Chapter 169: Too Late to Pretend

Aether followed. He wasn’t sure that he was going to be able to do it, but at the same time, if he stayed still, the ending would be the same. The women guided him through the city, showing him just how well they knew the city. They went through many paths that he had no idea about, that he had never seen before in his whole stay here… well, it wasn’t a long time, but you get the idea.

He didn’t even know this part of the city, but it was normal, since the city was massive, and from what the woman from the Inn had told him, the city was divided into many sections. They all had a ruler, someone who had undeniable power in the city.

It was said that the sectors fought with each other many times, killing eachother. Which, in the Tides, meant the end.

But they were getting distracted. What he wanted to say was that because he had only been to one sector, he couldn’t know the others.

They walked for a while, Aether becoming quite wary that the woman might have been lying to him, after all, just how far had she come? Could her husband really fight a monster one-on-one for this long?

It wasn’t logical; it didn’t make sense. Something felt wrong, and he wasnt going to deny that feeling.

…

Yet in the end, they had reached a house.

The house itself looked… ordinary.

That was the unsettling part.

It was a narrow, two-story stone building pressed tightly between its neighbors, its walls made from the same pale, salt-worn blocks that dominated this part of the city. The stone had been smoothed over time by wind and passing hands, edges rounded rather than sharp. A shallow set of steps led up to a wooden door reinforced with iron bands dulled by age and moisture. Above it, a small balcony jutted out, its railing uneven but intact, with fabric once hung there long ago, now reduced to stiff, colorless strips.

The windows were narrow and tall, fitted with cloudy glass that caught the light without reflecting it cleanly. Faint scratches marred the frames, old marks, as someone had once tried to carve symbols into the wood and given up halfway through. The roof sloped gently, tiled with dark stone plates that overlapped like scales, some cracked, some shifted out of place, but none missing.

If not for the coral, it could have passed for any other lived-in house in the sector.

The coral had not overtaken it violently.

It had settled.

Pale growths crept along the base of the walls, branching upward in slow, deliberate patterns, like veins spreading beneath skin. Some were thin and brittle, snapping softly underfoot where fragments had fallen away. Others were thicker, fused directly into the stone, their surfaces smooth and faintly luminous, pulsing with a dull inner glow that waxed and waned like a sluggish heartbeat.

Around the windows, coral had grown in delicate arcs, framing the glass as if mimicking decoration. Inside those arcs, the stone looked warped, softened, as though the house had inhaled and never fully exhaled. Near the doorframe, a cluster of coral jutted outward in jagged spikes, their tips rounded down over time, no longer sharp, just present.

One strand had crept across the wooden door itself, splitting into thin filaments that disappeared into the grain. The wood hadn’t rotted. It had accepted it.

The coral wasn’t aggressive.

It wasn’t consuming the house.

It was living with it.

Aether stood still for a moment, taking it in. This wasn’t a ruin. It wasn’t abandoned. It was a home that had been slowly, patiently claimed by the Tides, not destroyed, not erased, just… altered.

A quiet reminder that even normalcy did not remain untouched here.

If before he had felt that something was wrong, then now, he knew it.

…

’Didn’t coral grow from dead bodies?’ That was the thought that kept resurfacing inside his mind. But if that was the case, then there would have to have been a dead body inside for a while, and he didn’t mean days, for this level of coral infestation, probably weeks. Maybe a month or two, but he was probably exaggerating.

It didn’t make sense, but he still decided to go inside.

As they opened the door, he tried not to touch the coral; he didn’t want to touch the dead.

Yet, as the door opened, he froze in the doorway.

A man lay on the ground, by all means completely dead, and it didn’t seem as if he had died recently.

The floor beneath him was no longer a floor in any meaningful sense. Coral had completely infested it, rising in thick, tangled masses that devoured the stone and spilled upward like a frozen tide. Jagged formations overlapped and fused together, some branching outward in sharp, brittle fans, others forming dense, knotted clusters that looked heavy enough to collapse under their own weight.

His boots were half-buried.

Coral had grown around him, climbing up the leather in thin, skeletal tendrils, cracking it apart and stitching it back together in the same motion. One leg was trapped deeper than the other, coral gripping his shin like a cast made of bone and glass. Where it touched exposed skin, the growth thinned, flattening into translucent plates that adhered directly to flesh, tracing the lines of muscle beneath as if studying his shape. Coral had grown him, climbing up the leather in thin

He was tall, broad-shouldered, built like someone who had once relied on strength without thinking twice about it. His clothes were torn and stiff with dried blood, fabric fused to coral in several places, threads disappearing into pale growths that climbed his torso in branching patterns. Across his chest, the coral formed a crude lattice, spreading from a wound just beneath his ribs, as though it had poured out of him rather than into him.

His arms hung at his sides, fingers slightly curled. Coral had crept along them too, wrapping around his wrists and forearms in spiral bands. Some pieces had broken off, leaving jagged stumps behind, while others continued upward, embedding themselves into the skin like parasites that had learned restraint.

His face was the worst part.

One side was untouched, gaunt but recognizably human, stubble lining his jaw, lips cracked from dehydration or something worse. The other side had begun to calcify. Coral framed his cheekbone, climbing toward his eye in thin, delicate filaments that stopped just short of the lid, as if hesitant. His eye on that side was open, staring ahead without focus, the sclera clouded, the iris dulled to a washed-out gray.

…

…

The coral had infested the floor, claimed his body, and anchored him in place, not as a corpse, not as a victim, but as something in between. A man held upright by the remains of the dead, standing only because the Tides had decided he was not finished yet.

Aether stared, his eyes completely hollow. What kind of sick joke was this?

“Looks like the monster has left for a while. Quick, we have to help him! It will be back!”

The woman rushed by her husband’s side, her hand gliding across his face. She touched the coral many times, but it was as if she was completely unaware that she was even touching it.

Did she not see it? Did she not know that he had died, but how, he had only arrived, and he could instantly tell.

So then… it wasn’t that she didn’t know, but rather that she refused to accept it. She denied that her husband had really died.

She said that the monster was going to come back, but was that really the case, or did she just say that to herself because she needed something to keep her motivated, something to make her keep denying the truth?

His eyes darkened further, looking down on the sorry sight.

It made him wonder if he hadn’t been badly hurt after his battle with Lilith, and if he hadn’t entered Demon of Dread, would he have reacted the same? Would he have gone to his friends and acted as if they were still alive, just in dire need of help?

The woman noticed that he hadn’t come to help her and just stood there watching, so she turned to him with a hateful gaze, screaming at him.

“Are you just going to stay there and stare like the useless piece of…” She stopped herself before looking away and back to her deceased husband.

Her outburst had surprised him, but it had given him an answer. Before, the reason she was nervous wasnt because of him, or the request, but because she knew this would happen, she knew she was going to outburst like this.

She was nervous because she knew this part of her was going to come out.

…

…

Aether frowned. He was done with this place; he was done with everyone being so blind.

…

“You’re crazy… everyone in this hellhole is insane!”

Was he the only one in this place who could see the truth?

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