Chapter 113: The Shadows of Rust and the Hunter's Mark
The fall into the underworld of the Scum Bastion was a descent into the bowels of a sick metallic beast.
After escaping the Supreme Elder's conceptual slash on the surface, Kael, Eris, Elara, and Violeta plummeted down the destroyed ventilation shaft, enveloped in the absolute darkness of the Rust Sector's subterranean levels. The air went from a mixture of acid rain and ozone to a suffocating soup of methane, iron oxide, and chemical rot.
They fell dozens of meters. There was no time to summon braking techniques.
Two immense arms, gray as lead and hard as forged steel, intercepted their fall at the bottom of the pit. Bren, the giant of Iron Mountain, caught Violeta and Elara against his armored breastplate, absorbing the kinetic energy of the impact with a muffled grunt, his boots sinking half a meter into the toxic mud of the floor. Kael rolled down the tunnel wall, using the friction of his obsidian pauldron to slow his inertia before landing heavily on one knee, while Eris fell beside him, rolling skillfully to dissipate the force of the crash.
The deafening roar of the True Saint annihilating three city blocks on the surface echoed like apocalyptic thunder through the catacomb's pipes, raining rust dust and stone fragments down upon them.
"Perimeter!" Kael barked instantly, his voice a whip in the dark, ignoring the sharp pain piercing his dislocated right arm and spine.
"Secured!" Varian answered from the shadows.
A flash of green light dimly illuminated the immense subterranean chamber. The sniper was stationed on a rusted maintenance catwalk, ten meters above the mud level. His bone bow was drawn with an arrow of pure energy, his electric yellow vertical pupils scanning every drainage tunnel that emptied into the main chamber.
They were in an ancient chemical filtration cistern, a cavernous dome supported by immense, corroded stone pillars. The wastewater reaching their ankles was thick, black, and shone with an oily, poisonous iridescence.
In the center of the dome, elevated on a circular stone platform free from the toxic flood, stood the Weaver. The array smuggler was as pale as a corpse, sweating profusely, surrounded by an intricate circle of runes carved directly into the rock floor and filled with silver dust and mercury.
Kael stood up, the black water splashing against his obsidian greaves. He walked toward the platform, every step heavy, calculated. He reached out with his left hand, covered in the worn black leather of his gauntlet, and tossed the loot onto the Weaver's makeshift workbench.
The Fault Spatial Stone rolled across the stone, emitting a dense hum and distorting the light around it, as if the crystal were absorbing space itself.
"The fuel," Kael said, his harsh breathing echoing in the relative silence of the cistern. "Ignite it. Now."
The Weaver grabbed the stone with trembling hands. His eyes widened as he felt the gravitational pressure of the fault crystal.
"You are insane..." the smuggler babbled, looking at Kael and the girls emerging from the sludge. "I felt the pressure of the sky collapsing up there. You have provoked the wrath of a local sect's True Saint. The entire damn city is under quarantine."
"That is my problem," Kael cut him off, slowly unsheathing Whisper of the North, the immense dark blade emitting a faint magmatic heat that dried the toxic water around it. "Yours is that, if this array doesn't get us out of here in the next three minutes, you will die long before we do. Initiate the jump sequence."
The Weaver needed no further threats. Knowing he was trapped between furious gods and obsidian demons, the smuggler knelt and placed the Fault Spatial Stone in the center of the geometric array.
"I need eighty seconds to align the coordinates and saturate the core with the stone's Qi," the Weaver reported, his hands moving feverishly as he traced seals in the air that glowed pale blue. "The destination is blind, but adjusted toward the southern badlands, near the desert border. When the vortex opens, it will be unstable. You will have five seconds to cross before it collapses under the stone's pressure."
"Eighty seconds," Kael murmured.
The Morningstar leader turned to his squad. The cistern ceiling creaked violently. Tons of dirt and debris fell into the mud as a new shockwave, originating from the True Saint tearing the city apart above, shook the foundations of the Scum Bastion.
"Defensive formation around the platform," Kael ordered. "Bren, absolute wall at the front. Elara, cover Varian's rear. Violeta, I want you to monitor the tension of that array; if the Weaver tries to alter the coordinates to a sect cell, cut off his hands. Eris, focus. Don't waste a single spark of fire unless death is an inch away."
The team deployed with the precision of a lethal machine. Bren slammed his dented basilisk shield into the edge of the stone platform, anchoring his Iron Mountain body. Violeta stood next to the Weaver, her neon violet eye and diamond blue eye fixed on the array's runes, her brain operating like a dimensional supercomputer despite the trail of dried blood staining her cheeks.
Forty seconds.
The hum of the array began to intensify. The Fault Spatial Stone floated a few inches above the floor, radiating concentric rings of silver light that illuminated the dark catacombs.
And then, the smell changed.
It wasn't gradual. The stench of rust and chemicals in the cistern was abruptly replaced by a sickeningly sweet aroma. It smelled of rotting lotus, ancient flesh exposed to the sun, and a sludge that did not belong to the city's industrialization, but to a primeval abyss.
Kael felt the hairs on the back of his neck stand up. His Sword Heart throbbed with a cold fury, warning him of an imminent danger that did not come from the sects above, but from the underworld itself.
The thick black sludge covering the cistern floor stopped flowing toward the drains. The toxic water began to move in the opposite direction, swirling and bubbling with an unnatural consistency.
"Watchtower reporting multiple anomalies," Varian's voice sounded over the telepathic network, laden with a sharp tension. "They are not Heavenly Sword Inquisitors. I repeat, they are not from the sects. I have twelve... no, fifteen heat signatures emerging from the lower drainage tunnels. Their Qi is erratic. They are not purely human. The radar is marking extreme toxicity levels."
From the murky waters of the four largest drainage tunnels, they emerged in total silence.
They didn't splash water. The sludge seemed to merge with them, forming them as they rose in the gloom.
They were cultivators, or at least they had been in the past. They wore frayed gray robes, permanently stained with a dark mud that seemed to throb as if it were alive. Their faces were partially hidden behind grotesque masks forged directly from human bones fused with pumice stone. Their limbs showed repulsive mutations: asymmetrical arms with black chitin claws, backs hunched beneath exposed marrow spines, and skin that exuded a yellowish-green mist.
They wore the symbols of a cult, but not one of the twelve orthodox gods, nor any religion sanctioned by the empires. They wore necklaces made of fossilized beast fangs and scarification tattoos that formed the image of an immense, blind eye.
"What are those abominations?" Bren grunted, adjusting his grip on his shield, his instinct rejecting the very existence of the creatures.
Kael narrowed his eyes. He remembered the pit in the Swamp of Oblivion. He remembered the boiling mud, the city-sized eye opening beneath the earth.
"They are devotees," Kael whispered, gripping his greatsword. "Worshippers of the deity lying beneath the swamp."
From among the fifteen mutated figures, one individual stepped forward. It was the largest, its gray robe almost torn by the tumors of muscle and bone deforming its chest. It wore no bone mask; the right half of its face was a conglomerate of purulent scabs and parasitic fungi oozing dark ichor. In its right hand, it held a staff of petrified wood that radiated a Stage 6 Origin Realm aura, but distorted, raw, savage.
The cult leader raised its head and noisily sniffed the air of the cistern.
"They smell of Him..." the leader's voice did not sound human; it was a wet gurgle, like boiling mud in a cauldron. "They smell of the King's disturbed sleep. You woke the beast. You ran across its back."
The cultists surrounded the central platform in perfect silence, their eyes shining with demented fanaticism in the gloom. They didn't look at the jade box on Kael's belt. They didn't care about the Phoenix Tear or the Dragon Root.
The cult leader raised its gnarled staff and pointed, without hesitation, toward the pale, exhausted figure of Eris Morningstar, standing next to Violeta.
"But we are not here for punishment," the leader continued, and its disfigured mouth twisted into a repulsive smile. "We are here for the fire. The Flame of Destruction that devoured its Avatar's flesh in the swamp. The Sleeping King has dreamed of that entropy. He needs it. Her fire... is the missing key to melt the chains of his seal."
Kael felt the temperature of his own blood spike.
The Ancient Demon hadn't just watched them flee; it had felt Eris's Flame of Ruin burn its mud emissary (the Half-Saint abomination from Chapter 105). The cosmic monster had recognized the lineage of destruction. It knew that black and white spark could eradicate the laws binding it beneath the sea of sludge.
"Catch her alive," the mutated leader ordered, lowering the staff. "Turn the rest into fertilizer for the King."
Kael didn't wait for the cultists to take the first step. In Morningstar doctrine, diplomacy ended the moment family was threatened.
"Varian, free fire! Bren, secure the array!" Kael roared.
The cistern erupted into violence.
Varian released the energy string. The high-pitched hum pierced the stagnant air. Three [Arrows of Inevitable Judgment] shot from the upper catwalk. The beams of pure white light, wrapped in emerald wind drills, ignored the gloom and the toxic gas.
The three projectiles struck simultaneously. One arrow cleanly decapitated a cultist on the left, the second pierced another's chest, shattering its spine, and the third struck a third's knee, ripping off the entire leg in an explosion of wind and black blood.
"Too slow!" Bren bellowed.
Four cultists threw themselves against the front of the platform. Their chitin claws scraped brutally against Bren's immense basilisk shield, sparking but failing to penetrate the Iron Mountain's defense.
"Elara!" Kael marked.
From the shadows of one of the immense stone pillars, Elara materialized directly behind the cultists besieging Bren. The Mist Flower unleashed her [Waltz of the Lunar Frost].
Elara moved with ghostly fluidity, leaving three translucent ice copies that refracted the light from the spatial array. When the mutants tried to turn and attack her, their claws struck the illusions. The copies imploded silently, sending clouds of frost needles that drove into the cultists' bodies, freezing their joints instantly with a thick layer of black ice.
With the enemies immobilized, Elara executed the [Slash of the Frigid Midnight]. Her two curved daggers traced arcs of liquid silver light. She slit the throats of the four frozen cultists. There was no red blood; the exposed tissue turned porcelain white instantly, necrosing at zero degrees.
However, the organic horror of the Sleeping King's Cult was just beginning.
The headless bodies struck down by Varian and those with slit throats from Elara fell into the toxic mud of the cistern... and didn't stay there.
The black water bubbled violently around the corpses. Tendrils of sludge, similar to the rotten vines of the swamp, sprouted from the sewer floor and connected to the wounds of the dead cultists.
With a sickening sound of suctioned flesh, the decapitated heads began to reattach to the necks via thick seams of black mud. The severed leg was replaced by a grotesque prosthesis of rock and solidified sludge. Elara's freezing cuts were corrupted and dissolved by the acid of the ground, restoring the monsters' mobility.
"They're regenerating with the environment!" Varian shouted, firing another volley of arrows that shattered the cultists again, only to watch the sludge begin the healing process anew. "They're ecosystem parasites! As long as they touch the city's mud, they won't die!"
Kael, who had launched himself into the center of the enemy formation to face the leader, intercepted a brutal strike from the petrified wood staff with his Whisper of the North.
The impact was massive. The mutated leader's raw strength rivaled that of a pure physical combat expert. Kael felt his knees threaten to give way, but his [Sovereign's Will] kept him anchored like an immovable pillar.
"Your sword cuts flesh, boy," the cult leader mocked, its purulent face inches from Kael's, exuding a breath that smelled of sunken corpses. "But we are the mud of the world. You cannot kill the earth. Hand over the girl of the Flame."
Kael gritted his teeth, his golden eyes blazing with volcanic wrath.
"If you are the earth, then I am the core that melts it."
Kael shoved the leader back with a violent heave of his entire body. He channeled his [Magma]. It wasn't blood; it was the pure, uncontrollable thermal fury of the world's crust. The veins in Kael's arms glowed incandescent red beneath his hardened skin, transmitting an extreme heat that made the catacomb's damp air smoke. The blade of Whisper of the North shifted from jet black to blinding orange, melting the metal to a hyper-dense semi-liquid state.
Kael unleashed a massive upward slash. The heat was so overwhelming that the toxic sludge around him evaporated instantly, creating a cloud of lethal steam.
The cult leader tried to block with its Origin-level staff, but the ancient wood burst into flames upon contact and was cleaved cleanly. Kael's magmatic blade traced a diagonal line from the mutant's right hip to its left shoulder, splitting it in two. The heat cauterized the wound instantly, preventing any attempt at mud regeneration.
But the other fourteen cultists, completely immortal in the mud, took advantage of Kael's distraction to lunge at the central platform, ignoring Bren's shield bashes and Varian's arrows. Their only target: Eris.
A four-armed bony aberration leaped over Bren's shield, falling directly toward the Pillar of Fire's position, its claws extended to paralyze her.
Violeta, focused on maintaining the integrity of the spatial array while the Weaver wept in panic, didn't hesitate. Without breaking eye contact with the teleportation runes, Violeta raised her free hand toward the falling creature.
[Absolute Void Mirror].
A sheet of perfect spatial ice, smooth and dark as night, materialized in the air half a meter from Eris. The cultist's claws crashed into the mirror. Instead of breaking, the mutant was caught in stasis. Its limbs sank into the spatial ice as if it were thick molasses, paralyzing it completely in mid-air, suspended between attack and nothingness.
Eris Morningstar, standing next to the mirror, looked at the paralyzed monster trying to kidnap her at the behest of a forgotten god.
Her physical fatigue and the exhaustion of her Dantian were atrocious. Every breath burned her chest. She knew forcing her fire now would mean damaging her own meridians, perhaps permanently. But Eris had never been one to run, and she certainly wasn't going to let some mud-worshippers think they could claim her life to break a cosmic seal.
Eris's dark eyes emptied of any warm emotion, leaving only the frigid abyss of destruction.
"You claim to be the immortal earth," Eris whispered, her voice devoid of her usual sarcasm, resonating like a hollow echo in the subterranean chamber. "But you forget one detail. To create something new, first I erase you."
Eris raised both hands toward the rest of the cultists regrouping in the mud.
She did not summon the Flame of Eternal Ruin. In her fragile state, that would have killed her. She summoned the technique of purification by annihilation.
[Ash of Oblivion].
From Eris's palms, fire did not erupt. A cloud of ashen gray dust erupted, glowing with a dim silver hue, defying gravity and inertia. The ash cloud expanded like a silent storm over the cistern, sweeping across the surface of the black mud.
The moment the Ash of Oblivion touched the cultists' mutilated bodies and the sludge tendrils regenerating them, the world seemed to stop.
There were no screams of agony because the technique didn't burn flesh; it disintegrated biological and spiritual laws. The ash sought out the "ley lines" of the Ancient Demon's Qi animating the mutants. The bone tumors, the sludge prostheses, the rotting flesh... everything began to flake away.
It was like watching a dry sandcastle caught in a hurricane.
The fourteen immortal cultists simply crumbled into fine dust instantly. The ash spores devoured their regeneration, erasing their cells from existence. Where Eris's ash touched the toxic mud of the floor, the sludge was purified, leaving sterile puddles void of any residual Qi, as if those monsters had never been born.
Absolute silence returned to the catacomb, broken only by the sound of Eris's hands turning gray and parched like old parchment paper. The Pillar of Fire swayed, the emotional apathy of the technique taking its toll, and fell to one knee, coughing dryly. Elara caught her immediately, looking with reverent awe at the gray dust covering the chamber.
At the edge of the mud pit, the cult leader, split in half and with its organs cauterized by Kael's magma, still breathed weakly. The life force granted by the Demon was so obscene that it refused to die immediately.
Kael walked slowly toward the mutant's remains. Whisper of the North in his hand was still red-hot, illuminating the leader's shattered face.
The purulent man coughed blackened blood, but incredibly, his lips curled into a crazed, victorious smile. His blind, mud-filled eyes stared blindly at Kael.
"You have lit the beacon..." the leader whispered, his voice a gurgling echo. "Killing us is useless. You were just scum before. But now... now you have rung the King's bell."
The mutant raised a trembling finger, pointing not at Kael, but toward Eris's pale figure on the platform.
"The fire has been recognized. The Greater Hound has sniffed the ash. The Dust Hunter has already felt its mark in the world. It is the executioner of the faith. And it will not stop at oceans, mountains, or deserts. There is no hiding in the North for the Flame of Destruction..."
Kael didn't let him finish.
With a cold, absolute downward motion, Kael drove the magmatic greatsword into the leader's head, vaporizing its skull and silencing the prophecy forever.
"The Hunter will be hunted when the time comes," Kael declared, ripping the blade from the molten rock.
"Ten seconds!" the Weaver's hysterical scream broke the silence of the tomb. "The portal is opening!"
Kael turned toward the platform.
The Fault Spatial Stone floated in the center of the runes, shining now with a blinding light that hurt the eyes. The space above the platform began to tear. It wasn't a stable, clean tunnel; it was a savage fracture, vibrating with jagged platinum and black edges. It was a cosmic wound bleeding toward the southern lands.
BOOOOOM!
The entire cistern shook violently. The vaulted ceiling began to collapse in enormous blocks of stone, revealing the light of the acid rain and the lightning of the sword formations tearing the upper city apart. The True Saint of the Heavenly Sword had demolished the streets and finally found their underground hiding place.
"Get on the platform!" Kael ordered at the top of his lungs, sprinting toward the vortex.
Bren hoisted the exhausted Eris over his good shoulder and stepped into the center of the runic circle. Varian jumped from the catwalk, storing his bow mid-flight, and landed next to them. Elara and Violeta positioned themselves flanking Kael.
The Weaver, weeping tears of relief and terror, infused the last drop of his Qi into the formation.
"Blind jump! Hold on!" the smuggler screamed.
A shockwave of gravitational pressure crushed the chamber. The cistern ceiling gave way entirely, and tons of steel, stone, and machinery plummeted directly toward the platform, accompanied by the distant, furious silhouette of the True Saint descending from the skies of the Scum Bastion.
But they were a millisecond too late.
The jump array absorbed the six Pillars and the Weaver. Platinum light swallowed their bodies, their souls, and their exhaustion.
The portal closed with a muffled crack that imploded the air of the catacomb, disintegrating the Fault Spatial Stone into inert dust. Tons of city rubble crashed onto an empty platform and a sepulchral silence, crushing the ashes of a forgotten cult.
Far away, crossing the immeasurable folds of the continent and bypassing the eyes of gods, the Morningstar squad had escaped the Scum Bastion. They carried with them the cure for the Patriarch, the spark for his soul, indelible scars, and an invisible mark that, unbeknownst to them, was already hunting them in the dark.