The underground chamber was already a wreck. Most of the vaulted ceiling had collapsed, and rubble piled up like mountains, burying the ancient murals where the darkness of tens of thousands of years had returned.
The air reeked of scorching and blood, along with an indescribable dry scent, like that given off by rocks baked at high temperatures.
The dark red light had long since faded. Only a few shattered chunks of ore still gave off a faint glow on the ground, ready to go out at any moment, like the last few fishing lights on the sea after a storm.
The leader of the men in black lay at the edge of the rubble, one hand reaching forward, all five fingers spread as though grasping for something.
His fingers trembled, not from cold, but with the final, uncontrollable spasms of muscles and nerves as life drained from his fingertips bit by bit.
He wanted to grab something, even a stone, a handful of dirt, a wisp of air. Anything would do. But his fingers could grasp nothing. Every curl merely pushed the rubble away from his palm, letting more dust trickle between his fingers.
He had barely escaped the core of the pillar of light. Only "barely."
The instant the pillar erupted, he had instinctively thrown himself sideways. His body slammed into the rubble, his shoulder struck a jutting rock, and bone shattered with a crack. Before the pain could reach his brain, the pillar's wave of heat had caught up with him.
It had not struck him head-on, merely grazed him with its edge, like someone lightly brushing a red-hot branding iron across his back.
It did not hurt. Not at all. His nerve endings had burned away in that instant, before they could even send the signal for "pain."
Most of his robe had burned away, exposing the mangled skin beneath. The skin on his back was a grotesque charred black, not the charcoal black left by fire, but a deeper, dead black, as though he had been cooked from the inside out, even his blood vessels congealing into blackness.
In several places, the muscle tissue beneath lay exposed. The dark red muscles had been dried out by the intense heat, becoming hard and taut, like a layer of leather wrapped around bone.
Those unlucky fellows. Duke Desolation had stood too close. When the pillar erupted, he had not even had time to turn around. In the dark red light, his pale gray robe was like a sheet of paper tossed into a furnace.
It curled, blackened, and turned to ash in an instant. His body remained in the light for less than half a second, and then nothing remained.
No corpse, no ashes. Even the talisman he had worn for hundreds of years, supposedly capable of blocking one fatal attack, evaporated completely in the light.
Duke Desolation, a supreme expert of the continent's northwest who had lived for over a thousand years in seclusion on the Far Wasteland, left behind only a faint scorched smell, swept up by the heat and soon dispersed into the air.
Marquis Darkblood did not escape unscathed either. He was fast. His blood race instincts had alerted him to the danger before anyone else, and a second before the pillar erupted, he had already turned into a cloud of black mist and drifted toward the edge of the pit.
But the pillar was faster. The dark red light swallowed the edge of the black mist like red-hot scissors cutting through black silk.
A corner of the black mist was sheared away. It let out a shrill screech in the light, like a baby crying, and then vanished completely.
Marquis Darkblood tumbled out of the black mist and fell onto the rubble. His entire left arm below the shoulder was gone, not severed, but evaporated. The skin at the stump curled back in a grotesque gray-white. There was no bleeding, because his blood vessels had been cauterized shut in that instant.
His face was white as paper, his lips trembling, his gray-white eyes filled with terror-not the fear of death, but the terror of an ancient being who had lived for who knew how many years realizing for the first time that he, too, could die.
The head of the Chronicle Court had stood farther away. His position should have been the safest. But the instant the pillar erupted, a boulder hurled by the shock wave struck his back and smashed him against the wall.
He heard the sharp crack of his own spine, and then lost all feeling in his lower body. He slid down the wall into a sitting position, bracing both hands on the ground as he tried to repair his damaged nerves with mana. But nearly all his mana had already been drained at the altar. Now he could not cast even the simplest healing spell.
He merely sat there with his head lowered, staring at his insensible legs in silence, saying nothing.
He was not dead. The splinter from a support beam had just missed his heart and major blood vessels, but his right arm was completely ruined, and a hole had been pierced through one lung. Every breath produced a hissing leak of air from the wound. Leaning against the stone wall, he gripped the wooden spike through his body with his left hand. He hesitated for a long time, not daring to pull it out.
There were also several nameless helpers without so many titles, merely people the black-robed man had gathered at short notice. Some turned to ash in the pillar, some were buried in the collapse, and some vanished into the darkness, never making another sound.
And the leader of the men in black, that man with gray-white eyes who had never revealed his name, who had exhausted everything to awaken Voraksa, now lay at the edge of the rubble, making harsh, wheezing sounds in his throat, like air leaking out.
It was not a sound he wanted to make. His lungs had suffered severe burns in the pillar's wave of heat. Every breath felt like sandpaper scraping the inside of his windpipe, the pain making his entire body shake, yet he could not stop breathing.
"Hah... hah, hah..."
His eyes were half open, his vision blurred as though through frosted glass. What did he see? Rubble, dust, broken support beams, scattered fragments of ore.
And a figure, indistinct, standing not far away, head lowered to look at him.
Who was that? He struggled to make out the person's face, but his eyes were almost unable to focus. He could see only a rough outline.
An average build, dark clothes, perhaps a beard, perhaps not. The person's face was blurred, like an oil painting soaked in water, its features bleeding together until he could not tell the eyes from the mouth.
But he recognized that posture.
It was the posture he had seen in childhood whenever he fell, whenever he was bullied, whenever he hid beneath the covers and cried. Bent at the waist, head lowered, both hands reaching out, as though waiting for him to throw himself into those arms.
His lips trembled.
"Mo... Mommy..."
His voice was so quiet that even he could not hear it clearly. His mouth hung open, a few broken syllables that hardly formed syllables emerging from his throat. Then the corners of his mouth curved slightly.
It was not a smile. It was more like the expression of a child unwilling to wake after a good dream.
So warm.
Then the corners of his mouth stopped moving. His hand stopped trembling too.
His eyes remained half open, their gray-white pupils unfocused, like two glass beads that had lost their luster, reflecting the collapsed, cracked vault overhead.
He lay there just like that, one hand reaching forward, fingers slightly spread, as though grasping something unseen. What that something was, no one knew.
Perhaps it was a trace of warmth that had not yet faded, perhaps a name he could never return to, perhaps a word he had never managed to say in his entire life, buried in the deepest reaches of his heart, all but forgotten even by him.
Even when he logged off, we still did not know what this man in black was called.
Not far away, the rubble moved.
A hand reached out from beneath the rubble, its fingers thick, its joints pronounced, its back covered with fine scars and calluses. The hand groped over the rubble a few times, caught hold of a larger rock, and pushed hard, heaving aside the heap of debris pinning him down.
A middle-aged man climbed out of the rubble.
He wore a dark blue robe without any unnecessary ornamentation, only a complex silver geometric design embroidered on the chest. His face was composed, his gaze calm, like an ancient well without a ripple.
It had now been slashed in several places by the rubble, revealing scraped, bleeding skin beneath.
His face was covered in dust and dirt, obscuring his features. Only a pair of dark brown eyes could be seen, so calm they bordered on indifference.
His lips were cracked, bluish stubble sprouted on his chin, and the hair at his temples had begun to gray. Yet he stood with his back perfectly straight, like an old tree whose branches had been snapped by a storm but which had not fallen.
He stood up and rolled his shoulders. Rubble clattered out of his collar and cuffs.
His right arm hung at his side, rotated slightly inward at an unnatural angle. A deep wound ran across his forearm, the flesh curled back to reveal stark white bone beneath.
He lowered his head to glance at the wound, his face expressionless, then tore a strip of cloth from his hem with his left hand.
He wrapped it around his forearm, caught one end between his teeth, and pulled hard with his left hand, tying it tight. His movements were clean and efficient, as though he had done this countless times.
He raised his head and swept his gaze over the ruins. Where Duke Desolation had stood, only a blackened rock surface remained. Marquis Darkblood lay on a heap of rubble, clear tissue fluid still seeping from the stump of his left arm. His eyes were closed, his chest rising and falling faintly. He was still alive.
The head of the Chronicle Court sat on the ground against the wall, head lowered and utterly motionless. It was impossible to tell whether he was unconscious or dead.
Shattered Pivot Executioner lay beside the fissure, a wooden spike protruding from his chest. His left hand still gripped its end as he hesitated, not pulling it out.
The middle-aged man did not go over. He turned and headed toward the slope at the edge of the pit.
Rubble shifted beneath his feet with cracking sounds. His pace was not fast, but every step was steady, as though he were measuring something.
His right arm swayed gently with his steps. The strip of cloth was already soaked through with blood, turning from dark gray to black, dripping one drop at a time.
He did not look back.