The Beginning After The End novel Chapter 418

Chapter 418

Chapter 416: The Third Ruin

ARTHUR LEYWIN

The zone trembled as its behemoth protector collapsed, its chest pierced with translucent mana arrows and stone shards, its final piteous roar choked with black blood.

Mica, sweating and caked with dirt, nudged the behemoth with a toe, making the massive, fur-covered corpse rock slightly. Its tiny black eyes were staring sightlessly past me from above the piggish snout and tusks.

“And…another one…bites the dust,” Mica said, flopping down on one huge forearm like it was a shaggy couch.

A shiver ran through the aether in the zone, and I scanned our surroundings.

We stood atop a column of dry, crumbling rock. We’d had to cross from column to column, fighting various monsters of increasing size and power, to reach this final battle. The ground was an indistinct sandstone wasteland a mile below, so far that the columns blurred together before reaching the bottom. The zone seemed to go on forever in all directions, with the columns slowly fading out into a heat haze where they met the soft blue of the sky on the horizon.

Boo moaned, and I glanced in his direction. Ellie was standing beside him, giving him comforting pats.

Regis chuckled. “Who would have guessed that an asura-bred guardian beast could have a fear of heights?”

The shiver happened again.

Ellie had started to give Regis a dirty look, but stopped when she saw my face. “Brother, what’s wrong?”

“I’m not—”

The stone at my feet cracked. All eyes turned to the crack, only a few feet long at first, but even as we watched, it began racing across the rough surface of the column’s flat top. Boo and Ellie jumped to one side as the crack split the column’s face nearly in two. Then, with a guttural grinding that vibrated in my bones, a dozen other fractures split off the central crack, and the stone beneath our feet began to shift.

All around us, the zone exploded with the avalanche cacophony of shattering stone, and a thick cloud of dust choked the air.

The exit portal, which was inset into the floor and had been guarded over by the behemoth, flared to life, offering us passage to the next zone.

Lyra sprinted for it, her feet hardly touching the crumbling surface as she ran.

“Don’t go through!” I shouted, and she slid to a halt just beyond the square frame. “Stabilize the platform if you can!”

As Mica and Lyra hurried to follow my order, I scooped Ellie up and leapt half the width of the column’s top to land by the portal, the Compass already in hand.

Setting Ellie down, I channeled aether into the Compass and focused on the portal. If my mental map from Sylvia was correct, the third djinn ruin was just on the other side, but sincewe didn’t have simulets, the others might not end up there unless I stabilize the portal first.

Mica jumped to the center point of the crack and slammed her hammer down into it. Instead of sending the column bursting apart, magic raced from the hammer along the spreading cracks, pulling stone back against stone. Lyra sprinted around the outside of the column, a gust of magical wind flowing out from behind her and down around the edge of the lip to stabilize it by buttressing the structure with a supportive band of hardened air.

“It’s like something else is controlling the mana!” Mica shouted, an edge of panic in her voice.

“The landscapes of the Relictombs are immutable,” Lyra huffed as she ran. “They built this place using aether, and their creation resists tampering by even the most powerful mages…”

With the sliver of my attention I’d given to everything except the Compass and portal, I realized I had never considered this fact before. I’d lost my mana core before entering the Relictombs, and so had always relied on aether to survive here. While it made sense that the djinn’s intention would preclude allowing those testing within to simply remake the zones with mana, it also suggested that, with the proper utilization of aether, the fabric of the Relictombs itself could be rewritten.

There was no time for such considerations right now, though. From my periphery, I saw as Mica began to tremble, her biceps bulging as she held onto her hammer with all her strength. The stone beneath Lyra’s feet collapsed, and she vanished into the hole. From somewhere below, I felt the mile-high column shift and twist, the noise of it lost in the cacophonous tumbling of rocks from every direction.

The column shattered.

Lyra and I were standing on the edge of the portal frame, which didn’t move. Ellie was standing right beside me, but one foot had been off the frame. When the surface crumbled, her eyes went wide and her hand reached for me as she was pulled backwards by gravity.

Behind her, Boo, Regis, and Mica plunged down with the broken rubble, the guardian bear giving out a despairing roar as its claws scrambled for purchase against stone no longer capable of supporting it.

I nearly lost hold of the Compass as my hand snatched out for Ellie. My fingers brushed hers, but I had been focused on stabilizing the portal…

Her hair flew up past her face, whipping in the wind like a flag, her hands clawing at the air as if she could take hold of it somehow or catch herself on nothing. Belatedly, a scream pierced the air, pleading and helpless.

Cursing, I leapt off the side after her and activated God Step.

The paths flashed past at a speed that was difficult to process, especially with my heart in my throat. With my eyes on Ellie, I let the rest of my senses focus on the paths.

Aiming my body toward her and making myself as aerodynamic as possible, I sped after her. It felt like it took a very long time. Her body was twisting around in freefall, and when I caught up and wrapped my arms around her, it was with enough force to knock the air from her lungs. She scrambled to take hold of me however she could, pulling my hair and jamming her thumb into my eye. We both began tumbling end over end, locked together by her grasping fingers and my arm around her waist.

“El…Ellie! You have to”—my fingers finally closed around her wrist, and I pulled her around to face me—“calm down!”

She pulled closer and wrapped me in a tight hug, screaming, “Boo!”

About twenty feet to our right, the guardian bear’s huge bulk was rotating end over end. A long, low, mindless growl was issuing from him, and he was trembling wildly.

Regis was closer, nearly straight ahead. He did a kind of twirl and spun to look at me, his tongue lolling from the side of his mouth. ‘I always thought I’d like skydiving,’ he thought. ‘And dodging several million tons of killer rockfall definitely adds to the experience.’ His shadow wolf form melted away, leaving behind only a small wisp, which began drifting back up toward the portal frame.

“We need to save Boo!” Ellie screamed in my ear.

“You’ll have to summon him from the top,” I hollered back over the wind.

Ellie’s brows furrowed in determination as she nodded despite the wind-whipped tears streaking across her cheeks.

My focus turned to the aetheric paths, searching for one that would return us to the portal frame now high above, but then Ellie’s grip tightened on me again. Noticing her horrified gaze, I followed it.

Mica was nearly a hundred feet above us, the aetheric paths shifting and fading as her relative position to us kept changing. I cursed, struggling to calculate how I could get to her and then the portal frame in time.

“Brother, hold me still!”

Ellie raised a glowing white hand as she clutched tightly to my robe, stabilizing herself as she took aim at the lance. A misty white bolt shot out, barely grazing past a falling rock before finding its target.

With a sudden infusion of mana, Mica stopped falling. She hesitated, looking down at us, but I shook my head. She nodded and flew straight back up into the air.

I spared a second to watch the ground growing rapidly closer, then tried to bring all my focus to the aetheric pathways. When they didn’t immediately coalesce in my mind, I closed my eyes, feeling them the way Three-Steps had taught me.

There.

With Ellie firmly in my arms, I “stepped” into the aether. We appeared atop the thin edge of stone surrounding the glowing portal.

“Boo!” Ellie screamed, her voice shrill.

With a faint pop, a shadow appeared overhead, and the enormous guardian bear crashed down on top of me.

From under a fringe of fur, I saw Mica’s boots land next to us.

“Boo!” Ellie exclaimed, her sobs muffled as she must have shoved her face into her bond’s side.

Careful not to send the mana beast tumbling off the edge again, I extricated myself from his bulk and brushed myself off. Regis drifted into me, humming a tune, heedless of the fact that everyone had nearly just died.

The rest of us all shared a look, but no one had any words.

Once again, I pulled out the Compass and set to work stabilizing the portal so that it wouldn’t send the others off on their own. I nodded when it was ready, and Lyra stepped in, looking like she was sinking into a pool of quicksilver. Mica reached up to rest her hand lightly on Ellie’s shoulder. The two shared a look and a pale smile, then Mica hopped in after Lyra.

Ellie hesitated. “I’m sorry,” she said after a moment. “I should have—”

I held up a hand to forestall her continued apology. “Stop feeling like you need to apologize for everything.”

Glancing over the edge, a shiver ran through her and she nodded. Boo needed no encouragement to wade into the portal, and Ellie followed with a look of grim determination.

I looked around the zone one last time, taking in the destruction with a sigh, and then stepped into the portal.

On the other side, we found ourselves in a familiar corridor, brightly lit by panels of light running along the top of the walls. Mica, Lyra, Ellie, and Boo were staring around. Feeling a sense of deja vu, I turned to watch the portal we’d entered through vanish.

“Well, this is eerie,” Regis said as he stepped from my shadow. I shook my head, realizing that he’d said exactly the same thing when we found the first ruin.

Before, the sterile environment had put me on edge, but now I knew what to expect. Sure enough, a moment later, runes lit up along the walls, and the lights faded to a low violet color.

Once again, an irresistible force took hold of me—of us all—and suddenly our group was skidding across the tiled floor, bringing us to a massive, black crystal gate.

Cursing, Lyra spun around, but the white hallway was gone. “What’s happening?”

“It’s all right,” I assured her. “On the other side of that gate we’ll find what we’re looking for. I’ll face some kind of test or challenge. You won’t be able to help me, so you should have the chance to rest there.”

“Who needs…rest…” Mica asked, leaning against Boo’s side to hold herself upright.

‘Welcome, descendant. Please enter.’

“What was that?” Ellie asked.

“Did you hear the words?” I asked as the runes on the gate pulsed brightly.

“Not words, just…something. Like a whisper beyond the edge of my hearing.”

I frowned, considering. It would have made sense if Ellie could hear the message too, since she was also a descendant of the djinn, but she didn’t have any insight into aether, so maybe the Relictombs saw her differently.

Better get inside me, just in case, I suggested to Regis. I don’t want you trapped on the wrong side of the door.

He became incorporeal and drifted into my body, his wisp form settling near my core. ‘Wake me up when something interesting happens.’

“This next part can be a bit trippy,” I said, reaching out and brushing my fingers across the smooth surface of the gate.

My fingers went through, the crystal clinking lightly as it folded away from my hand, making room for my passage. Taking a deep breath, I stepped into the solid surface, my skin tingling from the strange, warm caress of the black crystal flowing around my skin.

Everything went dark for a moment, and it felt like I was walking along the bottom of a warm ocean, then the crystal veil parted again. This time, when I saw the geometric patterns, I recognized them as being similar to those I’d seen in the keystone when I learned Aroa’s Requiem. Something about that magic and this was the same, although it was still beyond me to comprehend exactly what.

I wasn’t expecting danger, but I still quickly scanned the space on the other side of the crystal door.

It was brightly lit by a large number of lighting artifacts giving off a sunshine-like glow. The room was lined with glass display shelves, and the middle of the room contained over a dozen low, glass-encased tables.

Stepping up to the closest display, I searched for a plaque or card that might explain what I was seeing, but there was no label on the contents. Inside the glass, resting on a purple velvet cushion, was a featureless cube.