Chapter 95: The Shadow’s prize
The darkness in the maintenance tunnel was not merely the absence of light. It was a physical, suffocating presence. It pressed against Glen’s skin like freezing water, heavy and absolute, drowning out the sounds of the collapsing city above. The ambient blue glow of the mana torches had been snuffed out in a single heartbeat, leaving the Shadow Sword operatives completely blind.
Glen gripped his Abyssal blade, the void fragment in his core flaring in desperate response to the overwhelming anti-mana flooding the confined space. The dark metal of his sword hummed, casting a faint, sickly purple illumination that barely pushed back the shadows.
Standing in the center of the tunnel, separating Glen from Isla, Caleb, and Fraser, was the Female Noble of the Lost.
She had no true physical form. She was a silhouette cut from the fabric of a starless night, a shifting, liquid darkness that vaguely resembled a tall, slender woman. The only distinct features she possessed were two glowing, piercing eyes that burned with cold, ancient indifference. She did not radiate the overwhelming, explosive kinetic pressure that her brother, The Wanderer, did. Her aura was subtle, insidious, and infinitely colder. It felt like standing at the edge of a bottomless ocean trench, waiting to be pulled under.
"Formation!" Glen roared, his voice sounding muffled and distant, swallowed by the unnatural dark. "Isla! Fraser! Sound off!"
There was no response. Glen could see the faint outlines of his team through the gloom, frozen in place. They weren’t dead, but they were trapped in localized pockets of absolute stasis, their shadows wrapping around their ankles and creeping up their legs like iron chains. Isla was struggling, her green eyes wide with fury as she tried to channel her mana, but the darkness absorbed her energy the moment it manifested. Fraser’s fire was completely extinguished, the older hunter locked in a silent, desperate struggle for breath.
Only Caleb remained unbound, though he was backed against the crumbling concrete wall, his gravity focus whining frantically as he tried to push the encroaching shadows away.
The Female Noble did not gloat. She did not introduce herself. She simply glided forward, her feet never touching the cracked concrete.
Glen lunged, his Abyssal blade raised, channeling every ounce of his stolen skills into a single, desperate strike. "Get away from him!"
The Noble didn’t even look at him. She raised a hand formed of shifting night. A tendril of solid shadow whipped out from the floor, striking Glen squarely in the chest. The impact was like being hit by a freight train. Glen was thrown backward, crashing into the tunnel wall with bone-jarring force. The air was driven from his lungs, his vision swimming with dark spots as he collapsed to the floor, his muscles paralyzed by the freezing cold of the void.
The Female Noble drifted past him, her glowing eyes fixing on the massive, pulsing root of the Ash Bloom that had broken through the tunnel wall. This was the anchor point. The central node her brother was using to siphon the city’s mana and fuel his grand design on the surface.
She reached out and placed her shadowy hand directly against the glowing crimson bark of the root.
"My brother gorges himself," she whispered. Her voice did not echo in the tunnel; it manifested directly inside Glen’s mind, a chilling, ethereal sound that carried the weight of dead stars. "He forgets the balance of the court."
The reaction was instantaneous and violent. The root, which had been pulsing with a sickly crimson light, suddenly turned pitch black. The Female Noble was not destroying the anchor with physical force; she was corrupting the corruption. She was injecting her own, highly concentrated void energy directly into her brother’s supply line, poisoning the well.
A massive, agonizing screech echoed through the tunnel, a sound that seemed to come from the bedrock of the city itself. The root network withered instantly, the crimson veins turning gray and brittle, crumbling into fine ash.
The tether was severed. The Wanderer’s infinite supply of refined mana was cut. He was now stranded on the surface, forced to rely solely on the reserves contained within his stolen human vessel. The Female Noble had crippled her own kin, not out of allegiance to humanity, but to enforce the terrifying, alien hierarchy of the Lost.
She withdrew her hand from the dead root and turned her glowing eyes toward Caleb.
"No!" Glen screamed, forcing himself off the wall, his muscles tearing as he fought the paralyzing cold. He triggered his Shadow Step, attempting to teleport directly between the Noble and his brother.
But the Noble was the absolute master of the dark. Glen’s skill fizzled and died, the ambient shadows rejecting his command. He stumbled forward, his legs feeling like lead, every step an agonizing battle against the crushing pressure of her aura.
Caleb raised his hands, his geometric prism glowing a blinding, desperate purple. "Gravity Well! Maximum output!"
A localized field of crushing gravity, strong enough to flatten a heavily armored tank, slammed down on the Female Noble. The concrete floor beneath her instantly spider-webbed and collapsed under the immense pressure, creating a shallow crater. But the Noble simply flowed through the gravitational field like water through a sieve. Physical forces, gravity, kinetic energy—they meant absolutely nothing to a being made of pure, conceptual void.
She reached out, her shadowy fingers wrapping gently around Caleb’s throat.
Caleb gasped, his eyes rolling back in his head as the freezing cold of the void seeped into his skin. The purple glow of his gravity focus flickered and died, the artifact falling from his trembling hands and clattering uselessly against the stone. The shadows in the tunnel surged forward, wrapping around Caleb’s legs, his torso, and his arms, pulling him into the dark, shifting embrace of the Noble’s form.
"A unique resonance," the Noble whispered, her voice echoing in the dark. "Mine."
"Caleb!" Glen roared, swinging the Abyssal blade with everything he had left.
The dark metal cleaved through the Female Noble’s neck, a perfect, decapitating strike. But there was no resistance. The blade passed through her shadowy form as if cutting through smoke. The severed darkness instantly reformed, completely unharmed.
The Noble did not even acknowledge the strike. She tightened her grip on Caleb, who was now almost completely submerged in the shadows, his physical form losing its definition as he was pulled into her spatial dimension.
"Glen!" Caleb choked out, his voice barely a whisper, his hand reaching out from the darkness, his fingers brushing against the empty air. "Glen, don’t—"
The shadows collapsed inward.
With a sound like a dying breath, the Female Noble of the Lost vanished. The oppressive, liquid darkness that had filled the tunnel evaporated instantly, leaving only the faint, flickering blue light of a single surviving mana torch.
Glen crashed to his knees on the cracked concrete, his hand grasping at the empty air where his brother had been a second before.
"Caleb..." Glen whispered, his voice cracking, the sound small and pathetic in the massive, ruined tunnel. He scrambled forward, digging his bare hands into the rubble, desperately searching for a trapdoor, a spatial tear, a lingering shadow—anything. But there was nothing. Just cold stone, dust, and the discarded, lifeless shell of Caleb’s gravity focus.
The stasis holding Isla and Fraser shattered. Isla gasped for air, falling to her hands and knees, her combat tunic soaked in cold sweat. Fraser leaned against the wall, coughing violently as the freezing pressure left his lungs, his burned hands trembling uncontrollably.
"Glen..." Isla breathed, her green eyes wide with horror as she looked at the empty space, then down at the discarded gravity focus. "Where is he? Where is Caleb?"
Glen didn’t answer. He couldn’t. The realization of what had just happened crashed over him like a physical weight, crushing the breath from his lungs. His brother. The only family he had left in this broken, dying world. The boy he had sworn to protect at all costs, the reason he had fought so hard to survive the dungeons. Gone. Taken by a monster he couldn’t even touch, let alone kill.
A profound, terrifying silence settled over the tunnel. The distant rumbling of the collapsing city above seemed to fade away, leaving only the sound of Glen’s ragged, uneven breathing.
Then, something inside Glen snapped.
It wasn’t a loud, dramatic break. It wasn’t a scream of anguish. It was a quiet, absolute fracturing of his restraint. The fear, the desperation, the calculated tactical thinking that had kept him alive this long—all of it evaporated, burned away in a single microsecond, replaced by a cold, blinding, apocalyptic rage.
The void fragment in his core, sensing the absolute lack of emotional restraint, flared to life with terrifying, unprecedented intensity. Black, jagged veins spread up Glen’s neck, crawling across his jawline and pulsing with dark, corrupted energy. His eyes, usually a calm, calculating brown, bled into a solid, terrifying pitch-black. The Abyssal Prism, secured in the canvas bag against his chest, began to hum in perfect, lethal synchronization with his heartbeat, feeding off the anti-mana flooding his system.
The Wanderer was on the surface. The Wanderer was a Noble of the Lost. The Wanderer was the reason his brother was gone.
And the Female Noble had severed the anchor. The Wanderer was weakened. Cut off from his infinite supply. Vulnerable.
Glen stood up. He didn’t look at Isla. He didn’t look at Fraser. He turned his gaze upward, toward the ceiling of the maintenance tunnel, toward the surface crater where the cosmic entity waited.
"Glen?" Isla asked, her voice trembling as she saw the black veins pulsing on his skin, the sheer, suffocating pressure of his corrupted aura filling the tunnel. "Glen, what are you doing?"
"I’m going to kill him," Glen said.
His voice didn’t sound human anymore. It was a layered, echoing rasp, distorted by the void fragment bleeding into his vocal cords. It sounded like the grinding of tectonic plates, like the whisper of a dying star.
He gripped his Abyssal blade, channeling every single ounce of mana, anti-mana, and stolen aura he possessed into his legs. The ground beneath him shattered, a massive crater forming instantly from the sheer kinetic pressure of his stance.
Glen launched himself upward like a ballistic missile. He didn’t look for a staircase or an elevator shaft. He simply blasted straight up, his blade carving through the concrete ceiling, the bedrock, and the twisted steel of the ruined city above. He became a drill of pure, unadulterated rage, tearing through hundreds of feet of earth in seconds, leaving Isla and Fraser behind in the dark.
He was going to the surface. He was going to use the Prism. And he was going to make the demon pay.
