Chapter 41: Lucian vs Zoria

"But how?"

Lucian tilted his head back, taking in just how far the black stone stretched upward, vanishing somewhere into the fog above. Around him, nothing but mist and the massive chain coiled around the stone’s entire length.

He settled his sword back against his hip and reached for the chain instead, testing his grip against the links before committing his weight to it.

He climbed slowly, working his way up one handhold and foothold at a time, wedging himself into the gaps the chain offered, glancing down every so often. No sign of the Omen closing in behind him yet, not so far.

By the time he’d made it roughly halfway up the stone’s length, a sound reached him, faint at first: a heartbeat.

The closer he listened, the wronger it sounded. Nothing about its rhythm matched anything human.

The strangeness of it didn’t slow him down, if anything, it pushed him faster, urgency tightening in his chest at the thought that the white-haired woman above him might be in real danger the longer this dragged on.

♪ Hey. Why’s it taking you so long to cut that chain? ♪

"Can’t you just wait a second? I’m about to save you."

Something in the way the Lady Ghost answered told him she genuinely had no idea what he was talking about.

Lucian had already decided the only real way to help the woman trapped above him was to free her from whatever bound her up there, rather than trying to sever the massive chain running the length of the stone itself, something he wasn’t even sure his own strength could manage.

♪ Wait, did you just say you’re trying to save me? ♪

Something about that response struck Lucian as genuinely strange. She was the one who’d guided him through that black gate in the first place, wasn’t the whole point of coming here to free her from whatever held her captive?

He glanced back up. The woman was still there, still bound, still trapped, even if he couldn’t make out her actual condition from this angle.

But something didn’t add up. How was this ghost woman speaking to him across such distance, and yet felt nothing at all now that he’d nearly reached her?

"Ghost lady, you’re the one trapped up there on this stone, right?"

He asked it carefully, uncertainty creeping into his voice, some instinct telling him the woman he was climbing toward might not actually be who he thought she was.

♪ We’re not even in the same room! There’s no other human in here except you! ♪

Lucian’s hands stilled on the chain.

He called back up at her, insisting he wasn’t lying, that he could clearly sense another woman directly above his head.

The Lady Ghost held firm, though, certain that Lucian was the only one who’d made it into this black chamber at all. Whatever she understood about this domain, she seemed to understand it well enough to know exactly who’d managed to slip through into which room.

Lucian drew his own conclusion regardless.

"Rather than argue about this, I’ll just save her and prove it to you myself."

That silenced her, at least for a moment, the possibility that someone else might genuinely be trapped in there settling in.

Then, just as Lucian closed the last stretch of distance toward the woman above him, the massive chain running along the stone’s surface shifted violently beneath him.

Every hand and foothold he’d relied on gave way at once, and gravity took him.

There was nothing else to grab. Nothing to slow the fall. The ground rushed up fast, and with only seconds left before impact, pure instinct took over, his sword already free of its sheath, searching desperately for any gap in the chain he could wedge it into.

He found one. He drove the blade into it with everything he had, metal shrieking against metal in a shower of sparks.

"Got it!!"

The blade held. He hung there, suspended only a few meters above solid ground, close enough that a failed grab would have meant real, lasting damage.

While he hung there, catching his breath, something warm and red dripped down from his blade onto his forehead.

"What is this fluid?"

He wiped at it with his free hand, and what he found there startled him, thick, dark, unmistakably blood, viscous enough to cling to his fingers.

He traced it back to its source. The chain. The same one his sword had just torn into.

Somehow, this iron was bleeding.

Looking closer, he could see the wound his blade had left behind, a gash cut clean into the metal itself. Iron didn’t bleed. Whatever this chain actually was, it wasn’t ordinary metal at all.

He dropped the last few meters to solid ground and reached out to touch the chain again from below. His expression shifted the instant his fingers made contact.

That same wrong, irregular heartbeat he’d caught earlier, near the woman above, sounded far clearer down here.

It wasn’t coming from her at all. It’s coming from the chain itself?

Lucian murmured the thought aloud, the wrongness of this entire place settling deeper into him with every passing second.

Then the chain lurched, shifting toward something else entirely.

Something prickled at the back of Lucian’s neck. Through the fog, a rush of displaced air reached him, closing fast.

He spun to meet it.

CLING!

His sword came up just in time, Sonata’s light and Kirana’s glow flaring together to catch the Omen’s sudden strike before it landed.

The force behind it still nearly buckled his knees.

This thing found me way too fast!

The Omen had tracked him down with terrifying precision. Lucian held his ground, backing slowly into the fog, eyes locked on the massive shape looming in front of him.

Then he broke, turning to sprint deeper into the mist. The Omen surged after him.

Strangely, its movements seemed to drag now, slower than before, nothing like the speed it had shown earlier.

Lucian’s attention snapped to the chain trailing from its body, tracing it back to where it anchored into the black stone itself.

♪ What are you waiting for? Cut the chain near the base of that stone, now. ♪

If the Lady Ghost was right, the chain anchored to the stone carried some direct link to the Omen’s own strength. Lucian remembered the wound his blade had already left in it, the strange blood still weeping from the gash, as though that section of chain carried something alive, something wounded, something that might actually be the true source of whatever controlled the Omen at all.

He broke into a full sprint, searching for any opening that would let him close the distance to that stone.

If it came to it, he was ready to catch the woman above if she fell.

He faked a break to the left, drawing the Omen’s attention that direction, and the massive creature took the bait, lunging left to cut him off.

Lucian cut right instead, seizing the opening, raising his blade high and bringing it down across the chain with everything he had.

THUD!

The chain anchored to the stone gave way far easier than the length closer to the Omen itself had. He hadn’t severed it completely, not yet, but the strike landed hard enough to visibly wound whatever this thing actually was.

The Omen staggered, head dropping, its massive frame going still for one long, suspended moment. Sonata and Kirana blazed brighter in Lucian’s grip, answering the hit.

A furious sound tore out of the creature, and the voice carrying it had changed entirely, no longer the deep, feminine growl from before, but something male now, something unnervingly familiar.

"You little pest. How could you possibly know my weakness?"

Wait. That voice.

"You’re Zoria!! Damn it, you’re actually still alive."

Lucian’s whole body went rigid. The same vicious man Lumina had spent this entire memory hunting had been hiding here the entire time, folded inside the Omen itself.

No wonder Lumina had never managed to track him down, Zoria wasn’t flesh anymore. He was a soul, nothing more.

"Well, I’ll admit, I didn’t expect a little pest like you to know anything about me at all. I was actually planning to just let this creature tear you apart. But a moment ago, I felt something familiar coming off you, something close enough that I thought my ancestor had finally come to pull me out of here."

Something familiar? Lucian’s thoughts raced. Something close to Crimson blood, from inside my own body, that has to be that strange pill from Lumina!

"But I can’t feel it anymore, not from you. Strange."

The Omen, still hunched forward, began straightening again, its attention fixed on Lucian from across the distance between them.

"Little pest. Do you want power?"

Zoria’s voice, still bleeding out through the Omen’s frame, shifted into something almost persuasive.

"Don’t think I don’t know what you’re actually after. You want my body."