Free Web NovelChapter 104: Chapter 102 When the Hammer Measured the Guardian
The storm of Qi kept rising around Narka until it touched the sky of the Veil with a pressure that seemed to have no edge. The brown tones pierced by light orange flashes swirled from the cracks of his shell, from the incandescent veins, from the depth of an existence too ancient to be measured by an isolated technique. In front of him, the three blond men remained suspended with the same cold posture, the same white elegance, the same green gaze, while the five red-black Vertices spun behind them with the patience of blades.
The Veil was already broken below: the reflected sea, opened in great dark wounds; the distant land, reduced to ruin; the sky, strained by a fight that had begun to surpass the shape of a simple confrontation and was approaching something more like a trial between incompatible natures.
Narka did not wait for the storm to finish closing. The energy surrounding him changed direction, compressed itself against his body, and began to spin with growing violence. His colossal mass was enveloped in layers of compressed earth and gravity, not as an external armor, but as a direct extension of his will. The Qi tightened around the shell, the pillar-like legs, and the ancient head, until it turned him into a form of brutal drilling. It was not speed alone. It was weight organized into advance. It was a mountain spinning upon itself with the intent to pierce the world before it.
The gravitational pull increased around him, and the air of the Veil began to bend toward him, pulling at the remains of energy, the vapor of the destroyed sea, and the suspended fragments that still floated after the previous clashes.
The three blond men launched themselves at the same time. There was no doubt among them nor any visible difference in the execution. The three bodies advanced head-on, identical, with the white suit cut against the broken sky, and the five red-black Vertices began to spin around the formation in increasingly tighter circles. The concentrated flame covering the triangles darkened at the edges, leaving black trails inside the air, while the complete formation descended toward Narka like an offensive crown made of false bodies, fire, and geometry. From afar, it would have seemed like a frontal collision. From within the Veil, it felt like another trap approaching with the exact shape of a charge. ƒreewebηoveℓ.com
Narka increased the rotation. The compressed gravity around his body pulled at the three blond men and the five Vertices, trying to drag them toward the center of his advance to destroy them before they could open up. The drill of earth and Qi crossed the distance at hypersonic speed. The sky vibrated. The reflection of the sea sank beneath them as if something enormous were absorbing its surface from above. The invisible tip of that attack was ready to pierce the entire formation and erase the Hammer’s multiplication at once.
Then, at the exact instant of impact, the three blond men and the five Vertices changed.
The human form of the copies came undone first from the edges, losing rigidity, becoming purple smoke before breaking into dozens of small silhouettes. The red-black Vertices folded in on themselves and also fragmented, not into debris or scattered fire, but into a flock of purple crows that burst around Narka with impossible speed. They did not crash into him. They surrounded him. They climbed up the sides of his colossal body, crossed in front of his gaze, spun over his shell, and ascended toward the sky of the Veil in dark spirals, as if the entire attack had only been a skin abandoned at the last second.
Narka did not completely stop his advance. He spun within his own Qi, braking the drilling before wasting it against an absence, and his golden eyes shone again with ancient intensity. The wave of spiritual Qi came out of him like a deep tremor, wider than before, traveling through the flock from within. It did not seek to destroy the crows. It sought to read them. To separate body from technique. Intention from residue. True presence from deception. The wave passed through the purple forms one by one, marking them for minimal fractions within the air, revealing their internal structure, their contained smoke, their perfect artificiality.
None of them was the blond man.
Not one of the three bodies. Not one of the crows. Not a single one of those forms carried the real center of his presence.
The flock kept ascending around Narka, no longer pretending a direct attack. Some silhouettes came undone upon touching the edges of his gravitational Qi. Others opened into purple smoke and mixed with the height. The Veil remained filled for a few seconds with false wings, dark feathers, and remnants of energy that did not have enough weight to be an enemy nor enough fragility to seem like a simple illusion. Narka remained in the center, colossal, with the storm of Qi still spinning around his body, while the spiritual reading finished confirming the obvious: the Hammer was no longer there.
The voice came from far away.
Not from a single point. Not from a direction that could be pursued immediately. It sounded in the distance of the Veil with an elegant, cold, slightly mocking calm, as if the blond man had left his name nailed into the air before withdrawing his body from the Guardian’s reach.
—Remember this, tortoise. My name is Lucien Valcrest, Second of the Nine Hammers. From this moment on, you have become my enemy.
The phrase remained suspended for an instant over the broken sea.
Narka did not answer.
The purple crows began to disappear. One after another, they came undone into smoke, losing form until they were reduced to faint stains that the wind of the Veil dispersed without effort. The sky opened again, emptier than before. The reflection of the sea continued below, mutilated by the fight. The destroyed land remained distant, silent, marked by the violence of a combat that had not ended by victory, but by calculated retreat.
Lucien had not fallen. Narka had not been defeated. Both had seen enough to understand that the next encounter could not be sustained with the same measure.
When the last crow disappeared, Narka was left alone in the Veil.
The storm of Qi still rose from his body, but it no longer found a target to crush. His golden eyes remained fixed on the space where the voice had faded, ancient, grave, without useless rage. Silence returned around him with the weight of something incomplete. It was not peace. It was pause. A pause marked by a new name, by a declared enmity, and by the certainty that the Hammer had chosen to withdraw before revealing his entire form.
Above the destroyed reflection of the sea, the Guardian remained motionless, carrying upon his shell the weight of a threat that had just moved away, but had not ended.
The Qi began to descend. It did not go out all at once, because a force like that did not disappear like a common flame when fuel was denied to it. The storm that had surrounded Narka kept spinning for a few more seconds, enormous, dense, still dragging remnants of vapor, fragments of energy, and dust from the Veil around his colossal shell. The drill of earth and gravity, now without an enemy to pierce, gradually lost its form. The compact layers that had enveloped his body opened into slow spirals, separated from the black and gray mineral plates, and began to come undone into brown currents pierced by light orange flashes. The rotation died first at the edges. Then in the center. Afterward, only the pressure remained, vast and heavy, floating around him like the echo of a mountain that had just stopped.
Narka remained motionless above the destroyed reflection of the sea. The Veil was open beneath him in great mutilated stretches, with zones where the water no longer returned and others where the dark surface moved with a sickly slowness, as if even that plane took time to remember how it should behave after having been forced beyond its form. The distant ruins of the reflected land remained suspended on the horizon, split by the previous wave of energy. There were no crows. There were no Vertices. There were no three bodies of Lucien Valcrest before him. Only the name remained, the declaration, and the precise sensation of a threat that had withdrawn without having been broken.
Narka let out a sigh. It was low, grave, mineral, more like the sound of a deep cavern releasing ancient air than the tired gesture of an exhausted creature. There was no desperation in him. Nor humiliation. His golden gaze remained fixed on the empty space where Lucien’s voice had faded, and within that stillness there was no useless rage, but evaluation. Narka had lived too long to confuse a retreat with a victory. He had seen enormous forces disappear because of pride and weak beings survive because of calculation. What had just happened belonged to none of those simple categories. Lucien was not weak. He was not a cultivator. He was not a mage. He was not an ancient beast. And yet he had managed to force him to release a measure of power that should not be necessary against an ordinary human.
—A human being without magic, without aura, and without Qi —Narka murmured, with a solemn, slow voice, loaded with ancient weight—. And yet he forced me to fight with eighty percent of my total power.
The Veil responded with silence.
The phrase was not born as praise nor as fear. It was record. A truth placed within the world so it would not be lost. Narka barely closed his golden eyes for an instant, as if he were feeling again the texture of that energy: the blackened red of the Vertices, the green thunder that dispersed spiritual perception, the purple smoke turned into false bodies, the impossible precision of a technique built with human logic and ambition too refined.
It was not Qi. It did not have the spiritual root of a cultivator. It did not breathe like aura. It did not obey the architecture of magic. But neither was it a simple machine. There was something alive inside that system, something extracted, processed, directed, forced to fulfill a function that imitated the behavior of superior energies without truly belonging to them.
—Human technology mixed with vital power —he continued—. An incomplete imitation, but dangerous. It does not reach the nature of Qi, but it manages to emulate some of its forms. Enough to deceive, interfere, resist, and cut.
He opened his eyes.
The storm finished dispersing around him. The last threads of earth and gravity Qi ascended like luminous dust before going out in the height of the Veil. His colossal body stopped imposing pressure over the entire plane, and calm returned with difficulty, not because the place was intact, but because there were no longer two wills forcing it to break.
Narka observed the destroyed sea once more. Lucien Valcrest, Second of the Nine Hammers. The name remained inside him like a stone newly placed on an ancient path. Not out of fear. Out of memory.
Then his form began to shrink.
The change was not violent. The mineral plates of his shell compressed with controlled slowness, the dark quartz spines lost size without losing hardness, the cracks of red veins closed toward a smaller scale, and the legs that before seemed like mountain pillars drew in until the complete immensity of the Guardian was concentrated into a small form, heavy in meaning although reduced for the common world.
Narka returned to that compact presence that could move without breaking ceilings or sinking floors, but even so he preserved something impossible to hide: the gravity of having been, only a few moments ago, a living mountain floating over the sea of the Veil.
The plane began to come undone.
The ruins of the reflected sea lost depth. The cracks in the sky closed in silence. The mutilated land became shadow, then image, then nothing. The Veil did not explode nor tear; it withdrew, as if a dark curtain had been slowly gathered from the edges of reality.
The institute returned around Narka with its true form: intact walls, real ceilings, windows bathed by a different light, common air charged with late heat and a distant smell of salt. It was no longer the clear morning in which Lucien had arrived from the rear. Time had advanced. The afternoon was beginning to fall over the place, spreading lower tones over the surfaces of the institute and lengthening shadows that did not belong to the Veil, but to the normal world.
Narka was on a roof.
Small again, motionless for a second, he observed from there the real extension of the institute. Below, life continued with an almost cruel ignorance. Corridors, courtyards, windows, distant movements. No one there had seen the sea of the Veil evaporate. No one had heard the name Lucien Valcrest nail itself into the air like a threat. No one understood that an invisible war had grazed the institute from above and had withdrawn before touching the common world. Narka did not feel contempt for that ignorance. He only accepted it as part of the weight of guarding. There are dangers that do not announce their arrival to those who could break just by knowing they exist.
He turned his head toward another roof. Then he jumped.
His reduced form crossed the space with a dry lightness, landing on the next surface without unnecessary noise. From there he jumped again, advancing over the roofs of the institute while the afternoon spread around him. He was not running with visible urgency. He moved with purpose. The combat had ended for now, but the threat had not. Lucien Valcrest had withdrawn, yes, but he had left behind something more dangerous than a failed attack: a direction, a name, and the certainty that the Blacksmiths were no longer watching from afar.
Narka kept jumping between the roofs, small before the normal world, immense in what he had just understood.
Lucien Valcrest crossed the sky of the city with invisibility active, reduced for the common world to a minimal distortion between the afternoon light and the high currents of air. Below, the city extended like a fabric of concrete, avenues, roofs, and distant noise, oblivious to the combat that had just occurred outside its visible reality. The systems of his propulsion boots kept emitting translucent energy beneath his feet, propelling him with clean stability, without flames or thunder, only with that silent pressure that allowed him to advance above buildings and routes as if the airspace belonged to him by right. The camouflage device on his chest corrected every reflection, every change of light, every ripple of wind over his ivory-white suit, and his entire body remained hidden within an almost perfect layer of energy.
His face showed no satisfaction. Nor fear. The retreat from the Veil had not left in him a simple emotion that could be easily named. What he carried in his green eyes was a colder cruelty, more closed, stripped of the light arrogance with which he had arrived at the institute. It was not humility. Lucien Valcrest did not descend to that kind of word. It was calculation wounded by an uncomfortable truth. He had found something that did not fit, and what did not fit could not be despised immediately; first it had to be measured, separated, studied, and then destroyed with the correct method.
—That tortoise does not resemble any magical beast I have seen —he murmured, with a low voice, barely above the wind that could not fully touch him—. Nor did it seem like an aura user.
The city kept passing beneath him. The glass of the buildings reflected an afternoon increasingly tilted, and among those reflections his presence did not exist. Lucien advanced over them without looking at anyone in particular, but despising them all with the same cold indifference. People, vehicles, offices, noise, schedules, small lives convinced they were occupying a place within the world. All of that was mass. Background. Matter without real weight. However, for the first time in the day, his thought did not stop on that common inferiority, but on the colossal form that had forced him to retreat from the Veil without having closed the hunt.
—It was not magic —he continued—. It was another energy. Not recognizable. Heavy. Ancient. Too stable to be a simple natural anomaly.
He remembered the pressure of Narka falling over him, the wave of spiritual Qi reading the hidden Vertices, the gravity accumulated around that mineral shell, the golden eyes that did not need pupils to impose presence. Lucien did not feel the pressure again as fear, but as data. That was the difference that allowed him to remain dangerous. A common man would have turned that experience into trauma. He turned it into incomplete classification.
—The pressure it exerted could be compared to that of a great-power aura user at level 22: the Realm of Aura Crystallization —he said, and his voice hardened slightly as he put the measure into words—. But it did not use aura. It did not respond like them. It did not move like them. And the most annoying thing...
The pause was not theatrical. It was calculation.
—...is that it did not seem to be using all of its power.
The boots increased the propulsion by one degree without his posture changing. Lucien rose a little higher, avoiding a line of civil surveillance drones that never managed to register his passage. The translucent energy beneath his feet compressed and expanded again, propelling him toward the outer zone of the city. At that height, the institute was no longer visible behind the urban blocks, but Narka’s presence continued occupying an exact place within his tactical memory. Not as a feared figure. As an unresolved problem.
—If I had to fight that tortoise with my entire margin open, the Vertices in standard state would not be enough —he whispered—. I would need the amplification weapons. The six complete variants. The combat armor.
He did not say it with haste. He said it like someone enumerating the tools necessary for an inevitable procedure. His seven Vertices, even with fire, thunder, and smoke, were not the totality of his system. There were layers he had not released. Variants he had not shown. Instruments he was not wearing because that visit had begun as a personal inspection, not as a declared war against an entity capable of forcing him to measure every microsecond. That difference irritated him. Not because he had been reckless, but because the world had once again reminded him that even an authority like him could find resistance in poorly classified places.
The afternoon wind opened before his advance. The city began to fall behind, replaced by wider zones, more separated buildings, and less guarded air corridors. The invisibility remained intact. His suit remained impeccable. His face remained cold. But beneath that neatness there was a darker decision, a new line on the map of his priorities. Narka was no longer an accidental obstacle. He was a presence that had to be prepared for, measured, and, at the correct moment, taken to a situation where even his antiquity would not be enough.
Lucien increased his speed.
The translucent energy of the boots lengthened beneath his feet in a barely visible trail before being corrected by the camouflage. The air compressed around his invisible body, and the city descended behind him like something that no longer deserved attention. His gaze remained fixed forward, cruel, clean, without need of a smile.
—It would be better to prepare myself to reach level 23 as a meta-human —he said at last—. Just to ensure the result.
After that, he did not speak again.
The sky received him like an absence in motion. The city was left behind beneath the afternoon, unaware that Lucien Valcrest was not moving away because of defeat, but to return with a more precise measure of destruction.
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END OF Chapter 102
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