The Box: Fate
Chapter 69 — The Ghost of the Capital
The shockwave from the Angel's descent did not expand with a roar; it withdrew with a terrifying, vacuum-like silence.
Five miles outside the crumbling borders of Aethelgard, the protective sapphire bubble created by Azureus finally popped, gently dropping the battered Sovereign Vanguards onto the high grass of the western plains. The grass beneath them was green, wet, and tangible. The air smelled of dew and distant rain.
Gideon the Ash-Bringer collapsed heavily against a jagged boulder, his crimson armor fractured in a dozen places, his chest heaving as he stared back at the horizon. Beside him, Azureus stood in his towering humanoid form, though his blue scales were dangerously dim, flickering like a candle in a heavy draft.
"Look," Gideon spat, shaking blood from his knuckles.
Where the grand, towering white spires of Aethelgard had stood for generations, there was now a perfectly smooth, semicircular crater that stretched for over two miles. The palace, the royal walls, the fake King, and Malakor had been cleanly excised from the planet's geography. There was no smoke, no rubble, and no fire. The Angel of Death had not destroyed the area; it had completely deleted the code of the bedrock itself.
At the very lip of that colossal, empty crater, a lone figure lay motionless in the dirt.
"The boy..." Azureus murmured, his slitted eyes narrowing as he felt the faint, flickering pulse of Kataki's soul.
Gideon pushed himself up, using his greatsword like a crutch. "He's alive. But he's empty. That thing he summoned didn't just take his mana, lizard. It ate into his life expectancy. If we don't stabilize him, his body is going to give out before noon."
An hour later, the core members of the squad began to regain consciousness in a hidden cavern near the foothills.
Axel Hatanaki was the first to open his eyes, his muscles groaning in protest as he sat up. Sharky Bee followed, his hand immediately reaching for his green-tinted daggers out of sheer instinct. One by one—Murasaki, Kuro, Akira, and the rest—the sixteen-to-eighteen-year-old players looked around the dark cave, their faces pale and hollow.
In the center of the cavern, Kataki lay on a makeshift bed of cloaks. His left wrist was crudely bandaged with cloth provided by Vahn, but his skin was a sickening, translucent white. The silver brilliance of his eyes had completely vanished, leaving his closed eyelids looking hollowed out.
Vahn sat beside him, his expression darker than the shadows of the cave. "He broke his internal threshold. When the system was active, the interface absorbed the feedback of the high-tier skills. Now that we're in a real world, summoning a conceptual entity like the Death-Bringer means your own nervous system has to act as the grounding wire."
Zanaki sat against the cave wall, his arms crossed, his face devoid of his usual smug grin. "So he saved us, but he killed himself doing it? That's a terrible trade, even for a leader."
"He isn't dead," Azureus's voice resonated from the dark corner of the cave, where he stood keeping watch over the entrance. "But the Void General is also not entirely erased. The Crimson Overwrite that Malakor triggered using the red Zenith card was fueled by the ancient blood of Crash. You cannot delete a primordial seal with a single swing of a scythe."
Gideon walked into the cave, throwing a heavy bundle of local medicinal herbs onto the ground. "The lizard is right. I looked at the crater before we pulled the kid out. There's a lingering, violet rot sticking to the bottom of the pit. Malakor's physical body is gone, but his spirit has drifted into the lower subterranean channels. He's going straight to the bedrock where Crash is chained."
The room went completely silent. The weight of their new reality was settling in. They had no health status screens to tell them how long Kataki had left. They had no map waypoints to guide them to the next objective.
"We can't go back to Liya," Axel said, his voice heavy but steady. "And the Capital is gone. If the Seven Demon Lords realize the human leadership has been wiped out, their armies will march across the Eastern plains within forty-eight hours."
Sharky Bee stood up, adjusting his tactical belt, his green eyes flashing with a cold determination. "Then we don't wait for them. If the game is over, we play by our own rules. We have an Apex King on our side now," he pointed a dagger toward Gideon, "and we have the Dragon King. We treat the wounds, we wake Kataki up, and we take the fight straight to the trenches before Crash can open his eyes."
Vahn looked up at the teenagers, a faint, proud smile breaking through his scarred face. They weren't panicking anymore. The loss of the system hadn't broken them; it had turned them into something far more dangerous than players. It had turned them into real vanguards.