Chapter 45: The First to Believe
Chapter 45: The First to Believe
The gun in Ryan’s hand was still smoking.
Mira lay on the stone floor, blood spreading into a red pool beneath her.
Damien Vale no longer looked at his niece. He looked at Ryan.
And in his mind, the past twenty-four hours began to reassemble themselves. The deleted recording. The voice "like it was being forced." The line "taking him alive is not necessary," coming from a report only one person had heard.
All of it came from the young man who had just shot an unarmed girl.
"It was you," Damien said. Very quietly. "From beginning to end."
Ryan stepped back, cradling his broken wrist. "Captain, she was helping the enemy—"
"She is my niece."
The pressure of a Gold Tier 9 bore down, and Ryan dropped to his knees.
Damien turned to the formation. "Nadia. Save the girl. Now."
A female Awakened rushed to Mira, both hands already covered in healing light.
"As for him." He pointed toward Ethan, who still stood in place, the gate device in his hand, not fleeing even though the way out was resting in his palm. "No one fires. That’s an order."
Corin lowered his gun first. "I said it from the start. A Black Iron can’t subdue two Gold-tiers."
He said nothing more. He didn’t need to.
Ethan looked at the gate device in his hand.
His plan had succeeded. He had a gate, a way back. Just activate it, and he and Laira would vanish from here in three seconds.
He didn’t press it.
"Treat her," he said to Nadia, then pulled the pouch of energy crystals out of his cloak. "I have this. Take as much as you need."
Nadia looked up. The pouch of crystals in his hand was what Laira had traded blood to gather, enough to take him up several more tiers.
She looked at Damien. He nodded.
A few other Silver-tiers lowered their guns too. No one had ordered them to do so. It was just very hard to raise a gun at a man who was sharing his own resources to save the hostage he was accused of kidnapping.
A lying story needs only an image like that to begin cracking.
But the Void Eye gave them no time.
The ground shook. Not the footsteps of monsters, but the earth itself. At the center of the ruins, where Ethan’s Eye of Truth had burned brightest, a long crack split open.
Ethan raised his head. Through the eye, he saw it: the Void Eye was pressing down, an invisible weight bearing on the entire stretch of land, like a finger crushing an anthill.
"It wants to bury all of us," he said. "Along with this place."
Ryan understood before the others that this was the last chance.
Every gaze was fixed on the crack. No one was looking at him anymore. And in the hand of a Silver-tier nearby, a gate device was still intact.
He lunged, snatched it, activated it. A blue vortex burst open.
"Ryan!" Damien roared. But he was standing between Laira and Mira, and he couldn’t abandon his niece.
Ryan paused for a moment before the vortex, turning his head to look at his brother across the sea of monsters and rock dust.
Ethan understood what was running through his brother’s head, without needing him to say it. The whole field of ruins was collapsing. It was unclear how many gates still worked. If these people died here, Ryan’s story would be the only story left. The one who returns first is the one who’s heard first.
"Run back," Ethan said, his voice carrying over the roar of the earth. "Tell your story. I’ll come later, along with nine people who saw it with their own eyes."
Ryan’s face went white. Then he threw himself into the vortex and vanished.
The gate closed.
On the ground, the clock began to run.
The crack widened into a pit.
"Hold on to each other!" Damien shouted, one arm around Mira, the other raising a golden shield to fend off the falling boulders.
But the weight from above was too great. The ground beneath the whole group’s feet shattered.
Laira lunged over, one wing spread wide, wrapping around Ethan.
"I’ve got you," she said.
Then they all fell into the darkness, while above, the sea of monsters and the field of ruins were crushed into nothingness.
The sound of collapse dragged on for a long time. Then silence.
Ethan came to in the darkness.
The air here was different. Cold, still, ancient. The smell of dust wasn’t the dust of the Anomalous Coordinate, but the smell of a place sealed away for a very long time.
Laira was curled around him, her wings draped over his body. She had taken the full force of the fall.
"Are you all right?" she asked.
"Yeah. And you?"
"Dragons don’t break that easily."
But he heard the fatigue in her voice, and rested his hand on her wing for a moment.
Around them, other points of light began to stir. Corin. Nadia. Damien, still holding Mira in his arms. Four others.
Nine survivors. Trapped underground, in a place no map of humanity had ever recorded.
"Lights," Damien ordered, his voice having regained the composure of a commander.
A few beams of white light flicked on.
And the whole group held their breath.
They hadn’t fallen into a cave. They had fallen into a hall.
The ceiling was so high the lamplight couldn’t reach it. Colossal pillars, each as large as a building, rose up into the darkness, covered in carvings. The floor was polished black stone, reflecting the light like the surface of water.
At the far end of the hall, looming in the darkness, was a gate. It was so tall its top vanished into the night above, its surface blanketed with symbols twisting into one another in intricate patterns.
"What is this?" Corin whispered. "Not human architecture. Not from any civilization on record."
Damien stepped closer, tilting his head up to look. "Unreadable. Not a single symbol I recognize."
But Ethan no longer heard them.
Because to him, the gate was not silent at all.
The moment the lamplight fell on the gate, the eye on Ethan’s forehead lit up on its own.
Not from him activating it. It opened by itself, as if called by something.
And within his sight, the dead symbols on the gate began to move. They flowed, splitting into tens of thousands of streams, a language he had never studied but whose faint meaning he could still feel behind it.
He saw images.
A war. Not between humans and monsters, but between existences so vast the sky was merely a backdrop. A purple-black eye opening in the void. A bottomless, deep red abyss. A suit of armor radiating primordial light. And another eye, the eye that saw through everything.
They weren’t fighting each other. They were tearing each other apart, as if they had once been one, and were trying to swallow each other back.
Ethan stepped back, a hand clutching the eye on his forehead.
Among the tens of thousands of alien symbols, he recognized one shape. At the very center of the gate, larger than all the rest, carved deep into the stone: an eye, exactly like the eye burning on his forehead.
And from behind the gate rose something only he could hear. Not through his ears. A whisper, ancient and patient, as if it had been waiting here since before humanity existed.
It called a name.
Not "Ethan." A different name, one he had never heard, but the eye on his forehead recognized it.
Ethan stood rooted before the gate.
Not out of fear of death.
But because he was about to learn who he truly was.
The whisper cut off when Laira shook him.
"Ethan."
The eye on his forehead cooled down. The symbols froze back into stone. The hall once again was nothing but darkness and silence.
"I’m fine," he said. "The eye reacts to this place. That’s all."
Laira didn’t believe it. But she didn’t ask in front of strangers. She only stood a little closer to him.
Damien walked back over, the lamplight casting up onto his scar-covered face.
"You saw something," he said.
Ethan weighed it a beat. "My eye read something on the gate. But I don’t understand yet what it says."
Corin and a few Silver-tiers exchanged looks. Two days ago, a confession of "I have power you don’t" would have made them raise their guns. Not now. They had just fallen into a place that could kill them all, and the only person who could see the way through was standing right in front of them.
"So our lives are in your hands," Damien said.
"You’re not afraid? Handing your life to the man you were just ordered to kill?"
Damien looked toward Mira, lying unconscious, being tended by Nadia.
"I nearly killed an innocent person today. From now on I only believe what I see with my own eyes." He held out his hand. "And I saw a man who had the chance to run, but stayed."
Ethan looked at that hand for a moment, then took it.
Nadia knelt beside Mira, both hands covered in blue light. Her face was tense.
"The round went through the lower abdomen. I’ve stopped the bleeding and closed the external wound. But there’s serious damage inside." She looked up. "I’ve kept her alive. But I can’t fully heal her here. She needs rest, and absolutely no strenuous movement."
"Will she live?"
"If we get out of here in time."
Ethan placed the pouch of crystals in her hands. "Use all of it."
Nadia froze. "This is a whole fortune. You need it to level up."
"I can find more. She only has one life."
Behind him, Laira watched the scene and said nothing. She knew him too well to be bothered by it.
They set up shelter between two pillars, far enough from the gate that Ethan’s eye wouldn’t activate on its own.
Nine people, an alliance no one could have imagined, gathered around the small fire Laira lit with a single breath. Two days ago they had been sent to kill Ethan. Now they sat with him, sharing the last of the dry rations.
"That gate is the only way out," Ethan said. "But to reach it, we have to cross this hall. I can see the energy lines running beneath the floor. Step in the wrong place and you trigger them."
"Only you can see them?" Corin asked.
"Only me."
Corin let out a breath, then laughed, weary but relieved. "Then thank god we didn’t shoot you."
A few others laughed too. The layer of ice in the air, the one that had been frozen for two days, thawed a little.
Damien didn’t laugh, but he looked at Ethan pensively. "When we get out of here, I’ll take you before the Council. The nine people here will testify. Ryan opened fire on Mira in front of everyone. His story won’t hold up."
"You’re underestimating the Greaves clan," Ethan said quietly. "And underestimating the fact that the one who speaks first is always believed first."
Damien was silent, because he knew Ethan was right.
That night, when everyone was asleep, Ethan sat watch alone.
Until Laira quietly sat down beside him.
"You should sleep," he said.
"So should you."
The two of them were silent, watching the fire. On the other side of the fire, Mira slept, her breathing weak but steady. Damien lay near his niece, a hand still resting on the grip of his weapon even in sleep.
"You’re worried about the girl," Laira said.
"She took a bullet because of me."
"I know." Laira looked at Mira for a moment. "She betrayed her teammates to stand on your side. She deserves to be saved."
Ethan glanced at her, a little surprised.
Laira shrugged, a very human gesture she had learned from him. "I’m a dragon, not a petty one."
She rested her head on his shoulder. Her torn wing stirred faintly, draping lightly over both their backs.
"Four days ago, when I stepped out of that box, I thought I’d fallen into the hands of yet another master," she said. "One who would see me as a weapon."
She didn’t go on. She didn’t need to.
Ethan brought up his right hand, the scar-covered hand, and gently stroked her red hair. She closed her eyes and leaned into it.
In this cold underground, beneath the gate of something whose name was unknown, he said nothing. But for the first time in twenty years, he found he didn’t want to be anywhere else.
On the other side of the fire, Mira cracked her eyes open.
She saw Ethan and Laira leaning against each other. A vague warmth rose in her chest, mixed with something she didn’t dare name.
That man had given a whole fortune of crystals to save her.
She closed her eyes, forcing herself to stop there.
But the corner of her mouth still curved up faintly in her sleep, for the first time in years.
In a place tens of thousands of miles away, the colossal gate still stood silent in the darkness.
But the eye carved at its very center faintly gleamed with a very dim light.
And at the utmost far heights of the universe, the Void Eye suddenly turned its attention down toward the underground.
Because it had just felt something it thought had been buried long ago.
Another shard of the ancient enemy, just awakened.