Chapter 54: A Burning Hatered

He couldn’t help but curse inwardly as he realized the reality of things. This fucker was sentient and just laid a trap for Kael. Making him feel like it was still asleep when it was fully conscious and knew that Kael was here.

The anger that flared in him was immediate and sharp, not because he’d been fooled, that was expected, but because he’d almost trusted his own eyes. The Tower was teaching him again: the map was truth, and perception was bait.

If Kale had moved trusting but his eyes, he would have turned to cooked charcoal and cinder. The thought arrived vivid and ugly, his body blackening, hair igniting, lungs filling with heat until there was nothing left to inhale. He felt bile rise, not because he was nauseated, but because his survival instincts hated imagining failure so clearly.

’Fine,’ Kael muttered, “Presence!” The word came out low and controlled, like a switch being flipped. He didn’t waste time arguing with pride. Pride didn’t extinguish fire.

Immediately, all the feelings of heat were simply muted. The relief was almost shocking, like stepping out of a furnace into a cold room, except he knew the heat was still there and his skin simply wasn’t allowed to feel it properly.

Kael felt as if he was forced down the depths of a sea as his own vision felt like it resisted him. Everything turned gray, the world losing its sharpness as if someone had smeared ash over his eyes.

While his body no longer felt the heat of the area, his senses also suffered from the dulling. Sounds became distant and muffled, like he was hearing through thick walls. His own breath became the loudest thing again, and his heartbeat thudded in his ears like a drum.

Without hesitation, the Ifrit snapped his head out, blazing along the way the very air itself as it turned its face a couple of times around.

Fire trailed its movement like a cloak being whipped around, and the light shifted violently as it moved, casting trembling shadows over the arena’s broken edges. It was unable to find the preparator that it was about to consume.

It was sure that it was here; it invaded its territory, only a fool wouldn’t recognize an invader, but it also disappeared as soon as it invaded its territory. Kael stayed still, teeth clenched, body pressed low, and felt that dull gray sensation wrap him tighter as if the rune was insisting he become a non-event.

Did it flee? Did it hide, or did it simply leave?

The Ifrit couldn’t understand what happened, so it simply rose up, if that was a proper use of the word. The motion looked wrong for something half stone and half flame, less like standing and more like gravity being politely ignored.

It hovered in the air, mere stone with fire shaping the rest of its body. A tail of flames instead of legs, and a chest of hardened molten rock with a horned mask of infernal stone for a face. Even in gray, even with dulled senses, the sight made Kael’s skin crawl. The face wasn’t expressive, but it didn’t need to be. It was a mask built to intimidate anything that understood fear.

It turned its whole body left and right, unable to find the source of its discomfort; it even began flying forward, trying to locate the thief. The fire that made up its body stretched and tightened as it moved, like muscle made of flame.

Heat rolled off it in waves Kael could only partially sense, like pressure against his clothes. Every time it shifted direction, sparks and embers drifted from it and died before they hit the ground, swallowed by the arena’s own inferno.

Kael, on the other hand had laid low, so low that he was kissing the hot ground, and thanks to that, he was not spotted. His cheek nearly touched the ash-coated stone, and even with Presence muting sensation, he could still feel the ground’s hostility through the dullness, like pressing your face against something that wanted to blister you.

More like, his presence itself seemed to have been disregarded. He didn’t feel invisible in the heroic sense. He felt invalid. Like his existence had been filed away as irrelevant.

He was sure that the Ifrit looked his way multiple times, but it never noticed him. The creature’s head turned with slow certainty, scanning, pausing, scanning again. Kael held his breath each time the horned mask angled toward him, even though breathing was already muffled and distant.

That was the power of [Presence] rune. It didn’t hide one; it simply invalidated their presence. The distinction mattered. Hiding could fail if someone looked hard enough. Invalidating was… stranger. Like the Ifrit’s attention slid off him the way water slid off oil.

The creature moved up ahead, far too close to Kael that he felt the heat from its body washing close and licking away at his clothes. Even dulled, the proximity was terrifying. His sleeves felt warmer.

The air around his face felt thinner. The faint smell of burning cloth tried to push through the rune’s muffling and made his stomach twist. Kael stayed still anyway, body rigid, because any movement now would be a confession.

He couldn’t let out a sound as he waited for the Ifrit to go by. His jaw clenched so hard it ached. His fingers dug into the ground, nails scraping ash, and he forced himself not to cough even when his throat felt dry and raw.

The silence felt like it weighed tons, the kind of silence where you could hear a lie form in someone’s mouth.

Time wasn’t Kael’s ally, it was his enemy, as he knew well that the moment his mana was depleted, he’ll be exposed with his hand in the cookie jar to this creature. The rune wasn’t free it demanded a price. And he was paying it right now.

He could feel it like a steady drain somewhere behind his ribs, a tugging emptiness building as if something inside him was being poured out.

And he know what fate would await him after that. There wouldn’t be a chase. There wouldn’t be a second warning.

There would be fire, and then there would be nothing to recover….

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