Chap 96: Scream

Saeda’s head felt tighter the longer she kept her eyes shut, trying to ignore the darkness that brought back painful memories. She needed her ears and second sense to track Sade, who had disappeared. He must have turned invisible again.

But Sade was done with invisibility. He hovered above the curly black-haired mortal, considering his next move. His purple lightning would be effective—but he had to be within an inch to deliver a blast she couldn’t dodge. When dirt from the cracking ceiling fell toward him, he glanced up.

Tingles crawled over Saeda’s head, and she opened her eyes just in time, leaping backward. A chunk of rock the size of a jacuzzi crashed where she had been. She barely landed before more rocks came flying—twelve that time. No, more kept coming.

Sid’s eyes glowed purple. Using a telekinetic chant, he hurled fifty massive chunks of ceiling at the mortal. Amid the chaos, he aimed to get close enough to extinguish her light for good.

Saeda summoned swords, but blue energy erupted from them before they even reached the boulders. The rocks exploded into smaller pieces and were flung back. She didn’t know how she was doing it. Her mind and eyes focused only on hazards darting toward her from every angle.

Pinches at her back cleared her mind of incoming boulders. She spun around, but before she could swing her swords, an invisible force yanked them from her hands. A ball of purple light hovered an inch from her forehead, flashing memories of her father. Her heart sank as her feet left the ground.

The darkness had already consumed much of the mountain outside the cavern, but cracks and falling dirt signaled the start of the earthquakes.

The earth beneath Saeda crumbled, and she fell into a deep fissure. Sade was upside down, which was why her sword attack hit nothing. His lightning blast aimed at her forehead missed when she shrank just in time, destroying only the boulders about to crush them both.

When the surge of lightning ended, Saeda had pulled herself up—but a boulder blocked her path. Too late to summon a sword, she spread her hands, hugged the rock, and stabbed her fingers into its coarse surface. With all her strength, she spun it around and hurled it toward Sade.

Upside down, Sade froze the boulder midair with sorcery, but the effort broke another chant he was holding. His energy was draining. The other boulders he’d sent all froze and fell. Flipping right side up, he faced the mortal, but she already had two swords ready.

Then the ground sank again. “No!” she shouted as the liquid earth swallowed her feet knee-deep, hardening to trap her in place.

She stabbed her swords into the ground and pressed down on the handles, trying to lift herself. The blades sank deep but found no anchor. Angled strikes didn’t occur to her at the moment.

Sade floated down, closing the distance. The spreading cracks beneath him didn’t faze him. Perhaps he needed to knock her out before finishing her off—something she couldn’t escape, even if she saw it coming.

The black hole expanding behind his puppet wiped his calculations from his mind. He glanced at his puppet. Riven could transport them at a critical moment, useful for once. When he killed the Sentinel before him, he wanted Riven to witness it. Curiously, he reached for Riven’s energy—but sensed nothing. Riven was either dead or gone.

The black hole tripled in size in a blink. Sade stepped back, eyes narrowing in conflict. Yet he found resolve. It was up to him to transport his members, and he would have to hold the encroaching darkness at bay in the meantime.

It had taken years for Sade and his members to hunt fragments to free the Omega Stone. Yet none had known what happened to matter not created by the Sealed Bond during a reset. He hadn’t forgotten the one member left behind. He had tried everything to retrieve them. That member was long dead. And that gave him an idea.

He darted his black-filled eyes at the mortal trapped in the ground. He wasn’t just going to hold back the darkness and create Vortexes for his members to leave. He was going to ensure that when he and his members left, the darkness would accelerate, trapping the Sentinels there until the reset. But first, he needed to make sure his little puppet couldn’t interfere.

When Saeda noticed Sade encasing himself in a purple force shield, she knew he wasn’t pausing. All she could do was try to pull herself from the ground. She gasped as the earth beneath her turned liquid and a force lifted her into the air. She reached frantically for the ground, only to drop face-first.

Telekinesis on large, moving objects was three times harder. It required immense energy. Usually, deactivating a fragment’s defense drained Sade’s energy, but on that quest it was holding back the darkness for hours—and maintaining a wide vortex that turned out to be useless.

His puppet wanted to be difficult, but he couldn’t meet her level at the moment. The energy he had left was reserved for transporting himself and his members. So he hurled a massive boulder at the mortal with such force that she was pushed deep into the darkness.

Saeda screamed as she spun through pitch black. No one heard her, so far was she from the lit cavern. The practicality of the light filtering through the cavern’s ceiling never crossed her mind. How could it, when she felt herself suffocating?

Kie still had blood running down his face, but Miko ignored it. After helping him to his feet, she darted away to complete the triangle with Tee. Lilith stood at the center of their formation.

Tee had no idea that the plastic ball Lilith held contained the fragment. With her mind in turmoil, she would never have guessed it. And when Lilith smiled at her, it was disturbing enough—but something far worse came.

Lilith used her long tongue to slowly lick Kie’s blood from the black, shiny fabric on her arm. Her eyes never left Tee.

Tee blinked, forcing herself to look toward the darkness on one side of the cavern to regain focus.

“What the—?” she blurted, realizing one side of the cavern was gone. But her teammates’ spinning swords at Lilith pulled her attention back.

It was a useless attack, but what else could they do? Kie wanted to unleash a single, powerful wave of energy from the edge of his sword at Lilith—but the pain of keeping his broken neck straight made the thought impossible.

Black smoke swirled around Lilith’s feet and rose, solidifying into a metal barrier. All their swords struck it and fell. The attack happened so fast that it took two more throws before their minds even told them to stop.

Small bulges began forming across the metal barrier, fusing their brows in concern. Within moments, their swords were swinging nonstop to deflect thousands of massive needles shooting at them.

Meanwhile, Lilith stood in the center, ripping the plastic off the fragment. When she saw a diamond instead, she stared until it shape-shifted into an orange ball with a red star inside. The strong aura confirmed it was the fragment. She tilted her head back and swallowed it.

The shooting needles stopped, and the barrier vanished. But Tee, Miko, and Kie had no time to pull the needles from their skin. They were shocked to see not Lilith standing in her spot, but a shadow darting across the ground—heading straight for Tee.

The wrenching pain in Tee’s heart made her flinch. She jumped back, narrowly missing two jaws of teeth that sprang from the shadow to bite her feet off. She wasn’t so lucky.

A sharp shrill numbed her ears as a slender hand with metal claws slapped her face. The snap from her neck echoed loudly before her vision plunged into darkness.

The creature left Tee mid-fall and sank back into the shadow, which darted toward Kie. Miko’s eyes moved fast, and she threw swords spinning like razor discs. The shadow twisted around each blade as they struck the ground.

In Kie’s next heartbeat, tears blurred his vision as the dark creature appeared before him. Four thin metal claws pierced his stomach and emerged from his back. When they were pulled out, he collapsed to his knees. Pain reminded him how far he still was from enduring immense levels of suffering.

Miko’s eyes widened as darkness appeared before her. She shrieked and shut them tight. When she felt her feet land on solid ground, she opened her eyes and realized she was at the edge of a chunk of earth cut off by darkness—far from where she had been.

The brown-eyed mortal had vanished and reappeared elsewhere. Lilith remained unimpressed, but she couldn’t submerge to attack when a red vortex expanded beside her. Only then did she see the darkness encircle her, leaving just a wide chunk of ground and streaks of light. Sade was keeping the rest back. As Lilith stepped through the squirming center of the vortex, her human form began to appear, and the darkness shrank to air.

Legion had finished channeling energy into his war hammer axe. A black beam of darkness zapped from the blade, aimed to fry the mortal on his knees—when the red vortex appeared.

Tight pinches on Zod’s skin warned him of imminent danger. Weak and dizzy, he pushed himself to the ground. The heat passing over his head singed most of his hair, and he blinked repeatedly to clear his vision.

Once Sade sensed Lilith passing through his vortex, he stopped holding back the darkness. His energy was low, and Legion could always be replaced if left behind.

Legion glimpsed the vortex shrinking rapidly, his fiery eyes dimming. His weapon dissolved into black smoke trailing behind him as he dashed through it.

The darkness recreated only matter forged from the fragment’s defenses. Anything outside that would remain trapped in the space until the erase.

When the ground beneath Miko disappeared, her heart sank. She expected to fall—but instead, she floated. The cavern and its light vanished, like a black blanket thrown over everything. She paddled, but no wind met her, confirming she hadn’t moved.

Tee’s hand vibrated, pulling her consciousness back. She opened her eyes to pitch black and the strange sensation of flying. Thoughts of being trapped by Sade made her scream.