The air was growing thicker, vibrating at a frequency that made my teeth ache. The Pass was incredibly close—I could feel it by the way physics itself was beginning to "glitch" under the pressure of the chaotic mana.
Zeno walked ahead, his silhouette a dark, blurry smudge against the gray crags.
"...if that kid wasn't lying... then those distorted are nothing more than a byproduct of his existence..."
I stopped, leaning against a cold rock to catch my breath. "What are you even talking about?"
Zeno flinched and whipped around. For a split second, his gaze turned sharp. "Huh? What is it, Iron?"
"A byproduct," I repeated, watching him closely. "You were talking about those monsters we just killed. What did you mean by that?"
Zeno waved it off, turning back to the trail. "Just thinking out loud, kid. The brain starts leaking when you get old. Forget it, the Pass is right here. We need to keep moving."
I froze in my tracks, intentionally leaning into the "petulant kid" routine.
"So that's how it is?" I said, letting a note of weary disappointment slip into my voice. "After everything that's happened, you still don't trust me?"
Zeno halted, but he didn't turn around.
"Fine," I sighed, taking a step away from the path. "If I'm just a burden to you, someone you can't even talk to... maybe I should just go?"
"You manipulative little bastard. Fine. Sit down for a minute."
I sat on a flat stone, waiting. Zeno leaned on his staff, casting his gaze out toward the horizon.
"Years ago, on a job, I crossed paths with a kid. He was maybe eighteen, twenty. Strange fellow, eyes entirely too old for his face. We were holed up in some ruins, surrounded by things far worse than those four-armed tuskers. He just sat there, completely unfazed, and told me that every single distorted, every horror crawling out of the mana rifts, was nothing more than a byproduct of the True Overlord's existence."
"The 'True Overlord'?" I asked. (Sounds like a textbook fantasy title).
"Exactly. But that kid was dead serious. He said the 'Overlord' doesn't even have to do anything. His energy, his 'Chaos Mana,' is so dense and volatile that it literally infects the reality around him. It takes the natural world and warps it... into that. He called the Overlord the 'father' of them all."
I leaned back, a dry chuckle escaping my throat.
"And you actually believed him? Zeno, come on. In my... country, they told stories like that to kids so they wouldn't stay out late. We had boggarts, ghosts, monsters under the bed. It's just folklore to explain things people don't understand."
Zeno shrugged, though he didn't share my amusement. "Maybe so."
"Did you ask his name, or did you ever see this 'Overlord' yourself?"
"No, never asked his name, and I never saw the 'Overlord' either."
"So some random guy tells you a fairy tale, and you're still chewing on it all these years later?" I shook my head, feeling my engineering skepticism flare up. "More than likely, it's just high-level mana radiation causing localized mutations."
"Yeah, you're probably right," Zeno smiled, faint and weary.
Fifteen minutes later...
"Hey, look up, kid. We're here."
I looked up, expecting something spectacular. Fiery rifts in the sky, floating islands, or at least lightning arcing from the ground. But as we crossed an invisible threshold, the world remained... just the world. The same rocky slope, the same pine trees, and the same gray mist.
"That's it?" I looked around, bewildered. "This is your Pass? It's just a forest, only a little more beat-up."
"Your eyes are deceiving you," Zeno didn't even slow down, but I noticed his grip tighten on his staff. "Don't look at the outer shell. Look at how it functions."
I focused.
As an engineer, I was hardwired to believe that every process had logic and structure. Energy flows from point A to point B. But here... here, the mana was glitching. The ether around us was practically detonating with white noise. The mana would jerk, shift directions, collapse into nothingness, and then spontaneously manifest again. It was chaotic, unpredictable, and... it hurt like hell.
"I see it now..." I whispered, pressing a palm to my temple.
"Exactly," Zeno nodded.
We pushed deeper into the woods of the Pass. Even the shadows fell wrong here, stretching and shrinking at random. I did my best to step exactly in Zeno's tracks, steering clear of areas where the air felt uncomfortably dense. It was an uncanny place. It looked like ordinary nature, but the very fabric of reality felt incredibly fragile.
"We need to find a spot deeper in," Zeno pointed toward a cluster of massive boulders blanketed in bluish moss. "Out there among the crags, our own emanations will completely bleed into the background. If we can hold out until dark, we'll be—as you like to put it—ghosts."
I nodded in agreement, though doubts still gnawed at me. Sure, we were in a blind spot, but damn it, would they really fail to track us here? I could feel my skill pulsing nervously, as if throwing up warning flags.
"Let's hurry," I quickened my pace, trying not to look back as a tree branch behind me momentarily turned translucent before snapping back into solid reality. "I don't like this place at all."
While the Pass itself played host to its own bizarre anomalies, the ravine at its foot had turned into an absolute hellscape.
Richter's detachment had marched straight into the thick of the swarm. The Distorted were crawling out of every crevice. Unlike the seamless synergy between Zeno and Iron, the Order's rank-and-file enforcers were drowning in a tidal wave of flesh and talons.
"Close ranks! Shields up!" an officer bellowed, his voice cracking, but his command was cut short by a wet crunch. A four-armed beast closed the distance in a single leap, tearing his head off along with a chunk of his helmet.
Richter walked right through the carnage without so much as drawing his sword. Slender blades of pure mana spiraled around him, precisely severing the limbs of any monster that dared draw near. He stepped over the body of a young guardsman whose entrails were steaming against the cold stone, never once looking down. His gaze was fixed entirely upward—toward the heights of the Pass.
At that exact moment, hundreds of miles away in the quiet of his study on the Upper Horizon, Master Valt sat motionless before a gigantic magical sphere.
The crystal's surface glowed with a soft, bluish light, broadcasting a bird's-eye panorama. It displayed the rocky ridges, the swarming dots of the enforcers below, and two barely perceptible sparks heading deeper into the Pass.
Beside the Master, leaning against the cold wall, stood Jerald. He was completely bound in glowing chains that bit into his flesh at the slightest movement. Upon his lips lay a seal of silence—an invisible band of magic preventing him from making a sound. His single good eye darted across the imagery within the sphere, filling with fury.
Valt slowly reached out, tracing his fingers across the sphere's surface.
"Do you see, Jerald?" the Master said softly.
He turned his head toward the prisoner, a cold, triumphant fire igniting in his eyes.
"They walked willingly into a cage whose walls I have spent years building specifically for their kind. Soon, our grand design will become reality. And you, my dear guardsman, will watch it unfold from the front row."
Smiling, Valt shifted his gaze back to the sphere, where the tiny pinpricks of Iron and Zeno dissolved into the static of the ether.