The copper walls of the bedroom flawlessly blocked out the chilly air of Sector Null, but the atmosphere inside remained heavy and restless. The night was still young, and the silence that had fallen over the Bastion felt suffocating to minds that had been in survival mode for so long.
Nyx lay motionless beneath the heavy blankets, but her consciousness refused to surrender to a healthy rest. She drifted into a chaotic, turbulent stream of dreams that took hold of her with brute force. Fragments and sharp flashes shot through her sleeping brain. Suddenly, she stood in a boundless, gleaming space of pure white light. Before her appeared the form of her mother, the Moon Queen, shrouded in an aura of untouchable royalty and mystical power. Nyx tried to reach out her hand, but the images immediately began to distort. The queen dissolved into a thick, icy mist, and Nyx was dragged toward a massive, baroque mirror.
She stepped forward to look into the glass, but she did not see her own reflection. Behind her crystal-clear image, an entire, unfamiliar family suddenly appeared. They stood there in silence, radiating a rich history that felt deeply connected to her own being. At the same time, she felt the tangible presence of children around her, small hands reaching for her clothes, an intense warmth and responsibility filling her chest.
But the dream granted her no peace. In a fraction of a second, the tenderness flipped into pure horror. The massive floor beneath her feet tore open with a thundering crash. All around her, the world exploded into bright, blinding flares. Jet-black smoke mingled with the blood-red light of destruction. Severed limbs flashed through her field of vision, mutilated forms, and the sharp, chilling echo of her own voice screaming at the top of her lungs. She wept, trapped in a web of pure, raw loss.
With a loud, choked gasp for air, Nyx shot upright in bed. Her entire body was covered in a thin layer of cold sweat, and her heart hammered wildly against her ribs. She pressed her lips tightly together and tried to control her breathing, looking around the darkness of the room in a panic. Her first thought went straight to the boy beside her; she fervently hoped Silarias had not woken up from her sudden movement.
However, as she carefully turned toward him, she realized with a shock that Silarias himself was in the middle of a heavy psychological war.
His massive muscles were tense beneath the sheets, and his face was twisted in a grimace of pure pain. He moved his head restlessly back and forth on the pillow, muttering in his deep sleep with a fragile, muffled voice.
"No… not in there… I don't want to lose you guys," he brought out, shivering and faltering as if fighting an invisible force taking everything from him. "Open the gates! Open them! I need to get in!"
Hearing his vulnerable voice cut straight through Nyx's heart. Without a second thought, she moved from her bed to the mattress where Silarias lay and threw both arms tightly and protectively around his broad, trembling shoulders. She pulled his massive body close to tear him from the clutches of his nightmare.
With a sudden jerk, Silarias woke up terrified. His fists instinctively went into a fighting stance, his breathing heavy and rasping. He looked around wildly, his eyes wide in the dark, until he felt the familiar warmth and tight grip of Nyx. The realization that he was in the safe rooms of the Bastion slowly sank in. This had been a dream. A dark, intense dream, but he had no idea when this memory took place or how it had played out in his mind.
Nyx held him tightly, resting her chin on his shoulder and gently rubbing his back to soothe the adrenaline in his muscles.
"Easy now… it's okay. I've got you," Nyx reassured him with a soft, warm voice, though her own heart was still racing. "Mmm, so you're sleeping terribly too, huh… Guess we're sleeping poorly together, then."
At the sound of her familiar voice, Silarias felt the heavy tension drain from his large body. Exhaustion hit him like a sledgehammer. The sharp contours of his face relaxed, and he let his head drop heavily onto her shoulder.
"Yeah, Nyx… sleeping poorly together," he mumbled, his voice slow and heavy. It was as if her touch broke the last bit of resistance; within a single second, he fell into a deep, dreamless sleep. Nyx smiled tiredly, closed her eyes, and followed him straight into sleep, completely knocked out.
The hours passed in a flash, and the deep, chilly night of Sector Null slowly gave way to the bright, copper glow of the early morning. The bright neon light outside dimmed, and the mechanical clocks of the Bastion let out a heavy, rhythmic hum that echoed through the hallways.
Everyone was ready surprisingly early in the central hall of the barracks. Silarias, Nyx, Aurelius, Jane, Nicola, Lyn, Apollo, Beat, Izumaru, Balamore, Cilla, and even young Ren and Miki stood shoulder to shoulder. The fresh, clean clothes Master Ometol had laid out felt comfortable, but the echoing space was wrapped in an icy silence.
Silarias let his gaze wander through the massive hall. The tables were empty, the mugs cleared away, and the large copper doors to the training sectors were tightly shut. There was absolutely no legend to be seen. No Master Ometol, no ringing sword, no puffy jacket. Nothing at all.
"Uh… where the hell did those old geezers go?" Silarias broke the silence dryly, scratching the back of his head thoughtfully. "Didn't they say last night we had to be up early?"
Aurelius spat onto the steel floor with a grim expression, leaning heavily on the hilt of his sword. "Typical. Big talk at the drinking table, but when morning comes, they just leave us here to rot in the cold. Maybe they're still sleeping off their drinks."
"I don't think so," Jane responded immediately, her sharp eyes scanning the closed doors. Her jaw was set tight. "This feels too planned. That look Ometol gave us yesterday… they are testing us right now. Who knows, they might be watching from the shadows already."
Nicola nervously adjusted his glasses, his white-hot eyes glowing faintly as he scanned the environmental data. "The internal systems of the Bastion are running at full capacity, but the legends' quarters are completely shielded from my reach. No heat signatures, no digital noise. They are literally untraceable."
"Could they… could they have left us behind already?" Ren asked, his voice fragile and a bit fearful as he tightly gripped his hair. The panic from the previous day was still fresh in his young body. "We just got here! What do we do if they don't come back?"
Miki crossed her arms tightly, looking at the panicked boy beside her with an extremely dry, uninterested expression. "Stop whining, Ren. They're not going to just walk away after giving us those cryptic speeches. This is probably part of their ridiculous training."
"Speeches? Those weren't speeches, those were absolute truths!" Beat suddenly roared, completely possessed as he waved his arms wildly in the air, his eyes wide with hype. "The rhythm! Locking in the heat! Don't you get it?! They want us to activate the lessons ourselves! The adrenaline has to pump! We are the Nobodies, damn it!"
Apollo's eyes instantly turned into large, gleaming, hyperactive children's eyes at Beat's shouting. "YES! The walls need to melt from the pressure! That's what that fiery woman in the leather said! Maybe we should just smash the doors down ourselves!"
"Calm down, idiots," Izumaru cut them off with a cold, calm voice, crossing his arms over his massive armor. "A predator doesn't hunt with electricity or brainless shouting. Real strength lies in the silence right before the strike. That's what the woman in the iron armor was trying to tell me and Jane. We need to control our rhythm."
Balamore nodded slowly, his heavy presence instantly bringing a deeper calm to the group. "Izumaru is right. Every word they said last night was a key. Bending your knees with the steel, slowing down the data to absolute zero… they gave us the blueprint before the battle even started."
Cilla stepped forward, placing a comforting hand on the shoulder of Lyn, who still stood stable and quiet next to the trembling Nicola. "They want to see if we have the discipline to dissect their words without them holding our hands. The night is over. The lessons they gave… we have to put them into practice now, whether they are here or not."
Nyx looked intently at Silarias, and for a moment, the memory of their shared nightmare flashed through her mind. But the weakness was gone. Her eyes were sharp as glass again, filled with the icy power of the Moon Queen.
"The lessons were about filling each other's emptiness," Nyx said, her voice faltering but determined, piercing through the air. "Silarias, your presence breaks illusions. My cold locks the truth in place. We aren't going to stand here waiting for them to fetch us. We are going to use those lessons to completely demolish the limits of our own divine powers."
"Damn right!" Silarias yelled, his voice overpowering as the pure adrenaline shot through his veins at top speed. He slammed his fist into the palm of his other hand, sending a loud shockwave through the empty hall. "The hunger is too great. Bring on that grueling training. We'll break those doors open ourselves!"
The raw energy hung like a charged storm cloud in the empty copper hall. The absence of the legends didn't make the group weaker; it made them hungrier than ever before. Every word about bending with the steel, locking in the heat, and controlling the internal noise echoed like a war rhythm in their minds, ready to force the absolute reawakening.
Suddenly, a devastating shockwave slammed through the copper floor of the Bastion. The massive plates tore open with a deafening crack, and the copper walls shattered into millions of glowing particles. But this was no destruction of raw chaos; it was a transcendent metamorphosis. Around the entire group of fourteen warriors, reality exploded into a volcanic spectacle that took their breath away.
From the ripping depths of the ground rose massive, jet-black pillars of gleaming obsidian, deeply rooted in rivers of liquid, neon-like magma flowing slow and thick. The air above them transformed into a dreamlike, ash-grey woven sky where millions of glowing ash particles drifted upward like thousands of golden fireflies. It was a breathtaking display of pure nature force, caught in a serene, fairy-tale aesthetic. The sizzling heat vibrated tangibly in the air, and the ash rain glinted like falling stars against the dark, smoky background of this fresh volcanic battlefield.
And there, hidden deep behind the dense, pulsating wisps of the glowing ash cloud and rising smoke, the intimidating silhouettes of the five legends emerged. They stood motionless across the distant rocky peaks, unreachable and shrouded in shadow, but the outlines of their transformed shapes stood out with a godlike threat against the bright firelight.
Central in the fiery glow, the shadow of their leader was visible. His cloak seemed to have vanished, replaced by the hypnotizing outlines of floating, rotating rings spinning like liquid gold around his body, while his form radiated a supernatural light from within and his eyes stood like black holes in the darkness.
On a nearby rocky ridge, the silhouette of the fiery woman was outlined. Through the smoke flashed the sharp, glowing lines of veins pulsing purple through her body, and behind her back rose the contours of five massive, meters-long tails of compact, hissing gunpowder, whipping wildly through the ash cloud.
Right behind her, shrouded in jet-black vapors, the shadow of the armored cook turned into a mechanical nightmare. The outlines of her heavy armor seemed to fuse with her weapons from the heat, creating a monumental, terrifying centaur-shape of copper and iron in the shadow that made the ground shake.
At the flank, deep within the resonance field of the smoke, the silhouette of the man with the silver-grey beard rose up. His large sword was slammed into the ground, and through the mist, the unreal shadow of thousands of razor-sharp shards could be seen floating motionless in the air, caught in a mysterious, neon-blue light field.
And finally, floating between the rising sparks, was the shadow of the lazy speedster. Where just moments ago his oversized puffy jacket had hit the ground with a loud crash creating a crater, his human silhouette was now completely blurred. There was only a constant, flashing line of white-hot neon light cutting through the ash clouds at insane speed, accompanied by the non-stop, rhythmic thumping of successive sonic booms rolling through the hall.
The five silhouettes stood there like unreachable gods in a dreamlike fire world, wrapped in mystery. What kind of terrifying, evolved forms had truly risen here remained hidden in the smoke. The ultimate test had begun.