Chapter 269: The Dark Side
Confusion crossed everyone’s faces. Even Christy turned toward him, anger briefly interrupted by uncertainty. "Kael?"
But Kael kept staring at the old man. "Go ahead," he said. "You earned it. You really did"
The old man’s breathing quickened as suspicion warred against desperation. He looked at Kael, then at the broken bridge, then at the beacon waiting behind him. For a few seconds, he seemed to understand that something about Kael’s calmness was wrong. But survival won in the end, as it had every time fear had spoken louder than reason.
Without another word, he turned around and sprinted toward the beacon.
The old man sprinted as fast as his aging legs could carry him, his body bent forward and his arms pumping with the ugly desperation of a man who had already decided everyone behind him was dead. Fear was an incredible motivator, and it lent strength to his shaking knees, speed to his thin legs, and breath to lungs that should have been too tired to keep going. He did not look graceful. He did not look brave. He looked like prey that had mistaken betrayal for survival.
Meanwhile Kael turned away from the ravine’s edge and crouched slightly, his eyes no longer following the old man. "Get on my back, we’re doing this the hard way," he said.
Christy blinked at him, still half caught between fury and disbelief. "What?"
"We’re going down."
Hakim’s eyes narrowed beneath the cloth over his face, and even he looked surprised by that answer. Christy stepped closer to the edge and looked downward into the abyssal darkness, where the broken remains of the bridge had already vanished without a sound.
"You can’t seriously mean..."
"I trained for this, years... it’s like breathing at this rate," Kael interrupted, and for a brief moment, his gaze lifted upward as if the ravine had become something else in his memory. Cold mountains. Broken fingernails. Torn muscles. Breath scraping through his throat while stone chewed through his palms. And above him, an old monster of a master standing with folded arms, watching him fall with the patience of someone waiting for a lesson to finish.
"You’re Late..."
That had been his first lesson. No ropes. No safety. No mercy. Just cliffs, stone, pain, and the very simple understanding that the ground below did not care whether a person had learned enough before hitting it.
Kael looked back toward the old man, who was rapidly shrinking into the distance on the other side of the ravine. "It’ll take time," Kael said calmly. "But I’ll climb down and back up."
The old man froze mid-run as those words reached him, his body locking in place for a heartbeat before he slowly turned around. Kael’s eyes met his from across the ravine, and even with the distance between them, the old man felt that stare crawl under his skin.
"And if you don’t make it to that beacon before I get there..." Kael smiled slightly, and the expression was small enough to be worse than rage. "...remember my old threat."
He couldn’t hear it; he couldn’t read his lips. But the mere look on Kael’s face was enough to make the old man remember.
The old man’s blood ran cold, and then Kael finished it without raising his voice. "I’ll make you eat your own teeth."
Panic exploded across the old man’s face because he realized something horrifying in that moment. Kael wasn’t bluffing.
He could actually do it. He could actually come back. Going down the ravin, and climbing back up, any other man wouldn’t have dared. But this was a monster in human form.
There is no impossible when it comes to a man who can outrun a desert sandstorm carrying four people.
The old man immediately resumed sprinting with everything he had, running harder than before as if the beacon itself had become the only thing standing between him and Kael’s hands.
Kael snorted lightly before shifting his attention back toward the ravine. "Christy."
She hesitated only a second before moving close, and Kael grabbed her firmly around the waist with one arm. "Oi..."
"Hold tight."
Hakim silently climbed onto Kael’s back and hooked his arms around his shoulders, his movements efficient and careful as if he had already accepted that arguing would waste more time than fear. "You sure about this?" Hakim asked quietly.
"No," Kael replied honestly.
Then he jumped.
Christy almost screamed as the world dropped away beneath them. Wind exploded around them as they plummeted downward into complete darkness, the cliff face rushing past in a blur of black stone and loose dust. Then, with a sound that struck through the ravine like a hammer blow, Kael’s hand slammed into the cliff wall. His fingers dug into solid rock hard enough to halt their fall, and cracks spread around his grip as dust and pebbles rained downward endlessly.
Christy’s heart pounded violently against her ribs, her arms locked around him with enough force to hurt. Kael looked downward calmly, his Basilisk Eyes glowing faintly in the darkness. To him, the ravine wasn’t fully black. He could see enough. Ledges. Cracks. Outcroppings. Places to jump. Places to avoid. Places that might hold long enough if he trusted his fingers more than common sense.
"Hold on tighter," Kael warned, and then he kicked off the wall. The three of them shot sideways through the abyss before Kael caught another ledge one-handed, the impact snapping through his arm and shoulder hard enough that Christy felt the jolt through his entire body.
He moved again, then again, then again, descending less like a human climbing and more like some beast navigating vertical terrain. He pivoted, dropped, caught, swung, and leaped from one imperfect hold to another, using the ravine wall as if it were a route he had already mapped in his bones. At one point his hand grabbed onto a protruding rock, but the stone cracked under the pressure and the entire thing shattered instantly.
Christy gasped as all three dropped violently, the abyss swallowing them for a few breathless seconds. Before panic could fully take over, Kael twisted mid-fall and caught another ledge lower down, his shoulder muscles bulging violently from the sudden strain as his body absorbed the weight of three people. "Hah..." Kael exhaled, the sound more irritated than frightened.
"I guess I should have removed at least one brace; we’re too heavy."
Hakim quietly stared at the side of Kael’s head, and only one word formed clearly in his mind.
Monstrous.
Any normal climber would need hours to descend something like this, even with tools and ropes. Kael was doing it barehanded while carrying two people, and the worst part was that he looked less afraid than annoyed by the inconvenience.
Soon enough, they finally reached the bottom. Kael landed softly against dry earth, bending his knees just enough to absorb the impact before straightening again. Christy immediately let go and staggered backward slightly, one hand on her chest and the other on her injured leg as she tried to convince her body that it was no longer falling.
The ravine floor was enormous and silent, but the silence felt wrong. No water flowed here. No wind moved naturally through the bottom. There was only dry cracked terrain littered with massive bones and jagged stone formations, while darkness stretched endlessly ahead like the throat of something waiting to swallow them.
Then came the sounds. Skittering. Scraping. Low guttural breathing. Something moved deep within the abyss, something huge enough that the faint vibrations traveled through the ground and into Kael’s feet. He slowly turned his head toward the distant darkness, and his instincts screamed at him immediately.
Do not wake that thing up.
Even Kael had enough sense to understand that some fights weren’t worth it. Not now. Not with a timer running. Not with people depending on him. "Move quietly," Kael whispered.
Nobody argued. The three advanced carefully through the ravine floor, moving between bones and jagged stone with their bodies low and their steps measured.
They couldn’t see anything, and all they had to do was grab onto Kael’s clothes while he led them forward.
Every step felt dangerous, and every sound echoed too loudly. At one point Christy nearly stepped on what looked like a pale insect the size of her arm before Kael pulled her away silently, his grip closing around her shoulder just in time.
The creature clicked its mandibles angrily before burrowing back underground, leaving only a trembling patch of dust behind. Hakim’s hand remained close to his blade, his posture loose but ready. Little would it do to someone who can’t see in the dark.
While the deeper they moved, the more oppressive the atmosphere became. The ravine did not feel empty. It felt occupied by things that had learned to live without light.
Then a scraping sound echoed nearby, and Kael froze instantly. His eyes sharpened as the sound repeated, closer this time, dragging across stone with slow, deliberate weight.
Too late.
Something massive shifted within the darkness. Two glowing pale eyes opened, then another pair, then several more, each one appearing at a different height in the gloom. Stone ground against stone as a creature slowly crawled out from behind a jagged rock formation. It was a lizard at first glance, but only if someone had never seen a lizard and only understood the shape from a nightmare.
No. It was something pretending to be one.
Its body looked entirely made from layered stone plates, thick and uneven like naturally formed armor. Its claws gouged deep lines into the ravine floor with every step, and when its mouth opened slightly, rows of jagged mineral-like teeth reflected faintly in the darkness. The thing had no eyes, only hollow sockets, blind and empty. Yet its head immediately turned toward them.
Hakim cursed quietly. "It heard us."
The stone lizard released a deep vibrating growl, the sound rolling through the ravine floor and waking the darkness around them. From further within the ravine, more growls answered.
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