The underground chamber had been silent for a very long time.
Morning light filtered through the hole in the ceiling, falling in a pale column across the cavern floor.
Dust drifted through it.
Raileigh Zeppelin sat on a broken slab of stone nearby, his golden eyes studying the black dagger in his hands.
Chad paced.
Back and forth.
Back and forth.
His whip hung loosely from one hand, its metal tip occasionally scraping against the floor. Todd stood a few paces back, leaning heavily against a load-bearing column with her arms tightly crossed over her chest, her expression souring with every loop Chad completed.
"Will you stop that?" she snapped.
Chad paused mid-stride. "Stop what?"
"Pacing. You're like a caged animal."
Chad paused, turning his head with a slow, mock-apologetic grin. He tossed his whip lightly from hand to hand.
"Pardon me, Todd. Unlike some people, I possess basic motor functions that require movement. I'm not a sloth who can just stand still for hours on end."
"Who exactly are you calling a sloth?"
"You."
Todd pushed herself away from the pillar.
"I've done more work during this operation than you have."
Chad scoffed.
"Really?"
"Really."
She pointed toward herself.
"I was the one who discovered Lord Gide Baiden's pathetic attempt to send a cell to capture our Prince. I was the one who had to act as an insider, leading them into the palace, positioning myself so the Dukker boy would follow. "
Her eyes narrowed. "What were you doing all this time?"
Chad looked away.
"You don't have to gripe about everythig you know, it's like."
Todd's expression darkened and she took a sharp step foward.
"Say that again."
"I said—"
"Alright, enough, both of you," Raileigh chimed in smoothly finally raising his head tolook at them.
"Please don't fight."
Todd pointed at Chad.
"He started it."
Chad pointed back.
"She called me lazy."
"You called me a sloth."
"I didn't mention your name now did I? The only reason you think that is because you know what you are."
"I don't care who started it. You're both supposed to be the adults here. Stop acting like children. I do understand that we've been perched in this damp hole for hours, and it's suffocatingly boring but please bear with me."
"That's easy for you to say Prince when you aren't working with a bafoon." Todd said and before Chad could retort, Raileigh interjected.
"You know," Raileigh murmured, his voice echoing softly in the cavern, "this dagger isn't just a standard weapon."
The two attendants looked at him in confusion. Raileigh continued.
"This dagger. It's an SK series." Raileigh held it up, letting the dim light catch its edge. "Made from the shell of a powerful turtle beast. I've read about them in history books."
Todd stepped closer, her irritation momentarily forgotten. "What does it do?"
"If I had to guess its function based on what i read in those books..."
He tapped the blade lightly.
"It affects the mind."
Todd looked at him.
"How?"
"I don't know."
Raileigh smiled.
"Perhaps it slices off a piece of their sanity. Perhaps it leaves a lasting scar on their consciousness. The exact effect is unclear, but the intention is obvious."
Chad whistled low. "That's... dark and that kid just had it on him?"
"Dark, but effective," Raileigh agreed. He glanced toward Elias's motionless body.
The boy's body hadn't moved.
He remained sprawled across the stone, dried blood darkening his clothes.
Still.
Silent.
Dead-looking.
"Speaking of which," he said, his voice dropping to a casual, almost conversational tone, "Elias. I know you've been awake for the last twenty minutes, listening to every single word we've said."
Silence dropped over the cavern like a lead weight. His hand moved in a blur, and a small metallic object arced through the air—
FLASHBANG.
The cavern was instantly washed in a searing, blinding wall of magnesium-white light that scorched their retinas. Before the echo of the blast could fade, a thick, sulfurous smoke bomb shattered against the stone, billowing an opaque, choking grey fog across the floor.
Todd cursed.
Chad staggered backward.
Raileigh immediately raised an arm.
Elias dove behind the nearest pillar, his chest heaving as he suppressed a dry cough.
'How the bloody hell did that bastard see through my Suppression?How could he have—' Elias thought frantically, pressing a hand against his throbbing temple.
He pushed the thought aside. It didn't matter. What mattered was escape. He risked a glance around the pillar. The hole in the ceiling was still open, pale morning light filtering down into the cavern. It was his only way out.
A massive hole in the palace leading directly into an underground chamber. Surely someone should have noticed, right?
Elias shook his head. The motion sent another spike of pain through his skull.
'Wonderful, the classic cliché, he thought bitterly. Escape through the hole in the ceiling. The obvious escape route. The obvious trap. Of course they'll expect that.'
Unfortunately, it was still his only route.
He bolted from cover, sprinting toward the next pillar.
'By now, their retinas have adjusted to the flashbang, and Flow perception makes the smoke screen completely useless to hide behind,' he analyzed coldly.
CRACK!
The leather whip lashed through the air with the velocity of a gunshot, shattering the stone pillar inches in front of Elias's face and sending a shower of sharp granite shrapnel stinging across his cheeks. He stopped dead in his tracks.
"Resistance is futile," Chad called out, his voice echoing through the smoke. "You might as well give up now."
Elias sighed.
"Of course it is."
Another throb caused him to touch his temple. Since waking up, his chaotic mind kept flashing back to Erynn and Angram and for some reason he could put it out of his mind. He waved his other hand, and the smoke parted like a curtain, pulled back by a controlled gust of wind.
He turned to face them, his expression deadpan and cold.
Chad whistled low. "You're a tricky bastard, aren't you? Despite your age, you've got real talent. The early stages of Ascension, and you're already this dangerous. Imagine what you'd be capable of if you climbed higher."
Todd stepped up beside Chad, her hands crackling with latent energy. "And his recovery rate is absurd. Look at him; his wounds are practically knitting themselves together through sheer willpower and advanced Flow control."
Elias met their gazes, his expression calm. "What do you want?"
Todd smiled.
"You're standing face-to-face with two Votaries."
"So?"
"So most people would be terrified."
Elias stared at her.
"That," he said coolly, not shifting his stance by a millimeter, "doesn't answer my question."
"We aren't obligated to humor you with an answer."
Elias looked toward the hole.
"Then will you let me leave?"
"What if we don't?"
Elias didn't blink. He had already anticipated their answer. In fact, while pretending to be unconscious, he had already consulted his only remaining ally in this nightmare scenario.
"Tamamo," he thought. "I'm going to do it."
The fox spirit's voice echoed in his mind, soft and serious.
"Are you sure?"
"I don't have a choice."
With an explosion of mist and a feral growl that vibrated through the stones, Elias underwent his metamorphosis. Maintaining the transformation drained an astronomical amount of energy; while his total reserves meant he could keep it up indefinitely his output was the issue so when he tried the transformation he was only able to maintain it for forty-five minutes after which he would be completely drained. He couldn't afford to burn out, so he forcefully capped the timer, dialing it down to a razor-thin, high-intensity window: twelve minutes and thirty seconds.
His crimson irises now had vertical slits in them his hair darkened, streaks of black spreading through the strands like liquid shadow. His skin took on a faint, dusky hue, and red whisker-like marks appeared on his cheeks. On his forehead, a nine-petaled lotus bloomed in crimson with faint mist emanating from his body.
He leaned forward as if to crouch and accelerated with an instantaneous burst of speed that left a crater in the stone floor. He lunged directly at Raileigh, intending to bypass the guards entirely.
"Not so fast!" Chad roared.
Chad and Todd intercepted him mid-air with terrifying synchronization. A shockwave of pure concussive force exploded where their paths crossed.
With the Yako transformation active, Elias had effectively crossed the threshold into a pseudo-Vortary state. He blurred through the space, utilizing the Mist aspect of his transformation to dissolve into phantom wisps whenever their strikes came too close, slipping through their defenses like smoke through a clenched fist.
But Chad and Todd were true Votaries, their experience honed through years of training. They coordinated seamlessly, covering each other's openings, forcing him into corners. Elias was operating on a merciless countdown, his muscles burning under the strain as he fought desperately to maintain the upper hand.
'Damn it—they're too coordinated!' Elias gritted his teeth as a heavy blow from Todd caught him in the ribs, sending him skidding backward.
Before he could recover, Chad's whip lashed out, wrapping tightly around his ankle and hurling him with bone-shattering force straight into a massive stone pillar. The pillar cracked down its center under the impact, and Elias hit the ground, coughing up a spray of dark blood. A sharp pain shot through his head again and he remembered his vision.
'Why do I keep remembering this?'
Through the haze of pain, he saw the royal prince standing just a few yards away, quietly observing the skirmish with that same eerie, unsettling familiarity.
'That it, he's the key!', Elias thought, desperation overriding his better judgment.
'If I can get to him, I can use him as a hostage.'
He lunged.
With a burst of explosive acceleration, Elias dissolved into a cloud of dense mist, bypassing Chad and Todd's frantic interception attempts. He materialized directly in front of the prince, his hand clawing outward to grab the boy by the collar.
"Got you—"
Before his fingers could make contact, a faint, translucent spherical object drifted lazily into the space between them.
Elias froze for a split second, his golden eyes widening.
'A bubble?'
Pop!
The bubble burst with zero physical resistance—instead unleashing a blinding, concentrated wave of the flashbang's trapped light directly into Elias's dilated Yako eyes.
"Urgh—!" Elias hissed covering his face, blinded and disoriented and staggering backward.
Taking advantage of the opening, the prince spun low, drawing the obsidian dagger and lunging upward to drive it straight into Elias's chest a second time.
Elias reacted on instinct. His hand shot out, grabbing Raileigh's arm, and using his own momentum to throw the prince over his shoulder toward a pillar. At that exact instant, another translucent bubble manifested out of thin air beneath the falling prince, cushioning his descent like a pillow of condensed air. He landed safely, brushing dust from his clothes, his expression unruffled.
Then he looked down at his arm. Long, red scratches marked his skin—scratches from Elias's extended fingernails.
It was right then, in the heavy silence following the clash, that everything clicked into place for Elias and a realization struck him with the force of a falling mountain. He knew there was more to the visions he was having than he could understand. He would normally record them in his diary and after brief contemplation carry on with his day but today he was remembering the vision more vividly and every time he looked in the Prince's direction or passed close to him.
They were memories.
The dreams of Angram—the boy who had been banished from his village, who had witnessed the battle of gods, who had been mauled by a beast and rescued by a feral girl with golden eyes—those weren't just random visions. They were echoes of a past life. A life that had been lived before Elias was born. A life that had ended in that cave, with Erynn's fierce grin and her promise to hunt a god.
The same golden eyes that Raileigh Zeppelin had.
Raileigh tilted his head, his golden-flecked eyes meeting Elias's stunned gaze. A slow, knowing smile spread across the young man's face.
"You've figured it out," Raileigh muttered softly, his voice carrying an eerie, transcendent echo.
"You-you're the Fool?"
Raileigh smiled, slow and satisfied.
"Hello, World."