The air in the corrupted garden was thick with clashing energies: the sterile, draining hum of Silas's null-blade, the volatile, sickly-sweet rot of the flora, the pure, desperate radiance of the Solar Core Seed, and the crackling, transgressive power building around Selene.
Silas didn't charge. He advanced with measured steps, his eyes cataloging everything. "Your mana signatures are depleted. Your movements are fatigued. The chain-swing was... audacious, but costly. This is not a fight. It is a foregone conclusion." He flicked his wrist, and a pulse of null-energy shot from his blade, not at them, but at the ground between them.
The stone tiles died. Their color leached away, becoming grey and brittle, and a wave of mana-nullification spread outwards like a ripple in a pond. Arlan felt his already low reserves gutter further. Selene's violet aura dimmed.
Status Effect: Nullification Field (Weakened). Mana regeneration halted. Active skill cost increased by 50%.
"First rule of asset acquisition," Silas lectured, his voice a bland monotone. "Control the environment."
Arlan didn't wait for the second rule. He Voidstepped. Not far—just three meters to the left, behind a petrified tree with golden wire leaves. The spatial jump cost him dearly, his core screaming in protest. But it broke Silas's immediate line of sight.
Silas didn't turn. He simply gestured with his free hand. The tree Arlan hid behind shivered, and its wire leaves shot towards him like a swarm of razor-edged bees.
Arlan dropped and rolled, Aethelbrand flashing in a horizontal arc. Sever: Projectile Momentum. The grey slash didn't cut the leaves; it severed the kinetic energy propelling them. They clattered harmlessly to the ground around him, inert.
"Good. Instinctive application of your negation principle," Silas noted, as if grading a performance. He turned his attention to Selene. "And you, Miss Vayne. Let's see the famed Crimson Weave."
Selene didn't give him a spectacle. She moved, not with vampiric speed (too mana-costly now), but with a predator's cunning. She darted behind the dry fountain, putting the Solar Core Seed between her and Silas. "You want data?" she called out, her voice laced with a dark taunt. "Try this. Blood Price: Thorns of Regret."
She didn't cast at him. She cast at the garden itself. She slammed her palm, still bleeding from her bitten thumb, onto the black-sap-weeping tree next to the fountain.
Her blood, charged with vita-arcana, merged with the tree's corruption. The tree convulsed. Its branches lengthened into whip-like tendrils tipped with thorns of black crystal. They lashed out not at Silas, but at the other corrupted plants around him, transferring her "curse."
The rotting-flesh blossom nearby exploded, releasing a cloud of soporific, memory-dulling spores. The frozen-flame flower guttered and sent out waves of emotional despair (the "regret"). Silas, caught in the area, was forced to react. His null-blade whirled, creating a vortex that sucked in the spores and disrupted the emotional waves, but it cost him focus.
Arlan used the distraction to check Silas window's status.
Class: Null-Operative (Silent Accord Variant / System-Disruptor)
Primary Affinity: Negation / Psionic Dampening
He couldn't Voidstep again. So he ran, low and fast, using the cover of Selene's activated botanical chaos. He didn't aim for Silas. He aimed for the Nullification Field's origin point—the spot on the ground Silas had initially struck.
His Eyes of Finality saw it: the field was a sustained effect, anchored to that point of dead stone. An endpoint existed: disruption of the anchor.
He reached it, and with Aethelbrand, stabbed downward at the stone, at the sustained null-effect.
Sever.
The grey blade sank into the dead tile. There was no explosion. The field simply unraveled, the greyness receding from the tiles like a tide going out. The oppressive drain on their mana ceased.
Silas's calm finally cracked. A flicker of irritation crossed his features. "Persistent." He abandoned his data-gathering approach. He moved.
He was fast. Terrifyingly fast for a man who relied on technology and control. He closed the distance to Selene in a blur, his null-blade aiming not to kill, but to incapacitate—a precise thrust towards her shoulder, meant to inject a neural-disruptor charge.
Selene tried to twist away, but she was too slow, too drained. The blade tip grazed her upper arm.
There was no blood. The null-blade's edge didn't cut flesh; it unmade the biological and magical bonds at the point of contact. A circle of her leather armor and the skin and muscle beneath simply vanished, leaving a perfectly round, painless hole the size of a coin that went straight through. A second later, agony erupted as nerves, suddenly severed, screamed. She cried out, stumbling back.
"Selene!" The roar tore from Arlan's throat, raw and primal. The young teenager was immediately replaced by something darker, more elemental. The void inside him yawned wide, hungry.
Silas turned towards him, already calculating his next move. "Attachment. A predictable weakness."
Arlan didn't hear him. He saw only Selene's wound, the shock on her pale face. He saw the endpoint of Silas. Not just his death, but his erasure.
He didn't have the mana for a fancy technique. He had rage, and he had the Oblivion Core fragment.
He charged. Not with skill, but with the devastating, straight-line fury of a bull. Silas raised his null-blade, a perfect parry ready to disarm and dissect.
Arlan didn't try to parry. He let the null-blade come. As it swept towards his sword arm, he did something insane. He dropped Aethelbrand.
The grey sword clattered on the stone. Silas's eyes widened in surprise for a split second, his programmed responses faltering at the illogical move.
In that split second, Arlan's left hand, sheathed in the last dregs of his Umbral energy and a bleeding thread of power from the Oblivion fragment, shot forward. It passed inside the arc of the null-blade. His fingers didn't form a fist. They formed a claw.
He didn't aim for Silas's heart or throat. He aimed for the man's aura. For the precise, intricate field of null-energy that surrounded him, his primary defense.
His clawed hand, trailing wisps of void-smoke, plunged into the space over Silas's chest.
Negation Touch: Core Disruption.
It wasn't a spell. It was an imposition of his will, his nature, upon another. The Void Scion declaring a patch of the enemy's reality null.
Silas's null-field didn't shatter. It inverted. For a terrifying instant, the energy meant to cancel other magic turned in on itself, feeding on its own structure. Silas gasped, a sound of pure, system-shocking agony, as his own defensive protocols backfired. He staggered, dropping his null-blade, which clattered and died.
Arlan followed through. He drove his forehead into Silas's nose with a sickening crunch. The agent reeled back, blood spraying, his analytical calm utterly shattered, replaced by animal pain and confusion.
Arlan didn't pause. He scooped up Aethelbrand. Selene was on her knees, clutching her arm, her face pale but her eyes burning. "The orb, Arlan! Now!"
Silas was down, but not out. He was fumbling for a backup device on his belt.
Arlan turned to the Solar Core Seed in the fountain basin. Its pure, potent energy was the opposite of everything he was. He couldn't touch it. But he could touch its container.
He raised Aethelbrand. The door's concept had been "worthiness." This orb's containment was a concept too: "Purity in stasis."
Sever the Stasis.
The grey blade touched the edge of the energy orb.
There was no cataclysm. The orb didn't explode. The force containing it—the stasis—was severed. The orb of pure sunlight activated.
Light, blinding and beautiful and furious, erupted from the fountain. It didn't radiate heat; it radiated potential. It filled the archive, scouring the corruption from the plants, which withered to ash, and bathing Silas in its radiance.
The Accord agent screamed. His grey suit, his tools, his very body—all infused with null-energy and foreign tech—reacted violently to the pure solar power. Smoke rose from him. He scrambled back, his movements jerky, blinded and burning, and fled through the archway into the cavern, his form swallowed by the greater corruption of the chained sun outside.
The light faded, the orb now a gently pulsing, warm presence. The garden was gone, replaced by a circle of ash and one pure, healthy-looking sapling that had sprouted where Selene's blood had touched the ground.
Silence, blessed and exhausted, returned.
Arlan stumbled to Selene's side. The wound in her arm was clean but gruesome, the edges grey and dead where the null-blade had passed. She was shivering, shock and blood-loss setting in. Her vampiric side, weakened by mana depletion, was struggling to regenerate.
"I need... blood," she whispered, her voice thin. Her fangs, usually concealed, were slightly extended. Her eyes held a glassy, hungry sheen. "Not much. Just... a taste. To jump-start the healing."
The request hung between them. Intimate. Dangerous. A line crossing from ally to something more.
Arlan didn't hesitate. He offered his wrist. "Take it."
She looked at his wrist, then into his eyes. The hunger warred with something else—gratitude, fear of what she was. "Are you sure? My bloodline... It can create a craving. A bond."
"I trust you," he said, the three words simpler and more profound than any vow.
She nodded, her resolve firming. With a quick, precise motion, she took his wrist and bit down. It was sharp, a brief sting, then a strange, pulling sensation. He felt no pain, only a deep, resonant tug as she drew a small amount of his blood. Her eyes fluttered closed, and a faint, healthy pink returned to her cheeks. The grey edges of her wound began to pink up, new flesh knitting with visible, if slow, speed.
After a few seconds, she pulled away, licking the small puncture wounds closed with a tongue that felt oddly cool. The marks vanished almost instantly. She looked revitalized, her aura stronger. And her gaze, when it met his, held a new, unbreakable depth.
"Thank you," she said, her voice steady. "Your blood... it tastes of cold starlight. It's... potent."
"Just don't eat me up when I'm asleep", Arlan said with a joking smile
He helped her up. Their hands lingered together. The moment stretched, charged with the aftermath of violence and the intimacy of the exchange.
The system chose that moment to chime, breaking the spell with its clinical efficiency.
Quest: 'Defend the Stolen Sun' - Complete.
Primary Objective: Repel the Silent Accord Agent - Success.
Secondary Objective: Secure the Solar Core Seed - Success.
Rewards: [Solar Core Seed - Bound to Location], [Major Universal XP Orb], [Skill Unlock: Umbral Lash (Basic)], [Bloodline Sympathy (Selene Vayne) +25].
The Solar Core Seed pulsed warmly, now seemingly attuned to the archive, its energy stabilizing the space. The XP orb would be a massive boost. The new skill was welcome.
But it was the last reward that made Arlan pause. Bloodline Sympathy. The system was quantifying their bond, the trust, the shared struggle, the blood given and taken.
Selene saw him reading the air. "What is it?"
"Nothing," he said, but a corner of his mouth quirked up. "We make a good team."
She smiled back, a real, tired, beautiful smile. "you are not wrong." She looked at the orb. "What do we do with that? We can't carry a miniature sun."
As if hearing her, the Solar Core Seed floated gently out of the fountain and towards Selene. It hovered before her, then slowly dimmed, condensing into a beautiful, palm-sized pendant of solidified sunlight on a thin, golden chain. It drifted into her waiting hand, warm and light.
"It chose you," Arlan said, a note of wonder in his voice. "The purity chose the transgression."
Selene fastened the chain around her neck. The pendant rested against her skin, glowing softly through her torn clothes. It felt right. "A stolen sun for a stolen girl," she murmured. "Fitting."
They took a moment to recover, sharing the last of their nutrient bars and water. The archive, now cleansed, felt like a sanctuary. But they couldn't stay. Silas was wounded, not dead. Others would come.
As they prepared to leave, a new, system-wide notification pulsed, not just for Arlan, but likely broadcast to every heir in the Labyrinth.
Labyrinth Announcement:
The First Threshold is breached. The central chamber, the Progenitor's Crucible, will open in twenty-four Labyrinth cycles.
Only those bearing a Progenitor's Key (acquired from Major Archives or Vaults) may enter.
Within the Crucible lies the path to the Aethelian Forge, and the greatest inheritances.
Competition is advised. Mortality is expected.
The message was clear: the gentle exploration phase was over. The Labyrinth was now a hunting ground, and the prize was in the center.
Arlan looked at the Solar Core pendant around Selene's neck. It hummed with power. "I think we just found our key."
Selene touched the warm crystal, her expression turning fierce. "Then let's go to their Crucible. And show them what happens when a shadow and a stolen sun walk in."
Together, they left the archive, the light of her pendant and the cold certainty in his heart their only guides into the deeper, darker games of the Aethelian Labyrinth.