After A Billion-Year Torture, I Returned As A Transcendent Player

Chapter 65: Last Two Zones

The mist cleared into open ground, and the smell hit Aidan before the sight did. Old bone and colder dust, the particular stillness of a place that had swallowed a great many people and kept every one of them.

Rows of pale markers stretched out in every direction, and beneath the grey sky, hundreds of half-formed figures knelt motionless in the dirt between them.

[Tier-4 Zone: The Bone Garden.]

[Clear Condition: This ground holds the echoes of every failed attempt on Vorkapar. Defeat the Warden that wears their strongest fragments to advance.]

’No idea how many are buried here.’ Aidan looked over the kneeling figures, unmoving, waiting. ’Enough that the ground stopped bothering to count. Cheerful.’

[Arthur: This place smells like Jovan.]

[Jovan: I have never once smelled like a graveyard.]

[Arthur: You smell like you’re already halfway there.]

’Focus, you two.’ Aidan started walking down the center row. ’Something in here is wearing other people’s power like a coat. I’d like to meet it before it decides to introduce itself.’

He didn’t have to walk far.

At the far end of the garden, a tall figure rose out of the dirt between two markers, stitched together from bone and pale, dust-grey flesh, wearing fragments of a dozen different fighting stances all at once.

[The Warden of Bones has awakened.]

It planted a stone-cracked fist into the ground, and its skin hardened into something dull and iron-veined, the exact seam-locked posture of a defense Aidan had broken apart once before.

’Earthsteel.’ He almost laughed. ’I know this one’s answer already.’

He didn’t bother with subtlety. Electromagnetism seized the iron threading through the Warden’s shell, and metal pried its seams apart before it finished settling into the stance, and a contained burst cracked the whole defense open from the inside in one clean pulse.

The Warden staggered, and its skin rippled, shedding the broken form and reaching for a new one.

Scales bloomed across its arms, bronze and living, and it came in with a heavy, dragon-touched swing that would have caved a lesser guard.

Aidan caught it on a shell of hardened wind, felt the impact ring up through his bones, and answered the way he’d answered a scaled wall once before, wind gathering into blades too fine and too many to shrug off at once.

The Windshear tore through the borrowed scales in a hundred shallow cuts, and the Warden shed that skin too, staggering back, already reaching for its next stolen shape.

This time it came at him fast and elusive, gale-step flickering it in and out of range, precise little cuts landing and vanishing before he could answer them.

’Cute.’ Aidan let it circle twice, reading the pattern. ’But I already beat the original.’

He seeded Epoxy across the dirt in a wide, patient web the way he had once before, let the Warden commit to its next pass, and caught it mid-stride, threads snapping taut around legs that had never learned to expect a trap.

He closed the distance while it hung there and drove a single dense point of metal and lightning through its exposed chest.

The Warden shuddered, and for a moment every stolen fragment it wore flickered at once, gravity and flame and blade and coiled shadow, all of it trying to surface in the same failing body and finding no room left to stand in.

Then it simply came apart, bone and borrowed power scattering into grey dust that the wind carried off toward the waiting markers.

[Warden of Bones defeated.]

[Tier-4 Zone: The Bone Garden. Cleared.]

Aidan exhaled slowly, watching the dust settle over a field of graves too wide to count.

’None of you fought the real thing.’ He turned away from the field. ’You fought something that already had your answers memorized. Rough draw.’

[Advancing to Tier-5 Zone.]

...

The garden dissolved, and the mist that replaced it held longer this time, thick and reluctant.

[Tier-5 Zone: The Hollow Vault.]

[This vault seals itself in three minutes. Retrieve the Sigil of Passage from its center and escape before it does. Another Transcendent Player enters with you. Only one Sigil exists.]

[Companions cannot enter this zone.]

Aidan felt his crew wink out of his awareness again, and this time he didn’t bother commenting on it. Three minutes didn’t leave room for banter.

The vault revealed itself as a collapsing ruin, ceiling already cracking, dust sifting down in slow curtains, corridors branching off in every direction toward a distant, pulsing light at its heart.

A second figure dropped into the ruin beside him, low and quick, already sprinting before Aidan’s boots finished settling.

He didn’t get more than a glimpse, something lean and fast, chitin-plated, moving on all fours like the ruin belonged to it more than to any of them.

It didn’t look back. It didn’t say a word.

’Not a talker. Fine by me.’ Aidan broke into a sprint of his own, boots hammering down a side corridor. ’Three minutes. Let’s not waste one of them being polite.’

The ruin fought him the whole way in.

A section of ceiling gave out ahead of him, and he blew through the collapse on a burst of wind before the debris finished falling. A pack of stone-skinned Terrors rose out of the rubble to bar the path, and he cut them down in three strikes without slowing his stride.

He caught sight of the other racer twice, always ahead of him, always faster on the straightaways, using the low ceilings and narrow gaps like it had been built for exactly that shape.

’It’s going to beat me there on speed alone.’ Aidan’s mind ran cold and quick, timing the seconds bleeding away. ’Then I stop taking the long way.’

He peeled off the marked path and blew straight through a load-bearing wall instead, metal and burst tearing a shortcut through solid stone, and came out into the vault’s central chamber half a breath before the chitin-plated racer did.

The Sigil hung suspended over a slow, grinding sinkhole, a small disc of pale light, and both of them reached for it at the same instant.

Claws met his wrist first.

Aidan didn’t pull back. He let the claws bite in, felt them tear a shallow line across his forearm, and used the grip to yank the creature off balance instead of freeing himself from it.

They went down together, rolling across the crumbling floor, and for three violent seconds it was just claws and fists and the Sigil’s light strobing wildly between them.

He got a hand on it first.

The creature’s jaws snapped shut a hand’s width from his throat as he wrenched free, and Aidan drove an elbow charged with lightning into its skull hard enough to send it sprawling off him entirely.

[Sigil of Passage claimed.]

The vault groaned, ceiling cracking wide open, and the exit sealed itself somewhere behind him with a sound like a held breath finally letting go.

He didn’t wait to see what happened to the creature left inside.

[Opponent ejected.]

[Congratulations, you win.]

Aidan stumbled out of the collapsing ruin into open mist, chest heaving, blood dripping steady from the claw marks on his arm, and let himself breathe for exactly one second before the next words appeared.

[Tier-5 Zone: The Hollow Vault. Cleared.]

[All zones cleared.]

[Advancing to Boss Zone.]

The mist thinned around him one final time, and the sky itself seemed to hold its breath as the new world took shape.

A vast, frozen tomb spread out beneath a sky the color of an old bruise, ribs of dead stone arching overhead like the remains of something that had died mid-scream. At its center, sealed behind a wall of black ice, a shape stirred, ancient and enormous, wings folded tight around a body built out of centuries of unanswered hunger.

[Boss Zone: Vorkapar’s Tomb.]

[Total Attempts on Vorkapar: 376. Successful Clears: 0.]

Aidan pressed a hand to the wound on his arm, sealed it with a thin thread of flame, and looked up at the sleeping shape behind the ice.

’Alright, old man.’ He rolled his shoulders, exhaustion and something sharper than exhaustion both burning steady in his chest. ’Let’s see if 377 is the number that finally ends you.’

The black ice began, slowly, to crack.