Chapter 355: The Ruins of Aegis

The journey to Aegis took most of the morning, and for the first hour, there was nothing unusual about it.

Kai sat near the front of the transport with Sera and Lily behind him, while Gabriel sat across from them, scrolling through documents on a tablet.

Through the windows, Nexus City slowly shrank behind them until the skyline was only a gray outline on the horizon.

The land beyond the city looked like any other part of the continent.

Modern roads connected towns and settlements, Hunter facilities appeared every few dozen miles, and farms and energy stations filled the space in between.

That changed after they passed the last major settlement. The roads grew older and emptier, trees crept closer to the edges, and eventually the smooth pavement gave way to a stone road that looked far older than anything in Nexus.

Lily leaned toward the window. "Is this still an active route?"

"Technically," Gabriel said.

"Technically?"

"Most people don’t come this way anymore."

"Why not?"

Gabriel looked toward the wilderness ahead. "There’s no reason to."

Sera leaned forward. "Except for Aegis."

"Exactly."

Ancient stone began appearing between the trees as they went on. At first it was small, a broken pillar here and an old stone platform there, but soon they were passing the remains of bridges and entire stretches of ancient road that disappeared beneath the forest floor.

Lily pressed closer to the glass. "Those aren’t from Nexus."

Gabriel smiled. "No."

"How old are they?"

"Unknown."

Lily frowned. "You keep saying that."

"Because that’s usually the answer."

Lily turned to Kai. "How did people build this many structures without anyone knowing who made them?"

Kai kept his eyes on the ruins outside. "Maybe people knew once."

Lily went quiet at that, and Gabriel glanced at him. "That’s possible."

Another hour passed. The trees grew taller, the ground grew rougher, and mountains rose in the distance, but Kai had started noticing something else. In a wilderness this large, there should have been monsters everywhere, and he hadn’t seen a single one.

Sera noticed at almost the same time. "Where are the monsters?"

"Almost none live out here," Gabriel said.

Lily looked at her. "Is that normal around Aegis?"

"No," Gabriel answered immediately. "It’s one of the reasons researchers don’t like this region."

Kai studied the silent forest. "Something is keeping them away."

"We think so."

"Do you know what?"

"No."

Twenty minutes later, Lily spoke up again. "There’s nothing modern left."

Kai looked outside, and she was right. There wasn’t a broken road sign or a single communication tower, only trees, mountains, and ancient stone as far as he could see.

Gabriel put away her tablet. "We’re entering the old Aegis region."

Sera sat up straight, and Lily’s eyes started moving across the landscape as if she was afraid of missing something. "Aegis," she said quietly.

Ever since they had arrived in Nexus, they had heard the name. The Church had records of it, Gabriel had spoken about it, and Bahamut had sent Kai here because of it, but none of them had actually seen it until now.

Kai was looking toward the mountains when one of them caught his attention. It was dark gray, with forest covering its lower slopes, and at first he took it for just another peak. Then he realized its shape was too straight to be natural.

He leaned forward. "Stop."

The driver slowed immediately, and Sera looked at him. "What?"

Kai pointed toward the horizon, and everyone followed his finger. The structure stretched from one side of the horizon to the other, and while it looked like a mountain range, it had no slopes at all. Its surface rose perfectly vertical.

"That’s a wall?" Kai asked.

"Yes," Gabriel said.

Sera stared at it. "How big is this place?"

"We don’t know."

The transport started forward again, and the closer they got, the more impossible the wall became.

They passed the first mountain and realized the wall was taller than it, and then they passed another, and the wall kept going.

Forest had grown thick around its base, trees had pushed their roots through the cracks, and whole hills had formed against the stone.

In some places, the wall disappeared into the mountains themselves, while in others, it rose so high that clouds hid the top.

Kai tilted his head back, but he couldn’t see where it ended.

Sera let out a quiet breath. "That’s ridiculous."

Lily was already studying the stonework. "There isn’t a modern construction method that could build something like that."

"Not one that we know of," Gabriel said.

Massive symbols had been carved into the surface, most of them worn away, though a few were still clear, and some of them were larger than buildings. Then the gates came into view.

Two enormous stone doors stood ahead of them, so massive that the transport looked like a toy beside them, and both of them stood wide open. They looked as if they had been left that way for thousands of years.

Sera stared. "They’re just... open."

"Why?" Kai asked.

Gabriel shook her head, and Lily pointed toward the hinges. "They’re still intact."

Kai looked at her. "After thousands of years?"

"That’s the problem," Lily said. "Stone shouldn’t be in this condition."

"That’s one of the reasons the Church believes Aegis was built with technology we’ve lost," Gabriel said.

The transport passed beneath the gates, and for a moment, the sunlight vanished completely. When they came out the other side, the ruins of Aegis stretched out in front of them, and nobody said a word.

No single building dominated the landscape, because the entire city did. A road wider than any modern highway ran ahead for miles before vanishing between enormous structures.

Towers rose from the earth, some broken and some still standing. While others were half buried beneath mountains that had grown over them, and the tallest of them disappeared into the clouds.

Bridges connected buildings hundreds of meters above the ground. Some were broken in the middle, and others stretched into empty space and simply ended.

Giant humanoid statues stood throughout the city with their faces destroyed, and even the smallest of them was several times larger than a modern building.

One was so tall that its head vanished into the clouds.

The transport rolled to a stop, and Lily stepped out slowly, her mouth slightly open. "This..."

She couldn’t finish, and Sera climbed out beside her and looked around. "Okay. Now I understand why nobody can explain this place."

Kai followed them out, and the moment his feet touched the ancient road, he felt something he couldn’t explain. It was deeper than mana and quieter than danger, like something beneath the ground had noticed him.

He looked down. The stone under his feet was covered in ancient symbols, some broken and some worn smooth, but the road itself was still whole.

Buildings surrounded them in every direction. Some had collapsed into the earth, while others looked like their owners had walked out one morning and never come back. That was what disturbed Kai the most. Aegis didn’t look destroyed. It looked interrupted.

In the distance stood a massive circular structure, its outer ring hundreds of meters wide, with enormous pillars arranged in a perfect circle inside it. None of it looked damaged.

Lily started walking toward it. "That’s not a building."

"No," Gabriel said.

"What is it?"

"We’ve studied it for decades, and we still don’t know."

Lily looked genuinely offended. "That’s unacceptable."

Sera laughed. "You’re going to fit in here."

Kai’s attention had moved to the weapons. They were everywhere, massive structures aimed at the sky, some shaped like ancient cannons and others too strange to name. One of the largest was slowly turning.

"It’s moving," Kai said.

Sera looked at Gabriel. "And that’s normal?"

"No."

The weapon stopped, and everyone waited. Then it slowly rotated in another direction.

"It’s still functioning," Lily said.

"Some of the systems are," Gabriel said.

A faint blue light ran along the surface of the road, disappearing a few hundred meters ahead before another section lit up further on, and then another, as if energy was slowly moving through the city’s veins.

Kai narrowed his eyes. "This place isn’t dead."

"No," Gabriel said, smiling faintly. "That’s what makes Aegis so dangerous."

Lily had stopped in front of one of the towers, tilting her head back further and further as she tried to find the top. "How old is this?" she asked, her voice barely above a whisper.

Gabriel looked out across the ruins. "Older than any surviving record."

Lily slowly turned toward her. "That’s impossible."

Gabriel smiled sadly. "That’s what everyone says the first time they see it."

When Lily looked back at the ruins, the excitement had drained from her face. "There should be records."

"There were. They were lost."

"How?"

"We don’t know."

Lily frowned. "How does an entire civilization disappear without leaving enough behind to identify it?"

Gabriel looked toward one of the faceless statues. "Sometimes civilizations disappear, and their records disappear with them."

"Or someone removes them," Kai said.

Gabriel’s expression turned serious. "That’s another possibility."

Nobody spoke for a moment, and Kai remembered Bahamut’s words.

Within it are the ruins of Aegis.

If you wish to understand what comes next, begin there.

He had imagined a forgotten city, or a buried temple with a few ancient structures around it. He hadn’t imagined an entire civilization frozen in place, one that had somehow lasted thousands of years without ever truly dying.

"What happened here?" he asked.

Gabriel shook her head.

Lily pointed at a distant structure. "What about that?"

"Unknown."

"And that?"

"Unknown."

"That one?"

"Also unknown."

Lily stared at her. "Do you know anything?"

Gabriel laughed. "More than most people."

"That’s not saying much."

Sera burst out laughing, and even Kai smiled. For a moment, the weight of the place lifted.

Then Kai realized the wind had stopped.

Dust still hung in the air around them, but it wasn’t drifting the way it should. Near his feet, it slowly slid across the stone in the opposite direction of where the wind had been blowing.

Sera noticed his expression. "Kai?"

He didn’t answer. The air around him bent, only slightly, just enough to notice if someone was looking for it. Distortion was reacting to something.

Beneath his feet, a broken symbol grew clearer as the dust pulled away from it and the cracks in the stone shifted.

Lily stepped closer. "Wait. What is that?"

Gabriel’s face changed, and she moved forward immediately. "Don’t touch it."

Kai hadn’t moved. He was staring at the symbol, which looked nothing like the others around it. Half of it had been destroyed, but something about the part that remained felt familiar.

The air around him bent again, and the symbol flickered before a faint blue glow spread across the stone.

Lily froze. "That wasn’t active."

"No," Gabriel said quietly.

The symbol brightened, and then another lit up several hundred meters away, followed by another, and another. Sera turned in a slow circle. "Kai..."

One after another, markings that had been silent for thousands of years began to glow along the road, up the walls, across the towers, and around the enormous circular structure in the distance.

Lily backed away. "What’s happening?"

Gabriel stared at the ruins. "I don’t know."

The ground trembled, not violently, but enough to shake loose the dust from the structures around them. Somewhere deep beneath the city, something massive began to turn, and the sound rolled through the ground under their feet.

GRRRRRRRRR...

The giant weapon in the distance began rotating again, and another followed it, then another. The towers started glowing, faint energy flickered across the bridges, and the road beneath Kai lit up in both directions.

For thousands of years, Aegis had been silent, and now it was waking up.