Chapter 134: It’s Me

Another punch, another blast...

"We’re almost there."

Another hand torn and regrown.

"Keep it up!"

Huda shouted from ahead.

"We’re through the worst of it!"

The gravity started to lighten, pressure easing as they neared the bottom... the top... whatever this place called its destination.

Once more, Malik pushed a bit more Rukh into the flame, and Safira used it to punch harder.

Together they tore through the last of the dense air and broke out into open space.

The bottom was... another desert.

But it wasn’t like the first layer.

Flat earth in shades of gray, black, and white, bleached by something no Sun could ever manage.

The ground looked like it had been dead for many centuries, while the air smelled like ash.

And it stretched.

It stretched seemingly forever.

Cracked earth running on until the eye gave up trying to see further.

The sky above held the same sickly yellow as the first layer, but something about it was wrong, something that crawled under Malik’s skin the longer he looked at it.

A place that shouldn’t exist and existed anyway.

Huda landed first, her feet touching down with a soft thud.

Safira landed a moment later, her knees buckling slightly before she caught herself.

Malik landed last, his body heavier with exhaustion than it had any right to be, considering how little he’d actually done.

Perhaps it was the result of how fast they moved.

Safira turned to him and nodded.

"We did it."

He did the same.

"That we did."

She turned to Huda next and pulled her into a soft hug, her arms wrapping around crimson-haired shoulders.

Huda humphed, like an annoyed cat, but she didn’t pull away.

If anything, she leaned into it.

She liked it.

Yes, she’d never admit that in a hundred years, but she liked it.

Malik looked away, letting them have the moment, and scanned the horizon instead.

His golden eyes swept the dead land, and what he saw made him stop.

Hundreds of thousa... millions of spots dotted the earth.

Each one was a small pocket of chaos in an otherwise still landscape.

Rukh gathered in said spots, swirling, spinning, tearing at reality itself, stitching and snapping and undoing itself over and over in an endless loop of creation and ruin.

One second, a patch of ground folded into itself, collapsing down into nothing.

The next, it imploded in a burst of color and light, taking everything nearby with it.

A tree bloomed from bare ground in an instant, flowers opening and dying and opening again, before it imploded and left only ash behind.

None of it made sense.

None of it followed any law.

But they weren’t meant to.

"These are Anomalies..."

Safira explained, stepping up beside him.

"The fastest way to get you a Rune."

Malik nodded, his eyes still tracking the chaos.

She was right.

Through the destruction, he could make out rarer ones, faint pulses of a different kind of energy buried in the noise.

And sometimes, just sometimes, something stayed behind after the chaos passed.

Holy Relics.

Runes.

Things that didn’t answer to the rules of men.

Seekers who dove this deep were rare, and most who tried it never made it back up.

Some couldn’t handle fighting the flow of Rukh. Others got greedy, weighed themselves down with too many law-breaking prizes until their odds of surviving hit zero.

Safira and Huda had brought him to the best spot in the entire layer.

If he’d actually needed a Rune, he’d have been thrilled.

But that wasn’t why he was here.

He needed to go deeper...

Down to Hell, to Spine Splitter, before IT could make another move against him.

Which meant convincing the two of them to keep going.

’How do I do that without giving myself away?’

He opened his mouth, ready to start working on an excuse—

"Thanks for the—"

BOOM.

The ground rippled.

BOOM.

His teeth rattled in his skull.

BOOM.

The tremor came again, closer this time, and the dead earth split open in a spiderweb of cracks running out in every direction.

Then a shadow fell.

It rolled over them like a wave of dark, swallowing the sickly yellow sky, drowning everything in an endless night.

Malik looked up...

And up...

And up...

His breath caught somewhere in his throat.

A shape loomed above them, so massive it blotted out the entire horizon.

He couldn’t make out a face, couldn’t make out anything beyond the sheer, crushing size of the thing that had just found them.

Safira stepped back into a stance.

Huda cursed under her breath, wind already gathering tight around her fists.

And Malik smiled.

’Well...’

It looked like he didn’t need an excuse after all.

This thing just made one for him.

"Why the Hell is a Venerable awake?!"

Huda’s voice cracked as she screamed.

"DAMMIT!"

She grabbed Safira and Malik both, lifting them off the ground before the next tremor could throw them off their feet.

"I-It might detect Teacher’s Rukh on us!"

Safira blasted behind them while blutterting out whatever reason that came to mind, the air exploding outwards in a desperate attempt to add speed to Huda’s wind.

"That’s stupid!"

Huda shot back, her eyes fixed on the massive shape rising from the earth.

"The Elder Sandworms, I understand, but a Venerable has at least thirteen Runes! This one might even be a Second Class monster! We’re not strong enough to attract it! A mere whiff of big brother can’t be it!"

"Then there’s no reason!"

"Then that’s even more stupid!"

Malik listened to them argue and felt something click into place.

’It’s me.’

The realization was unmissable.

’I’m what attracted it.’

Weakened or not, broken or not, he was still an Angel.

His Rukh still carried that weight monsters like this could sense from miles away.

The Elder Sandworms in the first layer hadn’t noticed because they were too weak and too caught up in their own hunger.

But this thing?

This thing knew.

And thus...

CRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACK!

The Venerable had fully erupted from the ground.