My eyes, unlike the queen's, weren't searching for the Guardian.
What I searched for, with the silent desperation of someone afraid of what they'll find, was my daughter. Arachne was almost at the epicenter of where the creature had emerged — and each second of searching stretched something inside my chest to a point that hurt. My eyes swept the devastated field, jumping from rubble to rubble, from body to body, ignoring the bronze colossus that dominated the horizon as though it were mere scenery.
And then I found her.
Sprawled against the wall, leaning, unconscious. Her legs folded in a way that, on any other day, would have made me run screaming. But her chest rose and fell. Slowly. Weakly. Alive. Maybe being unconscious had been her luck — the limp body, surrendered, letting itself be carried by the explosion instead of resisting it. A warm relief filled me for an instant, running down my shoulders like hot water.
It lasted an instant.
Because the tension took over everything again. The enemy was right in front of us — still, probing the terrain with slow movements of its colossal head, as though trying to understand something. As though searching for something. And there were few things, in that universe, more terrifying than a monster of that size searching for something no one knew what was.
That was when I noticed the red box in Morgana's hands.
Honestly, I didn't remember seeing her grab it. But, probably, she did it the instant I was closing it — her fingers gathering from the ground, amid the chaos, the object I had let slip. She knew. Even not working against the queen, that was still a treasure. A treasure that had already saved us from too much to be abandoned in the dirt like garbage. I swallowed dry, feeling the iron taste of my own blood at the back of my throat, and said nothing.
✦ ✦ ✦
While the great creature analyzed the terrain, I could, for the first time, observe it with precision.
The enormous humanoid guardian rose beneath the light of the towers — the bronze of its skin reflecting the flashes of fire and ice in blades of light that ran across its body like water. Shoulders too broad. Hands too large. A face with no expression at all, sculpted with a perfection that, in a being of that size, seemed profoundly wrong. It was like looking at a museum statue that had decided, on a whim, to start breathing.
And it was funny — if anything there could be funny — that a dragon always chose to leave a humanoid protecting its own nest.
There were studies about that. Superficial, like everything involving dragons, but they existed. The most interesting of them said that dragons didn't like to create golems in their own image — maybe out of honor, maybe out of arrogance. As though replicating their own form in something smaller were an insult to the original.
Honestly, I had a different theory.
Mine was based less on the dragons and more on the races — on the living examples scattered throughout the Oasis. I believed, firmly, that humanoid creatures carried an enormous advantage over all the other forms of life. Whether for delicate manual labor, whether for brute labor. Whether, simply, for the capacity to wield weapons with ease. To me, the races of the universe were living proof that the humanoid form was a success far superior to any other — an answer that existence found and repeated, world after world, race after race.
The ironic thing was that this didn't apply to the strongest creature known.
Dragons weren't humanoid. And dragons were at the top of everything. Maybe my theory simply didn't take into account something the dragons had in excess — something that made hands, fingers, and thumbs irrelevant.
Magic.
✦ ✦ ✦
"ARGHHHHHH! What did you do to my soldiers?!"
The enormous queen didn't bother to do the necessary calculations.
None. She simply ran in the direction of the guardian — tons of chitin, rage, and maternal grief charging at a sprint — while it remained still, lost, still searching for whatever it searched for. I held my breath. The two were similar in size. By logic, by physics, by everything I knew of battles, that impact should be an earthquake of flesh against metal.
But, to my surprise — and, most certainly, to hers — it was as though the queen had crashed against a mountain.
The guardian didn't retreat a centimeter. It didn't sway. It didn't even seem to register the impact. It was she who staggered backward, disoriented, her legs tearing furrows in the earth while she tried to recover her balance — and, on her misshapen face, I saw stamped the same shock I felt on mine.
"My Lord… didn't you say this guardian was supposed to be… weak?"
Morgana raised the question without taking her eyes off the scene, her voice small.
Yes. I had said that. And it wasn't a guess — it was based on a rule of the Oasis itself. An inviolable rule. And, exactly for that reason, taken as impossible to break.
"It doesn't make sense… a summon with such power… This is impossible."
"What's impossible, Liv? I'm not understanding."
Morgana didn't know — because she had never been a summoner, and so she didn't understand how that worked.
I myself, before, knew only the general rules about what was or wasn't possible in the Oasis. It was only with Zaetar that I began to understand, in practice, the limitations of a summon — the conjuration time and, mainly, the distance. Summoners were as sought-after as healers, because they managed to be absurdly strong. But, if there was a problem with the class, it was this: the summoner needed to be present with their summon. He couldn't simply order the creature to do whatever it wanted while he stayed home, comfortable and safe. To many, that was a lock the Oasis itself had created — a way of ensuring that even the strongest class carried its own danger on its back.
And the dragons, of course, were another category.
Creatures of nearly infinite mana, of magic no one even dreamed of reaching. But even they were limited. Even the nearly infinite obeyed the rule. It was exactly for that reason that nest guardians, despite being strong, were incapable of reaching the power of a level S creature — in truth, the great consensus among scholars was that those creatures perhaps didn't even reach level A. Abandoned by the summoner for centuries, drained by time and distance, they should be husks. Shadows of what they once were.
And that was the main reason those two sons of bitches — the Burman and the Aquamarine — had started killing each other before even defeating the guardian.
To them, the guardian was the easiest problem to solve. A formality. The real obstacle, in the minds of the two, had always been each other.
The queen's rage — and my total incomprehension of what that thing was — only made sense when I finally noticed what the creature carried in one of its hands.
Two heads.
And both were of the queen's giant summons. The same colossi that not even Arachne had managed to scratch. The same ones that ground up a hundred and twenty Orghaal and nearly half of my Burmans as though they were twigs. They dangled from the bronze hand like casual trophies — and the entire world rearranged itself in my head in a single icy second.
The rule of the Oasis — the same one I had explained hours ago, the same one the greatest scholars of all the races bet on — was fallen on the ground along with those two heads. Summons weaken with time and distance. It was law. It was physics. And that thing had just torn the law apart in front of me like wet paper.
That couldn't be done by a mere level A guardian.
In truth, I doubted it was possible for a level S. And there was, still, another factor gnawing at me from within: the winner of the fight between Bestaria and Wignall — whoever it was — also didn't seem to be present anywhere.
"This guardian doesn't make sense… We need to move away from it. As fast as possible."
✦ ✦ ✦
After what seemed an eternity, the great guardian finally looked at the queen.
She still seemed dizzy from her own impact — her legs trembling, her head swaying from side to side. And it simply extended its giant hand toward her. Without hurry. Without rage. With the calm of someone plucking a fruit.
The bronze fingers closed around her head.
The queen thrashed violently — she bit, scratched, struck uncontrollably, her colossal legs scraping sparks against the metal forearm. Tons of concentrated fury, the same power that had shredded my daughter and destroyed my army, discharged whole against that grip.
And nothing. Absolutely nothing seemed to diminish the strength of that colossus.
I felt a cold descend my spine — not the cold of common fear, but the cold of someone who suddenly understands their own scale. Because what I was watching wouldn't be a battle.
It was a massacre.
"We need to enter the nest. It's the only way to stop this creature and protect this kingdom."
The guardian was strong — of that I had no more doubt.
But I knew, too, of another thing: entering the nest, the guardian ceased to function. It was its very name. Guardian. Its function was to prevent entry — and, if someone entered, that function died. And, to me, there was a simple and desperate logic in all of that: if it was up here, hunting, then down below… down below it should be empty.
"But how are we going to do this? I mean… how are we going to get past this guy?"
Morgana spoke with a trembling voice, her eyes fixed on the scene in front of us — the queen beginning to gush blood from every orifice, her colossal body contorting as though it were being squeezed, slowly, by those bronze hands. That was exactly what was happening.
"Zeus. Where's the Void?"
"He's in the Castle, my lord."
I didn't answer Morgana's question — because the answer was a few meters from us.
I preferred just to shout for them to follow me. We ran, and, behind us, the guardian seemed to take pleasure in torturing that creature — the wet sounds, the cracks of chitin giving way, the scream that rose and fell in waves. I just ignored it. Forcing each step, forcing my ears not to listen, forcing my mind not to imagine those hands around someone I loved.
We reached the castle at a sprint.
And there was the Void — standing in a corner, motionless, exactly where it should be. I had said it didn't need to participate in the battle. And the son of a bitch really didn't disobey. Not even when the world collapsed. Not even when death marched through the territory. In truth, it didn't seem to care in the slightest about what might happen to itself — the chin raised, the usual disdain, as though all of that were far beneath its dignity.
That was when the queen, finally, understood she was going to die.
Her scream changed. It stopped being rage and became pure desperation — a shrill, broken sound that crossed the entire battlefield. And, in the same instant, all the Tyrin responded. All of them. They ignored my soldiers, ignored the towers, ignored everything — and ran desperately to where she was, climbing the guardian's body by the thousands, covering the bronze with the black of their own chitin.
Only to seem useless.
I knew. A creature that had defeated that queen's two guards would see that desperate attack exactly as it appeared to be: the foolish attempt of someone desperate to live. Children trying to save their mother from a god. Ants biting a statue.
✦ ✦ ✦
"Void. Create a rift to the main tunnel. Now."
The Void simply shook its head and began to conjure.
The rift opened in the air — that vertical wound of dark light, distorting reality at the edges — and, in the meantime, a final scream of pain tore the night behind us. I didn't need to look to know. The sound of the queen's head exploding between the guardian's fingers was wet, short, and definitive — and, right after, came the sound of it shaking its own body, expelling the clinging Tyrin like someone swatting insects off their skin.
But I looked. I couldn't not look.
And what I saw was the end of an empire in real time. The Tyrin, without the queen, seemed to lose something fundamental — the direction, the purpose, the very will. The infinite army that had devoured protectors for generations came undone in seconds, becoming thousands of lost and terrified creatures, running in all directions, fleeing through the gate, scattering across the dark horizon like ashes on the wind. My theory was right. If she fell, they would all fall.
Only it wasn't I who brought her down. And the victory tasted of dirt.
Soon, only the guardian and the queen's carcass remained on the field.
"Damn! My Lord, the queen is dead — it's going to Arachne!"
My heart clenched until it hurt.
I advanced a few steps to observe — and there it was, moving in the direction of my unconscious daughter, leaning against the wall, defenseless as a cub. Each step of that thing made the earth tremble. And each tremor shook something inside me that had no name.
I couldn't let that happen. I couldn't. Not after everything.
"Morgana. Fire a dart at it."
"But, sir, if we do this—"
She looked at my face. And whatever she saw there ended the discussion.
"…Understood."
Morgana stopped, drew her crossbow, and aimed at the guardian's face with that icy calm only she had in the middle of chaos.
The shot flew — fast and precise as only Morgana could manage — and struck the humanoid's temple head-on.
It didn't wound it. I knew it wouldn't wound it. But it did exactly what I needed: it stopped. The colossal head turned slowly in our direction, and, for a whole second, those empty statue eyes met ours across the battlefield. Then it turned completely. And began to walk toward us, at slow steps.
Away from Arachne. In our direction. Exactly as I wanted — and exactly as I feared.
"Void… if it's going to happen, now is the time."
The Void activated the ability, and the rift began to form completely.
And that was when the guardian understood what that was. The statue's patience evaporated all at once — and the thing began to run. The entire ground thundered under each stride, the battlefield shrinking between us at an absurd speed for something of that size.
"Damn, damn… fast, fast… GOOO!"
We threw ourselves through the rift.
Morgana first, then Livina, then me, and last the Void — the world turning into that icy blur of the crossing. And, for an instant, I thought we had made it.
Then the hand came.
A colossal bronze hand crossed the rift behind us — and closed around the Void. There was no struggle. There was no time. The fingers squeezed a single time, and the Aquamarine burst like a ripe fruit, its blood bathing all of us in a sudden hot rain. In the same instant, the rift closed — severing the invading arm in a clean cut — and a giant fist, reaching almost to the elbow, dropped to the floor of the tunnel with a dull thud.
And then came the scream.
A scream of pain and fury so monstrous that, even forty meters below the ground, it crossed the entire earth into my bones. I stood still for a second, panting, covered in the blood of a creature that had died obeying my last order. The Void never wanted to be there. Never cared about us. And, even so, it was the only one of us who didn't fail at anything — not a single time — until the end.
Livina let out a strangled sound beside me. Morgana just closed her eyes for a second — the exact time of a grief we couldn't afford.
I wiped the blood from my eyes with the back of my hand. There was no time for more than that. Not even for it.
✦ ✦ ✦
"The hole is probably nearby. We need to hurry and find the nest."
That was when the three of us heard it.
Earth being churned. Rock being torn. A rhythmic, brutal sound of something digging with its own hands — and digging fast.
"Damn… I think it's coming down."
Livina and Morgana exchanged looks, the shock stamped on their blood-dirtied faces.
It was the sound of something desperate to return somewhere. I knew exactly where. And it, probably, also knew that we knew. From that moment on, that became a race against time — us, running through the veins of the dead anthill; it, tearing the earth in a straight line like a bronze drill.
Our only advantage was knowing the way.
My lungs burned. My legs, heavy from the exhaustion of an entire night of war, obeyed on stubbornness alone — and the map of the tunnels drew itself in my head at each curve, each fork, each mark I had memorized in the days of mapping. Behind us, the sound didn't stop. Didn't diminish. Didn't tire.
We advanced at a sprint through the tunnels — feet slipping on the whitish membrane, the weak light dancing on the walls — until we drew near the narrow part. And it was there, before we arrived, that I saw them.
The bodies of the queen's two guards.
The two colossi that had exterminated my army. That ignored forty Yokais as if they were flies. They were fallen in the tunnel, immense and motionless — and their heads had been removed with perfection. Not torn off. Not crushed. Removed. The cut was so clean it looked like a surgeon's work, and the rest of the bodies didn't have a single other injury. Not a scratch. It was as though death had come for the two of them in a single movement — precise, absolute, and without any effort.
I felt my stomach turn. That wasn't just power. It was a message.
We passed quickly through the site — and then found something else.
Morgana got a fright, her crossbow raised in a reflex, before realizing that thing didn't move. That it was just a head.
A guardian's head.
The same bronze. The same perfect and empty statue face. Identical, in every detail, to the creature that tore the earth behind us at that exact moment — only smaller. Considerably smaller. My mind tripped on that for an instant: another one? There was another?
But I was shocked by something else.
Because, beside the head, two bodies lay on the earth — with wounds that seemed to be beyond any cure.
"Morgana. Check if one of the two is alive. And heal them."
While she ran to the bodies, my mind spun in calculations that didn't add up.
Because, even if I entered the nest, I still had not the slightest idea how to leave it. I knew the guardian wouldn't enter — but I didn't know how to deal with it at the exit. I didn't know how to disable it from inside. In truth, I had no idea what the fucking nest was even like on the inside. I was betting our lives on a place no living being had ever described.
✦ ✦ ✦
I advanced to the enormous gate.
Without the guardians before it, the structure seemed much clearer — and much more alive. The entire surface was covered in carved drawings, lines, and symbols that intertwined in a dance my eyes couldn't fully follow.
"Damn… how the hell does this shit open?"
"Sir… only Bestaria seems to be breathing."
I turned to Morgana — and that was when I saw, beside the path we came from, an enormous hole torn in the rock.
It was from there that the creature had come out.
And the reason for that, to me, remained an uncomfortable mystery. A guardian shouldn't leave the nest. Under no circumstances. It was the very definition of its existence — to guard means to stay. And, even so, that thing had torn through forty meters of rock to rise to the surface, as though something up there had called it. What? Why? None of that made sense.
I shook my head, expelling the questions. They wouldn't open any door.
I turned my focus back to the drawings, hunting for a clue, an instruction, anything. But the carvings were confusing — what seemed to be four dragons flying in a circle, forming a perfect circumference, and, at the center of everything… nothing. Nothing beyond a small square hole, dug into the stone.
Four dragons. A circle. A square hole.
That made no sense. There didn't seem to be an answer anywhere.
"Lord… did you find something?"
Livina seemed euphoric with nerves, her eyes leaping from me to the tunnel at our backs — where the sound of digging grew, closer and closer, deeper and deeper.
"I don't know. I feel something's missing, but I don't know what… But I think I know who knows the answer. Morgana — how's Bestaria?"
✦ ✦ ✦
I advanced quickly to where Bestaria was being healed.
And I knelt beside Morgana, adding my hands to hers — two healing was better than one. Besides, I had a theory: even if I had no idea how to open that shit, I faithfully believed Bestaria did.
Her body was destroyed.
The skin torn in dozens of points, the blood soaked into her fur, one of her arms twisted at a wrong angle. And, even so, her chest rose and fell with the stubbornness of someone who refuses to die on principle. It didn't take long for, finally, the feline eyes to open.
"Argh… hahaha… who would have guessed a human would save me… ARGHHH."
Bestaria woke still weak, spitting blood between the words — and looked at me.
She didn't seem shocked. Honestly, she seemed more tired than anything else. Tired in a way that went beyond the body.
"Cut it out. We're being chased by one of the fucking guardians that YOU woke up. Show me how the hell this gate opens — otherwise, we're going to die."
Bestaria realized, by my tone, that there was no room for jokes.
But it was I who was caught with my guard down by her answer.
"I… I don't know."
The ground seemed to vanish beneath my feet.
Because that made no sense at all. How could she know a nest existed — know enough to drop everything and live in that end of the world because of it — and not know how to open it? That knowledge was clearly something hidden by force from common people. But Bestaria wasn't common. She was elite. She was a Burman queen, one of the ten forces of the belt, someone with access to secrets I didn't even dream of. Her simply not knowing was something… unreal.
"Hey, don't look at me like that. The truth is that, despite this clearly being a nest, I have not the slightest idea how to open it. Nothing we were told and taught seems right…"
She looked at the gate like someone trying to remember something — and getting frustrated with what they find.
"And, besides… you saw that guardian. Those sons of bitches nearly killed us — and we only managed to fight ONE. Honestly, I even thought they were playing with us. If it weren't for this son of a bitch here…"
She looked at the Aquamarine's body beside her — Wignall, his chest caved inward, his stoic face frozen forever.
"…I'd be dead. In the end, the wretch was useful."
There was something strange in the way she said that.
A weight behind the words — something she knew and wasn't telling, something about how exactly that "useful" had happened. But the tunnel trembled, the sound of digging grew, and there were too many questions in line for me to spend time on that one.
That was when an enormous crash, coming from the giant hole, made Bestaria go rigid all over.
"Hey… did you bring the Other one with you?"
"Of course! How do you think I managed to flee that son of a bitch? Besides, the Tyrin queen attacked us up top and everything turned into chaos — entering the nest is our only way out."
Bestaria looked at the ground, thinking about something.
And then she stood up. Too fast for someone who was dying two minutes ago.
"We need to get out of here. Fast. Or we're screwed."
Morgana, who was still healing her, stopped with her hands in the air.
"Hey… didn't you kill this one? So help us with the other one!"
Bestaria looked at Morgana.
And began to laugh. A desperate, broken laugh, that had absolutely nothing funny about it — the kind of laugh that escapes when the body no longer knows what to do with the fear.
"You don't understand."
She looked at the dark hole — from where the noise increased by the second.
"What are you trying to say? Spit it out!"
The irritation rose through me all at once. It was clear, crystalline, that she knew something she wasn't telling — and each second of silence cost distance between us and that thing.
She looked at me. And then lowered her head, as though she were too exhausted to carry what she knew.
"Arg… you really don't know anything…"
She raised her eyes to the stone ceiling, like someone trying to recover the exact words of an old lesson.
"Every nest has two guardians. And the dragons are funny, ironic… and huge sons of bitches. They have the habit of not allowing the guardians to face the invader together. To me, those wretches like to give hope to the invaders. It happens that the first one the nest releases… is the weak guardian."
She pointed her chin at the bronze head fallen in the earth, a few meters from us.
"That's the one you're seeing there. We killed it. It cost almost everything we had… but we killed it."
The silence that followed lasted the exact time of a breath.
My mind redid the calculations on its own, without asking permission. The monster up above — the one that crushed the Matre Queen like ripe fruit, the one that carried the heads of the two colossi like trophies, the one that exploded the Void with a handshake and destroyed everything it found in its path without suffering a single scratch…
That was the second one.
And we had struck it with a dart. Provoked it. Made it a personal enemy.
And then Bestaria looked at the dark hole, from where the sound of digging already made the earth tremble beneath our feet, and finished the sentence I no longer wanted to hear.
"Now tell me… what do you think is going to happen to us, now that the strong one has woken up?"
No one answered.
"We're lost."