Chapter 22: No Regrets Once the Move is Made
Eileen slid down the blood slick wall and collapsed onto the ground.
Her mana was gone.
Not low. Gone.
Her fingers trembled once, then stopped responding altogether. She could only sit there, breathing hard, watching her teammates still fight in front of her while tears ran silently down her face.
Loyi was not much better. His face had turned grey. The hand gripping his dagger was shaking from strain, but he still refused to let it go.
Hodell let out a quiet breath.
He had imagined many endings for himself.
In the academy dormitory, on those long sleepless nights, he had played through escape routes in his head over and over. If his identity was exposed at Liuli Cloud Dream Academy, how would he leave? If it happened inside the Rapid Response Department, how much time would he need? Which corridor? Which blind spot? Which lie would buy him another ten seconds?
By day, he acted.
Had his jokes with Carlo landed naturally enough?
Had the distance he kept from Celia looked normal rather than deliberate?
When those younger students came to him with bright eyes, asking for guidance with the trust only the innocent could give, he had smiled and taught them things wrapped in half truths and outright lies.
Sometimes, in the cafeteria, with sunlight pouring through the windows and his friends arguing about ideals, family, the Empire, and the future, he would drift for a second.
Just a second.
In that second, he would almost believe he belonged there.
That he could laugh with them and not be performing.
That maybe, if he just kept walking forward, the false identity could become a real one.
Maybe he could climb high enough using the Erhai School's resources, seize the power they wanted him to hold, and then turn around and strangle them with it. Maybe "Ryan" would stop being a mask and become a fact.
Every night, before sleep, he would tell himself the same thing.
Go to sleep. There's another performance tomorrow.
It was like reciting a shutdown command to his own mind.
And sometimes, just before sleep swallowed him whole, the night sky of Liuli Star would flash through his mind.
That brilliant sky.
That dark sky.
That sky like a flowing, endless curtain.
Before real despair arrives, people always keep a little luck hidden in their hearts.
Even now, with the cave filled with blood and beast stench, with death pressing in from every side, a corner of Hodell's mind still hoped this was some elaborate design by the Erhai School. Maybe another test. Maybe another trap with an exit hidden somewhere he had not yet seen.
Or maybe it was exactly the opposite.
Maybe the organization had already made enough progress with its New Human research that he was no longer that important. Maybe he had simply overestimated his own value.
If he died here today, everything would be simple.
His file.
His forged records.
His name.
His carefully woven fake life.
All of it would probably be summarized inside the General Administration's archives with one clean sentence.
Ryan. Loyal to the Empire. Exceptionally gifted. Died in the line of duty.
I once hid a secret inside a joke and told it only to the stars, he thought. When I die, the universe will just have one less punchline.
The beasts were closing in.
This really was the end.
And then—
Everything stopped.
It was not silence in the ordinary sense.
It was as if the world had been seized by the throat.
A pressure beyond description slammed down from above. The air froze. Sound vanished. Even the dust hanging in the cave seemed to stiffen in place.
The charging beasts halted all at once.
Every trace of madness in their blood red eyes was replaced by something simpler and far more honest.
Fear.
Not caution. Not hesitation.
The oldest fear there was. The fear of prey looking up and realizing the predator had arrived.
At some point, a figure had appeared above them on the cave wall.
No one had seen her arrive.
It was as though she had always been there.
Or as though space had simply decided to place her there without explanation.
She was slender, cold, and still. The dim cave light traced the line of her body and caught on her pale silver hair, but her face remained partly hidden in shadow. She did not look at the team below. She did not need to.
She slowly raised one hand toward the seething sea of beasts.
Then she pressed down.
The cave wailed.
Space itself seemed to groan under the force of it.
A terrifying gravitational field descended in an instant.
The swarm of beasts did not even get a chance to scream.
Their bodies collapsed.
Flesh, bone, scales, shells, all of it crushed flat in the same breath, as if a giant invisible hand had driven them into the earth. The ground was painted red. Thick, wet, and horrifyingly even. It spread all the way to the edge of sight.
One strike.
That was all.
The tide that had nearly buried Third Team was erased like loose dust off a table.
The few surviving beasts let out broken, panicked cries and fled into the dark tunnels, tripping over blood and bodies in their desperation to escape.
The hopeless trap was broken in the crudest, most unreasonable way imaginable.
Hodell stared upward, speechless.
…
By the time the immediate aftermath was over and the wounded had been stabilized, the team had gathered again in the briefing room.
"Captain, the preliminary report has already been sent."
Loyi tucked away his communication crystal and looked up.
Kyle rubbed beneath one eye with two fingers. He looked exhausted down to the bone. "Good. Has Ryan arrived?"
"Not yet," Eileen said. Her curiosity had not completely faded, even after everything. "Captain… that silver haired lady who appeared at the end… who exactly was she? She was terrifying."
Baron, leaning against the wall with his arms crossed, answered before Kyle did. His voice was still rough from shouting and blood loss.
"That was Lady Elanis."
There was no trace of his usual aggression in that sentence. Only respect. And something close to awe.
"If I remember right, she's the strongest person on the surface anywhere in Oluson."
He paused.
"The Silver Radiance Sword."
The title settled heavily in the room.
Then the door opened.
Hodell stepped in with an apologetic expression, one hand still on the frame. "Sorry. I had to deal with some of the wounds first. Did I keep you waiting?"
His eyes swept the room in one pass, taking everyone in.
Alive.
Spent, but alive.
Eileen's face softened immediately.
"It's fine. Sit."
Kyle gestured to the empty seat.
Once Hodell sat down, Kyle placed both hands on the edge of the table and spoke.
"First, on behalf of Third Team, I want to thank Ryan."
No one interrupted.
"Baron is alive because of you. Our line held because of you. If not for you, we would not have made it to the point where Elanis could intervene."
Hodell gave a small nod. "I only did what I could."
"Ryan."
Baron pushed himself off the wall.
He limped forward with an ugly stiffness, his injuries not yet fully settled. Blood and dust still stained him. He looked like a man carved from some rough, ugly battlefield stone.
Then, in front of everyone, he bowed his head.
Deeply.
"Thank you," he said.
His voice was hoarse, but every word landed like a hammer.
"If not for you, I'd be rotting in the gut of some beast right now."
He lifted his head again. His eyes were red, but steady.
"And everything before this… the way I looked at you, the way I treated you… I was blind. Narrow minded too. I'm apologizing to you properly."
He drew in a breath.
"From now on, you're my brother in life and death. In the General Administration, if anyone dares talk trash about you again, they answer to my shield first."
The room went silent.
Eileen let out a soft breath, almost a laugh of relief. Sasha's expression eased by a fraction. Even Kyle's face loosened.
Hodell stood up at once and caught Baron by the arm before the man could say anything else dramatic.
"You're making too much of it," he said. "We're teammates. Of course I was going to help. The timing just happened to work out."
He pushed the credit away cleanly and left it in the space between them as shared survival instead of personal glory.
That only made Baron look at him with even more weight in his eyes.
Loyi, however, had noticed something else.
He stepped closer, brows drawn.
"Repairing a standard issue shield on the brink of collapse, in the middle of that kind of pressure… even if it was temporary, that was not normal." His voice held no hostility, only sharp technical curiosity. "Ryan, that instinct of yours is a little too convenient."
Hodell smiled modestly and let the question pass unanswered.
Kyle took control of the room again.
"Everyone."
They all turned.
He remained standing, shoulders stiff.
"I called this meeting because I owe you all an apology."
The room grew still.
"This mission was mishandled from the start. As captain, I judged it too narrowly. I treated it as an illegal mining investigation and failed to account for the scale of the threat. That mistake nearly got the whole team killed."
He looked at each of them in turn.
"I failed in my duty. More importantly, I failed your trust."
His gaze settled for a second on Hodell.
"Especially yours. If not for you, we would not have made it out."
Then his jaw tightened.
"It's ridiculous that I…"
He stopped himself there.
Baron could not hold back any longer. "Captain, that wasn't just on you"
Kyle lifted one hand.
Baron fell silent.
"The mistake happened," Kyle said. "There's no use pretending otherwise. Regret doesn't turn back the clock."
Then something hard returned to his eyes.
"But I'll say this much."
He straightened.
"I will not make the same mistake twice."
No one spoke.
The silence in the room was heavy, but not empty.
Kyle rubbed his brow again and let out a slow breath. "That's all for tonight. Rest while you can."
He turned and walked toward the door.
Then Sasha, who had said almost nothing since the mission began, finally spoke.
"No one here blames you."
Kyle stopped.
"You should let go of what you can't change," she said. "We'll move forward with you."
Kyle glanced back at her, and for the first time that evening a real, if faint, smile crossed his face.
He nodded once and left.
Eileen watched the door close and sighed.
"The captain still can't put the past down."
Hodell looked over. "The past?"
Loyi answered instead.
"Before Oluson, Captain Kyle failed a mission badly enough to get demoted and transferred into the Rapid Response Department."
That explained a few things.
A man like Kyle was not carrying caution alone. He was carrying memory.
After a short silence, Loyi refocused and brought the discussion back to the case.
"We've already done a first pass on the recovered clues. Residual rune fragments. Energy trajectories. The physical traces in the vein. At this point, it's almost certain Black Bone was the main operator."
He laid several notes onto the table.
"What they were doing in No. 7 Vein was not normal mining. It was some kind of biological activation or driving experiment. We still don't have the full picture, but the beast tide was definitely linked to it."
"So we walked into a trap from the beginning," Hodell said. "Black Bone wanted the authorities to become the ones associated with the beast outbreak."
Sasha added in her flat voice, "Not just that. If this had gone cleanly for them, the first riot and the second could both have been buried under the same false narrative."
The realization settled over the room like a draft from an open crypt.
They had all been played.
Black Bone had triggered the tide.
Used the tide to erase evidence.
Prepared a second wave to erase the investigators.
And if Third Team had died there, then the whole mess could have been pinned neatly on a failed official operation.
The vein would become contested property.
The authorities would lose face and manpower.
Black Bone, standing closest to the ruins, would then step in again as "maintainers of order."
Profit.
Influence.
A cleaner hold on the area.
All bought with blood.
Baron's fingers clenched so tightly the knuckles cracked.
"Black Bone…"
His voice was low and murderous.
"They're finished."
The system prompt flashed in Hodell's vision a moment later.
[Mission [Investigation] completed. Gained 50,000 EXP]
…
In another part of Oluson, someone else was learning the same news in a very different mood.
The Black Bone patriarch let out a short, harsh laugh.
Then he set down his wineglass with exaggerated care, as if he were afraid the slightest extra force might crack it.
The next instant, he exploded.
Crash!
The inkstand on his desk flew across the room. The secret letter beside it followed. Black ink splashed over the thick carpet in a spreading stain that looked almost like a wound.
"Useless!"
His voice tore out of him.
"All useless!"
He paced like a trapped beast through the mess, every step louder than the last.
"Such a perfect plan. Such a perfect plan! And it was ruined by…"
His chest rose and fell violently. He snatched up the crystal goblet in his hand and crushed it outright. Red wine and blood ran together over his palm, dripping onto the floor and staining the front of his expensive suit.
"Elanis," he hissed. Then louder, unable to contain himself, "How did Elanis appear there?!"
He spun and seized the nearest subordinate by the collar.
"Do you understand what was waiting there? Do you understand how much work went into that trap? Even if those insects from the Rapid Response Department survived a little longer than expected, she should never have been drawn in. Never!"
The subordinate had gone pale.
"I… I don't know, Patriarch. The last reports were fragmented. Communication died right after. Even the lookouts near the vein have gone dark…"
The patriarch threw him aside.
He paced again, leaving bloody prints behind him.
"Our family… a hundred years of foundation…"
His voice wavered with fury and something worse.
"We were so close. One more step and we would have used this to enter the upper circles of the Empire. One more step…"
He stopped in front of the great family tapestry hanging on the wall, its crest glowing faintly in the light. He reached toward it, fingers trembling, then curled them back into a fist.
"At once," he said through his teeth. "Activate the emergency plan."
The subordinate snapped back upright. "Yes, Patriarch!"
"Prepare for the worst."
The subordinate ran.
The patriarch stood there for a moment, then turned and staggered toward the communication crystal.
His hand shook as he pressed down onto it.
The crystal glowed.
A blurred figure appeared.
"Oh?" the figure said lazily. "You look awful. So you failed?"
The patriarch's face twisted. He swallowed rage, forcing his voice into something usable.
"Help me suppress the evidence. Use your channels."
"On what basis?"
The question landed like a blade.
The patriarch's temple twitched violently.
"Don't forget our agreement."
"The agreement," the figure replied, almost amused, "was based on your success. What exactly do you still have now, other than trouble?"
"You…"
The patriarch could hardly breathe.
The figure in the crystal chuckled.
Then the communication ended.
Cleanly.
The light died.
The patriarch stared at his own reflection in the dimmed crystal, his face twisted by fury and fear.
Then he roared and hurled it at the wall.
The crystal shattered into glittering fragments.
It looked very much like the state of the Black Bone Family's ambitions.
He stood there, chest heaving, staring at the shards.
And then, uninvited, a thought slipped into his mind.
What if Elanis appearing there… wasn't an accident?
The cold from that idea went straight into his bones.
His blood seemed to freeze.
His knees gave way.
He fell heavily to the floor, sitting in the wreckage he had made with his own hands, surrounded by broken glass, spilled wine, black ink, and the first real taste of ruin.
.....
[If you don't want to wait for the next update, read 10–50 chapters ahead on P@treon.]
[[email protected]/FanficLord03]
[One Piece, Naruto, Bleach, Soul Land, NBA, and more — all in one place.]