Chapter 703: It’s Time
Chapter 703: It’s Time
"Three weeks ago."
The hiss that broke the silence of the vast chamber was small, almost nothing.
The top of the dark capsule shifted, the surface dissolving in sections like a tide of ants retreating from a shoreline, the nanobots peeling back in a smooth, practiced motion to reveal what lay beneath.
Pale white skin. Black hair that moved like liquid even in stillness. The nanobots finished their retreat, and before the last of them had fully slipped away, his eyes snapped open.
Dark, and pupilless.
What followed was not gradual. In an instant, a lightless darkness gushed outward from him like water through a broken dam, as even the srounding lost their color. The capsule beneath him creaked under the crushing weight of darkness, the metal groaning at its seams, and the ruinous touch of the darkness only added to its collapse.
The chamber’s dim lighting turned red.
The siren that followed screamed panic in the only language sirens knew, cutting through the quiet of the space with the particular urgency of a system designed to respond to exactly this.
Beneath it, the muffled grinding of the floor accompanied the rise of iron walls from the ground, thick, heavy, moving to contain the darkness that was already spreading to cloak the chamber.
The two other capsules in the chamber opened in the same moment. Two figures came out fast, no hesitation, no gradual orientation, eyes immediately scanning the space around them with the sharpened alertness of people whose bodies reacted to the situation before their minds had fully caught up.
"Alex suddenly woke up." The voice was female, soft but strained at its edges, someone trying to hold panic to a manageable level and not entirely succeeding. "After nearly three months of semi-unconsciousness, he just returned, and he immediately began his ascension to Third Rank."
"Third Rank." Venedikt’s voice came out as a hiss, the disbelief in it sharp enough to cut. The word landed in the chamber and sat there, and for a moment no one added anything to it.
"He advanced only four months ago," She continued, the words coming faster now, following the momentum of alarm. "And for the last two and a half months he hasn’t trained at all, since he has been stuck in the Ancestral Realm because of his condition, with stress levels so high I have been worried for his physical safety every single day."
"This is not normal." She said it plainly, more of an acknowledgement out loud than anything else. "The mana levels are dangerously high. Nearly four times what a standard Third Rank ascension would produce, and they are rising by the moment."
"Zoe, Everything is fine." Venedikt’s voice was even, deliberately so. The words did very little. He could hear it in his own voice as he said them, the reassurance landing flat, not because it was wrong but because certainty wasn’t something he had enough of right now to give away convincingly.
"If something were wrong, Zero would have intervened," he followed, his eyes moving to his brother.
Andrei stood with his eyes fixed on the isolation walls, the nanobots shifting at their seams, the structure of them shuddering under the building pressure from within, and his face carried a fear he wasn’t trying to hide.
"Venedikt, Andrei." Zoe’s voice sharpened. "You two need to leave this chamber. Those isolation walls will not be able to contain the energy much longer."
The chamber responded to her as she spoke, the two remaining capsules sinking smoothly into the floor, the floor itself reconfiguring alongside the walls and ceiling, all of it realigning beneath nanobots, sealed beneath solid black metallic structure.
The only thing that remained unchanged was the door, one exit, to the outside world, still available, still open, for now.
Andrei didn’t move immediately. His eyes stayed on the isolation area, on the walls that were visibly straining now, the seams of them breathing with the effort of holding back something very close to no longer being holdable.
"Brother." His voice came out quieter than he’d intended. "Do you believe Alex has recovered?" He swallowed, the next part refusing to come easily. "Or is he still... affected?"
Venedikt looked at the same walls his brother was looking at. The darkness pressed against them from within, painting a grim image in his mind, but he pushed it away and answered.
"We will find out soon enough," he said in a grim tone, and then, quietly, he smiled.
"The madness didn’t make him forget what he wished to protect in the Ancestral Realm." He held the thought steady, pride and confidence filling his eyes. "That much won’t change now."
"Yeah," Andrei murmured. His eyes didn’t move from the walls.
"You two need to leave." Zoe’s voice had lost the last of its managed calm. "The isolation area is on the brink of..."
A sound interrupted her, a low creak, a tearing, the particular sound of something under too much pressure finally finding the path of least resistance, as a wound ripped open in the metallic surface of the containment box.
Darkness gushed through it.
Venedikt exhaled, one long, controlled breath, and turned toward the exit. His steps were unhurried, and Andrei fell in behind him, the way he always did, and the moment both of them crossed the threshold, the door sealed shut behind them with a sound that left no ambiguity about what it meant.
The wait stretched for hours.
Neither brother moved far from the door. Zoe’s voice found them every other minute with an update on the mana levels, each one delivered in the careful tone of someone managing their own alarm while trying not to add to anyone else’s.
The numbers had settled, eventually, at approximately eleven times the normal level for a Third Rank ascension. Abnormal by any reasonable measure, and yet much more normal compared to the unplanned advancement.
The wait continued for nearly six hours, and finally Zoe’s voice rang through the place.
"IT’S OVER, IT’S OVER." Zoe’s voice came out at a pitch entirely unlike her usual register, the small voice stretched to its limit, and before she had even finished the first repetition, Venedikt was already at the door.
"Open it," he said. The chill in his voice was not coldness; it was the sound of someone whose composure had been under sustained pressure for several hours and was now operating on the very last of it.
"Venedikt, Alex’s status hasn’t been confirmed yet, let me run a..." The sound of a fist meeting immovable iron cut her off. The impact was not loud so much as final.
"Open it. Now."
A breath of silence, and then the black iron blocking the entrance shifted away, folding back into itself, and the chamber opened.
Venedikt went in fast, his eyes moving immediately, finding what they were looking for. A lone figure standing in the distance, surrounded by darkness that hadn’t entirely settled, tendrils of it shifting around him with a slow, idle life of their own.
Alex turned.
The eyes that found them were dark and pupilless, and they looked across the chamber without recognition, without warmth, without any of the particular quality that made them the eyes of someone human.
Andrei stepped forward.
"Brother." His voice came quicker than usual, carrying something under it that he was covering with ease and urgency both. "It’s me. Andrei. Remember?" He was already walking closer, slow and deliberate, closing the distance one careful step at a time.
"You kicked sense into my thick skull when I lost control, so... do I have to do the same for you?" A short laugh, genuine despite everything. "I’m kidding, obviously. You would mop the floor with me, but hey, I could probably get in one good punch at least."
The darkness in Alex’s eyes receded.
Slowly at first and then all at once, and in the space it left behind, something familiar returned, and with it a smile that started small and settled into something real.
He crossed the distance in a single stride and pulled Andrei into a bear hug that left very little room for argument about how it had landed.
"So you are fine," Andrei said. "Really fine, I mean."
He had been saying some version of the same sentence for the better part of half an hour, with the particular persistence of someone whose mind had filed the information and kept returning to check on it anyway.
Alex took a sip of his coffee, looked at him over the rim, and nodded with the patient amusement of a man who understood exactly what was happening and had no intention of rushing it.
"As I said before, while I am not entirely free from that mad bastard’s reach, I have sealed him away and cleansed my mind of the corruption he poisoned me with." He set the cup down. "Even if he acts up again, it won’t be the same as before."
"Good." Venedikt’s nod carried the weight of a man setting something down that he had been holding for a very long time. The smile that came with it was small and real and entirely relieved.
"I just want you to remember one thing." He met Alex’s eyes directly, the way he did when something mattered enough to say without softening. "It was Odysseus who made you into the Dark King, so you are not responsible for what happened in that state."
Alex was quiet for a moment.
"I am responsible," he said, and the heaviness in his voice was not self-pity, just the plain, settled weight of someone who had already thought this through completely and arrived at a conclusion they intended to keep. "If I had held no hatred for them, they wouldn’t have suffered at my hands. That part belongs to me."
"But I also know that if I had lost to him, the misery and death he would have unleashed would have been beyond calculation." He picked up his coffee again. "So. I regret nothing."
A hand landed on his shoulder from the right. "That’s the spirit," Andrei said.
"We should get cleaned up and go home," Venedikt said, the relief in his voice settling into something more practical, more like himself. "Aunt has been communicating with your AI avatar and has nearly talked the poor thing into an existential crisis."
Alex opened his mouth to answer, and stopped.
His eyes had found the floating window open before him, the one carrying a message that had arrived with the quiet certainty of something that had been waiting for exactly this moment to deliver itself.
His expression shifted. The ease of the last few minutes left his face without announcement, replaced by something older and more serious, the look of a man reading something that had weight to it.
Andrei and Venedikt both caught it, the smiles dropping from their faces before either of them had consciously decided to let them go.
"Zero has asked to meet me. He said it’s time I learned the truth of the two worlds." Alex said, and no explanation was needed to know the weight of that statement.