Chapter 22: The Siege of the Slabs
The sixty-second countdown for the Herald's first wave was a slow-motion execution of the silence that had once defined the Under-City. Every tick of the digital clock in Kaelen's vision felt like a heavy hammer blow against the collective heartbeat of the cavern. Below the rusted catwalk, the thousands of newly "Awakened" residents were a chaotic, swirling sea of flickering white, violet, and gold light. They were discovering the terrifying weight of their own potential in real-time. Men who had spent thirty years hunched over ore-crushers were staring at their hands as the calluses split to reveal glowing golden circuitry; mothers were pulling their children close, only to find that their touch now left shimmering trails of protective Aether.
But the atmosphere shifted with a violent suddenness the moment the clock hit zero.
The temperature in the Slabs didn't just drop; it plummeted into a bone-deep, unnatural frost. The humid, recycled air of the Under-City, usually smelling of grease and recycled oxygen, turned into a freezing fog that carried the scent of ancient, stagnant graves and the metallic tang of ozone. At the mouth of the main transit tunnel—the massive "Gateway" that connected the industrial slums to the "civilized" world above—the shadows began to detach themselves from the walls.
**[Warning: High-Density Abyssal Manifestation in progress.]**
**[Enemy Type: 'The Hollow-Guard' (Vanguards of the Lord Malphas).]**
**[Quantity: 500+ Units (Increasing).]**
**[Threat Level: Lethal / Soul-Consuming.]**
**[Special Note: These entities possess 'Aether-Thirst'. They feed on the unrefined output of the Awakening.]**
From the darkness emerged the Hollow-Guard. They were twisted, nightmarish reflections of the Senate's Black-Watch. They stood seven feet tall, clad in suits of empty, matte-black plate armor that seemed to drink the light of the torches. There were no bodies inside the steel—only swirling, pressurized purple smoke that pulsed with a malevolent intelligence. They didn't walk; they glided over the uneven stone, their long, jagged claymores frost-rimed and humming with a frequency that made the teeth of everyone in the cavern ache.
"They aren't here for a territorial conquest," Lyra whispered, her violet eyes widening as she scanned the spectral architecture of the enemy. "They're here to harvest. The fragments of the Root Heart you just gave these people... they're like raw, unrefined diamonds. To the Abyss, the 'Awakened' are just a more nutritious crop. They're here to reap the spark before it becomes a flame."
Kaelen stood at the very edge of the catwalk, his golden circuitry flared to a blinding intensity that illuminated the rafters. "Then we'll give them something they can't digest."
He didn't wait for the Guard to reach the commons. Kaelen vaulted over the railing, a fifty-foot drop that would have shattered his legs an hour ago. Now, he hit the stone floor with a thunderous *crack*, the impact sending a massive shockwave of golden Admin-data through the ground that knocked the entire front line of Hollow-Guards into the air like autumn leaves.
**[Skill Activated: Monarch's Impact (Rank-A / Evolved).]**
**[Damage Dealt: 1,800 Physical / 1,200 Holy-Code.]**
**[Status: Grounded. Abyssal entities within 20m are 'Slowed'.]**
"Sovereigns!" Kaelen's voice roared, amplified by the Root Heart until it shook the very foundations of the cavern. "Look at them! They've come to put the chains back on! They've come to treat your souls like ore in a furnace! Are you going to go back to being 'Dead-Weight'?"
The old miner Kaelen had noticed earlier—a man named Garak who had spent forty years bowing to the whips of the Senate's foremen—was the first to break the paralysis. He let out a primal, earth-shaking scream, his weathered skin glowing with a white-hot radiance that burned through his tattered tunic. He didn't have a weapon, so he wreathed his bare fists in jagged golden lightning and charged.
"FOR THE ONES THEY FORGOT!" Garak screamed, slamming a fist into the visor of a Hollow-Guard. The entity didn't just fall; it imploded as the man's raw, uncapped soul-potential bypassed the armor's physical resistance.
The cavern erupted into a symphony of violence.
It wasn't a tactical, organized battle. It was a riot of liberated souls. The people of the Slabs lacked the refined "Skills" of the High-Rankers, but they possessed an anarchic unpredictability that the Abyssal logic couldn't calculate. Because their soul-limiters were gone, their abilities manifested based on their deepest, most desperate needs.
A baker, who had spent decades kneading synthetic dough in the heat of the industrial kitchens, slammed his palms together, creating a focused blast of pressurized heat that melted the matte-black armor of three Guards into slag. A group of orphaned street-urchins, who had survived the slums by hiding in the narrowest ventilation shafts, moved like flickering shadows, their small hands wreathed in Null-energy that short-circuited the Guards' smoky cores before they could even swing their claymores.
Kaelen moved like a whirlwind of violet and gold through the center of the slaughter. *The King's Spite* carved through the Hollow-Guard with a singing sound, its blade now dripping with golden liquid data. Every time the lunar-etched steel connected, it didn't just cut—it "overwrote" the Abyssal smoke, turning the dark entities into harmless piles of grey ash and empty metal.
**[Kill Streak: 12... 30... 65... 100.]**
**[Experience Gained: 45,000.]**
**[Level Up! Level 25 reached.]**
**[Level Up! Level 26 reached.]**
**[Stat Points Assigned: +10 Strength / +5 Agility.]**
Despite the massacre, the numbers didn't seem to dwindle. For every ten Guards Kaelen decapitated, twenty more glided out of the darkness of the transit tunnel. The Herald's laughter echoed from the shadows—a dry, rattling sound that seemed to come from inside Kaelen's own skull.
"Is this your glorious revolution, Kaelen Thorne?" the Herald's voice whispered, slick with mockery. "Giving the sheep the hearts of lions only makes the feast more satisfying for my Master. Look at your 'Sovereigns'... they are burning like dry straw. Their bodies were never meant to hold this much light."
Kaelen parried a heavy, overhead claymore strike, the force of it cracking the stone beneath his boots, and glanced toward the flank. The Herald was right. The Awakening was putting an immense strain on people who hadn't been conditioned for Aether. Some were beginning to stumble, their golden circuitry flickering and dimming as their **Vitality** reached critical levels.
"Elara! The cocktail! Now!" Kaelen yelled, his voice strained.
High above on the catwalk, Elara kicked a massive, reinforced crate over the edge. It was filled with hundreds of her new "Sovereign-Draft" vials—potions she had spent the last hour infusing with the Root's raw energy and her own alchemical genius.
"DRINK UP, YOU GLITCHES! IT'S ON THE HOUSE!" she screamed.
As the glass vials shattered across the floor, the liquid didn't just sit in the dirt. It vaporized instantly into a thick, shimmering golden mist. As the exhausted residents breathed it in, their circuitry flared back to life with a roar. Wounds closed, fatigue vanished, and a new wave of power surged through the crowd.
**[Field Effect: 'Alchemical Rebirth' Active.]**
**[Regeneration: 8% Vitality per second.]**
**[Global Buff: 'Echoes of the Root' – 30% increased damage to Abyssal Entities.]**
The tide didn't just turn; it became a flood. Fueled by the mist, the "Dead-Weight" pushed the Hollow-Guard back, inch by bloody inch, toward the transit tunnel. Kaelen led the vanguard, his gold eyes burning through the fog like twin searchlights. He reached the tunnel entrance, ready to seal it, but he stopped dead.
The purple smoke wasn't coming from a rift in space. It was being exhaled by a person.
Standing in the center of the tunnel was a woman Kaelen knew all too well. It was Commander Vane of the Black-Watch. But the proud, iron-willed officer was gone. Her stern face was frozen in a silent, agonizing scream, and her skin had turned into a translucent, purple-hued glass. Inside her chest, where her heart should be, a pulsing, jagged shard of Malphas's own Abyssal core sat, radiating waves of corruption.
"Vane?" Kaelen whispered, his blade lowering for a fraction of a second.
"She is the anchor," Lyra said, landing softly beside him, her violet hair whipping in the gale-force winds coming from the tunnel. "The Lord Malphas is using her Diamond-rank core as a bridge. She's being hollowed out to act as a physical vessel. If you don't break the bridge, Kaelen, he will manifest his true form right here, and the Slabs will be nothing but a crater."
Commander Vane—or the puppet wearing her skin—looked at Kaelen. A single tear of black, oily ichor ran down her glass-like cheek.
*"Kill... me..."* her lips moved, the voice a faint, desperate ghost of her former self.
Then, her eyes turned into absolute voids. She raised a hand, and the shadows in the tunnel solidified into massive, obsidian spikes that shot toward Kaelen with the speed of railgun slugs.
"The Sovereign of a dying gutter," Vane's voice spoke, but it was now the deep, vibrating, resonant tone of the Abyssal Lord Malphas. "You gave them power, but you forgot to give them a future. I am the only future allowed. I am the silence that follows the roar of the world."
Kaelen didn't dodge. He slammed *The King's Spite* into the ground, activating **Monarch's Domain**. The golden dome of energy clashed with the obsidian spikes in a shower of sparks that blinded half the cavern. Kaelen felt his **Corruption** spike violently as he touched the Lord's power.
**[Corruption: 24.5% (Accelerating).]**
**[Warning: Direct contact with Abyssal Lord core will trigger 'Soul-Bleed'.]**
"Kaelen, the tunnel is buckling!" Elara shouted, her voice filled with panic. "The spatial pressure is too much! If he steps through her, the entire Sector collapses!"
Kaelen looked at Vane. He saw the woman who had represented the Senate's tyranny, but he also saw a human being who was being erased by a monster who viewed her as nothing but a battery.
"I'm sorry, Commander. You deserved a better end than being a doorway," Kaelen whispered.
He didn't use a blade strike. He dropped the glaive and lunged forward with his bare left hand—the hand marked by the Root Heart. He bypassed the obsidian spikes, the golden circuitry on his skin burning through the shadow-glass of her armor. He slammed his glowing palm directly over the black shard in her chest.
"**ADMIN OVERRIDE: PURGE PARASITIC ENTITY. EJECT!**"
White light, pure and clinical, exploded within the tunnel. The black shard didn't just break; it shattered into fine dust. The purple smoke was sucked backward into the Abyss with a violent, vacuum-like roar that popped the ears of everyone in the cavern. Vane's body went limp, the glass-skin reverting to bruised, human flesh as she collapsed into Kaelen's arms.
Outside, the five hundred Hollow-Guards instantly dissolved into piles of empty, hollow armor.
**[Objective Complete: Repel the First Wave.]**
**[Reward: 50,000 Credits, 100,000 EXP, and 'Vane's Broken Core' (Material).]**
**[Level Up! Level 27 reached.]**
The cavern went silent, save for the ragged breathing of the thousands of new Sovereigns. They looked at the mountains of black armor, then at Kaelen, who was kneeling in the tunnel holding the unconscious Commander.
"Is... is it over?" Garak the miner asked, his voice shaking as the adrenaline began to fade.
Kaelen looked up through the cracks in the ceiling, toward the violet vortex in the sky that was only growing larger.
"No," Kaelen said, his voice flat and heavy. "That was just the Herald clearing his throat. Malphas is still coming. He just realized the Slabs are a distraction."
He turned to Lyra, his eyes hard. "Where is he focusing now?"
Lyra's face was ashen. "The Spire. He's going to the highest point in Aegis Prime. He's going to use the Spire's central Aether-transmitter—the one the Senate used for propaganda—to broadcast his 'Abyssal Silence' to the entire planet's network. If he reaches that transmitter, he'll rewrite the souls of every 'Awakened' person before they even learn how to fight back."
Kaelen stood up, handing the limp form of Commander Vane to a group of medics. "Elara, stay here. Fortify the Slabs. If more of those smoke-things show up, you use every vial you've got. We can't let this spark go out."
"Where are you going?" Elara asked, grabbing his arm, her eyes searching his.
Kaelen looked at the golden seal in his palm. It was pulsing in perfect sync with the vortex in the sky.
"I'm going back to the Spire," Kaelen said. "I have a date with a Lord, and I'm tired of being the one who's hunted."
He looked out at the sea of Sovereigns. "I'm going to the top. I can't promise you'll come back. Who's with me?"
For a moment, there was a deafening silence. Then Garak stepped forward. Then the baker. Then the woman with the child. Within minutes, hundreds of the "Dead-Weight" were stepping out of the shadows, their eyes glowing with a raw, uncapped power that no Senate hunter could ever hope to match.
"We don't have a name for an army like this," Garak said, a bloody grin splitting his face. "But 'The Dead-Weight' still feels right. We're the weight that's finally going to crush the Abyss."
Kaelen nodded, a grim smile touching his own lips.
"Then let's move. We've got a world to save, and I'm done walking."
**[New Quest: 'The Ascent of the Sovereigns']**
**[Objective: Reach the Spire's Zenith and intercept Malphas.]**
**[Time Remaining until Full Manifestation: 01:45:00.]**