Chapter 38: Saga 38: Signs Ignored
"Missing persons are up eighteen percent this month," Claire said, spreading a stack of guild reports across the safehouse table with the brisk efficiency of someone who’d clearly stayed up half the night compiling them. "Renodin’s Six Brigades think it’s just increased monster activity near the outskirts, seasonal migration patterns, nothing worth escalating. I don’t think it’s monsters at all."
"Black Ring," Sylvia said, not a question, already reaching for the map Claire had marked.
"No confirmed sightings anywhere, no signature magic detected at any scene. But the timing’s too clean, too regular to be coincidence. Every single disappearance clusters within a day’s travel of the capital, radiating outward like ripples from a stone dropped in still water." Claire tapped the map, red pins scattered in a loose, deliberate ring around Renodin’s palace district.
Kael leaned over the map, frowning, tracing the pattern with his finger. ’System, anything on this?’
[Location Assist is having considerable difficulty. Whatever’s doing this is masking its signature the same way Paul’s cult did before the highlands incident. I can tell you where the holes in reality are forming, not what’s actually making them.]
’Great. Super helpful, as always.’
[I do my best with what I’m given, which, frankly, is you. Manage your expectations accordingly.]
"There’s something buried under the palace," Harriden said quietly, arms crossed, leaning against the far wall where shadows pooled thickest. He’d spent the better part of two weeks slipping through the capital’s shadow network unseen, listening to whispers passed between servants and guards that never should have reached his ears at all. "Old palace workers, generations back, talk about a sealed chamber deep beneath the foundation stones. Nobody’s opened it in three hundred years, not since it was first built over. Superstition says it’s cursed, that opening it invites ruin on the whole royal line."
"Cursed how?" Yuki asked, leaning forward with genuine interest for once, instead of his usual lazy sprawl.
"Nobody remembers anymore, not specifically. That’s what worries me most. A curse people can name, you can prepare against. A curse people have simply forgotten the shape of is a curse nobody’s ready for."
Adian, uncharacteristically serious for once, folded his arms, his usual theatrical bravado entirely absent from his posture. "I’ll pull whatever royal archive records still exist on the original palace construction. If there’s genuinely a seal down there, someone documented it before people got scared enough to stop asking questions about it altogether. Buildings don’t get built over ancient curses without at least one paper trail somewhere."
"And if it’s real?" Kael asked, looking around the room at each of their faces in turn. "If something’s actually sealed under the palace, right now, while we’re all sitting here drinking tea?"
Sylvia’s expression hardened into the cold, calculating look she wore right before battle, the one Kael had come to recognize meant she’d already started running through contingencies in her head. "Then whatever the Black Ring is planning isn’t just an attack on the capital. It’s an excavation. A very deliberate, very patient excavation, three centuries in the making."
The room fell quiet with the full weight of that realization settling over them.
"We should warn the guild," Claire said finally. "And the royal family, too, before it’s too late to prepare properly."
"And tell them what, exactly?" Sylvia’s voice was flat, pragmatic. "That an ancient cult wants to crack open a sealed chamber none of them officially believe exists, based on servant rumors and a system that can’t even give us a straight answer about what’s actually down there?"
Nobody had a good response ready for that. Which was, in its own quiet way, the most frightening part of the entire conversation.
Later, after the others had gone to bed, Kael stayed up with Adian in the safehouse’s cramped study, surrounded by stacks of borrowed royal archive documents Adian had smuggled out under dubious pretenses.
"You don’t have to help with this," Kael said, watching him squint at a particularly brittle scroll. "This isn’t really your fight. You’re just the proxy, technically."
"Just the proxy." Adian huffed a laugh, not entirely amused. "Kael, I’ve watched over this group since before you showed up. Watched Sylvia grow from a terrified girl hiding from her own power into whatever unstoppable force she is now. Watched Claire learn to trust people again after her mother’s temper nearly broke something in her. I might not fight on the front lines the way the rest of you do, but that doesn’t mean I’m not invested in all of you surviving whatever’s coming."
"I didn’t realize you felt that strongly about it."
"I don’t advertise it. Doesn’t fit the image." Adian gestured vaguely at himself, the perpetual smirk, the theatrical flourishes. "But someone has to hold the paperwork together while the rest of you save the world. Might as well be me."
Kael found himself oddly touched by the admission, buried as it was under Adian’s usual deflecting humor. "Thanks. Genuinely."
"Don’t get sentimental on me, kid. We’ve got an ancient curse to research and approximately no time to do it in."
They worked long into the night, and somewhere in the pile of crumbling documents, the first real thread connecting the missing persons to the sealed chamber beneath the palace began, slowly, to take shape.
"Here," Adian said finally, well past two in the morning, holding up a fragment of parchment with newfound urgency. "Cross-reference the disappearance locations against this old survey map of the original battlefield boundaries. Look at the overlap."
Kael leaned over the fragment, tracing the marked points with a growing sense of dread. "They’re not random at all. They’re mapping the seal’s perimeter. Testing its edges."
"Which means whoever’s behind this already knows exactly where the weak points are, or is actively searching for them one disappearance at a time."
"We need to get this to Baldric first thing in the morning."
"Agreed." Adian rubbed his eyes, exhaustion finally catching up with him after days without proper rest. "Though I suspect he already knows more than he’s let on, given how he reacted to Minato’s name earlier."
"You think he’s been sitting on information this whole time?"
"I think guild masters carry a lot of weight nobody else gets to see. Baldric’s no exception, whatever secrets he’s keeping close." Adian began carefully gathering the fragile documents for transport. "Get some sleep, Kael. Tomorrow’s going to be a long day, and I have a feeling it’s only the beginning of considerably longer days ahead of it."
Kael nodded, though sleep felt like a distant, almost irrelevant concept with the weight of everything they’d just uncovered settling heavily over him. He made his way back to his dorm anyway, mind still turning over every implication of what they’d found, the ancient warning echoing louder in his thoughts with every passing hour.
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End of Chapter—
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