Chapter 71 — The Price of Chaos
The forest of the Underworld was not made for running.
The stone trunks had no space between them like a normal forest — they grew in irregular patterns that created corridors ending without warning, rock and root alleys that forced abrupt changes of direction. Dregor knew this. He used it. Every time Jelim's stakes tore through the trees behind him, he had already turned, already calculated the next angle, already placed solid matter between himself and the destruction that followed.
But there were too many.
"FANZEL!" The name came out between forced breaths, not from exhaustion but from genuine irritation. "Where the hell are you?"
The forest exploded behind him.
Three stone trees shattered simultaneously, fragments fanning out to cover the next ten meters with cutting shards. Dregor leaped — not upward but sideways, his body rotating horizontally as the fragments passed beneath his feet. He landed in a run that didn't lose any speed.
He turned again. Stopped.
The sound of the stakes had ceased.
Dregor stood motionless, both axes in hand, his single functional eye sweeping the forest ahead with total focus. Silence. The kind that wasn't the absence of sound but the presence of something watching.
Then he heard it.
Not stakes. Not breaking wood.
Footsteps.
Many. Uncoordinated. With that specific rhythm of movement without its own purpose — only direction imposed from outside.
He turned slowly.
The dead werewolves filled the space between the trees.
They didn't run like living creatures — they ran like puppets someone had given speed without giving balance. The headless bodies stumbled into each other, slammed into trunks, fell and rose without processing the fall, their arms moving at angles that muscles without intent shouldn't have been able to produce.
They were coming at full speed.
"Damn witch."
He drew the axes from his back. And went to meet them.
---
Up above, Jelim watched.
The smile that appeared on her exposed face was different from the smiles she had made when the mask still existed — smaller, more genuine, more dangerous precisely because it tried to be nothing other than what it was.
"You finally decided to act like a man."
The bodies advanced through the forest. She felt each one like an extension of her own fingers — not consciousness, not will, just presence that responded to her. Twenty-three puppets scattered among the trees, converging in a pattern that Dregor had not yet fully realized.
He didn't need to realize it. He only needed to keep fighting.
And he fought.
The axes described arcs that were neither defense nor attack but something in between — a geometry of destruction that turned every werewolf into an obstacle eliminated before it could become a problem. One diagonal cut split two at once. A punch with the shaft destroyed the third before the blade finished its arc. The momentum of the stone trees was used as a springboard to reach those climbing the trunks, the axes turning into demolition tools that transformed the underground forest into a succession of explosions of flesh, stone, and dark blood.
It was impressive.
Jelim began to concentrate the trees that were still floating in the air.
The remaining stakes joined the whole trees — wood and stone converging into a mass that blocked the torchlight and cast a massive shadow over the section of forest where Dregor continued eliminating the puppets. They all descended at the same time.
---
Dregor heard the sound before he saw it.
The kind of sound that doesn't come from a specific direction because it comes from everywhere at once — wood and stone cutting through the air in enough quantity to create audible pressure before impact.
He looked up.
*Shit.*
The mental message arrived at that exact moment.
*— My lord. Now.*
Dregor didn't think. He threw.
The right axe left his hand with force that made the air whistle — trajectory calculated to the left, passing through three werewolves that disintegrated along the way like irrelevant obstacles. The left axe went to the right, the blade cutting the air with that specific sound of metal at high speed.
Both axes entered portals that Fanzel had opened at the exact moment. They disappeared.
Beneath Dregor's feet, another portal opened.
The forest exploded above him — wood, stone, roots, everything colliding at the point where he had been. The crash made the walls of the underground valley vibrate. The shockwave reached the main battlefield as a tremor that rippled the ground beneath anyone still standing.
---
Jelim saw the axes reappear.
One on the left — a portal opening three meters away, the blade emerging with accumulated speed. The second on the right, parallel, at the perfect angle so that dodging one would put her in the path of the other.
She dodged the left one.
She stopped the right one with telekinesis — fingers contracting, an invisible barrier materializing, the axe halting in the air thirty centimeters from her face.
"Hey, witch girl."
The voice came from below.
Jelim looked down — and saw Dregor climbing the stone wall of the valley, his fingers finding fissures that weren't obvious but existed, his body moving across the vertical surface with a speed that shouldn't have been possible for someone of his size.
The punch arrived before she fully processed that he was already close enough.
Base of the palm. More surface area than a closed fist. Against a face that wasn't expecting physical impact, the difference was irrelevant.
The sound was dry. Bone giving way.
Jelim was launched — she didn't fall, she was thrown, the exit velocity determined by Dregor's force rather than gravity, her body cutting through the valley air in a horizontal trajectory that passed centimeters from Steve before a stone tree stopped the motion.
Her back. The back of her neck. Her shoulders. All at once.
Jelim slid down the trunk to the ground. Her face was wrong — asymmetrical in a way that wasn't natural, blood flowing from three different points, her purple eyes focusing and unfocusing with the specific discontinuity of a building concussion.
Steve saw all of it happen less than two meters away.
Dregor landed between them and Keara. He caught the axe that Fanzel launched from a nearby portal. Fanzel stepped out of the same portal, adjusting the sleeves of his purple robe.
"You gave us quite a lot of trouble," Dregor said, his voice completely calm. "But it's time we collected what is ours. And annihilated you."
Steve gritted his teeth.
"Keara." His voice came out deep, carrying the quality of a decision made before the words. "Take care of Jelim. Don't let her die."
Then his eyes found Jelim on the ground, semi-conscious, her face disfigured.
"And you," he said in a serious, low voice. "Try not to die."
He began walking toward Dregor.
Keara ran to Jelim. The freed prisoners instinctively retreated. Orzun stayed where he was, knives in hand.
Nessira watched Steve walk away. She opened her mouth. Closed it. There were no right words — she didn't know that boy, didn't know what she would say, didn't know what he needed to hear.
She remained silent.
"What do you think you're going to do, kid?" Dregor didn't retreat. "It's clear you have no strength left."
"I know."
Steve stopped at a distance that still allowed conversation.
"That's why I'm going to play the risky card."
He closed his eyes.
Nessira realized before anyone else. It wasn't the movement, it wasn't the sound — it was the feeling. That specific vibration she recognized as easily as her own name. The energy of chaos beginning to move inside Steve differently from the other times. Not channeled through the Percentage System with its limits, counters, and warnings.
Direct. Raw. Unfiltered.
"No." Her step forward was immediate. "Don't do that."
Steve didn't open his eyes.
The energy continued to move.
---
The darkness came from within.
Not gradually — it was like a light being turned off, the outside world becoming irrelevant in a way that wasn't unconsciousness because Steve still felt completely present. Only the present had changed location.
He was in a place.
Dark. Without clear dimensions — the floor existed because his feet touched something, but what that something was couldn't be perceived. The walls existed because there were limits, but where those limits were was impossible to determine. The air had a weight that didn't belong to any natural atmosphere.
And there were two thrones.
Black stone. Not carved — formed, as if the matter had decided that shape by its own will. Tall enough that whoever sat in them didn't need to rise to dominate the space.
Two occupants.
On the left — her.
Steve recognized her and didn't recognize her at the same time. It was Nessira — the hair that shifted between black and gray, the structure of the face, the proportions. But the version on the throne had it twisted, distorted, like a reflection in a non-flat mirror. The eyes that should have been green were empty — not colorless but bottomless, holes where light entered and never returned. The skin that should have been white as snow had darkened in geometric patterns that ran across her face and neck at angles that made the mind refuse to fully process them.
She was smiling.
On the right — him.
Steve. Or what wore his face. The same structure, the same curly hair, the same height. But the eyes were absolute purple-black with no pupil, no iris, no recognizable humanity. The posture was different — not of someone sitting because they were tired, but of someone settling in because they belonged.
He was smiling too.
"Who are you?"
Steve's voice came out before the decision to speak had even arrived.
Neither of them answered.
They stood up.
Simultaneous. Coordinated. As if the decision had been made by something above both of them that the two obeyed without needing to communicate. The thrones were left empty and the two began to approach — not exactly walking, but the space between them and Steve shrank regardless of what their feet did.
The corrupted version of Nessira arrived first.
Her fingers — too long, joints wrong — touched Steve's face with a gentleness that was worse than violence because it made no sense in that place.
Steve tried to pull back.
His feet didn't respond.
The fingers moved toward his eyes.
"No—" the word came out strangled. "No, get out, get out of me—"
The smoke entered through his eyes.
It wasn't an invasion — it was dissolution. The corrupted version of Nessira losing solid form and becoming something that could pass through skin without needing an opening, that crossed without asking permission because it didn't recognize that permission was a concept that applied to what it was doing.
Cold. Absolutely cold. Like fingers of ice moving through places that shouldn't have had temperature.
The corrupted version of Steve came next.
Through the mouth.
The scream that emerged didn't come from the dark place — it came from the real throat, from the real body, on the battlefield of the Underworld where everyone could hear. The sound of someone trying to expel something that had no way of being expelled because it didn't exist in any dimension that expulsion could reach.
The darkness swallowed everything.
---
On the battlefield, Steve's body stopped.
Completely still. Arms hanging. No muscle tension — just suspension, like a puppet whose strings had all been released at once.
Dregor stopped as well.
Fanzel took an involuntary step back, his blue pupils pulsing with active evaluation mana, trying to read what was happening and finding no category for it in the archives he possessed.
Keara released Jelim and stood up with hands already glowing.
"Steve—"
The rays began.
They didn't come from outside. They came out of Steve's body — purple mixed with a color that wasn't exactly pink but was what happened when purple met something that had no name in any language of the Underworld. Small at first. Then larger. They ran along his arms, climbed his neck, spread across the ground from his feet in lines that cracked the underground stone in a radiating pattern.
The ground around Steve cracked in a perfect circle.
The nearest torches extinguished simultaneously — not by wind, not by impact, but as if the light had simply decided not to exist within that specific radius.
The eyes opened.
Purple mixed with absolute pink. No pupil. No iris. No trace of the specific hesitation that had always been present in Steve Matsinhe's eyes even in his moments of greatest anger. No weight of seventeen years of a difficult life that used to be there even when he tried to hide it.
Only those impossible colors where someone should have been.
The mouth opened.
The smile appeared slowly — not like a smile of victory, not like a smile of relief. Like something that had never smiled before and was now discovering it had the muscles to do so and found the process fascinating.
Wide. Full. Completely wrong on that boy's face.
Dregor stayed where he was.
His single functional eye fixed on the figure in front of him. The axes in his hand but not raised — not exactly out of fear, but from the specific recognition of someone who had seen enough to know that advancing without information is a mistake not made twice.
Fanzel had stopped breathing.
Keara stood motionless with glowing hands, eyes wide, healing magic active with nowhere to go because there was no visible wound to heal.
Orzun gripped his knives so tightly his knuckles turned white but didn't move — the young orc's survival instinct telling him that movement was a trigger and a trigger meant death.
Nessira stood two meters from Steve.
Her emerald eyes didn't shift for even a second.
She saw the purple-pink in his eyes. She saw the smile. She saw how the body's posture had changed — not Steve's posture that slightly hunched when he was insecure, that placed his feet at the wrong distance when he didn't know where the danger was. This posture was something else. It occupied space differently. As if the body had been filled with something that knew exactly how much space belonged to it.
The rays continued to shoot in every direction.
A stone the size of a head slowly rose from the ground without anyone touching it, without any gesture being made. It hovered. It rotated in the air with that specific slowness of something being examined by an entity that was still learning what it could do.
Then it shot forward.
It crossed the entire valley and embedded itself in the opposite stone wall with an impact that made the structure vibrate and sent fragments falling for three full seconds.
The smile grew wider.