Chapter 205: Shard Cult
Tension and excitement sat heavy over the group now that they knew why the Freelands had gone so unnaturally quiet. Flattened against the dry grass at the hill's crest, dirt clinging to clothes and skin, humans and broodlings alike kept low as hushed voices cut through the heat.
"I don't give a shit! We have people who can't fight, we can't just charge down and start a fucking brawl!"
Even whispering, Min couldn't hide the sharp edge in her voice.
"We're turning around. Seo-jin tasked me with keeping everyone alive, and that's exactly what I'm gonna do."
The second Bile's bloodlust started rising, a hot pressure rolling off him, Min's own aura hardened in response—
"You two are gonna get us spotted!"
Ash crawled between them on his elbows, sweating through his shirt, face pale as hell, but his eyes were sharp and furious.
Looking straight at Bile—
"Calm down before they sense your killing intent!"
Then he snapped toward Min.
"Stop pickin' fights!"
She opened her mouth, ready to fire back, but the words caught. Arguing with Ash meant arguing with a kid. Heat crept into her face, not from embarrassment alone, but also because he was right. Leadership wasn't just throwing weight around, but dealing with the broodlings had been grinding her nerves raw.
"You want to fight, but you want to retreat. I got that right?"
Looking between them, Ash's voice was low but steady.
After a beat, both nodded.
"We should get as much information as possible before making a decision. We can't even see how many there are, so before we do anything, how about we do some recon?"
Getting called out stung. Getting directed by a child stung worse. Min exhaled hard through her nose, then planted a hand on Ash's head and aggressively ruffled his hair.
"Go on back over with Lynn. Appreciate the help, but you're out of your league kid."
Ash shoved her hand off immediately and fixed his hair with an offended glare.
"Out of my—look, I spent most of my life running around dangerous places completely by myself. I'm not just some kid."
Min rolled her eyes.
"You are just a kid—"
"No he's not."
Bile's hand landed firmly on Ash's shoulder, pulling him closer to his side.
"He is part of the brood. And I say we do this recon, like he suggests."
Min's anger flared all over again.
"You don't even know what recon is!"
"It doesn't matter! If he says we should, I agree!"
Seeing both of them seconds from starting another fight, and officially done with being called a kid, Ash muttered under his breath and simply started crawling toward the enemy himself, keeping low through the brush.
It took Min a second to process what he was doing. By then, he was already too far out.
"Ash! Get back here!"
The boy glanced back over his shoulder, pressed a finger to his lips, and shushed her.
"That little—Ash! Now!"
Without missing a beat, his pointer switched to a middle finger, then turned and kept crawling.
Staring at him, Min's jaw clenched hard enough to crack.
"I'm gonna kill him. I'm gonna fucking kill him."
She was too big to go after him herself, and for half a second she almost barked at one of the broodlings to drag him back. That thought died fast. Not like they'd listen.
Squeezing her eyes shut, she took a slow, deep breath through her nose.
"Grimm, you here?"
"Yep."
The voice hit right beside her ear. Her whole body jerked before she locked it down through sheer force.
"D-Do me a favor? Follow Ash. Make sure he stays s-safe."
"On it!"
She felt nothing. No shift in the dirt, no gust, no warning. Keeping her eyes shut another second, she slowly cracked one open.
"He gone?"
Bile stared at her like something diseased had crawled out of a corpse.
"You are pathetic."
"Fuck you!"
The harsh whispers from behind were now too far for Ash to pick up, and the pounding of his own heart was too loud to hear much else as dry brush scraped beneath him.
'What am I doing?'
[Playing hero again.]
'I'm not playing! And what else was I supposed to do? Those two were gonna get us exposed.'
[You could've snuck off the other direction.]
'I'm not a coward! I'd never betray the boss!'
[Why? What exactly has he done to make you so loyal? Huh?! You've already lost and risked too much! What is so special—]
"I don't know!"
Ash instantly slapped a hand over his mouth, dropped flat, and rolled beneath a thorny bush, dry twigs snagging his shirt. He froze there, chest tight, listening hard enough for his own heartbeat to hurt...nothing.
'I don't know, alright? But I don't want to be alone anymore.'
Lying in the dirt under that scratchy cover, old memories pushed up whether he wanted them or not. His first night with the Dead Hands. Yeah, he'd been scared shitless, and having to fight for his place hadn't helped, but even now he could still remember the noise, the laughter, the heat of bodies packed together.
It was the first time in his life he'd been around people who didn't look at him like he was trash or a problem. They laughed at his dumb jokes. They noticed when he did something right. Between the Dead Hands and the brood, he'd seen something he'd never really had before—people who actually felt like they belonged to each other.
And for the first time, Ash wanted that too.
[Just promise me you won't do anything stupid. If you need to, imagine what happens to Triss if you're gone.]
Starting forward again, he tried not to picture it, but he knew exactly what his system was getting at.
'I promise.'
[Good. Now look up.]
"Look up?"
He did—and nearly screamed. Grimm's massive body was flying straight at him.
Panic shot through him as he frantically waved both hands for the ghost to get back, but the idiot only sped up, tail whipping behind him.
"What ya doin?"
"What the hell are you thinking?!"
Ash kept his voice low enough to avoid carrying, but the harsh whisper still came out sharp. Grimm visibly shrank back midair, his huge form drooping.
"I was told to—"
"Doesn't matter! You gotta think, Grimm! We have no idea if any of them can see ghosts."
"I'm sorry. I didn't know."
Seeing that familiar sulk building fast in Grimm's oversized eyes, Ash exhaled through his nose and rubbed at his forehead before tapping his own chest.
"Come on. Just stay inside until I say, okay?"
The sadness vanished instantly. Grimm lit right back up, gave a quick excited flick of his tail, then dove forward without hesitation, his enormous body dissapearing into Ash's chest in a rush.
Ice-cold pressure flooded through the boy's veins so fast it locked his muscles for a second. Then, just as quickly, the chill faded. By the time Grimm was fully inside, that freezing shock had dulled into a strange warmth spreading through his body.
'Think this is close enough?'
[Move up a bit more.]
Shaking off the feeling, Ash kept low and crawled another twenty feet or so before stopping beside a crumpled slab of rusted iron. Part of the metal had split wide enough to squeeze through, so he dragged himself inside, shirt snagging on jagged edges as he ignored the stink, dust, and thick cobwebs clinging to him.
Once inside, he settled against a flatter section of cold iron and let out a quiet whistle.
A moment later, Triss slipped through the twisted metal like she belonged there and immediately leapt into his lap, pressing her head to his chest with a steady purr.
"I need you to check things out, okay? Assume they can see you, and stay out of sight. Try not to miss anything either. Got it?"
Triss tilted her head up, met his eyes, and gave a quick nod. Then she was gone. She slipped back through the metal without hesitation, and through their bond, he could feel her moving fast and low toward the Shard Cult camp.
They hadn't been close enough before to catch every detail, but even from a distance, the camp had been impossible to miss. Spread across a massive cracked stretch of old concrete, patched tents and makeshift structures had been thrown together in clusters. At a glance, someone ignorant might've mistaken it for scavengers or drifters.
That illusion died the second you noticed the people. They all wore masks. Every last one of them.
Shard cults varied wildly, even among those worshipping the same god. Different rituals. Different madness. Different rules. But masks were the common thread. Not normal masks either. Plenty of shard users covered their faces.
Rotting flesh stitched from monsters and humans was something else entirely.
At the camp's outer edge, multiple patrol pairs moved in loose patterns between cracked concrete and sagging tents. Slipping unseen between them, Triss ghosted her way inside. Her paws made no sound, and even the loose flaps of canvas nearby never stirred from her passing.
Once she stopped behind a tent and pressed herself low, following Ash's order to stay hidden, her wide yellow eyes flashed.
When the glow faded, her feline slits were gone. Brown human pupils stared out instead.
Still hidden deep inside the rusted iron, Ash blinked hard, and his own vision shifted. His eyes turned yellow, pupils narrowing into sharp feline slits as Triss's sight flooded into him.
He'd tapped into Triss's vision. Watching through her eyes felt weird every time.
The camp warped into something else entirely. Everything became shifting black-and-white silhouettes, blurred but alive, while the only real color came from the souls moving through it.
Cultists burned in different shades. Color determined strength. Brightness meant purity. The darker the color, the filthier the soul was. A decent person might shine clean. Something rotten looked like sludge dragged through skin.
Every soul Triss passed was dark. Not one flickered clean. From tent to tent, she bounded low and silent while Ash counted through her eyes, tracking numbers, patrol routes, and every stronger soul-color that stood out from the rest.
Tent by tent, Triss moved deeper while Ash's borrowed vision flicked across things no camp of sane people should've held. Masks came first. Not one matched. Some were stitched from stretched human faces, lips still attached in places, teeth sewn into cheeks that weren't theirs. Others looked grown from monster hide, wet and sagging, with horns shoved through skull plates or jaws forced open and worn like helmets. One cultist wore what looked like a child's face pulled over his own, tiny teeth hanging crooked over a grown man's throat.
Every mask was dark. Every soul beneath them was worse.
Totems started appearing the deeper she went. Bone lashed to rusted rebar. Vertebrae stacked with melted candles jammed between them. Crude symbols carved into flesh nailed to wood. Some were small, shoved between tents like ward markers. Others rose taller than men, decorated in finger bones, entrails, and black cloth that twitched despite the still air.
Altars followed. Not one was clean. Some were little more than cracked concrete slabs painted in blood and ash. Others were piles of corpses stripped to ribs and arranged with purpose. Burnt offerings. Animal parts. Human hands. Strange rods of black steel hammered into skulls.
And all of it pointed inward. Toward the center of the camp.
Even through Triss, Ash's stomach tightened.
The central altar dwarfed everything else. It had been built from shattered concrete, twisted metal, and what looked like fused bone, forming a massive blackened mound in the camp's heart. It pulsed. Not visibly at first, but enough that Triss's vision caught the twisted aura of it, like the thing itself had a soul. Thick stains soaked the ground around it, layer over layer, old and fresh.
Dozens of cultists surrounded it in uneven circles, kneeling, swaying, or standing with heads bowed.
And then Ash saw the syringes. At first he thought they were weapons...then one moved.
The tallest cultists wore frames of rusted metal strapped to their backs, lined with massive syringe-like spikes and tubing that fed into their own flesh. Some dragged corpses. Others carried them over their shoulders like butchered livestock.
Human corpses. Men. Women. A few looked small enough that Ash immediately stopped himself from thinking harder.
They brought the bodies forward one by one and laid them at the altar's base.
At the front stood the darkest soul Ash had seen yet.
His mask looked fused to his skull, a rotting patchwork of layered faces stretched so tightly over his head that multiple mouths were visible, sewn shut except for one. Black antler-like growths jutted upward from his scalp, and his robes looked soaked enough to glisten.
When he spoke, the whole camp went still.
The language meant nothing to Ash. It wasn't just foreign. It sounded twisted and evil. Wet. Choked. Like words forced through drowning throats.
The altar answered.
Black ichor seeped from cracks in its surface. Then it moved. Tendrils spilled out slow at first, thick and oily, before snapping across the corpses. They wrapped limbs, throats, torsos, then dragged the bodies inward.
The flesh disappeared into the altar like it was being fed to something waiting beneath it.
Ash forgot to breathe
'Triss, get back here now!'
His heart hammered so hard it hurt. He didn't fully understand why, but every fiber of his being was screaming at him to flee. Whatever he had felt inside that altar hadn't just scared him. It had reached somewhere deep and primal, something that left his skin cold and his stomach twisting.
Responding instantly to her master's summons, Triss retreated. Hearing the raw panic in Ash's voice, she abandoned the careful silence she'd used to enter.
She moved fast.
Too fast.
Just as she crouched to leap over a smaller altar littered with bone and black wax, a massive floating eye split open over it.
Sickly light burst from its pupil and locked onto her, freezing Triss mid-step so violently Ash felt it through their link.
His breathing stopped as a voice rolled from it, dark and wet, like something speaking from the bottom of a grave filled with oil.
"Umbral Felis. How rare."
Ash's stomach dropped so hard he nearly vomited inside the rusted metal shell hiding him. His vision swam, body locking as terror slammed through him.
As everything was going black, a gnarled black hand crawled out from the floating eye's pupil...finger by finger...reaching for Triss.
Then, just before the black overtook his sight, something else came into focus. Something almost as shocking as the eye itself.
A human with no mask. One he recognized.
John stood behind the floating pupil.