(IC) Chapter 326 - Below the Marshes

Ayu walked forward through the shallow marshes toward a crevice easy to miss.

Not the prettiest place to be walking barefoot, but it could be worse.

Her ears filtered every sound, her nose pulled in the scents, each one clear in her mind—what it was, where it came from, guided only by the feel of it.

She stopped at the cave mouth and glanced back, her gaze piercing the lush vegetation and locking several miles away.

Lukas and Chiara were there. Their eyesight wasn’t nearly as sharp as hers, so they relied on their waves instead.

“So this is the spot?” Ayu transmitted.

“It should be,” Lukas replied. “We expect no Xok’al this far southeast, but there may be other challenges. Be careful, and any issue—”

“Yeah, yeah, pull back, I know,” Ayu cut in. She’d be careful, sure—but whatever lay inside wasn’t something she expected to threaten her. After reaching the Third Body State and finally pushing Primal Flow beyond 7%, with her Awakening on top of that, she reckoned only three existences in the entire stage could challenge her. Well… those three and the Six Tails, probably.

So no, she wasn’t exactly thrilled about this ruin exploration. Honestly, this whole Azcoyatl territory obsessed with the Pillar path felt foreign—useless—to her. Back in the capital, she’d had to sit through hours of Chiara’s promotion ceremony, which felt longer than a damn wedding. And that ruin? Nothing. Absolutely nothing that could help her—just more weird visuals Chiara claimed were another key to some puzzle Ayu wasn’t even sure needed solving. Wasn’t the objective just to kill all the Xok’al? Stop the Seven Tails? Why all the complications?

Still, Lukas and the others needed her, so she tagged along. Though, truth be told, she’d much rather be farming Warden orbs with Alonso. Sigh.

Alas, what would they do without her?

Sometimes being too strong was a burden. She chuckled, amused at the thought.

With a smile, her bare feet leapt onto the crevice as she slipped into the dark. Her eyes clung to faint reflections off the stone, keeping sight longer than they should.

But deeper in, even that faded. She mapped the cavern by sound alone, each drip and echo painting shapes in her mind.

The Xok’al scent never reached her, as expected.

Minutes dragged on. She exhaled sharply, irritation bubbling at the never-ending cavern system.

“Ayu, is everything okay?”

Chiara’s signal brushed against her thoughts.

Ayu pulsed back a short confirmation. A full pattern from here would only garble across the distance with all the interference.

It had been easier with Alonso—he could handle all that EM wave business well enough. As for her, she felt she was falling far behind, not even having reached the First Pillar State. Still, she knew she was on the right path, the one that suited her best. She didn’t need to be good at everything. She wasn’t fighting alone after all. She would be the muscle; Lukas and Chiara could be the mind.

She kept pushing deeper into the underground passage—until—

Her head tilted back back an instant before a vine lashed through the air faster than sound, grazing millimetres from her face. She hadn’t even needed her Awakening to evade it.

But something was wrong. The weight behind the motion… it wasn’t a vine at all.

The cavern groaned, and the walls came alive. Dozens of tendrils slithered out, twisting with fluid speed, their cores glinting faintly with metal.

They struck at once, converging to pierce and bind.

Ayu’s body moved before thought. Knees bent, weight shifted, and her frame uncoiled like a whip. Her elbow shattered the first vine, metal shrieking as it bent like softened clay. Her knee crushed another, sparks flashing off the strike.

She caught a third mid-air, fingers closing on it like a vice, then ripped it clean from the wall, her muscles flexing with effortless brutality. The air cracked as she spun, using the broken length as a weapon, lashing through the cluster around her.

In less than a heartbeat, the cavern floor was strewn with twisted fragments. What had been a mass of automaton-like metallic tentacles now lay in ruin, crumpled like straw beneath her strikes.

Ayu exhaled, shoulders rolling as if nothing had happened.

“Is that the warm-u—”

Then she felt it.

Her head snapped aside as a projectile ripped through the space she’d just left, slamming into the rock wall and bursting stone and dirt into the air.

Ayu’s eyes narrowed.

The bullet’s speed was decent, sure, but—

She vanished.

The cavern air stilled. Before the large construct could fire again, Ayu was already behind it, her form gliding without stirring even a breath of air. Her left foot anchored into the ground—cracks split the stone, the boom echoing like thunder.

Her right leg shot forward. The kick crashed into the thick metal shell, caving it several inches deep before hurling the machine across the cavern.

BOOM!

The far rock face exploded as the robot slammed into it, stone shattering, dust and sparks scattering in a storm of debris. When the haze thinned, its frame was visible, crumpled in on itself.

Ayu studied it for a heartbeat, sharp eyes confirming no twitch of movement.

“Ayu?”

Another pulse touched her mind from outside. Chiara.

They probably heard the noise—but really? Come on, it was her.

She sent a short confirmation back, shaking her head before continuing deeper.

The tentacles and that robot? Decent defenses… for the Ayu of a month ago. Hell, maybe even Wang could’ve handled it.

She smirked at the thought as she walked on until the cavern narrowed into a great metallic gate.

Her toes tapped against the ground, the dull thud sending ripples of sound through the rock. The echoes came back in waves. She used the reverberation to confirm it: no other path—just this gate.

Should she kick it open? But if she broke something inside… yeah, maybe not.

She leaned closer, studying the details etched into the metal. Thin carvings lined the surface. Once certain no danger lingered, she turned back—faster this time. Fury and Primal Flow surged together, her form flickering through the tunnels, vanishing and reappearing until she burst out in less than a second.

A final press, and she was suddenly behind Lukas. He flinched before shaking his head. Not the first time she’d done that.

“So, how was it? You found it?”

“Yep. Big metal door.” Ayu shared the visuals, details of the carvings included.

Chiara grew thoughtful, the silence stretching until light sparked in her eyes. “I see… alright. I can open it.”

Lukas gave her a long look, then nodded.

“Let’s go, then.” He signalled Camila and Mei on the floating platform, Maurice and Ishaam’s squad on standby, and Imani and Wang to command the guard.

A minute later, Lukas and Chiara followed Ayu back to the gate.

Lukas narrowed his eyes, fingers brushing the carvings: a temple, with a sun and moon above. “Think this is a reference to Eclipse?”

Chiara’s lips curved, a small chuckle slipping out.

“What?” Lukas muttered, slightly blushing.

“That’s Tona-Metz,” Chiara said, her smile subtle. “The Azcoyatl’s sun-and-moon deity. Just because we recently read about Eclipse doesn’t mean it’s going to show up on a random Xayen carving, Lukas.”

He tilted his head, lips quirking. “You’re assuming random. I’m assuming deliberate. Sun plus moon? That’s the first syllable of Eclipse.”

Chiara chuckled softly, eyes glinting. “Only if you force the equation. Mythology isn’t algebra.”

“Everything’s algebra if you squint hard enough,” Lukas countered.

Her gaze lingered on him, almost teasing. “Careful, or you’ll convince yourself Tona-Metz was a mathematician.”

“And if he was?” Lukas grinned. “Wouldn’t that make an eclipse… proof?”

Her three minds flickered through the absurdity before settling on a laugh, quiet and cryptic. “Proof or paradox.”

Ayu blinked at the two of them, utterly lost. How was that even funny? These two… yeah, they were meant for each other, no doubt about it.

“Okay, you two should probably take a well-deserved honeymoon in the next Waiting Room. But for now, let’s wrap this up.” She stepped forward with a smile, glancing at Chiara. Genuinely, she was happy for them, but… come on. She wanted to fight some Wardens already. Alonso was waiting, and they had a deadline.

Lukas nodded, and Chiara shifted her focus to the gate. She pulsed waves at a precise frequency, weaving them into a complex pattern.

The door shuddered once before sliding upward, revealing the vast chamber beyond.

For a moment, only darkness. Then Chiara extended another pulse, threads of EM latching onto conductive filaments buried in the walls.

Light flared, spilling across stone and metal, the chamber awakening after centuries of silence.

And then—

Ayu’s eyes widened, a rare silence stealing her tongue as she took a step forward. “This…”

Lukas and Chiara froze beside her, their gazes lifting in unison. Capsules lined one corner, obsidian metal glinting faintly in the dark, but none of that mattered. The chamber was dominated, almost consumed, by the colossal form at its heart.

They had seen it before—etched in the capsule’s visions, within the sealed chamber of the Xayen ruin in the Azcoyatl capital.

Lukas’s chest tightened. His heart thundered as he laid a hand against the smooth surface. Waves rippled outward, and as they came back to him, his lips curled into a slow, irrepressible smile.

Alonso’s body stood deep within the Northern Mountains. For some reason, he felt better in solitude, in the heart of mountains like those he used to hike back on Earth, rather than in the luxurious chambers the Ajnal offered him. Especially now that he had become a sort of messiah… yeah, distance from the fanatics felt necessary.

While his body remained motionless in the cold, his mind raced with thoughts and calculations.

“So you mean the microcapacitor configuration is already optimized?”

“Yes—and by that I mean there’s absolutely no way to make it better at your current state,” Houston replied. “When the overload happened, the energy relocated itself into balance—an equilibrium point where consumption is minimal and output is maximal. Put simply: it’s beautifully perfect.”

“So advancement with the technique depends on my actual control over it, then?”

“I guess so. Same as No-Strike, in that way. However, there’s one critical point. One we’d already discussed—but now it’s adamant.”

“You mean I have to transcend both Pillar and Body states at once to maintain equilibrium?” Alonso said, already piecing it together. The internal capacitors relied on the body to hold, and the mind nodes to feed, with resonance between them to stabilize. If one grew beyond the other, the whole configuration would collapse—not only rendering the skill useless, but likely harming him as well.

Alonso leaned back against the cold stone, his fur coat—stitched back together in places—rustling faintly in the breeze.

Achieving the next states…

He knew they were a source of massive growth, each advancement offering roughly a 50% increase in performance. Compared to his meagre progress in SP, it was an entirely different league. Yet… it would take time. With his current SP, he was confident he could reach one of them within a week if he fully focused on it, but both—and simultaneously—would demand far longer, or more SP to accelerate the process.

Meaning it wasn’t something he could rely on right now. Better to keep honing the Path of Shards and—

“The Sun’s Chosen, huh? Nice one. Anyway, now that you’ve got some free time after scaring the Xok’al, mind joining us for the last ruin in the Wilds? We’ve narrowed the location to less than a two-mile area. Since it required all the other five to pinpoint, we’re guessing it may prove a bit of a challenge. I’m sending you the coordinates next. See you there.”

He read the pulse, transmitted from more than a thousand miles away with surprising clarity. Likely Chiara—and some powerful amplifiers—handling the relay, yet obviously written by Lukas.

But more than that… it meant they had finished their exploration of the two Azcoyatl ruins. That was fast.

And they’d heard about him too. News travelled quickly. He also wondered if the Xok’al were attacking the Azcoyatl now—but they hadn’t said.

In any case…

He rose, snow slipping from his coat to the stone below, and glanced at the sun sinking toward the horizon.

Sunset already… just like this stage.

Memories flickered from the very beginning—dinosaurs, the herds, those very first steps into the trial. And now… it had come full circle, back to where it all began.

For a moment he stood still, the breeze brushing past. Then his form blurred—sparks crackling, a magnetic trail in his wake—as he shot across the mountains, flying toward the southern wilderness.