Chapter 88: Collapsed Aftermath
The broadcast drones reached Abyssal Clock’s district before the emergency vehicles did.
The footage went live and stayed live. The city watched the medical teams flood the plaza around a cracked Chrono Construct shell and the unconscious bodies arranged in a circle around it.
What they saw was a cracked plaza around the remains of a Chrono Construct. Seven bodies were arranged in a careful circle around the rubble. Someone had positioned each person on their back with their heads pointing outward and their weapons beside them before lying down herself.
Mira was the last one the medics reached.
She was on her side with her hand still touching Raze’s arm, and her War Maul was across her lap. Her hand was still on the grip.
The medic who checked her shoulder went quiet. He called for a second opinion. The second opinion called for a third. Three doctors stood over her in the plaza while broadcast drones hovered overhead and had a conversation in low voices that the microphones barely caught.
"How far did she carry that thing?" one of them asked.
Nobody knew yet.
"And after that, she arranged all of them?"
"All six. One by one. With this shoulder."
The third doctor looked at Mira’s unconscious face. At the hand still resting on Raze’s arm. At the careful circle she’d built around the team before she let herself fall.
"She shouldn’t have been able to stand," he said. "Let alone carry anyone."
But she had.
That was Mira.
...
Mayor Ko arrived twenty minutes later.
He walked through the medical staging area slowly and stopped at each stretcher.
Raze first. The greatsword was still in his hand, and even unconscious, he hadn’t let go. A healer was trying to figure out how to remove it without waking him. Mayor Ko looked at him. The number one-ranked hunter in the city was only twenty-four years old but had already been through hell.
He moved on.
Lily was sleeping with her Skypiercer still strapped across her back because nobody wanted to touch it without her permission. Even asleep, Lily looked like she was thinking.
Victor was sleeping, but his fist was clenched as if something was troubling him. Elden, with two medics working on something internal that the mayor chose not to ask about.
The support hunters would recover faster.
Mayor Ko looked away and stared at Mira. He stood beside her stretcher longer than the others. Like everyone else, she was sleeping, but he knew she had pushed herself too much to pull everyone out of the collapsing dungeon. Her hand had been moved from Raze’s arm by the medics. It was resting at her side now, palm up. Still slightly open like she was reaching for someone.
Mayor Ko looked at the Divine Maze gate visible in the far district. Its light bent wrong near the edges. Whatever it was doing to the space around it, nobody had been able to explain yet.
Four gates cleared, and only one remained. And most of the people who had been clearing them were unconscious on stretchers.
His assistant said carefully, "Sir, the strike teams..."
"I know," Mayor Ko said.
He looked at Mira one more time. Then he walked toward the command vehicle.
...
The hospital gave them the entire east wing.
Lily woke up first. Four hours after admission. The nurse beside her was checking monitors when Lily’s eyes opened.
"Did everyone make it out?" Lily said.
"Everyone’s here," the nurse said. "All seven of you."
"Good," Lily said. Then she was asleep again before the nurse finished smiling.
...
Raze woke up two hours later and immediately tried to stand.
His legs informed him this was not going to happen. He sat back down on the edge of the mattress and looked at his own hands. They were shaking.
The nurse said, "You need to stay in bed."
"How’s Mira?" he asked.
"She’s stable, she just pushed herself too much... You all did."
Raze frowned at those words but then asked. "And the support? Kael and Jin?"
The nurse blinked before faintly smiling. "Both of them are stable and sleeping."
Raze nodded before first asking about Lily, Mira, and then everyone else. "And me?" he said finally.
"A couple of days, even with the healers."
He looked at his shaking hands again. "That’s too long."
"That’s reality."
He got back into bed, but he left the curtain between his room and Mira’s open so he could see her breathing.
...
Elden had been awake before either of them. He’d already requested a data terminal, and the hospital had given him one because the alternative was Elden finding one himself.
When Lily woke up the second time, he was sitting beside her bed in a wheelchair, he was clearly driving faster than the hospital preferred.
"The influence data is worse than we thought," he said.
"Good morning to you too, Elden."
"It’s afternoon. And the data is bad."
Lily rubbed her eyes. "How bad?"
He turned the terminal toward her. She read for thirty seconds. Her face changed.
"Oh," she said quietly.
"Yeah."
"We’re making it worse," Lily said. "Every gate we clear puts more pressure on the ones that remain."
"The remaining gate is expanding faster than we originally thought. And with our condition now, the damage might be too much before we can all tackle it."
Lily looked at the ceiling. "We’re running out of time faster... We can’t even buy time by sending others in."
"Yes. That would be a suicidal mission."
"And we can’t fight for the next four days."
"Also, yes."
Lily closed her eyes. "Who’s left?"
Elden was quiet.
...
Mira woke up at sunset.
The first thing she did was count to make sure everyone was still here. She couldn’t see anyone from her bed, so she listened instead. Raze’s breathing from the next room is deep and steady. Monitors beeping at different rhythms down the hall. The sound of Elden’s wheelchair is somewhere on the floor.
She couldn’t count everyone from sound alone. That bothered her.
"Seven?" she said to the nurse.
The nurse understood immediately. "All seven. All stable."
Mira’s eyes filled with tears. She turned her face toward the wall so nobody would see.
"Thank you," she said.
The nurse left her alone. When Raze looked through the open curtain a minute later, Mira’s face was calm again. Dry. Composed.
"Hey," he said.
"Hey."
"You arranged all of us in the plaza before you went down."
"Someone had to."
"Your body was pushed beyond the limit."
"Someone had to," she said again.
"Stubborn..." Raze looked at her for a moment longer. " But thank you," he said quietly.
Mira laughed. "Don’t thank me for doing something small like that... Also, stop leaving your curtain open. You need sleep."
"You too."
...
Victor was awake.
He wasn’t trying to leave his bed. Wasn’t requesting terminals. Wasn’t asking about the team.
He was lying with his eyes open, staring at the ceiling, thinking about Kai Rosefield.
The update had come through his personal channel two hours after admission. Three words from his contact.
"The assassin failed. Target alive."
Victor read it twice.
His hand tightened around the phone before deleting it. Then, lying still and staring at the ceiling. He felt something he hadn’t felt in a long time. It was not guilt. He had moved past that years ago, the moment he understood how much his family controlled.
Guilt was for people who were not sure.
Victor was sure.
But sure was not the same as right. And the man he had tried to kill was somewhere out there getting stronger, while Victor lay in a hospital bed.
He closed his eyes.
When the nurse checked on him an hour later, he appeared to be sleeping peacefully.
He was not sleeping.
...
The city had been watching all of it.
Titan Grave’s district had been recovering for days. The first restaurant reopened, and children were playing outside again. Hollow Sky’s district was quieter, and the cleanup operations were still ongoing, with many of the residents and hunters helping out. Workers were still removing debris from rooftops.
While this was going on, the leaders of Mythal City were under extreme pressure.
The emergency meeting took place in a room never meant for emergencies. A conference room on the hospital’s fourth floor that someone had repurposed quickly enough that the whiteboard at the front still had patient care scheduling on it.
Mayor Ko sat at the head of the table. Guild representatives, military liaison, two hospital directors, and Elden, who was the only member of the strike team well enough to attend and who had brought Lily’s data on a tablet.
Elden presented the influence spread analysis. Nobody interrupted. When he finished, the room was quiet for long enough that the sounds from the hallway outside became audible.
"Do we wait for the team to recover?" one of the guild representatives asked.
"No," Mayor Ko said.
"With respect, Mayor, the strike force—"
"I know. But we can’t wait." Mayor Ko said. "What is the current capacity of each member for dungeon operations?"
The hospital director read from her report. All of them would need a couple of days, even with their healing hunters helping out. This is because of the vast difference between the healers and Mythal City’s top-ranked hunters.
And also the residual magic inside of each of them from the Mythical Dungeon.
Nobody spoke.
"The Divine Maze’s is the only dungeon left yet... its influence has not only grown a lot... But it’s doing something we still cannot categorize." He set the tablet down. "We do not have three weeks."
"Who is available?" Mayor Ko asked.
The room didn’t need to think, but as if they were trying to delay the answer. All of the hunters who went into Abyssal Clock were out of commission for days, and Sera was still sleeping.
Nobody spoke.
Mayor Ko looked around the table. "So the only one left is Kai Rosefield."
The room was very still.
Mayor Ko looked at the official before sighing and then at the window, where the Divine Maze gate was just visible in the far district.
"Ask him to come over," Mayor Ko said.
"Would it matter?" An agent spoke with a look of helplessness. "We already pointed out that the Divine Maze dungeon is possibly the hardest."
"Are we really about to try and send Kai to his death?"
The room fell silent.
...
Kai was in the chair beside Sera’s bed when the call came.
He had been there for six hours. Not sleeping, not doing anything that required movement. Just sitting with his forearms on his knees and his eyes on the window and the city outside it. He saw the last gate, the Divine Maze shining through the city, still waiting for a challenger.
Sera was breathing steadily. The monitors beside her ran their quiet updates. The room smelled like antiseptic and recycled air and faintly, still, like red flowers.
His phone lit up on the chair’s armrest.
He looked at it.
Mayor Ko’s office.
He looked at the window without saying anything.
