The Demon Queen's Royal Consort-Chapter 115 - Dungeon - XXIII

The wind howled between the mountains like a dark omen.

Two days had passed since the first mountain had been swallowed by the darkness. Now, all of us watched, in depressive silence, as the second followed the same fate.

The black abyss seemed to slowly chew away everything that existed there, as if reality itself were being dissolved. Dórian, arms crossed, clenched his teeth without saying a word. Aeloria sat at the edge of the peak, eyes wide open, staring into nothingness. Dália rested her head on my shoulder, still not fully recovered, and Seraphine just closed her eyes in helpless anger.

'Every two days, a mountain is erased.'

That was the cruel logic dominating our minds. The pressure was suffocating.

We rose, like survivors on a battlefield still in progress, and walked to the edge of the peak, staring at the sixth mountain. novelbuddy.cσ๓

With a low-gravity jump, I floated toward the sixth mountain.

There was the barrier: a black, rippling membrane completely covering the entrance.

I reached out. Nothing. No heat. No pain. But also, no way through.

It was the beginning of the storm of tests. I propelled myself back to the fifth mountain's peak, and from there it was pure chaos.

**

Aeloria raised his hands to the sky and conjured an ice meteor, accelerated by my gravity magic, while I fired the densest lightning I could muster. Dália lifted her hands and released a beam of life energy, glowing like liquid gold, and I felt the air's temperature shift in response.

Dórian struck with his blade reinforced with Prana, trying to crack the barrier. Seraphine hurled her spear with enough force to break walls, and nothing.

A tsunami of water and life crashed against the barrier, simultaneous attacks using everything we had.

But the damned membrane... didn't react. No cracks. No tremors. Not even a shimmer. It was like striking the void.

Frustration mixed with fear. Something told me the key to this mountain wasn't brute force. And that made me even more uneasy.

'This won't open with raw power,' I thought as I stepped back.

The clock was ticking. And the third mountain was next in line for oblivion.

**

The sky began to darken again, painted in shades of red and violet by the distorted light passing through the distant black barrier.

Two days... Two mountains disappearing one after the other. The group's silence wasn't just physical—it was mental, emotional. As if we were prisoners of an invisible clock, each tick marking our imminent downfall.

I sat near the fire Dórian had managed to rekindle with difficulty. The sparks danced in the air, but there wasn't enough warmth to ease the weight on my chest.

Dália was leaning against a rock, wrapped in improvised blankets. Her face still pale, those intense red eyes half-open, struggling against the exhaustion she had felt ever since she brought down half the crocodile with that beam of life. Her body still trembled, even at rest. But she gave me a faint smile whenever she looked my way.

Aeloria stood a few steps from the fire. The wind blew against his frozen robe, snow clinging to his bluish hair. Seraphine walked up to him, her footsteps nearly inaudible on the metallic surface.

"We can't keep waiting. That barrier is going to swallow us along with the mountain if we don't act soon," she said, crossing her arms. "Have you noticed the chalice... it's pulsing stronger every day?"

"Yes. It's reacting to something. Or preparing for something," Aeloria replied. His eyes never left the distant black barrier.

"Those patterns on the edge of the mountain... they're not natural," Seraphine continued, her eyes glowing with unease. "Our mother's been making me study dungeon artifacts nonstop ever since... you know..." she said, brushing the scar on her face with her right hand. "I don't know much about dungeons, but I know enough about artifacts to understand that it's linked to the passage to the next mountain."

Aeloria raised an eyebrow. "The chalice?"

"Yes. It's not just a container. It could be the key. Or some kind of link to the barrier."

The fire crackled behind me, and I found myself staring at the chalice again. That cursed object... pulsing slowly, as if it had a heart of its own. As if it were waking up.

Dórian silently chewed on a strip of dried meat, listening to the conversation in silence. After swallowing, he said without looking at anyone:

"If it's the key, we still need to understand the lock."

"Or find out who has the guts to turn it," Aeloria added in a grim tone.

Seraphine went quiet for a while, her gaze fixed on the chalice.

"Maybe... it's not about who has the courage. But who's willing to pay the price."

I took a deep breath, feeling the weight of her words. Nothing had come easy since we entered this cursed dungeon. Nothing was earned without blood. The problem was... whose blood would it be next?

Dórian gnawed on the dried meat like it was wood. His eyes, usually locked onto battle, were now lost in restlessness.

Seraphine broke the silence, her body near the fire before she spoke:

"Artifacts follow a different logic from our magic in Atlas."

Everyone turned to her.

She paused, picking up a small metallic shard from the frozen ground and spinning it between her fingers.

"Artifacts bypass those steps. They create anomalous effects, like shortcuts rooted in ancient commands—commands that don't depend on the user. That's why both mages and warriors can use them. They don't require control, just activation," she said convincingly.

"But even they have something in common with our magic?" the group questioned.

"What?" I asked, locking eyes with her.

She looked back at me calmly.

"Patterns. Everything has a pattern. Even this dungeon, no matter how chaotic it seems."

Dórian scoffed. "I don't see any pattern in this place. Feels like a nightmare that changes its rules every week."

"That's how it seems, but hear me out." She leaned forward slightly, her expression more serious now.

"Apparently, there was no logic until we reached the second mountain. It was only there—when Glenn killed the first locust and that weird centipede—that we were able to climb to the summit and see the other mountains for the first time."

"And then, every two days, a group of centipedes tried to take the third mountain. Then another fixed pattern of days to conquer the fourth and fifth mountain."

"Finally we got here, and activated that bizarre chalice."

Aeloria nodded. "The barrier activation on the fifth mountain and the destruction of the first one also happened together. Connected."

"The first mountain disappeared as if it had been erased from the dungeon. The second today, two days later. This is a cycle. A pattern," I added.

"Exactly." Seraphine pointed to the chalice, which was still pulsing with its sinister red glow at the center of the metallic altar.

"This isn't here by accident. That thing's been pulsing like a heart ever since we activated it with the mire. And what's different about this mountain compared to the others? Only two things: the acidic mire, and this artifact."

"The mire didn't affect the sixth mountain's barrier," Dórian reminded us. "We threw entire buckets at it. Didn't even scratch it."

"Then that leaves the chalice," Seraphine said, her voice now lower. "That chalice. The only thing that feels... alive."

Silence settled once again, as heavy as the clouds covering the sky above. The fire crackled quietly, as if it too felt the weight of our revelations.

Then Dália, her voice fragile, almost a whisper over the crackling wood, broke the stillness:

"You... know so much about artifacts, Seraphine. How?"

Everyone turned to her, then to Seraphine. The warrior leaned back against the cold stone, her eyes briefly lost in the pulsing glow of the red chalice in the distance. In silence, she brought her hand to the scar that crossed her cheek, fingers gliding slowly as if trying to erase a time that could never return.

"Because when I was sixteen years old..."

Her voice was calm, but something in the tension held between each word—something in the way Aeloria watched her quietly, eyes cast down—made the air feel heavier, almost oppressive.

Seraphine took a deep breath.