Chương 237: Chapter : 237

Ken closed his eyes.

"Resting is the one thing I am genuinely good at." The sun had set completely now, and the jungle was wrapped in the deep, velvety darkness of a tropical night. Insects chirped and clicked in the canopy overhead. The firelight from the camp painted flickering orange shadows across the huts and the exhausted faces of the villagers. It was peaceful, or as peaceful as a village could be after a battle against dark magic.

Zinia had created a ring of raised earth around the camp perimeter, a simple but effective barrier that would alert them to any approaching threat. She sat on the inner edge of the ring, her strong arms wrapped around her knees, watching the jungle with tired but vigilant eyes. She did not trust the quiet. Quiet in a place like this felt wrong. Ira was meditating near the fire. Her eyes were closed, her hands resting on her knees, her breathing slow and rhythmic.

She was cycling water mana through her body, accelerating her natural healing process. The shallow cuts on her forearms from deflecting weapons were already closing. Within an hour, they would be nothing but faint white lines. Laxmi stretched out on the ground near the fire, her hands behind her head, staring up at the stars that were visible through gaps in the canopy. She was exhausted but too wound up to sleep. Her mind kept replaying the fight with the screaming trees.

The sound they had made when they died was something she knew she would hear in her dreams for a long time. Sayma finished her notes and closed her notebook with a snap. She removed her glasses and rubbed her eyes, which were sore from hours of reading and writing by firelight. The report she had compiled was thorough and detailed, but it was incomplete. There was one entry she had started and then deleted three times. The entry about Ken. About the moment the skeleton fell apart.

About the wave of force that she had felt but could not explain. She looked across the camp at him. He was asleep, or pretending to be. His mouth was open. His suit was a disaster. A thin line of drool connected his chin to the ground. He looked like the least magical person in the entire Belmontia Empire. And yet. Sayma put her glasses back on and opened her notebook. She started the entry again. Then deleted it again. Then closed the notebook and put it away. Some things were too important to write down.

Some questions were too dangerous to ask out loud. At least not yet. But across the village, beyond the huts and the freed tribespeople and the crackling campfire, something was happening. The air in the scorched clearing was growing cold. The dead altar was humming with a faint, barely perceptible vibration. And three figures were emerging from the jungle on the far side, their dark robes trailing behind them.

A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation. The Hollow cultists had returned. They had been watching from the shadows of the jungle, waiting for their moment. When the skeleton fell and the anchor trees burned, they should have run. Any sensible enemy would have cut their losses and fled into the night. But Vorath was not sensible. He was a believer. And believers did not abandon their cause just because the odds were against them. They doubled down.

They went all in. They burned everything they had left on one final, desperate gamble. The gamble was a corruption wave. A last-resort Black Magic technique that consumed the user's stored mana and released it as a wave of pure, concentrated despair. It could not control minds like the skeleton had. It could not enslave bodies or create guardians. But it could break spirits. It could shatter minds. It could turn a village of survivors into a village of the broken and the mad.

It was the weapon of someone who had nothing left to lose. And Vorath had nothing left to lose.

Vorath led the way, his skull mask tilted forward, his gloved hands clenched at his sides. Behind him came Seket and Grath, their own masks hiding whatever expressions they wore. They moved quickly and quietly, staying in the shadows of the trees, making their way toward the destroyed altar. The 13th Unit was scattered across the village, resting and tending to the wounded. Nobody was watching the jungle perimeter. They had won the battle. They thought the war was over. It was not.

Vorath knelt beside the broken altar and pressed his palm against the cracked stone. The dark mana beneath it responded to his touch, rising up like black water from a well. It was not much. The destruction of the anchor trees and the skeleton warrior had depleted most of the stored energy. But there was still enough for one thing. One final, desperate act.

"The ritual cannot be completed," Seket said, her voice tight with anger and fear.

"The network is destroyed. The skeleton is gone. The tribe is free. We have failed."

"We have not failed," Vorath said. His voice was calm and cold, the voice of a man who had accepted the cost of what he was about to do.

"We cannot complete the offering to the Sovereign. But we can still serve the cause. We can still make these people suffer." He placed both hands on the altar and began to chant. The words were old and terrible, spoken in a language that predated the Belmontia Empire by a thousand years. The air around the altar turned black. Not dark. Not dim. Black. The kind of absolute darkness that swallowed light and sound and hope. Grath and Seket added their voices to the chant.

Their combined dark mana poured into the altar, feeding the ancient curse that Vorath was awakening. The ground trembled. The trees groaned. The freed villagers in the huts stirred in their sleep, their faces twisting into expressions of sudden, unexplained terror. From the altar, a wave of pure dark mana began to spread. It rolled outward in all directions like a black tide, invisible to normal eyes but devastating to anyone with mana sensitivity. Wherever it touched, the air grew cold and thick. Plants withered.

Insects fell dead. The very soil seemed to recoil from its touch. Sayma felt it first. She gasped and clutched her head, her glasses falling from her face.

"Dark mana surge!" she cried out.

"Massive dark mana surge from the altar clearing! It is a corruption wave!" Iris was on her feet instantly.

"Everyone get back! Move away from the jungle edge!" But the corruption wave was faster than any of them. It swept through the village like a silent, invisible flood. The freed villagers began to scream. Not the blank, mind-controlled silence of before. This was genuine, agonized terror. The dark mana was attacking their minds directly, filling their heads with nightmares and hallucinations.