Chap 136: Dark Sorcery

Four days passed since Kie and teammates faced off Varrak in the Vergant village. The time off they got, he spent with Tee at the windy fields laying his head on her lap and letting her brush his hair. 

All the while his mind went back to taking the blame for the Primus soldiers using sorcery on his recent mission. Though the Commander declared the mission a success he didn’t like that Tee broke orders. Was she mocking him?

As the leader, he should be able to punish his members, even by scolding them. But he had to do something about it. Girlfriend or not. 

“What did you think of our last mission against Varrak?” he asked, looking up into the trees. 

Tee looked down at him, her loose strands blowing over her cheeks. “It was… intense,” she said quietly. “But we handled it.”

Kie watched the sky instead of her face. His fingers curled slightly in the grass. Handled it. That’s what she called that?

He exhaled slowly. “Tee… I asked what you thought. Not what you think I want to hear.”

Her hand paused in his hair.

Kie sat up, careful—slow—so he wouldn’t startle her. He turned to face her fully. His voice stayed calm, soft even, but there was weight beneath it. “Because of what you did, Prodigy now knows of the existence of Vergants.”

Tee’s eyes widened a little, guilt flickering. “Kie, I—”

“Wait.” He raised a hand—gentle, but unmistakably firm. “Let me finish.”

He took her wrist lightly, his thumb brushing the back of her hand, steadying himself before he continued. “I’m not angry. I’m just… disappointed in you.” His brows drew together. “You can’t just do that. Not when the team is counting on you. Not when I am. You can’t keep running off and acting on whatever you feel in the moment.”

She couldn’t believe he was scolding her. Him, of all people. A tight, sinking feeling pressed into her chest, the kind that made her feel younger, smaller… like she’d done something foolish. Belittled, even. Was it truly her fault that the Vergants had pleaded with her for the authority to use sorcery?

The breeze carried her faint sigh. “I only wanted to help them.”

The words felt small on her tongue. 

“I know.” He reached up and tucked a strand of her white hair behind her ear, his touch warm. “That’s why I’m trying to say this the right way. I want to be gentle with you, Tee. You know I do.”

His voice tightened, lower. “But I also can’t let you think you get special treatment because we’re… us.”

Her lips parted, eyes softening, but he didn’t let go of the seriousness in his tone.

“If it were Zod, Saeda or Miko who did that, I’d pull them aside. I’d correct them. So I have to correct you too.” He exhaled slowly, tension easing from his shoulders.

Tee lowered her gaze, shoulders curling inward. “I… didn’t realize I made you worry that much.”

Kie reached out and tipped her chin up with two fingers—gentle, yet unyielding. “You did. And you need to hear why.” His voice held steady. “You gave the Vergants authority to use sorcery after the Commander explicitly forbade it. And because of that, Prodigy now knows they exist—when they shouldn’t.” His jaw tightened. “Varrak may not even be dead. And if he survived… what you did might come back to hurt them. Or us.”

Her breath caught, shame and dread mixing in her chest.

But Kie’s expression softened again. “I know you didn’t do it out of ego or to defy me. You were trying to help. You wanted to give them a way to fight back. That instinct is good, Tee. It’s one of the things I admire about you. Youre’a fighter.” His thumb brushed her cheek, warm and reassuring. “I just need you to trust my lead next time. Even when it’s hard.”

Tee swallowed, nodding slowly.

“I’m not punishing you,” he said quietly. “I just need you to understand the weight of what happened. Because I care about you. As your leader… and as your boyfriend.”

Her eyes shimmered with fragile relief. But the feeling twisted painfully in her chest. How did he make her feel that way—an MG off wannabe? Usually, when those tools spat their dirty comments at her, she could shrug it off without a second thought. Their words never reached her. Never sank in.

But Kie’s did.

In that moment, something about the way he said it—soft, steady, disappointed—slipped past every wall she’d built. His voice didn’t just reach her, it cracked something open inside her, something she didn’t even know she’d been protecting.

“I understand.” she muttered, avoiding his eyes. 

Kie leaned his forehead to hers, letting the wind sweep softly between them. “Good,” he murmured.

He moved in for a kiss, but both of their senses snapped alert at the same moment. The faint echo of the Commander’s voice drifted through the swirling wind. They turned toward the source as a hologram flickered into view.

Mission time.

Tee’s shoulders eased slightly when she noticed the absence of red lines around the projection. It wasn’t one of the deadly Harbinger quests.

Tee and her comrades got suited up. Oddly, in the mission base, it was not the Commander who greeted them, but the Lieutenant. The Primus workers in uniform nearby were familiar.

The Lieutenant briefed the five Sentinels on a new assignment, but without the holograms the Commander usually used. 

“In all my years at Primus,” she began, her voice low but firm, “I have never encountered a case like this. Civilians of a Vergant village were slaughtered by one of their own. The Vergants of that civilization specialize in dark sorcery, and the disorder stems from a Xeno-victim who triggered a mutation. But here is the disturbing part—neither the host nor the Xenogene died. The Xenogene has instead manifested into an intelligent entity… one actively seeking control.”

She let that sink in before continuing. “You five managed to free your teammate Saeda when she was sealed with a vulture. You did not require the Ether dagger, which is why this request for aid came directly to us. Your objective is not to eliminate the subject, but to sever the corrupt bond. If you succeed…” Her eyes moved across their faces, sharp and unwavering. “You may prove to be the key to curing the Xenogene altogether.”

The room felt suddenly smaller. The weight of her words pressed down like a closing fist.

A cure?

Tee dropped her folded arms at the Lieutenant’s last sentence. She swore she was dreaming. All sounds seemed to stop as she battled with herself not to get excited, to stay rational. She remembered the countless false hopes from scientists who claimed they had finally found the answer.

It had been over two thousand years, and no one had found a cure. But realizing that case involved Vergants, her hope rose. The Commander once mentioned that the Vergants were the smartest beings.

Zod had already gotten over his excitement about visiting an inhabited Vergant village. The important thing was finding a cure for the idiopathic condition—the Xenogene.

To show respect, Zod raised his hand, and the Lieutenant paused for him to speak. “Just a gentle reminder that it was Miko who freed Saeda from the vulture.” He turned to Miko’s wide brown eyes. “This mission really rests on her.”

He gave Miko a gentle pat on the back.

All attention shifted to Miko, and her lips trembled. The cure to the anomaly that plagued mankind rested on her shoulders and she had no idea how to do it. She stared at the ground, lost, her body beginning to twitch.

Zod regretted what he said and quickly reassured her, “Forget what I said. This is really a group effort.”

He let out a nervous laugh to ease the tension.

The Lieutenant intervened, reminding them of the time. She and the surrounding Primus workers performed a two-stage teleportation chant. The second half of the chant was carried out by several natives in the village.

The five Sentinels landed, and the first thing that struck them were the trees. They loomed everywhere—towering, dense, their twisted black trunks spiraling unnaturally toward a canopy that swallowed the sky. The branches interwove tightly, leaves forming jagged, shadowy patterns that made the forest floor flicker with strange, shifting shapes. The whole place felt alive, almost sentient, and the air hummed with a low magical resonance that pressed against their senses.

Only after their eyes adjusted did the buildings reveal themselves—smooth, reflective structures that shimmered like metal. Their surfaces caught the scattered light filtering through the trees, bending it into pulses that almost seemed to breathe.

Even then, it was difficult to tell where the houses ended and the trees began. Some trunks were unnervingly straight and flat, echoing the shapes of the buildings. Branches arced in sharp geometric angles, their leaves arranged in precise patterns that mirrored the village’s architecture. Every element felt deliberately unnatural, as if the trees and structures had been grown together by the same dark hand.

A faint metallic tang lingered in the air beneath the dense canopy, blending with the damp earthiness of the forest floor.

The Sentinels had seen enough to know the place was unsettling. Then they noticed the Vergant natives surrounding them. Their dark-colored robes and hoods were starkly different from the bright colors and jewels of Primus. 

Tee didn’t bother imitating their accent for introductions. She simply took Zod’s cue and bowed. Kie’s recent scolding still echoed in her mind.

One native pushed back their hood, revealing a head marked with black tattoos. The tattoos shifted, and Miko let out a sharp shriek at the disturbing sight.

Black tattoos were daring—they could easily be mistaken for curse-marks. But Tee remembered that Vergants bore Balance Seals. It was the reason Xenosapians did not plague them. Perhaps the elders weren’t trying to kill her after all.

“Greetings, O Sentinels. We give thee thanks for thy coming to aid us. Pray, follow us.”

Two of the natives gestured for them to come and led them through a door carved into a massive tree. Zod waited until the door shut behind them to try initiating conversation with the natives. But the door opened again almost instantly, leaving him no time, and he had to keep following across a long pathway in a dull new place.

The pathway was one of many that stretched above and below them. Low murmurs drifted through the air, yet there wasn’t a soul in sight besides the Sentinels and their two escorts. The walls, rising all the way to the dark ceiling, reflected the dim lights like bronze. The air was a bit chilly, carrying an earthy scent—odd for an indoor space.

Miko held her arms tightly, trying to stop the trembling. But it wasn’t the chill that shook her. It was the weight of Zod’s earlier words. Was the success of that mission really going to depend on her?

Tee assumed they had just stepped out of a sophisticated elevator that brought them into this particular building. But one question nagged at her. Why hadn’t the natives simply teleported them directly to the Xeno-victim instead of making them walk? Her mind drifted to the village’s heart stone, which had to be intact if that place was still functioning.

She tried shifting her thoughts to anything else, but her mind kept returning to the heart stone. She prayed they weren’t traveling anywhere near the center. Her steps slowed. She dreaded the possibility of running face-first into an invisible barrier.

Her thoughts slipped back to her recent mission with Varrak. She was grateful the Primus soldiers had killed him and removed the decoy—because of them, she hadn’t come close to being barred. But things would be very different in an occupied village where the heart stone was actively upheld.

Her hand nearly moved to tug up her turtleneck when she noticed Saeda brushing her fingers through the air as she walked. Tee stared at her, wondering why her aura-sensing had to be such a struggle. Some people just had better luck.

Kie questioned the two Vergant escorts about the Xeno-victim they were meant to eliminate. He was hungry for any information about what they would be facing.

One of the escorts turned to them and spoke.

“Thou art from the modern world. Not only art thou unaware of many things, but thou couldst not receive knowledge through the Verge. Therefore, thou dost require a fuller explanation—one that might bear thee back through time.”

Kie’s brows knitted. Great. He had accidentally triggered storytime. Still, he and the team listened closely, doing their best to interpret the escorts’ archaic dialect. Their attempt at speaking modern English sounded like a poorly translated message from aliens.

Before the abolition of sorcery, the Vergants had been native to one of the five continents. It was once a utopia. Each sector was dedicated to a different study—among them the Xenogene and the Apocalypse. Drevarus, who would later become Severin, had ties to both sectors. His obsession with the Alpha Seal grew from his desperate hope that its power could cure his daughter…

Zod suddenly cut in, buzzing with interest. “His daughter—what was her real name again? I can’t remember it from folklore.”

“Lilith,” said the escort.

The Sentinels exchanged looks. They all knew that name. The leader of the Harbingers had taken on the name of Severin’s long-gone daughter.

The Vergant continued, explaining that their utopia had been destroyed during the Reign of Severin. Years after humanity revived, the Vergant Cleansing began. Those who resisted separated themselves and hid from the world according to their individual interests. That village was the result of such separation, and the few pioneers who founded it eventually grew into a population of hundreds.

That particular village remained devoted to studying the Xenogene. Dark sorcery was still commonly practiced there, as they possessed a deeper understanding of it than most. However, the incident that required the Sentinels’ intervention was entirely new—and wholly unexpected.

The corrupted Vergant was an apprentice training to become an elder, a man named Madara-J’nah. He had also been a host of the Xenogene. Like many before him, he believed the Xenogene could only be altered through the darker forces of the energy spectrum. And so his trials… and his experiments with dark sorcery on himself.