Burning flames blasted the creatures into pieces, scorched the rot out of them, and scattered their blood hissing against the earthly walls rising about Valens. Dozens, hundreds of them rushed toward him in mindless fury, red eyes scathing, the tips of their claws gleaming, the fog churning and rolling around him.

He sucked in a deep breath and beat on, a boat against the tides, forcing his way through the waves, never lingering long enough to give them a chance to pin him still. He couldn’t stop. That was about the only thing he understood during the short time since this madness had begun. He couldn’t stop, and it was just that simple.

Mana was a problem, though. It burned taking breaths now. The reek of the air sent chills crawling down his spine. His skin was all prickly and sensitive, feet stinging dully, mind reeling as he considered the reasons behind this chaotic mess of a rebellion.

Something about the fog, Valens thought. It was wrong. It felt wrong, as if it had a mind of its own. He could understand the discretion carried out by the Shifters for the longest time, but what about the men and women? Children? How were they related to the business when the only thing they had against his flames was their senseless intent to take a piece of him?

They didn’t have weapons. They came at him with their hands, as if they thought their tiny nails would somehow prove a better weapon than the Shifters’ elongated, painfully sharp claws.

Something was controlling them, and that something had to do with this damn fog.

Yet Valens didn’t have the time to stop and think about it. Instead, he sent them stumbling back with an occasional Gale as he made a run through the poor ring of Belgrave, toward his place where he hoped Selin awaited him. That hope was fast dwindling, since every new street that welcomed him had already been caught in a heap of chaotic madness like the prior one.

There were men and women, he saw, battling out in the open against the beasts. Men and women of respectable quality, holding their ground, albeit barely. They didn’t look aware. They didn’t look in control. All they were doing was giving a response to their neighbour’s sudden transformation into the Wicked.

Police were there, and then there were adventurers scattered in some houses, and esteemed Mages huddled in the Resni’s Tower. Even the total of them could scarcely make a dent in this swarming horde. Belgrave was ill-fitted to deal with a trouble of this magnitude.

It shouldn’t have happened. Valens knew that with the boundaries active, an intrusion of this kind wouldn’t be possible from the Broken Lands. The authorities could find the Rifts when they opened and take appropriate action against them. A breach from the inside, however, wasn’t expected.

Valens was about to use another Light Feet onward when pressure settled over his shoulders. The Shifters and the horde of people trying to claw their way up the earthly walls paused. The air grew cold, and colder still, as an eerie silence fell around him.

[You are in the presence of an Ancient One.]

Slowly, he raised his chin and peered up into the sky. The dark, thick shroud of clouds had parted, revealing a round moon-like object hanging in the air. Bloody red, with a pupil-shaped dark patch in the middle of it.

Black tendrils danced upon its surface, squirming like shadows poked awake as the transparent, fleshy walls closed in around it as though the lids of an eye. If that was meant to be a blink, then Valens had to admit it was the most terrifying gesture he had ever seen in his life.

[The eye of the Veiled Mother gazes at you.]

Giant drops of red liquid dripped down from the edges of the fleshy lids as the eye gazed downward to him. Inside that black pupil, something was moving and scrutinizing Valens as if he were the only one in this giant city worth the eye’s attention.

He felt movement around his chest as the Gate of Surges shifted. The archaic gate of his soul groaned and twisted, threatening to open wide as the eye kept him in its gaze.

This… Feels like a violation. Am I supposed to stay silent and let this thing see through me?

As much as he was thankful to this thing for having put an end to the madness around him, only for a second, which gave him precious time to renew his mana resources, he wouldn’t have the eye of some entity take a peek at what was inside.

With a Hexsurge, he reached forth for his gate and took hold of the spheres on the surface. Void’s reek tingled his nose as he pushed the gate slowly shut, after which the eye in the sky blinked once again.

Oh? Does this mean I can do this as well?

There was filth left lingering in his chest cavity. Normally, Valens would use a Lifesurge to cleanse this vicious, biting touch off his body, but as the Hexsurge remained active, he felt a certain pull from inside of it. A sort of connection unlike anything he had ever seen before, which propelled him to try his chances.

But the moment he tried reaching for it, a shrill scream exploded in his mind, sending him crashing down to the ground. Blood trickled down from his ears and his nose, muscles straining to hold against the pressure that increased all of a sudden.

“Hhh…” he grunted as he quested for Lifesurge and washed the damage around his ears, spreading a much-needed warmth over his muscles.

Some of the Shifters exploded right away under the influence of that stabbing scream, while others, mostly the humans, stumbled awake and blinked down at their hands.

“You shouldn’t have come here,” a voice dinned in Valens’s ears as he pulled himself, wincing, up to his feet. “You don’t belong to this world anymore.”

It was a woman’s voice, but it was unnaturally deep. It certainly fit the image of a true Ancient, unlike Valens’s rather complicated upbringing. It was coming from the eye, veins across its surface pulsing at each vowel.

“You have been played,” Valens decided to answer. If the Mother of Venerable Fates thought this was a good time to have a talk about Valens’s sudden coming to this world, then it had better take a good look around it. “Deceived by the Evercrest Family. Yet you say I’m the one who doesn’t belong? That’s an odd logic there.”

“Meddling with the threads of Fate will cost both of you,” the ethereal voice answered. “You are not aware of the things you have set in motion. You will be the bearer of its weight, one way or another.”

“I’ve been bearing some weight all my life,” Valens said, staring up at the eye, as it didn’t feel right speaking out to no one in particular. “Some more wouldn’t change a thing. Tell me, why are you here? Why are you doing… this to these innocent people?”

“Their souls are weeping. In pain, they are no more. Taken by the one who sleeps between the worlds,” the voice answered. “The choice is yours, Surgemaster. It depends on you whether you want to carry the sins of your Forefathers or forge a new path for yourself.”

The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

“Cryptic speech and making a point of keeping the mystery. No wonder why this world is troubled by a deal of twisted tales,” Valens said, frowning. “Tell me if you know—how can I fix this? Why would that woman try to open that Gate? What is the point, anyway?”

“So this is your choice, once again,” the Mother of Venerable Fates muttered. There was a weary tone in her voice, as if the mere act of speaking was taking a toll on her. “Your Master was right in his worries. He shouldn’t have sent you here. You should have never left the prison your Forefathers have constructed for their kind.”

“The prison for their—”

“Perhaps,” the Wretched Mother cut him off sharply. “It will remind him of his past if I take your fate as a lesson. Perhaps then, your kind will remember why they abandoned these wretched lands.”

Globs of red liquid dripped down from the giant eye, splashing across near Valens. They squirmed as limbs stretched from inside of them, covered in red flesh with veins pulsing over them.

Then the dead Shifters around him were lifted off the ground, broken body parts shifting as they were forged into shapes twisted beyond logic. Where there should be heads were arms and legs, crimson tendrils stitching them with masterful precision. The now-awakening humans scampered back from the sight, leaving Valens alone with a thousand Shifters turning back to life.

“A lesson for the Damned,” the Wretched Mother said. “This world belongs to them, now.”

A crooked amalgam of many different forces clashed in the very air Valens breathed, and it was without giving him a chance to say anything that the swarm of creatures rushed toward him in muted obedience.

Inferno rose from the tips of his finger, burning like stubborn fire across a dead patch of bare earth. Apathy tugged at his mind, promising relief from the churning thoughts of this world and the creatures, of his Master and the home he had left behind, of anything that tried to take his focus away from the scene in front of him.

Yet even against the storm of his thoughts, he stood straight in the face of the incoming horde.

It was high time he dealt with the problem rather than allowing unknown entities to batter him with their puzzles. High time he left the questions behind and dove into the crux of the problem. Not like he had much else going for him in this dead street anymore. Not like he had anything else to rely on but himself in this world.

He sent wave after wave of furious flames toward the fast-approaching crowd before reaching for the earth and ripping a large piece of it with the Gravitating Earth. He sent his will demanding across the street, and it answered, giant walls rising from the sides of him and caging the horde from all around.

Inside that earthly cage, Inferno found its victims all naked and helpless. Inside that earthly cage, Inferno cleansed the damned like it had never existed.

His chest burned as breath wheezed weakly out from Valens’s lips, sweat pouring down his forehead. His palms were slick with sweat, and that enormous eye still hovered across the sky like a painful reminder.

Down below, beyond the cage he’d just managed, another horde was gathering from the broken parts of the creatures, and when he squinted, he made out a group of people with eyes redder than a rabbit’s. Those were adventurers out trying to protect the people, but now they were turning toward him, and Valens wasn’t sure if he liked the look in their faces.

I have to do something about the eye, but I don’t have nearly enough mana to deal with a second horde, let alone that giant creature in the sky.

[The Eye of the Venerable Fates - ???]

That eye was just a part of the Wretched Mother, not even the whole thing, and yet it was enough to control thousands of creatures with ease. The fact that Valens could hold his ground for this long was alone a miracle. He couldn’t keep at this. Couldn’t keep at this, at all. But he couldn’t think of anything else either.

Golden light exploded outward from above Belgrave, coming from the Golden Cathedral nailed in the middle of it. A generous sprinkle of light motes gave the creatures a pause, which Valens used as a chance to dash out toward a side street.

Broken buildings flashed by him as Valens rushed past through them, heart thundering in his chest. A cascade of different frequencies poured into his mind, prickling his senses, sending jolts of awareness down his limbs. The golden light motes were moving in his sound vision, not toward the creatures, but to the sky, merging into each other.

Is it the Bishop? Is the Church finally stopping being a spectator against all of this?

“Val, watch out!”

Valens didn’t know how he flung himself out of it, but the moment he heard that woman’s voice, without giving a second thought, he threw himself toward the side, dodging narrowly the tip of a giant sword that came cleaving from inside a broken wall.

Pain stabbed at his chest as he crashed into the ground and rolled to a stop as gravel bit into his body. He floundered clumsily back to his feet after the impact, squinting back at the sight with questions in his mind.

There was a familiar face, looking equally surprised, with another one standing behind her.

“Selin?” Valens blinked. “And Celme? What the hell are you two doing here?”

The Berserker was holding a sword in her hand and was clad in plated armor, while Selin wore her usual morning attire, which told Valens that she didn’t have the time for a change.

Before they could answer him, the owner of the first sword that sent Valens crashing to the side showed himself by walking out of the broken house with that giant weapon clasped tight in his plated hands.

[Undead Chief - Level ???]

“This…” Valens swallowed as he felt the familiar lull in the Undead’s frequencies, but even without them, he could tell that he was under the influence of the Everfog by those gleaming green eyes. “The Shapeshifters and the Eye in the Sky weren’t enough. Now we have the Undead here as well?”

“Mr. Kosthal!” Selin called out to him.

Valens frowned deeply as he felt his mana pool. He didn’t have enough to fend off an Undead Chief. The most he could do was to take Selin and hope that a few Light Feets would be enough to get them out of this place.

“I’ll hold him.” Celme stepped forth, raising her sword against the plated monstrosity twice her height. “You should get Selin away from this place… this city. Something very bad is about to happen.”

“What?” Valens squinted at her. “Why do I feel like you know that something?”

Celme’s lips curled downward as she averted her gaze. “I don’t have time to explain, Val. Get her out of here.”

“Are you insane?” Valens questioned, jabbing with a finger toward the Undead Chief. “That’s not a normal soldier, that’s an Undead Chief! You remember Hook? This creature will kill you if you try to do something stupid.”

“Then what?” Celme demanded. “What do you want us to do, then? You look like you’ve just recently crawled out of your own grave.”

Valens clenched the fingers of his right hand as the Undead Chief lumbered toward him. Good. At least he didn’t have eyes for Celme and Selin. If he could evade him long enough using the complicated structure of the poor ring—

The Chief lunged forward with blinding speed, the tip of the giant sword growing larger in Valens’s sight. His heart skipped a beat as he barely threw himself sideways with a Light Feet, the sword scraping a deep vein across the earth before the Undead Chief came to a stop.

It turned, green eyes churning, the jagged edges of the sword catching the crimson and golden lights across the sky. The frequencies there were still shifting, and something was coming in, but Valens didn’t have the time to take a peek at it.

“I can save you,” Valens said when he felt the Undead’s gaze on him. Without mana, the only thing he could do was to try to allure the undead’s mind into believing him. “That’s why you’re here, right? Your Liches have sent you here to kill me, because they know I’ve fixed someone just like you before.”

The Undead Chief grunted as he took a step in, hauling the sword with one hand.

“Yes!” Valens said when he saw him linger in his step. “It’ll be easy. You won’t have to ever suffer from the clutches of those Liches. You will become your own man, the master of your own mind. Just—”

He didn’t even see it. The Undead Chief was there one second, seemingly listening to him, then he was a flash of dark streak as he lunged in and stabbed with the sword. That giant sword.

“Val!”

“Mr. Kosthal!”

Shit. I’m done…

The blade should have cleaved him in two. There was no escaping it, not with his mana gone, not with the way time itself seemed to crawl in that single, awful moment. Valens saw it coming, saw the jagged edge of that hateful weapon hungry for his core.

But it never reached him.

Because something slammed into the Undead Chief with the force of a meteor.

The impact cracked the air, splitting the earth beneath their feet. A thunderous boom rattled Valens’s chest as dust and stone erupted around them. The sword missed. It missed. It buried itself deep into the soil beside him, trembling with the force of its own redirection.

A figure stood there. Cloaked in soft-looking skin, one fair hand holding up a giant sword that sent the Undead Chief skittering back.

Valens blinked.

“Been a while, eh?” Nomad said, turning his head slightly to him. “Reckon some things never change, indeed. You look like you could use some help, Healer.”