Chapter 571: The Fifth Altar
Chapter 571: The Fifth Altar
On the third day, it reached full glow before noon.
He was mid-hunt when it happened. He felt it rather than saw it, a resonance in the ambient essence of the area that registered in the background of his awareness and drew his attention backward toward the altar.
He finished what he was doing.
Then walked back.
The altar was fully lit... warm, steady, the same patient quality as the other three.
He looked at it for a moment.
Then he allowed himself to actually feel what three days of sustained work had cost—the rib that still slightly ached from the Grade Three’s hit, the accumulated tiredness in his hands from extraction after extraction, the deep background fatigue of a body that had been running hard since before the three strongholds and had not been given the full recovery it was eventually going to insist on.
He gave himself ten minutes.
Sat beside the glowing altar.
Let Luton settle on his head.
Ate what he had left.
Then he looked at the record.
The fifth altar.
The coordinates resolved against his internal map and he stilled.
Not dramatically. Not with the visible jolt of unexpected recognition. Just a cessation of motion, a fraction of a second where his body and his mind arrived at the same place before either of them continued.
He knew where the fifth altar was.
Not because he had been there recently. Not because of anything that had happened since he entered the Forest of Twin Disasters this time.
Because he had been there before.
Years before.
He sat with that for a moment.
The fifth altar’s location corresponded to a section of the forest that was very close. Uncomfortably and precisely close to the point where he had first arrived. The point where the forest had received him not as an explorer or a fighter or a summoner hunting strength, but as a boy who had been removed from his family’s home with nothing and told, in words that were clearly meant to be final, to die somewhere out of sight.
He had not died. He had survived and had grown strong in the surviving.
He had left the forest eventually and built what he had built since—the summons, the skills, the understanding of what he was capable of and what he was working toward.
But the entry point was still there.
And the altar was near it.
He exhaled slowly and summoned Skylar. Damien mounted without ceremony and a second later, they flew.
The forest changed beneath him as they moved—not in ways he could have articulated precisely, but in ways he felt. A gradual familiarity building in the landscape below, the shapes of the terrain acquiring a quality he recognised without being able to say exactly when he had last seen them. The particular angle of the ridgeline to the east. The way the canopy broke over a section of elevated ground a kilometer ahead.
He had seen these from below once.
From the ground, with nothing, at the beginning.
Skylar descended through a gap in the canopy and landed in a section of forest that was quieter than the fourth altar’s region had been. Older, somehow, though age was difficult to read in a place that was ancient throughout. Something about the specific arrangement of the oldest trees—the ones whose trunks had circumferences that took ten men to span—gave this section a quality of weight that went beyond simple density.
He dismounted.
Stood still.
The forest was the same forest it had always been—indifferent, ancient, occupied by its own rhythms, paying him no more attention than it paid anything else.
But he was not the same person who had stood in this section of it the first time.
He remembered the cold. The specific cold of having arrived with nothing during a season that had not been kind about it. The specific feeling of the ground beneath him when he had stopped walking because he had nowhere specific to walk toward and standing still felt like the only honest option available.
He remembered looking at the trees and understanding that they were going to outlast him unless he made a decision about whether he was going to outlast them first.
He had made the decision.
He was still making it.
The memory did not produce grief in him—it had stopped doing that some time ago, the raw edge of it worn smooth through repetition and through the distance that success created between a person and the worst moments that had shaped them.
What it produced was simpler.
A promise.
Not newly made—the promise was old, as old as this section of forest in his personal history. Made in the cold, to no one, on a day when he had still been deciding whether to bother. Made to himself and kept privately and never forgotten regardless of what had happened since.
His father.
The man who had decided that an E-rank Summoner was not worth the space he occupied in the family. Who had removed him from everything—not quietly, not with the private shame of a parent who knew they were doing something wrong, but completely. As if Damien had been a resource that had failed to perform and was being discarded accordingly.
His father, who did not yet know what he had discarded.
Who would.
That was the promise. Not elaborate. Not conditional. Just: you will pay for what you did to me, and I will be the one who collects.
Damien stood in the forest where it had started and let the promise settle back into its usual place—not in the front of his mind, not consuming, just present. The foundation beneath everything else he was doing.
He had come back to this forest stronger than he had left it.
He would leave it stronger still.
And eventually, when enough strength had been accumulated—when the summons were what he intended them to be and the skills were what he was building them toward and whatever was sealed at the center of this forest was no longer sealed—he would turn toward the direction his father was in.
And the promise would be kept.
He moved.
Found the altar in forty minutes—it was close to the entry point, as the record had indicated, positioned in the root system of one of the oldest trees in the section. He looked at it for a moment before crouching.
Pressed his palm.
The blood spread.
The shimmer began immediately—not the full glow yet, but more than the fourth altar had shown after a full day. This section of forest had seen its share of mana beast activity over time, the ground around the oldest trees carrying years of accumulated blood from territorial disputes and hunts that had nothing to do with him.
The altar was not empty here.
He would still need to add to it. Still needed to fill the radius with enough fresh evidence to tip the altar from partial to complete. But the foundation was already deeper than the fourth location had offered.
He spent the rest of the third day working.
Not with the grinding patience of the previous two days—with the specific purpose of someone who could feel the finish line and was covering the remaining distance deliberately.
The mana beasts in this section were different from the fourth altar’s residents. Older stock. The Grade Threes here were bigger than the one that had cracked his rib, heavier, moving with the kind of confidence that came from being the apex of a section of forest for long enough to stop being uncertain about it.
He killed them anyway.
The technique was refined now—three days of repetition had made the palm entry faster, the essence cut cleaner, the core extraction quicker. He wasted less motion than he had at the third altar’s clearing. The process had become the kind of smooth that only came from doing something until the doing stopped requiring thought.
By late afternoon the altar was approaching full.
By the time the forest’s darkness had deepened to its nighttime quality, he was crouched beside it watching the last of the glow expand from partial to complete.
He held his breath without meaning to.
Then it was done.
Warm. Steady. Patient.
Five.
He sat in front of it for a while.
Not celebrating. Not calculating. Just sitting in the section of forest where everything had started, with five of seven altars glowing somewhere behind him in the trees, and the Thing of Ruin sealed at the center of this forest waiting for the last two.
He looked up through the canopy at the sky above.
Thought about his father.
Thought about hat was coming.
Thought about the distance between where he was and where he was going.
Then he closed his eyes.
Rested.
Tomorrow, the last two.