novelraw Chapter 183: Celestial Shadow
Chapter 183: Celestial Shadow
Inside the orb, Guilliman took stock.
They weren’t alone.
Five other people occupied the space with them. He ran his eyes across them quickly, reading what he could from posture and positioning before anyone had said a word.
Two of the five stood close to the old man in the wheelchair. Not beside him the way bodyguards stood. Closer than that. The kind of proximity that came from familiarity, from time spent together. They were young, both of them, and carried themselves with the particular confidence of people who had never had a reason to doubt their own standing.
The other three stood together in a separate cluster. Different energy. Quieter. The posture of people running internal calculations about what they had agreed to and whether the math still held up now that they were actually moving.
Guilliman looked at the old man.
Wheelchair. Still. Eyes pointed ahead.
"Athen used to be braver."
One of the girls near the old man let the words out with a distinct curl of contempt, scanning the group with the kind of look that didn’t bother hiding what it thought. "I genuinely wonder what happened to the last generation."
She wasn’t wrong on the surface of it. A request had gone out. Rewards attached. Not small ones either. A personal level-up mission. An echo at Wayfarer rank minimum. Athen had made an offering and the response had been this. A handful of people in an orb, barely enough to fill a corner of a room.
Where was the hunger? Where was the drive to become something more than what you currently were? The people sitting behind their assignments, waiting for safe opportunities to land in their laps, those weren’t slayers. They were tenants.
"Haha." The old man’s laugh came out easy and genuine, carrying no edge. "Kid, not everyone runs as hot as you."
He let that sit for a moment.
"We are entering a fight between two Great Abominations." He paused. "And King Shi is involved."
Another pause. Deliberate.
"You’d have to be genuinely insane to walk into that willingly."
He said it without judgment. Just fact. He wasn’t stupid about what this was. A suicide run for most. The five who had shown up were almost certainly here because each of them had a personal exit strategy ready, a way to peel off the moment things deteriorated past a recoverable point. That was the real reason they came. Not bravery. Preparation.
"It’s just two abominations." The girl who had spoken before came back in quickly, her companion nodding beside her almost in the same breath. "Your holiness could handle them easily."
They said it like a shared opinion, voices almost layered on top of each other.
They meant it completely.
Guilliman watched the old man’s reaction.
The man laughed again. The same easy laugh. Not dismissive. Just the laugh of someone who had heard their name attached to impossible things enough times that the association no longer surprised him.
The orb continued moving.
The light outside shifted as they pushed deeper, the texture of the valley changing around them as they crossed from zone to zone without stopping. The air inside the orb stayed still and separate from whatever was happening outside.
They crossed into the tenth step.
The orb slowed. Stopped. Hanging in open air, suspended.
The old man wheeled himself forward, positioning his chair in the center of the group. His eyes moved across each face in the orb with the practiced sweep of someone who had sized up groups of people for a very long time.
"For those of you who don’t know me." He let his hands rest easy on the arms of the chair. "I will introduce myself."
"I am called Celestial Shadow."
A beat.
"Third ranked in all of Athen."
The words hit the interior of the orb and stayed there.
Guilliman felt it move through his chest before his mind finished processing the title. Something involuntary. The weight of a name that meant something landing in the body before the brain could rationalize it down.
River Bandit had gone still.
He had suspected. Something about the wheelchair had tugged at a memory, a detail from something he had heard or read long before he was anywhere close to this rank. He had suspected and then talked himself out of it because the reality of it was too large to sit comfortably next to.
But there it was.
Celestial Shadow.
One of the founders of Athen. Old in a way that the word old didn’t quite cover. He had been building and fighting and surviving since before most of the people in this orb had been born. His history with the King Shi family was recorded, if you knew where to look. He had gone to war with their old leader personally. Stood against him. Held his ground.
Not S-rank.
Beyond it.
Legendary was the only word that applied, and even that felt like it was reaching for something it couldn’t quite grab.
The three who had been quietly running calculations had stopped running them. There was nothing to calculate anymore.
"In honesty," Celestial Shadow continued, "this mission is not about battle."
His voice stayed even. No performance. No theater.
"We are here to steal a cub from the Red Mane Lions. That is the objective. We came as thieves, so there is no glory waiting, no sacrifices required, no standing fight." He looked around the group. "In and out. That is the entire plan."
The war between the factions was backdrop. Cover. The chaos of two Great Abominations tearing the valley apart was an opportunity to move through the noise and take something valuable while every powerful eye in the area was pointed somewhere else.
"Some of King Shi’s people will also be present in the area." His gaze moved from face to face, steady and deliberate. "Do not engage them unless you have no other option. A slayer who is alive is worth everything. A slayer who has no life is worth nothing."
His eyes landed on Guilliman.
Held there.
A second passed.
He frowned slightly. Not harsh. More like a man noticing something unexpected in a familiar equation and filing it away.
Then he nodded once.
"Stay close," he said. "No detours."
The orb opened.
And the floor dropped out from under all of them as they plummeted into the valley below.