Chapter
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In the legends of the ancient hunters, there was a creature that was never seen—except in the moments it chose to appear.
They called it "the Mole."
It was not large. It was not terrifying. But when it chose to disappear—it never returned. It burrowed through the earth faster than imagination could follow. It emerged where no one expected it, and vanished before breath could be drawn. They said it was born of dust, that the earth held no weight over it, that stone softened before it like clay.
They said many things.
No one had ever seen it alive.
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Beneath the ground—where there was no light, no sound—Karsu was digging.
The darkness around him was thick, viscous, clinging to his skin from every direction. The soil pressed against his chest, crushed his lungs, reminding every cell in his body that it was not meant to exist here.
But Karsu did not need light.
His fingers were wrapped in thin metallic threads, coiled around each one like unbreakable rings. At their tips, the Qaz of stone worked in silence. Whenever his hand touched earth, stone became sand. Whenever it touched sand, it became dust.
And whenever it became dust, Karsu pushed it behind him.
His hands began to spin. Slowly at first, then faster. The threads at his fingertips turned into fine drills, tearing a path forward. His body began to move—not like one digging, but like one swimming.
Dust trailed behind him like the tail of a comet.
Forward. Always forward. He knew the direction. He could feel it—the faint breath of air above, the emptiness calling him upward.
Then—he felt danger.
Above him, Cox was preparing.
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On the surface, Cox was running.
Not like a man fleeing something he feared—but like a man rushing toward something he could not wait to witness.
The ground beneath his feet shifted. Stones rose from the earth, uneven in height, forming beneath him as if they were growing. Smooth. Precise. Ascending step by step—like a staircase climbing into the sky.
Dozens of meters.
With every step, he rose higher. The earth fell away beneath him. Trees shrank. The sky drew closer.
At the peak, he looked down. At the mound of earth that buried Karsu. At the stillness that deceived the ignorant.
He raised his halberd.
The air around him began to tremble. Dust rose from beneath his feet, spiraling upward, wrapping around his body—and then hardened.
Obsidian.
Not just his body. His weapon.
Everything turned to obsidian—the hardest form of stone, where rock surpassed even metal.
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He leaped.
No—he fell. Like a mountain cast down upon the head of an insect.
His black, gleaming body tore through the air like an arrow loosed by an angry sky. The halberd before him was no longer a weapon—it was a judgment. A hammer of absolute force, deciding that this very place deserved to be erased.
"Now… die!"
His voice was not a sound. It was a shockwave that arrived before him.
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Then—impact.
The world beneath him ceased to exist.
The halberd touched the mound—but it did not crush it in the way ordinary things are crushed. It erased it.
Beneath the point of impact, the soil did not scatter—it evaporated. It became fine dust like ash, then less than dust. A crater ten meters deep formed in an instant—not because the earth split open, but because it disappeared.
The shockwave surged downward, forward, in every direction.
Nearby trees did not break—they were torn apart. Their trunks split from within, as though something had detonated inside them. Leaves turned into green sparks that scattered into the air before burning away.
The mound that had buried Karsu—that silent mass that had stood arrogantly above the earth—was no longer a mound. It was an abyss. A grave for something that had not yet died.
But deeper still—beneath everything—
the world shook.
It was not an ordinary tremor. It was violent enough that the deep stone beneath the crust cracked like glass thrown against rock. There was a moment—a moment of total silence after the shock—as if the earth had stopped breathing.
Then—
the earth screamed.
Deep cracks spread from the central crater like a giant spider's web, stretching for dozens of meters in every direction. From those cracks, not only dust emerged—but the breath of the earth itself. Hot. Sulfurous. As if the wound had reached the planet's veins.
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Beneath it all—Karsu.
He did not see the blow coming. He did not hear it. Light could not reach him, and sound was too slow for what had happened.
But he felt it.
The wall of earth around him—which he had been digging through like butter—hardened instantly. Then there was no wall. No earth. Nothing but pressure.
Not ordinary pressure. Pressure that made his ribs creak like dry wood beneath the weight of a whale. Pressure that made his eyes tremble in their sockets, bleeding crimson like tears.
Pressure that made his heart—for the first time in his life—stop. Not from fear or even emotion. It was purely physical. Biological.
Through it all, Karsu kept digging.
His fingers, which had been spinning like drills, did not stop. The metallic threads at their tips screamed against the stone that had suddenly transformed from soft sand into an unyielding mass.
But Karsu did not need the stone to yield.
He needed to disappear.
And the Mole was at its best when danger pressed against it from every side.
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BOOOOOOM!
The explosion was immense. The mound of earth scattered in every direction as if it had never been. Dust rose high, covering the sky, covering the trees, covering everything.
And the tremor—did not stop.
The ground shook beneath Cox's feet as he stood smiling at the heart of the abyss.
It shook beneath everyone in the forest. It reached the edges of the capital, where guards stopped breathing for a moment, and dust fell from the ancient walls.
And at the heart of the forest, everything stopped.
Fargas heard the explosion. He was far away, but the sound reached him as if it had been beside his ear. The ground beneath him trembled, and he nearly lost his balance.
He looked toward the sound. His blue eyes narrowed.
There.
He did not hesitate. He did not calculate. He did not analyze.
He ran.
It was not ordinary running. The Qaz of Acceleration—that Qaz he had mastered over the years—activated in an instant. The air around him compressed, distances shrank, and the forest around him turned into streaks of light.
Step after step, his speed grew.
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The first thing he saw was dust.
Not ordinary dust. It was thick, heavy, as if the earth had expelled its soul all at once. Then he saw the stones—not scattered, but launched like projectiles. Then he saw the cracks splitting the ground, stretching from beneath his feet to where sight could no longer reach.
He laughed.
Not a laugh of victory. A laugh of discovery. A man who had just realized he possessed the power to split the earth in half. He leaped from the air, descended toward the crater he himself had made, and climbed its edge like a man playing in his own domain.
He looked down. Into the darkness. Into the void he had created.
"You'd better hope you're dead!" he shouted into the crater, his voice echoing from the stone walls. "If you're still alive… I want to see what you look like!"
The smile never left his lips. It was the smile of a man who had witnessed a miracle and claimed it as his own.
Then, after a moment of silence:
"Did you evaporate from the pressure? That's possible!"
He laughed again. Louder this time. More at ease.
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Then he saw the hand.
It emerged from between the cracks in the earth, from the dust that had not yet settled, from the darkness that was supposed to yield nothing.
Wrapped in silver threads, gleaming like mercury beneath a moon that did not exist.
Then he saw the face.
Karsu did not leap. He did not dash. He did not climb. He simply—appeared. As if the earth that had exploded beneath Cox moments ago had merely been a door Karsu quietly opened to enter the room.
He stood there. Covered in soil, in debris, in the remnants of the world that had collapsed upon him. His face bled from his brow, from his cheek, from his split lip. But he did not look wounded in the way humans understood the word. He looked like someone who had emerged from a battle in which he had lost everything—except what he needed to keep fighting.
He looked at Cox.
And Cox—for the first time since he had leaped from the sky—stopped laughing.
Nothing dramatic happened. Karsu did not threaten him. He said nothing. He simply stood there, brushing dust from his shoulder like a man who was late for an appointment, not like someone who had survived a catastrophe.
But his eyes…
His eyes looked at Cox the way a butcher looks at a piece of meat, uncertain where to begin.
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Then—there was no moment of "suddenly."
There was a feeling.
Cox felt it first in his knees. Then in his teeth. Then in his eyes—a faint, involuntary tremor.
The ground beneath him did not shake.
The ground shuddered.
This tremor was different from the one before. That one had been violent destruction. This one was… deep. As if something beneath the earth had decided to breathe after holding its breath too long. And the act of breathing was a mistake.
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It began with a sound. Not an ordinary sound. A massive cracking, slow at first, as if the earth were groaning beneath a wound that had not yet healed. Then it grew faster. It became the sound of thousands of rocks remembering, suddenly, that they had never been fused together—only balanced on an illusion.
The crater fractured. Not just the one Cox had made—that one was deep enough. But the earth around it. A circular rupture, as if someone had pressed a finger against the surface of a frozen lake.
The stone masses at the edges began to fall inward.
It was not an ordinary collapse. The earth was not simply falling downward—it was consuming itself. The outer edges slid toward the center, the center sank deeper, and everything moved in a slow, heavy rotation, as if the earth were folding itself over its wound.
Cox leaped back.
But the collapse did not seek to swallow him. It sought to widen the wound.
The stones that had been beneath his feet moments ago became part of a shifting slope, crawling downward with slow violence. The trees standing at the edges of the circle began to tilt—not all at once, but as if bending slowly, their roots pulling from the earth like fingers slipping from a grasp.
And the dust—the dust became a cloud. It did not just rise. It rose like a gray wall stretching for dozens of meters, swallowing light, swallowing sound, swallowing everything except the sound of the earth tearing itself apart.
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