Chapter 80: Primordial Water
The old Opera House squatted in the warehouse district like a rotting tooth, three stories of crumbling grandeur that everyone had forgotten. Lea stood in its shadow, studying the boarded windows and condemned notices.
Three levels below ground... the memories had said... Where Renar's first acoustic experiments were conducted.
She couldn't scout ahead through the mirror world. Right now, she was alone.
Lea used Shadow Sneak instead, becoming darkness itself as she flowed through the gaps in the boarded door.
Inside smelled of rot and old velvet. The main theater stretched before her, seats torn and moldering, the stage collapsed into the orchestra pit. But she wasn't interested in the visible ruins.
Her enhanced cognition mapped the building's layout from the memories she'd consumed during interrogations. Service corridors behind the stage. Stairs leading down to storage levels. And below that, the experimental chamber where early acoustic researchers had tested sound dampening before the fatal collapse.
Lea descended through darkness, her golden eyes adjusting automatically. The stairs groaned under phantom weight, but she was barely physical now, more shadow than substance.
The second sublevel held abandoned dressing rooms and prop storage. The third...
She felt it before she saw it... a wrongness in the air, a pressure that made her scales itch. Mystical energy is being shaped and directed.
The chamber opened before her like a throat. Massive, circular walls lined with strange geometric panels that seemed to absorb light and sound equally. And in the center, three figures worked methodically.
The Conductors.
Lea pressed herself into the darkest corner, behind a support pillar wrapped in sound-dampening material.
The first Conductor was a woman in her forties, with gray-streaked hair pulled back severely. She painted symbols on the floor with something that glowed faintly red. Lea recognized it was blood mixed with seastone dust.
The second was younger, male, moving between pillars set in that specific geometric pattern.
Twenty-three pillars...Lea counted... And chained to each one...
Her stomach turned. The victims. Some are conscious, most are drugged into a stupor. Men, women, even two teenagers. All positioned according to whatever acoustics the ritual required.
The third Conductor stood at the chamber's center, conducting an invisible orchestra. His hands moved in precise patterns, and Lea felt the air resonate with each gesture. Sound shaped but not yet released, pressure building like water behind a dam.
"Tomorrow midnight...", the woman said without looking up from her painting, "We'll have the final vessels by then."
"The resonance is perfect...", the male Conductor said, running his hand along a pillar, "I can feel the Path opening already. Just needs the final push."
The central Conductor, clearly the leader, nodded, "Three ascending as one. The Scream will carry us through, and the Fourth Step will be ours."
His voice had an edge to it. Desperation masked as confidence.
Lea read their surface thoughts carefully through Silence, keeping her own presence completely suppressed. All three were Third Step, as she'd learned from the interrogations. All three had failed individual ascension ritual attempts before. This joint ritual was their last chance. If they couldn't reach Fourth Step together, they'd become Horrors.
Pathetic. And monstrous.
They worked for another two hours while Lea watched from the shadows. Setting up the final ritual components, testing acoustic patterns, adjusting the positions of their victims like instruments in an orchestra of suffering.
Finally, they finished. The woman looked around the chamber with satisfaction.
"Tomorrow night...", she said, "The crescendo begins."
They left through a tunnel Lea hadn't noticed before, probably leading to the old sewers. She stayed perfectly still for ten minutes after they vanished, ensuring they were truly gone. Then she moved to the nearest pillar. The victim, a middle-aged man, chained there didn't stir as Lea examined the bindings. Mystical restraints made with pure seastone, not just physical chains. She'd need to disable the entire ritual framework to free them safely.
Lea's mind raced faster than thought, calculating possibilities.
She could free them now, but the Conductors would know immediately and relocate. She could destroy the ritual setup, but that might trigger whatever acoustic resonances they'd already established. She could report this to IS7, but by the time they mobilized...
No. She'd handle this herself. Tomorrow night, when the Conductors returned to begin their ritual, she'd be waiting.
And this time, there would be no crescendo.
Only silence.
=0=0=
As Lea attempts to sneak out, turning into a puddle of darkness to move stealthily.
But as soon as she slipped through, two drones were shining light on her. And the master of the drones was Dawn, crossing her arms while tapping her foot.
"Tell me, where are you going?", the princess asked.
"Uh... stopping an ascension ritual?", she confessed easily.
"Why didn't you tell me? My citizen is under threat, I should be the first person to know about this.", Dawn sounded angry, but then she thought about it more, "Strange... I can't sense anything wrong."
She used Mimicry to mimic both Order and Legacy from her father, trying to scan the entire city. With Cognito enhancing her processing power, she could find each individual Pathstrider in Renar...
"Quick, tell me where I should be looking?", she asked Lea.
"The Opera House, I was about to go and stop three Scream Pathstriders there."
Lea briefly explained the situation, about the trio called the Conductors, what they were planning from the look of it.
Dawn's expression darkened. "Then we're going in. Now."
"Dawn, wait—"
But the Fifth Step demigod was already moving, her drones lighting the way as she strode toward the main entrance. Lea had no choice but to follow. The two of them got onto the main street, where it was empty. Nobody bothers the princess, as they cannot afford to offend a very angry-looking demigod of Progress.
Not that they know, and most of them were busy.
It didn't take long for them to get to the Opera House using a steam motorcycle conjured by the princess.
Dawn didn't bother with stealth. She raised one hand, and an astral cannon materialized that hummed with divine resonance. Erudition and Creation intertwine, creating weapons from thought itself.
She blasted the Opera House's front entrance apart.
The explosion echoed through the building as Dawn marched inside, Lea scrambling to keep up. They descended rapidly, following the path Lea had mapped earlier.
The Conductors looked up in shock as Dawn burst into the underground chamber, astral weapons manifesting around her like a halo of destruction. Cannons, rifles, even what looked like a goddamn ballista.
"Release my citizens.", Dawn said coldly, with cannons behind her kept on manifesting, "Now."
The lead Conductor's face twisted with desperation. They were so close. So close to Fourth Step after years of failure.
He began chanting, but not Scream's Honorific Title.
"Primordial Storm of Beginning!!
Shattering Roar of Creation!!
The Scream of Reality!!!"
Lea's blood ran cold. That wasn't Scream. That was a Path of Divinity Honorific Title!!
The air itself began to vibrate. Reality shuddered.
But something went wrong.
Water poured from nowhere, flooding the chamber from invisible cracks in existence itself. Not normal water... This was primal, carrying the weight of oceans and the fury of storms...
The Paths of Divinity connected practitioners directly to the Cosmic Laws underlying reality, granting powers far beyond what normal Pathstriders could achieve at the same Step. It was a way to touch the fundamental forces of the universe.
But what happened when that Cosmic Law already had a master?
What happened when a true god ruled over it already appeared?
The lead Conductor screamed, but it wasn't the Scream of his Path. It was agony as his body began to twist, bones breaking and reforming, flesh rippling with wrongness. The other two Conductors convulsed beside him, their desperate attempt to piggyback on his invocation dragging them down with him.
They were becoming Horrors, transforming into monsters of madness and terror.
"The Law of Chaos already has a master...", a voice boomed through the flooding chamber, neither male nor female, speaking with the authority of tsunamis and hurricanes, "The All Blue does not share... The Flood wouldn't either..."
The three Conductors collapsed into writhing masses of flesh and water and sound, their human forms lost to transformation. Horrors, born from the hubris of trying to claim a Law already owned by divinity.
Dawn's astral weapons blazed to life, firing in perfect synchronization at the emerging monstrosities.
"Lea!", she shouted over the roar of water and gunfire, "Free the victims! I'll handle these things!!"
Lea was already moving, her Cursed Constructs lashing out to shatter the seastone restraints binding the prisoners. Twenty-three victims to free while Dawn fought three newborn Horrors, and water continued flooding the chamber.
The Avenger and the Architect, working together against the consequences of desperate ambition.
And somewhere beyond this realm, the God of Water watched with ancient, uncaring eyes.