Chapter 56: Old robes

Chapter 56: Chapter 56: Old robes

The refined essence sat at the center of his Core, dense and heavy, the tenth of his reserves purified the night Kane died. He’d spent only a sliver of it against the ten. The rest waited, coiled.

’Almost all of it.’

It was reckless. It left nothing behind.

It was the only idea he had.

He began to retreat again, but deliberately now, each step drawing the masked man along the line he wanted. To the left. To the left again.

One. Two. Three.

Pause.

Jason moved.

He didn’t parry the fourth thrust. He stepped into it.

The spearhead tore through the meat of his shoulder and out the other side, a white flash of pain, and he let it.

His left hand clamped around the shaft and held, the masked man’s weapon pinned inside his own flesh.

For one heartbeat, it could not be pulled free.

The Stoneborn Spear came around in a short, savage arc. Jason drove the butt into the masked man’s gut, and the figure bent, just slightly, just enough that his weight shifted forward.

There.

The first opening.

It existed for less than a breath.

Jason dropped the shaft low and thrust.

---

Lightning ran down the spear.

Fire ran with it.

They did not coil politely, the way they had against the ten. They twisted, and tore, and slammed together in the center of the shaft, and Jason poured the refined essence in after them, almost all of it, a dense gold-white flood that screamed through every channel in his arm.

"Crimson Thunder."

The masked man’s head snapped up.

For the first time, the blank white mask looked straight at him.

Jason drove the spear into his chest.

The explosion lit the whole plain, white and red, bright enough to throw the faceless statues into sharp relief.

A column of red flame and white lightning tore upward through the haze, and the shock hurled Jason backward across the stones. He rolled and lay still, ears ringing.

Where the masked man had stood, there was a blackened crater. A single red cloak lay at its edge, burning at the corners.

---

Jason lay on his back for a long time.

His shoulder was a ruin. His ribs ached in broken rhythm. His Core was empty, not thin, not drained, but hollow.

No chime came.

’Not even for a kill a full Level above me.’

He let the bloodline work it’s magic on his wounds.

The crater held no body, only a ring of red ash and a seal burned into the stone, already half melted. When his legs finally agreed to move, he dragged himself toward the nearest body of the ten and knelt.

The robe was old. Fibers crumbled under his fingers like ancient paper. He lifted the mask.

No face looked back. Beneath the white porcelain was gray, dry skin stretched tight over bone, the features sunken and waxy, long since dead.

There was no blood. Only a thin trickle of dust, spilling from the wound he’d made.

He opened the collar. A seal was burned into the sternum, a small, intricate knot of red lines, already fading as he watched.

’Not men. Corpses. Puppets.’

He checked a second body. A third. The same dry skin, the same fading seal. Their spears were plain iron, worn and pitted, the red glow along the shafts nothing but residue from the arrays that had driven them.

’Someone or something worked these bodies like marionettes, and the Sovereign’s arrays still pull the strings.’

That was why they had fought without a sound. That was why the system had given him nothing for killing that thing despite it being a full rank above himself.

He thought of the masked Peak, and his stomach turned.

’Dead men, kept at the strength they died with.’

If a corpse left at the road could break him open, what waited in the Pagoda itself?

He had known it from the moment the system called the man a Sovereign. The pill sat somewhere well beyond anything a Second Level cultivator could reach.

Even with his ability to fight above his level.

He was out of his league.

He’d known it.

But the reminder still stung.

A pill that could restore anyone from any condition. A chance to give Novaria the life she deserved once again.

And he had come here, and nearly died to its doorman.

---

A thread of Perception, all he could spare, drifted toward the Pagoda.

It snagged.

Signatures. Dozens. Red-robed shapes boiling out of the haze, no longer in neat wedges but in a ragged, hungry swarm, and every one of them was turning toward him.

’They felt the explosion.’

Jason’s heart lurched.

He forced himself upright, shoulder screaming, and ran.

Piercing Thunder was beyond him. He had barely enough essence for one clean thrust.

He ran on the bloodline instead, hauling strength from it with every step, boots slamming across the cracked flagstones, past fallen pillars and faceless statues that seemed to lean after him.

Behind him, the soft, dry sound of many feet, rushing in perfect, silent rhythm, like rain on dead leaves.

Closer. The air behind him turned colder with every stride.

He did not look back.

’Almost there, almost there.’

A spear hissed past his ear and shattered against a pillar. Another skipped across the flagstones at his heels.

’Faster. Don’t think. Just faster.’

His lungs burned. The wound in his shoulder tore open again and he ignored it.

The gate rose out of the haze, black and patient.

He hit it at a stumble, dragged the golden key from his inventory, and closed his fist around it. The cold metal pulsed once.

’I’ll come back. Stronger. Strong enough to walk through every one of you.’

He didn’t say it aloud.

He looked once toward the distant Pagoda, pale and unbothered, and mourned the pill he could not reach. Then he thought of Novaria, waiting at home, and pushed the grief down. She needed him alive more than she needed him heroic.

He turned. The red shapes were a hundred paces away, no more, a wall of masks without eyes.

The Stoneborn Spear dissolved from his hand.

He pulled out the mask, plain and smooth, and settled it over his face, because the room was booked under Ash, and Jason Veryon couldn’t walk out of it.

The Veil rose, his reading folding into something that belonged to someone else.

Then Jason stepped through the gate.