Free Web NovelChapter 102: Chapter 100 The Guardian and the Hammer beneath the Veil
The car descended along the private route that bordered the rear part of the institute with the offensive smoothness of a machine far too expensive to belong to a place built for educational purposes. The sea appeared first as a broken gleam between concrete structures, steel railings, and walls that pretended to separate human discipline from the damp vastness breathing behind them. Then its smell appeared: salt, wet rock, seaweed crushed by the tide against the dark base of the coastal wall. A clean and rotten scent at the same time, ancient, indifferent, entering the vehicle’s ventilation system and reaching the interior with an almost insolent delicacy, as if even that high-end car could not prevent the outside world from reminding it that there were still things that could not be bought.
He drove without changing his expression. The city had been left behind. The mutilated skyscraper, the contained explosion, the line of buildings receding beneath the rearview mirror, all of that already belonged to an earlier layer of the day. Here the morning had another texture. The sunlight, now fully affirmed, fell over the rear part of the institute and over the lower beach with a clarity more white than golden, cleaner than beautiful, turning every surface into an exact declaration of its materials. The concrete seemed colder. The metal, harder. The water, sharper.
There was no crowd. No pedestrian traffic. No voices. The lower area, connected to the coastal line that embraced the enormous structure of the institute from behind, preserved a functional solitude, designed more for maintenance, restricted access, and administrative stillness than for constant human presence. He liked that absence, not because he sought silence in a romantic sense, but because the lack of witnesses always simplified the world.
He reduced his speed when the private road opened toward a discreet esplanade beside the lower beach. The place was not a beach in the pleasant sense of the word. There were no umbrellas, no families, no leisure, no gentle sand stretched out for the body. There was a wide strip of mineral ground where gravel mixed with wet sand and flat stones punished by the waves. Beyond that, the sea extended its surface in an apparently calm breath, but even from a distance it was possible to recognize, in the break of the foam against the rocky base and in the deeper color of the water farther out to sea, that this calm was not kindness. It was a broad mask. A habit of contained violence.
The institute rose over all of that like a piece of architecture determined to deny its surroundings while depending on them to seem more important. From the rear, its scale was even more evident. It did not have the frontal gesture with which institutions present themselves to the world. Here it showed something else: functional walls, upper terraces, lines of reinforced glass, service areas integrated with such clean precision that the very complexity was concealed beneath an appearance of absolute order.
Seen from below, with the sea behind it and the lower beach turned into a silent base, the whole structure seemed less like an academy and more like a refined fortress, a vertical organism that still did not know it was being watched from the exact point where its defenses had not yet begun to tense.
He parked. The car stopped in an area of partial shade, beside a stretch where the service pavement almost touched the mineral sand. The engine fell silent with immediate obedience. For a second, none of the sounds from outside fully entered the vehicle’s interior. The sea kept breaking against the rocks. The air kept moving. The morning remained complete. But inside persisted that sealed interval that only certain expensive objects can grant: the illusion that the world is outside and that one has not yet decided to belong to it.
Then he opened the door and stepped out. His shoes touched the ground with minimal firmness, without unnecessary noise. The ivory-white suit continued to look impeccable under the coastal clarity, perhaps even more expensive there, where the surroundings were too rough to receive it naturally. The fabric did not wrinkle. It did not lose its line. The discreet golden finishes remained almost invisible at first glance, as if the suit itself understood that the highest luxury never needs to shout. He closed the door with an exact gesture and remained standing for an instant beside the car, with the sea wind touching his golden hair, barely pushing the surface layers of the hairstyle and making the fabric of his jacket move just enough to remember that, however refined his presence was, he was standing before something older than his money and his surname.
He raised his gaze toward the height of the institute. There was no visible emotion on his face. Nor haste. There was, instead, a sharp concentration, polished by the decision already made. The car ride had not cooled his intention; it had refined it. All the previous rage, the broken glass, the corpse left behind, the offense that continued breathing inside him since the failure of the others, no longer manifested as turbulence. Now it was held in the form of purpose. That was one of his most dangerous talents. He did not need to live for long inside emotional disorder in order to act. It was enough for him to feel it, recognize it, extract from it a useful direction, and then dress that direction in calm. Beneath the clear sky, with the smell of the sea entering and leaving the air like an old insistence, he seemed like a perfectly composed man about to attend a private meeting, not someone arriving at the edge of an institution to invade it from above.
He headed to the rear of the car. The trunk opened with a faint hydraulic click and revealed an interior arranged with almost irritating precision. Nothing was simply stored. Everything was placed. There were compartments integrated into the base, black matte-finished surfaces, fastenings invisible at first glance, and, in the center, two pairs of dress boots placed as if they were display pieces inside a portable showcase. They were not ordinary footwear. Even motionless, even before revealing any function, they conveyed the sensation of having been designed not only for elegance, but for a more specific, more expensive, and less human use than the simple act of walking.
He took one of the pairs. The light blue color of the boots had nothing of innocence nor vulgar lightness. It was not the bright blue of a flashy garment nor the weak tone of something decorative. It was a high, cold blue, almost mineral, with a polished surface that absorbed the light at times and returned it at others with a very faint reflection, as if beneath that dress appearance there were less conventional materials waiting to be activated. The shaft rose enough to embrace the ankle and part of the leg with elegant firmness. The lines were stylized, even aristocratic, closer to an object made for an elite parade than to technical equipment for aerial deployment. Precisely because of that, they were more unsettling. In another man’s hands they would have seemed like a whim. In his, they were another extension of the same functional luxury that followed him everywhere.
He crouched without losing composure. The morning wrapped around him with a stable light, and the wind carried gusts of salt that broke apart against the white bodywork of the car. He untied his shoes with the serenity of someone who had already performed the same procedure too many times to grant it drama. He left them to one side, inside the same trunk, without disorder. Then he put on the boots one by one. The fit was immediate, exact, as if they had been built not to the measure of his body, but to the most precise measure of his authority. The light blue, combined with the ivory white of the suit, produced an elegant and strange contrast, too neat for a battlefield, too technical for a simple display of taste. When he finished putting them on, he remained standing upright for an instant, checking his balance. He made no extra gesture. He did not need to show satisfaction. The boots were already part of his figure with the same naturalness with which the dress shoes had been before.
Then he looked back inside the trunk. There rested the other object. He took it with one hand. It was a disc of sufficient size to cover a broad part of the chest without becoming cumbersome, built from a central circle from which four symmetrical points emerged, not long or aggressive, but integrated with such balance into the piece that the whole seemed like a star contained within a geometry of precision. The surface was not entirely metallic. Nor did it seem like glass. There was in it a quality both translucent and opaque at once, as if the material were always in an intermediate state between the visible and the latent. In the center of the circle, a translucent button could be distinguished, slightly raised from the rest of the object, crossed by a dormant light that did not yet shine, but that suggested, even at rest, a technology too advanced or too specialized to belong to ordinary circuits.
He held it in front of himself for a few seconds. Not because he doubted. He was only calibrating. He raised his gaze toward the institute again. The structure was still there, enormous, vertical, still unaware. The line of the sea continued breathing behind it. The lower beach remained deserted. The morning, with an almost clinical whiteness over certain surfaces, did not grant broad shadows in which to hide a body in plain sight. That also seemed appropriate to him. He did not need shelter from the surroundings. That was what instruments were for. That was what well-invested money served for.
That was what certain privileges existed for: so that even exposure could be corrected with a minimal gesture from the right hand.
He brought the disc toward his chest and placed it over the fabric of the suit, right above the sternum, with such natural precision that it seemed to be adhering to an invisible slot always meant to receive it. The piece remained motionless against the clothing for an instant. Then it fixed itself in place on its own. There were no straps. No visible clasps. There was only a slight vibration that ran across the surface and a subtle change in the outline of the circle, as if the device had recognized the temperature, the density, and even the pulse of the body that carried it.
Beneath the ivory white of the suit, the object became even stranger: an alien, refined, and silent shape, resting on a man who seemed to belong too much to luxury to need visible technology and, nevertheless, was about to disappear thanks to it.
He placed his finger on the translucent button. The activation did not produce a cumbersome sound nor vulgar illumination. The first thing that happened was a brief pulse, almost intimate, that expanded from the center of the device toward the four points in the form of an internal glow too clean to be called ordinary light. Then, from the edges, a translucent layer began to unfold, a film of energy or suspended matter that did not fall over him like fabric nor cling to his body like liquid. It emerged. It opened. It enveloped him.
It began covering him from the chest toward the shoulders, the back, the arms, the neck, the head, the entire torso, then descending along the legs until it met the light blue outline of the boots. For one second, it remained visible like a second skin made of altered clarity, an almost ghostly layer in which the air seemed to bend.
Then the camouflage began.
He did not disappear all at once. His figure became imprecise first. The edges of the suit, the clean shine of the jacket, the shape of the face, the golden hair stirred by the sea wind, everything began to lose itself not in a shadow, but in an optical correction that made the surroundings take possession of his silhouette. The lower beach appeared where his side had been before. The gray of the pavement occupied the place of his legs. A reflection of the sea slid over the space where his arm had been an instant earlier. The transparency gained density until the ordinary eye would no longer have been able to establish with certainty where the air ended and where he continued. The translucent layer did not hide him like a cloak. It rewrote him within the landscape.
Only certain fleeting and minimal details allowed the process to be perceived while it completed: a faint distortion at the edge of the outline, a brief ripple where the wind found a resistance it could not explain, a tiny break of light over nothing. But even those remnants faded little by little. After a few seconds, in the place where the blond man had been standing beside the open trunk, there was no longer a visible man. Only the car, the salty air, the deserted lower beach, and the sound of the sea striking rock and gravel with its usual insensitive constancy.
However, he was still there. freewёbnoνel.com
He could feel the device attached to his chest like a cold and stable presence, more like a sustained order than a machine. He could also feel the way the surroundings reorganized themselves over his body, hiding him without suffocating him, and that sensation did not seem unsettling to him. It seemed correct. The visible world was too basic a nuisance for those who possessed tools capable of correcting it. He remained motionless for one more second, checking the field’s response, the camouflage’s adaptation to the morning light, the way the wind and the smell of the sea still reached him despite the active layer. Everything was within what had been foreseen.
Then he took the boots with both hands, not to remove them, but to adjust something in them.
Upon touching the light blue surface, the response was immediate. From the outline of each boot, a translucent energy began to emerge, even fainter than the invisibility layer, as if it were not light properly speaking, but a barely perceptible visual pressure, a controlled manifestation that adhered to the lines of the footwear and then descended a little farther down, surrounding the sole in an almost liquid strip. The air around him changed. Not in temperature, but in density. Gravity seemed to waver by one degree, as if someone had suddenly removed a minimal part of the world’s weight without announcing it.
He did not smile. He simply released the boots and let the system complete the synchronization.
The translucent energy continued flowing from both pieces, enveloping his feet and ankles in a mute vibration. Beneath the invisibility, only the altered surroundings could betray that something was activating there. The nearest mineral sand did not rise in a swirl, but certain grains trembled. A small residue of dry salt, trapped in a crack in the pavement, detached itself and oscillated in the air before falling farther away. The pressure changed around him with such refined subtlety that it seemed nothing was happening and, nevertheless, everything had already begun to obey another law.
He barely separated his feet. He straightened his invisible back.
He looked again toward the upper part of the institute, or more exactly toward the space where he sensed his approach should begin, because seeing it now did not mean admiring a facade, but calculating the cleanest way to impose upon it a presence that would not even be perceived before becoming a problem. He did not want to enter from below. He did not want to waste time in corridors, controls, minor accesses, or protocols built for visitors. The institute, with its scale and impeccable lines, deserved to be approached according to a logic superior to that of ordinary human transit: from above, from where surveillance usually trusts too much in its own height.
The energy of the boots increased by one degree.
The ascent began without visible impulse. At first it was barely a subtle separation between the sole and the ground, a minimal emptiness, almost irrelevant, but sufficient to demonstrate that the weight no longer belonged entirely to the earth. Then that distance grew. One centimeter. Two. Five. The car remained a little lower. The gravel, the mineral beach, the base of the coastal wall, everything began to reorganize itself from a barely different angle.
He rose with the deliberate slowness of someone who does not need to dramatize an ability because he considers it a natural part of his resources. There was in that neither the vertigo of a creature thrown into the air nor the violence of vulgar mechanical propulsion. There was control. Exquisite, expensive, insulting control. As if the sky were not a height to conquer, but another surface available to those who could buy the right tool.
He rose higher.
The lower beach shrank below like an auxiliary access area too small to have deserved any attention at all. The high-end car became a white piece parked beside the coastal edge, almost unreal in its stillness. The sea opened its extension better, showing the wider breathing of the waves and the irregular line of rocks that contained the rear base of the institute.
From up there, the architecture began to reveal its true seams: terraces hidden from the frontal view, maintenance lines, functional breaks, aerial circulation areas perhaps intended for technical systems and not for an invisible man ascending in silence. The institution still did not know. The wind did.
At that height, the coastal air already struck with greater force, pushing against the active camouflage layer and forcing the field to correct itself again and again to maintain invisibility without betraying contours. He felt those corrections as light pulses over his skin, nothing that could discomfort him. The device on his chest remained stable. The boots continued emitting that translucent energy that disobeyed gravity with an almost offensive elegance. Everything worked.
And he kept rising.
The upper part of the institute began to fall below the line to which he was rising. The architectural whole, enormous from the ground, began to shrink enough to better reveal its general organization: the main blocks, the lateral wings, the barely suggested inner courtyards, the roofs of different levels, the strips of glass, the blind spots that from below could not be fully read. The sea behind extended its merciless shine until it was lost in a distance without emotional use. The sky, instead, opened clean, vast, and white in certain layers due to the intensity of the morning.
He felt no admiration. Only a colder satisfaction: height still had meaning when it served to dominate what lay below.
When he stopped, he remained suspended in the sky above the institute. Invisible. Unreachable to the naked eye. Beautiful and absent beneath his own camouflage.
From there, with the sea breathing behind the building and the entire structure of the place extended beneath him like a piece ready to be studied, for an instant he seemed not like a man, but like an intention without a body, a refined threat awaiting the exact moment to descend upon something that still continued ignoring that its morning had just stopped belonging to it.
Suspended above the vast geometry of the institute, the blond man let the height finish handing him the map. From up there, with the camouflage still active and the sea breathing behind the structure like an immense beast too ancient to be interested in human affairs, the building ceased to seem like a simple institution and became an organism distributed in blocks, corridors, windows, and inner courtyards, an architecture of discipline stretched beneath him with the naïveté proper to every place that still believes in the sufficiency of its walls.
The morning bathed everything with a firm, almost merciless clarity, and beneath that light the institute had nowhere to hide its shape. He observed it in silence for a few seconds, allowing his green eyes, invisible to the world but no less attentive because of it, to run over the general arrangement of the whole with the cold precision of someone who does not admire a place: he evaluates it.
Then he descended slightly, enough to approach the area that interested him without completely abandoning the advantage of the angle. He did not want to break in yet. He had not come to waste the privilege of invisibility with a clumsy entrance. He had come to find. To confirm. To look before touching. The device attached to his chest continued correcting his outline with impeccable efficiency, absorbing light, bending reflections, rewriting his presence within the air itself, and the boots continued holding him with that translucent energy that turned gravity into a suggestion rather than a law. Under that combination, the sky was merely another private corridor.
“According to the only information I was able to get out of those teenagers...” he whispered to himself, in a low, clean tone, almost kind if one ignored the poison underneath, “tenth-grade students. What a vague description.”
He did not sound irritated. He sounded worse. He sounded entertained by the poverty of the data, as if the fact of having to search for them with so little seemed to him a small intellectual offense, not a real complication. He adjusted his trajectory and headed toward the section corresponding to middle education.
From above, he could better distinguish the organization of the area: blocks less monumental than other zones of the institute, wide windows, corridors visible from certain angles, and an academic life distributed with that false normality that only exists before being interrupted by something that does not belong to the common order. He descended more. Not too much. Just enough to slide near the exterior lines of the building without touching the structure, moving through the section with the cleanliness of an intention that did not yet need to dirty its hands.
He passed beside several classrooms. He saw groups of students leaning over notebooks, screens, and half-voiced conversations. Teachers moving with the disciplined fatigue of those who still believe routine preserves some moral value. Rows of desks. Boards. Young uniformity. Distracted gestures. All of it seemed small to him, almost obscenely small. Not because he despised education in itself, but because he disliked the human scale of certain scenes, that ridiculous concentration of minimal aspirations gathered inside a classroom as if the world were not always one accident away from reminding them of their true proportion.
He continued moving forward, with no visible haste, following the arrangement of the courses until he located the one he was looking for.
Tenth A.
He stopped in front of that classroom and remained suspended near the windows, motionless in the air, held by the invisible boots and still covered by the camouflage field that continued making him an imperceptible error within the morning. From that position, he could observe the interior better. Not in a general way, not like someone looking at any ordinary class, but with the meticulousness of a hunter accustomed to separating noise from prey.
His eyes moved row by row, face by face, posture by posture. Most of the students were exactly what they were supposed to be: teenagers trapped within their own scale, too present in themselves to register what remained outside the immediate logic of the classroom. Young bodies. Irregular concentration. Tedium. Contained murmuring. Nothing worthy of memory.
Then it happened.
It was not a startle. It was not an open reaction. It was not something a normal teacher, an ordinary guard, or a less attentive man could have noticed and retained with certainty. It was barely a fraction of a second. A minimal gesture. Two gazes that did not move with the distracted chance of a student following any noise or change of light, but with a precision too brief and too clean to belong to coincidence. Two teenagers glanced sideways and looked directly at him.
Directly. Not at the window. Not outside. Not at the morning glare on the glass. At him.
The blond man did not move. Not a muscle. Not an improper oscillation in the suspended line of his invisible body. But inside, something sharpened with an immediate, almost intimate satisfaction. Not because it surprised him that creatures capable of detecting an anomaly existed. What pleased him was the confirmation. The sudden, precise sensation that the search had stopped being an abstract hunt and had become a concrete discovery.
A smile formed on his invisible mouth.
“I found them,” he whispered.
The phrase fell barely beneath the sound of the outside wind and the muffled murmur of the classroom, a confession so low that it did not belong to the world of the others, but only to the private chamber of his own mind. His eyes then fixed on the two of them. Sebastián. Virka. He did not need anyone to pronounce their names inside there. He needed no more proof. There was something in the way both of them had turned their gaze, in the exact quality of that minimal reaction, that immediately separated their existences from the rest of the students. They were not simply two young bodies in a tenth-grade classroom. They were the point around which an irritating part of his morning had been curving.
He allowed himself to observe them more closely. His attention settled first on Sebastián, trying to quickly read what distance, the school context, and apparent stillness still did not fully reveal. Then it went toward Virka, whose mere presence, even contained beneath human appearance and within the vulgar normality of a classroom, dragged along something that did not quite fit with the rest of the surroundings.
He did not think of them with admiration. He thought in terms of usefulness, threat, hierarchy, cost. What he could extract. What they still had not told him. What explained the chain of errors, losses, and failures he had already left behind like a trail of useless names.
And it was exactly in that instant, when he decided to take from them a deeper reading, that something fell upon his back. Not a hand, not an energy that could be defined with ease, not an attack in the simple sense of the word, but pressure. Brutal, absolute, ancient.
A pressure that did not descend like a blow, but like presence. As if a colossal mountain, an impossible mass loaded with the mineral weight of entire eras, had suddenly been placed upon him without needing to touch him physically. His invisible body did not fall, but everything in him immediately recognized the violence of that imposition. The boots held the height. The device maintained the camouflage. However, the sensation was clear, monstrously clear: something was crushing him from a plane deeper than simple matter, as if the entire atmosphere had ceased to be air and become stone.
His smile disappeared.
The green eyes hardened and he turned with clean speed, without entirely losing his outward composure, although inside, alarm had already crossed the first layer of his pride. The classroom, the windows, the morning clarity over the institute, everything that had been before him an instant earlier tore apart without sound, not like a destroyed image, but like a substituted reality. The air changed. The light changed. The world changed.
He was no longer before the real building. Now he was inside the Veil.
The institute was still there, but it was not the same. It was its twisted reflection, its echo suspended within a space where reality seemed to have been torn from its ordinary anchor to be rewritten under other rules. The structure retained form, yes, but not innocence. Everything around had that strange and hostile quality of things that exist in a plane too close to the original to be another place completely, and too alien to it to remain the common world. The air weighed differently. Distance breathed differently. Even the light seemed less solar and more spectral, as if it had crossed layers of silence before touching anything.
And in front of him floated Narka.
Colossal, complete.
It was not the reduced form that could rest on a shoulder, but the true one, the one that belonged to the Veil and only to the Veil. He rose with his six and a half meters of length like a living mountain suspended in nothingness, with the massive shell covered in black and gray mineral plates crossed by incandescent red veins that beat between the cracks as if something ancient and subterranean were still burning inside. Spines of dark quartz protruded from the shell with the severity of natural blades, and beneath that immense presence, his golden, ancient, pupil-less eyes observed him with a stillness more unbearable than any roar. There was no theatrical fury in that gaze. There was history. There was weight. There was a calm so old that it turned the blond man’s own existence into something brief, recent, and almost insolent.
He was still invisible, and it did not matter. Because before a presence like that, invisibility became a lesser resource, a technical luxury suddenly degraded into an elegant trick with no real value. The pressure continued descending from Narka, not as an active gesture of effort, but as a natural quality of his mere existence within the Veil. The blond man, one of the Nine Hammers, understood in that instant, without needing anyone to explain it to him, that he was no longer observing his prey from a position of advantage.
He had been set aside. Separated. Taken out of the common world and placed, invisible and intact, before a living antiquity that had existed far too long to need to announce power.
And Narka was looking at him.
The gaze between them did not last even a full heartbeat. Narka did not speak. He did not warn. He did not need to move as common creatures move when they want to announce violence. The pressure that was already descending from him over the Veil remained there, immense, mineral, ancient, and suddenly, before his colossal mass, a rocky projectile of monstrous size emerged, compact and brutal, woven in brown tones crossed by light orange flashes that seemed to burn from within the stone itself. It was not born with a roar. It was born slowly for an impossible fraction, as if the Veil had been pushing it from a depth older than air, and in the next instant it had already become a hypersonic mass that crossed space with such absolute violence that the reflected world of the institute had no right to resist.
The impact did not strike a wall. It struck the entire scene. The reflected structure of the institute evaporated beneath that trajectory as if it had been merely dust arranged with arrogance. Windows, corridors, roofs, entire blocks, everything was torn from the Veil with monstrous cleanliness, undone in a sweep of pressure, heat, and mineral destruction that left no recognizable ruin, only absence. Even the floor disappeared almost completely. What an instant before had been surface, support, and institutional reflection was reduced to a semicircular base suspended over the vastness of the reflected sea, like a mutilated platform opened to the impossible horizon of that plane. The water of the Veil was exposed below, silent and black in its depths, breathing beneath the scene as if it had been waiting for human architecture to be removed in order to remember who had been there before. And the blond man was nowhere in sight.
Narka continued floating over that devastation with the same stillness of a living mountain. His golden, ancient, pupil-less eyes did not search desperately through the nothingness. They did not need to. His presence continued weighing over the Veil with a calm so immense that any other creature would have mistaken for immobility what was, in truth, dominion. It was in that instant, above him, that the air tore open.
Two triangles appeared. Not perfect, not decorative, but sharp, aggressive, built to cut direction and existence. Their front points were longer and sharper than the rest of the form, and their surfaces did not obey a single color, but a prismatic texture of multiple tones that changed with cold violence as they crossed the air. They descended against Narka’s head at hypersonic speed, leaving behind them two clean wounds in space, two lines of pressure that whistled with ruthless precision. They were not improvised projectiles. They were a surgical response. An attempt at execution measured to the microsecond.
They did not arrive.
Before they touched Narka, a sphere of Qi emerged in front of him with the same mineral tonality as the previous projectile: deep browns, light orange flashes beating inside its rotating mass like embers buried beneath living rock. The sphere did not explode or unfold with spectacle. It appeared. It existed. And that was enough. The two triangles crashed against its invisible edge and were deflected in opposite directions with a dry violence, torn from their lethal line and thrown toward different ends of the Veil, as if the mere presence of that defense had corrected the attack’s right to continue.
Microseconds later, Narka responded again. From his colossal body emerged another sphere. This one was not born to intercept. It was born to dominate. It rotated on itself as it left the proximity of his shell, made of the same matter of brown tones and light orange flashes, but now denser, heavier, more like a released core than a conventional technique. For an instant, it remained compact, suspended in front of him like a threat still contained. Then it began to expand.
The speed of that growth was supersonic. The sphere opened over the Veil like a will of total crushing. It did not advance only by occupying space; it attracted, absorbed, crushed. Everything that still remained of the institute’s reflection, every edge, every partial ruin, every remaining surface, every architectural line that had survived the first projectile, was dragged toward it with inevitable violence. The semicircular base began to give way. Fragments of reflected matter detached themselves and were swallowed. The air itself seemed to lean toward the expanding center, as if that sphere were not growing inside the Veil, but forcing it to recognize a gravity older than its own.
In very little time, there was no institute left. No walls. No base. No vestige of floor. Only the reflection of the sea.
The ocean of the Veil remained stretched below without land to interrupt it, a dark and silent immensity over which Narka floated like a presence born to exist there since before any human construction. Then the sphere disappeared. It did not collapse with a roar nor leave a delayed explosion. It simply ceased to be, as if it had finished removing from the plane everything it considered unworthy of remaining standing.
The void finally revealed what destruction had not reached. In front of Narka, suspended over the reflection of the sea, rose a geometric figure formed by four triangles arranged around a common center: one in front, one behind, one on each side. Above them, closing the shape, floated a fifth smaller triangle, exact, motionless, like an upper seal finishing the structure. All of them shared the same prismatic texture, that multiple and cutting shine that did not seem to reflect the light of the Veil, but to fragment it into layers incompatible with normal matter. They did not rotate in disorder. They held themselves in a rigid, almost ceremonial balance, as if each angle were occupying a calculated position within a defense of extreme precision.
Inside that figure was him. The blond man had already deactivated every appearance of invisibility. His ivory-white suit remained impeccable. Not a tear. Not a stain. Not a visible trace of the monstrous weight that had just fallen over the entire plane. His golden hair remained in place except for slight alterations imposed by the broken air of the technique. His green eyes, now completely exposed before Narka, had lost the elegant lightness from before and held a cleaner, colder, more attentive hardness. He did not seem relieved to have resisted. He did not seem victorious. He seemed something more precise than both things: a man who had just confirmed that he was not facing prey, but an entity with which a single mistake was equivalent to disappearing without leaving even the luxury of a name.
Even so, he did not retreat. He remained inside the triangular structure, suspended in the Veil, with his face serene as far as the situation still allowed serenity, looking at Narka head-on while beneath them both only the endless reflection of the sea continued to exist.
For a few seconds, nothing visible happened. Narka continued floating above the endless reflection of the sea with the mineral immensity of his complete form imposing itself over the Veil like an ancient truth. In front of him, still enclosed within the structure of five prismatic triangles, the blond man did not make the slightest useless movement. There was no light arrogance in his expression now. Nor open fear. What there was, was a colder, more exact concentration, that of a man who had already accepted that he was facing an entity capable of crushing him if he miscalculated a single fraction of a second.
He was the one who broke the silence.
In front of Narka, a great sphere of compact earth was born, compressed to a brutal extreme, a round and monstrous mass covered by spikes of rock that rotated around its own form while currents of gravitational Qi enveloped it like invisible rings. The deep brown tones and light orange flashes appeared again within that technique, but now no longer as a simple visual manifestation, but as the sign of a density that had passed the limit of what the air should endure. Around it, space began to lean toward it. It did not only attract matter. It attracted direction. It attracted trajectories. It even attracted the right of movement to remain free.
Y las líneas de diálogo deben ir así:
—Never expected to find such a powerful beast... —he said in a low, clean voice, without the mocking contempt from before, but also without the slightest real consideration—. To the point of forcing me to use five of my Prismatic Vertices. And, besides that, it thinks like a human...
— I will not keep listening.
Narka’s voice did not come out like a shout. It came out deep, vast, with that rough weight that did not seem to come only from a throat, but from something much deeper, as if the Veil itself had decided to give body to the rejection. There was no theatrical fury in the sentence. There was the fatigue of stone. The refusal of an existence too ancient to keep granting words to someone it had already decided to crush.
The attack began in the same instant.
In front of Narka, a great sphere of compact earth was born, compressed to a brutal extreme, a round and monstrous mass covered by spikes of rock that rotated around its own form while currents of gravitational Qi enveloped it like invisible rings. The deep brown tones and light orange flashes appeared again within that technique, but now no longer as a simple visual manifestation, but as the sign of a density that had passed the limit of what the air should endure. Around it, space began to lean toward it. It did not only attract matter. It attracted direction. It attracted trajectories. It even attracted the right of movement to remain free.
Then it shot forward.
The sphere advanced against the blond man at hypersonic speed, dragging the air of the Veil with it, deforming it, pulling it toward its rotating mass while the spikes of compact earth rotated with a violence capable of crushing everything caught within that field of attraction. It did not even seem like a projectile. It seemed like a fragment of cataclysm turned into a single will.
The blond man reacted immediately. The prismatic figure that had protected him disassembled with instant precision. The five triangles separated from around him and shot forward as if they had been waiting for exactly that moment. But they no longer fully preserved their previous nature. As they advanced toward Narka’s sphere, their prismatic texture began to mutate. The multicolored surface was gradually covered by a reddish flame, compressed to the extreme, a combustion so dense and tense that in several areas it began to blacken from within, as if fire itself were being pushed to a limit where temperature stopped seeming like light and began to seem like ruin.
The Prismatic Vertices stopped looking like defense. They became burning blades.
They flew against the great sphere of earth and gravity with straight, surgical violence, incapable of hesitation. The clash did not produce an open explosion immediately. It produced something worse: a contracted collision. Two forces pushing against each other without granting themselves the right to disperse. Narka’s gravitational mass tried to devour everything toward its center, crush it inside its rotating spikes, flatten the very direction of the enemy offensive. The five transformed vertices, instead, cut forward with compact ferocity, as if they wanted to pierce that gravity through absolute imposition.
Space began to crack.
Not the reflected matter of the Veil. Space itself.
On both sides of the point of impact, reality twisted and broke into dark lines, thin at first, wider afterward, as if the clash had driven an impossible pressure against the structure of the plane. The cracks opened around the collision and the spectral light of the Veil deformed inside them. For an instant, it seemed that the entire combat had stopped belonging to a fight and had become a dispute between two wills that were forcing too much upon a world that had not been made to withstand them.
Then both energies collapsed.
Not outward, but inward. The compression gave way upon itself with such extreme violence that the entire area where they had collided contracted into a point of destruction, brief, fierce, silent for a minimal fraction and monstrously loud the next instant. The blast tore through the air of the Veil and launched remnants of pressure, blackened fire, broken gravity, and fragments of spiritual rock in multiple directions before disappearing in an abrupt dissipation.
But by then, both were no longer there. Very high above, in the upper part of the Veil’s sky, they appeared again, heading toward each other. fɾēewebnσveℓ.com
Narka had risen first. His colossal mass advanced with an absurd speed for something so immense, as if the mineral weight of his body did not make him slower, but more terrible. Around him spun five circles of compact earth Qi and gravity, each one formed by a dense rotation of brown tones and light orange flashes; the discs accelerated around him with controlled fury, driven by the same gravity they generated. They were not ornaments or simple shields. They were layers of crushing in motion, orbits of violence ready to grind down whatever entered their reach.
In front of him, the blond man had also remade his offensive. The triangles gathered again, no longer as a barrier that enclosed him completely, but as a single geometric formation hardened by the same reddish and black fire that had covered the vertices before. The figure pointed straight at Narka, with its main point turned into a kind of compact spear, a drilling head born from perfect angles and compressed flame.
Behind that form went the blond man, pushing it with both hands and with the full weight of his body projected forward, the white suit intact but now lashed by the wind of the ascent and by the savage pressure of the imminent clash. His green eyes no longer had elegant coldness. They had fierce calculation.
Narka did not reduce his speed. Neither did the blond man. The five gravitational circles continued spinning around Narka like orbits of crushing. The prismatic figure wrapped in reddish-black fire continued tearing through the sky of the Veil with the straight violence of a spear. The distance between them collapsed in an instant, and the firmament itself seemed to tense before the imminent clash.
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END OF Chapter 100
knowing that this story has not exactly been short. That is why, if you are still reading up to this point, I truly thank you.
I also want to apologize for uploading only one Chapter this week. The reason was that I could not find a way that completely convinced me to write this Chapter 100 the way I wanted. I felt that I had to give it the right weight.
And I want to say something sincerely: I am a beginner writer. I am still learning, still growing, and still searching for the best way to tell this story. That is why, thank you for giving someone like me a chance and for believing in me.
Truly, thank you.
ATT: Goru SLG
