Chapter 39: Resonance Sight
Chapter 39: Resonance Sight
Outside the cave, Laira was killing.
Gone was the free-spirited bearing of a proud Crimson Dragon. Gone was the half-teasing, half-serious smile. She hurtled through the veil of purple mist like a broken spear of flame, one wing stretched wide to catch the wind, the other drooping and shredded, every beat spraying out a burst of red blood.
The purple-scaled monsters weren’t afraid to die. They didn’t know fear. One fell, and the next trampled over its comrade’s corpse to advance, eyes hollow, black fluid dripping from their mouths, aimed at one single direction: the cave crevice behind Laira.
She burned down one row. Then another row.
But the Void Mist eroded her flame faster than usual. Each time she breathed fire, the purple smoke stole away part of the heat, forcing her to burn harder, to spend more. And each time her torn wing stretched taut to change direction, the pain sawed through her spine like a blade.
One monster slipped past the flame and lunged from the blind spot on her broken-wing side.
Laira couldn’t turn in time.
Purple-black claws slashed down onto her shoulder, tearing another line across scales already shredded.
She gritted her teeth and swung her arm, burning the monster to ash, but another wound of blood had opened along her side.
Inside the cave, Mira saw everything through the crack in the rock. Her hands still pressed against Ethan’s shoulders, holding the last fragile layer of recovery, but tears had welled up.
"Hurry, Ethan," she whispered, her voice breaking. "Please, hurry."
In the darkness behind Ethan’s eyelids, the red stream of energy kept flooding in without pause.
But now it was no longer just energy.
The deeper he absorbed, the more Ethan felt the red stream carried something ancient. Not a memory. Not a voice. But a pressure, a weight, as if every drop of this energy had once lain at the bottom of a place so deep that light had never touched it.
And in that deep place, a name surfaced on its own in his awareness.
The Abyss.
Ethan didn’t know why he knew. The [Eye of Truth] displayed no line of text. There was no notification panel. Only a cold truth carving itself into his marrow: this red stream came from the Abyss. It was a shard of the power of an existence beyond everything he had ever known.
Another thought immediately leapt up, sharp as a knife.
My eye can drink it. So does my eye also belong to the Abyss?
But the instant that thought took shape, the [Eye of Truth] stirred faintly, and Ethan understood he had drawn his conclusion too fast.
The eye didn’t produce the red stream. It only saw, only recognized, only drank. Just as it could see the purple-black stream of the Void without belonging to the Void in any way. His eye stood above both of those things, observing both, leaning toward neither.
It wasn’t a tool of the Abyss.
Nor was it a servant of the Void.
It was the thing that saw through both.
Ethan didn’t yet understand what that meant. But he noted it. And he set the thought down, because right now there was something more important.
The red stream had risen to its limit.
The Heaven’s Gate within his body trembled one final beat, more violent than all the previous times combined.
Then it burst open.
[Rank: Bronze Tier 1.]
Ethan opened his eyes.
And the cave blazed a brilliant red.
Not Laira’s fire. This light came from Ethan’s own body. Beneath his skin, glowing red veins flared up, running down his arms, neck, chest, spreading all the way to his temples, weaving into one another to form a network so intricate and precise it looked unnatural, exactly like electric circuits etched onto a circuit board. They glowed in time with his heartbeat, flaring once with each beat, radiating heat so high the air around him began to warp.
Mira flinched and stepped back, shielding her eyes from the blinding red. "Ethan? This is..."
Ethan didn’t answer right away. He was listening to his own body.
The pain was still there, but it had retreated far. The wounds on his shoulder, on his chest, the energy channels torn by backlash, all had knitted back together under the red stream. His body had never been so full of power.
But he looked down at his left arm.
The forearm was still severed. The blackened burn was still there. And in the core of the wound, the purple-black glow of the Void Flame still smoldered, forced back by the red stream but refusing to go out, like a thorn embedded too deep for any power to pull free.
The Abyss could heal his entire body.
But it couldn’t touch the wound the Void had left behind.
Those two forces, even inside his own body, neither could swallow the other.
Ethan understood something that chilled him: as long as the Void Flame still burned, he was still carrying a shard of the enemy right in his own flesh.
Outside the cave, Laira suddenly froze in the middle of the battle.
A strange heat surged across the Partner link, flowing into her body like a current of lava. Her wounds didn’t heal, her broken wing was still broken, but her strength swelled up in surging waves. The flame around her, which had been gnawed away by the purple mist, suddenly flared back, deeper red, denser, so hot that the nearest monsters caught fire just for standing in the wrong place.
"Ethan..." She raised her head toward the cave, her red-orange eyes blazing.
He had leveled up.
And he was sharing that power with her.
But that wasn’t all.
Inside the cave, Ethan stepped toward the mouth.
Mira panicked. "You can’t go out there! Your body just—"
"I’m not going out." Ethan stopped at the crack in the rock, looking out at the battlefield. "I don’t need to go out."
He activated the [Eye of Truth].
The world before his eyes shifted into that familiar black and white. But this time, on the body of each monster, a red point appeared. Some at the neck. Some at the knee joint. Some deep within the ribcage, where a purple-black crystal core was beating.
Weak points.
Ethan had seen them long ago, just as he had once seen the red point in the core of the Bone-Winged Dragon’s fireball. But before, he could only look. The information stayed inside his head, and he had no way to convey it to the battlefield fast enough.
Now it was different.
The red veins on his body flared bright. Through the Partner link, he felt a new channel open, not a channel for transmitting energy, but a channel for transmitting sight.
Ethan focused on a monster charging toward Laira’s broken wing. His eye locked onto the red point on its neck.
And he pushed that image across the link.
Outside, Laira suddenly turned, without ever looking back, without any hesitation, her hand striking straight at the neck of the monster lunging from the blind spot behind her.
The monster shattered.
Laira paused for half a beat.
She had just struck something she couldn’t see. But she knew it was there. Knew exactly where to strike. Not instinct. Not luck. An image had just appeared in her mind, crisp, instant, passing through no words at all.
She understood at once.
"Ethan," she whispered, the corner of her mouth curving up in the middle of the bloody battle. "You’re watching for me."
Inside the cave, Ethan nodded faintly, though she couldn’t see it.
A faint line of notification drifted across his sight.
[Eye of Truth: derivative ability activated.]
[Resonance.]
No words needed. No signals needed. He looked, and Laira knew. He locked a target, and her hand answered. His eye became her second pair of eyes, a pair that saw through the death point of every enemy.
From that moment, the battle turned.
Laira no longer had to defend her blind spot.
She no longer had to judge, no longer had to split her focus guarding the broken wing. She only had to trust. To trust that each time an image flashed in her head, it was Ethan pointing the way. And she struck accordingly, absolutely, without a shred of doubt.
A monster dove from above. In Laira’s mind appeared the red point at its wing joint. She looked up, and a jet of flame pierced straight through it. The monster dropped like a stone.
Three closed in from three sides. Three red points appeared at once, in the order Ethan had arranged: nearest first, farthest last. Laira spun a ring of flame, three strikes, three deaths, as clean as a dance rehearsed a thousand times.
She was fighting with one broken wing, her body covered in wounds, her energy gnawed away by the Void Mist.
And yet she was winning.
Because she was no longer fighting alone.
Inside the cave, bloody sweat ran down Ethan’s temples. Maintaining [Resonance] continuously like this ground him down horribly, each target he locked another needle stabbing behind his eyes. But he didn’t stop. Every monster he locked was a blow Laira didn’t have to take. Every red point he marked was a wound she didn’t have to carry.
He hadn’t been able to go out and shield her.
So he would become her eyes from within the darkness.
"Mira." Ethan said, not taking his eyes off the battlefield. "Keep me awake. At any cost."
Mira swallowed her tears, both hands gripping his shoulders, pouring the last of her energy into his body. "Yeah. I’ll keep you."
Out there, amid the sea of purple mist and monster corpses, Laira tilted her face up to the sky.
Ethan’s red veins, through the link, were also running faintly beneath her scales, as if two bodies shared one bloodstream.
She felt him. Felt his gaze spread across the entire battlefield, spread across her, holding her, guiding her.
For the first time since being left behind in this Anomalous Coordinate, Laira didn’t feel alone.
She burst out laughing. The laughter rang out amid the roars and the flames, proud once more, but this time with something it had never held before: absolute trust in the one behind her back.
"Look closely, Ethan." She roared, charging straight into the thickest of the monster pack. "Watch me tear them apart."
The deep red flame blazed up, this time no longer snuffed out by the purple mist.
It burned in time with the pulse of the veins on Ethan’s body.
Burned like a shard of the Abyss just awakened.
And in a faraway place that did not belong to this world, amid the endless darkness, a colossal pupil narrowed slightly.
For the first time, the Void Eye looked at its prey for longer than a moment.
For the first time, it saw something worth looking at.