Noah followed the monster through the winding halls of the Lost Citadel. Liquid ice flowed through his veins and he held Unraveling Disruption at the ready, prepared to release its magic in an instant. There would be no chances. No risks. He would not allow for them. The centipede monster’s many legs clicked against the old stone like the steady beat of a small army’s march. Every single movement it made was careful and deliberate, as if convinced that Noah was practically frothing at the mouth in wait for an excuse to kill it. Google seaʀᴄh 𝓷𝓸𝓿𝓮𝓵•𝓯𝓲𝓻𝓮•𝓷𝓮𝓽 They passed by no less than a dozen corpses on their way through the ancient pathways. Torn apart and deconstructed, they barely even resembled anything living anymore. The scenes looked more like some desperate art major’s shock-value attempt at passing a class they’d been slacking off in all semester. It did strike Noah that there may have been the slightest chance that the monster had good reason to believe he was waiting to kill it. He wasn’t sure how long the two of them walked. The entire time, not a single other soul entered the range of his domain. Everything down here knew just how far his senses could reach. They’d experienced it firsthand. Now, it seemed that they’d chosen their sacrificial lamb and had no plans of offering up extra meals. That was going to make things annoying if he didn’t find a way out of here soon. After all, Noah needed their magical energy to sustain himself. If this didn’t work… it didn’t matter if the monsters were still trying to kill him or not. They would die all the same. It was their lives or his — and until he verified that his gourd was still functional and all his students were safe, there was no life in this underground labyrinth more valuable than his own. The monster took random turns, seemingly going down the exact same paths they’d gone down before. It led him through tunnels that its kind had dug as well as the manmade paths. Noah could have sworn it was choosing them at random. Not once did it pause. Not once did it try to orient itself or make sure it was heading in the right direction. It just kept clicking along, and he kept following it. A part of him wondered if it was just trying to lead him in circles to tire him out. If that idea hadn’t been so stupid, he might have considered it for a bit longer. It was fortunate for the monster that he didn’t have the attention span to deal with such things at the moment. His mind was already split in enough directions. Letting his thoughts drift to anything but the immediate task at hand would be a death sentence. And so they walked. Noah wasn’t exactly sure how long they spent wandering those wretched stone walls. It felt like something around a few hours. It could have been half or double that. The call of the line constantly lurked at the edges of his vision. It wound around the veins running through his body and plucked at the strings of his heart. The power beckoned to him. He wasn’t even sure what the promise was. He wasn’t in a mindspace anymore. The Line couldn’t actually do anything outside his own body or some manner of mindspace. Interacting with it would only beckon its influence deeper into his mind. It would only twist what little remained of his thoughts even further. He had no desire to experience the near-infinite sea of memories welling within him in hopes of drowning out everything else. Not any more than he had to, at least. The monster turned a corner. Noah did too, fully expecting to find yet another functionally identical pathway stretching out to continue the endless maze. A gaping cavern loomed before them. Its domed ceiling hung a hundred feet in the air, inlaid with swirling patterns of gold that were just barely visible in the darkness. A few massive pillars rose from the floor up to the ceiling. Judging by the huge chunks of rubble littering the ground, there had once been many more of them. They hadn’t survived. Something had destroyed them. The pillars weren’t alone in that. Massive portions of the ground had been torn up. Scorch marks scarred patches of the stone, and huge gouges ran all along the walls. There had been a fight here. A big one. Only a single part of the room hadn’t been ravaged. A huge pair of square double doors, easily three times Noah’s height, waited at the far end of the room. They’d been melded with the curved walls perfectly. Not a single speck of dust nor adornment touched their surface. The doors were as plain as they possibly could have been. They were nothing but gray stone. And in their center, in a circular protrusion connected to the righthand door, was a keyhole. It took Noah a moment to process the fact that he hadn’t stepped into yet another hall. Then he realized the monster was watching him, its horrid face still cautious and fearful. It hadn’t moved so much as a single leg after they’d stepped into the room. The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon. Noah’s domain swept over their surroundings. There still wasn’t a single trace of anything living anywhere near them, but the room was large enough that his domain didn’t quite reach the doors or anything that may have been behind them. The monster didn’t say a word. It didn’t need to. The key around Noah’s neck felt like it had grown heavier. This must have been what Sebastian had been talking about. These doors were the entrance to the Lost Citadel. Or, perhaps if he was lucky, the exit. But Noah wasn’t that optimistic. Nobody locked a door from the inside. “The key,” the monster rasped in Sebastian’s voice. “You… take it. The Citadel.” “I gathered as much,” Noah said. He drew deeper on his magic, drawing the power close to himself. The buzzing fragments of white energy around him hissed in anticipation, sending electric arcs dancing across his skin. “Stay here. If you try to leave — I’m killing you.” “Prayer,” the monster said. “The experiments here. Successful. Not strong enough. Prayer.” Noah stared at it for a moment. Then he turned toward the door. “I don’t care. You’re coming with me until I find a way out of here.” “Prayer,” the monster said again. But it didn’t move. It simply stood there, watching him with wary red eyes, as he started across the room and toward the door. His domain washed over the stone around him in search of any signs of… well, anything. But there were none. The stone was just stone and the gold was just gold. There didn’t seem to be anything of interest at all— Up until his domain touched the doors. Noah froze on the spot. They were walls of pure magic. Power burned within them with such an intensity that they might as well have been two molten flashlights. There wasn’t any pattern, nor was there some discernible purpose to what the power did. It was just power. More than Noah had ever seen contained within a single object. Even if he’d been given a few hours to whittle away at them with Sunder’s power, he suspected he wouldn’t have been able to do much more than scratch their surface. Whoever had made these doors… they must have been at the absolute peak of Rank 7 if not Rank 8 — and they’d poured a hell of a lot of magic into them. What is this place? What purpose did it serve? Noah reached up to the key hanging around his neck. He lifted it, resuming his approach once more. His domain couldn’t pick up anything behind the doors. The intensity of the magic blocked his senses entirely. There was one thing for certain. The maker of these doors was far, far more powerful than the colony of hivemind monsters that he’d been carving through. Noah came to a stop just before the doors. The keyhole was so high that he couldn’t actually reach it, even if he stretched his arm directly above his head. He was forced to climb up onto a nearby piece of rubble to get himself in range. I wonder what the chances are that this thing explodes the moment I try to open it. Surely it isn’t trapped, right? “Prayer,” the monster said from behind Noah. It hadn’t budged from its spot at the entrance of the room. “That word does not mean what you think it does,” Noah said. The voices buzzing in his head were silent for once. Every part of him was in agreement. I can’t just sit around and wait forever. If its trapped, I’ll deal with it. He slipped the key into the hole. It slid in without resistance, sliding to a stop with an ominous clunk that echoed through the room behind him. Noah readied himself. He reached for Sunder. Its power arced through his veins, turning them jet black. Then Noah twisted the key. It moved easily, rotating ninety degrees to the right before coming to a stop with another loud clunk. A mechanism within the door shuddered and whirred. Moments later came a heavy, echoing boom. Then, before Noah could even try to push the doors himself, they swung inward. A wave of rotted air rolled past Noah’s face and clotted in his lungs. “Prayer,” said the monster behind Noah, its voice growing more panicked. “Prayer. Prayer.” Within the darkness beyond the doors, two red lights ignited like lit flames. Eyes. Each of them the size of a beach ball. A low, chittering hiss coiled within the shadows. The drumming sound of a hundred chitinous legs rolled through the air. It was a dozen times louder than the monster behind him. Noah took a step back, dropping down from the piece of rubble he’d stood on. From behind the doors emerged the mother of all centipede monsters. It was ten times as large as the creature behind Noah with a body so long that he couldn’t even begin to see the end of it. Black carapace covered its body, broken only by the bundles of agonized, fang-filled faces that riddled its length like patches of pustules. Dark fluid leaked from their eyes and mouths, dripping onto the floor and sizzling wherever it touched. None of the faces belonged to the monster. It only took Noah an instant to realize that they must have been taken from the very centipedes that Noah had just been killing minutes ago — and it looked like something had melted them into this enormous, vile creature’s body. The massive monster’s real features were those of an insect, with two curved mandibles twitching before a maw of dripping grey fangs. Noah’s domain prickled in warning. It was a little late for that. This thing was powerful. Far more powerful than anything else he’d fought since arriving in the corridors. And it wasn’t just powerful. More than just hatred lurked in the eyes of the creature before him. There was intelligence. “Two souls,” the enormous centipede whispered, its chittering voice twisted in delight. “I have been so hungry. It has been so long since I last ate. You — you will be a fine meal.” “Prayer,” the monster said once more from behind Noah, its voice weak in terror. And, finally, Noah realized that it hadn’t misunderstood the meaning of the word in the slightest. It was trying to pray for help. “There are no gods here,” the huge creature whispered as more of its seemingly endless body poured out from the shadows to rise up above Noah. Its mandibles parted in what could have only been a sadistic smile. “There is only the Devourer of the Citadel, free at last.”