Chapter 191: The Labyrinth

The impact was not a singular event. It was a violent, chaotic series of collisions that tore the breath from Vane’s throat. They hit the slanted stone of a drainage chute first. The ancient masonry stripped the leather from his shoulder guard. They tumbled downward in a tangle of limbs and bruised iron. The world spun in a sickening blur of black rock and freezing spray.

They slammed into the bottom. The water was waist deep and stagnant. It smelled of ammonia, centuries of decay, and powdered bone.

Vane took the brunt of the final landing. He hit the submerged flagstones back first. The water displaced around him in a heavy wave. The shockwave traveled up his spine and settled directly in his shattered chest.

His vision inverted. The colors of the dark crypt inverted into a blinding negative flash. He did not scream. He could not scream. His right lung had entirely collapsed. The left was struggling against the internal bleeding that was rapidly filling his chest cavity.

“Vane.”

Isole’s voice was a frantic, muffled sound in the dark. She was splashing through the water, her hands searching for him blindly.

Vane forced his eyes open. He was lying on his back, half submerged in the freezing muck. The ceiling was forty feet above them. The jagged hole they had fallen through was a distant square of grey light.

Kavor did not jump down after them. The Grave Warden simply stood at the edge of the pit. The blue slit of its mask stared down into the abyss for a long, silent moment. Then, it turned and walked away. The heavy, grinding footsteps echoed through the upper antechamber and faded into the dark.

Vane tried to sit up. His body refused the command. The pain was absolute. It was a physical wall that his logic could not climb. He tasted copper and bile. He rolled onto his side, coughing up a dark, thick mouthful of blood into the water.

“Do not move,” Isole whispered.

She found him in the dark. Her hands were freezing, but they moved over his armor with desperate precision. She found the dent in his chest plate. She felt the unnatural shift of the bones beneath the leather. She let out a sharp, ragged gasp.

“Your ribs are crushed,” she said. Her voice was trembling, stripping away the calm veneer of the Saintess. “You are bleeding inside. I have to fix it.”

“No time,” Vane rasped. Every syllable felt like chewing glass. “It did not jump. It is taking the stairs. Or it is sending something else.”

“I am healing you, Vane. Be quiet.”

Isole raised her hands. She did not grab her staff. She placed her palms directly against the ruined leather over his heart.

She began to cast.

The golden light bloomed in the suffocating darkness of the lower crypts. It was a beautiful, flawless color. It looked like captured sunlight. The pure Holy mana flowed from her core, passing through the psychological braids her mother had forced upon her, and entered Vane’s chest.

It felt warm. It felt soothing. It was also completely useless.

Vane felt the skin knit together. He felt the bruising fade on the surface. But the light did not reach the bone. The purity of the mana made it weightless. It lacked the density to force the jagged edges of his ribs back into alignment. It lacked the heavy, biological authority needed to reconstruct a collapsed lung. It was a cosmetic fix for a fatal wound.

“It is not working,” Isole whispered. The panic in her voice spiked. She poured more mana into the filter. The golden light flared brighter, illuminating the massive underground tunnel. “Why is it not working? The lattice is perfect. The output is stable.”

“It is too light, Isole,” Vane wheezed. He gripped her wrist. His fingers were slick with his own blood. “You are treating a symptom. Not the disease. Stop casting.”

Isole shook her head. Her emerald eyes were wide and shining with unshed tears. The light from her hands cast harsh, frantic shadows against the curved stone walls.

“I can do this,” she insisted. She closed her eyes. Her brow furrowed in concentration. She tried to force the light deeper. She tried to make the pure mana do the work of a surgeon. “I am a Sylvaris. I can purge the damage.”

“Isole. Stop.”

Vane did not say it out of anger. He said it out of survival.

He had heard something.

The sound did not come from the hole above them. It came from the darkness of the tunnel ahead. It was a dry, clicking sound. It sounded like wooden blocks being struck together in a rapid, erratic rhythm.

Vane forced himself into a sitting position. The agony was blinding, but he pushed it into a designated corner of his mind. He reached blindly into the water and found the shaft of the Silver Fang. He pulled it into his lap.

“Look at the water,” Vane whispered.

Isole opened her eyes. She looked down.

The golden light from her hands was illuminating the stagnant pool around them. The water was not empty. The floor of the tunnel was lined with bones. Human bones, animal bones, the discarded calcium of a thousand years of rot.

And the bones were moving.

They were vibrating. The loose femurs and shattered skulls were twitching in the muck, reacting to an invisible current.

The clicking sound from the tunnel grew louder. It was joined by a wet, tearing sound. It was the sound of dead sinew being stretched over dry joints.

“The Grave Warden,” Vane said. His voice was a bloody rasp. “It controls the necrotic domain. It did not jump because it does not need to hunt us. The crypt will do it.”

From the shadows just beyond the reach of Isole’s golden light, the hunters emerged.

They did not have skin. They did not have eyes. They were quadrupedal constructs made entirely of mismatched bones. A human ribcage formed the torso. The elongated skulls of wolves served as heads. Their legs were a horrific amalgamation of shattered spines and sharpened femurs. Black, necrotic sludge held the joints together, acting as a foul, magical cartilage.

Bone Hounds.

There were three of them in the immediate vanguard. They moved with a jerky, unnatural speed. They did not growl. They simply clicked their skeletal jaws, tasting the air.

Isole raised her hands. The golden light flared like a beacon.

“Get back,” she shouted.

She aimed a pulse of pure Holy Light at the closest Hound. The golden wave struck the construct directly in the chest.

The result was pathetic.

The Holy Light scorched the outer layer of the black sludge. The Hound stumbled backward, its ribcage smoking. But the light lacked the physical mass to break the bones. The Hound righted itself instantly. It shook its skeletal head and locked its empty eye sockets directly onto Isole.

Or rather, it locked onto the light.

“They do not have eyes, Isole,” Vane said. He used the spear as a crutch, hauling himself to his feet. His left leg threatened to buckle. “They track mana. They track heat.”

Isole looked at her glowing hands. She looked at the Hounds. The constructs were practically vibrating with aggression. They were not looking at her flesh. They were staring directly at the source of the pure, unfiltered Holy energy.

In a necrotic zone, pure light was not a weapon. It was a thermal flare dropped in the middle of a frozen ocean. It was a dinner bell.

“Your filter,” Vane wheezed, taking a clumsy step backward. “It is drawing them. The purer the light, the brighter you shine in the dark. You are painting a target on our backs.”

Isole stared at him. The horror of the realization washed over her face. The magic her mother had beaten into her, the purity she had sacrificed her true nature to maintain, was not just failing to heal him. It was actively trying to kill them.

“Kill the light,” Vane ordered.

Isole clenched her fists. The golden glow vanished.

The tunnel plunged into absolute darkness.

For a terrifying second, there was nothing but the sound of the dripping water and Vane’s ragged breathing.

Then, the clicking resumed.

The Hounds had lost the blinding visual of the light, but the residual mana was still in the air. They were confused, but they were still hunting. They began to fan out, their sharp bone claws clicking against the submerged stones.

“We have to move,” Vane whispered in the dark. His voice was barely audible over the sound of the water. “If we stay, they will find us by scent.”

He felt a hand grab his shoulder. It was Isole. She pulled his arm over her shoulders, taking his weight. She was shaking, but her grip was like iron.

“Which way?” she asked.

“Deeper,” Vane replied. “Away from the main shaft. We need a bottleneck. A room with one door.”

They began to walk. Every step was a negotiation with agony. Vane could feel the broken edges of his ribs shifting with every movement. He focused entirely on the mechanics of walking. Left foot. Right foot. Do not breathe too deeply. Do not pass out.

Behind them, the splashing started.

The Bone Hounds had found their landing zone. The clicking of their jaws echoed off the curved walls of the labyrinth, multiplying until it sounded like a legion of insects swarming in the dark.

Isole dragged him forward. They moved through the twisting, flooded corridors of the ossuary. The walls were lined with square niches, each containing a skull that seemed to watch them pass. The air grew colder. The smell of rot intensified.

Vane was failing. He knew it. His vision was tunneling, leaving only a small, grey circle of clarity in the center of his sight. He was bleeding out internally. The Usurper system offered no solutions. It simply documented his declining vital signs with cold, indifferent logic.

“I cannot cast,” Isole whispered. She was half carrying him now. “If I cast a light to see the path, they will swarm us. If I cast a heal, they will track the warmth. I am useless.”

“You are walking,” Vane corrected her. His voice was incredibly weak. “That is a use. Keep walking.”

They turned a corner and hit a set of stairs leading out of the water. At the top of the short flight was a heavy wooden door. It was banded with rusted iron and sealed with an old, broken padlock.

Isole practically threw Vane up the stairs. She kicked the door. The rotted wood splintered, but the iron held. She hit it again, channeling a tiny, desperate fraction of kinetic force into her boot. The hinges screamed and gave way.

They tumbled into the room beyond.

It was dry. It was small. The stone tables in the center indicated it was an old embalming chamber. There was no other exit.

Isole slammed the ruined door back into the frame. She dragged a heavy stone table across the floor, barring the entrance.

Source: Webnovel.com, updated by NovelKeep