Chapter Eleven: Noblesse Paranoia.

  Kainen huffed and heaved violently. He didn’t need to breathe, but it helped; helped generate more power and he needed all of it.

  His torso flexed, abdominal muscles knotting as he twisted. Violence exploded from his form as he phased body blurring again, and again, and again each punch carried by the speed of a runaway train. Then something tapped him from behind.

  He spun.

  The blizzard flickering around his abruptly halted form surged inward, snow screaming as it was pulled toward him. Any flake that dared touch his skin stained red, absorbing his victim’s life fluids as if the storm itself were feeding. He stared down at his clawing hands as a dreadfully annoying buzzing sound echoed somewhere beyond the storm.

  The noise pulled at him; important, somehow. More real than where Varikath had gone. More real than how he’d vanished. More real than how he himself had ended up here.

  Mizu froze.

  The thing in front of her jerked violently, eyes snapping open. Before she could even think to step back, it changed, twisting and contorting. Hollowed cheeks filled out, softening into something almost healthy. Its complexion warmed. Those horrible red-and-black, soul-stealing eyes flared and settled into a dazzling emerald green.

  Color rushed through its hair, bleaching it into a brilliant snow-white.

  It took a step toward her.

  Her vision lurched, the world bending like an acrobat mid-trapeze. She was certain absolutely certain; that it had been hanging upside down by those— those…

  There was nothing.

  Nothing wrong. Nothing unnatural.

  He was simply standing beside her, the way he always had been. No long, insidious black talons; just short, well-manicured nails crowning slender fingers. Smooth skin. Normal skin.

  He remembered.

  Where he was. What the buzzing was.

  That cantankerous demon box.

  He opened his eyes fully, and before him stood some girl. Rage twisted his face instantly; raw, instinctive hatred that some impertinent thing had entered his domain and watched him sleep. His lips curled back as a hiss slipped free on reflex, his body folding inward, muscles coiling to lunge before relaxing.

  Even as his compulsions lashed out.

  Her mind bent under the pressure, forced to accept normalcy, forced to believe that nothing was wrong as he lazily dropped, flipped, and landed on his feet beside her.

  He listened.

  Her heart hammered in her chest. Her lungs crackled wetly. Her arteries squelched like tinfoil stuffed with gelatin as blood surged through them. He smelled her fear, thick and sharp, pheromones flooding her sweat, adrenaline soaking into her bloodstream like seasoning.

  Well. That is unfortunate.

  She had seen far too much before he woke.

  “Do not move,” he said calmly.

  “Do not speak.

  You may breathe and take only those actions associated with it.”

  His voice struck her mind like a hammer, twisting thought against thought. Her body obeyed instantly, locking in place despite her still-screaming consciousness; she became perfectly still, save for the steady rise and fall of her chest.

  What the fuck.

  She screamed it internally for what felt like the hundredth time. It was all she had left. The only thing still hers. To be terrified, to gibber silently in her own head as she tried to understand what this man was, what he was doing, and what kind of ability could steal everything else so completely.

  Unbeknownst to her, Kain was having a similar internal debate, though with far less panic and considerably more irritation.

  He considered killing her. It was, after all, the appropriate response. Gazing upon a pureblood in such a manner was an unforgivable offense. The only complication was Andrew. Against his better judgment, Kain had begun to like the boy; an inconvenient development, especially given how troublesome secrecy would be afterward.

  I’ll interrogate it first, he decided. Then, if it’s unrelated enough… I’ll eat her.

  He wasted no time.

  “Why are you here, little creature?” he asked, without flair or ceremony. Simplicity was preferable. There was no sense expending effort on a potential victim. Or revealing more than necessary to an unknown, should i be forced to let her go.

  Mizu was petrified.

  One part of her wanted desperately to tell him whatever he wanted; anything to make this stop. Another part fought just as hard to protect Andrew, to keep this monster from learning anything that could put him in danger. In the end, neither part mattered.

  She had no choice.

  It felt as though invisible strings had been tied directly to her vocal cords. Her mouth moved, her voice answering him in a flat, mechanical cadence as she explained why she’d come; every reason, every circumstance that had led her here.

  Kain didn’t appear to understand even half of it.

  He nodded occasionally, sometimes tilting his head in what might have been engagement, but mostly his attention drifted as she spoke. She told him everything. The stupid, private details; why she’d wanted to talk to Andrew in the first place, why she hadn’t called Axle, her conversation with Missy.

  When she mentioned the booster, his focus sharpened for a brief moment. But before she’d spoken more than a few words about how it worked, he rolled his eyes. She moved on without realizing she’d been dismissed, continuing on to explain; down to the exact length of time she’d seen him sleeping.

  The entire ordeal made her feel ill.

  Worst of all, she couldn’t tell whether his control over her was growing… Or if he’d only used those initial commands to frighten her. Either possibility was worse than she wanted to examine too closely.

  He snarled.

  She didn’t see it. She didn’t hear it.

  Kain quietly shelved the plan of eating her. She would clearly be missed. Her rambling explanations, her complete lack of resistance, told him everything he needed to know. He had made a mistake; after dealing with Axle and Andrew, he’d assumed humans were simply more resilient.

  Instead, he’d overdone it.

  He hadn’t slipped past her mental defenses— he’d shredded them.

  And I’m sure Andrew will have an opinion on that, he thought with mild annoyance.

  Even so, he didn’t retract his compulsions. Petty as it was, he was still irritated at being awakened. Humans despised this level of intrusion, and he knew it… But before withdrawing, he settled on one final punishment.

  “Summon Axle,” he said.

  “He can decide how to deal with this… mess.”

  His voice was smooth. Pleasant. Almost beautiful.

  It felt like a final insult.

  She obeyed.

  Her hands shook as she typed, panic bleeding through her fingers even if it couldn’t reach her voice. The message went out in frantic, capitalized desperation:

  ‘AT HIDEOUT PLEASE HELP I THINK HES GOING TO KILL ME’

  The moment she hit send, the sensation vanished.

  The cold, invasive pressure akin to an icy rod driven straight up her spine into her brain suddenly withdrew. Her body revolted at the absence, organs squirming as sensation rushed back all at once, leaving her nauseous and hollow.

  And finally, terrifyingly…

  Alone in her own head again.

  The backlight of a screen reflected twice over in the blackout lenses of Axle’s glasses.

  Well, that didn’t take anywhere near as long as I thought it would.

  He briefly considered leaving a message for Andrew before heading out; but his thoughts drifted back to the previous evening, and he dismissed the idea just as quickly. It wasn’t a good one. Andrew was attached to that Transylvanian motherfucker in a way that bordered on unnatural. And as much as Kain didn’t show hostility…

  Axle was intimately aware the attachment wasn’t mutual.

  It was in the details.

  The way Kain barely bothered to hide his superiority complex. The open annoyance whenever Andrew insisted he stay out of people’s heads. It made it painfully clear how little he thought of humans as a whole.

  Andrew, of course, was opinionated. Loud about it, too. A man firmly on the path to foolishness. And rereading the text now, Axle couldn’t shake the nagging certainty that if he brought Andrew along, the boy would push Kain past the point of politeness; past the point where he let them handle things the way they wanted to.

  He was half-sure the only reason that hadn’t already happened was because Kain only half listened to what they said, and only understood about half of that.

  This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.

  Plus, he thought absently, I’d rather not unpack how this is kind of my fault.

  “Still…”

  Axle racked the slide on his gun. Metal clicked back, revealing two names engraved cleanly into the chamber.

  Jonas & Alex Ceazar.

  Orange energy curled from beneath Axle’s nails, slipping into the barrel like barely contained chaos searching for a host. The names of the lost flared, glowing with explosive light before the energy sank into the magazine and bullets. The points fractured microscopically, the black powder within altered, with something like a little chemical X added to the mix.

  Anticipation grew within Kain.

  He could feel… something. A sense of dormant potential. Of something happening… Almost happening. Something immense unfurled its malignant digits, reaching up through the earth. At times, he saw it flicker from the girl locked inside her own body: a tongue of black energy licking off her skin before crumbling to the floor in brittle flakes. At other moments, a reddish haze sloughed from her like dense smog, dispersing just as quickly then, gone like a trick of the light.

  Unbeknownst to Axle, a timer had begun to tick down.

  The Dungeon Lord’s Mantle: at long last flexed.

  Red lightning arced across the god-sinew stitched into Kain’s body as the final droplets of his latent aura writhed within his energy system. Colorless. Pure. Unadulterated. The potential of infinity screamed through his specter. Then, at last, thick and viscous sludge surged across the totality of his spirit. The tidal wave consumed the blueprints of his soul, washing his bones in sorrow, transmuting the last remaining impurities into a dense, lightless aura.

  [You have gained eight experience]

  [Trait notification; Dungeon-Lord: Local area discovered Milwaukee; Suburn; Sector – C: Harley’s complex]

  [Trait notification; Dungeon-Lord: Potential dungeon location discovered]

  Then a completely new much larger screen unfolded itself from the air a liminal shape of nothingness contorting itself into a rectangle

  [Potential Dungeon locations: Harley’s Complex.]

  [Harley’s Complex

  Aura: N/A

  Shadow-Vein capacity: 1/1

  Traits: Urban, Labrynthian

  Local population: N/A

  Dungeon population: Unavailable

  Terror Radius: Unavailable

  Core-Room: The bad-actors last stand; Unavailable

  Size: N/A

  Minion capacity: N/A

  Core Functions: Unavailable

  Dungeon-Lord abilities: Disabled

  Captives: 1/0

  Status: Pending; Shadow veins priming]

  [Dungeon-Lord abilities temporarily populating due to extreme conditions]

  [Error no nearby shadow veins are primed; Processing.]

  Kain stared at the wall of notifications flooding his vision, each one filing itself into his mind as though it had always been there. Even when the system finally fell silent, the sensation did not.

  Something inside him twisted.

  Fought.

  Ambient mana tore itself apart as opposing forces collided. The mana sought to understand; to scan intent, to interpret. The dread aura of the Mantle only hungered, seizing any stray energy that brushed against it and shredding it outright. A thread of paranoia and anger wormed its way past Kain’s mental defenses.

  They’re coming. He thought to himself before; suddenly the system unloaded on him again.

  [Mantle; lord configuration is being exchanged for Massacre configuration.]

  [Massacre configuration pre-requisites: Dungeon configuration stage: Incomplete (True) Dungeon population: 0/N/A (True) nearby hostile population: 500+ (True) Concealment: false. 1/Unknown knows the location of the dungeon-lord and his potential dominion (True)

  [Dungeon-Lord temporary abilities: Resist Divination; Terror pulse; kill me once.]

  [Trait notification; Dungeon-Lord: No core exists, no shadow-veins are primed, no Dungeon is established; Massacre configuration will degrade you by 1% per hour. Massacre the invaders, strip the lands and build the dungeon. Dungeon-Lord Cataclysm in approximately 99 hours.]

  Black, metaphysical venom pulsed alongside his heart as his being began to shift. Magical circuits and purpose-built organs were added to and refined. The thick dark aura clung to his psi core, wrapping it in writhing obsidian mire that felt as though it were merely waiting— coiled to detonate. It seeped into his bones, licked across his joints like a calligrapher’s brush, etching ghost-runes into his frame.

  Then his life force rebelled.

  His vampiric vitality fought the Mantle tooth and nail. Skin bulged as arteries burst; only for the symbiotic horror lurking just beyond the veil to seize the escaping essence, force it back, and flood his veins anew. His blood recoiled inward, life and unlife grinding together under unbearable pressure.

  [Trait unstable; Kill Me Once: doubles degradation speed; create the dungeon to purge incompatible dungeon-lord abilities generated during survival mode.]

  He exhaled— long, hard, unsteady.

  The breath was unnecessary. But the tremors that wracked him were not.

  A palpable exhilaration coursed through his form as he felt the endless malice beneath the earth stir, stretching upward toward him like a child seeking an approving father’s hand. It was still distant. Still small.

  But not for long.

  He could feel them now.

  They knew he was here.

  Reaching. Searching for structure, infrastructure something to anchor their power, something that did not yet exist. Each second they grasped for a hand that was not there, their instability worsened. They crackled, grew volatile.

  And the Mantle echoed their pulse.

  It finally clicked.

  This was how Dungeon Lords did it. How new-borns scarred entire continents like demigods barely learning to crawl. There was an obscene amount of energy locked in the land beneath him; enough to rival a major leyline, and it was still swelling. Every tremor from the girl beside him made the shadow-veins quiver in pleasure, her terror feeding them. Her rage. Her malice. Her self-reprisal. Every fragment of negativity that formed the bedrock of her mind flowed downward, nourishing the coils of pure evil tightening around the certainty of her imminent death like a serpent wringing prey for the last drop.

  If even one of these veins detonated… how much of the continent would remain?

  Did those Dungeon Lords explode because they had too few anchors? Too many? Or because they had nothing to support the pressure? Or…

  Was it intentional?

  Did Eidruhn send me to die?

  His thoughts were ripped apart mid-spiral by a sudden surge of rage. The shadow-veins responded instantly, surging through the earth in desperate imitation, straining to reach him. But the motion was immature and unfocused. The ground rumbled softly, a stunted echo of true catastrophe, before the nascent quake collapsed in on itself.

  That evil little fuck.

  That was why Eidruhn had been so certain. He hadn’t told him a damned thing. If that smug, intrepid construct of energetic hallucination hadn’t omitted the truth, Kain would have gone…

  Nuclear.

  The word stopped him cold.

  Nuclear?

  The term felt alien. Foreign. Yet as he turned it over, a tingling crawled up his blackened spine and a memory; not his own forced its way into focus.

  An island.

  Isolated. Ringed by Open Ocean, distant land barely visible on the horizon. Fire erupted across it as though an Arch-mage had clawed their way out of the fiend pits themselves. Inferno storms tore through the land, reducing its heart to ash. Then… Detonation. A storm of shrapnel and shockwaves pulverized what remained, the island buckling as though it might sink beneath the sea.

  When the vision cleared, only ash and pressure remained.

  It was disturbingly familiar.

  A dungeon-born cataclysm; right down to the toxic field that would forever poison the land where it occurred.

  That lethal gaze snapped back to Mizu.

  No.

  Not Mizu.

  The intruder. The invader. Fodder. A foundation stone to claim dominion. A seed to grow the dungeon.

  Urgency battered his mind. Paranoia followed close behind fear of discovery, of pursuit, of eyes turning toward him. The shadow-veins whispered to his dark aura, hunger braided with warning, flooding his spirit with ghost-memories not his own.

  Lies.

  Betrayal.

  Patricide.

  Fratricide.

  Matricide.

  Cheating.

  Suicide.

  Despair.

  Filthy animals. Engines of raw malice, every one of them. The deep wells of humanity’s lament pulsed beneath the earth itself, murmuring of cruelty and sin, urging him to make a display. To cow them. To remind them.

  Start with the girl.

  Make her the focal point.

  Then only fifty more would be needed; to sustain the veil, to hide him.

  She stood rigid, posture locked into an unnatural stillness that had begun to ache. Pain barely registered compared to the terror flooding her chest. Axle had seen the message— she knew he had, but with every second that passed she became more certain he wouldn’t be fast enough.

  Whatever they had gotten involved with… it was unstable.

  He was unstable.

  The visions battering her mind grew sharper, more violent. Pieces of his true form slipped through the cracks, snapping into focus for fractions of a second and every time she noticed, it felt like being struck across the skull as something seized the thought and forcibly restored the illusion.

  The classer in front of her hissed, muttering to the empty air. The calm, suave, unnaturally pleasant charisma he’d worn before was gone. In its place was raw paranoia. His eyes darted constantly, tracking things that weren’t there. His voice grated, harsh and uneven.

  At times he would tense suddenly, and the air itself seemed to seize, everything going deathly still, as though a predator had fixed its gaze on the room itself.

  At others, the ground trembled beneath them, glasses rattling, furniture shivering as the earth answered something it did not yet understand.

  She could hardly tell what he was saying.

  Whenever he spoke to the air around him, the sounds were wrong; most of it not even adjacent to English. The few syllables that came close carried no meaning, no structure. Just noise shaped like language.

  Yet something kept pulsing at the back of her mind.

  Her subconscious her instincts, something older than thought, fed her the same conclusion again and again, uninvited and unavoidable.

  He’s talking himself into killing me.

  Each pause, each muttered phrase, wasn’t hesitation, it was justification. He wasn’t waiting for Axle anymore. He was done waiting.

  The last realization didn’t even need words.

  She watched it happen.

  The effigy of famine relaxed. His shoulders settled. His eyes stopped darting, paranoia giving way to focus, cold amd resolved. Calm in the way predators became calm right before the strike.

  And when he looked back to her, something peeled away.

  Unseen to Mizu, black mist flaked from her aura like rotting bark, drifting lazily to the floor. It carried despair, resignation; the quiet grief of someone who had accepted an unfair death. The shadow-veins beneath the shack drank it eagerly, coiling tighter, swelling as they were seasoned with a new soul’s surrender.

  The leylines lapped at her presence, stripping at her edges, breathing her weakness into the nascent architecture forming beneath the lord’s will.

  Kain stepped forward.

  The movement was smooth, soundless until his foot found a loose board.

  The crack echoed like a gunshot.

  Mizu flinched, a broken sound tearing out of her throat as she squeezed her eyes shut. When she cracked one open.

  The door exploded inward.

  Wood screamed as it tore free, the slab slamming into a poorly placed shelf and obliterating it in a spray of splinters. Sunlight flooded the hideout in a blinding wedge between her and Kain.

  His skin hissed instantly.

  Steam bled from every pore as even indirect light punished him, his flesh blistering and reddening where it touched the glow. Then the reaction escalated.

  Moisture ripped from his body in a violent flash, steam erupting outward as if his blood itself had been boiled away. Fire crawled across the stolen clothes, orange and yellow licking upward while his skin burned in sickly greens and deep, bruised blues.

  The scream that followed wasn’t human.

  It slammed into Axle and Mizu alike; raw like a mechanical animal with an engine for lungs— like something enormous and furious being torn apart from the inside.

  The floor shook. Pallets split. The room itself seemed to recoil as dread rippled outward, staggering Axle even as he fought to stay upright, his mind struggling to process what he was witnessing.

  Kain’s body failed.

  Attributes crashed. Power bled away. Whatever cursed vitality sustained him was torn out piece by piece, atom by atom, incinerated by the hateful force bound to the sun. He tried to phase, nothing. Tried to compel; his aura vaporized before the intent could form.

  Even if Axle wanted to move, he couldn’t.

  The mantle’s terror crushed him in place, senses spinning as the ground trembled beneath his feet. And then, just as suddenly…

  It stopped.

  The fire.

  The fear.

  The pressure.

  What remained was a shape slumped against the wall.

  A tall skeleton.

  Its chest cavity was hollow, the heart reduced to gray ash between blackened ribs. Empty sockets stared outward, fangs exposed where lips had burned away, the skull fixed in an accusatory, lifeless rictus.

  Axle forced himself upright.

  Whatever guilt tried to surface, he buried it. The body didn’t move. There was no twitch, no regeneration, no sign of the endless healing Andrew had described.

  He stepped closer.

  Mizu still hadn’t moved.

  She stood rigid, eyes blown wide, staring straight into the sunlight as if she hadn’t realized the danger had passed. Frozen exactly where she’d been when Axle burst in; before the screaming, before the fire.

  Axle took another step, peering into the ruined chest cavity, noting the pile of ash where something vital had once been.

  Then.

  Footsteps thundered behind him.

  He heard the door grind softly against the floor, its hinge sagging after the recent abuse.

  Mizu was already gone.

  She didn’t hesitate, didn’t look back. She shattered the rear window of the bakery overlooking the hideout, glass spraying as she hurled herself through the opening, nicking her forearm as she passed; like a dolphin forcing itself through a ring it might miss. She tore through the staff room, knocked some kid at the counter flat as she vaulted it, and ran.

  She didn’t care who called the cops she didn’t give a damn about anything besides getting away.