Chapter 322 - Fragments

Images burst into his mind.

Vast black monoliths piercing the clouds, surfaces alive with flowing lines of light.

Floating bridges that swayed like ribbons in the air, magnetized paths where thousands in shimmering garments glided soundlessly.

Great towers pulsed with resonance, nodes beating like colossal hearts, their rhythm echoing across the city.

Figures stood on platforms of light, manipulating sparks with bare hands, weaving lightning into blades and armor.

A chamber of glass and metal. Rows of reptilian-like bodies—motionless, suspended in liquid fields, their veins glowing faintly.

A figure cloaked in threads of shadow, hands moving as if sewing something unseen. Fibres of light and bone tangled in their grip.

The sky cracked red. Blood covered the obsidian walls. Towers folded in on themselves, collapsing into dust.

Crowds screaming, pulled apart by invisible tides. Children running as their feet lifted from the ground, drawn upward into vortexes of sparks.

A battlefield of broken spires. Armies of men and Xok’al clashing. The ground itself split, rivers of fire devouring streets.

The cloaked figure again—arms raised. Behind them, a mass of tails coiling in the dark. One, then two, then more, writhing like serpents.

Blood spilled across marble floors, carving patterns as if feeding the stone.

Temples burning. Statues torn from their pedestals. A thousand voices chanting, cut off mid-cry.

Silence.

Ash falling like snow over an empty city.

Then—out of the ruins, new hands.

Men and women gathering around shattered altars, forging armour from broken shards.

Bodies scarred, yet sparks running through them. Patterns etched into skin, carved into bone.

From scattered remnants, order was born.

The survivors split in three. One—half beast, half man—claimed the vast plains. The other two raised banners of their own: one to the East, one to the West.

Each crowned a leader, not by lineage, but by will.

The first Emperors.

Oaths were sworn. The memory of Xayen erased with fire and silence. History buried beneath stone, the past declared forbidden.

The signal ended there.

Alonso’s breath escaped in a sharp exhale.

He gazed at the others, who seemed to also be going through the information in the capsules.

Chiara was the first to finish. Their eyes met. Neither spoke.

They waited.

“Well… that was informative. I’d call it a history lesson, if half of it didn’t look like something straight out of a fever dream,” Lukas exhaled, lips quirking faintly.

“Not a fever dream. More likely a signal compression. Memories reduced into visual fragments. The distortion suggests decay over time, but the coherence remains sufficient,” Chiara kept staring at the capsules.

“Whatever the origin, one fact is clear: the Xok’al were indeed the cause of the Xayen collapse,” Lukas said lightly, though his eyes stayed sharp. “And it wasn’t a small collapse. What we saw suggested mutual destruction. The survivors who crawled out weren’t the strongest. They carried only scraps. The West clung to both Body and Pillar—the Ajnal. The East bound themselves to the mind—the Azcoyatl. And the beastmen took the plains. The legacy of the Xayen fractured.”

Wang tilted his head. “So the Xayen Empire stretched across the whole world, East to West? A single ruler?”

“Likely,” Lukas answered. “And maybe more. From earlier data, we know there’s a high chance of a ruin far north where the Xok’al dwell, and another deep in the southern wilds. If that’s true, then this wasn’t just a kingdom—it was a world-system. And when it fell, everything else fell with it.”

Ayu huffed, hands on her hips. “Alright, fine, history’s messy. But what I don’t get is, if those monsters wiped them out, why didn’t they finish the job? And if they lost, how are they back now?”

Alonso leaned forward slightly, eyes narrowing. “Perhaps something, or someone, tipped the scales.”

Chiara spoke again. “The cloaked figure in the images. The frames repeated him more than once next to the Xok’al. That suggests correlation, if not causation. Strongly implied link to the Xok’al genesis. Possibly a Xayen geneticist, a bioengineer, perhaps both.”

“A shadow in every shot. Always near the tails. Whatever he was, he wasn’t just decoration. He was tied to their rise, and that makes him a key element in the storyline of this stage,” Lukas said, rubbing his chin.

“So what—you’re saying some crazy old lab rat blew up the world because he wanted to play god?” Ayu snorted.

Alonso smirked faintly. “Sounds like a mad scientist’s dream.”

“I have generated two hypotheses based on the observed fragments and extrapolated probability models. Validation will require additional data,” Chiara said calmly.

“Hypothesis one: post-war hibernation. The Xok’al that survived the collapse withdrew into the polar north. If we model the metabolic demands of large-scale EM-active organisms, long-term dormancy is improbable under natural biology. However, with Xayen-level genetic engineering, the probability rises to a tolerable margin. What has occurred since the Great War 50 years ago, may represent a staggered awakening—the weakest surfacing first, escalating toward a six-tail emergence, and ultimately the theoretical seven-tail, if left unchecked.”

Wang’s voice was even. “Long hibernation for centuries?”

Lukas leaned back, arms crossed loosely. “Improbable doesn’t mean impossible. We’ve seen stranger things inside The Tower.”

“But if hibernation’s real, why have we never seen traces of it? No mention of it in any of the Xayen ruins so far,” Alonso pointed.

Chiara followed. “Which leads to hypothesis two: external intervention. Someone—or more likely a group—accessed Xayen records and deliberately reconstructed the Xok’al. It may have been intentional continuation of the cloaked figure’s designs. Perhaps contingency plans embedded in the ruins, left in case of failure, to ensure the survival—or resurrection—of the race he engineered.”

“So what—you’re saying some group of lunatics just brought the Xok’al back? Like it wasn’t bad enough the first time?” Ayu asked.

“Possible,” Chiara said flatly. “The perfect organism was always the implied target. Seven tails. That level of adaptation and resilience… it matches every Xayen doctrine on evolution we’ve seen so far.”

Lukas gave a crooked smile. “The perfect organism—or the perfect weapon. Depending on who you ask.”

Alonso’s voice settled over them. “Whichever it is—hibernation or revival—the effect’s the same. They’re here. They’re growing stronger. And if those fragments are right… then what comes next will be the end—unless we do something about it.”

Silence lingered for a few seconds, until Lukas clapped his hands. “Alright, I’d say this visit was more than productive. The detailed notes on the Ajnal progression system—especially the skill: Storm Domain—will be useful for you two,” he said, glancing at Wang and then fixing on Imani. “Think the smithing methods can actually be applied with what we’ve got?”

Imani stayed quiet for a moment, thoughtful, before nodding. “Yes… but the highest tier would require me to reach the Divine Warrior of the Land stage. Without that level of control, it wouldn’t be possible.”

“Good. Then that’s the goal,” Lukas said firmly. “We push SP gain as the priority. The sooner we advance, the sooner we unlock that potential—and right now, the clock is the greatest enemy we face.”

Alonso nodded, reaching to his waist. He pulled a pouch free and tossed it toward Lukas. “Speaking of which. Six Warden orbs in there. Use them however you think best.”

The others stiffened in surprise—Lukas most of all. “And you?”

“I’m fine. Absorbed plenty already. Besides, while you’ll be roaming the world, I’ll be stuck here at the front. More Wardens will come. I’ll have chances.” He grinned faintly. “Might even send you more by courier if I feel generous.”

Lukas nodded, no surprise on his face. “Alright. And listen, Alonso… we’ve already set the next steps, and you know them as well as I do. But there’s one point I need to make clear.”

He leaned forward slightly, his voice calm but firm. “It’s fine if the line is breached. It’s fine if the capital is taken. Hell, it’s fine if the entire Ajnal civilization vanishes from the map. What isn’t fine—what we cannot afford—is losing you. You’ve faced the Xok’al more than any of us, so I won’t waste words telling you how dangerous they are.”

His eyes stayed fixed on Alonso’s. “Push back when it matters, survive when it matters more. As long as you’re still breathing, I’m confident we’ll find a way to win—even if the rest of the world burns first.”

“He won’t die, Lukas,” Ayu said before Alonso could open his mouth. “He made a promise.”

Alonso smiled at her, their eyes holding for a moment. She had wanted to stay with him, but they’d already talked it through. Lukas and the others would run into Wardens on their journey—and they needed her more than he did.

He turned back to Lukas. “Well, there you have it. As for the Xok’al—it’s fine. They’re improving, learning, but so am I.” His grin tugged wider. “Let’s see who does it faster.”

Lukas nodded. “Alright. Anything else from this site? Coordinates, info I missed? Chiara?”

“The site lacks explicit coordinates for the other ruins, but its own fixed location narrows the possibilities for the others. Using it, I estimate a tolerance radius of thirty-two kilometres for the one buried in the southern wilds. For higher accuracy, we will need multiple reference points—at minimum the Azcoyatl capital site, and perhaps also the unchecked ruin in the southeast of their territory.”

Her voice paused, a rare flicker of hesitation entering. “And… there is something else. I believe the fragments we processed contain a secondary layer. Not visual, but encoded in the transmission itself.”

Lukas frowned. “Hidden? Like a puzzle? Some buried code?”

“Not code in the conventional sense,” Chiara replied, her tone clipped, analytical. “The visual dataset we saw was derived from a single-pass Fourier transform of the EM pulse. Too clean. Too regular. Almost… intentional. The fuzziness could not be genuine degradation—but signal compression. A deliberate mask.”

Alonso’s brow arched. “So… the pictures were just the surface?”

“Precisely,” Chiara said, fingers twitching slightly as though sketching equations in the air. “Think of it as a multiplexed signal. What we interpreted was the amplitude domain. But the phase spectrum may conceal secondary information. With the correct basis function, the carrier can be decoded again, revealing an entirely different dataset layered beneath.”

Wang’s eyes narrowed. “And without that basis function?”

Chiara’s voice dipped, unusually hesitant. “Then the task ranges from computationally intractable… to impossible. Without the key, the deeper layer will remain sealed. My probability estimate of success without it is less than 0.002 %.”

Lukas scratched his chin, smirking faintly as he remembered his time at uni. “Alright, let me translate. What she’s saying is: what we saw was the teaser trailer. The real film’s hidden behind the math. And unless we find the Xayen’s special decoder ring—probably tucked away in another ruin—we’re stuck watching the blurry version.”

“Well, good luck finding it,” Alonso said with a smile, though his eyes lingered with interest on the capsule. Would it be more history buried—or something else?

“Then that’s clear,” Lukas said, his voice cutting through. “The plan doesn’t change. We move to the next ruins and stack the pieces together until the whole picture shows.” He leaned forward, eyes scanning the group. “To summarize: Chiara’s breakthrough into the Third Pillar State means she can step into the Primal Priest role—functionally the Azcoyatl counterpart to the Ajnal Generals. With that authority, she can unlock the sealed chamber in their capital’s sacred site. From there, we push southeast to the untouched ruin. If the data between the two is enough, we’ll move the ruins in the Southern Wilds. And beyond that… we adapt, depending on how the war shifts.”

The others exchanged glances, then nodded in agreement.

Ayu stood before him on the wall, the night breeze tugging strands of her hair across her face.

“The Dawnless Blade, huh.” Her lips curved into a smile. “I like it.”

“It seems we both wear titles now—Daughter of the Wild Fire.”

Ayu chuckled, light and defiant. “Hah, I’ll get a better one. You’ll see.”

She brushed his mind with an image—herself standing tall before the beastmen, their cheers rising like thunder behind her.

Alonso’s voice softened. “I’m sure you will.”

She nodded once, firm, and before he could answer she leaned forward, pressing her lips to his in a swift kiss.

“Teach those lizards a lesson,” she whispered, and then turned, vaulting clean over the high wall, landing effortlessly with the others waiting below.

Alonso’s eyes followed her until they locked with Lukas, Imani, and the rest. They held his gaze, smiling faintly, before turning eastward to begin their march.

He drew in a deep breath, tasting the capital’s air—warm stone and copper tang from the forges, sweet smoke from burning oils, faint spice drifting up from the night markets below. It was a strange mix of metal and life, a city bracing for war.

Channeling through his blades, he leapt, his coat snapping in the air as he glided down toward the gathered host.

He landed with a muted thud, the earth trembling beneath his boots. Behind him, the coat flickered in the torchlight as fifty Sun Bearers and five hundred Lords of Sparks bowed low in unison, their voices carrying one word into the night.