The loud laughter died down abruptly in a single fraction of a second. The atmosphere in the room visually shifted immediately to a terrifying, suffocating, and heavy tone.
BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!
A heavy, unimaginably hard thudding and brute, shivering strikes suddenly pounded with immense destructive power against the solid, armored door of the Bastion. The thick walls of the building began to creak audibly and terrifyingly under the impact. A thick layer of dust and bone-dry grit drifted down in large, suffocating streamers from the ceiling to the floor, instantly making the view in the hall blurry.
Everyone immediately stepped into a razor-sharp battle stance, the fit of laughter completely wiped from their faces in a single blow. Weapons were drawn from their sheaths with a hissing, metallic sound; the cold steel reflected the faint light. Nicola and Lyn stepped forward in unison with heavy, resolute strides, their boots planted deep in the dust and their eyes fixed ice-cold on the trembling entrance. The bright, crackling auras of Beat and Apollo flared up with brute intensity, suddenly coloring the dark room terrifyingly bright blue and golden yellow. Sparks literally spewed off Beat’s fists, hissing against the stone floor.
No, no, this really cannot be true… Nyx thought, as her heart pounded at a sickening speed in her throat and she bit her teeth deep into her own lip until it bled. The Bastion was our safe haven, our very last spot to catch our breath after that hellish depletion. Has Abysia smelled us out already? Have her spies beaten us to it? We are completely exhausted… if a whole army is standing outside the door now, we are all going to perish. My cells are already refusing service, I can barely make a fist.
“Take positions, now! Form an impenetrable barrier around the staircase!” Apollo commanded in a low, terrifyingly controlled voice. There was not a single trace of panic in his tone, pure, ice-cold military focus ruled the room.
Beat nodded briefly, his whole body tensed tight and his fingers crackling with pure electricity as he slowly edged forward, his eyes locked onto the gate. “Nicola, cover the left side with your shield. Lyn, stay directly behind Apollo. If that door gives way, we blast everything we have in active energy outside in one go. No mercy.”
Visually, the thick steel of the armored door was only now beginning to deform dangerously. The massive plates bent slowly but surely inward, the metal groaning and showing deep dents from the pure, brute force of the strikes on the other side. The heavy, mechanical lock squeaked and creaked terrifyingly under the immense pressure, as if the massive bolts could shoot through the room like bullets at any moment. A heavy, deep, and almost inhuman snorting sounded from right behind the latch, followed by a hysterical, cracking voice cutting raw through the gaps of the bursting metal.
The heavy door of the Bastion flew open with a final, booming crash, the hinges flying out of the wall with hissing sparks. Not an enemy kicking the place in, but a completely out of breath, deathly pale, and wildly screaming Ghoulia stumbling over the threshold. Her clothes were full of scorch marks and her eyes were wide with pure, hysterical adrenaline.
“WE LOOKED A THOUSAND TIMES AND SOMEHOW IT WAS NOT THERE AT FIRST!!” Ghoulia roars into the central hall, her voice cracking completely from haste and panic. Everyone freezes mid-attack, drawn weapons still raised half-threateningly. “Listen Nyx, we searched damn well! Day one absolutely nothing, after walking at least eighteen rounds across that whole fucking plain! And today, day two, in the exact same spot… I swear on my own soul, Silarias is simply lying there!”
The entire room explodes visually. The name alone strikes like a sonic bomb. Before she can even finish her sentence, the whole group reacts in a synchronized, possessed reflex. Feet scrape across the floor with a loud racket, sleeping auras fly open with a bright flash, and everyone makes moves to sprint past her outside at an insane speed, the muscle pain completely forgotten.
“Wait, hear me out, goddamn it!!” Ghoulia shrieks right over them, throwing her arms wide and tossing her own weight into the mix to interrupt the blind stampede with brute force. Everyone brakes squealing and skidding on the dusty stone floor, the air heavy with generated heat. “There is a man standing by him! A man in a cloak of pure, tangible darkness… you cannot see his face at all, it is as if the void swallows his head!”
Nyx’s pupils narrow to deadly pinpricks. Her liquid, silver hair begins to vibrate softly and light up from pure tension.
A cloak of darkness? Nyx thought, as a shiver ran down her spine. Not the darkness of Abysia… this sounds different. Bigger. A void walker? Who on earth has the power to just bend reality around Silarias without us noticing?
Ghoulia opens her hands wide to sketch the bizarre picture, her breathing still wildly irregular and hoarse. “Look, at first we thought of course that he wanted to kill him or hurt him when we saw that purple glow. But it seems… it seems as if he is protecting him. And really protecting him seriously! We shot thousands of things at him out of pure fear! Magical arrows, spears, heavy fireballs, we blasted literally everything in our arsenal at his head!”
“And there was not a scratch to be seen?” Apollo asked with a raised eyebrow, his grip on his weapon still tight.
“No, nothing! That guy just absorbed everything, the whole time!” Ghoulia rages on, her arms flailing wildly through the air as if she were warding off the projectiles herself. “And when a soldier finally slipped through and almost had his fingers on Silarias, he brought them back laughing. Well, not even running, he just literally stepped into a void, a black hole in reality, and popped right out behind that soldier again! He did not stab anyone, nothing! Not a scratch! I am one hundred, no, one thousand percent sure he could easily take every single one of us at the same time… but he just teleported everyone away time after time. Or he absorbed those damn projectiles and shot them in an arc to safety, somewhere high in the sky where they exploded with a loud bang without hitting anyone!”
A heavy, stunned silence falls. Everyone looks at each other with shivering pupils. The tension no longer hangs by a thin thread, the atmosphere has completely shifted to pure, intense mystery. Slowly, step by step, the entire group begins walking toward the broken exit as one man, out into the destroyed outside world. Their gazes are set tight and unyielding on the distant, smoking horizon where the ruined arena lies, the exact, destroyed spot where Silarias must be lying.
As they walk over the sharp debris outside with fast, tense steps, the wind whipping through their hair, Miki looks up at Ghoulia with big, glistening eyes. Her voice is full of pure, childlike curiosity, innocent amidst all the violence: “But sis Ghoulia… did really no one get close at all? Not even a tiny bit?”
Ghoulia suddenly bursts into unexpected laughter, a somewhat nervous, dry laugh echoing across the empty plain. “Yeah… and that was due to a giant flaw of ours. We were so insanely obsessed with making ground inward, that we were pounding with everything we had. Because of that, a giant stone building on the side exploded through our own fault. The massive fragments collapsed at breakneck speed, right on top of a small child wandering lost among the rubble.”
Everyone abruptly holds their breath, the steps of the group slowing down briefly. Jane and Lila look at Ghoulia’s face with wide, shocked eyes.
“But that masked void walker…” Ghoulia’s voice drops to a tone of pure, deep disbelief, her eyes fixing on the horizon. “He materialized right next to that child in a fraction of a millisecond. It was as if time stood still for a moment. He just caught that entire, massive falling building with his bare hands… and threw it straight into oblivion with one brute swing, as if it were a wad of paper! Completely vanished into nothing!”
The group listens breathlessly, the visual impact of her words hanging heavy and tangible in the dusty air.
“Then he gave that child a gentle pat on the head,” Ghoulia continues, looking at the ground with a bizarre, light smile. “He said nothing at all. Not a single word came out of that cloak. Right after that, he teleported straight to the next soldier who finally had his hands on Silarias… and boom, he too was immediately sent away without mercy. And that… that was the closest we ever came.”
She stops walking for a moment, right on the edge of the hill overlooking the destroyed arena, and looks Nyx straight in her deep eyes.
“But I tell you honestly, Nyx… something about this feels very honorable. I feel absolutely no evil coming from him… but then again not really peace either. So yeah, a bit hard to place,” she says laughing, shrugging her shoulders and trying to laugh away the heavy tension in her own muscles, as the group now truly gets the ruined arena in sight.
As the group breaks over the hill, the view shifts abruptly to the edge of the destroyed arena. A platoon of soldiers is lined up there, sweating and shouting in the chaos. With brute manpower and rattling chains, they are positioning a giant, heavy siege cannon. The barrel is aimed directly at the spot where Silarias is lying.
“ALIGN! AIM AT THE RIGHT FLANK OF THAT BLACK GLOW! NOW!” roars the commander with a cracking voice.
Nyx, Jane, and the rest see it happen in a fraction of a second. Their pupils narrow in pure horror. The adrenaline shoots back into their tired muscles with an ice-cold shock. Without thinking, they set off shouting hysterically, their voices echoing across the open field as they storm down the slope with exploding auras.
“STOP! DO NOT SHOOT, IDIOTS!!” shrieks Nyx, her liquid silver hair flying wildly behind her.
Sssssst…
The hissing, dry sound of the burning fuse cuts through the ambient noise with chilling clarity. The sparks eat their way at lightning speed toward the touchhole.
“NO, THEY WILL BOTH DIE THAT WAY!!” Nyx, Jane, Aurelius, Beat, Apollo, Lyn, Nicola, and Lila shout in unison in a choir of pure panic. Their arms reach far forward, but they are still too far away.
Ghoulia is the only one walking calmly behind the running horde. With an icy calm, almost bored movement, she unscrews the cap of her metal hip flask with her thumb. She brings it to her lips, takes a deep, generous swig of the burning liquor, wipes her mouth with the back of her hand, and mutters dryly: “Think not.”
BOOM!
A loud, deafening, and all-devouring explosion blasts from the thick barrel of the cannon. The air pressure hammers a deep crater into the mud below, and the massive, glowing cannonball flies at a sonic speed straight toward the target. The air vibrates from the heat.
However, the masked Void Walker does not flinch. At the very last moment, just when the ball seems about to pierce his dark cloak, he makes a simple, fluid, and almost graceful sweeping motion with his palm. As if moving gravity itself like a sheet, the trajectory of the killer cannonball curves completely around him with an unnatural curve. Simultaneously, he spins an insane pirouette on his heel. With every spin he makes, he shoots glittering, pitch black void holes into the open air around him with his fingertips.
Pooof!
A bright red, unusual cloud of smoke appears with a hissing sound at the spot where he was just standing. He has dissolved into nothingness, leaving a blood-red mist behind.
Miki and Ren, who have been watching the spectacle open-mouthed, suddenly jump five feet into the air in unison. Their arms wave wildly upward. “WOAHHH HE IS ACTUALLY RIDING IT! GO SLINGER MAN!!”
And indeed, due to the pure visual escalation and the bizarre adrenaline surging over the battlefield, hundreds of spectators and soldiers suddenly pop up everywhere from the deepest corners, from behind debris, and out of broken trenches. They were hiding out of fear, but the pure hype pulls them up like a magnet. The atmosphere shifts in a single blow from a death cry to a wild stadium.
“Uhh… umm… BUT WHAT IS HE GOING TO DO NOW?!” shouts a hyperactive hypeman who pops out of total nowhere at the sideline. He is dressed in torn rags, his eyes practically rolling out of their sockets from excitement, and he points a trembling, possessed finger straight at the flying cannonball.
There, right on top of the glowing, ultra-fast cannonball, sits the Void Walker mounted as if it were a wild horse. His dark cloak flutters wildly in the wind.
“YEEEEHAWWFFF!!!” sounds a bizarre, echoing yell from beneath the mask.
The cannonball races at breakneck speed straight toward one of the previously created void holes. It dives in, disappears with a bright red flash, and shoots out on the other side of the battlefield with triple acceleration. At every hole it passes, small, bright red smoke clouds burst apart. It literally ping-pongs from void hole to void hole, faster and faster, flashing through the air like a black lightning bolt until it reaches the exact center of the arena.
With a loud POP and a thick, red cloud of vapor, he materializes out of the last black hole. He plants his heel with a brute kick straight against the bottom of the cannonball, sending the heavy projectile blasting straight up into the clouds at a giant speed. The Void Walker teleports right beside it in a fraction of a second. As he begins falling back to the ground together with the ball, he draws imaginary weapons and starts shooting pure void energy into the ball with insane speed like a true gunslinger.
Pew! Pew! Pew! Pop! Pop!
Every shot leaves a trail of that same red smoke. The charged ball can no longer hold the absorbed void and explodes high in the air in a spectacular firework of purple, black, and blood-red fire.
The Void Walker falls in a straight line down and lands with a heavy, perfect superhero landing straight on the stone floor of the arena. The impact is so immense that a deep, shivering crack tears through the floor on the spot, running meters long right up to the feet of the soldiers.
The entire battlefield goes completely wild now. The spectators, the soldiers who were just shooting at him a moment ago, and even the hypeman completely lose their minds. A deafening, wild cheer erupts from hundreds of throats. People jump into each other’s arms, toss their helmets into the air, and scream their lungs out over this absurd show.
In the middle of the frantic chaos, the Void Walker slowly stands up from the red mist, the smoking crack before his feet, as Nyx’s group comes running to the edge of the crater with open mouths and pounding hearts.