Chapter 4: THE SEAL BREAKS
The tunnels climbed for what felt like hours.
My forearm throbbed with each step, the bandage already stiff with dried blood. The endrega mandible hung from a strip of cloth I'd fashioned into a crude belt—not elegant, but it kept the blade within reach. Every shadow could hide more of those clicking bastards.
[SP: 65/125]
[HP: 110/265]
The passive regeneration helped, but it wasn't fast enough to call comfortable. I moved through the ancient corridors with my enhanced senses stretched to their limits, cataloging every sound, every shift in the air.
The architecture changed as I ascended. Rougher construction gave way to worked stone, then to something older and more refined. The runes on the walls grew denser, more complex. Whatever civilization had built this place, they'd put their best work near the surface.
Or near whatever they were protecting.
I rounded a corner and stopped.
The door filled the entire passage. Thirty feet of Elder stonework covered in layered enchantments that made my eyes water when I tried to focus on them. The magic wasn't subtle—it radiated outward in visible waves, a barrier designed to keep something in. Or keep something out.
[OBSTACLE DETECTED: ELDER SEAL — INTEGRITY 23%]
[ESTIMATED AGE: 800+ YEARS]
[COMPOSITION: MULTI-LAYERED WARD STRUCTURE]
[NOTE: DEGRADED BUT ACTIVE]
I approached slowly, extending one hand toward the surface. The air thickened two feet from the door—not physically, but magically. Like pressing against an invisible membrane that pushed back harder the more you leaned into it.
Twenty-three percent integrity. That means it's weak. Weakened by time.
My palm touched the stone itself, and the enchantments flared. Blue-white light traced the rune patterns, responding to my presence. The magic recognized something in me—or recognized the body I was wearing.
The First Blade. Elder Blood Era experiment. Maybe they built this door to keep this body contained.
I pushed. Not with my hands—my hands were already flat against the stone. I pushed with something else, something that lived in the space between my physical form and whatever had transplanted my consciousness into this ancient weapon.
Nothing happened.
I pushed harder. The membrane of magic resisted, flexed, held.
Come on. You're falling apart after eight centuries. I just need you to fall apart a little more.
Frustration built in my chest. The wound on my arm pulsed. My stamina was draining just from standing here, from pressing against a wall that didn't want to move.
[SP: 52/125]
[WARNING: MAGICAL RESISTANCE DETECTED]
I know there's magical resistance. I'm standing in it.
The anger helped, somehow. It gave the pushing something to feed on—fuel for the fire that had killed those endrega, fuel for whatever else this body could do.
Stop. Stop being magic. Stop being a wall. STOP.
Something inside me answered.
The sensation defied description. Like a muscle I didn't know I had suddenly flexed, sending a wave of... anti-something... radiating outward from my palms. The enchantments didn't just flicker this time. They screamed.
Blue-white light turned to crackling static. The runes fought back, trying to maintain their structure against whatever I was doing to them. For a moment, the door and I existed in a silent war—eight hundred years of magical engineering versus something that had been designed to unmake exactly this kind of defense.
[ABILITY ACTIVATED: NULLIFICATION (INSTINCTIVE)]
[EFFECT: ANTI-MAGIC FIELD — RADIUS 2M]
[WARNING: MASSIVE SP DRAIN]
[SP: 31/125... 19/125... 8/125...]
The enchantments shattered.
I heard them break—actually heard them, like glass cracking in a fire, like ice fracturing under sudden pressure. The layered wards collapsed one by one, each failure cascading into the next, until the door stood bare of any magic at all.
Then my legs gave out.
I hit the stone floor hard, vision swimming, lungs heaving. The Nullification had torn through my stamina reserves like a hurricane through paper. Every nerve ending fired at once, then went quiet, then fired again.
[SP: 2/125]
[WARNING: CRITICAL STAMINA — UNCONSCIOUSNESS IMMINENT]
No. Not yet. Need to see if it worked—
The door groaned. Ancient hinges, untouched for centuries, began to move. Stone scraped against stone as the massive slab swung inward, revealing darkness beyond.
Then the darkness took me.
Not darkness. Something else.
I stood in a forest that didn't exist. Snow fell without touching me. The trees were wrong—too tall, too thin, stretching toward a sky that had no stars.
Fear. Not mine.
The emotion hit like a physical blow. Terror so pure and desperate that it stopped my breath, made my hands shake, made every instinct scream to run even though I didn't know what I was running from.
This isn't my fear. This isn't my memory.
Flashes. A girl with ash-blonde hair sprinting through undergrowth. Soldiers behind her—too many, too fast. A city burning in the distance. Screams that echoed across water.
Cintra. The fall of Cintra.
She fell. The girl fell, and the fear spiked into something beyond terror, something that felt like the world ending—
The scene shifted.
Different forest. Different time. The same girl, older now, standing in a training yard with a wooden sword. Frustration this time, not fear. The burn of muscles pushed too hard, the ache of failure after failure after failure.
Why can't I do this? Why can't I control it?
Not my thoughts. Her thoughts. Bleeding through whatever connection had formed between us.
The training yard dissolved into fragments: a white-haired man with worried eyes, an old warrior with kind hands, the feeling of power coiling inside her like a snake waiting to strike.
And underneath it all, a pull. Something reaching toward me through the connection, recognizing what I was without understanding why.
[CIRI-LINK: TIER 1 — ACTIVE]
[ELDER BLOOD CARRIER DETECTED]
[CONNECTION STATUS: ESTABLISHED — ONE-WAY]
[DIRECTION: ABOVE]
I woke gasping.
Cold stone under my cheek. The taste of dust and blood on my tongue. The door stood open, showing stairs that climbed upward into darkness.
"What the hell was that?"
My voice echoed off ancient walls. No one answered except the system.
[UNCONSCIOUSNESS DURATION: 4 HOURS 23 MINUTES]
[SP: 47/125 — RECOVERY ONGOING]
[HP: 125/265]
[NEW ABILITY UNLOCKED: NULLIFICATION (TIER 1)]
[COST: VARIABLE (BASED ON TARGET MAGICAL STRENGTH)]
[RANGE: 2M RADIUS]
[NOTE: INSTINCTIVE ACTIVATION ONLY — CONSCIOUS CONTROL REQUIRES TRAINING]
I sat up slowly, muscles protesting. Four hours. I'd been unconscious for four hours, lying on the floor like a corpse, while my stamina crawled back from nothing.
But the door was open. And I knew—somehow, impossibly—that somewhere above me, a girl with Elder Blood was struggling with powers she couldn't control.
The Ciri-Link pulsed in my awareness. Not with fear this time, but with something quieter. Determination. Stubbornness. The feeling of someone refusing to give up even when giving up made sense.
I don't even know her. I just woke up in this body yesterday. Why do I care?
The question had no good answer. Maybe the body cared and the caring bled through to me. Maybe the connection itself created the attachment. Maybe I was just the kind of person who couldn't ignore someone in trouble.
Doesn't matter why. Matters what I do about it.
I pushed myself to my feet, using the wall for support. The mandible blade still hung at my hip. My legs held, barely.
The stairs waited.
Somewhere above, Ciri trained with Witchers who couldn't understand what she was becoming. Somewhere above, a threat I remembered from television and games crept closer with every passing day.
I started climbing.
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