The battle ended not with triumph, but with silence.
A heavy, oppressive quiet settled over the chamber, broken only by my ragged breathing. My body felt wrong—misaligned, as though something fundamental had been shifted out of place and crudely forced back in.
I leaned against the cold stone, steadying myself, and only then did I truly look at my hand.
It had changed.
My right hand bore a faint reddish hue, veins glowing dimly beneath the skin like molten threads trapped under flesh. Pure Axiom pulsed within it—not flowing naturally, but lodged, infused as if my body itself had been rewritten to accommodate it.
My hair had turned silver-white, strands drifting slightly even without wind, responding to invisible currents of energy. My eyes were still red, but the world—
The world was clearer.
Distances compressed. Shadows sharpened. I could feel the dungeon breathing, its pulse syncing faintly with my own heartbeat. Every structure, every rune, every fluctuation of Axiom revealed itself as if outlined in light.
Most of the impure Axiom that once circulated in my body—the diluted, survivable kind humans used—had been replaced.
Swapped out.
By pure Axiom.
Something no human was meant to contain.
I should have died the moment it entered me. I knew that. Every scholar, every warning, every corpse left behind by failed dungeon expeditions testified to that truth. Pure Axiom was poison. Radiation. A force that unmade the human form from the inside out.
Yet here I was.
Alive.
Barely.
My limbs trembled when I tried to stand. The power answered sluggishly now, like a tide pulling back after crashing ashore. I understood instinctively: I could wield pure Axiom—but only in fragments, only for moments. My body wasn't built for this. It was adapting, yes, but adaptation came at a cost.
Forcefully ingesting pure Axiom was like breathing poison and hoping your lungs learned to survive it.
I sat down, letting my back slide against the stone, and closed my eyes. In that moment of stillness, history surfaced—not memory, but truth etched into the world itself.
—
Long ago, before bastions and borders, before dungeons and classifications, Axiom existed freely.
It wasn't "mana" then. It wasn't something stored or measured. It was truth. The foundation beneath life, magic, and existence itself. To command Axiom was not to bend reality, but to speak to it with clarity. Magic, life energy, and Axiom were not separate systems—they were one and the same.
Back then, Axiom was everywhere.
Then came the First Lie.
No one knew what it truly was. A declaration? A spell? A definition forced upon reality? Some claimed it was divine intervention, punishment brought down when humanity drowned itself in greed and endless war. Others believed it was a metaphysical mistake—an error in logic introduced when someone tried to redefine the world itself.
But all stories ended the same way.
The Blight.
A grotesque phenomenon that devoured definition itself. Living or non-living, flesh or stone—it does not matter. The Blight did not consume matter. It erased meaning. When the First Lie occurred, nearly a quarter of humanity vanished in an instant. The rest followed slowly, claimed by corruption, madness, and despair as the Blight spread.
The world was reshaped.
Yet the First Lie did more than unleash a plague.
It rewrote reality's rules.
Space fractured. Pocket dimensions emerged—places that appeared familiar from the outside, but transformed completely once entered. Landscapes that rejected natural law. Environments that accumulated Axiom unnaturally.
Dungeons were born.
Within them, Axiom existed in terrifying abundance—dense, concentrated, lethal. Humans learned quickly that absorbing too much of it led only to death or insanity. Scholars classified it: pure Axiom within dungeons, impure Axiom on the surface. The surface Axiom was faint and contaminated, but survivable.
Humanity endured.
They learned to stabilize dungeons near the surface, anchoring them to reality. They harvested Axiom crystals to power cities. Bastion Capitals were built—fortified strongholds standing against the Blight's advance.
It was never a cure.
Only containment.
The Blight continued to grow, held in place by temporary solutions and borrowed time. And as always, humanity's greatest enemy was never the Blight itself—
But its own ambition.
—
I opened my eyes.
The gate before me responded as I pressed my hand against it, runes flickering in recognition—not of authority, but compatibility. The massive doors parted.
The chamber beyond stole the air from my lungs.
The floor was transparent glass, revealing layers of flowing Axiom beneath, like slow-moving oceans of light. Above, crystals of countless colors hovered, refracting impossible spectrums. Runes stretched through the air like luminous threads, converging toward the center of the room.
There floated a massive globe.
It resembled an atom—rings spinning endlessly around a core of blinding brilliance. A powerhouse. A heart.
If I hadn't awakened my body to pure Axiom, I would have died the moment I stepped inside.
I ascended the stairs, each step heavier than the last as my body struggled to adapt. And then I saw it.
Inside the nexus—
Not energy.
A person.
Suspended within the light.
I raised my hand, fingers trembling beneath my tattered cloak. "If I destroy the heart of the dungeon," I whispered, "I can leave. If my theory is right."
Then—
A sound echoed at the back of my head.
Soft. Broken.
Crying.
"What was that?" I spun, palm raised, runes forming instinctively. Nothing. Slowly, I turned back.
The figure inside the nexus shifted.
A voice echoed inside my mind.
Help.
My breath caught. I lowered my hand.
"I see," I murmured. "You're like me."
"A prisoner."
If I killed her, perhaps the dungeon would collapse in a controlled manner. Perhaps I would escape. Or perhaps nothing would happen at all. There was no certainty.
I couldn't do it.
"No," I said quietly. "I'll just find another way."
I focused and analyzed the whole surrounding.
Threads that span from the walls converging into the Nexus...
Every rune-thread in the chamber vibrated with a specific Axiom frequency. My perception sharpened—my iris briefly forming a magic circle as I blinked. I zoomed in, isolating the threads binding the nexus.
Chains.
Each extracted energy in a precise, repeating wavelength. One thread alone was insignificant—but together, they formed a system.
A nervous system.
Cut the nerves, and the body shuts down.
"I intend to do just that."
I constructed the spell carefully, editing each circle.
Cause Circle: Sever energy extractionEffect Circle: Disruption at matched frequencyCost Circle: Sustained pure Axiom outputLimit Circle: Self-collapse after executionDuration Circle: InstantaneousScope Circle: Frequency-locked, multi-target
ᚲᛋ ᛗᚨ ᚱᛖ ᛋᛏ (Crucis Matrix – Resonant Severance)(Cut all conduits sharing a defined Axiom wavelength.)
Each circle aligned.
I tuned the spell to the exact frequency of the threads, ensuring nothing else would be affected.
"Magic thrives in ideas," I whispered, "and I have imagination."
I cast.
Silence.
Then the threads snapped.
Crystals above dimmed one by one. The dungeon's hum faltered. The nexus flickered—and collapsed inward.
Axiom detonated like a heartbeat stopping.
The girl fell.
I caught her before she hit the glass.
Her body was light—too light for someone bound at the heart of a dungeon—and cold, soaked in residual Axiom that prickled against my skin like static.
For a heartbeat I just stared at her crystalline, ocean-blue hair, strands refracting the dying light of the nexus, before instinct took over.
I pulled a cloak from my pack.
It was old. Frayed. Stained dark in places that would never wash clean. I had taken it five floors ago from a dead man's corpse—nothing left of him but bones fused to the stone, his ribs cracked open as if the dungeon itself had pried him apart. I remembered hesitating back then, swallowing bile before forcing myself to take it.
Now, I wrapped it around her anyway.
Better than nothing.
The moment I grabbed her onto my back, the dungeon screamed.
The walls buckled as if reality itself had lost its grip. The glass floor rippled like disturbed water. Water droplets rose upward instead of falling, freezing midair before drifting sideways. Sound fractured—stone collapsing somewhere far behind us reached my ears seconds too late, stretched and warped.
Without authority, the dungeon was eating itself.
"If we don't leave now," I muttered through clenched teeth, "we become fuel."
I ran.
Each step felt heavier than the last as the Axiom density spiked erratically, surging and collapsing in violent pulses. The stairs twisted beneath my feet, angles shifting subtly enough to disorient but not enough to see. Then—
A shadow.
I looked up just in time to see a massive crystal tear free from the ceiling.
I jumped.
Pain exploded through my ankle as I landed wrong, bone grinding against bone. I hit the floor hard, breath ripped from my lungs in a strangled gasp. This is the backlash from abusing the rune spells into my body.
The impact sent us rolling—my grip failed, and she slipped from my back, skidding across the glass.
"No—!"
I clawed forward, dragging my useless leg behind me. My hands shook violently; my body was finally rebelling, pure Axiom burning through nerves already pushed far past their limits. The air felt thick, like breathing through molten glass.
Then—
She moved.
Her eyes snapped open.
They weren't panicked. They weren't confused.
They were aware.
She pressed her palm against the altar floor.
The response was immediate.
Runes ignited beneath us—vast, precise, and impossibly complex. A magic circle unfolded layer by layer, not drawn but constructed, rings blooming outward with mechanical perfection. The innermost circle rotated clockwise, etched with spatial anchor runes. A second ring counter-rotated, glowing gold and violet, stabilizing positional vectors. Above it, a third circle flared cerulean—pure displacement logic, raw and elegant.
Then came the outer arrays.
Six auxiliary rings rose vertically, orbiting the core like halos, each pulsing a different color—crimson, emerald, amber, azure, white, and void-black—each color corresponding to a different Axiom modulation: distance compression, coordinate locking, mass tolerance, momentum cancellation.
My breath hitched.
I knew this spell.
I had seen it once before.
A memory surfaced unbidden—me standing beside my father in Sunspire, craning my neck as a high-class court mage raised his staff. The plaza had gone silent as the circle formed beneath him, radiant and absolute.
My father had leaned down and whispered, "Remember this, Elrin. You can fake many spells. But teleportation? You'll know it when you see it."
He was right.
You could not mistake it.
This was teleportation magic.
Elite-grade. Court-level. Far beyond anything a novice should even comprehend.
The circles accelerated, runes blurring into bands of light as the spell reached critical alignment. The altar hummed—not violently, but decisively, as if reality itself had accepted the command.
Light surged upward.
The world folded.
And then—
We were falling.
From the sky.