Chapter 69 — The Mask That Fell
The HUD timer read four minutes and thirty-two seconds.
Steve was already running.
There was no plan. No strategy. There was only Dregor ahead, Dagon gone, and the scythe in his right hand pulsing with purple light that gave off no warmth — it only burned from within, only consumed, only demanded the price it always demanded.
Dregor did not retreat.
He stood still with both axes hanging at his sides, his single functional eye following Steve's trajectory with the expression of a man seeing something truly interesting for the first time in a long while. The smile came slowly — not out of cruelty, but genuine recognition.
The scythe came down in a diagonal arc.
The two axes rose in an X, intercepting the blade with an impact that cracked the underground valley floor in a straight line beneath both their feet. The sound echoed off the stone walls like thunder trapped in too small a space.
Dregor didn't move an inch.
"Not bad, kid," he said, his voice perfectly calm beneath the effort. "Entertain me."
Steve pushed. Leaped backward. Landed with his feet scraping across the underground stone, his purple-black eyes locked on the man in front of him.
"Where did you send Dagon?" The words came out with more anger than he intended.
Dregor tilted his head slightly.
"To a much better place than this."
Something inside Steve snapped.
"You bastard."
Steve started running again.
---
The Great Forest smelled of damp earth and ancient magic.
Dagon stood motionless in the middle of a small clearing for exactly as long as he needed to fully assess the situation. He looked at the trees. At the sky visible through the canopy. At the frozen mountains on the northern horizon, shrouded in mist and completely silent in the distance.
Then he made a sound between his teeth that wasn't quite a word.
"Back in this place again."
He took three steps toward the mountains. Stopped.
He calculated mentally — two days on foot over normal terrain. Then the Frozen Mountains. The descent back into the Underworld. The path to the valley where the caravan was.
Four days. Maybe five.
Steve didn't have four days.
"I can't let that kid destroy everything we've built."
He closed his eyes.
Took one deep breath — surface air, air with wind and moisture and the scent of living things that the Underworld would never have.
"Now."
His eyes opened.
They were no longer Dagon Ashford's eyes.
They were reptilian — vertical irises, golden-yellow, with no white, no recognizable humanity. Eyes that belonged to something far older than any player transported into a fantasy world.
The transformation began.
It wasn't explosive. It was worse — it was slow. Deliberate. As if every change had to happen in the correct order, as if the body knew exactly what it was becoming and felt no need to rush.
The skin changed first. Not in color — in texture. Human skin began to harden into plates, each overlapping the next like armor growing from the inside out, black as wet obsidian and gleaming with a dark blue sheen when the forest light hit the right angles.
Then the structure.
His shoulders widened — not like muscle, but like architecture being rebuilt in real time, bones reorganizing with sounds the forest absorbed in respectful silence. The spine lengthened. The neck grew to proportions a human body could never allow. His height rose, and rose, and kept rising until the lower canopies of the trees were level with his shoulders.
The wings emerged slowly from his back.
Each one was folded at first — black membranes with veins that glowed dark purple, as if the Nexus's own magic flowed through them instead of blood. They unfurled completely with a soft, almost gentle sound that didn't match the sheer size of what produced it. A massive shadow covered the entire clearing.
The tail formed last. Long. Heavy. With a tip that wasn't merely pointed — it was geometric, cut into precise angles like forged crystal.
The dragon stood motionless for a moment.
It looked toward the frozen mountains with reptilian eyes that had lost none of Dagon Ashford's intelligence — they had simply stopped pretending to have limitations that had never been real.
"I need to be fast."
The wings swept downward.
The forest bent under the displaced air, century-old trees bowing at impossible angles, leaves spiraling away as the dragon rose above the canopy, above the low mist, above everything.
And turned north.
And accelerated.
---
In the underground valley, Steve's scythe sliced a stone tree clean in half.
Dregor was no longer where he had been.
He reappeared two meters to the right, leaping from rock to rock with a lightness that completely contradicted the size of his body. He was laughing. Not with malicious glee — with genuine satisfaction, the kind that only appears when someone finally finds opposition that justifies the effort of getting out of bed in the morning.
"More," he said. "I want more."
Steve spun. The scythe described a horizontal arc that would have cut anything at waist level.
Dregor jumped vertically.
He rose three meters, used a rock outcrop as a springboard, and dove from above with both axes converging on Steve in a perfect diagonal line — a movement practiced until it became instinct, until it stopped being a decision and became simply the body doing what it knew how to do.
Steve raised the scythe above his head.
The impact was catastrophic.
The shockwave opened a circular crater in the ground beneath Steve's feet, underground stone cracking in a spiderweb pattern that spread in every direction. Steve was forced downward — knees hitting the stone, arms vibrating with a force no human body was supposed to absorb.
But he held.
Dregor pushed off with a perfect backward leap, landing several meters away with that irritating grace. He stood upright. Looked at Steve, still on his knees in the crater.
And threw one of his axes.
Not with dramatic speed. With surgical precision — the kind of throw that only exists after thousands of repetitions, after learning exactly how much force is needed for a specific target at a specific distance.
Steve turned his head too late.
The shaft — not the blade — struck him from the side. It was both better and worse: the bone didn't break, but the impact sent him flying sideways in a helpless arc. He lost all control of his trajectory, the scythe slipping from his hand as his shoulder slammed into the stone wall.
He fell.
Rolled.
Stopped.
He lay there with his face pressed against the cold floor of the underground valley, the metallic taste of blood filling his mouth, the world spinning in spirals that refused to stabilize.
He got up anyway.
He always did.
He picked up the scythe. Stood on legs that trembled in a way he couldn't hide. Looked at Dregor.
And ran.
Again.
That was when the HUD flashed.
**[SYSTEM PERCENTAGE — CRITICAL WARNING]**
**Usage time exceeded**
**Immediate deactivation**
**Fragment: reclaimed**
The scythe disappeared.
Not gradually. Not dramatically. It simply ceased to be in his hand, as if it had never existed, and Steve found himself running with a closed fist gripping empty air. His feet kept moving out of inertia until his body realized there was nothing left to support the effort.
He dropped to his knees.
His hands hit the ground before his face did. The stone was cold. Rough. Real in a way the scythe had never been.
He tried to stand.
His legs said no.
Steve stayed there on all fours, breathing with the particular difficulty of someone who had exhausted reserves he didn't know he had. He slammed his closed fist against the ground. Once. Again.
*Damn it.*
*As always.*
*Weak. Useless. Just like I've always been.*
"It was good fighting you, kid."
Dregor's voice came from above. Close. Steve didn't need to look to know the man was approaching with those deliberate, unhurried steps — the same cadence of someone who knows there is no urgency because the outcome is already decided.
---
In the air above the battle, Jelim floated.
She had spent the last few minutes doing what she did best — aim, press, finish. Werewolf after werewolf, methodical, without hesitation. The cracked white mask reflected the torches of the underground valley in irregular fragments of light.
She looked down at Steve on the ground.
"Damn the moment I thought he could actually help with anything."
A voice came from the side.
"You should worry more about your own life first."
Jelim turned her head.
The portal was two meters away from her — small, oval, completely silent. Dragf stepped out of it with his sword already in motion, body rotating, the edge of the blade converging on her head with the precision of a strike that needed no power because speed took care of everything.
The shield formed at the last instant.
It wasn't a conscious decision — it was pure reflex, telekinesis activating before thought, an invisible barrier materializing between the blade and the mask.
The impact shattered the shield instantly.
But it absorbed enough force to turn a decapitation into a collision — the blade struck the mask with violence that partially shattered it. Fragments of white porcelain flew in an arc, and the shockwave sent Jelim flying horizontally with a speed that wasn't flight but directed falling.
The stone tree stopped her.
Her back collided with the trunk with a sound that echoed through the valley. Jelim slid down. She remained suspended a few meters above the ground, telekinesis holding her body by pure instinct while her system tried to process what had just happened.
Dragf landed below her. He looked up without any particular expression.
"Learn to pay more attention to your enemies."
He turned. Walked toward the main battle.
Jelim remained suspended.
She didn't move for a long second.
Then she began to float upward.
Slowly. Very slowly. Like something that feels no hurry because what is about to happen needs no speed to be inevitable.
"I don't remember," she said, her voice completely flat, "the last time I received an attack."
The mask cracked further.
A new line crossed what remained, from the right corner to the center, and a fragment fell — spinning as it descended, catching the torchlight, white against the darkness of the underground valley.
Then another fragment.
Then two at once.
Steve was on the ground, Dregor standing over him, and he saw the pieces falling from above with that specific slowness of things that happen slowly because they are important. The mask that had been intact since the first day. The one he had never seen removed. The one he had simply accepted as part of who Jelim was — the mask, the coldness, and the voice that said *enemy is enemy* without ever explaining why she needed to say it out loud.
The fragments kept falling.
Jelim rose.
And the face beneath was gradually revealed as the porcelain disappeared — not all at once, but in pieces, like a puzzle coming undone. Each falling fragment revealed more than the one before.
Steve forgot Dregor.
He forgot the pain. He forgot the timer. He forgot the hundred and fifty prisoners, Nessira in her cage, and the missing Dagon.
Because the face appearing above was familiar.
Not vaguely. Not in a way that could be coincidence, resemblance, or a memory distorted by exhaustion.
It was a face he knew.
Purple hair now falling freely without the mask to hold it back. Purple eyes — not brown, not blue, but purple with that specific intensity of a computer screen at three in the morning when the room is completely dark. A serious expression that wasn't learned coldness but something older, more calculated.
Steve's heart stopped.
It went back.
Back to the small room in Mozambique with the blue glow of the monitor as the only living thing in the space. Back to the feeling of finally beating that boss after hours of attempts. Back to the notification that appeared in the corner of the screen while he was still catching his breath in relief.
*Friend request — User: Nesin.*
Back to the messages. The video call. The face on the screen — blurry from the connection quality but present, smiling, saying *wow, your skin is really chocolate* with that disarming casualness he had found strange but couldn't ignore.
Back to the link.
*www.hptt.lordoffantasi.com*
Back to the hospital. His mother's hand in his. The form. The final question — *are you willing to lose everything?* — and the answer he had given without thinking, because at that moment losing everything had seemed impossible since he already had nothing left to lose.
Back to the scream that tore out of him when his body began to dissolve.
*NESIN! You put me in this!*
All that journey. All that forest. All those monsters and cultists and werewolves and temples and underground worlds and counted days and power that consumed him every time he used it.
All that distance between Mozambique and here.
And she was here.
She had been here from the beginning.
The Jelim who said *enemy is enemy* without ever explaining why she chose that absolutism. The Jelim who stayed close instead of pulling away when she could have left. The Jelim who had said *I'm here because I wanted to be* in that tone he hadn't fully understood at the time.
The Jelim who knew the name of the link. Who knew the Nexus before entering. Who had appeared in the forest exactly when he needed her, beside Dagon who had also come from another world, as if coincidence were the most natural thing in the universe.
There had never been any coincidence.
Never.
Jelim — Nesin — floated at the top of the underground valley, the last fragment of the mask falling in slow motion, her face fully exposed for the first time, her purple eyes looking down without apology and without explanation.
Steve was on his knees on the ground.
Dregor stood two meters away, watching the scene with genuine curiosity, axes lowered, like a man who recognizes that something is happening that is not his concern.
The tears came before Steve decided anything.
Not from sadness. From anger and betrayal and confusion and something deeper that had no name but hurt in a way Dregor's axe never could.
He opened his mouth.
The name tore out, incredulous, filled with everything at once.
"**Nesin.**"
The valley fell completely silent.