yasinovel Chapter Fifty-Nine: Gilded Shadow
Chapter Fifty-Nine: Gilded Shadow
Chapter Fifty-Nine: Gilded Shadow
The last battle was upon us.
True to his word, Lord Oboro delivered us the runestones for the Colmar and disguises for our infiltrators. Soraseo, Rubenzo, and Mersie had gone with him to infiltrate the ceremony through the front door, while Chronius had been assigned to help Mirokald attack it from another angle. Neferoa would remain in the capital for the sake of distracting the Knots and in preparation for my backup plan, while Eris distributed our prepared soundstones across the entire Shinkoku Empire. Only the Spy remained unaccounted for, though I had taken steps to identify and support them. I trusted them to pull through in our favor at the right time.
Which left Marika, Beni, Ravengarde, and I to run our airship. We double-checked the provided runestones at my request, confirmed the absence of sabotage—on that front at least—and then set sail into the mist-laden skies.
I found myself in the same situation I’d been in back when we marshaled together to fight Belgoroth: loading runestones into cannons in the artillery room and readying them for battle. Beni and Ravengarde were nowhere near as talkative as Cortaner and Colmar had been, but they worked hard enough to compensate.
“Can you see the way forward?” I asked Marika through the room’s loudspeakers. The world beyond our portholes looked like an impenetrable ocean of mist.
“Barely,” Marika replied, her voice carrying through the rooms. “Seo’s map helps, but the fog is getting thicker by the second. The essence is condensing.”
I could feel it in the air too. Anxiety, fear, doubts... The mist exacerbated and absorbed those emotions before ferrying them back to Mount Kazandu. It was almost suffocating.
Did Daltia intend to temper her wicked Artifact with the terror of men? Wouldn’t the raw desires of the demonic souls caught in her Devil Coins be enough?
Whatever the case, we could expect a welcoming committee once we approached the mountain.
“Beni,” I said with a hand on my fellow Hero’s shoulder; a wise boy whom I had come to consider like a little brother to me. “Demons will soon try to board our ship. Climb inside Ravengarde and don’t come out unless absolutely necessary. Do you understand?”
“Y-yes,” he replied with more bravery than most children his age could manage, his voice hoarse yet steady. “I’ll... do my best.”
“I know you will,” I replied with a smile. “And so does your mother.”
“I do,” Marika said, her voice wavering with anxiety through the loudspeaker. “Beni... promise me that you will stick to repairs and run at the first sign of danger. Uncle Robin will take care of the bad guys.”
Beni bit his lower lip and nodded, though I noticed he didn’t promise anything out loud. Ravengarde opened its back compartment to let him climb inside.
Eris appeared inside the artillery room immediately after in a puff of smoke, her once soundstone-filled bag empty.
“Delivery completed and on time,” Eris boasted proudly. “We at Arcane Abbey Deliveries hope you’ll be satisfied with our service!”
“Why do you think you keep having repeat customers?” I teased her back, though jokes hardly helped alleviate the tension in my heart. The die was cast.
“I wonder what you have in mind, handsome,” Eris replied. Neferoa and I had recorded the soundstones’ contents in secret specifically to avoid Daltia eavesdropping on it by accident. “Do you intend for the people of this land to take up arms and overrun the mountain?”
“Something like that,” I replied evasively. “If all goes well, we can listen to a recording after the battle is over.”
Eris scoffed. “And if we aren’t lucky?”
“Then we’ll hear it in real-time.” The Colmar’s alarm rang across the airship the moment I finished my sentence, signaling the start of our troubles. “Here they come.”
“Demons!” Marika shouted over the speakers. “I need someone on the deck!”
“That’s my cue,” Eris said, her staff radiating power as she looked at me with a grim gaze of concern. “Don’t die on me, Robin. I’ve buried too many friends.”
As always, it fell on me to lighten up her mood. “Only if you give me something to live for.”
“Fine.” A thin smile spread across her face. “That’s a bargain I can live with.”
She pressed her lips against mine. Her kiss was quick, clumsy, and hesitant, with little confidence and much anxiety; but it was raw and true. Like all good things, it ended way too soon when Eris teleported away.
“Ewww,” I heard Beni complain from inside Ravengarde.
“You’ll get it one day,” I promised him as I slid open the wooden panels and allowed our cannons to stick outside of the hull. Mist flooded into our ship and I saw screaming shadows coming at us from within its depths.
I started blasting.
Soraseo entered the den of evil in her country’s uniform.
It had been so long since she last wore a common officer’s lacquered armor rather than her crimson one. Father forced her to earn that particular equipment through grueling training. Her current outfit lacked the essence-enhanced capabilities of the other. It made her feel naked as she walked through the incised mine passageways leading into the heart of Mount Kazandu.
She remembered the few times she visited the mountain in the past. The air had seemed so pure back then, even within its deepest tunnels, but it now choked with putrid essence even more intense than a Blight’s heart. She could smell its vile stench through the pieces of her helmet covering her mouth and its influence warped the very fabric of reality around them. The walls glowed with golden and silvery hues, as if the stone had suddenly transformed into precious metals. The heat only continued to increase the further her group progressed inside the volcano, with crimson runestones engraved into the walls providing a flicker of twisted light.
Evil permeated Soraseo’s flesh and bones, trying to find a way in. Her mark burned her skin beneath her armor as the power within recoiled from the intense corruption around them. It shielded her mind as it did when she fought across many Blights, but she hadn’t sensed such an oppressive aura in the air since the City of Wrath.
A distant detonation shook her out of her thoughts.
It was distant, a booming echo from high above, hardly louder than far away thunder, but both she and Lord Oboro managed to hear it over the cultists' song.
Robin.
“Intruders?” her teacher asked with a look of false concern.
“Too little, too late,” the cultist guide declared, his hands joined. “The promised time has come!”
The hooded men sang louder than ever, and the hill of gold appeared to vibrate in response to their prayers. The coins flickered and undulated, their gleaming substance merging together into a gilded mountain of white-hot blinding light. A little lava began to spill out of the ring containing the pit and nearly melted a screaming captive alive.
Soraseo tensed up, as did her allies. The essence in the air thickened until it became unbearable and suffocating. Crimson, skull-shaped steam arose from the golden hill; Soraseo had no idea how long it would take for the coins to merge together into a Devil’s Crown, but she knew the process was fast underway.
Then she felt it.
That familiar sensation of recognizing a fellow Hero.
Her eyes immediately pinpointed its source: a duo of hooded cultists singing in front of the statue, their backs turned on Soraseo’s group. Her power granted her enough understanding of motion and body language to recognize Chronius among them. How had he managed to infiltrate the gathering?
If so, then his other companion had to be–
“Now,” Soraseo heard the disguised Rubenzo whisper at her side, uttering the signal.
She reacted instantly, knowing that hesitation would spell their doom.
Soraseo drew her weapon faster than the wind and turned her blade on her teacher.
Her power caught a glimpse of his genuine surprise written all over his face, while Rubenzo’s hand moved to grab him from behind and Lady Mersie grabbed daggers hidden under her armor. The entire sneak attack took place in the span of a second.
If Soraseo had miscalculated, she would stop within an inch of Lord Oboro’s neck before she could land a killing blow. Part of her hoped that she had been mistaken, that her instincts had deceived her.
The thing wearing her teacher’s face caught her sword in midair at inhuman speed.
Soraseo’s hand immediately became lighter, her sword teleporting straight into Lord Oboro’s palm. His body’s limbs and neck then twisted in an unnatural way, the joints snapping like twigs like a ragdoll. Rubenzo’s hand barely missed its chest by an inch.
Soraseo’s heart sank in her chest. She barely had time to see the ghastly smile stretching on her teacher’s humorless face and hear the two words he whispered under his breath.
“Good try,” he said.
The Shadow of Envy slipped through their grasp and ran straight for the Devil of Greed’s treasure.
The room erupted into screams of chaos and confusion in an instant. The impostor wearing Lord Oboro’s face threw the stolen sword at Mersie with inhuman strength before she could retaliate with knives of her own, forcing her to dodge. By the time Soraseo and Rubenzo raced after him, the Shadow was already shedding their disguise and running on all fours. Their limbs stretched out into long and thin stick-like appendages with too many joints.
Their cultist guide had the misfortune of standing in the Shadow’s way; he barely had time to open his mouth and shout a warning before ‘Lord Oboro’ pushed them aside with an elongated arm. The Knot member’s body immediately turned to dust in the blink of an eye as all their years of life were stolen from them.
The Shadow didn’t slow down, their attention was entirely focused on the hoard of souls they sought to steal for themselves.
Soraseo cursed her slowness as she picked her sword off the ground. She should have struck earlier. She had had a gut feeling something was wrong when her teacher had so readily agreed to help them. Lord Oboro always argued that a true swordsman knew when to unsheathe his sword, and he never did anything without cautious consideration. The real one would have investigated Soraseo’s story and delayed before giving anything more than information.
He had been simply too eager to act decisively. His reluctance to discuss the adamantine mask—whose details he likely shared because the Heroes could have easily confirmed the story and earned their distrust otherwise—had only confirmed her suspicions.
The impostor must have murdered or even stolen him a mere few hours before their visit.
Her teacher would be avenged.
Chronius turned around with daggers in his hands while his hooded ally—who had to be the Spy—threw runestones hidden inside their sleeves into the magma pool. An enormous burst of icy essence erupted from it instantly and unleashed a cloud of steam across the chamber that swallowed panicked cultists, angry demons, and hostages alike. A thick mountain of ice swallowed the coins and plugged up the magma pit before it could overflow.
Chronius threw a volley of knives with lethal accuracy. Dozens of projectiles flew across the air, each of them nailing a cultist’s head or a demon’s eye. The Shadow alone dodged them easily enough, their Archer power granting them inhuman accuracy and reflexes. Yet when their elongated arm reached for the Devil Coins, they found a thick wall of ice in the way. Their inhuman screech of frustration echoed with hundreds of voices, while their mouth stretched into a maw filled with fingers and eyes. Their body began to undergo an even ghastlier transformation as melting ice shrouded the chamber in thick mist.
Undeterred, and with her power allowing her to pinpoint its movements, Soraseo prepared to charge after the abomination with her sword when her brother’s scream reached her ears. The danger of the Shadow, the ritual, and the threat of Knots and demons alike faded from her mind as her head snapped in Doggotaro’s direction.
Her brother stared at her with abject fear, while the statue’s hands had moved to seize him like a mother with her child.
The Devil of Greed’s marble lips had stretched into a smile.