Captain Roan was no stranger to pain. His scarred hands worked with the patience of a man who'd pried secrets from worse men in darker wars. Merran's cries echoed off the tide-cell walls, but no confession came.

Not of the Hollow Nine. Not of the shards.

His fear was too deep, too raw. The terror of betrayal outweighed the agony of broken skin and bruised bone.

(If I talk… I'm dead before dawn. They'll carve me from the inside out. Better to suffer now, better to bleed here than to betray the Nine.)

Up above, Khael stood with the others around the map spread across the table. The villagers whispered in anxious knots. Juno's fist still trembled with the memory of restraint. Kaen paced, restless fire flickering at his fingertips. Rael leaned against the wall like a blade waiting to be drawn. Lira and Ceyla watched the horizon, their silence more telling than words.

Khael's gaze never left the northern marks on the parchment.

(Hollow Nine… I know your hand is behind this. In the manga… this was where it all began. But I can't say that. They'd never believe me. Without evidence, I'm just a fool making shadows out of smoke.)

He folded the map, tucked it under his arm, and turned.

"Come. We'll see the caves for ourselves."

The guardians moved as one, leaving the uneasy murmurs behind. Their boots pressed into wet sand, the tide licking hungrily at the shore. Every step toward the cliffs felt heavier, as though the sea itself tried to drag them back.

When they entered the cave, the world changed.

Salt air gave way to a stench like rotting kelp and burning oil. The walls were jagged, veined with faint black scars that pulsed with something unnatural. And at the center, buried in stone like a wound in the earth, was the shard.

It glowed faintly dark violet, threads of shadow writhing within its surface like snakes coiled beneath glass. The air vibrated around it, heavy, suffocating. Every breath scraped the lungs. The faint sound of the sea was drowned out by something deeper: a pulse, a rhythm like a monstrous heartbeat.

Ceyla's hands sparked with lightning instinctively.

"By the tides… it feels alive."

Kaen spat, firelight flickering from his tongue.

"Alive? It feels cursed."

Juno set his jaw, muscles tightening as Shinrei burned through his veins.

"We destroy it."

But Khael didn't move yet. His eyes lingered, locked on the shard, thoughts winding like smoke.

(So this is it. The shard… the bait. A beacon that drags monsters from the abyss. This is why the tide grows stronger. Why Pearlbay bleeds every day.)

His hand tightened on his sword hilt.

(If the Hollow Nine planted this here… then Pearlbay isn't their target. It's their testing ground.)

The shard pulsed again then split open like a wound tearing wider.

From its cracks poured water, black and foaming, bubbling as if the sea itself boiled beneath the cave. Shapes writhed in the surge tentacles, fanged maws, twisted shells gleaming with abyssal light. One after another, the monsters erupted into the cavern, shrieking like drowned souls.

The guardians drew their weapons in the same breath. Lightning sparked, fire ignited, wind howled against the cavern walls.

But Rael didn't move. Not yet.

His hand was on his blade, but his eyes… his eyes were elsewhere. On the shard. On the shadows twisting inside it.

(Brother… is this you? Are you one of them? Did you put this here?)

Seirath's smirk flashed in his memory. That same cruel calm, the mocking words that had haunted him: "(You can't kill me…)"

Rael's chest tightened, rage and grief colliding until his breath shook.

(If it's you—if you had a hand in this—I'll end you with my own sword. Even if you are my blood.)

The monsters surged forward. One lunged, a crablike beast with a jagged shell, but Rael's blade moved faster.

"ECHO ART: STONE SPIKE!"

Pillars of jagged rock burst from the cavern floor, impaling the creature mid-lunge. Its shriek rattled through the chamber as Rael's eyes burned, not with fear but with vengeance.

Khael slashed beside him, wind tearing through another cluster.

"Focus, Rael! Don't lose yourself!"

But Rael didn't answer. He leapt, blade sparking with both lightning and earth, his shout tearing from his throat:

"I'll kill you all! Every damned one of you!!!"

The shard pulsed again louder, stronger. For every beast they struck down, another clawed its way out, the cavern trembling under the onslaught.

Kaen roared, flames exploding in a wave that charred the ceiling black.

"Damn it, it's endless!"

Juno slammed his fists into the ground, taishin erupting in shockwaves.

"Then we hold! If this shard is their source, we fight until it breaks!"

Ceyla's voice cut sharp through the chaos, lightning dancing along her arms.

"Then let's make it break!"

"IT WON'T WORK!" Lira's voice cracked across the roar of surf and the shriek of beast-forms. Her hands flashed with healing light, but the shard throbbed, an obsidian heart that drank at the air itself. Every strike they landed seemed to slow, as if the stone swallowed momentum.

Khael stepped forward without hesitation. "Let me hold it. Maybe I can destroy it… cover me, Juno, Kaen!"

Juno's eyes narrowed, bandages twitching with restrained force. "Ok!" He slammed both palms into the ground, opening the next Taishin Gate with a sound like iron unhinging. "Taishin technique: Wild Lutos!!" The name ripped out of him short, brutal. The earth answered; a shockwave of condensed muscle and raw focus blasted outward, slowing the torrent of smaller monsters and carving a narrow corridor straight to the shard.

Kaen didn't wait. Fire braided through his veins and up his arms, the heat a living thing that licked at the cavern walls. "Echo Art: Blazing Enferno!" He roared, and a column of flame erupted, not merely fire but a furnace-spear aimed to sear the shard's surface and force it to reveal its seams.

Rael moved like a blade looped in thought precise, surgical. He formed a luminous sigil beneath the shard, Seraphis' light bending into barbs. "Judicator—bind its pattern!" His words were a command and a prayer: if the shard could not break, perhaps it could be constrained.

Ceyla swept a storm around them, lightning barbs forming a cage that kept tendrils and jaws at bay. "Hold it! Keep them from interfering!" Every muscle in her frame trembled with the effort of maintaining the field.

Even the tired Guardians rallied.

Khael approached the shard. Up close, it was worse, an eye of blackness that reflected nothing but hunger. Tendrils of void-sheen curled and reached as if the fragment had a mouth. The dragon-blood pulsed in his wrists, his scales prickling under the skin like a second heartbeat.

(If anyone can resist this thing, it's you.) Juno's thought reached him through the clash, steady and simple.

Khael slid a palm over the shard. Heat and cold fought beneath his touch—fire burning back at void, wind tasting like iron. The shard answered with pressure, a thousand small knives along his nerves. He drew in breath; the dragon inside him hummed, an old, low chord.

"Now!" he barked.

Juno slammed his Wild Lutos into a final, focused pillar beneath them, his body a living anvil. Kaen poured the Enferno into a single lance, shaping the flame into a heated lock that wrapped the shard like a vice. Rael's sigils snapped shut, roots of light lacing the fragment's perimeter. Ceyla's storm formed a rotating cage to dampen the shard's shockwaves. Lira's hands hovered at Khael's back, a soft glow to steady his pulse and mend the micro-tears already opening in his skin.

For a breath thin, fragile, the shard cracked a hairline. Sparks of black light sizzled. Triumph flickered, like a candle in a gust.

Then the shard screamed.

Not a sound but a shove of will. It yanked at Khael's hand like a living thing recoiling to bite. The wound opened along his palm where void met dragon. Pain flared acid, ice, and grief. His knees buckled. The winds he bore stuttered.

"Khael!" Ceyla's shout

To be continue

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