Chapter 35

  Raime pressed deeper into the Rift’s forest, each step—or rather each drift—drawing him into terrain older and more oppressive than what lay near the temple. The canopy thickened until the sky was almost gone, smothered beneath layers of twisted branches and violet-hued leaves. The light that bled through felt warped, like something strained through the membrane of another world.

  It’s totally another world… I never thought that I could miss the colour green so much.

  His levitation carried him a body’s height above the ground, silent and smooth, while the Tetra Unum trailed at his side and Thunk hung loose in his hand, pulsing faintly with the thread of psionic energy he kept tethered to it.

  Another beast found him before long. A shape burst from a hollow trunk—its body a slick mass of tendons wrapped in bone-like ridges, its jaws unfolding sideways like a grotesque flower. Raime’s perception caught every detail as though slowed to a crawl: the flex of its muscles, the splatter of saliva from its jagged maw, even the faint scrape of its claws striking bark as it lunged. Once, such speed would have startled him into panic. Now, his mind stretched the moment apart into pieces he could study.

  He flicked a thread of thought and the Tetra Unum lashed forward. The three blades scissored apart in midair, carving across the creature’s flank before it even cleared its leap. A splash of black ichor streaked through the air toward him. With a flick of his intent, he moved the foul liquid aside with a simple telekinetic push. By the time it hit the ground, Thunk had already spun away from Raime’s side and smashed into the base of its skull. The blow cracked bone-ridges like pottery.

  The beast dropped like a stone on the floor, then went still.

  Raime hovered, watching its body. It went for me the instant it sensed me. No hesitation. And yet I saw two others in the trees behind it—neither moved against others beasts. Only me.

  That pattern repeated itself again and again.

  A grove later, a massive quadruped beast with crystalline growths on its body barreled from the underbrush. Its hide glittered with jagged scales like fractured glass, its every step leaving gouges in the soil. Raime rose higher, threads spreading from his mind until Tetra Unum darted low, lancing between the cristals at the joints. The creature bellowed, tusks smashing into a tree and shattering it, but it never looked to flee, never spared attention for anything else in the grove. Every thrash of its bulk angled toward him alone.

  He circled it, calm and deliberate, letting the weapon bite deeper each time it swung past. With his slowed perception, even those earth-shaking charges were predictable— momentum without precision. The beast lasted longer than the first, but in the end, its own fury doomed it. It staggered, fell on its side, and Raime drove the spear-tip of the Tetra Unum into the exposed throat until its convulsions stilled.

  As he cleaned the ichor off with a flick of psionic force, Raime caught himself breathing evenly.

  I could have finished it quicker if I used more energy, but this here is a game of attrition. And with the advantage of being able to levitate it wasn’t even a real fight. Now I move around them like I’m walking a pattern I already memorized. In a way it reminds me of playing a Souls game franchise. Just that I am not using a controller now.

  Another hour brought a swarm of fliers—not centipedes, but horned insectoids with translucent wings and needle-tipped legs. They came shrieking out of the canopy by the dozens, their wings slicing the air with shrill vibrations. Raime spun into the air to meet them, cloak snapping around him as he twisted.

  Thunk left his side with a psionic shove, a blur of dark steel that pulped the first insect into fragments. The Tetra Unum spun like a sawblade, cleaving arcs through the air that left ichor raining down like black sleet. They were fast, vicious—but in Raime’s perception, every dive telegraphed itself, every stinger tracked in lazy arcs he could slip past.

  He moved with almost casual grace, body tilting just enough for each attack to miss by a breath. The ones he couldn’t avoid due to the sheer amount of insects, he pushed away with telekinesis. Where once he would have been overwhelmed, now he threaded himself between them, each counterstrike placed with surgical precision. By the time the last insect shrieked and crumpled into the undergrowth, Raime had not a single wound. Not even a drop of whatever passed for hemolymph here touched his clothes.

  He paused, floating above the litter of twitching carcasses, and felt the weight of the realization settle over him.

  I should be afraid. Any human would be. But I’m not. They seem slow. Predictable. Fragile, even. I look at them and see not terror but angles, joints, places to cut. Is that me still thinking, or is it the changes to my race and the effect of the attributes?

  The forest had no answer for him, but while his capabilities proved more than enough to face these threats, the centipedes remained the exception.

  Twice he encountered their kind again, and each time the battle demanded more. Larger than before, with legs like swords of hammered steel, their bodies armoured in overlapping plates that even the Tetra Unum struggled to pierce. When one came crashing through the canopy, Raime felt the familiar edge of danger sharpen across his nerves.

  He dropped, let himself fall through the trees, then lashed upward with both weapons at once. Thunk smashed into its headplate just as the Tetra Unum’s blades slipped between the segments of its belly. The centipede shrieked, a metallic wail, and whipped its body in coils that snapped trees in half. Raime had to weave hard, threads straining to pull his weapons back before the beast’s thrashing swallowed them.

  Every movement of the creature carried weight and precision. Not mindless fury—it fought like a predator that knew its strength. Where the tusked quadruped charged wildly, this monster stalked in three dimensions, twisting, coiling, snapping from angles no grounded beast could match. A creature as big as a truck wasn’t supposed to move like that, that was what passed to his mind.

  Still, Raime no longer fought as prey. He darted and wove through sudden halts, skimming through gaps a finger wide. Every strike he made landed not from luck but from choice, his cognition pulling ahead of instinct. The battle stretched long, measured in the cracks and splits opening across its armour, until at last he carved wide behind its head and drove the spear-tip deep into the brain beneath.

  The thrashing stopped.

  Raime hovered above the husk, chest heaving. His hands tingled after the reverberations of his own strikes.

  He wiped ichor from his weapon again, the motion automatic, and rose higher through the branches until the mountain finally came into sight—its dark flanks rising like a wall from the endless canopy. The Rift pressed on around him, heavy and alien, yet he cut through it like a blade.

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  And with every battle, every slowed heartbeat, every clean kill, Raime knew the gap between himself and the man he had once been grew wider. Still, it was a change he couldn’t avoid. He didn’t even know if, given the choice, he would avoid it. There was something deeply compelling in watching himself grow to such heights, mastering foreign powers and becoming stronger in a world that wouldn’t care if he lived or died. Raime was feeling for the first time in his life, a strange excitement build inside himself, After the first frightful days in the Rift, he got his feet under himself, he got help of course, but thanks to his decisions and hard work now he was capable of moving forward. Going back home wasn’t a dream anymore. He could see the road clearly. Even if there would be obstacles in his way— and he was sure there will be, he felt that he had acquired not only the means, but the right mindset to face every challenge.

  It was with these thoughts that Raime felt the forest edge with his perception. It ended not with a gradual thinning of trees but with a sudden rupture. One moment Raime drifted through the oppressive canopy, blades dripping ichor from yet another fallen beast. The next, the trees opened into a raw scar of stone and shadow.

  The mountain rose before him.

  It was no simple peak, no natural spine of the earth. Its flanks towered like a wall carved from black iron, ridged and sheer, each surface etched with faint violet veins that pulsed as if alive. Where roots and moss dared to cling, they withered, as though the stone itself rejected anything born of soil.

  Raime slowed to a halt, hovering at the edge of the forest, the line where green gave way to void-dark stone. The air changed here. Thin, sharp, metallic on his tongue—as if every breath was drawn through a blade. The Rift pressed heavier, denser, as though he had stepped into the focus of its attention.

  He let his gaze climb, higher and higher, until the mountain’s summit vanished into the storm-coloured haze that hung like a shroud. A faint vibration thrummed through his psionic thread, resonant and deep, as if the stone itself whispered against the fibers of his mind.

  This isn’t just a mountain. It’s a locus of power. But I don’t feel the influence of the Rift upon it.

  His weapons hovered close, silent sentinels at his side, but no beast followed him past the treeline. He glanced back once, noting how the creatures lingered in the gloom, eyes bright with hostility, yet none crossed onto the barren stone. Their hunger ended here, as if even they feared to trespass.

  The realization struck him deeper than any fight had: for the first time since entering Ithural, the hostility of the Rift did not surge outward—it recoiled.

  Raime’s lips curled in the faintest of smiles. He stood at the threshold of something greater, something that defied the rules of the Rift.

  This trip is getting more and more interesting.

  The silence was as heavy as iron. It almost felt like he’d stepped from a screaming crowd into a cathedral.

  The change was immediate. The moment he crossed from the forest to the barren stone at the foot of the mountain, the air thickened, resonant with some buried frequency that hummed against his teeth. His psionic thread quivered, unbidden, like a plucked string reacting to a note it recognized but could not yet name.

  It feels alive, he thought, scanning the surface. The ground here wasn’t smooth. From afar it looked like unbroken black, but up close he could see patterns worked into it—faint grooves, interlocking spirals and chevrons that stretched in strange geometries. It looked both natural and artificial at the same time.

  He crouched, brushing the tip of a finger over the stone. The pattern wasn’t cut into it. It was grown, layered into the very mineral, pulsing with faint violet light deep beneath the surface.

  Someone—or something—had shaped this mountain.

  Raime rose again, the weight of that realization prickling along his skin. It wasn’t just an obstacle, not just an alien landmark. The mountain was infused with intelligence, or at least a construct. And whatever that was, it still lingered. He could feel its echo pressing against the edges of his mind.

  The ascent began as a climb over jagged slopes. The air grew colder, sharper, carrying with it a metallic tang that clung to his tongue and throat. He floated rather than scaled, jumping and then levitating over sheer rises, gliding across chasms where violet fissures glowed like veins of fire. Each step upward felt like moving deeper into another presence, a pressure that regarded him without malice or hunger, but with scrutiny—as if measuring him.

  Halfway up the lower slopes, Raime found the first undeniable trace of civilization.

  A wall stood jutting from the stone, half-collapsed but unmistakably crafted. The material looked like fused obsidian, edges sharpened into cruel angles that glinted faintly under the Rift’s dull light. Strange sygils were carved into its surface, their lines warped but still coherent, and though Raime didn’t recognize the script, his Insight flared. Shapes unfolded in his mind, impressions rather than words—command, defence, warning.

  He stepped closer, running his hand over the sygils. His psionic thread vibrated again, more strongly this time, as if the stone remembered.

  “These weren’t just words,” he murmured aloud. “They are some kind of glyph. Magical in some way, or capable of magic, but not of the psionic kind.”

  Raime drew in a breath and kept climbing. The unknown was calling him.

  The further he went, the more signs appeared. Pathways carved into the rock, wide enough for dozens to walk abreast, though they had fractured with time and quake. Pillars rose like broken teeth, their tops lost to collapse, but their bases bore the same sigils, carved deeper and glowing faintly when his psionic energy brushed them. Once, he even found a stairway, half-buried, its steps worn smooth by the passage of countless feet.

  The mountain was not barren. It was a ruin. Another one.

  By the time he crested another ridge, Raime knew for certain. Before him stretched a plateau, broad and flat, and on it lay the remains of a city.

  Structures jutted from the stone in alien shapes, half-collapsed towers of fused crystal and stone, arches that spiraled instead of curving, roads lined with fractured pylons that still hummed faintly with buried power. The city had been vast, sprawling across the slope like a black lattice woven into the mountain’s flesh.

  Now it was silent.

  Raime hovered above the plateau, his weapons circling him instinctively. He scanned every shadow, every broken arch, waiting for the sudden lunge of yet another beast. But none came. The hostility of the forest had stopped at the treeline, and here there was only stillness.

  Only once did sound break it. A low, resonant groan, so deep it shivered his bones. The mountain itself seemed to exhale, the wind pulling through the hollowed streets with a note like a dirge.

  He set down lightly among the ruins.

  Everywhere he looked, there were reminders of a people—or creatures—that had once thrived here. Murals, if they could be called that, etched into black stone with uncanny precision. They depicted humanoid shapes: tall and lean, with digitigrade legs and reversed joints, and a single glimmering eye in the middle of their faces.

  He went on with his study of the murals. Some of the scenes showed them in rituals, Others showed them in war, lines of their kind surging against shadowy figures Raime couldn’t quite discern.

  He traced one mural with his gaze, heart tightening. The creatures etched there were unmistakable.

  They are the same… it’s here that first creature that came out of the Rift portal originated.

  The realization clicked into place like a blade finding its sheath.

  This is their home. This mountain, this city—this was where the first Rift-beast came from. It came from a people, a species, that lived here. Maybe still lives here. But the question is both why? And how? The creature that came to earth was so weak, I have a hard time believing that it managed to cross this part of the forest to reach the portal, there is something I’m missing…

  Raime’s pulse quickened, though not with fear. Excitement, curiosity, a tremor of something dangerously close to awe. He had expected endless wilderness, mindless monsters. But here stood proof of structure, of history.

  He knelt at the mural’s base, fingers brushing the grooves. His psionic Threads vibrated violently, the resonance now a chorus instead of a note. He felt impressions press against his mind—the arrival, hunger, conquest. Not words, not language, but instincts preserved in stone.

  They weren’t just beasts. They were soldiers. Bred or born, it didn’t matter. They fought a war here. But they were not Ithurians—though the similarities were undeniable…

  Raime pulled his hand back, standing slowly. The plateau spread before him, vast and broken, and yet he could almost see it whole again in his mind’s eye: towers alive with light, streets thrumming with tall figures, the mountain itself pulsing as their heart.

  Now it was empty.

  And yet, not dead.

  Somewhere deeper, further up the slopes, he felt it: a pull, faint but insistent. Something still lived here, something that remembered, and it was aware of him. Not like the beasts, driven by hunger, but like a watcher behind a veil, deciding whether to acknowledge him or not.

  Raime set his jaw, levitated higher, and looked toward the inner mountain.

  “Guess I’ll find out if anyone’s home,” he whispered, his voice swallowed by the silence.