CHAPTER 9: THE VITRIOLIC VEINS
The silence of the Ossuary was a suffocating shroud, a false peace that clung to them like grave dust. Stepping out of the bone-chamber was like being born into a new kind of hell. The dry, dead air was ripped away, replaced by a searing, chemical fog that scorched their throats and promised a slow, dissolving death. A thunderous, gut-shaking roar hammered them—the sound of a vast, churning river of acid carving its way through living flesh.
They stood at the lip of an abyss. Below, a river the color of infected bile and rusted metal raged, its frothing currents eating away at canyon walls of pulsating, filter-like tissue. The very air was a weapon, shimmering with corrosive heat.
Jaya's voice was a raw scrape against the din. "The Circulatory Rivers. It's a digestive solvent. Not a drop touches you, or you're just… gone."
Aryan leaned against the shuddering wall, his body a hollow vessel. The confrontation with his doppelganger had left a psychic wound that felt deeper than any physical injury. The Null-Shard was a cold, dead weight in his arm, a serpent sated for the moment, but its hunger was a constant, whispering pressure in his soul.
Rohan, his face a grim mask of pain, assessed the narrow, glistening ledge that wound down the canyon wall. "The sled stays." It wasn't a suggestion. The look in his eyes was one of pure, undiluted fury—not at them, but at his own broken body.
What followed was an act of butchery disguised as medicine. Elian held him down while Jaya worked. There was no gentle glow of healing. Her hands, gripping her mend-weaver blades, became instruments of brutal necessity. She didn't just set the bone; she forged it back together, the ethereal energy searing through muscle and sinew, the smell of cooked meat briefly cutting through the chemical stench. Rohan didn't scream. He locked his jaw, his eyes rolling back in his head, a low, animal growl tearing from his throat. Jaya's own blades, usually a soft silver, now glowed with a sickly, absorbed crimson—the physical manifestation of Rohan's agony, stored and ready to be unleashed.
Supported between Aryan and a shaken Elian, Rohan took a step. The ledge was a slick, treacherous ribbon of tissue over a churning grave. Every shuffle was an eternity, the acid mist eating at their exposed skin, leaving raw, weeping patches.
They were a third of the way across when the river noticed the fresh meat.
A shape, long and sinuous, broke the surface with unnatural silence. It was an Eel-Hound, a creature of pure, evolved horror. Its body was a segmented tube of glistening muscle, its head a single, circular maw of interlocking, rotating bone plates. It launched from the acid, arcing through the air with a dreadful grace, and anchored itself to the wall above them with barbed sucker-feet.
It did not look at them. It had no eyes. It simply knew they were there.
Its maw dilated, and a glob of concentrated vitriol, thicker and darker than the river below, shot towards Aryan's face.
Aryan's reaction was not born of courage, but of a deep, abyssal instinct. The Null-Shard awoke, not with a hum, but with a silent, voracious pull. He didn't raise a hand. His mind, cold and sharp as a shard of obsidian, focused. He saw the [Trajectory] of the acid, a bright, sizzling line in the conceptual web. He didn't block it. He bent it. The glob veered, sizzling past his ear and striking the wall, which hissed and dissolved like sugar in water.
Another Eel-Hound launched. Then another. The air became a storm of sizzling death. The ledge was being eaten away around them.
"Aryan!" Jaya screamed, her voice barely a whisper in the roar.
He was already gone, lost in the chilling arithmetic of survival. [Trajectory]. [Adhesion]. [Structural Integrity]. They were just numbers, variables to be solved. He was the void, and the void was a perfect, unfeeling logic.
He targeted the [Adhesion] of the lead Eel-Hound. The concept didn't just weaken; it was annulled. The creature's sucker-feet lost all purchase. It made no sound as it fell, its form swallowed by the hungry river without a trace.
He turned his attention to the ledge beneath another. He didn't break it. He imposed the concept of [Absence] upon a single, critical point. A section of the path, half a meter across, simply ceased to exist. The Eel-Hound dropped into the newly formed gap, its silent fall a testament to the absolute nature of Aryan's power.
He was a god of localized oblivion.
But the void demanded payment. With each precise, surgical annihilation, a piece of his warmth, his empathy, was scoured away. The world grew monochrome, reduced to threats and solutions. The pain of his friends, the roar of the river, it was all just data.
An Eel-Hound skittered too close, its grinding maw inches from Elian's leg. Jaya moved faster than thought. One of her mend-weaver blades, now burning with the violent crimson energy of Rohan's pain, flew from her hand. It wasn't a graceful throw; it was a release, a vomiting forth of stored agony. The blade struck the creature not with physical force, but with a wave of pure, metaphysical suffering. The Eel-Hound didn't just die; it convulsed, its body seizing as if reliving every second of the bone-setting trauma, before going rigid and tumbling into the abyss.
They staggered off the ledge and into an outlet tunnel, collapsing into a heap. The relative silence was deafening. Rohan was unconscious, his body finally succumbing to the shock. Elian was trembling, staring at Aryan as if he were one of the monsters.
Jaya crawled to Aryan, her hands hovering over him, but not touching. His eyes were open, staring at the pulsating ceiling, but they saw nothing. They were the flat, black eyes of a deep-sea creature, devoid of light, devoid of soul.
"You're still in there, Aryan," she whispered, her voice breaking. "Fight it."
But Aryan didn't hear her. He was listening to the much clearer voice now, the one that had been a whisper but was now a resonant echo in the hollow of his being. The voice of the void. It was calm. It was logical. It promised an end to all pain, all struggle. All he had to do was let go.
He had saved them from the acid. He had saved them from the Eel-Hounds. But as he sat in the corrosive darkness, he knew, with a terrifying certainty, that the greatest threat to their mission had never been the Primordial's defenses. It was the beautiful, silent darkness growing within him. And it was winning.