Chương 41: Chapter 40 - Forget The Cost

The boss turned toward him as he closed the distance, and for the first time since the fight had started, Ant felt something in its stance shift — not fear, nothing that simple, but attention. Real attention, focused entirely on him in a way it hadn't bothered with before. It moved fast. Faster than anything should have moved, its shifting form blurring at the edges in a way that made tracking its next strike feel like guesswork more than anything else. Enhanced Vision.

The world sharpened around him, the boss's outline resolving into something he could actually follow — the faint tension building in one arm a half-second before it committed to a strike, the shift of weight that gave away which direction it meant to move. It wasn't perfect. But it was enough. Soul Render met its next strike head-on, and the impact that should have shattered his arm instead traveled through muscle that could take it, absorbing the force the way a body absorbs something it can actually withstand.

He pushed off the block and into a strike of his own, fast, low, opening a line across something that had no business having a leg and buckled anyway. Together, Mahkir said, already moving to match him, and for the first time in the whole fight the two of them weren't circling separately — they were moving as one thing wearing two shapes, Mahkir taking the openings Ant's strikes created, Ant closing the gaps Mahkir's speed opened. Mahkir's jaw lit again, flame gathering fast.

"Flame Breath!" The second blast tore into the boss from the opposite side of Kalsar's Kithren's next bite, and the violet mass buckled properly this time, cohesion fraying visibly at the edges where the fire had touched it twice now and never quite recovered the ground it lost. Kalsar's Kithren staggered upright one more time, runes flaring with everything it had left stored inside them, and Ant caught Kalsar's voice cutting across the chamber, rough and urgent.

"Now! Everything — now!"

"Elemental Release!" The light along its spine didn't just flare this time. It broke, every rune firing at once in a single, blinding column of stored force, days — maybe longer — of absorbed magic released in one uncontained burst that slammed into the boss from the flank at the exact moment Ant's blade found its center. The boss didn't stagger this time. It came apart.

The shifting violet mass that had held it together for the length of the entire fight simply lost whatever was keeping it cohesive, streams of light unraveling outward in every direction, the humanoid shape collapsing in on itself and then failing to reform, the chamber filling with drifting motes of color that dimmed as they fell. Silence came down heavy and complete.

Ant stood in the middle of it, breathing hard, the borrowed strength already fading out of his limbs, leaving behind the particular ache of a body that had just been asked for considerably more than it had. This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it. [Anomaly defeated.] Experience gained: 3, 600. You have reached Level 6. Mahkir has reached Level 6. He barely looked at it.

He was already moving toward Maren, toward Axel, dropping to his knees beside them as Axel's chest rose in a slow, shallow breath.

"He's breathing," Maren said, and her voice cracked slightly on the last word, relief and exhaustion tangled together.

"He's breathing. He's just — out." Kalsar's Kithren limped over and lowered itself to the ground beside them without being told, runes dark now, spent completely. Kalsar himself crossed the chamber slowly, no triumph anywhere in his face, watching the four of them with an expression Ant couldn't quite place.

"You disobeyed a direct order," he said, stopping a few feet away, his eyes moving from Ant to Mahkir and back again.

"I should be furious about that. Some part of me still is." He let out a breath that came out rougher than he probably intended.

"But in doing it, you likely saved my Kithren's life. So — thank you. That comes first, whatever else I have to say after it."

"I'm not very good at taking orders," Ant said, still catching his breath, his legs unsteady beneath him in the aftermath of whatever Attribute Sharing had cost him.

"Mahkir's the same. We're similar like that." Something that might have been the beginning of a smile crossed Kalsar's face before he pushed it back down.

"It was reckless, regardless. You could have died. Both of you, and Maren's Kithren besides." His tone hardened again, the gratitude folding itself back beneath something more serious.

"That's not a small thing to have risked. I need you to actually understand that, not just agree with me because it's easier than arguing."

"Yes," Ant said, and meant it, the weight of what could have happened finally starting to settle now that the fight itself was over. Kalsar held his gaze a moment longer, then nodded once, apparently satisfied that the point had landed. Around them, the last of the violet light was fading from the air, the residue that had thickened every breath since they'd entered the chamber finally thinning into nothing.

As it cleared, the space around them came into focus properly for the first time — and what emerged from beneath the haze was worse than the fight had been. Bones. Old, scattered across the chamber floor in a way that suggested nothing had ever come to gather them. Fragments of armor, corroded and split, half-buried in drifted dust. A blade, its hilt long since rotted away, lying near a ribcage that had settled where its owner had apparently stopped being able to carry it any further.

"This is what a vortex actually looks like once the magic clears," Kalsar said quietly, his eyes moving across the wreckage with the particular stillness of a man who'd seen this before and never quite gotten used to it.

"The residue hides all of it. Softens the edges, makes it easier to walk through without thinking too hard about what you're walking over. Strip that away, and this is what's underneath. Everyone who came down here before us and didn't make it back up." Ant stared at the empty chamber, the violet haze gone entirely now, nothing left of it anywhere he looked.

"If it's all gone," he said slowly, "how does a vortex even come back? I thought the whole point was that it kept building."

"It does," Kalsar said.

"This isn't gone, not really. Just spread too thin to see anymore. What we just burned through, what my Kithren spent absorbing, what that thing was made of — none of that disappears. It scatters. Thins out into the stone and the air around us, invisible, harmless, for now." He nodded toward the walls, the ground, the space that had been thick with pressure not long ago and now looked like nothing more than an ordinary cave.

"Given time, it starts finding its way back together. Slowly. A trickle at first, condensing back down into something small enough to matter again. And something small draws attention — weak Wraithkin, the kind we fought on the way in. They feed on it, same as anything down here always has, and feeding it only makes it grow faster than it would on its own."

"So it just — starts over," Ant said.

"Every time," Kalsar said.

"That's the cycle. Nobody's ever managed to end it outright, not that I've heard of. Best anyone can do is keep clearing it before it builds into something like what we just fought." He glanced around at the scattered remains one last time, then crouched beside the nearest of them.

"Which is a conversation for another day. Let's see if any of this is salvageable. No sense leaving good equipment to rot any further than it already has."