There's No Love In the Deathzone (BL)-Chapter 478 - 471. Chipping the Mountain

"Ouch..." Han Shin rubbed the back of his head as they walked together toward the command center. "Hey, I think this is swollen," the healer protested, and when the perpetrator ignored him, he turned to the perpetrator’s boyfriend. "Zeeein!"

"You’re a healer, so heal it yourself," Zein said without care, and Han Shin pouted in disappointment.

"You’re so cold now...even though I worked hard to take care of your kids..."

Bassena scoffed, but Zein chuckled and patted the healer’s head--nothing more. "Then stop spreading stuff to my kids, huh?"

Han Shin grinned and poured his mana to the back of his head, getting rid of the pain a Saint-class magician-warrior-hybrid’s palm caused. He stared at the back of Bassena’s head with narrowed eyes--not for revenge, but to scan the man. He took out a measuring device to make sure, and just as he thought, Bassena was clean. The cleanest of the clean, as if no speck of miasma had ever entered his system.

The black eyes glanced at Zein and observed the guide from head to toe. "How can you be fine after absorbing so much?"

"There’s all kinds of guiding in this world, Shin..." Zein replied with a slight daze in his voice.

Ah...they had been doing it before--sexual guiding. But he only found out last night that there were degrees to it. How deep the guide and the esper dove inside each other heavily influenced the quality of the guiding.

With last night...even though he cleansed Bassena fully, he didn’t feel like he nearly experienced burnout, unlike last year. He woke up feeling fine. They both woke up feeling fine. And he thought he could guide the rest of the espers today.

"Ugh--you must have done it in that place, did you?" Han Shin clicked his tongue when he saw the flicker inside the blue eyes. "Are you trying to relive the experience or something? Or was it because the last one ended badly?"

"For someone who keeps protesting about us, you awfully showed so much interest in my sex life," Bassena glanced back with a raised brow.

"Because I still need spice! Unless you can send me back to my fiancee!" Han Shin groaned and howled at the slightly brighter sky. "Anyway, why are you looking so serious suddenly? I thought today was supposed to be a recovery day?"

"You’ll see," Bassena said simply while opening the command tent’s door.

Inside, there were people he had called for today’s emergency meeting; Kei, Ashur, and Iore. Ron also followed them a minute later after changing his clothes, and afterward, they locked the command center.

All of them, save for Bassena and Zein, had a curious expression. But looking at Bassena’s serious expression, they just waited patiently--not for long, since Bassena also didn’t waste any time. Right after the command tent was locked, he took out a highly secured tube and put it on top of a cleared table.

"Ugh--what the hell is this?" Han Shin winced as he stared at the tube, which was supposed to be clear, but was now filled with murky miasma. In the middle of it was a dark crystal, almost looking like a shard, which was letting out the miasma.

"It looks different from a regular miasma," Kei narrowed her eyes. "It wasn’t just a black smoke; and...there was a different kind of power coming from it..."

"Like the one used by those commander classes to evolve?" Ron muttered.

"Yes, I think so," Han Shin poked the tube after putting on his gloves. He flicked his gaze toward Bassena. "Was this inside that creature you fight? The one leading the troop?"

Bassena nodded and Ron unconsciously rubbed his chest. His body might have disintegrated instantly at that time, but he could still feel the split second of contact--as well as the pain that came with it.

"I haven’t included this in the report because it’s still a conjecture, but after talking with Zein, we came to the same conclusion," Bassena stared at the crystal lying in the middle of the tube. "That creature was the fragment of the Fallen Star."

As the other espers widened their eyes in surprise, Zein put his hand against the clear glass tube. The crystal, which had been lying quietly all this time, suddenly shook and moved around in the tube, pushing on the edge as if trying to run away.

"My nemesis," Zein smirked. If that creature was the fragment of the Fallen Star, then it would be the same kind as him--just in the opposite team. And then, the blue eyes dimmed and the guide’s face turned grim. "Seemed like it might be targetting me."

"You don’t know that."

"No, it kept looking in the direction of the guides," Bassena said. "So there’s a high possibility."

Of course, there was also a possibility that it targeted the guides in general instead of Zein specifically--which might also explain why the wights and the lesser specters kept attacking them from behind, and even showing up through the crack in the middle of the guides.

Either way, it was bad. Most likely, this fragment wasn’t the only one existing--which means they would have to face it again in the future.

The esper came to a contemplative silence, but Bassena clapped his hands to bring their attention back.

"Anyway, we’re not here to talk about their real objective," he said, knocking on the tube’s metal frame to send the fragment back to the middle. "It’s to decide how to deal with this."

They watched the crystal shake and pour out even more miasma to fill the tube, as if trying to hide itself from them--or rather, from its blue-eyed antithesis.

"The original plan with Specter was to put them in this secured tube. But as you can see..." Bassena stroked the metal frame, which was supposed to be new and pristine, but now looked like it had been staying in a warehouse for a decade or more. The metal shine was getting dull fast in real-time, and those with discerning eyes like the scouts could see the inside was getting corroded. "This tube can’t contain the intensity of the miasma the fragment let out."

"How nasty..." Han Shin shuddered and glanced at the box containing the dark purple shards they gathered for research purposes.

Thankfully, that one didn’t have the autonomous function of being a toxic gas sprayer.

Kei narrowed her eyes as she leaned closer to observe the fragment better. "In that case, the best solution is to destroy it, right?"

"Right," Zein nodded, retracting his hand so the fragment wouldn’t get even more agitated and spray decaying fog inside the tube. "The problem is...we can’t be sure what will happen when we destroy it."

The espers frowned slightly, thinking about all kinds of possibilities. In the end, looking at the corroded state of the tube, Ashur lifted his face to look at Zein with widened eyes.

"...are you worried it would be like an eruption?"

The other espers turned toward Zein and Bassena with a gasp. An eruption from a fragment of Celestial Being who was at least as strong as two five-star espers? How destructive could it be?

"Yes, exactly," Bassena nodded. "We were thinking of doing it in a cave or secluded place, and even then, we will do it inside my nightfall," he explained, and added immediately when the other espers nodded in agreement. "That being said, the creature could cancel my domain, so I’m worried the fragment might have that effect when we destroy it."

And if that were to happen, the eruption would still escape the domain and destroy the surroundings.

Of course, they had no idea if that would really happen, but in this operation, they needed to be careful about everything.

"So you need to get far away from here," Iore concluded.

"Yes," Bassena took the tube and put it back inside his sealed storage space. "Seeing the progress of the decay, it would be better to do it as soon as possible."

"How soon?"

"Today."

Han Shin gasped. "But we haven’t even started the cleaning up and the construction of the watchtower! The defense will be..."

"I know; that’s why we have this meeting," Bassena flicked the healer’s forehead, who grumbled about needing to heal himself again.

The meeting then shifted to talking about the construction and the defense of the place while both Bassena and Zein were gone to destroy the fragment. Drafting a cleansing schedule and defense rotation was stressful when the two commanders left the base, but Zein actually felt rather optimistic.

"Anyway, this might be a good thing," he said suddenly, and the espers looked at him with intrigue.

"What do you mean?"

"If that is a fragment, it means the Fallen Star had to divide its existence and power," the guide said. Just like Sethnath, who had to cease his own existence in order to provide Earth with all of his fragments. "The more it divides itself, and the more we destroy the fragments..."

"The weaker it’ll become," Bassena finished the thought with a smile on his face--the first one he had during his talk.

Suddenly, slaying a Fallen Star didn’t sound so difficult anymore.