Chapter 109: His Calm Before

The wooden training sword splintered into three pieces.

Lucian fell backward and landed hard on the dirt of the abandoned training yard. He lay there, gasping for air.

Raziel stood over him, his breathing was completely even.

“You are not human anymore,” Lucian groaned.

He accepted Raziel’s extended hand and pulled himself up. “I swung at your blind spot. You didn’t even look. You just moved.”

“You telegraphed the strike with your shoulder,” Raziel said flatly.

Lucian dusted off his pants. “Three weeks until the Ascension Tournament. If you fight like this, you are going to break the other novices in half.”

“That is the plan.”

Lara was sitting on a stone bench a few yards away.

“Sit,” Lara told Raziel.

Raziel obeyed, walked over to the grass in front of her and crossed his legs.

“Close your eyes,” Lara instructed. “Find the anchor.”

This was the second part of his training.

Lucian trained his physical reflexes for the tournament. Lara trained his mind to slow the decay of his soul.

Raziel closed his eyes.

He searched for a memory that used to bring him comfort, thought about Brother Thomas handing him a hot bowl of stew during a harsh winter in his first life.

“What do you feel?” Lara asked.

“I remember being grateful,” Raziel said.

“You remember it, or you feel it?”

Raziel stayed quiet, observed the memory like a spectator watching a stage play.

He knew he was supposed to feel warmth, but the emotion was locked behind a thick wall of glass.

“I just remember it,” he admitted.

Lara sighed softly. “It is fading faster than we thought.”

Later that night, Raziel locked the door to his room.

He needed to test the active output of his class. He had tested the Umbral Shield days ago. Now he needed a weapon.

He stood in the center of the room. He raised his right hand and called upon the fused core in his chest.

The golden light of the Paragon and the black sludge of the Shadow Parasite bled out of his palm.

They twisted together, the energy condensed and stretched outward until it formed a solid physical shape.

A sword.

It was a blade of pure energy.

The core was blinding gold, but the edges were pitch black, absorbing the dim light of the room. It hummed with a low, dangerous vibration.

Raziel walked over to the stone wall. He found a faint, residual suppression seal carved into the brick.

He swung the blade.

The gold-black sword passed through the solid stone and the magical seal at the exact same time.

The brick was sliced clean, and the blue mana of the seal dissolved into dead sparks.

The weapon cut matter and magic with the exact same ease.

It was the perfect executioner’s tool.

[SKILL ACTIVATED: UMBRAL BLADE]

[EMPATHY LEVEL: 81% -> 80%]

Raziel dismissed the sword. The energy vanished.

A part of him simply did not wanted to know nothing about his stats.

He thought about the upcoming tournament and having to kill Caius or the other novices if they stood in his way.

He felt absolutely nothing about it.

Raziel walked over to his desk and pulled out a small, smooth red crystal from his pocket.

Paladin Kiera had given it to him before they parted ways at the safehouse. It was a high-grade military communication stone.

He channeled a tiny fraction of neutral mana into it.

The crystal glowed.

“Raziel.” Mirael’s voice came through.

It sounded stronger than it had in the forest, it seems like Kiera was taking good care of her.

“Are you safe?” Raziel asked.

“Safe enough,” the Oracle replied. “But time is running out. The tournament is just a distraction. You need to understand what you are actually fighting for.”

Raziel leaned against the desk. “Caelum wants the Heart of the Forge. Seraphina wanted to open a door to true power. What exactly is the Forge?”

Mirael took a deep breath on the other side of the connection.

“The Forge is the heart of the world,” she explained. “It was created by the Ancient Pantheon to reset reality if the world became too corrupted to survive.”

Raziel frowned. “Reset reality.”

“Yes. Zion activated it once. That is how this works”

Raziel processed the information.

The world literally had a reset mechanic built into its foundation.

“And the Architect?” Raziel asked. “The entity behind Zion.”

“The Architect is the entity that built the Forge,” Mirael said. “And the one who built the game. Zion thinks she is the player, but she is just another piece on the board.”

Raziel looked at his scarred hands. He felt the cold emptiness of his eighty percent empathy.

“If the Architect designed all this,” Raziel asked, “do we have free will? Or are we just executing a script?”

Mirael thought about it. The silence stretched for several seconds.

“The architect designs the house,” Mirael said softly. “But he doesn’t choose who lives in it.”

Raziel didn’t interrupt.

“You chose to absorb the darkness into your own body,” the Oracle continued.

“She chose to protect those children in the south instead of using them as shields. I saw it. Neither of those decisions was in the original design.”

A long pause followed.

“That gives me hope,” Mirael whispered.

Raziel stared at the red crystal. He didn’t feel hope. He didn’t feel despair. He just saw the tactical reality of the board.

“Stay hidden, Mirael. I will contact you when the tournament begins.”

He cut the connection. The crystal went dark.

Raziel walked across the room and opened the heavy wooden door to his small balcony.

He stepped out into the cold night air. The wind blew against his face, carrying the distant smell of the capital’s smoke and the impending storm of the war.

He rested his hands on the stone railing and looked toward the southern horizon.

Hundreds of miles away, past the salt plains and the ruined outposts, Zion stood on the edge of a high cliff.

She wore her black armor, her cape flapping violently in the wind. She was looking toward the northern horizon, her red eyes fixed on the distant capital.

Two anomalies. Two players breaking the script.

Raziel blinked.

Zion blinked.

For the first time in the history of all the timelines, Raziel’s System and Zion’s Interface did not operate independently.

They synchronized.

A massive, screen-shattering window erupted in Raziel’s vision.

At the exact same millisecond, the exact same window exploded across Zion’s interface in the south.

The text was not the usual clean blue or warning red.

It was a chaotic, bleeding black font that glitched and tore at the edges of their vision.

[T̴H̵E̵ ̸A̶R̷C̸H̷I̵T̷E̵C̵T̸ ̸H̵A̶S̸ ̶E̷N̴T̷E̵R̶E̷D̸ ̶T̸H̶E̸ ̶G̵A̸M̶E̵]

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