CHAPTER 78: WILD WAVES (4)

Lucen followed close behind, boots cracking faint glyph dust underfoot as Varik stepped into the corridor beyond the corpse.

The wall that had once marked the limit of the rift’s mapped zone was cracked wide open now, broken not by battle, but by age and pressure, as if the deeper layers of the drift had grown impatient with containment.

The stone had peeled outward, like a wound that had finally burst.

The smell hit him first. Not rot. Not blood. Just something dry, copper-sweet, laced with ozone and something stranger, like the scent left behind by dead circuitry.

Lucen’s mana flicked up as they passed through.

[Zone Depth: Unclassified]

[Thread Drift: Unstable]

[Adaptive System Scan Initiated...]

[Result: Glyph Logic May Behave Unpredictably]

He narrowed one eye and muttered, "That’s new."

Varik didn’t slow. "It’s not a drift anymore. It’s a foundation layer."

Lucen stepped through the breach after him. The pressure difference was immediate. His body didn’t feel heavier, but the air around him did.

Every step echoed longer than it should’ve, and the light from Varik’s trace-glove stretched shadows out in impossible directions, like it didn’t know where to fall.

The corridor opened ahead into a vast chamber. The floor here was smoother, intentionally carved.

Archaic spell-lines still glowed faintly in the cracks, pulsing with a rhythm too slow to be natural, too alive to be mechanical.

Lucen stared at the far wall.

It moved.

Not like something was behind it.

The wall itself pulsed, a slow ripple through stone that shouldn’t have been able to bend.

Varik held up a hand to stop him. "There are things here that still sleep. Don’t wake them."

Lucen made a tight circle with two fingers and murmured, "Got it. No shouting, no fireworks."

Varik moved along the edge of the chamber, hands moving through a rapid sequence of glyph flicks. His pace was measured. Efficient.

Lucen recognized some of the sigils, suppression threads, silence envelopes, a few containment barriers. All elegant. Fast. Brutally exact.

’I could watch this all day,’ Lucen thought. ’Or steal half his technique and sell it as a workshop.’

He followed behind, watching carefully for mana shifts. Then, without prompting, he flared a trace of [Soundlash] into the upper right corner, not loud enough to echo, just enough to disrupt.

Varik paused and glanced at him.

Lucen pointed upward. "There was a lens node in the architecture. Old scry-point. It was still live."

Varik studied him for a second longer than necessary. Then nodded once and kept moving.

That small nod felt like a rare stamp of approval. Lucen didn’t react outwardly. But internally?

’One coffee off my debt to anyone.’

They advanced deeper. The terrain underfoot turned glassy in places, melted by old battles or collapsed zone cores. Some surfaces still sparked as they stepped.

A glyph beneath Lucen’s heel flickered briefly before fading into nothing. The system couldn’t even interpret it.

The silence was starting to feel personal.

After ten minutes of slow descent, the corridor narrowed again—and that’s when the hum started.

Low.

Wrong.

It didn’t come from any one direction. It came from all of them.

Varik’s hand snapped up again.

This time his voice was sharp. "Stay behind me."

Lucen’s system flared at the same moment.

[Proximity Alert: Rift Entity — Tier Black]

[Class: Warden]

[Combat Viability Rating: 0.4%]

[Suggestion: Evade]

Lucen read it once.

Then, muttered under his breath, "Wow. That’s generous."

The ground cracked open ahead. Not a collapse. A reveal.

The floor peeled back in angular seams, glyph-lined plates retracting into stone. Something rose slowly from beneath, massive, plated, and humming with a frequency that made Lucen’s teeth ache.

It wasn’t a creature in the usual sense. It was armor and energy. A living construct, shaped like a humanoid, but not built for people. It had no face.

Just a triangular head, no eyes, and a chest marked with a vertical glyph that shimmered with unstable mana. Both arms ended in blade-like structures, curved and segmented, humming faintly.

Varik didn’t hesitate.

He stepped forward.

No words.

No callout.

He simply vanished mid-step.

Lucen barely tracked the movement, one frame gone, the next one halfway up the wall, blades clashing against the construct’s wrists. Sparks flew. The entire room flexed with the impact.

Lucen saw what real power looked like.

Varik fought like someone who had nothing left to prove, every motion measured, every strike placed with surgical force. His spellwork wasn’t showy. It was lean. Direct. Weaponized geometry.

Still, Lucen wasn’t about to be dead weight.

He flared [Shockweave Bolt]

and angled it not at the enemy, but at the wall behind it, sending a rebound pulse across the construct’s rear flank.

It connected.

No damage.

But the flicker of electricity drew its attention, forcing it to split its targeting vector.

Varik used that moment.

In one spinning motion, he launched himself upward and drove a point-cast beam, tight as a thread, into the exact seam of the creature’s upper shoulder.

A flash.

Then nothing.

The Warden twisted, but it was already falling. The light in its chest glyph dimmed, flickered once, then sputtered out.

Varik landed in a crouch and exhaled slowly.

Lucen jogged forward, watching the now-dead construct crumple into a neat heap of shell plating and inert stone. The thing was easily three times his height.

He glanced at Varik. "Tell me there’s only one."

Varik didn’t answer.

Lucen frowned. "There’s more, isn’t there?"

Varik straightened and finally spoke. "The system pinged that one as a Warden. There are always more than one."

Lucen flexed his fingers, then looked down at his interface.

[Mana: 61 / 120]

[Recovery: 2.6/sec]

[EXP Gained: 0]

He hadn’t earned anything. No assist XP. No spell bonus. The system knew he hadn’t actually helped.

He stared at the empty notification for a second.

Then looked back up.

"Next time," he said, "let me do the dramatic finisher. Just for morale."

Varik raised an eyebrow. "That would imply survival."

Lucen grinned faintly. "Let me pretend."

The air around them pulsed again, faint, but sharper now. The zone was responding to their presence. Not with hostility.

With curiosity.

And somewhere deeper inside this forbidden stretch of space, something very old... began to stir.