in a space while not entirely existing in it, the specific way her presence was present without being fully committed to the room it occupied.
"I only came to say hello in the spirit of peace," she said, "before you ruin all my work without my being able to offer any resistance."
"Not even a ten-year-old Ren would believe that," Mayo said from her position behind Liora, in the tone of someone who found the joke too easy to resist but wasn’t going to pretend it required effort.
Selthia laughed... Genuinely, the sound a real person made when something actually struck them as funny and they weren’t performing it, short and unguarded before it settled back into something more composed.
Then she sighed.
"The simple fact that you’re here this soon is already a catastrophe," she said, and now the register was different, the tone of someone doing the inventory of a plan that hadn’t resolved the way it was supposed to.
"No matter how much energy I accumulate, how much I anticipate, how much silence I maintain so nobody detects the movement, he always arrives at the worst possible moment." She looked at Ren with something that was almost exasperation but also a warmth longing, the kind that was more genuine for being out of character.
"I managed to acquire enough mutants to produce one with the capacity to project a crystal core here, which in itself is no small achievement, but the process of corrupting the nucleus that was already integrated into the door takes several days. Days I clearly didn’t have..." She tilted her head slightly. "You realized because the numbers dropped and they stopped attacking the city walls, didn’t you?"
Mayo looked at Liora.
Liora looked at Mayo.
"Why are you telling us this?" Liora said, the distrust in her voice clear enough that the question sounded like what it was, not a request for information but a challenge. "If you’ve already lost, simply leave."
"I’m feeling very lonely," Selthia said, as though that explained everything by itself. Then, with an expression of genuine irritation: "Also I’m too fat now and I can’t fit through the ninth chamber."
Mayo opened her mouth involuntarily...
"Ha, fat? The ninth chamber is an exaggeration, but... how much is too much bulimia mindset in a corrupted entity when..."
"Selthia." Ren spoke before Mayo could launch her full joke, with the urgency of someone who had been holding a question for a long time and found the moment for it.
"Sirius knew about the doors... He would have known before coming down here; from a distance he would have recognized the effect range and stayed outside." He indicated the statue without taking his eyes off Selthia. "Why did he advance until he was almost touching it?"
A brief silence.
Selthia looked at the statue with the expression of someone evaluating whether the question was worth answering, then smiled, and this smile was different from the earlier one: smaller, with something like pride mixed in, the satisfaction of someone being asked about something they’re genuinely pleased with.
"My pet can show people what they want to see..."
Without further preamble she transformed into Selphira, with enough accuracy that Liora’s shoulders tensed involuntarily before she processed what she was seeing.
Then into Ren’s mother, the same face, the same hair, the same way she held her hands.
Then into a woman who resembled Luna in ways Ren didn’t fully recognize but that made Liora tense differently, a hotter kind of tension, the reaction that came from her seeing something that shouldn’t exist in the form it was taking.
Then into Luna...
The figure of Luna sustained by Selthia’s mana, standing before them with the exterior composure Ren knew too well, held for exactly long enough for the point to land.
"There are beasts that can project images, you have one of those," Selthia said, without returning to her own form while she spoke, "but I was fortunate enough to find a guardian in this chamber that could also conceal its mana the way nothing else can, and read what a person most desires and show it to them. What they want to touch... What they need to see on the other side of a door to advance without thinking."
She paused.
"A rather unpleasant beast, truthfully. The method is cruel and low, but perfect for walking someone into a trap."
Ren looked at Sirius’s hand, extended toward the door, arm half-raised with the angle of someone moving before the decision was fully made.
What the beast would have shown him. What Sirius would have needed to see on the other side of that door to forget everything he knew and move forward with his hand reaching out.
It wasn’t hard to deduce now.
"There it is," Selthia said, reading his face with the unsettling ease she had. "Exactly."
Then the floor vibrated, despite the fact that they were inside a ruin.
Not the kind of vibration that came from something moving far away in the chamber, the distant tremor that arrived with delay. The kind that came from something already above them that had been above them long enough to have built up speed, the reverberation of mass that had committed to direction before the group knew to look for it.
A thousand tons.
Selthia was gone.
The massive mutant beast that materialized where she had been was the size of a ten-story building laid on its side, and it came already in motion, without the preamble of something that evaluated before attacking, direct toward the group with the velocity of something that had been waiting for the right moment and had decided the right moment was now, driving toward the only direction the tenth chamber’s geometry allowed from that angle.
Toward the door.
Toward the range where the crystallizing beam would reach.