CHAPTER 123
Black Sea
“Come. Come,” Ella said. “The creator calls. We follow.”
The Isari followed her without a word, moving with a single intent.
Years in the shadows, where a careless sound drew death, had trained that kind of coordination into them until it required no discussion at all.
They let the light catch them and hold. Their edges stopped slipping. Their bodies gained weight to the eye, then to the world.
They were no longer hidden since what I asked of them went against their nature. They were stepping into the front line to carve a path for us.
“May we be the spear that pierces the veil blocking the creator’s path,” Ella muttered at last, approaching the chainrunners who had just reentered Via Appia.
Once out of the shadows, the Isari were noticed by chainrunners and beasts alike.
“On the right! Something’s coming from the right. Prepare the cannons!” Cedric shouted, noticing them.
On the nearest wagon, Tom and Martin grabbed the mechanism and started to swing the cannon right. As the barrel moved, they saw why Cedric had shouted: crimson beasts breaking from the fog, multiple at once, closing fast.
The beasts, however, realized it too late. The Isari were already in them—blades rising and falling in tight arcs, bodies dropping, the rear ranks buckling. A corridor started to form through the swarm, aimed straight toward our formation.
Their twin blades were far too fast for most to follow. Within seconds, cries rose—a desperate chorus—as beasts were torn apart and the Isari pushed forward.
Before I could call out, Gustav noticed and shouted, “Hold that order!” Then he looked at me and asked, “Are those… reapers… more of yours?” This time, he didn’t bother hiding his suspicion.
They had already seen too much. Haldrin wasn’t something that should walk this world, and yet it did. Now figures that looked like reapers appeared without warning, beyond what they expected or prepared for.
I considered lying, but we were past that point. Besides, I disliked wielding lies; each time I did, it felt as if part of Sjakthar lived within me.
It was, after all, in the Abyss that my cloak and I learned this aspect of the world. Refusing to wield it surely limited my options, but kept part of me whole… or perhaps it only made me think it did.
“What do you mean, hold? Has Bloodreaver driven you mad already? Do you want to charge into those monstrosities yourself?” Cedric shouted.
Tom and Martin looked at them both, unsure what to do.
Gustav had been suppressing the rage Bloodreaver caused in him, and hints of madness had begun to appear. At times, he surged ahead of the formation for a heartbeat before regaining his senses and forcing himself back into line.
Cedric, who should have inherited Bloodreaver, knew that well. He understood how the artifact acted on the mind and still chose to push Gustav.
Infuriated, Gustav screamed, raising the axe toward Cedric. The distance between them suddenly didn’t seem that long.
“Listen to me, you little brat. You have no command here. None. Stop acting like the commander. Hold your position, or I’ll stop you the same way I did your fath…”
Gustav stopped too late. Cedric stood still, stunned, staring at him. Anger rose in his face and shoulders, but he swallowed it and kept his mouth shut.
We had barely passed District 3, and already it seemed Gustav couldn’t keep his head in the fight anymore. Physically, he could. Bloodreaver would ensure that as long as there was blood to spill.
But mentally, he was at his limit, and he knew it.
“I’m sorry,” Gustav said, voice rough. “I didn’t mean it. Just… hold. Those might be allies.”
At that, everyone’s focus shifted back to the Isari. They were already carving through the swarm and closing on the road. They would be among us in moments, and the time for a decision was already ticking.
Tom and Martin, reluctant to turn the cannon away, muttered almost in unison, “Allies?”
Gustav turned to me, a questioning look in his eyes.
“Allies from the fog, you might say. But yes, allies. They’ll carve the path ahead, since most of our best are incapacitated already. Those are the Isari,” I said, a hint of pride in my voice.
The name seemed to hang in the air. Some of the chainrunners repeated it under their breath, struggling to believe the reapers approaching were not foes, but allies.
“These tricks the fog taught you weren’t merely tricks, were they?” Gustav asked, half driven by fury, half driven by anger at how much I had omitted and how unreal it all felt. “You became like the fog itself. The father of monsters.”
His words struck me and left me still for a moment. He saw in me the same thing he saw in the world, a force behind a veil, nurturing and creating monsters that brought nothing but destruction.
Looking around, I saw how the chainrunners watched me. The same questions in their eyes, a hint of awe, a hint of suspicion. Some were likely wondering whether what returned to the ward was even human or if, in fact, I was a shadow of the same fog that had been their greatest enemy for as long as they could remember.
They weren’t entirely wrong.
Even my mist was eerily similar. The thin veil around us blurred at the edges with the fog, and most of them didn’t even notice the shift. Had I called forth the true mist, they would have noticed, but this weaker version was the same haze to them.
But beyond that, I was still the one behind the veil, the one who brought forth such beings, as the fog brought forth its countless beasts. And even if it wasn’t only destruction, neither was the fog.
They saw these beings as monsters, but there was beauty in them, just like the creations of the fog. Even if they rarely looked long enough to see it.
I had seen beauty in places most people would see only horrors, but I couldn’t blame them. They were humans after all, limited, afraid, walking roads that once bloomed with life and now only showed signs of a dying world.
The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
My claim wasn’t destruction. On the contrary, it was the opposite.
Haldrin was proof of it. The auric core I had could have been turned into a weapon capable of mass destruction on a scale I could never achieve with my own hands. Instead, I chose to elevate a life, even if its form carried the means of destruction—greatly inspired by Miran himself.
Gustav wasn’t right, but he wasn’t entirely wrong either. It made me wonder what claim the fog had.
“You ride one of my… monsters,” I began, noting how many around us likely thought as Gustav did. “Yet you show no fear of it.”
Many had even named them, treating them as family, the way people did with cats and dogs.
“Don’t let that artifact take hold of you. It’s time for you to step down for a while,” I said, and Gustav went still.
His eyes held a red sheen that hadn’t been there before. Bloodreaver pulsed in his grip, whispering in his ears, demanding more blood with a hunger that would never be sated.
Gustav knew he wouldn’t win against me, and he had no reason to fight me. We were allies. Still, I saw the thought pass behind his eyes. Then, as if he snapped back, the rational part of him spoke. “You’re right. Overseer Cairen will command the run until our destination.”
Cedric and Cairen looked surprised at the turn of events. Some of the others seemed to interpret what I said as an order to their commander.
But the truth was simpler. Gustav was a rational man. He knew he’d reached his limit, and stepping down was the right decision.
Tom and Martin, stationed on the nearest wagon, exchanged a quick look, as if asking whether Gustav’s earlier order was still valid.
Cairen looked to me for half a second, then back to the wagon. “Hold fire,” he called. “They’re allies.”
Right then, the Isari cut free of the swarm and entered the road ahead of the front line. They stood tall and steady, their bodies bending light in brief, uneven shifts. At times, their afterimage was seen first, then the real body.
Sometimes they were simply not where you saw them. A moment later, their afterimage vanished, and that same Isari appeared behind a beast, blade striking a heart or a neck with precision.
Those who stared at them too closely groaned as a sudden headache hit. Some even vomited.
“Don’t look directly at them. Avoid direct eye contact and you’ll be fine,” I said.
It wasn’t magic that caused the nausea. It was the way they bent light, in a way human eyes couldn’t tolerate.
“Little ones, follow us. Your worst nightmare awaits,” Ella said in the human tongue.
That sent shivers through the lines.
To them, the Isari looked like reapers given form and hearing one speak such a thing only confirmed the fear they were already trying to swallow.
The fear that death had joined their run.
However, it was with them carving a path through the swarm that we managed to pass Districts 4 and 5.
Two districts went by without incident, two districts that had once been whole. Even if none of the present chainrunners had been there, they all knew the tales from before their destruction.
Haldrin remained far behind, but it never stopped following. The ground trembled with each distant step. Its presence changed the field. Many of the larger beasts no longer dared come from behind, forced into the front and flanks where our line could meet them.
As expected, crimson became more common the farther we got in our run, with at least one appearing every few minutes. Most were dealt with by me or the Isari before they reached the chainrunners.
Thankfully, despite their presence, no one died.
That luck, unfortunately, didn’t last.
At District 6, we had our first taste of the divine.
***
The ground ahead did not shake with the rhythmic thrum of a heavy beast. Instead, it began to vibrate with a constant, sickening hum.
A shadow spilled around the corner of the ruined district. It moved like a flash flood breaking through a dam, but it possessed a texture no water should have. It was a granular, shifting darkness that piled upon itself.
“What in the hells is that?” Cairen asked.
It looked like oil. It moved like sludge. But as it surged closer, eating up the distance between the buildings, the illusion of liquid shattered.
It was a carpet of life. Millions of spiders, none larger than a thumb, clambered over one another in a frantic, ceaseless wave.
They covered the ancient pavement so completely that the grey stone beneath vanished under a chitinous black sheen.
The beasts of the fog, usually so mindless in their aggression toward the chainrunners, recoiled.
Despite their need to purge the corruption within the humans, for the first time, those monsters knew fear. They scrambled back, claws skittering on concrete, desperate to escape the rising tide.
They weren’t fast enough.
The black sea crashed into the swarm at our front and flowed over them.
“Spiders,” Gorin whispered. His voice cracked. “Millions of them.”
The chainrunners had seen death in countless forms. They had seen men turn to ash and seen bodies cut apart. But this was a primal wrongness that triggered a shivering silence across the lines.
We watched a massive behemoth of raw muscle and sheer mass, one that had taken three Isari to hold back just moments ago, get swallowed by the tide. It roared, thrashing its massive limbs, crushing hundreds of spiders into paste with every blow.
But for every hundred killed, a thousand more took their place. They crawled up its legs, into its fur, seeking the soft, wet warmth of its orifices.
The behemoth fell to its knees. It did not scream. It gurgled.
Then the true horror revealed itself.
The beast’s skin began to ripple. It was not the twitching of muscle but a bubbling, chaotic churning from beneath the hide. The flesh distended, stretching taut like a balloon filled to bursting.
In less than twenty seconds, the venom had done its work.
For the last time, the behemoth stared at us, its once green eyes now black, devoid of life. Then it opened its mouth and countless spiders crawled out, then from its ears and eyes.
At last, its ribcage exploded outward. It was a wet, tearing sound and still, no blood came. Only a deluge of black as thousands of newly born spiders poured from the ruin of the beast, born from its meat, more spiders to join the black sea.
The Isari met them first.
They were engines of cold precision. Their twin blades became blurs, moving so fast they were barely seen, leaving a barrier of frost in their wake. They danced over the surface of the spider-sea, freezing the spiders where they stepped.
The spiders bit and swarmed, their mandibles scraping uselessly against the semi-reflective frost plates of the Isari. Some, however, did find purchase, but the venom that turned beasts into incubators found no hold on my creations.
In the antithesis of life that was the ice the Isari were made from, those same spiders couldn’t bring forth life of their own. The Isari were simply immune.
Yet their swords failed to cut the spider-sea. There were simply too many.
For every swipe that cleared a square meter of ground, the black tide simply rushed in to fill the void. The spiders realized the Isari weren’t food, so they ceased attacking the frostkin and simply flowed around them.
They poured through the gaps in the Isari formation like water rushing through a grate, ignoring the slaughter to reach the warm, blood-filled prey waiting behind them.
They were coming for us.
The distance between the Isari and the first line of chainrunners was long, but not that far.
As I watched the tide advance, ignoring the chainrunners’ cries, I finally recognized that will.
It seemed many, but it was in fact only one. A will from the Grey.
“The Spider God,” I said out loud.
It was the same abomination that had come to this world during my battle with Sjakthar, alongside the elf. Both had reached godhood within the Abyss, recovering the power they once had. But it seemed that wasn’t enough for the Spider God.
It hadn’t come for the humans or even the swarm of beasts; it had come for me. For my auric core.