Chapter 66 – Outer Being (1)
For a heartbeat, all I saw was that not-face.
Pink, pulsing, too smooth. No eyes, no nose, just a wet plate of flesh trying to pretend it understood what a human head was supposed to look like.
It lunged.
Hands—fingers—hooks—whatever they were—snapped toward my throat and the blazing point in my palm at the same time.
If they hit, the spell went off wrong.
If the spell went off wrong, best case I lost an arm.
Worst case, the square turned into a crater and I went with it.
"Master!"
Melody moved before I could.
The claymore jerked out of my grip as if someone had ripped it away—except there was no someone, just empty air and the brief shimmer of her form overlapping the steel.
To anyone else, it would've looked like a sword suddenly deciding gravity was optional.
To me, it was Melody grabbing her own body by the hilt.
The blade screamed through the space between me and the faceless guard, an arc of blue-white light and raw Ark current.
The not-hand reaching for my chest disappeared.
So did most of the forearm it was attached to.
The claymore carved straight through, mono-edge turned on for a fraction of a heartbeat. The cut didn't bother with neat anatomy; it just erased everything from elbow to somewhere in the shoulder.
The thing staggered, the pink face-plate shuddering, starting to split wider like something underneath wanted out—
Melody finished the motion.
She twisted her wrists—my wrists, technically, but right now that ownership was theoretical—and wrenched the blade down and across. Another line of impossible sharpness tore diagonally through the guard's torso.
For a moment, he was still standing.
Then he fell apart.
Not in gore.
In slices.
Chunks of armour and meat and pink wrongness hit the ground in a pile that didn't know what order it was supposed to be in anymore, then started to sizzle under the residual Ark still crawling through my sword.
Melody kicked the mess aside with the tip of the blade, as if flicking something off her shoe.
Only then did the claymore drift back toward my hand.
I grabbed it on reflex.
"You owe me, Master," she said sweetly, the words humming along the steel.
My heart was still trying to punch its way out of my ribs.
"I'll put it on the list," I said. "Survive this and I'll buy you… something."
"Something?" she echoed. "Vague. Suspicious. Acceptable. Finish the spell."
Right.
The spell.
The white-hot point in my palm was still there, compressed mana darling at the edge of what my channels could handle without screaming. Interrupting it for that long should've ruined the structure.
But the exoskeleton had taken some of the backlash, bleeding the instability off into its own runes. Ethan's patchwork genius actually held.
Good.
No more distractions.
I dragged my attention away from the sliced heap of almost-body and back to the real problem in the middle of the square.
The Outer-touched tower of meat was still there.
Still growing.
So Sang-kyu was still holding it in place.
He had one fist buried up to the wrist in something that might've been its chest, bracing his legs against a shattered fountain, seven cores burning like a string of overclocked stars. Every time the thing tried to twist away, he adjusted, kept it centred, kept it from falling sideways into another district.
I raised my hand.
The air around my palm wasn't just hot now.
It was *thin*.
Like reality had given up slightly in that one spot and decided to be less solid.
Promethean Inferno.
That wasn't the original name.
The original inventor had called it something dramatic and stupid in Old Imperial about "Heaven's Fire" and "Searing Judgement." It had taken him his entire life to bring it to Tier 7, and even then it killed half the people who tried to cast it.
Good concept. Terrible execution.
You didn't need to reinvent heat to make a sun-lance.
You just needed to stop wasting it.
I pulled in a breath that tasted like ash and broken stone.
Promethean Inferno, done properly, was simple on paper.
Step one: tie your spell diagram not to a point in space, but to a vector. A line. From *here* to *there*. Anchor "here" in your hand. Anchor "there" inside the target.
Step two: use the world as your fuel. Not just the air. All of it. Light from the sky. Ambient thermal noise. Mana vibrations. Anything that could be persuaded to agree with "hotter" as a direction.
Step three: choke it.
The original caster had dumped mana into a wide column and prayed.
I didn't pray.
I built a pipe.
In my mind's eye, the circuit folded. Channels narrowed, recombined, narrowed again, like arteries constricting. Instead of a wide beam, I forced the spell into a ridiculous, needle-thin conduit that ran straight up, past the clouds, past the sight of any normal mage.
The world above responded.
Light bent.
Not visibly—not yet.
But in the upper air, somewhere I couldn't see, a column of gathered brilliance thinned and focused, like a magnifying lens being shifted, adjusted, cleaned.
The colour in my palm shifted.
Yellow to blue.
Blue to white.
Most people thought "more heat" meant "more mana."
They never thought about *cleaner glass*.
"Melody," I said quietly. "If this goes sideways, remind me that this was genius, not suicide."
"It can be both," she said. "Aim."
I pointed my hand straight at the heart of the thing So Sang-kyu was holding.
Not the surface.
The core.
The place where all those stolen threads converged, where the pink faceless meat on every corrupted person in the square tied back into the main body.
[ System ]
[ PROMETHEAN INFERNO – CIRCUIT STABLE ]
[ SPELL TIER: 5 (OPTIMISED FRAME) ]
[ EXPECTED OUTPUT: TIER 7–8 EQUIVALENT ]
[ WARNING: CORE STRAIN IMMINENT ]
"Too late to be cautious," I told it.
And then I let go.
The point in my palm punched upward.
Not out.
Up.
For a moment, it felt like it missed.
Like I'd just thrown a tiny, annoyed firefly into the sky.
Then the sky answered.
A line dropped.
You couldn't really see the path it took. It was too bright, too thin, too clean.
What you *could* see was the instant it hit the top of the not-tower.
One heartbeat, the Outer thing was roaring, limbs flailing, flesh bulging.
The next heartbeat, a pillar of white burned straight down through it.
No flare. No explosion. No blossom of flame.
Just a *line*.
From somewhere above the clouds, through the core of the monster, into the ground.
It looked almost delicate.
For about half a second.
Then the world caught up to what had happened.
The white column didn't just burn.
It annihilated anything that counted as "connection."
Every thread tying stolen bodies into the mass evaporated.
The faceless guards—those still shambling—jerked as if someone had yanked on invisible leashes, then fell like puppets with the strings cut, the pink plates on their faces bubbling, blistering, shrinking into foul-smelling ash.
The main body tried to move.
It couldn't.
Promethean Inferno anchored it.
Not physically.
Conceptually.
"Here," I thought, teeth clenched. "Stay *here*."
The beam drilled down.
The Outer flesh it passed through didn't burn in the usual sense. Fire needs time for that. This didn't leave time. It took the available energy, focused it so hard and so fast that the matter didn't get the luxury of turning into anything recognisable.
Solid to plasma.
Plasma to—
Not my problem.
The entity screamed.
Not through a mouth. Through every inch of itself.
The sound clawed at the inside of my skull, a static howl that wanted to be heard in places that didn't have ears.
My S-rank core howled back.
Channels flared.
For a heartbeat, I could feel every part of the spell: the tightness of the conduit, the way the upper air boiled invisibly, the way the ground under the monster was starting to vitrify where the beam continued past it.
"Too deep," some rational part of me thought. "Too strong. You're cooking the bedrock. You're—"
I pushed more mana in.
Not because it was smart.
Because stopping halfway was worse.
So Sang-kyu let go and leapt clear at the last instant, as if his senses had screamed the same warning. His feet hit a toppled wall half a street away, sending cracks spidering out from the impact.
"Harb—!" he shouted something. I lost the rest in the thunder of the spell.
Promethean Inferno reached its saturation point.
The line thickened by a hair.
Then it ate everything in its path.
The Outer thing did not fall.
It *ceased*.
One moment there was a tower of stolen flesh and wrongness and screaming not-faces.
The next, there was a column of incandescent nothing punching into the earth, and a shockwave that blew outward in a ring, flattening what was left of the nearest buildings.
Stone turned to molten glass where the beam touched it directly.
Wood didn't get a chance to burn; it flashed straight to black and then dust.
People at the edge of the radius were thrown back, their hair and clothes singed, ears bleeding from the pressure.
I felt the spell reach the limit of the conduit I'd built.
The metaphorical glass began to crack.
"Enough," I tried to tell it.
The spell disagreed.
My core screamed.
You can't force that much power through a body, even with a good exoskeleton and reinforced channels, without something giving way. The armour drank as much as it could, runes flaring white-hot under my clothes, metal plates humming with stress.
Then they began to fail.
Bit by bit.
The amplification arrays Ethan had so proudly etched in—meant to handle "any load you want, Teacher!"—burned out one after another, popping like distant firecrackers along my limbs.
Melody's voice cut through the noise.
"Master! Stop!"
I *tried*.
The line thinned.
Wavered.
Cut off.
The world slapped back.
Sound, heat, dust, the stink of cooked stone—all of it rushed in at once.
The last thing I saw before my vision overloaded was the square.
Or what was left of it.
A crater had replaced the heart of the plaza, edges glassy and uneven. The buildings directly around it were half-gone, their fronts melted away like wax too close to a candle. Further out, structures leaned, cracked, roofs caved in.
A whole district, carved open.
The Outer thing was gone.
So were a lot of other things.
"Too much," I thought dimly. "I overdid it. Again."
[ System ]
[ PROMETHEAN INFERNO – COMPLETED ]
[ PRIMARY TARGET: DESTROYED ]
[ COLLATERAL DAMAGE: EXTREME ]
[ USER CONDITION: CRITICAL – FORCED SHUTDOWN ]
"Of course," I muttered.
Then my knees stopped being knees.
The world tilted.
I felt myself falling.
Someone caught me.
Arms under my shoulders, another under my knees. The grip was absurdly gentle for how strong it was.
I caught a glimpse of a familiar face as my head lolled sideways.
So Sang-kyu.
Closer, his eyes were even sharper. Sweat and blood streaked his skin, but his grin was wide and bright and utterly unreasonable for a man who'd just gone ten rounds with an outer fragment.
He said something.
It might've been my name.
It might've been "idiot."
It might've been both.
The words came out in a mess of Eastern syllables and broken Common, my hearing already going fuzzy.
Then everything went dark.
***
Seven days later, I woke up.
Pain wasn't the first thing I noticed.
Weight was.
Heavy blanket. Soft mattress. The distinct sensation of not being on the ground, not on stone, not in a crater. A ceiling above me, whitewashed, beams crossing it. The smell of alcohol and herbs and something sharply clean.
A hospital.
My lungs worked.
That was nice.
I drew in a slow breath and immediately regretted it as my ribs reminded me I'd been used as a conduit for a solar drill.
"Don't move too much," Melody said.
Her voice came from the side of the bed.
I turned my head.
Slowly.
She sat cross-legged on the little table by the window, intangible ankles resting comfortably where the wood should've been solid. Her sword-body leaned against the wall in the corner, wrapped in plain cloth. To any passerby, it was just luggage.
To me, it was humming quietly.
Melody watched me, eyes steady, hair falling around her face like a dark curtain.
"You were out for seven days," she said. "I was beginning to think I'd have to start poking priests just to see if their healing would annoy you enough to wake up."
My throat felt like sand.
"Water," I croaked.
A real hand—not hers—appeared at the edge of my vision, holding a cup to my lips.
I blinked.
So Sang-kyu.
Up close, he looked even older and even more dangerous. A few new bandages wrapped his forearms. His expression was somewhere between fond exasperation and curiosity.
He helped me drink, then stepped back.
Said something in his language—honestly, it could've been "don't die in my bed, brat, it's bad manners"—and then added, in accented Common:
"You… burn big."
Melody snorted.
"That's one way to put it," she said.
I sank back into the pillow.
"Status?" I asked her quietly.
She tilted her head.
"Outer fragment: gone," she said. "The thing you hit doesn't exist here anymore. The threads feeding it are charcoal and regret."
"Collateral?" I asked.
"Bad," she said bluntly. "You erased a whole district, Master. Buildings, streets, some very expensive statues. The duke's people are… conflicted."
I closed my eyes for a second.
Of course they were.
"And casualties?" I forced out.
Her expression softened.
"Less than it could have been," she said. "Most of the ones in the direct hit zone were already gone—faces eaten, souls halfway pulled. Your spell burned the connection they had left. It wasn't merciful, but it was better than leaving them hanging."
I let out a slow breath.
The ceiling beams blurred a little.
"You also impressed the local martial arts monster so much he carried your unconscious body through a collapsing city to the best hospital in Ocria," Melody added dryly. "Muttered at anyone who complained until they shut up."
I glanced toward the doorway.
So Sang-kyu was already gone, silent as when he'd appeared. Probably punching something else.
"He called you something," she mused. "Har… something. Har-bald? Har-bard?"
"Harbard," I said. My voice was still rough, but at least it worked.
"Harbard, then," she said. "Well, Harbard, congratulations."
She smiled, small and sharp.
"You picked a fight with the Outer, annihilated a neighbourhood, nearly cooked yourself from the inside out, and earned the respect of a man with seven mana cores and terrible fashion sense."
She tilted her head.
"That's a good first week of freedom, I think."
I stared at the ceiling.
Seven days gone.
A district turned to glass.
An Outer fragment erased.
And somewhere beyond the sky, something bigger than that fragment had definitely noticed.
"Yeah," I said softly. "Good start."
My core twitched.
Outside the window, the city murmured—wagons, voices, the faint clang of rebuilding.
Freedom, apparently, came with a lot of screaming.
I closed my eyes again.
Just for a moment.
Melody watched, expression thoughtful.
"We're not done with them," she said quietly.
"I know," I whispered.
The darkness took me again.
This time, I let it.