The journey was a three-week, walking nightmare.
The Eastern Mountains weren't just mountains. They were... wrong. The void corruption here wasn't a "zone" or a "patch"; it was the environment. The air was thin and smelled of static. The trees were twisted, black, skeletal things that seemed to writhe in our peripheral vision. The ground itself felt... spongy, unstable, as if the reality beneath our feet was rotting.
"This entire region is saturated," Mira said, her voice a low, tight whisper. We all whispered. Sound carried too far here, and it always sounded wrong. "The cult... they didn't just build here. They chose here. The veil is thin. It... it makes their work easier."
"It's making our work harder," I said, my voice rough. The constant, low-level hum of void energy was a physical weight against my mind. My integration, the 89% I'd been trying to stabilize, was a yoyo. It spiked to 92% when we crossed a corrupted stream, then dropped to 87% as I fought it back down. I was exhausted, and we hadn't even seen the enemy.
Elara was in the worst shape. Her 91% baseline meant she was constantly, actively fighting the ambient pull of the void. She walked in the center of our formation, a silent, pale ghost, her hands clenched so tight her knuckles were white. We, the other seven marked, had to form a constant, low-level resonance link just to anchor her, to lend her our stability. It was like eight people carrying a ninth, psychically, every step of the way.
"I... I can feel it," she admitted, her voice cracking, during one of our brief, cold rest stops. "The... the void. It's... it's calling to me. It says... it says it's... peaceful."
"It's lying," Zara snapped, her voice sharp, protective. "Peace is what you earn. The void... that's just... oblivion. It's not the same."
"Is there a difference?" Elara asked, her voice so quiet it was terrifying. "Sometimes... sometimes oblivion... it sounds... easier. Than this. Than... than fighting... all the time."
The raw, honest despair of it hit us all. She was right. It was exhausting. The fight never ended.
"The difference," I said, kneeling in front of her, forcing her to meet my gaze, "is choice. Oblivion... that's... that's giving up. Surrendering. Fighting... fighting is choosing. Choosing to be... you. As long as you're choosing, Elara... you're still human. You're still here. You just... you have to keep choosing."
It was the same hollow, desperate logic I'd been feeding myself. The same words Lysara would have used.
Elara looked at me, her haunted, glowing eyes searching mine. "Okay," she whispered. "I... I'll choose. For... for now."
"Good," I said, my voice rough. "Because we need you."
On the seventeenth day, we lost Derren.
He was one of Dren's best. A veteran scout, a survivor of the Harvest. He'd been with Kaela's team, scouting the western ridge. He wasn't a... he wasn't a kid. He was a soldier.
The ground just... opened. It wasn't a crevasse. It was a... a mouth. A patch of seemingly solid rock that was just... a thin crust over a pit of raw, liquid-like, void corruption. He fell, and by the time we got to the edge, it was... it was too late. The corruption was... it was consuming him.
He was still conscious. Just. His skin was blackening, his armor dissolving off his body.
"Commander..." he gasped, his voice a wet, rattling sound. He saw me at the edge. "Don't... don't... let it... take me. Don't... let me... turn."
I knew what he was asking. The mercy. The final, terrible, necessary thing.
Kaela was beside me, her face pale, her knuckles white on her sword hilt. "I'll do it," she whispered. "Ren, you... you shouldn't have to..."
"No," I said, my voice a stranger's. "He's... he's one of my team. My... responsibility."
I drew my shadow-steel sword. Its violet light seemed dim, offended by the pure darkness below.
Derren saw the blade. His body... what was left of it... relaxed. He nodded. "For... for Verdwood," he whispered.
"For Verdwood," I echoed. And I drove the blade down.
We buried what was left of his armor, marking the grave with a pile of black stones. We were all silent for the rest of that day's march.
That night, I sat apart, cleaning Derren's blood from my sword. My hands wouldn't stop shaking.
"It's not murder, Ren," Kaela said, her voice a low presence in the dark. She'd found me. "It was... mercy."
"It doesn't feel much different," I whispered, the words thick.
"It should," she said, sitting beside me, close, but not touching. "It has to. Because... because it bothers you. The... the moment it stops bothering you, Ren... that's... that's the moment they win. That's the moment you're... you're not... you... anymore."
She was right. The shaking, the guilt... that was the human part. That was the part I was fighting to protect.
On the twenty-first day, we saw it.
We crested a high, treacherous ridge, and... and we looked down. Lysara's coordinates had been perfect.
It was... worse. So much worse than the intel had suggested.
It wasn't just a "stronghold." It was a city. A black, sprawling, impossible fortress of carved, black stone, built into the heart of a massive, corrupted caldera. The air above it was... tearing. A visible, shimmering, purple-black wound in the sky.
"The... the void bridge," Mira whispered, her voice trembling with a new, fresh terror. "They're... they're not building it. They're... they're opening it. It's... it's already begun."
We crept closer, to a hidden vantage point, and I... I used the spyglass.
The center of the caldera wasn't a building. It was a machine. A vast, ritual formation. And... and the children...
They were part of it.
I saw them. Dozens of them. Not forty. It looked like... more. They were... they were chained, bound in circular formations around pulsing, black crystals. They were... slumped. Unconscious. Their convergence marks... they were blazing, all of them, their power being siphoned, drawn, fed into the rift in the sky.
"How... how many?" Kaela asked, her voice tight.
"I... I count... at least forty," I said, my voice shaking, sick. "Maybe... maybe fifty. They're... they're anchors. Living anchors. Just... just like Lysara said."
"If they... if they complete that... with that many kids..." Mira whispered, her face pale. "The bridge... it won't just 'leak.' It'll... it'll flood. The... the continent... it'll be... it'll be gone. Consumed. Weeks. Maybe... maybe days."
The stakes... they had just... escalated. From "terrible" to "apocalyptic."
"Can we... can we break it?" Kaela asked, her voice all steel.
I opened the blue journal. My hands... they were shaking so hard. I found the page. Lysara's neat, precise, perfect handwriting.
"The bridge requires... a sustained, harmonic resonance between all anchors. It's... it's a house of cards. Disrupt... even 10%... and the entire cascade... it will collapse. The bridge will fail."
"Yes," I said, relief flooding me. "Yes! We can! We just... we just have to disrupt the formation. We... we break the... the resonance cascade..."
My eyes kept reading. The next paragraph.
"But... the anchors. The children. Their... their integration... it's... it's being... artificially, violently... elevated. To... to sustain the bridge. They're... they're at 99%. They're... they're on the edge. If... if the connection is... is suddenly... severed? A... a sudden disconnection? The... the backlash... the... the psychic... recoil... it... it will be... catastrophic. They... they won't... they won't survive it."
My blood ran cold.
I read the last, desperate, final note, scrawled in the margin.
"I... I can't find a way, Ren. I... I've run the numbers... a... a thousand times. It... it... it might not be possible. To... to destroy the bridge... and save the children. You... you'll... you'll have to choose. I'm... I'm so... so sorry..."
"Ren?" Kaela asked, her hand on my arm. "What? What is it? What did she write?"
"We can destroy the bridge," I said, my voice a hollow, dead thing. "But... but the... the backlash... it'll... it'll kill the children. All of them. Instantly."
The team... the kids... they were listening. Torren, Zara, Elara. Their faces...
"So... so we... we have to choose?" Torren whispered, his voice cracking. "We... we... we kill... we kill forty kids... to... to save the world? Or... or we... we try to save them... and... and we... we risk... everything?"
"We came here to rescue them!" Zara's voice was a sudden, furious shout. "We're not... we're not murderers! We're not them! We're... we're Verdwood! We... we save them!"
"And what if we can't?" Mira countered, her voice cold, pragmatic. "What if, in trying to save forty... we condemn... everyone? Every other child? Every... every person... on the continent?"
The debate raged, but I wasn't listening. I was staring at the journal. At... at one last, tiny, almost illegible scribble. At the very, very bottom of the page.
"Ren... Takeshi's guilt... don't... don't let it... make you choose... martyrdom... over... effectiveness. I... I love you. Choose... choose wisely."
She knew. She knew. She knew me. She knew Takeshi. She knew I would... I would never... be able to make that choice. The choice to sacrifice the children. My... my students.
She was... from beyond the grave... she was telling me. She was ordering me.
"We... we have our plan," I said, my voice a dead, hollow thing. I closed the journal. "Three objectives. One. Infiltrate the stronghold. Two. Destroy... the void bridge formation."
I couldn't look at Zara. I couldn't look at any of them.
"Three," I continued, my voice breaking, "extract... extract any... any who... survive."
There was a terrible, terrible silence. Zara was staring at me, her face a mask of white, pure, betrayed horror. "Ren... no... you... you can't... you can't..."
"In that order," I said, my voice like iron. I wasn't Ren anymore. I was the Commander. "The... the apocalypse... preventing it... that... that is the primary objective. Everything... everyone... is secondary. That... that is the only choice."
"We're... we're... we're just... we're just as bad as they are," Zara whispered, tears streaming down her face.
"No," I said, my voice cold. "We're worse. Because we... we know... what we're doing."
The plan was... it was barely a plan. It was a prayer. "The eight of us... the network... we... we can pass through the outer... the corruption... the... the wards. The... the scouts... you..." I looked at the grim, hard faces of the fifteen men and women who had followed us here. "You... you are the diversion. You... you'll... you'll attack. At all three gates. At once. You... you'll... you'll pull their... their forces. Their... their garrison. You'll... you'll create the... the chaos. The window. For us. To... to get to the... the bridge."
"It's... it's a suicide mission," the lead scout, Roric, said, his voice flat.
"Yes," I agreed. "For... for all of us. But... but it's... it's the only one. We... we draw their... their army... and... and we... the network... we... we... we go for the heart. We... we use... the inverse... resonance. We... we... we shatter... the formation. The... the bridge... collapses. We... we... we grab... anyone... we can... and... and we... we get out."
"When?" Mira asked, her voice tight.
"Tomorrow," I said. "Dawn. Their... their guard rotation. Maximum confusion."
That night... the last night... I sat alone. With the journal. I... I was... I was just... reading. Her words. Her... her mind. Trying to... to... to find... something else. A... a third way. A... a Lysara way.
There wasn't one.
"You're... you're saying goodbye," Kaela said, her voice a whisper in the dark. She sat beside me.
"I'm... I'm preparing," I said.
"Not... not much... of a... difference," she replied. "You're... you're... you're expecting... to... to die... tomorrow."
"The... the... statistics..."
"Screw... your... statistics," she whispered, her voice fierce. "I... I... I want... to know... what... what you're... feeling."
I closed the journal. "I'm... I'm... I'm terrified," I admitted, the word a stone in my throat. "I'm... I'm inadequate. I'm... I'm guilty. I'm... I'm... I'm leading... all... all of us... our family... to... to... to die. I'm... I'm angry. That... that this... is... is... is the... choice. And... and... and... underneath... all... all that... I'm... I'm... I'm determined. Because... because stopping this... this... abomination... it... it... it matters. It... it matters... more... more... more than... my... my... comfort. It... it... it matters... more... more than... me."
"That's... that's honest," she said.
"She... she... she taught me... that," I whispered.
Kaela took my hand. Her hand was... it was trembling. Or... or mine was. "If... if... if we... survive... tomorrow..."
" When... we... survive," I corrected, a hollow, forced... thing.
"When," she amended, her grip tightening. "We... we... we need... to... to talk. About... about us. About... about... what... we... we're... becoming. About... about... if... if... if we... we can... we can build... something. That... that isn't... just... just fighting. And... and loss."
"I'd... I'd... I'd like that," I said.
We sat. Under... under that... that sick, corrupted sky. Two... two fourteen-year-olds. About... about to... to... to lead... an... an assault... on... on a... a... a fortress. Of... of... of hundreds. To... to... to kill... forty... children... to... to... to save... the... world.
The... the... the probability... it... it... it wasn't... 8%. It... it... it was... it was zero. We... we... we all... knew it.
But... we... we... we were... we were doing it... anyway.
Because... because she... she... she... she had... she had believed... in... in us.
"For... for Lysara," I whispered, the words a prayer.
"For Lysara," Kaela echoed.
At dawn... the assault... it began.