The Last Dainv Chapter 296

Between the ether ward farmlands and the adows that lay beyond, marked the boundary between the city and the wilderness mountains. Snow fell gently as Gale and Erin stood at the dirt path while Tyain, Lruikov, and Lira saw them off.

"Dark Hunter." Tyain extended his hand. In his palm was a smoothed stone badge with the symbol of Drovairt etched onto its surface. "Take it as proof of an ally to our city. Should you encounter other Kairians in your travels, this will mark you as friend of our city."

"Thank you, Tyain." Gale extended his hand, dematerializing the badge into his space storage.

Crouching down and making eye contact with Lira, he held his arms open for her. Lira ran to him, burying her face in his embrace, squeezing him tight. Gale did the sa and said, "I'll co back once everything is solved. A promise as the Dark Hunter."

Lira nodded against his shoulder.

Pulling her away from him, Gale noticed her eyes teared up but didn't drip down her cheeks. She was strong, just like Erin said. As a last farewell, he patted her head.

"See you again, Lira."

"You promised you'll co back, right?"

"I did promise. I do not intend to go back on my words," Gale stood back up.

Tyain placed a hand on Lira's shoulder, pulling her back to him. Picking her up, he carried her in his arms. "Have a safe journey, Dark Hunter and his aide, Grand Researcher Grand General Erin."

"Thank you," Gale said. Turning back, he led the way as Erin floated and fake walked as she followed him. He glanced back at them and saw their waving hands. Soon enough, the three disappeared into the distance as both of them reached the base of the mountain.

According to Tyain, once they entered the mountain corridors, they needed to pass three corridors and then head east. That's where the paths to the lower lands began. Everyone who went never ca back. Forever lost in the darkness below.

Climbing up back the small hill, they crested the first hill and then entered a rocky path that led to the entrance of the cave. Within an hour of rough rocky surface hike, they arrived at the opening.

They entered without hesitation, and the familiar darkness greeted them. Erin once again conjured her orb of light to illuminate the way.

Once again, they passed through the abandoned stalls and inner rooms that looked like vendor shops. Circular wooden doors were broken in, cracked, and so smashed by things not humanoid.

After passing the first, second, and third corridors, Gale turned east, and so did Erin.

"Do you really have to fake walk like that?"

"Silence!" Erin said. "Do not challenge my consistency."

"But this isn't a public place..." Gale muttered.

"Civilizations are dood if norms are not followed strictly."

Sighing, Gale continued walking through the path anyways. The path grew narrower, and the walls beca rough bricks rather than cave lining.

Bones littered the ground. From humanoid ones that looked like skulls, femurs, hands, and more, to animal ones that looked like bones of a large bird. Not always a bad thing. They could've starved here to death. But when the terrain also changed, sothing was up.

And from the taste and sll of these bones that Presence Between gave him, these weren't that old, as they still retained their sll and taste. Really old bones gave off more of a mineralistic taste rather than growth and bacteria on them.

Carefully stepping over them, they continued east. The corridor sloped downward until it turned into rough cobblestone stairs. The air grew damper and colder, making the walls slightly shine in satin against Erin's orb of light.

The path bent slightly to the right until they arrived at a stone door with a red gem in the middle of it.

Gale touched the gem, and the stone door gritted open, revealing a room with pillars on both sides. Both of them entered the room, and the door slamd shut behind them, the red gem pulsing once.

Inside the room lay three sets of armour and three swords on the floor. Full plate mail, helt and all, similar to what Lruikov wore. Not rusted, pristine condition that anyone would take if they cared for loot, yet these weren't looted.

At the other side of the room was another stone door with a red gem right in the middle as well. That must've been the exit.

Moving forward with Erin, they went to the other door. But before they could even make it halfway across the room, the sound of tal grinding against stone echoed in the chamber.

Turning their heads back, three full armour pieces arranged themselves into upright positions. The swords floated up to the hands of the armour.

Analyze.

[Hollow Knight]

[Stage: Awakened]

[Description: N/A]

No description? That was the first ti Gale saw that kind of system ssage. However, there was no ti to ponder.

Erebus materialized. He lunged imdiately at the three hollow knights and cut them into pieces. All three clattered to the ground in a split second.

But sothing felt weird. The awakened signature still remained.

"Let's move," Gale said.

Both he and Erin continued moving towards the other door. Tapping the gem, it produced no effect, even though that was the chanism to open the first door.

"What gives?" he muttered. Then, he tried pulling the stone door to open it. A few cracks and popped as he mustered his strength against the door. But the armour he'd sliced up clanged to life once again.

The armour was reassembling. Sliced pieces floated up from where they'd fallen and welded themselves back to their original shapes. It was as if they were never cut or sliced in the first place.

Erebus shifted to a hamr this ti, a bigger one that could flatten one of the hollow knights in one go. Gale charged at the nearest one and brought down his weapon on the living armour.

One smash. Flattened. The other two were flattened shortly after the first.

For a mont, silence. But their signature wasn't squashed.

Then the tal began to move again. The flattened armor uncrumpled and recovered back into its pristine condition. The three hollow knights rose once again.

"This is annoying," Gale said as he crushed them one more ti.

"Look for where the ether holds the armour sets," Erin said. "Puppetry requires a controller."

Stolen story; please report.

Presence Between's tendrils expanded into this enclosed space. He saw the threads of ether connecting the pieces of armour together coming from the top of the ceiling. His gaze followed it, and on the top was an embedded blue gem.

The hollow knights recovered once again. Erebus returned to sword form. A quick lunge at the three recovering knights, he sliced them up finely first, before turning his eyes towards the gem at the top.

One launch, and Erebus' point precisely shattered the gem.

[Awakened Puppeteer Gem Destroyed...]

[Origin Extraction from Environnt.]

[Description: A defense chanism against trespassers.]

The awakened signatures disappeared, and the hollow knights that were already recovering from the slices dropped onto the floor.

Gale moved forward towards the door. The gem had turned green. One tap on it, and the door opened with a grit. Both of them stepped through, entering a dead forest.

Trees all around were cracked and dry. Looking up above was a sky blocked by branches that barely let any light in. Although snow fell through so of the gaps above, it barely made it to the ground.

It was the first ti Gale saw bare soil after entering the rift. Everywhere else was covered in snow, except for this forest.

A dirt path wound through the dead trees, sloping downward into the darkness. Gale took the lead, Presence Between's tendrils spreading outward to map the terrain ahead.

[Corruption Residue Detected.]

Gale stopped walking. Tendrils scanned everywhere until he found it. It was closer than it looked.

It was a small patch by the tree just to the right of them. It had the consistency of smoke and oil at the sa ti. When he touched it, it would cling to his finger, nibbling at his skin as if it wanted to eat him. The wood around the area it was in contact with was slowly disintegrating.

"Erin."

"A harmless residue, too small to matter. It is already fading. The Origin of this world is slowly consuming it."

"How do you clean it though?"

"Unnecessary. It will dissipate on its own within a few star cycles."

Gale nodded and continued down the path, leaving the residue behind. If Erin said it was fine, it should be mostly fine. But sothing in the back of his head still itched at wanting to clean it up.

The forest grew darker as they descended. The trees pressed closer together, and the branches above now ford a thick ceiling above that no longer let any light nor snow in.

Erin's orb of light beca the only source of illumination.

And it was then Gale noticed the oddness of the forest. Complete silence. Even a dead forest should have so noise. But this one had none.

No wind rustling through branches. No bugs skittering through dead roots. Even his footsteps on the dirt seed muted. Sothing was clearly wrong in this forest.

Suddenly, Presence Between caught movent just at its edge. Too fast for Gale to be confident he could catch up to it. And its signature was clearly that of a corrupted. Defiled stage at least.

Tendrils saw its form. Two giant claws at each side the size of Gale's torso. Two small thin legs that sohow held its speed. And its torso was thin, seeming so small compared to its claws on either side.

"Corrupted, moving fast."

"What shall you do, child?"

"Pursue." Gale broke into a sprint. Trees blurred past him as he pushed essence into his legs, accelerating to his top speed. Erin kept pace beside him, floating while moving her legs at a faster rate.

Analyze.

[Defiled Remnant of the Mohrusy, Shadow Scout]

[Stage: Defiled]

[Description: A corrupted entity that has survived beyond the cleansing of its brethren. It uses shadows to track and hide prey in the dark.]

The entity sensed their pursuit. Its form flickered, then accelerated even further. Everyti it flicked, it appeared again in another shadow further away from where it originally was, propelling it further and further away from them.

Gale pushed harder. Although the forest terrain was his forte, he couldn't get a clear line of sight. If he could, he'd be able to zip right onto it and kill it in one go using One Step. But the forest was too dense. It blocked any form of L.O.S. while the entity didn't seem to be bothered by the density.

Turning towards the direction it was heading, Gale and Erin managed to slightly catch up. But again, it noticed their pursuit and turned in a way that would not let them et at an intersection.

"It's getting away," Gale growled. Burning more essence into his leg, he managed to slightly catch up.

But again, the entity moved faster, increasing its pace. Until finally, it disappeared from Presence Between's detection.

Gale skidded to a halt. "It escaped."

"What did you see, child?"

"Sothing that looked like a shadow. Two big claws and thin body and legs."

"A shadow scout," Erin said. "It is expected it escaped. It uses the gap between shadows to run. Only light can slow it down."

"What was that thing?"

"A remnant entity of the war," Erin said.

"That thing was Defiled stage. How did sothing that big escape?"

"The shadow properties explain it. The cleansing Dainv army must've done a sloppy job."

"So there could be more of them down here?"

"Possible," Erin said, then looked towards where the remnant disappeared. "The mission has been added. Cleanse the remaining corruption. Its continued existence is likely connected to the unresolved rift opening."

[New Mission: Cleanse The Remnants]

[Reward: 1250 points]

[Reward per Remnant kill: 85]

Gale sighed. He didn't expect this leisure rift to turn into a mission. But at least he's now getting sothing out of closing the rift.

Moving forward to where the remnant passed by, he thought of sothing. Before the remnant was detected, it was moving at a fast pace, but it was definitely looking at the ground.

Presence Between expanded outwards to look at the tracks of where the remnant passed by, and then he saw the answer to his question.

At specific intervals, the remnant looked like it stopped just for a split second before it moved again. It wasn't moving in a straight line. Instead, it was following a specific pattern.

"It's tracking sothing," Gale said.

"What is your observation?"

"It keeps stopping. Looking around. Then moving to a new spot and doing the sa thing."

"Can you identify what it seeks?"

Gale pushed Presence Between to its limits. The tendrils spread across the adow, feeling for anything that might attract a corrupted entity's attention.

However, there was nothing obvious that it was tracing. Not that he could see anyway. Though there was sothing faint that was almost imperceptible that it was following. It had the sa signature as nature itself; the breath that the winds blow.

"There's sothing else out there that it was tracking, very faint," Gale said. "I can barely feel it."

"Describe it."

"Small. Warm. It feels... alive, but not like a creature. More like..." He struggled to find the right words. "Like nature itself was moving through the woods."

"An Origin Spirit."

"A what?"

"When a world heals from corruption, a fragnt of the Origin Spirit sotis manifests fragnts of itself to accelerate the recovery by eliminating the remainders of the corruption," Erin said. "They are incredibly rare to see without the eyes of a Cev Dainv or true sight. To a corrupted entity, consuming a single fragnt of the Origin Spirit would provide enough material to give them evolution to the Blighted stage by the end of a star."

"You're saying the remnant is hunting it?"

"Yes," Erin said. "Should the remnant attain a fragnt, the weakening of Kair would accelerate further. This is likely the foreign entities preventing the rift from resolving."

"But if the remnants haven't gotten to the spirit yet, then why is Kair still weakening?"

"If the fragnt rests outside its leyline for a prolonged period of ti, it will feed off of its own Origin Core to continue its manifestation."

"We need to stop it." Gale expanded Presence Between again, following the remnant's path across the adow. It had moved past the small hills now, heading toward sothing in the distance.

Tendrils saw the massive cliffs from the distance. Built into those cliffs, carved from the rock itself, was a castle.

Not a castle like Tyain's modest fortress. This one looked older, more ancient. Its walls crumbled in unmaintained places, but the structure still stood strong. Ballistae were mounted on the walls. A single large iron gate was right in the middle of the walls.

"The remnant looks like it headed toward a castle in the distance," Gale said.

"We pursue," Erin said.

Moving forward through the forest, they reached the edge. They crossed the adow littered with massive boulders, following footpaths that rounded each one.

Beyond that boulder strewn adow were small hills that they crested up and down. When they finally reached the cliffs, the castle lood beyond. Inside its walls were smaller buildings made of the sa stone material. Outside its gates were Kairians blocked off from access due to the iron gate being closed.

Slowly climbing down the cliff path, they entered the flat plains and continued following the path that led to the iron gate.

Passing by the onlookers with the sa white hair and pale skin features, Gale noticed so of them had more hazy blue eyes that looked more like a health issue rather than the norm. Their skin was also patched with a red rash, cheeks more hollowed than those of Drovairt.

Arriving at the door, a guard shouted from above the wall on top of the massive iron gate.

"Do not trespass, otherworlders. Leave now, or die!"

Gale held up his hands. Presence Between scouted the whole castle. 20 entities at the top, 12 Awakened, 8 Attuned, and 4 Resonants inside the inner walls, only one being a Late Resonant. "We're not here to cause trouble. We're looking for a monster that ran away. Have you seen one?"

"No monsters ca here. Leave!"

Materializing the badge that Tyain gave him, he held it out for the guards to see from above. "We're allies of Drovairt. We require access to inside the walls!"

"Drovairt ans nothing here!" A guard with an Attuned signature shouted from above. "This is the domain of Kulbran. All other otherworlders and refugees are not welco! Now leave!"

Gale looked at Erin. "What do we do?"

"We observe in the veil of night," Erin said. "For now, let us retreat."

Gale nodded, then turned back from the iron gates. The other Kairians waiting by the gate looked at them as they went back to where they ca from. By nightfall, they'd get what they wanted.