novelraw Chapter 115: The Veil (3)
Chapter 115: The Veil (3)
[Level Four — 2:31 PM]
The point was behind the Veil.
Alex looked at it.
The Veil looked at him.
Neither moved for two seconds.
Then Alex looked at Maya.
Maya looked back at him.
No words were exchanged.
None were needed.
---
Maya made a gesture to Akari.
Just one.
Akari extended all nine tails.
All nine tails extended in a position that showed she was ready to attack.
Level Four wasn’t the best terrain for Nine-Tails Inferno — enclosed space, limited oxygen, a structure that could give way. Maya knew that.
That’s why she didn’t release it fully.
She held it back.
[Nine-Tails Inferno — CONTAINED — 40% output]
Infernal heat without visible flames.
The air on the north flank compressing, becoming dense — the kind of heat that doesn’t burn directly but makes being in that space unsustainable.
The Heralds on the north flank retreated.
The Veil felt the change in temperature.
He turned slightly — one degree, his bearer’s instinct evaluating a new threat.
Enough.
Raven from the south flank, Army of Bones redirecting.
The seventeen stable skeletons converging not in an attack on the Veil but in pressure.
Closing off the southern space until the Veil had heat to the north and mass to the south.
The Veil recalculated.
Kira from the ground — raising her bow with her right arm because her left arm was responding poorly to the seal’s pain — the arrow nocked, her amber eyes with [Predator’s Sense] at maximum, looking at the exact point she had identified.
Not at the Veil.
At the point.
The arrow flew.
It crossed Level Four.
It landed exactly where Kira had indicated — the symbol’s convergence point — embedded in the stone, vibrating.
The symbol pulsed.
The Veil felt it.
And for the first time in the entire fight, the Veil reacted.
Not with calculation.
With urgency.
---
The Veil’s plane exploded.
Not like a physical explosion — it was more like a visceral response.
The space between life and death opening within an eight-meter radius.
The air of Level Four distorting like heat over a desert.
Shadows moving in directions that corresponded to no light source.
Everyone in the chamber could feel it — their souls, as if their souls had acquired an abyssal weight that kept them rooted where they stood.
As if they were carrying an entire building.
[The Veil — Fragment 4 Partial Release — ACTIVE]
His violet eyes glowing until they became the only light source in their immediate radius.
His height didn’t change.
His mass didn’t change.
But the weight of his presence changed completely.
[Effective Level: 75]
[All stats: +40%]
The remaining Heralds stepped back by instinct at the power of their own bearer overflowing.
"If that point is disrupted," said the Veil.
His voice carried the echo of the active plane — not artificial distortion, but the real resonance of someone speaking from a place slightly displaced from normal reality.
"The ritual fails. The Heralds fail." A pause.
"Everything they built for me fails."
He didn’t say it with emotion.
He said it with a calm acceptance of the situation — he had calculated that scenario many times and knew exactly what it meant.
"I can’t allow it."
Alex heard him.
And understood something he hadn’t understood before.
*Not the ritual. Not the Fragment. Everything they built for me.*
The Veil wasn’t protecting the ritual because he believed in it.
He wasn’t protecting the ritual because of the Fragment.
He was protecting it because it was the only thing he had.
The Heralds gave him a purpose when he was nine years old, and that purpose was the only thing that existed between him and complete emptiness.
The Fragment was the tool.
The Heralds were the ones who had built him that way.
Alex looked at him.
The boy with violet eyes who didn’t remember having a name.
And felt something he didn’t expect to feel in the middle of a fight he was losing.
Rage.
Not toward the Veil.
---
Grim arrived first.
[Death’s Harvest — Enhanced] directly into the Veil’s plane to cut the connection between the plane and the symbol that the Partial Release had intensified.
The Veil blocked it with the plane itself.
The plane and the Harvest clashed.
Violet energy and crimson energy destroying each other at the point of contact.
[Grim HP: 3,360 → 2,800/3,360]
The plane was denser with Partial Release active.
It caused damage even on the block.
The Veil counterattacked Grim — [Direct Plane], the attack that ignored the physical body and struck at the essence of being.
[Grim HP: 2,800 → 2,200/3,360]
Grim staggered but didn’t fall.
**"Strong."**
"I know," said Alex, arriving at the flank.
[Shadow Step] — he appeared on the Veil’s right side.
[Blood Weapon — sword + Necrotic Burst combined]
The Veil’s plane absorbed part of the impact.
[Alex HP: 520 → 440/1,110]
The plane’s return damage.
[Veil HP: X → X-900]
---
The exchange that followed was different from the previous ones.
With Partial Release, the Veil was faster.
More precise — if that was even possible.
The plane responding to his intentions before he executed them, creating simultaneous defense and attack in every movement.
[Alex HP: 440 → 350/1,110]
[Blood Weapon — dagger] into the plane to interrupt the next attack.
[Alex HP: 350 → 280/1,110]
[Grim HP: 2,200 → 1,600/3,360] — the plane damaging Grim with each contact.
[Shadow Step] — desperate repositioning.
[Alex HP: 280 → 180/1,110] — the Veil’s plane reaching him even mid-jump.
One hundred eighty HP.
Alex landed on the ground.
He didn’t fall — but his knees gave way for a second before he forced himself up.
Level Four around him.
Kira on the ground with her hands on her side.
Still holding her bow.
The arrow embedded in the point she had identified.
Emily at the rear with her hands glowing, purification active, shaking.
She had used too much MP keeping the team alive.
Her hands trembled with the effort of continuing to channel.
Raven standing. Bleeding from a cut on her arm that no one had healed because there was no time.
Her skeletons — eleven now, six more lost to the Veil’s expanded plane — still functioning because Raven was still standing and refused not to be.
Maya with a cut on her left shoulder that no one had seen happen.
Akari still with all nine tails, the heat on the north flank sustained, coordinating what remained of the perimeter.
The entire team giving everything they had left.
And the Veil between Alex and the symbol’s point.
Fragment 1 spoke.
Not a whisper.
A direct offer.
*Let me. We’ve reached the center. End this.*
One hundred eighty HP. MP nearly empty. The Veil with Partial Release active blocking the only route.
The logic was perfect.
The Fragment was right.
Alex looked at Kira.
At Emily.
At Raven.
At Maya.
He thought about what he had told Maya the night before at the inn.
*I try to be brave and strong for you. Because even though I am, you motivate me to give more.*
He thought about Kira saying *I want to be part of whatever this is.*
He thought about Emily saying *come back.*
He thought about Raven buying a knife in Khar’Seth and carrying it for weeks, waiting for the right moment.
If he let the Fragment reach the center, the ritual would fail.
And the victory would belong to the Fragment.
Not his.
Not theirs.
"No."
---
[Partial Awakening — 10% Output — ACTIVATED]
For speed.
Only speed.
The minimum possible from the Fragment — enough for his reflexes to exceed what his body with one hundred eighty HP could do on its own.
The Veil detected it.
The plane responded, expanding to cut off all angles of direct approach to the symbol’s point.
North: Maya’s heat.
South: Raven’s skeletons.
East: Grim.
West: the Veil’s dense plane.
Direct: impossible.
Alex looked at the floor.
Level Four had stone.
Stone without runes — different from Level Three.
Flat surface.
Level Three.
The slide under the Golem’s guard.
Raven’s knife at the joint point.
The same logic.
The Veil covered vertical and lateral angles.
Not the floor.
Alex ran.
Not toward the Veil.
Toward the floor in front of the Veil.
At two meters, he launched his entire body to the ground — a slide — the same movement from Level Three but with Partial Awakening’s speed.
Under the Veil’s guard.
Below the plane that the Veil maintained at combat height because no one attacks from the floor at this depth.
The plane grazed his back.
[Alex HP: 180 → 140/1,110]
But he got through.
The symbol’s point one meter away.
Kira’s arrow embedded there, vibrating.
He grabbed it.
---
The Veil turned.
Too late.
"Now."
---
As if the space itself recognized that something had reached its natural limit, and what followed was different from what had come before.
The crimson light didn’t explode from Grim.
It imploded first — all the power of the nine hundred eighty harvested souls collapsing toward a central point in Grim’s chest where Fragment 1 lived.
One second of complete darkness within a ten-meter radius.
Then...
[SYSTEM — THRESHOLD REACHED: 1,000 souls]
[GRIM — EVOLUTION — AWAKENING FORM 2/7 — INITIATING]