Chapter 45: An Unlikely Alliance
Time was running out.
Elina stared down the dark hallway toward the central nave, trying to calculate how many minutes they had before the thing started hunting down the side corridors.
"I don't trust Lucien as far as I can throw him..." she muttered, wiping sweat from her forehead with the back of her sleeve. "But right now, he's the only one with a card left to play."
It wasn't just her. The air in the corridor felt thick enough to choke on, fear mixing with bone-deep exhaustion. Every few seconds, another low roar rumbled through the foundation, vibrating the stone beneath their boots. They knew the assignment, keep breathing and buy time, but the reality of it hit like lead.
Could they actually survive this?
Even standing fifty yards back, Nuri’s skin prickled from the sheer pressure radiating off the entity. Looking at Elina and Alina, he still couldn't fathom how the two of them had dragged each other out of that room alive.
Then again, as long as Lucien was still poking around, they had a shield. The Heretic was after something specific, and until he got his hands on it, he wasn't going to let the entire structure collapse on them. They were safe, for the moment.
Still, a knot kept tightening in Nuri's stomach.
The creature.
Lucien called it a divine avatar, but something about that label felt off. The mana radiating down the hall wasn't holy or ancient, it felt chaotic, dense, and oddly similar to the strange, unanchored magic Lucien himself threw around.
Was it really a god?
The more Nuri mapped it out in his head, the less sense the cult's plan made. You couldn't just drag a god into a physical shell with two soul stones and a broken array. The math was impossible. To anchor a true divine frame, you’d need the soul pool of an entire capital city, and even then, the spell would likely collapse under its own weight.
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So why had Rowen and Dally tried it here? What was their handler actually trying to spawn?
"Nuri? You okay?" Elina’s voice broke his train of thought. She was studying his face, her brows pulled tight. "You're pale as ash. Get it together, kid. We need a plan to keep that thing busy."
Nuri leaned back against the damp wall, his knees trembling slightly as the adrenaline crash hit him. "Distract it with what? No offense to us... but if we go back in there right now, we're just throwing ourselves into a meat grinder."
Silence fell over the alcove. Nobody argued.
Because he was right. Standing toe-to-toe with that shifting mass was suicide. They’d just end up tripping over each other before getting swiped through a stone wall.
"How sweet. A little war council."
Every head snapped to the left.
Lucien was leaning against a ruined archway, looking entirely too relaxed for a burning church. His long blond hair was slightly windblown, but otherwise, he didn't have a single scratch on him.
"You're back," Elina said, her hand dropping to her hilt.
Tucked into Lucien's handle, Mo gave a silent, metaphoric roll of its eyes. Trusting this psychopath when you don't even know his real name... absolute fools.
Before anyone could ask where he'd been, two figures shuffled out of the gloom behind him.
Rowen and Dally.
The two cultists stayed pressed against the far stone wall, shrinking into the shadows like the light itself was going to burn them.
The second Elina recognized Dally's face, her eyes flared. She took one furious step forward, drawing half an inch of steel, and Dally instantly dove behind Lucien's back like a terrified child.
Lucien didn't even turn around. He simply flicked two fingers.
Elina froze mid-stride, an invisible weight slamming over her boots and locking her joints in place. She glared at Lucien with enough heat to melt iron.
"I know they're not your favorite people," Lucien said smoothly, twirling a strand of hair around his thumb. "But unfortunately, we need their expertise if we want to send our little friend back where it came from. Do try to keep your knuckles down for five minutes."
He gave Rowen a sharp tap on the shoulder with his umbrella tip.
Rowen stumbled forward a step, clearing his throat awkwardly. He tried to puff his chest out to save face, but every time the entity roared in the distance, his knees gave a visible twitch. Dying in a dark hallway wasn't on his agenda today.
"So?" Alina stepped up, her green spear resting over her shoulder as she gave Rowen a cold, hard look. "What's the play?"
Rowen didn't waste time trying to act clever. "There's only one way to shut the seam down," he said, his voice raspy. "And it's not clean."
He looked around at their tired, blood-stained faces, swallowing hard.
"You really want to hear it?"
Nobody answered. They just stared at him, waiting.