novelraw Chapter 405: Nightmare
Chapter 405: Nightmare
As the last of the black sludge vanished into the ring, the room was revealed in its raw, skeletal state—ancient, gray stone that had been hidden for eons. The oppressive, light-eating atmosphere was gone. The air felt thin, empty.
Anne finally retracted her threads, though her hand remained near her hip. She stepped closer, looking at the pristine gray floor where the Nightmare Claw’s legacy had just been erased.
"You’ve changed," she said, her voice a mix of fascination and genuine fear. "In all my years, I have never seen a jump in power that felt so... absolute. You didn’t just grow stronger, Ethan. You became something else entirely."
Ethan stood up, clenching his fist. And the air itself seemed to shatter. A dull, rhythmic crack-crack-crack echoed through the cavern—not from the walls, but from the very space surrounding his knuckles. The vibrations were so intense that the loose pebbles on the floor disintegrated into fine powder.
[Host, we must evacuate immediately,] Crul’s voice hissed with an urgent, electronic rasp. [The structural integrity of this sub-level was tied to the bio-matter you just absorbed. The stone is becoming brittle. It will collapse within minutes.]
"Anne, we’re leaving. Now!" Ethan shouted.
He lunged toward the narrow tunnel they had used to descend. As he grabbed a jagged outcrop of granite to pull himself up, the rock turned to gray sand beneath his touch. He frowned, shifting his weight, but every handhold crumbled as if he were climbing a mountain made of dried ash.
"The hell..." Ethan muttered, forced to use his internal energy to levitate slightly and find deeper, more solid anchors.
Anne followed close behind, her eyes narrowed as she watched the granite disintegrate under Ethan’s grip. Curious, she reached out and slammed her palm against a section of the same rock. It didn’t budge. She channeled her Crimson Threads, trying to crush a protruding stone, but it remained as hard as diamond.
It’s not the rock that’s weak, she realized, a cold shiver running down her spine. It’s him. His passive output is so dense that the molecular bonds of the mountain are failing just by being near him.
"How much stronger did you get, Ethan?" she whispered to herself, scrambling up after him as the tunnel behind them began to cave in.
They burst out of the breach and back into the ruined upper hall. The scene was chaos. Dust choked the air, and the Royal soldiers were in a full combat-ready crouch, their rifles aimed at every shadow. The tremors from below had terrified them; many believed the Queen had finally woken.
"CEASE FIRE!" Jason’s voice roared, cutting through the panic.
He rushed toward the breach as Ethan and Anne emerged, but as he got within five meters, he stopped dead. His combat instincts—honed by decades of mercenary work and mechanical engineering—screamed at him to run. The man standing before him looked like Ethan, but the aura... it was like staring into the eye of a hurricane. It was the presence of a monster draped in human skin.
"Boss?" Jason stammered, his hand twitching near his sidearm. "You... you look different. What happened down there?"
"A change of pace, Jason. Nothing to worry about," Ethan said, his voice smooth but carrying a resonance that made the soldiers’ chests ache. "Report. What did we find in the other chambers?"
Jason took a shaky breath, forcing his legs to stay still. "Empty, sir. Total destruction. We opened six of the eight gates. Every single one was a graveyard of twisted metal and slag. Per Crul’s instructions, the logistics teams have crated every scrap of ancient alloy and loaded them onto the transports. We can bring them back for your inspection if—"
"No," Ethan interrupted. "Take it all back to the base. We’ll analyze the materials in the lab. What’s left?"
"Just two," Jason said, pointing toward the far end of the hall where two massive, untouched Cold Steel gates stood silent. "The Armory and the Warehouse. We couldn’t bypass the seals. They’re drawing power directly from the primary matrix. We were waiting for you, Boss. The heavy lasers aren’t enough—they need a massive surge of external energy to trick the sensors."
Ethan nodded, his new obsidian ring pulsing with a faint, dark light. "Then let’s not keep them waiting. Move the teams back. I’ll open them myself."
Anne watched him walk toward the Armory door, her gaze fixed on his back. She didn’t know what Ethan had become, but she knew one thing for certain: the balance of power in the Union had just been permanently shattered.
Reaching the colossal slab of Cold Steel, he didn’t need a grand display of effort. He simply extended his right hand, the obsidian ring pulsing with a dark, hungry light.
"Crul, now," he whispered.
A surge of pure energy, flowed from Ethan’s body into the door’s ancient circuits. The roar was deafening; internal mechanisms, frozen for eons, snapped open with a violence that sent sparks of mana flying across the frame. The door didn’t slide—it retracted with a heavy thud.
"Enter! Secure the perimeter!" Jason bellowed.
The Commander charged in first, followed by his men with rifles raised, their tactical lamps sweeping the air. Ethan and the Matriarch followed closely behind.
"Crul, full illumination," Ethan commanded.
The luminous stones and crystal orbs in the ceiling flickered and roared to life, bathing the hall in a cold, white glare. The sight that met them froze the soldiers in their tracks, breath hitching in their throats. This wasn’t just an armory; it was an ossuary.
Bones. Hundreds of human and humanoid remains carpeted the floor, forming a macabre path toward the weapon racks.
The scene told a story of absolute terror: the skeletons were piled near the shelves, hands still outstretched toward spears, swords, daggers, and axes they never managed to wield. Many seemed to have died in the final second, reaching for a defense that fate denied them.
"Look at this..." a soldier muttered, pointing to a corpse whose spine was snapped cleanly in two, as if a giant mace had struck from behind.
As they inspected the remains, the horror became even clearer. Skulls with perfect, fist-sized holes, ribs shattered inward, and pulverized femurs. These were wounds of devastating impact.
"It wasn’t an explosion," the Matriarch said, kneeling beside a skeleton missing its entire ribcage and left arm.
"This was a strange beast. The wounds are from something that used claw-like appendages to tear them apart. It must have been incredibly powerful to pierce metal and bone as if they were paper. The blows go right through the bodies and bury themselves in the ground. Even the polished edges of the metal were easily pierced."
Ethan walked among the dead, noting how some skeletons were missing entire sections—chunks of bone that looked as if they had been torn away and devoured in a single bite. The desperation of those ancient warriors was palpable; they had sprinted toward the weapons to defend themselves against the black shadow that entered their sanctuary, but the monster had been too fast, too strong.
"They tried to fight," Ethan said, his voice echoing in the deathly silence. "But you can’t fight a natural disaster with scraps of metal."
Jason approached a spear that a fallen warrior had failed to grab. The tip shimmered with a bluish reflection despite the dust of millennia.
"Boss, these weapons... even covered in dust, the Cold Steel of the blades is intact. If we get these out of here, we can equip the elite with something no modern armor can stop."
Ethan nodded, but his eyes remained fixed on the claw marks scarring the armory walls.
"Gather everything. Weapons, fragments, even the bones that still hum with residual energy. Leave nothing behind. Now, only the Warehouse remains. If the Armory was a slaughterhouse, I wonder what they chose to guard so zealously in the final room."