Silence lingered after the Descent, but it wasn't peace. It was anticipation—sharp and taut, like a blade held just before a strike. The five stood still in the vast stone chamber where they had emerged, each altered, each holding something new behind their eyes.
They had descended into themselves and returned changed. But this wasn't the end of the Gatewalk. If anything, it felt like the beginning.
Kael adjusted the Nullglaive against his back. It felt lighter now. As if it pulsed with his blood, syncing deeper with each breath. Beside him, Rei flexed her fingers, tiny arcs of lightning crackling between them. Elias's boots no longer touched the ground—he hovered, faintly, eyes lit with kinetic resonance. Veyra walked with figments at her side, translucent and shifting. And Thorn—Thorn radiated heat. Not visually, but in the way space seemed to bow around him, as if he were forged from pressure and flame.
The air itself tasted different.
The chamber around them began to shift. Pale blue runes lit along the walls, casting long shadows.
[System Sync: 93% → 94%]
[Core Stabilization in Progress…]
[Descent Sequence Concluded]
[Path Alignments Locked: Veil-Walker | Tempest Reaver | Architect-Kinetic | Dreambinder | Bastion-Bloodline]
A new pathway opened. Not a door—an absence. As if space had been peeled away, revealing a stair carved from mist and memory.
They didn't speak. They simply stepped forward into the dark.
---
The world below the spire changed again.
Gone were the smooth, structured stone halls. They walked now through a vast canyon, its walls rising high on either side—jagged, almost unnatural, like a wound carved into the world itself. Overhead stretched a sky that wasn't a sky: deep violet and swirling with subtle currents of light, as if clouds were painted with motion rather than substance.
Crystalline vines hung from the cliffs, gently glowing in pulses. Glass bridges arched from ledge to ledge, fragile and sharp.
"This feels… older," Veyra murmured. "Like we've stepped into something that forgot what it was supposed to be."
Elias ran his hand along the canyon wall. "These aren't carved. They were grown. Crystallized over thousands of years—maybe more."
Kael nodded once. "Keep alert. This place is watching."
Their footsteps echoed strangely. Sometimes too many echoes, sometimes not enough. Shadows shifted in ways that didn't match the light.
It wasn't long before they passed the first ruined structure.
It was half-sunken into the canyon wall. Spires made of some black mineral jutted outward like broken teeth. It had no doors. Just an open mouth and carvings—faded, jagged—etched into the stone.
Kael's eyes caught one.
An eye symbol, split by a jagged line. Beneath it, written in Old Veilscript:
> "What was seen cannot be unseen."
He didn't translate aloud.
Instead, he touched the haft of the glaive—more out of habit than fear. The air here whispered. Not in words. In implication.
---
They pressed on.
Time passed strangely.
Sometimes it felt like minutes. Other times, like hours had slipped past in silence.
Then, without warning—
The canyon pulsed.
It was a soundless wave. A ripple through stone and thought.
From the walls, shapes began to pull free.
Obsidian hounds—sleek, angular, and wrong. Their bones shone through glass skin, spines rimmed with flickers of blue flame. They didn't bark. Didn't snarl.
They moved in practiced formation.
And they attacked.
---
Kael stepped forward instinctively, glaive whistling as it came free of its holster. The first hound lunged low, fast. Too fast.
But Kael was faster.
He spun, the glaive slicing a perfect crescent through the air. The arc blurred—an illusion split from the real blade. The shadow double struck the hound's flank a split-second before the real blade cleaved into its skull.
A sharp crack. The creature shattered like obsidian dropped from height, fragments melting into black mist.
"More incoming!" Thorn's voice was a low bellow as he slammed his forearm into the charging jaws of another beast. The force of the hit rolled off his gauntlet like a wave, dispersing in a flare of orange. Emberguard pulsed—his defenses rising with every blow taken.
Three hounds flanked Rei.
She moved like a tempest incarnate. Blink. Dash. Arc.
Her blades hummed with electricity, weaving through the air. One struck, and lightning bound her target in a net of crackling pain. She blinked behind it—Stormbind activating in perfect timing—and drove both daggers through the spine.
"Two down," she hissed.
Veyra was a phantom, always just out of reach. Her figments danced between enemies, mimicking her posture. One was a mirror image—slashing with curved knives—another distorted, stretching too far to be real. Confused, two hounds leapt at a figment, only to phase through it. In that breath, the real Veyra struck true.
"They're learning," Elias warned. "They're coordinating movement patterns."
He raised one hand.
Vector Cage.
Gravity compressed in a dome around three hounds. They spasmed mid-leap—pulled in strange arcs, their bodies bending unnaturally—until they burst from the pressure, their cores imploding.
Kael's glaive blurred again—this time not as a feint, but a deliberate feint-path left by Ghostline Step. One hound tracked the illusion; the other followed Kael. But Kael had already shifted his path.
Shardwalk.
He passed through the canyon wall like smoke—reforming behind his enemy.
One strike.
Down.
---
When it was over, thirteen glass-hounds lay dead. Their remains melted into nothing, as if they had never truly been there.
Kael rotated the glaive slowly, breathing hard but calm. The team reassembled in a loose ring, watching the shifting cliffs for more.
"I don't think this was random," Elias said. "That wasn't just a patrol or a response. That was a test."
Kael nodded. "It felt like a trial. A coordinated pressure test. Measuring us."
"But why?" Rei asked.
Veyra looked toward the canyon walls, her voice quiet. "Because something older than us is watching. And deciding."
---
They moved on.
Soon, the canyon narrowed into a funnel-like cleft. The sky above thinned into a bright streak of roiling violet and turquoise light—an aurora bent into a cyclone. This zone… wasn't just dangerous. It was transitioning.
Kael noticed it first.
"The Veil's growing thin here," he murmured. "It's bleeding through."
Elias glanced up. "You feel that too?"
Veyra nodded. "I feel everything."
Reality felt… frictionless. Too easy to move in, as though gravity and density fluctuated slightly with every step. Sounds echoed twice, once now, once a second later.
A shard of sky broke off from above and fell like a blade.
It didn't hit them.
It phased through the canyon wall—and from that wall came a sudden, low moan.
Stone began to… breathe.
---
"Kael," Thorn rumbled. "We're not alone."
The group dropped low, moving behind jagged cover.
There, at the canyon's far bend—barely visible through refracting air—a silhouette moved.
Not a monster.
People.
At least six of them, moving in a tight unit. Matching uniforms. High-quality gear.
Symbols on their shoulders.
Kael narrowed his eyes. He recognized one.
"House Malkyre," he whispered. "Imperial enforcers."
Elias's face hardened. "Legacy family. I thought they weren't participating in this Gatewalk."
"They weren't," Kael said. "Not officially."
"Then why are they here?" Rei asked.
"Same reason we are," Veyra murmured. "To find something the rest of the world isn't supposed to see."
---
Kael crouched behind a slanted shard of glassstone, watching the Malkyre unit move with disciplined grace. Their lead scout—broad-shouldered, spear in hand—scanned the canyon's edges like he expected the walls themselves to strike.
These weren't students. They weren't here to learn.
They were hunting.
"We can't take them now," Elias whispered. "We don't know their numbers, their paths, or their motives."
"We're not taking them," Kael replied. "But we are following."
Rei gave him a side glance. "Since when do we shadow Imperials?"
"Since they started breaking the rules of the Gatewalk," Kael said. "Whatever they're here for—it's not sanctioned. And if it's not sanctioned…"
"It's worth knowing," Veyra finished.
Thorn grunted. "I'll take rear."
And like that, they became shadows.
---
For over an hour, they tracked the Malkyre squad through winding caverns and glowing ridgelines. The environment continued to deteriorate into instability—gravity flickered, footholds warped subtly under pressure, and several times Kael saw flickers of his own reflection moving independently on mirrored cliff faces.
The Veil was unraveling here.
Not violently. Subtly.
Like something was pressing on the seams of reality from the other side.
Then… the air changed again.
He tasted metal.
And ozone.
Then came the hum.
It wasn't a sound. It was a pressure. Low and vibrating in the bones—like something immense and alive had noticed them.
They rounded a corner and saw it.
A crater.
Vast, at least fifty meters across, cracked deep into the canyon floor like a gaping mouth. Around the rim were pylons—some shattered, some glowing dimly. Glyphs hovered in midair, cycling slowly. In the center?
A rift.
Not a Gate. Not quite.
A wound.
Like the world had been pierced.
Out of it spilled light and shadow in equal measure. And standing before it… were the Malkyre. Waiting. Chanting.
And then—
Something answered.
---
It came from the rift like a breath held too long.
A creature made of fractured geometry and glasslike limbs. It shifted shapes between moments, never fully settling. Its face was a mirror, and in it—Kael saw not himself, but Dorian, smiling with blood on his hands.
[Veil Entity Class: Echoborn – Wound-Level Aberration]
It shrieked, and reality broke.
Not shattered—bent.
Time stuttered. The canyon became a kaleidoscope. The rift surged outward, and two of the Malkyre were gone before they screamed—one twisted into a spiral of motion, the other reduced to ash.
Kael didn't hesitate.
"Form up!" he barked, instincts snapping to the forefront.
The five spread wide. Thorn anchored the left, shield raised. Rei vanished into mist and reappeared midair, blades flashing lightning. Elias cast three Vector Cages in a triangle around the entity—but they buckled immediately.
It wasn't obeying physical laws.
"Anchor it!" Kael called. "Veyra, can you bind its perception?"
She focused—three figments bloomed around the Echoborn, each mimicking its instability. It turned toward the wrong one.
That was all Kael needed.
He surged forward, glaive gleaming. Ghostline Step split him. Two Kaels darted in opposite directions—one vanished in a shimmer, the other ducked low, then activated Shardwalk.
He phased through the Echoborn's leg—coming out behind it—and swung upward.
The glaive hit.
It cracked. Reality itself cracked.
The Echoborn staggered back, glitching in place.
Then it screamed.
Rei landed a stormstrike on its core.
Thorn absorbed a glancing hit that would have eviscerated a lesser fighter—his aura surged in reply, Emberguard flaring bright red.
Elias funneled kinetic pressure into a single sphere the size of a coin and released it into the open rift. It reacted—the wound wavered, and the entity grew more solid.
Kael saw his chance.
He charged again—this time alone.
Blade gleaming. Breath held.
He struck true.
---
The Echoborn shattered inwards. Not into pieces—into possibilities. Like it was made of choices unchosen.
The rift dimmed.
The canyon pulsed once more, and all fell still.
---
[System Alert: Wound Encounter Stabilized]
[Veilcore Sync: 96%]
[Collective Advancement Achieved]
[All Present Combatants Have Gained Progression Points]
[Temporary Anchor Established – Storm March Region Access Unlocked]
Kael exhaled slowly, the glaive humming in his hand.
Around him, the group recovered in silence.
Above them, the sky cracked again—this time with streaks of gold and silver across the violet.
And from deeper in the canyon, something ancient stirred.
---