Chapter 1549: Story 1549: Shattered Links

Kael’s blade came down with the weight of every scream, every grave, every broken dawn.

Steel met chain.

The sound was not a clash but a shattering hymn—metal tearing from eternity, a scream older than the world. The battlefield convulsed as the jagged blade split a link of living fire. Sparks cascaded outward, each one a burning fragment of memory: faces of the fallen, voices of the damned, lives the Gate had devoured.

The colossus howled, its molten chest buckling inward as though Kael’s strike had pierced its very heart. The tether writhed violently, threads of chain-fire snapping loose, whipping across the battlefield. One tore through a survivor before he could even cry out, his body unraveling into dust.

Elara staggered, clutching the boy as the backlash surged into him. His glow flared painfully bright, his body arching in her arms. “Kael! You’re tearing him apart!”

But Kael did not falter. His eyes burned with grim defiance as he pressed the jagged blade deeper into the wound. “Better we bleed him with us than deliver him whole to that thing!”

The scarred woman laughed, a ragged, blood-choked sound. “Yes! Break it all! End the lie!” She dragged her half-broken body closer, driving her spear into another writhing chain. The link shattered under her weight, consuming her arm in fire, but she screamed triumph rather than pain.

The Gate itself wailed. Above, dozens of chains shook, their songs breaking into shrieks. Another fissure ripped wide, revealing more of the shadow pressing against the veil. A face—or something like one—loomed in the rift, vast and inhuman, its eyes like collapsing suns.

The Unborn leaned closer.

“Yes… break them. Break them all. Open wide, and let me breathe.”

The words crawled into their skulls, sickly sweet, dragging at their will. Survivors clutched their heads, some falling to their knees, begging to be freed, begging for silence even if it meant opening the way.

Elara staggered forward, fire blazing around her as she shielded the boy. Her voice cracked with fury. “You don’t understand! Every chain you break feeds him. He does not die—he gathers. He waits.”

Kael turned toward her, blade trembling in his grip, his face torn between rage and despair. “Then tell me how to fight him, witch! Tell me, before we’ve torn the world apart with our hands!”

The boy stirred again, his voice no longer a whisper but a thread of light weaving between them: “Not break… bind… together…”

Chains writhed at his words, some snapping inward, others slowing as though listening. For the first time, their scream faltered.

Elara’s eyes widened. She looked at Kael with something close to hope. “He isn’t the lock alone. He is the key. Not to break them—but to bind them anew.”

The colossus bellowed, its furnace-heart failing, molten flesh dripping into slag. The Gate thundered, hungering for the choice.

Kael raised his blade again, torn between destruction and salvation, knowing that the next strike would not just wound the chains—

It would decide whether they shattered or reforged.