Chương 21: Chapter 18 - Soul Anguish

In the castle, the army reached the center. A vast chamber opened before them. A black crystal chandelier hung overhead, its facets catching the light from torches that flickered with no visible source. A throne of crimson velvet sat at the far end, raised on a dais of obsidian. And on the throne, a figure waited. He was beautiful in the way a porcelain doll was beautiful—perfect, cold, and fragile-looking. His skin was smooth and pale, without blemish or imperfection. His eyes were the color of dried blood.

His lips curved into a smile that did not reach them. In his hand, a glass of wine swirled.

"Esteemed guests." His smile arrived before his voice did.

"Welcome to my grand ancient castle." He rose from the throne with elegance. His steps made no sound. He let the silence stretch, savoring it.

"I was going to let you be." The smile widened.

"But my spiritual intuition tells me that this is the moment I've been waiting for." The warriors tensed. Weapons rose. Feet shifted. He ignored them.

"Before we begin, allow me to introduce myself. I am Nefari. The one who devours and destroys souls." The air grew deathly still, the silence pressing in like a frozen shroud as the weight of his claim settled into their very marrow—leaving no room for breath, only the dawning horror of a promise already kept. The three Black Ape elders spoke the same word at once, low and involuntary.

"Ascendant Peak Stage..." Saro stepped forward, his hands open in a gesture of peace.

"We are travelers from another realm. We came seeking opportunity, not conflict. What do you mean by the moment you've been waiting for?"

"That?" Nefari swirled the wine, unbothered.

"I waited here for centuries, because my spiritual intuition kept insisting that something important would appear. Something worth waiting for." The elders exchanged uneasy glances. None of them had ever heard the term before. No one knew what it meant, or what rank it took to have one. He took a sip of wine.

"Spiritual intuition is vague, unfortunately. So I'll just have to take a more efficient approach." His smile widened.

"I'll devour your souls and steal your memories. That will tell me everything I need to know." He snapped his fingers. Every warrior in the room felt it at once—a slow, corrosive ache spreading through their soul cores, like something was quietly eating them from the inside. Their movements faltered. A few warriors staggered, clutching their chests as if they'd been struck, though nothing had touched them.

"Those below Seeker Peak Stage!" Saro roared.

"Find and destroy the source of the formation! Those above, hold him off!" He ripped the darkness-attributed herb from the sack and held it in his hands. The order divided the battlefield immediately. The weaker warriors scattered into the surrounding corridors, searching for whatever maintained the formation. The stronger ones stayed in the chamber, forming a barrier between Nefari and Saro. If they couldn't stop Nefari, they could at least keep him occupied until Saro finished ascending.

"... Buy me some time to ascend!" The elders looked at each other. They nodded and surged forward without another word. The moment they closed the distance, five small dolls stitched from old fabric jerked upright and charged. They moved with an unnatural, jerky rhythm, like marionettes controlled by invisible strings. Their button eyes glittered in the torchlight. Their stitched mouths hung in permanent, frozen smiles.

A cluster of apes brushed past them, unconcerned—until the dolls detonated in a burst of light bright enough to rival fireworks, and the first screams tore through the hall. Boom! The blast threw three warriors off their feet, their armor scorched, their skin blistered. The light lingered in the air, shimmering like a ghost of the explosion.

"Careful with my little dolls here." Nefari raised his glass, smiling through the shimmering light.

"Every doll holds a trapped soul. When the doll is destroyed, the soul burns itself out." His smile widened.

"I call it Soul Fireworks." The realization made the warriors hesitate. They weren't simply bombs. Every doll was another soul Nefari had stored away, another layer of protection between himself and death. Destroying them weakened his defenses—but every explosion also meant another trapped soul was being consumed.

"Don't be too disappointed," Nefari added, almost fondly.

"My stay here hasn't exactly been lonely. I've made plenty." More dolls rose from the shadows. Ten. Twenty. Their fabric bodies rustled like dry leaves skittering across stone.

"Ignore him! To the front, now!" Seri shoved forward, and the dolls swarming toward him froze solid with a single wave of his hand. Ice crawled over their fabric bodies, locking them in place mid-lunge. For a moment, they hung suspended, frozen in the posture of attack. They exploded anyway. The ice hadn't stopped the dolls. It had only stopped their movement. Boom! Boom! Boom! The ice shattered from the inside, chunks of frozen fabric flying in every direction.

Seri threw up a hand to shield his face, shards of ice cutting shallow lines across his forearm. The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation. He clicked his tongue.

"Push through—Seri and I will hold the dolls back!" Geldo's voice cut through the chaos, calm even now. A gust of wind swept a fresh wave of dolls backward, and he closed a ring of air around them before they could scatter and regroup. The dolls slammed against the invisible barrier, their fabric bodies crumpling against the wind. They detonated one after another, color and sound bursting uselessly against a gale that refused to break.

Each explosion sent ripples through the barrier, but Geldo held, his jaw tight with concentration. Seri, meanwhile, spread a field of cold around himself wide enough to freeze anything that stepped into it, and still the dolls kept coming. His breath fogged the air. Frost crawled up his arms, coating his hands in a thin layer of ice. Every wave of his hand brought another wave of frozen dolls, and every frozen doll brought another explosion.

"A century..." Seri muttered, disgust and disbelief tangled together.

"Creating dolls and trapping souls for a century... what a crazy bastard." The dolls stopped coming. For a moment, Seri thought they'd exhausted themselves. Then the humming started—soft, layered, almost gentle, building through the stone floor and into every chest in the chamber.

"Soul Resonance," Nefari said, watching from his throne, unhurried.

"Every doll carries a trapped soul. Souls, when they're close enough, like to sing together." A young orc near the wall dropped to his knees, clawing at his own collar as though something invisible were tightening it. Another doubled over, retching, though nothing came up. Geldo's wind couldn't touch it—the sound wasn't in the air, it was already inside their heads—and Seri's ice only slowed the dolls carrying it, never the note itself.

"It amplifies," Nefari added, almost fondly.

"Fear. Pain. Doubt. Whatever's already there." Two warriors went down before the hum finally guttered out on its own, spent the way a struck bell eventually falls silent. The chamber was quieter for it, and worse off.... Behind the doll line, Nefari watched it all with the same patient smile. Roc and Pear broke through the doll line together, dolls still swarming at their heels, neither of them breaking stride to deal with it.

Pear's hand came up, and a fireball the size of a wagon tore across the hall straight for Nefari. The flames roared, lighting the chamber in orange and gold, casting long shadows that danced across the walls. Nefari raised a hand almost lazily, and a translucent armor shimmered around his body. It flickered like a heat haze. The fireball slammed into him. Boom! The shell cracked. Spiders of light spread across its surface. It held.

Roc closed the last of the distance a half-step later, his fist already wreathed in flame. The fire trailed from his knuckles like a comet's tail as he drove it straight into Nefari's face. Boom! The armor shattered outright this time, pieces of translucent light scattering like broken glass. Nefari's body flew backward, his doll-like frame twisting in the air before crashing into the far wall with a sound like breaking porcelain. A crack appeared in the stone where he'd hit.

But when the dust cleared, there wasn't a mark on him. His pale skin remained unblemished, his smile unchanged. Around him, though, a dozen fabric dolls lay in scattered, lifeless pieces. Their button eyes stared at nothing. Their fabric bodies had gone still.

"Unfortunately for you," Nefari said, his voice unchanged, "my little dolls can absorb damage on my behalf. Damage meant for me is transferred to them instead." He smiled.

"You'll have to destroy all of them before you can truly hurt me." He laughed. The sound was like wind chimes—beautiful, hollow, wrong. Then the laugh stopped. His crimson eyes narrowed, the color of old blood catching the torchlight. His body flickered, and then he was gone. He reappeared behind two charging orcs, a hand closed around each throat, lifting them both off the ground before either could finish drawing breath. The orcs struggled. Their boots kicked uselessly at the air.

Their hands clawed at his wrists, finding nothing but smooth, unyielding porcelain. They didn't struggle for long. Their bodies went slack, the light in their eyes fading before either could understand what was happening. They hadn't been strangled. Their necks were unmarked. Nefari had simply reached past their bodies and emptied their souls. They dropped.

"Not you two, unfortunately." Nefari let the bodies fall.

"I'll take my time with the rest. Someone here triggered my spiritual intuition, and I intend to find out exactly who." He vanished again. Only Pear's eyes tracked him. His axe blazed with fire, leaving a trail of molten light as he chased Nefari through the chamber. The flames danced along the blade, hungry and alive. Nefari was mid-strike against a slower target, his hand already closing around a warrior's throat. The warrior's soul was already being drawn out, feeding Nefari's strength back into him.

The warrior's eyes were already going dim. Pear's axe came down from behind. The blade was already mid-swing before Nefari could react. He twisted away on pure instinct, releasing the dying warrior, but Pear's axe came down, releasing a roaring column of flame that swallowed him whole. Whoosh! The fire roared with the force of a forge, heat so intense it warped the air around it. Nefari's translucent armor crackled and shattered under the assault, pieces of soul-light dissolving like melting glass.

And then Nefari screamed. The sound was inhuman—a shriek that bypassed the ears and pierced directly into the soul. It wasn't merely pain. It was something worse—the sound of something hungry that had just been denied. Pear's body seized. Blood burst from his nose and ears. His vision swam. His axe slipped from his grip, clattering to the stone floor. He dropped to one knee, coughing. When the flames cleared, Nefari stood inside the wreckage of another shattered Soul Armor, untouched beneath it. His chest heaved.

His smile had thinned.

"Annoying," he said, the word arriving flat, almost bored. Pear spat blood and forced the words out anyway.

"This is the miserable part about a soul attribute." He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

"You end up paying for both kinds of damage."

"An irritating little insect." Nefari studied him with something that might have been curiosity, if curiosity could curdle into contempt.

"It's an honor to experience this ability." The chamber held its breath. The dolls froze mid-lunge. Even the flames seemed to pause, as if the air itself were waiting for something. Then the word came, soft as a whisper but sharp as a blade.

"Soul Anguish." There was no menace in how he said it. If anything, it sounded almost kind. The moment he raised his hand, every soul in the hall convulsed at once. This time, there was no formation to hide behind and no distance to escape through. Agony with no wound to explain it, no blade or fire to blame. It was the feeling of being unmade, of every memory, every thought, every hope being dragged to the surface and torn apart.

Roc's hands flew to his own chest, nails tearing through his own skin before he understood what he was doing. Blood welled from the scratches, running down his chest, and still he couldn't stop. His face was a mask of concentration and agony, teeth clenched hard enough to crack. Nearby, a young orc clawed at his own face, blood running down through the furrows he was cutting himself. His screams were wordless, ragged, as if his throat was tearing along with everything else.

A Black Ape warrior slammed his fists against his own skull, trying to make it stop. His eyes were wide and unseeing. Another collapsed entirely, his body curling in on itself, arms wrapped around his own chest as if holding himself together. Only Pear stayed on his feet—barely. His Ascendant soul held where the others' didn't, though his steps had gone slow and uneven, like a man walking through water instead of air. His breathing was ragged. Blood still dripped from his nose and ears.

He was still two stages below Nefari. Standing wasn't the same as winning. Nefari walked among them at his own unhurried pace after that, his steps silent on the stone floor. He stopped beside a struggling Black Ape warrior, the one who'd been slamming his fists against his own skull. The warrior's eyes were glazed, unfocused, still lost in the agony. Nefari touched his forehead with one pale finger. The warrior went still. His eyes dimmed. His body slumped. Nefari's form flickered with renewed strength.

One by one, the ones still writhing on the ground stopped moving entirely. Souls drained clean. Bodies left behind, already forgotten by whatever had been living in them a moment before. The ice field was shrinking. Seri's control was wavering, his frost retreating inch by inch. More dolls surged forward, button eyes gleaming, stitched smiles mocking.

"Geldo," Seri said, his voice tight with effort, "I'm leaving you here. I need to help the others." Geldo nodded, his wind barrier still holding—for now. Seri turned and charged toward the main battle, ice blooming in his wake. And then, all at once, every warrior still standing froze in place. Something vast had just stirred within Saro—a dense surge of spiritual essence rolling through the castle like a held breath finally being released. The dolls paused mid-lunge, their button eyes turning toward the source.

Nefari's smile flickered, just for a moment. Saro stood at the heart of the chamber, his eyes closed, his body trembling. The darkness-attributed herb was gone, dissolved into his system. His soul core was breaking through.