CHAPTER 55: SHARDS
The princess immediately dropped into a low combat stance, her crimson eyes glowing brighter.
"Targets secured," rasped the masked man standing at the front of the group.
John slowly pushed himself up from the cold stone floor, dusting off his sleeves.
His heart was pounding, but as his eyes landed on the leader's exposed forearm, his breath hitched.
Etched deep into the man's flesh was a distinctive, jagged black mark—a coiled serpent wrapped around an inverted crown.
John's eyes widened in disbelief.
The Obsidian Covenant?
It shouldn't have been possible; this was another world entirely.
But that mark was unmistakable. It was the permanent brand forced onto every single member of the organization—the very same mark burned into John's own skin during his time with them.
[Well, minion, it seems these guys have really taken a liking to you.]
The princess moved first. Dark, volatile Ether surged from her fingertips as she attempted to manifest her undead fighters.
But before the summoning could take form, heavy, enchanted metal cuffs were violently slammed onto her wrists.
The metal flared with a harsh crimson light, instantly snuffing out her spell, draining her strength, and forcing her down onto the cold dirt floor.
Within seconds, both John and the princess were bound and fitted with dense, energy-suppressing bracelets.
Shortly after being locked inside a dim cell, John sat propped against the damp stone wall beside her, his mind struggling to process the revelation.
He rolled his shoulders casually, trying to find a comfortable position before turning his head toward her with a faint, unbothered smile.
"So," John offered, trying to lighten the mood. "I'm guessing this wasn't part of today's schedule."
The Princess stared at him in complete, frozen silence. Her eyes, usually regal and sharp, were wide with a mix of sheer disbelief and growing irritation.
She looked at him as if he had entirely lost his sanity.
"We just got kidnapped, and you are trying to joke around?" she muttered, her voice dripping with venomous disdain.
"Well, sitting in silence only makes the time pass slower," John replied with a shrug, leaning back until his head rested against the rough masonry.
Behind his calm facade, however, John's mind was operating at full capacity. The primary reason he wasn't panicking was that, following the previous attempt on his life, his mother had given him a powerful spatial artifact capable of instantly teleporting him to safety—provided he could feed it energy.
Allowing them to slip these suppression bracelets onto his wrists had been a critical blunder on his part, severing his access to the device.
He probed the suffocating pressure of the suppression lock. It was engineered to seal a person's energy. But his physique operated on a fundamentally different layer that standard ways didn't apply to it.
He knew he possessed the raw, brute energy required to overwhelm the artifact and shatter it from the inside out.
But even if I can, the cost is too steep, he thought grimly.
Brute-forcing the array right now will accelerate my mental decline and leave my physical body utterly drained afterward. I need to bide my time for the right opening.
Besides, I need to figure out what the Covenant is actually doing in this world before we make a scene.
Before he could process the thought further, heavy, rhythmic footsteps echoed down the stone corridor.
A group of masked men unbolted the cell door, hauling both John and the Princess down a winding, torch-lit hallway that opened into a vast, circular chamber.
In the center stood two cold, slab-like metal tables. Without a word of explanation, the men slammed the pair down onto the cold metal, securing their arms, torsos, and legs with thick, enchanted leather straps.
A tall figure clad in ornate, dark robes stood watching from an elevated platform. His eyes were entirely featureless—devoid of pupils— reminiscent of the lord Roan back at John's branch.
His attention remained locked onto a floating, intricate brass mechanism hovering above his hands.
"Check the girl," the leader commanded with a cold voice.
"Then move to the boy. The Supreme has set a strict timetable for this sector. If we don't locate the shard here, we move to the next site immediately."
A shard? John thought, his eyes narrowing as he lay pinned to the metal.
The word ignited a dormant memory. Back during his awakening, he had encountered Dark, the eerie god.
It was Daren who had later laid out the exact terms of their deal: if John could secure something called a Primordial Shard from the Godfall Realm, Dark would grant him the means to break free from the Covenant's reaching influence forever.
So they're hunting for those shards down here, John realized, the pieces clicking together.
What do they think we are carrying... and what actually are these shards? Echo, do you have an idea?
[…]
But John got no answer from him; he continued listening.
"The girl is not a target," one of the men reported, stepping back from the Princess's table.
"She is just a commission target from the Umbra Kingdom."
"Fine. Process her for transfer later," the leader dismissed carelessly, turning his empty gaze directly toward John.
"Now check the boy."
Two men dragged a heavy, clawed extraction apparatus attached to glowing ley-line cables over John's chest.
The metallic prongs pressed hard against his sternum, locking into place with a sickening metallic click.
"Initiate the extraction cycle," the leader ordered.
The moment the array activated, an unimaginable, agonizing surge slammed directly into John's nervous system.
It was unlike any pain he had ever endured. It was a violent, tearing sensation that ripped past his physical flesh, tearing through his inner organs and went past the physical, and plunging deep into his inner domain.
The extraction array clawed violently at his soul, trying to forcibly drag whatever lay buried in his domain to the surface.
His vision whited out instantly. The effortless composure he had maintained collapsed into absolute, unadulterated agony.
Every nerve ending burned as if bathed in liquid fire, and with every passing second, the agony tore deeper into his mind, splintering his thoughts into jagged fragments.
"Ah—GAAAH!" John screamed, his body violently seizing against the leather bindings as his knuckles turned white.
The sheer, agonizing intrusion pushed his consciousness over the brink. The torment was relentless, tearing at his mind so violently that he couldn't hold onto a single coherent thought. His teeth ground together so hard he tasted copper pouring into his mouth.
"Make it stop! Make it stop!" he shrieked, his voice hoarse, broken, and desperate as the sheer, agonizing trauma shattered his mental grip entirely.
Under the extreme, life-threatening agony of the extraction process, John's suppressed power broke completely wild.
His dormant physique, pushed to a desperate survival threshold by the unbearable pain, erupted from his core. Deep within his domain, the red core flared wildly, pouring out a red energy alongside a terrifying surge of stellar energy that slammed headfirst into the extraction device's incoming probe.
The monitoring apparatus turned a violent crimson, buzzing erratically before shattering into a shower of white-hot sparks.
The leader froze, staring at the chaotic readings flashing on the floating rune display. "What is this power? This isn't a Dark Shard..."
His pupil-less eyes widened in sudden, stark terror as he looked down at John, whose eyes were now burning with a terrifying, ancient light.
"It's a Primordial Shard!" the leader roared, panic instantly breaking his cold demeanor. "He carries the essence of the Primordials! Kill him! Kill him right now!"
Before any of the Covenant men could draw their weapons or channel their energy, John's physique crossed its critical threshold. The sheer, unbridled volume of power detonated outward in a blinding, instantaneous shockwave.
The energy-suppressing bracelets on his wrists exploded into molten dust. The enchanted leather straps holding him down disintegrated into ash.
The expanding sphere of stellar energy tore through the chamber, shattering the stone tables, obliterating the extraction arrays, and blowing the heavy stone ceiling upward into the night air. The entire underground compound caved in on itself, crushing the men beneath tons of falling debris and sending a massive pillar of dust and destruction straight into the sky.
When the deafening roar finally faded, the facility was reduced to nothing more than a ruined, smoking crater under the open sky.
John stood in the center of the devastation, gasping heavily for air. His body felt dangerously weak, a deep, paralyzing fatigue clawing at his shattered mind as the brutal recoil of forcing his physique took its toll.
His vision swam erratically, threatening to pull him into unconsciousness.
I... I have to get us out... right now...
Barely holding onto his fading senses, John stumbled through the burning rubble toward the Princess.
She was still lying on the shattered remains of her table, entirely unharmed by the explosion due to a dense dome of dark Ether that had automatically manifested around her. She was staring up at him in frozen, speechless shock.
John reached down, his trembling, bloodied hands gripping her arm tightly. With the absolute last thread of his remaining focus, he pulled out his mother's spatial artifact and forced his final strand of energy into its core.
A brilliant, blinding silver light enveloped them both, and in the very next instant the crater was empty.