Raising Beast Cubs to Find a Husband novel Chapter 66

Chapter 66: The Glitch in the Deep

The world wasn’t ending. Just the room.

The ivory-white walls of the laboratory weren’t crumbling; they were dissolving into raw, colorless mist. The seamless floorboards were evaporating into geometric motes of light. Gravity lurched, flipping sideways, then upside down, as the artificial laws governing the chamber failed.

"SECTOR PURGE INITIATED. LOCAL REALITY UNMAKING IN PROGRESS."

The voice boomed from the vibrating walls, cold and devoid of mercy.

"It’s deleting the room!" Primrose screamed, clutching the Sun-Pearl to her chest as the floor beneath her feet turned into vapor. "Caspian! The Core thinks we’re foreign agents! It’s scrubbing the timeline!"

"What?! Why?!" Caspian roared.

He slammed his black crystal sword into the floor—or what used to be the floor. Instead of hitting stone, the blade sparked against a grid of hard, invisible light that sizzled with arcane energy.

The Void Residue—the black, shifting sludge—lunged. It didn’t move like a liquid; it moved like a tear in a painting. Where it passed, the air simply ceased to exist.

SCREEE.

It swiped at them with a claw made of nothingness. Caspian raised a shield of high-density water magic, a barrier strong enough to stop a torpedo.

CRACK.

The shield didn’t break physically. It unraveled. The blue water turned into purple, geometric shards and vanished into the void, erased from existence.

"Mana doesn’t work on it!" Primrose realized, watching the magic dissolve. "It consumes the energy signature! It’s a Null-entity!"

"Then we use physics!" Caspian growled, his eyes narrowing.

He looked at the pressure seal—the airlock door they had entered through. It was fifty feet away, across a room that was rapidly losing its cohesion. The white light was being eaten by the creeping darkness.

He grabbed Primrose by the waist. "Hold your breath!"

Caspian didn’t run. He launched himself.

He kicked off the dissolving console with the force of a cannonball. They flew through the air, dodging floating chunks of white stone that turned to dust upon contact. The Void Sludge lashed out, a tendril of jagged shadow whipping toward Primrose’s head.

Caspian spun in mid-air, throwing his body in the path of the strike.

HISS.

The slime struck his armored shoulder. There was no clang of metal. There was only a sickening silence as the volcanic glass armor simply vanished, leaving behind a patch of grey, dead skin that looked like cracked stone.

Caspian grunted, a sound of deep, jarring pain, but he didn’t stop. Momentum carried them across the gap. He slammed into the pressure seal.

"Open!" he commanded, slamming his hand on the silver panel.

"ERROR. SANCTIFICATION IN PROGR—"

"OPEN!" Caspian roared, channeling his immense physical strength into his fist. He didn’t hack the door. He didn’t use magic. He used the brute force of a Leviathan.

CLANG.

The ancient "Star-Metal" buckled. The delicate internal circuitry sparked and died. The seal broke.

WHOOSH.

The ocean outside, held back for three thousand years, realized the barrier was gone.

Millions of gallons of freezing, high-pressure water exploded into the room. It hit with the force of a collapsing mountain. For a normal human, it would be instant death. But Caspian wrapped his body around Primrose, turning his broad back to the torrent, taking the full, crushing force of the impact.

They were blasted backward, tumbled like ragdolls out of the dissolving laboratory and into the dark, cold silence of the Old Palace ruins.

Behind them, the blinding white light of the lab flickered once, then imploded.

"PURGE COMPLETE."

The massive stone door between the Fox Statue’s paws slammed shut. The glowing silver veins on the surface turned black and dull.

The "Glitch" was trapped inside. The room was gone, scrubbed from history.

Silence returned to the deep.

Primrose floated in the dark water, gasping into the air bubble Caspian had instinctively reformed around her. She was shaking, her heart hammering against her ribs like a trapped bird.

"We... we made it," she whispered, clutching the Pearl so hard her knuckles were white. "We got the data."

She looked around the gloomy ruins. "Caspian?"

The King was floating a few feet away. He had shifted back into his merman form. His long, powerful tail swished lazily to keep him upright in the current.

But he was leaning heavily against a broken marble pillar, his posture wrong.

"Neighbor?" Primrose swam over to him, dread pooling in her stomach. "What’s wrong?"

"I am fine," Caspian said, his voice tight and strained. "Just... a scratch."

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