Chapter 23 – The Quarry Goes Boom
The air above the basin split open again, but this time the crack did not vomit bodies like before. It widened slowly, as if something on the other side was pushing its fingers through reality and deciding whether the opening was large enough. The first Lesser Swarmlings dropped in a scattered rain, twenty black shapes hitting stone, dust, old road, broken ramp, and the edge of the Throat. Their shells cracked against the ground, but they rose immediately, mandibles clicking, legs scratching, red points opening across their faces. Then the last thing fell.
It landed in the middle of the basin with a heavy sound that made loose stones jump.
The Alpha was not enormous. It was only a little bigger than the others, maybe the size of a large dog, with a heavier body and longer front limbs. Its shell was still black, but thicker, layered like overlapping plates. Its legs were longer and sharper, the hooked tips scraping lines into the stone as it unfolded itself. Unlike the others, its eyes were not red. Six bright blue points opened across its narrow face, cold and clear, and all six locked onto Eiden at once.
Eiden’s breath caught.
“Blue eyes,” Roan said from behind him, still half on the ground. “That’s new.”
The Alpha lowered its body.
For one second, it did not move.
Then it vanished.
One moment the Alpha was in the basin, the next it was already on the lower road, rushing toward them with a speed that made every other Swarmling look clumsy. Its legs struck stone in rapid bursts, but the sound came late, like his ears were behind the fight.
“Move!” Roan shouted.
Eiden threw himself sideways without thinking. The Alpha reached him at the same instant, its hooked front limb cutting through the air where his neck had been.
Eiden felt the wind of it pass.
The Alpha landed behind him, claws digging into stone, and spun around with terrifying smoothness.
Eiden froze for half a second.
If he had been even a little slower, his head would have been gone.
His hand went to his throat before he could stop himself. His pulse hammered under his fingers. He was already injured. One more real hit, just one, and that would be it.
A panel flickered in front of him.
HP: 10/20
Current Mana: 2/80
“Yeah, thanks,” Eiden muttered. “I know.”
The remaining twenty Swarmlings surged forward while the Alpha circled. Neris forced himself up near the Throat, both hands shaking. Frost gathered at his fingers, weak and pale.
“I don’t have enough for Ice Wall!” Neris shouted.
“Then throw anything!” Eiden shouted back.
Neris formed an Ice Shard, small and thin compared to what he had used earlier, and hurled it at the nearest Swarmling. It struck the creature’s shoulder and cracked part of the shell, but did not kill it. The Swarmling staggered, then kept coming.
Eiden lifted his own hand. A Fire Bolt formed in his palm. It felt strange after everything else. Small. Basic. Almost pathetic. A spell he had learned in the forest against squirrels, now pointed at the things that had destroyed a world.
He threw it.
The Fire Bolt hit a Swarmling in the face and burst with a sharp flash. The creature flipped over, legs twitching. It was enough to kill one. One. There were nineteen more, and the Alpha was still watching him like it already knew the fight was over.
Roan stood up beside him, breathing hard. “I still have mana.”
“Good,” Eiden said. “Use it.”
Roan drew a silver line through the air. A Space Cut snapped forward and sliced through two Swarmlings at knee height. Their legs came apart, and they collapsed into the path of the ones behind them, causing a pile of black limbs and clicking mouths.
The Alpha attacked again.
This time it came from the right, skimming along the quarry wall so fast its legs were almost a blur. Eiden saw the blue eyes first, then the body, then the front limb already rising.
He ducked again, but not enough.
The hook scraped the shoulder of his robe and tore through fabric, missing skin by a finger’s width. The force of the passing body spun him around and sent him stumbling. His foot hit a loose stone. He nearly fell. If he fell, he would die. He knew it so clearly that fear shot through his body like ice.
A normal Swarmling leaped at him from the front.
Eiden shoved a Fire Bolt into its open mouth and fired.
The creature burst backward with smoke pouring from its head.
“Fuck off!” Eiden shouted, his voice sharper than he intended.
Roan blinked across the lower road, grabbed Neris by the back of his coat, and pulled him away just before three Swarmlings reached him. Space folded, and both of them reappeared near the broken platform. Neris looked like he was going to throw up.
“Warn me before you do that!” Neris gasped.
“I did warn you,” Roan said. “In my heart.”
The Alpha skittered up the wall.
It ran vertically for several steps along the stone, then launched itself off the wall straight toward Roan and Neris.
He blinked backward with Neris again. The Alpha passed through the space they had been and slammed into the platform edge hard enough to crack stone. It did not look hurt. It just turned its blue eyes toward Roan.
“That thing is learning who can move people,” Roan said.
“Then stop looking useful!” Eiden shouted.
“I can’t. It’s natural.”
Eiden threw another Fire Bolt at the Alpha. The spell hit its side and burst. The Alpha barely flinched. A black scorch mark appeared on its shell, but the plates held.
Eiden stared. “Of course.”
The lesser Swarmlings kept coming. Without mines, without mana, without walls, the fight had turned into running, dodging, and killing one creature at a time. Neris fired Ice Shards whenever something got close, but each one looked weaker than the last. Roan cut legs, blinked short distances, dragged Neris out of danger, and once shoved Eiden behind a stone just before the Alpha passed through the space in front of him like a thrown spear.
They were not winning anymore.
They were delaying.
Eiden felt it in his lungs, his arms, his legs. He felt it in the cut across his ribs that burned every time he breathed. He felt it when another Swarmling came too close and he had to spend precious focus forming a Fire Bolt while his hand shook so badly the spell almost slipped sideways.
The Alpha did not rush constantly. That was worse. It waited between attacks, circling, watching. When they focused on the lesser ones, it charged. When Roan prepared a cut, it changed direction. When Neris tried to aim, it went for him. When Eiden’s attention shifted for even a second, those blue eyes snapped back to him.
It knew.
Maybe not like a person knew. But enough.
Roan blinked beside Eiden, grabbed his sleeve, and dragged him behind a broken slab as the Alpha tore across the road where he had been standing.
Eiden hit the ground hard and bit back a scream when his ribs flared.
[HP: 5/20]
Roan crouched beside him. “We need to leave.”
“No.”
“Eiden.”
“No.”
“We can’t hold this,” Roan said, and for once there was no joke in his voice. “You’re out of mana. Neris is out of mana. I can keep moving us, but I can’t kill all of them alone—and believe me, my mana has a limit too.”
Eiden looked over the slab. The Alpha was circling again. Ten lesser Swarmlings still moved in the basin and roads, maybe more behind the smoke. Neris was backing away from two of them, throwing tiny Ice Shards that barely slowed them.
Roan was right.
The quarry was full of fire residue. He could feel it now through the Ember Core. Every mine that had exploded. Every Big Fire Bolt. Every burning patch, every scorched stone. It was everywhere, scattered in the air like invisible embers. For the last ten minutes, the entire quarry had been turned into a battlefield of Fire-aspected mana.
He had been absorbing tiny pieces of it without thinking.
Not enough.
Not fast enough.
But what if he stopped being careful?
Eiden pressed one hand to his chest. The Ember Core stirred behind his ribs, warm and small.
“Explain something,” Eiden whispered.
Roan stared at him. “Now?”
Eiden ignored him. “Ember Core. If I pull everything in at once, can I convert it?”
A panel appeared.
[Warning: Large-scale absorption of unstable Fire-aspected mana may overload Ember Core I.]
“That sounds like yes,” Eiden said.
Roan grabbed his arm. “What sounds like yes?”
Eiden looked at him. “Get ready to run.”
“That is never a good sentence from you.”
Eiden stood.
The Alpha’s blue eyes turned toward him instantly.
Eiden smiled.
Not because he felt brave. He was terrified. His body still wanted to run. His ribs hurt, his mana was empty, and every part of him knew he was one mistake away from becoming another corpse in the quarry. But beneath the fear, something else opened its eyes.
Fire.
He reached for every ember in the air and they reached back.
Heat rushed toward him from every direction. Scraps of fire left behind by ten minutes of explosions and fire spells. It came from the blackened ground, from the cracked stones, from smoking corpses, from the scorched walls of the Throat, from the basin where the Fire Mines had torn the earth open. It poured into him in thin streams, then thicker ones, then all at once.
The Ember Core flared.
Eiden’s back arched.
His mana bar shot upward.
Current Mana: 2/80 → 19/80 → 41/80 → 68/80 → 80/80
It did not stop.
The panel flickered.
Mana Overflow Detected.
Eiden’s eyes ignited red-orange. The veins under his skin began to glow like cracks filled with molten metal. Thin red lines spread along his arms, up his neck, across his cheeks. His two-colored hair lifted slightly as heat rolled off his body, the red parts glowing brighter while the black underlayer turned darker by contrast.
The Alpha stopped.
For the first time, it hesitated.
Eiden laughed.
It came out too loud. Something wild.
“Oh,” he said, raising one hand. A Fire Bolt gathered instantly—not a small ball, but a dense, bright sphere, more like a Big Fire Bolt. “Now this is better.”
“Eiden?” Neris called, voice trembling. “What is happening to him?”
Roan did not answer immediately.
Eiden threw the Fire Bolt.
It was not a normal Fire Bolt anymore. The spell crossed the basin in a red-white streak and hit a cluster of Swarmlings. The explosion was huge, far larger than it should have been, swallowing six meters of ground and blasting black shells apart like dry leaves. The shockwave rolled over the quarry.
Eiden looked at his hand.
Then he looked at the remaining creatures.
“You followed me into another world?” he said, his voice low and shaking with heat. “You crawled after me like hungry little bugs, and now you think you can take this one too?”
Another Fire Bolt formed.
Then another in his other hand.
He threw both.
Two explosions ripped across the basin, one after another. Lesser Swarmlings vanished inside fire. The few that survived were thrown tumbling, legs broken, shells cracked, mandibles snapping uselessly.
Eiden stepped forward.
“You picked the wrong fucking mage.”
The Alpha screamed.
It was the first sound it had made besides clicking, a sharp metallic shriek that echoed through the quarry. Then it charged.
Eiden brought both hands together.
Big Fire Bolt formed instantly. The sphere was larger than before, brighter, the center nearly white. Eiden threw it at the Alpha’s path.
The Alpha changed direction at the last second, too fast, impossibly fast, but the explosion was wider than it expected. Fire caught one side of its body and hurled it into the stone wall. Its shell cracked for the first time. Blue light flickered in its eyes.
Eiden laughed again.
“Run,” he said. “Come on. Run faster.”
He lifted one hand and fired another Big Fire Bolt before the smoke had cleared. The blast struck the wall where the Alpha jumped away, but the radius still caught it, slamming it down into the road. Eiden followed with Fire Bolt after Fire Bolt, each one exploding like a smaller mine, tearing craters into stone.
Neris stood frozen, staring. “He’s… what happened to him?”
Roan’s face had gone pale. His eyes were not on the fireballs. They were on the red glow under Eiden’s skin.
“He’s,” Roan said quietly. “absorbing.”
“What?” Neris asked.
Roan swallowed. “He’s absorbing fire mana from the air.”
Eiden could hear them, but their voices sounded far away, behind a wall of heat.
Everything felt clear. Too clear.
He could feel every flame in the quarry. Every hot stone. Every fresh blast. Every bit of Fire-aspected mana floating in the air. He could pull it, convert it, use it, throw it back harder. Why had he been careful before? Why had he been afraid of running out? Fire was everywhere. Power was everywhere.
He just had to take it.
The Alpha lunged from the smoke, blue eyes burning. It came low this time, zigzagging, too fast for a normal spell. Eiden did not aim at it.
He aimed at the ground.
A Fire Mine formed under his palm without him touching the stone.
It appeared ahead of the Alpha in a flash of orange.
The Alpha stepped on it.
The explosion launched the creature upward. Its body spun, two legs torn away, black fluid spraying into the air. Before it landed, Eiden formed a Big Fire Bolt and fired it directly into the creature’s exposed underside.
The blast filled the lower basin.
When the fire cleared, the Alpha crashed into the ground, shell cracked open, blue eyes flickering unevenly.
It still moved.
Eiden’s smile widened.
“You’re still alive?” he said. “Good.”
He walked toward it.
The remaining lesser Swarmlings tried to rush him. He did not even look at them. Fire Bolts formed around his hands and shot outward one after another. Each blast killed one or more.
“You destroyed my world,” Eiden said, not sure if he was speaking to the Alpha, the dead creatures, the thing beyond the crack, or the memory inside himself. “You ate everything. You climbed over people like they were nothing. You thought I’d just keep running?”
The red lines under his skin brightened.
“I’m going to burn every last one of you.”
A hot pressure built behind his eyes.
“I’m going to dig you out of every hole, every sky, every world you crawl into.”
His hands shook, but not from fear anymore.
“I’m going to erase your whole disgusting fucking race.”
He raised both hands.
A giant fireball formed above him, much bigger than a Big Fire Bolt, unstable and roaring. The air around it bent. Roan shouted something. Neris shouted too. Eiden barely heard them.
He threw it at the Alpha.
The explosion swallowed the center of the quarry. Stone cracked. The broken platform trembled. The Alpha disappeared inside white-orange fire.
For a moment, everything was light.
Then the light faded.
The Alpha’s body lay broken in the crater, legs curled inward, blue eyes dark.
A panel appeared.
[Lesser Swarmling Alpha defeated.]
Then his body broke.
It started in his chest. A sharp pain, deep and wrong, like someone had put a burning iron inside his ribs and twisted it. Eiden gasped and bent forward. The Ember Core was not warm anymore. It was a furnace with no door. Fire mana still poured into him, rushing through channels too small to carry it.
“Stop,” he whispered.
It did not stop.
Flame burst from his mouth when he coughed.
Pain spread through him, fast and simple. His veins burned. His arms felt like they were full of boiling water. His stomach clenched so hard he almost fell. Fire pushed under his skin, looking for places to escape. It came from his palms first, then from the cuts across his ribs, then from his mouth and nose in short, violent bursts.
Eiden screamed.
The sound tore out of him with flames.
Neris took a step forward. “Eiden!”
Roan grabbed his shoulder and yanked him back. “Don’t!”
“What’s happening to him?” Neris shouted.
Roan’s eyes were wide, but his voice came out forced and steady. “He pulled too much mana. His body can’t hold that much. He’s converting fire mana faster than his mana channels can survive.”
Eiden dropped to one knee. The stone under him began to glow red.
Every breath hurt. Not like a wound. Worse. Like his lungs were trying to burn from the inside. His heart hammered, and each beat pushed fire through his body instead of blood. He could feel his organs. That was the worst part. He could feel them as heat wrapped around them, squeezed them, cooked them.
He tried to shut the Ember Core.
He had no control over it.
“Make it stop!” Neris shouted.
“I can’t! What do you want me to do? I don’t know any seal spells!” Roan said.
“What happens if he can’t hold it?”
Roan looked at Eiden.
“If mana keeps trying to enter a body that can’t contain it…”
Neris shook his head. “No.”
Roan swallowed. “It has to go somewhere.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means he’s going to burst.”
“What does that mean? What’s going to happen to him?”
“How do you not get it? He’ll explode—kaboom!”
Eiden heard that.
Somehow, through the pain, through the fire, through the roar in his ears, he heard it.
He lifted his head.
Roan and Neris were too close.
His body was done.
The Ember Core pulled one last time, and the remaining Fire-aspected mana in the quarry rushed into him like a storm finding a hole in the wall.
Eiden stood.
He did not know how.
His skin was cracking with red light. Flames leaked from his eyes, his mouth, the wounds on his side. His hair whipped around his face, red-black and bright in the heat. He looked at Roan.
Roan understood.
“Get him out!” Eiden tried to say.
What came out was a burning breath and two broken words.
“G… .ut.”
Roan moved instantly.
He grabbed Neris around the chest with one arm and raised the other hand. Silver lines formed, shaking, bending in the heat.
Neris fought him. “No! We can’t leave him!”
“WE ARE LEAVING!” Roan shouted.
Space folded.
The last thing Eiden saw before they vanished was Neris reaching toward him, eyes wide with horror.
Then they were gone.
Eiden was alone in the quarry.
For half a second, everything was silent.
He looked up at the sky, at the crack that had brought the Wave, now trembling and shrinking as if afraid of what was about to happen.
Eiden smiled through burned lips.
The Ember Core failed.
Eiden exploded.
The blast hit with a massive roar that swallowed the entire quarry. White-orange fire surged outward from where Eiden stood, flooding the basin wall to wall and rising into a pillar that tore through the shrinking crack in the sky.
For several seconds, night became day.
The remaining Swarmlings vanished.
The crack vanished.
The quarry disappeared inside fire.
Then the light collapsed.
A long silence followed.
Far from the blast, on a dusty road beyond the quarry ridge, space opened and spat Roan and Neris onto the ground. They rolled across the dirt, Roan landing on his back, Neris coughing beside him.
Neris scrambled up first. “Eiden!”
He ran toward the ridge.
Roan caught his sleeve. “Wait.”
Neris tried to pull free. “Let go!”
“If you go now, you’ll die from the heat!”
“I said let go!”
Roan’s grip tightened. His face was pale, dirty, and shaking, but he did not let go. “Give it a second.”
Neris stared at him like he hated him.
Then the heat wave reached them.
It rushed over the ridge, hot enough to force both of them back. Neris raised an arm over his face. Roan turned sideways, teeth clenched. Dust and ash blew past them in a thick cloud.
When the wind finally weakened, they climbed the ridge together.
The quarry was black.
Everything was burned. The basin was a wide ring of scorched stone. Small fires still crawled in cracks, but there were no moving shapes.
The Wave was gone.
Neris moved first.
He stumbled down the slope, sliding on loose ash, coughing as smoke entered his lungs. Roan followed slower, eyes scanning the ground.
They found Eiden near the center of the blast.
At first, Neris did not recognize him.
A blackened body lay on the stone, curled slightly on one side, smoke rising from the skin. His clothes were almost completely gone. His skin looked like charcoal, cracked in places where dull red heat still glowed underneath. He looked burned beyond anything a person should survive.
But his hair was still there.
Red and black.
Singed, wild, and impossible.
Neris dropped to his knees beside him. His hands hovered, shaking, not knowing where to touch.
“No,” Neris whispered. “No, no, no…”
Roan crouched on the other side, his expression unreadable.
“Is he alive?” Neris asked.
Roan did not answer quickly.
Eiden’s chest moved.
Once.
Barely.
Then again.
Roan let out a breath that almost broke into a laugh.
“Yeah,” he said, voice hoarse. “Somehow.”
Neris covered his mouth with both hands. His shoulders shook.
Roan looked across the ruined quarry. The battlefield they had spent days preparing was gone, burned into one enormous scar.
He looked back at Eiden.
"Why did you push yourself that far?" Roan asked softly.
Eiden did not answer.
He just lay there, blackened and smoking, with red-black hair spread over the ash-covered stone.
Above them, the sky was clear again.