chsdbacks Chapter 1080 - Taming the Wall - True Ruins - 3
Chapter 1080 - Taming the Wall - True Ruins - 3
It was only then that Ren noticed the back wall.The stone was entirely covered in runes. They were the same archaic script he had been reading during the entire descent, but the center housed something fundamentally different. It was a dense, intricately woven node.
After a moment of study, Ren recognized the architecture: it was the exact same design that powered the massive door activation mechanisms, just scaled down drastically.
As he stepped closer, the node reacted.
Matter condensed on the surface of the wall, forming a small crystal. It was circular and strangely flat, feeling more like a textured surface than a three-dimensional object.
He approached it.
He reached out and pressed his fingers against the cool surface.
The small crystal instantly flared to life. An automated scanning sequence triggered again, very similar to the massive door's protocols, as tight, geometric lines of light washed over Ren's body, mapping his internal networks.
A sudden beam of light shot from the crystal, striking him dead in the center of his chest.
He didn't even have time to flinch. But there was no violence in the impact... It carried the precise, deliberate attitude of something that knew exactly where it belonged and used only the absolute minimum force required to get there.
Deep within his internal system, a massive shift occurred. It took Ren a full second to identify the sensation.
The beam hadn't delivered an attack, nor had it given him another crystal clone. The light had forcefully deposited the real Mantis back into his soul-space. The ruin's trial was officially completed, and the system was returning the hostage.
The living Mantis, newly settled back into the familiar warmth of Ren's internal network, immediately flared with confusion. It sensed the clone crystal Ren was still holding in his physical hand.
Through their bond, Ren felt the beast's bizarre cognitive dissonance. It perceived the clone as something simultaneously deeply familiar and entirely alien. It was the metaphysical equivalent of staring into a mirror and realizing your reflection possessed its own physical texture and weight.
The clone crystal was practically the Mantis's own crystallized echo. The beast prodded at the sensation with intense, wary curiosity, trying to decide if the thing in Ren's hand was a piece of itself or a completely different entity.
Ren waited patiently for the Mantis to finish processing the existential shock, which took considerably longer than he expected, before finally storing the clone crystal away in the Wolverine's spatial storage, right alongside the rest of their hard-won materials.
"Rest for a bit," he announced to the group.
It wasn't a tactical command. It was the quiet request of a man who knew the next step required absolute, surgical concentration, and concentration demanded silence. "I need to work on this."
He withdrew Sirius's core once more.
Sitting down, he initiated the purification process. Doing this in a state of rest, without the deafening roar of combat or the chaotic pressure of the crystal inner space, was a profoundly different experience.
But it was also agonizingly slow…
The remaining thirty percent of the corruption wasn't fighting him with blind rage anymore; it was fighting him with familiarity. The dark energy had rooted itself into the specific, intricate pathways of Sirius's beast system. Tearing it out without damaging the host required microscopic precision.
Around him, the group settled down. They collapsed with the specific, heavy grace of seasoned fighters who have just survived a nightmare and have been granted temporary permission to stop anticipating the next blow.
The guards paired off. Liora slumped heavily against a wall right next to Lin. Lin, true to form, sat perfectly rigid, having selected her resting spot with the exact same scrutiny she applied to a battlefield.
And Mayo... Mayo had hopped up onto the most central pedestal. It was clearly a sacred altar meant for ancient relics, entirely unsuited for sitting, but Mayo had unilaterally decided it was her chair now. She sat cross-legged, casually inspecting the silver egg.
Half an hour bled by.
The core in Ren's hands yielded another agonizing five percent. Twenty five percent remained.
It was taking an eternity. But it was fine…
They could afford to keep resting, slowly replenishing their shattered mana reserves for the long climb back to the surface. The current pace was manageable, provided the conditions in the ruins remained exactly as they were.
Then, the conditions changed.
♢♢♢♢
The warning didn't come as a sound; it came as a physical pressure.
A suffocating wave of energy rolled down from the ceiling before the first echo even reached their ears. It was a highly specific signature, the heavy, oppressive displacement of air that occurs when something possessing massive weight and high rank moves rapidly through an enclosed space. And it was moving with a cold, focused intent that had absolutely nothing to do with exploration.
Ren felt it ripple across his expanded perception. His mind categorized the threat in the fraction of a second it took him to recognize a familiar, creeping dread.
Something was coming down the stairs.
A heavy, collective silence fell over the room as every single eye snapped toward Mayo. They stared at her as if she were a breathing omen of bad luck.
"I only said that at least we know how to jump!" Mayo threw her hands up defensively.
Her gaze remained locked on the dark, gaping maw of the stairwell, her face twisting into the deep, uncomfortable grimace of someone who desperately wished they had been wrong.
The oppressive energy bleeding down from the ceiling didn't belong to a single entity. It was fragmented, scattered into distinct pieces, yet it pulsed with a sickening, unified rhythm. It possessed the terrifying coherence of a shattered machine whose gears still turned in perfect synchronization, regardless of the distance between them.
Eight distinct magical signatures.
Each one, isolated, would have been manageable. Their only real advantage right now was the physical bottleneck of the ruins. The stairwell was incredibly narrow. Only six of those disjointed horrors could physically squeeze through the shaft at a time, forced to crawl down one by one, and that discarded the ones that looked more like legs.
It was the exact tactical bottleneck Ren had banked on when he originally warned the group against letting Selthia's artifacts assemble in the lower chambers.
Now, that same bottleneck was being weaponized against them.
"We need to move out," Ren ordered.
But nobody moved. And the reason nobody moved was the exact same reason the urgency in Ren's own voice had died before the sentence even finished echoing off the stone walls.
Sirius.
The petrified statue of Sirius Starweaver remained anchored in the center of the chamber. It wasn't bolted to the floor by iron or stone, but it was fixed in the way only ancient ruins could fix things.
Its magical circuitry was seamlessly woven into the ley lines of the room itself. Moving it was practically impossible; it would be like trying to uproot the foundational pillars of the ruins with bare hands.
It wouldn't yield a single inch until Ren completed the decrystallization process. And that process couldn't be triggered without the heart, the core, securely integrated into the statue's chest to grant the three-dimensional system its vital coherence.
And the core still harbored twenty-five percent of its impure, deeply rooted corruption.
Ren stared down at his open palm. The core pulsed with a sickly, bruised light.
He was forced into a brutal mental equation. If he slammed the core into the statue right now, injecting that remaining twenty-five percent of rot directly into Sirius's dormant body, what part of the man's system would be permanently crippled? Sirius was a high-tier Tamer bonded to two beasts. That meant his overall network comprised his human core plus the intricate systems of both companions.
If the corruption spread uniformly upon activation, mathematically, it would only infect roughly an eighth of their total combined network. Could he purge it later once the man was awake?
Probably. It would be excruciating, but probably.
Ren ground his teeth together. He swallowed the bitter curse he wanted to spit out regarding the corrupted girl's immaculate timing.
Complaining wouldn't change the reality.
Suddenly, Selthia's bizarre behavior clicked into place. She had been so relaxed, so conversational.
She had accepted her defeat in the crystal space with such effortless grace. And while she was sitting on the floor, playing coy and making casual conversation, she had been ruthlessly stalling.
While he was distracted, her scattered artifacts had been mobilizing, crawling fast toward this exact spot. It was a failsafe she never mentioned because she didn't want to. It was horrifyingly clever.
But acknowledging her genius didn't solve his immediate, terrifying dilemma. If they grabbed the core, cut their losses, and fled up the stairs, they would be leaving the hollowed-out statue behind. Selthia could easily project a deeply corrupted substitute core and slot it into Sirius's chest. Or she could simply re-infect the full core if he decided to leave it inside the statue.
If she claimed Sirius Starweaver as a vessel, the problem would instantly graduate from a temporary tactical retreat to a permanent, catastrophic failure.
There would be no saving him on any reasonable timeline.
There was only one path forward.