The Transmigrated Author

Chapter 304: Richard (5)

[Central Fortress - Grand Chamber]

Jan saw him first.

The corridor was dark, lit only by the occasional spark from a shattered console, but the figure walking toward them was unmistakable.

Rel stepped into the chamber looking like he’d crawled through something and decided not to mention it.

The side of his shirt was gone not even torn, just absent revealing a stretch of skin along his ribs that was smooth and unmarked, as if the wound that should have been there had been erased.

Jan’s eyes narrowed.

"Rel."

The name carried across the room and stopped every conversation.

Camila looked up from her healing. Alice turned from her post at the door and Bazz shifted his weight and immediately regretted it.

Rel raised a hand in something close to a wave.

"Sorry I’m late. Got held up."

"...!"

Across the room, Louise stood up.

He didn’t yell this time.

The earlier rage the screaming through corridors, the melted walls, the ’WHERE IS REL’ had condensed into something quieter and far more dangerous.

His polearm materialised in his grip and his elemental attribute Purest Flame roared to life along the shaft, and beneath the fire, his aura bled into the weapon without him noticing.

Dominance and flame, coiled together.

SHAA...

He moved.

"YOU FINALLY SHOW YOURSELF YOU BASTARD!"

The distance between them collapsed. Louise crossed the room in three strides and brought the polearm down in an arc that would have split a lesser fighter in half.

Flame trailed behind the blade, hungry and hissing.

"...?!"

Rel raised his arm unable to process what was happening.

HWAMM!

Aura coated his forearm and a dense layer of energy that solidified over his skin like invisible armour prepared for impact.

BAM!

The polearm met it with a crack that echoed through the chamber. Sparks scattered. The Purest Flame licked against the aura but didn’t break through.

Louise’s eyes widened.

Rel held the block without moving. His feet hadn’t shifted. His arm hadn’t buckled.

"You’re angry," Rel said. "I understand."

"You understand nothing—"

"Louise stop!"

Jan was already moving. He grabbed Louise’s left arm and wrenched it back.

Bazz came in from the other side, ignoring the scream of his broken wrist as he locked down Louise’s right.

But Louise thrashed against both of them but the grip held.

"Let go of me!"

Valencia stepped between them.

She didn’t shout. She didn’t push him. She just stood there, directly in his line of sight, arms crossed, red eyes fixed on his face.

"Louise. Stop."

"I’m going to—"

"I know what you’re going to do," she said.

Her voice wasn’t gentle It was the voice of someone who’d dealt with this exact temper more times than she could count.

"You’re going to swing at him until you feel better. Then you’re going to realise you’ve made everything harder for everyone, and you’ll be angry at yourself instead. Skip to the end."

Louise’s jaw clenched.

"He kidnapped me."

"And I’m sure he had his reasons. But right now, we’re all still alive, Richard is captured, and we’re close to going home. If you can let this one thing slide just this once it would do everyone here a favour."

Louise stared at her. His breathing was still ragged and the polearm still wreathed in flame, but something in his shoulders had shifted.

Jan and Bazz didn’t let go, but their grips loosened slightly.

"This isn’t over," Louise said. The words were aimed at Rel.

"I wouldn’t expect it to be," Rel replied.

It was the wrong thing to say. Completely nonchalant. Almost bored.

Louise lunged forward again and was immediately pulled back by Jan and Bazz, his polearm sparking against the floor.

"Rel," Jan said through gritted teeth, "stop talking."

Rel shrugged and walked further into the room.

With the room finally settled, all the shattered consoles had completely black out, and the bodies in the room some standing, some leaning, some still nursing injuries they couldn’t heal had all turned toward Rel.

Jan was the first to speak.

"Where did you go?"

"Looking for anything that could help us get out of this place and I guess I found it."

He reached into his pocket. The movement was slow but when his hand emerged, the fifth shard was resting in his palm. It pulsed with a quiet, steady light—different from the dark, oily glow of the shard Richard had consumed.

This one was cleaner and it was most certainly the last one.

"Richard’s shard was a fake," Rel said. "Crafted by the Soul Forger. It was never going to work. This is the real one."

Jan stepped closer, eyes fixed on the crystal.

"Where was it?"

"Hidden deeper in the fortress. The Forger had it sealed away. Richard probably didn’t even know it existed."

Rel turned the shard over in his hand, letting the light catch its edges.

"He spent months chasing a counterfeit."

Bazz shifted his weight against the wall, cradling his broken wrist.

"So all that fighting with his future sight, in that demon form... it was all powered by a fake?"

"Fake, but functional. The Forger gave him just enough to be dangerous. Not enough to win."

"And you just... found it?" Alice asked, one eyebrow raised.

"I found the room the Forger didn’t want him to see. The shard was inside. So were a few other things." Rel pocketed the crystal again.

"But that’s not the important part."

He looked around the room, meeting each of their eyes in turn.

"Richard wasn’t just building machines and serums down here. He was building a way out."

The words landed and everyone looked ready to go home.

"In one of those rooms has a transmitter that’s fully constructed and fully functional. It’s designed to open a portal signal to something that can punch through the orb’s barrier and send everyone back to our world. Richard was planning to use it himself once he had all five shards. He just never got the chance."

Valencia’s voice was quiet.

"And you found this transmitter?"

"I found the room. It’s deeper in the fortress. The door’s sealed but there’s a system lock on it."

Rel gestured toward the corridor he’d come from.

"It’s reading an objective completion bar. Ninety-one percent. It won’t open until every quest in this orb is cleared. All of them."

A murmur went through the group. Bazz groaned.

"Of course there’s a lock," he muttered. "Wouldn’t be a proper nightmare without one more hurdle."

"So we clear the quests,"

"Then the door opens. Then we activate the transmitter."

"Then we go home," Rel said.

The word hung in the air.

Home.

After months of fighting through territories, dismantling regimes, surviving ambushes and machines and demonic transformations—it was close enough to touch.

"But how do you know all this?" Jan asked. His tone wasn’t accusatory. It was curious.

"You disappeared for more than an hour. You came back with a shard, a location, and a plan. That’s more than you could’ve pieced together from searching alone."

Rel was quiet for a moment. Then he exhaled.

"Because the shard showed me."

"Showed you what?" Valencia asked.

Rel leaned against one of the intact consoles.

The movement was casual, but the weight behind his eyes wasn’t.

"When I made contact with the shard, it didn’t just pulse like the others. It triggered a direct vision that showed me where to go."

"From who?" Camila asked.

Rel met her gaze.

"From me. A version of me. From further ahead in time."

"..."

The silence that followed was heavy.

Not disbelief they’d seen too much to dismiss anything outright.

"When all five shards are brought together, they don’t just open a portal. They temporarily link you to a future version of yourself. Someone who’s already lived through what’s coming. Someone who can speak to you. Warn you. Guide you."

He paused, letting them absorb it.

"That’s how I know about the transmitter. That’s how I know about the quest lock. That’s how I know what we need to do next. A version of me told me all of this. He showed me fragments. Not everything. Just enough to move us forward."

Valencia’s hand had drifted unconsciously toward her pocket, where her own shard had pulsed and shown her visions she hadn’t told anyone about. The battlefield of bodies. The man on the tower. The voice telling her to let him go.

She didn’t speak. But her eyes flickered.

"You’re saying the shards can let us talk to our future selves," Alice said slowly. "All of us?"

"I don’t know," Rel admitted. "The vision I got was fragmented. The full effect might require all five shards activated at once, at the transmitter. Everyone might get a glimpse. Or it might be limited. I can’t guarantee anything."

"But you trust what you saw," Jan said.

"I trust that it gave me enough to get us out."

Jan held his gaze for a long moment. Then he nodded.

"What else did he show you?" Valencia asked.

Her voice was steady, but there was something beneath it.

"The future self. Did he say anything else? About what comes after?"

Rel paused. Just a beat. Long enough for Jan to notice.

"Nothing we can’t handle," Rel said.

It wasn’t a full answer. Everyone in the room knew it. But no one pushed.

They were too close to the end to start questioning the one person who’d guided them this far.

Jan turned to the rest of the group.

"Then we know what we have to do. Clear the remaining quests. Get that door open. Activate the transmitter." He looked back at Rel.

"How much time do we need?"

"A few days, at least. Maybe more. Some of you are still injured and I know magic can’t fix everything, we can’t afford to walk into combat at half strength."

Bazz raised his broken wrist.

"He’s talking about me. And Jae. And probably anyone who got thrown into a wall."

"I can splint it," Camila said.

"It won’t heal faster, but you’ll be able to move."

"Then we rest tonight," Jan said.

"We start on the quests tomorrow."

The group began to stir and the tension of the past hour finally released into something that felt almost like resolve.

Almost like hope.

Rel stayed where he was and he knew exactly what he had just did.

The transmitter was real. The quests were real. The future self he’d described however that was a lie.

A necessary one.

A cover for knowledge he shouldn’t have.

But the way home was real.

And that was the only truth that mattered.