When Valens was about to open the clinic door, he caught a subtle shift in the Resonance. It was early in the morning, the sun's first lights barely flashing from beyond the thick swarm of clouds, the air foggy and the paved roads slick with dew. He’d left Selin in the house since it was still early, and told William on the way that she’d be coming in their usual hours.

He rushed to the clinic at this hour because the penicillin would be ready soon. He wanted to prepare the first batch before they opened the clinic.

This change in the Resonance, though, prickled his skin with unease. He paused as the clinic door creaked gently open, peered back into the street with eyebrows arched, but saw nothing out of the ordinary. It was silent—too silent, perhaps, for his taste.

Shaking his head, he stepped in and locked the door after him. His newly established reputation had turned this clinic into a haven of sorts for the poor ring of Belgrave, so while there were gangs who wanted to take a piece from him, or take him in for a variety of reasons, Valens found that there was an equally large group of people willing to support him so long as he kept the clinic active.

Of course, these gangs and the rest of the public weren’t aware that there would always be a Templar in disguise working in the clinic just in case. A single Dain could take a bunch of gang members without sweating a drop, not to mention Valens’s skills, which were greatly suited to dealing with crowded enemies, unlike the Templars.

Inside the simple laboratory, he checked the state of the fermentation. The crude penicillin was taking shape as a broth and would be ready for extraction in a few hours. After that, Valens would have to purify it.

It’s coming along quite well. This will change things.

He wanted to give the formula to the Church, even if that meant lending them another tool to control the public. He wasn’t all too bothered by that notion since the Church was losing ground quite fast under His Majesty King Edmund's new rule.

If all the things written about him are true, then the moment he catches the whiff of this medication, he will do his best to spread it widely to the people. The Church will have no choice but to comply.

Valens nodded as he returned to the main hall and poured himself into Selin’s chair behind the desk. The rush of the work was getting to him as of late, so having a silent moment before the work started felt nice.

We’re not making much progress on the other fronts, though. Other than marking hundreds of people as ‘soulless’ and sending information about them to the Church, I’m not sure what we have accomplished here.

It was as though he was thrown inside a giant pot of a city in which everybody lied, cheated, or tried to deceive each other for reasons that eluded him. When they weren’t busy doing those things, they were out searching for ways to make life uncomfortable for certain communities here.

And this was just a single kingdom in what Valens understood as a giant world, not counting the Broken Lands. That place was a whole other world on its own and had little to do with life in Haven’s Reach.

I can relate to that. I really can. Once you face those creatures and shadows out to get you, it’s hard to understand the mind of the people who live in places like Belgrave. No wonder Celme hates these people. They have no regard for the troubles concerning the safety of their little haven.

But what could these little people do? They were your farmers, miners, sculptors, and masons. Throwing these people out into a Rift would only result in pointless deaths. Perhaps, Valens rather thought, there was some merit behind this arrangement. Perhaps not everyone was born to take part in an endless conflict against the creatures of the Tainted Father.

Not me, I’m afraid. If I want to get to the bottom of this, I have to confront the evil in all forms.

That brought a smile to his lips as he shook his head. The Healer turned Hexmender, Archmage, and an adversary of the Shadow. Trying to find his way through the murky path, doing things he hoped would help him find his way.

You have to carry on. Nothing else you can do about it.

There came a tap from beyond the door of the clinic. The tightly closed shutters trembled slightly as that initial tap grew into a number of taps that rattled the wooden tiles over the floor.

Frowning, Valens pulled himself to his feet and went over to the door. Through the Resonance, he tried to feel the reason for the change, but found that nothing was out of the ordinary beyond the door.

Might as well check it.

He opened the door and peered out.

He blinked.

There were hundreds of people crowding the street, standing eerily in groups of five, staring out into nothing in particular. They didn’t talk. They didn’t move. All of them stood there like a mindless horde.

“What is happening here?” Valens muttered, frowning out into the crowd.

He caught familiar faces amongst them. Women and men who came rushing to the clinic just recently, who brought family and friends after Valens healed them.

At least a thousand people here. Perhaps two thousand. Surely they didn’t come here for a celebration, right? They are not even speaking. They are just standing there.

Prickling over his skin. Prickling right across his arms. Valens felt a sudden cold crawl down through his back as he faced the scene and reached for the Resonance.

There was a lull in the frequencies.

A sudden silence.

Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

It was broken when thousands of eyes turned to stare at him.

Something stabbed at the Resonance.

The crowd moved. It was slow at first. Felt like watching a swarm of oversized ants shifting all together at once. Then they picked up speed. Rushed toward the clinic mindlessly.

“Shit!” Valens said, and bolted back inside, closing the door shut after him. Turned the key to lock the damn thing while cold sweat trickled down his face.

What is happening? What the hell—

Fists crushed into the dirt walls of the clinic. Legs kicked, and fingers scraped painfully across the shutters. Valens watched through his sound vision hundreds of people trying to force their way into the clinic.

A shutter broke.

A hand managed to break in.

No, it wasn’t a hand.

It was a claw. A long claw leading up to a hand that was anything but human. Green scales flashed across it, stitched perfectly into each other and reflecting the weak light of the mana lamps. It tore through the wood and ripped half of the shutters wide open, revealing the chaos outside.

Men and beasts.

Women and creatures.

Valens didn’t know when he patched that hole with the Gravitating Earth and flung himself backward from the beast that managed to crawl inside. It looked like an ungodly mix of a reptile and human. Clad in perfectly shaped scales, slits of its eyes gleaming crimson in the hall.

[Shifter: Level 135]

Valens frowned when he saw the name wavering over its head. Only one of these creatures had managed to get in before he patched the hole, which gave him some time to understand the sheer madness he was confronted with.

“What the hell is a Shifter?” Valens said as he managed a Fireball over his fingers. A Shifter or not, a Level 135 creature wasn’t a match for his talents when he had dealt with much worse before.

No, the main thing here was understanding what was happening.

He got an answer from the beast. It came in a low hiss that spattered acid over the tiles, burning little holes across the clinic. His clinic.

“You…” Valens breathed. All around him, the walls were trying to fight back against the mindless horde outside. Strange thing was that not all of them were beasts like this. No, he saw through his sound vision humans trying to rip the stone and soil apart, cracking their nails, forcing the bloody stubs of their fingers into the shutters.

The beast lunged at him. Swiped a claw up into his face, Valens dodging the attack with a Light Feet, only to find himself facing a tail that came ripping through the air, impossibly fast.

A dirt spike rose from underneath his feet and caught the tail in mid-air. It broke into thousands of pieces but managed to send the tail to the side, saving Valens from an impact around his side.

He was about to throw the Fireball in his hand, only to pause when he picked a strange set of frequencies through the Resonance. Suppressed under a much more complex rhythm of frequencies, this set felt familiar to him.

It was human.

That decided it.

Valens reached for the Gravitating Earth, and the ground answered. The Shifter tried to come at him, but was stopped by the earthly spikes that stabbed at it from the ground. A dozen of them pinned the creature neatly to the clinic, made a fixture out of the damn beast that didn’t quite fit with the ambience of the place.

“You’re not making much sense,” Valens said, scowling at the beast as he neared it. It struggled against the earthly binding, spitting acid around it, hissing through a set of jagged teeth. “Are you a human or not?”

Before he could lay a hand over its head, something heavy slammed into the clinic. The whole side wall gave in as it crumbled into pieces, shaking Valens to the core, sending him stumbling back with a sudden force.

In moments, he was staring at a twisted horde of creatures and men.

There were hundreds of them.

He was alone.

Dain was nowhere in sight.

Worse, he could clearly see that there were children amongst them. Little kids clawing mindlessly at the walls, being pressed by the adults and the beasts beside them. They didn’t look aware. Their eyes were blank. Not a single human in this crowd seemed to be in a state to understand that there were green, giant, reptilian creatures between them.

And beyond the swarm, in the cloudy skies of Belgrave, something was moving. The distance made it hard for Valens to understand the reason behind it, but he could feel in the back of his teeth the pressure slowly settling around the air.

Something dark is at work here. Is it the Evercrest? That damn woman finally decided to move, is it? But where—

A pillar of golden light rose from the distance. It cleaved the clouds apart and sprinkled motes of light across the capital.

That came from the Cathedral… Is she there? Going for the Ninth Gate?

That didn’t make sense. The Evercrest woman could do whatever she wanted, but Bishop Cornelius was a man who could single-handedly deal with real Terrors. The man was a Level 400 Dawnkeeper, and even if he had his troubles in the mind, the divinity resting inside of him made him a natural enemy of anything wicked in nature.

Then Valens peered into the horde slowly making their way toward him. There, by the corner, a man was tearing his skin with his own fingers, revealing green scales hidden underneath it, taking deep, long breaths from the fog surrounding the street.

The shift in his Resonance was so stark that Valens nearly allowed a Shifter’s tail to hit his face. With a Light Feet, he fell backward and let the tail slam into Selin’s desk. It splintered, and the pieces of it scattered about the hall.

I can kill the creatures, but I can’t kill thousands of them! And those children. They aren’t turning. Why, then, are they trying to get inside? Is something controlling them?

He was losing ground, and he was losing it fast. He would get swarmed in a few seconds if he didn't do anything.

I need to get away. If there are hundreds of these creatures in the Knuckle Alley, there must be others in the city. Is that why I saw that golden light from the Cathedral? That place is the key. I have to go there, but not before I check Selin.

Right.

Inferno blazed alive. Waves of blazing flames surrounded him as Valens moved in toward the stubborn beasts. He caught one of them with a tendril, wrapped the burning thread around its arm, and sent it hissing toward the side walls. Another one was pinned to the ground by a number of spikes.

He didn’t want to make a mess of them before he got to the bottom of this matter. He didn’t want to do something that would hurt the children, either.

That didn’t mean he would be showing mercy to the creatures coming after him, though. No, they were dealt in equal measure as Valens forced a way through the horde. Walls upon walls of dirt rose from either side, Light Feet propelling him forward, but there were just too many of them.

Valens bolted through Knuckle Alley, breath rasping in his chest, the sinews around his neck painfully tight. Notifications rained in as the Inferno tore through the reptilian creatures that leapt from the walls he managed on his way and burned them to ashes.

A notification flashed before him.

[Trial of the Arcane Healer: I]: The Eye has been drawn. Blood marks the invocation. The veil thins, and the fog coils tighter around Belgrave. She watches from beyond. The path must be cleared. Through smoke, through memory, through the haze of forgotten names. Only by mending what the fog has broken can the Trial be completed.

Wind battered him harshly as Valens bolted through the street, the hissing, screaming, and guttural roar of the creatures echoing in his mind. Everywhere around him was fog, and the stench of burning flesh stabbed at his nose and his mind.

His chest heaved with each breath, lungs burning with the ashes scattered about him. He ran and tore through the creatures, trying to maintain control so as not to hurt the children mixed among them.

I forgot.

It occurred to him when the Apathy tugged at his mind. He remembered the Rift and the Weeping Horror, the twisted reality of the Haven’s Reach that people of Belgrave so dearly wanted to forget.

Acting as though it didn’t exist.

But there was no running this time.

Chaos was here, in the capital of Melton.

Here in the streets they lived.

This world is mad.

......