Chapter 1086 - Taming the Wall - True Ruins - Tricked
Chapter 1086: Chapter 1086 - Taming the Wall - True Ruins - Tricked
The anomaly didn’t stop at the architecture...
The power scaling was fundamentally wrong.
Based on everything Sirius knew about the new corruption, mutant ranks possessed a hard ceiling at Silver. But that rule was currently being shattered. As he descended, the designated "guardians" defending each threshold were noticeably stronger than the surrounding fodder. Not by a dramatic, impossible margin, but the increase was consistent.
That consistency was terrifying. It meant an evolutionary gradient existed here. A forced progression that absolutely defied the established laws of corruption.
♢♢♢♢
By the time he reached a chamber guarded by a fully realized Gold-rank mutant, and he hadn’t even breached the tenth level yet, Sirius had slaughtered thousands, and a deep, gnawing dread had set into his bones.
He couldn’t have known it then. He had no way of knowing that the thousands of corpses he was leaving behind would become the foundational biomass for the next generation anyway. He was witnessing the embryonic stage of a nightmare that would churn for years, each generation devouring the last, climbing the evolutionary ladder on a mountain of their own dead, until these very chambers mutated into the hellscape Ren’s group would eventually face.
Sirius hit the tenth level running on fumes. He was utterly physically depleted by the sheer numbers.
The fiercest enemies he had faced during the grueling descent had barely scraped High-Gold at their absolute peak. But he knew the final chamber would be entirely different.
He knew very well that the true entrance to ruins of this nature would be protected by a Platinum-rank guardian.
Sirius drew a ragged breath, preparing to trigger his beast fusion and burn his absolute final reserves if the situation required it.
But when he stepped into the cavernous final chamber, he felt... nothing.
The air was dead.
The stealth capabilities of the beast, the terrifying Whisper of the Wind that would eventually fall to Selthia, the original guardian whose soul had been warped and repurposed, were entirely outside the realm of human knowledge. No historical archive mentioned a beast capable of erasing its presence so flawlessly, simply because no one had ever survived an encounter to document it.
Sirius walked cautiously toward the massive, seemingly empty door.
And then, he saw her.
Sirius remembered.
The memory didn’t come back in fractured, hazy pieces; it crashed into his mind whole and agonizingly flawless.
He remembered the looming door.
He remembered the chamber he had sworn was empty.
And he remembered Lykea appearing just beyond the safe zone...
She was radiant. She possessed the exact clarity, the exact warmth, the exact gentle inflection of her voice that his own desperate, grieving heart would have conjured if asked to paint a perfect memory of his wife.
She had opened her arms, calling him in for an embrace.
And he, exhausted, bleeding, and utterly starved for her, had stepped forward.
"Lykea..." Sirius whispered.
The name slipped from his lips in the dim lit chamber. He spoke it before his newly reformed brain could fully process the horrifying context of that memory, before he could reconcile the beautiful vision with the grim reality he had just woken up in.
Ren didn’t say a word. He just slowly shook his head.
Liora mirrored the gesture. Her face twisted into heavy sorrow of someone forced to confirm a devastating truth the victim is only just beginning to piece together.
"You were tricked," Mayo said. Her voice was sharp, fast, speaking with the practicality of someone who believed ripping the bandage off quickly would make the underlying wound hurt less. "The guardian showed you exactly what you wanted to see... It was a trap."
♢♢♢♢
Sirius processed the revelation in agonizing real-time.
The missing piece of the puzzle slammed into place with the terrifying clarity of a man realizing he had walked willingly into an executioner’s trap.
The Platinum-rank guardian did exist...
It possessed a flawless, legendary artifact-like capacity for stealth and psychological projection, and it had weaponized that capacity exactly as Sirius would have weaponized any tactical advantage if their roles had been reversed.
"The guardian beast," Sirius barked. The disorientation vanished, instantly replaced by the sharp, authoritative urgency of a military commander identifying an active threat. "Platinum-rank... Did you fight it? I can help you..."
"Sorry, father-in-law, but it was already Diamond-rank," Mayo interrupted. She flashed a quick, entirely inappropriate grin, delivering the devastating information with the rapid-fire speed of someone desperate to land her joke before the conversation moved on. "It spent years down here gorging on pure corruption. And don’t worry, we already killed it."
"We? Didn’t Re..." Hikari retorted.
"Move faster! A Diamond beast is the least of our problems right now," Ren snapped, cutting through the banter like a knife.
Sirius’s head whipped toward him.
"The artifacts crawling down those stairs are vastly more durable than any corrupted Diamond rank wannabe," Ren said. He was already pulling Liora. His eyes swept over the bruised and battered group, calculating their exit chances with the cold efficiency of someone who had been running survival algorithms in the background of his mind. "It’s time to focus. Lin’s fusion isn’t going to hold them off forever."
He paused, just for a fraction of a second, ensuring his next words carried the absolute, undeniable weight they required.
"We will give you the full debrief when we are safe. Please wait till then."
Sirius felt his newly reconstructed body react before his brain could even formulate an argument. It was the deeply ingrained muscle memory of a veteran who had spent decades learning the exact difference between a situation that allowed for questions and a situation that demanded immediate, unquestioning obedience.
This was the latter.
He pushed himself off the stone floor, his legs steadying beneath him.
A few feet away, Mayo’s face was practically twitching. She looked like a pressure cooker of withheld comments and burning questions, all aimed squarely at the man who had technically just time-traveled several years into the future without ever moving his feet.
But Ren was right... Mayo knew it.
Even though the chaotic part of her soul desperately wanted to witness Sirius’s reaction to the absurd reality of the new world, she bit her tongue.
She held it in.