The air inside the ancient secret passage grew colder with every step Dex and Lumia took toward the depths of the earth. The smell of death and rot they had grown accustomed to in the servants' slaughterhouse was no longer dominant, it began to dissolve gradually, replaced by air that was sterile, cold, and devoid of all life, as though it had been preserved in a sealed vessel for thousands of years. They continued advancing through the descending dark tunnel for some time, each step deepening Dex's resolve and confirming to him that what he had read in the novel was no mere ink on paper, it was a solid, filthy, and complex physical reality.
At last, the pitch darkness ahead began to dissipate slowly, and the rough stone tunnel ended, opening into a wider space. They found themselves standing at the foot of a rocky slope, overlooking a wide and remarkable corridor that stood in complete contrast to the squalor they had just passed through. This corridor was built entirely from slabs of pure white marble, cold as ice and polished to a degree that reflected their pale shadows back at them. The high walls were lit by small spherical mana lamps embedded in the stone, producing a faint, bluish glow, pallid as the light of a dying moon. This was the actual entrance to the palace's lower vaults: the zone adjacent to and surrounding the Chamber of Stillness.
At the far end of the white marble corridor stood the immense gateway that separated them from their objective. It was no ordinary wooden door, nor even iron. It was a terrifying architectural masterwork fashioned from an interwoven blend of pure clear magical crystal and black Manalit Stone, which appeared to devour the blue light emanating from the lamps. But what caught Dex's attention was not the gate itself, it was the two entities guarding it.
Dex stopped in the deep shadow at the tunnel's mouth and extended his arm firmly to prevent Lumia from advancing another step. The problem was not having found the entrance, it was the nightmare that awaited at its end.
Before the enormous crystal gate fashioned from black Manalit stood no ordinary soldiers. There were two guardians.
"Shadow Organization killers, from their auras they appear to be B-rank," Dex whispered.
Before the gate stood two men, their bodies encased in matte black leather suits designed to absorb light and sound. Their faces were invisible, covered by cold white ceramic masks with a single red eye painted at the center. They did not move. They did not breathe visibly. They appeared to be part of the marble wall itself.
Each carried a black sword, a curved blade that reflected no light.
Dex turned to Lumia. She stood with a frightening calm, her silver eyes glowing with an intelligence that did not belong to this world. "Lumia, these killers sense even the intention to kill. If I attempt to attack, they will know before I have moved. And their defensive magic is linked to the palace's alarm network. Any physical or conventional magical breach will turn this place into an inferno."
Lumia smiled, a smile cold and predatory. "Dex, these humans are attempting to imitate shadows, but they do not understand that a shadow requires a place to exist within. They depend on sensing physical reality. But what if I made that reality disappear for them?"
Lumia stepped forward, but it was not a step in the third dimension. She appeared to slide between layers of existence. She raised her hands and her fingers began tracing invisible circles in the air. She spoke no magical words, spells were for humans. She was communicating directly with the cosmic laws.
[Void Distortion: Dimensional Isolation].
To Dex, the scene was simultaneously breathtaking and terrifying. The air around the two killers began to twist like threads of silk being rewoven. Suddenly, the two figures vanished from his field of vision, replaced by a strange black void, then they reappeared, but in a distorted form.
For the B-rank killers, however, something happened that their minds had never been trained for. Suddenly, their connection to reality was severed. They could no longer feel the ground beneath their feet, or the palace's surrounding mana. Lumia had isolated the spatial cube in which they stood from the rest of the world. They now existed inside a completely separate spatial bubble, they could see, but could not sense what was happening outside the bubble, and any alarm signal they attempted to transmit would remain trapped inside this spatial distortion, circling endlessly in an infinite loop.
They froze in place, weapons raised, but they appeared like insects trapped inside a piece of translucent amber. To the outside world, they were nothing more than still images frozen in the fabric of the air.
"I have locked their consciousness and their senses inside a repeating temporal second," Lumia whispered, her voice carrying a strange echo. "When the temporal bubble dissolves they will remember nothing that happened here. Move, Dex, the effort required to isolate living beings from the fourth dimension is draining the core of my mana."
Dex shot forward like lightning, passing within centimeters of the frozen killers. He reached the enormous crystal gateway. The scent of the black Manalit was piercing, resembling the smell of lightning before it strikes. He recalled what the novel had described: "The gateway of the Chamber of Stillness does not open to an iron key, it opens to a key that runs in the veins. To the blood of the Williams line."
Dex drew his short blade and with a swift, deliberate motion sliced open the pad of his thumb. He felt no pain, only a strange, coercive sense of belonging to this place. He pressed his blood-stained thumb against the circular seal at the heart of the gate, where the lion crest held its mouth open as though awaiting an offering.
A moment of absolute silence, then the seal began to glow with a deep violet hue before shifting to a pure celestial blue. His blood had reacted with the raw Manalit, declaring the identity of the blood's owner.
With a sound like mountains grinding against one another, the gate moved. It did not swing outward, it divided into thousands of small crystal fragments that slid into the walls in astonishing mechanical-magical unison, uncovering the dark passage that led to the heart of the Chamber of Stillness.
"We are through," Dex said to himself, wiping his blood from the seal, understanding that the confrontation ahead would not be with hired killers, but with the bitter truth that awaited within.