CHAPTER 162: CHAPTER 162: THE FRENZY OF DESPAIR

Nero moved swiftly through the twisting pathways of the Shatterveil, his senses sharp, his body coiled like a spring.

He pressed on, his eyes fixed on the path ahead.

He had escaped the encirclement of the Shadow Hunters, but how long could he truly evade them?

Hope’s voice echoed faintly in his mind.

"The closest anchor lies buried beneath the northern valley. Cracked but not yet broken.

It feeds Malrik’s reach into the heart of this place."

That had been hours ago, though Nero suspected that time flowed strangely here.

Now, the valley rose before him like an open wound.

His recon shikigami eagles darted high above, feeding him live images of the terrain ahead.

The closest anchor was nearby, hidden within a valley.

But the eagles had shown something else.

Monsters. Twisted, frenzied creatures born of the Shatterveil’s despair.

Their forms were warped, limbs elongated, eyes glowing with feral madness.

They moved with unnatural speed, attacking anything that moved, their jagged claws slicing through the air.

But they were not alone.

The Black Talons were there as well, positioned strategically around the valley.

Malrik’s elite enforcers.

They moved in precision, lines of coordinated spells slicing through the monsters.

He could hear them now, their voices echoing through the shadows, as commands echoed between them in clipped tones.

Spells crackled through the air.

The Black Talons fought with ruthless efficiency, their synchrony was almost mechanical.

But even that efficiency was fraying.

The longer the battle raged, the more the Talons faltered.

Their attacks grew harsher, less refined.

One spell shattered the monster it struck, then ricocheted into a nearby boulder, nearly collapsing part of their flank.

Yet the monsters were not backing down.

The anchor’s influence was spreading, and not just to the monsters.

Despair didn’t discriminate.

Nero’s eyes narrowed.

’The anchor is distorting their judgment.

Each spell carries increasingly more fury than control, more cruelty than intent.’

From his vantage point, he spotted the source.

At the far end of the valley stood the obsidian anchor, shaped like a fractured monolith.

From its base, veins of black magic spiraled outward like a spider’s web, pulsing through the ground.

Nero moved.

He slipped down the valley’s slope, his body bending light and shadow, eyes fixed on his destination.

The clamor of combat grew louder.

Screeches and spells clashed into an unholy rhythm.

The disillusionment charm held, but the pressure thickened.

The Black Talons were still locked into battle with the monsters, blasts of energy erupting as they fought to maintain control.

But the monsters were growing more and more frenzied.

They seemed to have further lost all rationality.

His chest tightened as he watched the creatures lunge at the Black Talons.

For every monster they cut down, two more appeared, their forms writhing, shifting like smoke.

It was chaos, a battlefield of shadows and despair.

His gaze shifted back to the far end of the valley.

The anchor. It pulsed with darkness, seemingly feeding the creatures’ frenzy.

Nero muttered "Malrik... is that his doing? But why would he do that?"

The closer he drew to the anchor, the more the world warped.

The air vibrated, resonating with something old, malignant, and hungry.

He skirted a clash between two Black Talons and a towering beast whose face had no mouth, just a spiraling void.

Neither side noticed him. Their minds were drowning in the anchor’s call.

At last, he reached the base of the monolith.

It pulsed like a diseased heart.

Darkness spiraled upward from its core, each pulse rippling into the earth like a heartbeat syncing with the madness above.

Threads of corrupted intent threaded through the valley.

Nero crouched beside it, just behind a jagged slab of stone.

Up close, the magic pressed against him, dense and volatile.

The despair in the air was thicker here, almost sentient.

It reminded him of a curse barely held in check.

Hope had warned him, this anchor was unstable, half-splintered from within.

He could feel that now. The energy wasn’t focused.

It was leaking, infecting everything around it.

He didn’t hesitate.

Nero’s wand moved in a silent arc, tracing a familiar glyph in the dust, the same one he had etched into the first two anchors, but this time without restraint, as secrecy was long gone.

The runes carved into the stone glowed faintly, pulsing like a dying heart.

He pressed his wand to their center, guiding his intent inward, targeting the most fragile seams of the magic matrix.

The anchor shuddered.

It resisted, of course it did.

For a moment, the shadows twisted upward, snarling at him in silence.

Illusions flickered, faint images on the edge of his vision.

Regrets. Failures. Doubt. Designed to distract.

He didn’t flinch.

They weren’t his memories. Just fabrications, reflections of despair meant to disrupt him.

It failed, like a drizzle crashing against his iron mind.

The amplifiers embedded at the base were overloading now, caught in the backlash of his unweaving.

He didn’t need to reverse the flow, just cut the veins.

His wand slashed diagonally across the circuits, severing three lines at once.

Sparks flew. The rhythm of the pulse broke, flickering into chaos.

Still, the anchor held.

He stepped back and began to draw.

Runes flowed from his wand tip in a single controlled motion.

He was customizing a containment array.

One designed not to preserve, but to accelerate the collapse.

He fed the array directly into the anchor’s base.

The conduits buckled.

A low tremor reverberated across the stone as the energy turned inward, no longer feeding the valley, but tearing at its source.

Cracks spread. Slowly at first, then branching like the ground splitting open before a quake.

Nero’s jaw tightened.

Then, snap!

A fracture ran straight through the core, and the anchor broke open with a sound like tearing sky.

Shadows peeled back in retreat. The pulse died.

Above, monsters collapsed, howling briefly before dissolving into ash.

The Talons faltered, some falling to one knee, others gripping their heads as the haze of madness receded.

Silence slowly fell across the valley.

Not peace, but the kind of stillness that warned of a deeper storm.

Nero didn’t linger.

He turned from the broken monolith, its surface scorched and shivering with dying magic, and slipped through the thinning veil of smoke.

The disillusionment charm still held, wrapped around him.

He slipped through the chaos, each step took him further from the ruined anchor.

But something had shifted.

In a space beyond light, a presence stirred.

Malrik’s eyes snapped open.

His gaze was dark, shadows coiling around him

His lips curled into a cruel smile, his voice a whisper that echoed through the Shatterveil.

"I found you!"

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