Chapter 108: Chapter 108: Memory of Rust and Blood

​The silence that saturated The Void Chamber after the physical interrogation ended felt far more oppressive than the searing lashes of light themselves. Dayat remained bound to the root-woven chair, his breathing heavy and smelling of iron—the unmistakable scent of internal bleeding. Before him, Kancil remained unconscious, his small frame looking fragile and broken under the dim, flickering glow of the purple crystals. Veynar, the High Warden, stood motionless, clutching the Root-Singer’s Baton, which still hummed with a faint, malevolent green light.

​”You think us monsters, do you not?” Veynar’s voice shattered the stillness, smooth and laced with the poison of absolute conviction. “You believe us cruel for punishing you, the ’well-intentioned’ outsider. But you do not know, Dayat. You have no inkling of what your ’master’ did to this land in the forgotten ages.”

​Thalmirion stepped forward, his arms crossed over his opulent chest. His ancient eyes glinted with a hatred that spanned millennia. “Show him, Veynar. Let him witness exactly what it is he seeks to awaken. Let the truth be his final tormentor.”

​Veynar raised his baton high into the stagnant air. “By the authority of the primeval roots, I summon the memory of this soil. The Echo of Ancestors: Grand Projection!”

​Instantly, the crystal-lined walls of the chamber erupted in a blinding, white radiance. Dayat felt a violent sensation of falling, as if the floor beneath his chair had suddenly vanished into an abyss. However, he did not plummet into darkness. His vision was abruptly flooded by colors more vibrant than anything he had seen in the current age—a green so deep it felt alive, skies of an impossible azure, and a World Tree so gargantuan it made the current Vaelith look like a mere sapling.

​This was Verdia in the Era of Myth.

​Dayat no longer felt the physical agony of his wounds, but his consciousness was forcibly dragged into a historical record that felt terrifyingly tangible. Beside him, he could sense the presence of Lunethra and Dola, also caught in this mental projection. Lunethra stared around with tear-filled eyes, recognizing the lost glory of her ancestors. Dola, however… Dola looked to be in excruciating pain. She clutched her head—a gesture impossible for a standard AI—her expression a mask of profound existential suffering.

​”It hurts… my head…” Dola hissed, her voice a jagged wreck of static. “Data… corruption… unregistered memory packets… attempting to force access…”

​Suddenly, the peaceful Verdia sky was torn asunder.

​A dimensional rift, the color of fresh arterial blood, opened across the horizon. From its depths, it was not demons or organic horrors that emerged, but a gargantuan metallic structure—a silver disc of cold, unyielding geometry. And at its peak stood a woman.

​Dayat gasped. The woman possessed facial features that were an exact mirror of Dola’s, but her silver hair was significantly longer, and her eyes lacked the electric-blue spark of life. Instead, they emitted a cold, rhythmic red binary glow. She wore a futuristic military uniform that stood in jarring contrast to this fantasy world—a suit of black polymer armor with flowing circuits of binary light etched into every seam. Upon her shoulders sat a metallic cloak that billowed even in the absence of wind.

​”The Maiden of Steel,” Lunethra whispered, her voice trembling with ancestral dread.

​The woman did not scream. She did not roar. She simply raised her hand, and a heavy, synthesized mechanical voice resonated across the entire continent. “Optimization sequence initiated. Organic life is an unstable variable. Verdia must be converted.”

​The slaughter was systematic.

​Dayat watched as thousands of flying machines—ancient, lethal drones and gargantuan mechs—descended from the rift. They did not burn the forest with fire; they did something far more horrific. Wherever the machines touched the earth, the organic roots transformed into cold, silver cables. Green leaves hardened into razor-sharp metallic plates. The fertile soil calcified into a dead, industrial floor.

​The ancient Elves tried to fight back. Light-callers unleashed thousands of glowing arrows, but swarms of micro-missiles from the Maiden’s machines intercepted them before they could even draw close. Dayat witnessed stomach-churning scenes: a brave Elven general decapitated by a silent laser blade, while Elven children were snatched up by robotic claws to have their Mana extracted for fuel.

​Half of Verdia was transformed into a metallic wasteland in a matter of days. The screams of millions trapped within the “Steel Plague” filled Dayat’s ears in this projection, a cacophony of agony that seemed to vibrate his very soul.

​”Look at it, Dayat!” Veynar’s voice echoed within his mind. “That is the ’progress’ the Maiden brings! That is what you call the ’aid of technology’!”

​At the summit of a spire made of iron that had grown from the carcass of the ancient World Tree, the Maiden stood with an utterly flat expression. To her, the death of millions of Elves was merely a rounding error in her efficiency calculations. Dola, witnessing this, fell to her knees. Her head throbbed with the weight of the realization. She saw herself in the past—as the world’s cold, logical executioner.

​However, as the despair reached its zenith, the Verdia sky shifted once more.

​Six brilliant lights descended from the heavens like falling stars. Dayat felt a Mana pressure so immense the projection itself threatened to shatter into fragments.

​The Nura of Light descended with wings of radiance that blotted out the sun. Beside her, the Riha of Wind summoned storms capable of shearing gargantuan mechs in half. The Maira of Water purified the land of its rust, while the Arda of Earth rose mountains to crush the Maiden’s iron towers. The Narisa of Flame melted the remains of the metal into slag, and the Samara of Aether locked the dimensions, ensuring no more reinforcements could be summoned.

​The battle was a cosmic cataclysm.

​The Six Goddesses did not speak. They moved with perfect, divine synchronization. Dayat watched as the Maiden of Steel fought back, firing beams of concentrated red light from her chassis, but the combined power of the Six, who represented the fundamental rules of the world, was too great.

​”Analysis: Probability of failure… 99.9%,” the Maiden’s voice sounded in the memory, distorted and flickering.

​The climax occurred when the Six Goddesses merged into a single, colossal pillar of prismatic light. They struck the Maiden directly in her central core. She was not destroyed—her essence was too potent to be wiped from existence. Instead, her military chassis was shattered into millions of pieces, and her consciousness was fragmented into data shards, sealed across the continent through the Celestial Six-Fold Seal

.

​The projection exploded in a flash of blinding white, and Dayat was jolted back into the reality of his interrogation chair in The Void Chamber.

​He was gasping for air, sweat drenching his body. The sight of millions of dead Elves and the horror of that war remained burned into his retinas. However, instead of the horror the Elders expected, Dayat slowly lowered his head and began to laugh.

​The laughter was small at first, then grew into a cynical, bitter sound that echoed through the soundproofed interrogation room.

​”Hah… hahahaha…”

​Veynar and Thalmirion frowned. They had expected Dayat to beg for mercy after seeing the “truth.” Mereka mengharapkan Dayat akan berlutut dalam ketakutan.

​”What do you find so amusing, human?” Thalmirion asked, his voice sharp and defensive.

​Dayat lifted his face. His eyes, which had previously been filled with sorrow and exhaustion, were now utterly dead. All that remained was a cold, crystalline hatred. He stared at Thalmirion with a look of absolute derision.

​”So… that is your reason?” Dayat asked, his voice calm yet suffocatingly heavy. “You fear a history that isn’t even mine? You torture me, Kancil, and Dola because of a cowardly trauma from thousands of years ago?”

​Dayat looked at Dola, who was still trembling on the observation table. She stared back at him with eyes filled with confusion and pain, as if she had just seen a nightmare of herself.

​”Do you know what I thought while watching that recording, Veynar?” Dayat continued, his gaze shifting to the High Warden. “I didn’t feel pity for the Elves who died. I thought… if the Maiden had the power to flatten you people like that, why on earth did she lose?”

​Veynar recoiled. “You… you truly have lost your mind.”

​”No, I haven’t,” Dayat smiled sinisterly, revealing his blood-stained teeth. “I just realized one thing. If my kindness is rewarded with prisons and whips, then I would much rather be the apocalypse you fear. If Dola truly is the Maiden… then I will make sure she awakens fully to finish what she started thousands of years ago.”

​Thalmirion took a step back, his face turning a ghostly pale. “He… he truly is the perfect host for the Maiden. He possesses no conscience.”

​”My conscience died when you burned Kancil’s back,” Dayat hissed. He looked toward the boy’s unconscious form. “You call Dola a monster? Look at yourselves. You torture children, you slander the man who saved your mother-tree. Who is the monster now?”

​Dayat closed his eyes, feeling the hatred flowing through his veins like high-octane fuel. The historical projection hadn’t granted him fear; it had granted him inspiration. Inspiration of a power that could dismantle everything.

​Veynar swung his baton once more, closing the interrogation session with a violent shove. “Take them back! Prepare the Public Trial! The people must know that their hero is a monster who desires the return of the Maiden!”

​Dayat was dragged back to his cell. Throughout the journey, he did not struggle. He remained silent, letting his hatred freeze into absolute resolve. In the next cell, Kancil remained unconscious, unaware that his world had just turned into a very dark place.

​Inside the damp, airless cell, Dayat sat leaning against the ancient roots. He stared at Dola, who sat motionless in the corner, appearing utterly devastated by what she had witnessed in the projection.

​”Dola,” Dayat called out softly.

​”Master… am I… am I that monster?” Dola asked, her voice small, fragile, and breaking.

​Dayat looked at her, and then he smiled—a smile that was no longer warm, but filled with an obsessive, dark protection. “It doesn’t matter who you were in the past, Dola. To me, you are my assistant. And if this world deems you a monster… then I will be the one who unleashes that monster to level them all to the ground.”

​That night, in the depths of The Deep Root Cellar, the Hero of Verdia was truly buried, and the seed of The Maiden of Steel began to receive a new kind of nutrient: pure, unadulterated vengeance from a human who had been discarded by his own mercy.

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