Chapter 360: To the Empire (4)

The impact thundered like a mountain cracking open. The hall buckled as the Twisted’s vast body lurched, spines rasping against the air itself until the sound scraped the mind. Ketal slid backward under the shock, boots carving a dark arc across the polished floor, and steadied himself in the same breath. He drew a long, deliberate inhale through his nose, found Helia with a glance, and marked her absence.

She had already fled—far and fast. He allowed himself a quick, silent approval. The speed of her retreat deserved praise, and the choice itself had been correct. Protecting her while fighting a Primarch would have been impossible. He narrowed his eyes at the thing that had filled the inner palace and spoke in a voice flattened by focus.

“How did you get outside?” he asked it.

“I think you know the answer,” the Twisted Primarch replied, and mirth like rust on bone rode the sound. “You, of all beings, brought me out.”

“So it was as I thought,” Ketal said.

The Twisted had escaped the Demon Realm, and the reason was painfully simple. Ketal had killed what had been sealing the White Snowfield. The moment that gatekeeper vanished, the barrier began to fail, and through that failure the Primarch pushed a portion of itself into the Mortal Realm.

So this is my sin,

he thought, and the taste that rose in his mouth was strangely bitter.

Even so, a point did not fit. He set it down plainly.

“You should have been fighting the others,” he said. “How did you come out alone?”

The three Primarchs had warred with one another since creation first found its shape, and they would continue until whatever stood beyond war itself reached out a hand to stop them. Even when Ketal stepped beyond the skin of this world, their conflict had not paused. If one emerged into the Mortal Realm, logic suggested the others would follow. A single exit felt like a flaw in the math.

“You may thank your underlings for that as well,” the Twisted said, and amusement curled through the words. “More precisely, thank the ones beneath you. They interfered in our war. They were impressive.”

Ketal’s expression hardened as the memory returned. When he had departed the White Snowfield, he had commanded the barbarians not to follow him. If obedience proved too heavy a burden, he had told them to kill a Primarch instead. In his tongue, it had been a softened way of saying they should remain at home and keep their heads low.

Yet they had not understood it that way. They had believed in him completely and had hurled everything they had against a Primarch. The cost had been devastation so complete that only the word

extermination

came close to describing it. Even so, through that ruin, they had achieved the impossible—they had driven one of the three beings to the brink of death.

They had changed the balance of a fight that no mortal should have been able to nudge. The Twisted sounded genuinely entertained.

“To think that mere mortals who had crawled in from the Outside could influence our battle,” it said. “ It’s astonishing. Their effort pleased me.”

“I see,” Ketal answered, and his tongue clicked once against his teeth.

“You are the victor among the three,” he said.

The Horrid, Twisted, and Hideous—of those three, the one that remained standing was the Twisted Primarch. The creature’s form rippled, and a dry satisfied laugh escaped from deep within its body.

“It’s all thanks to you,” it said. “I will commend them myself. I would grant them a reward.”

“Then die,” Ketal said.

He tore Aura from the depth of his breath and poured it along the axe until the metal drank it with a hungry gleam. The weapon answered like a living thing; the authority of the Abomination housed within it rose to the skin. Ketal lowered his shoulder and charged.

The Twisted met him without hesitation. A single spine, one among tens of thousands, shot out with a scream like cloth being ripped from the weave of the world. It streaked for Ketal’s chest, riding an authority that did not touch merely flesh but tried to alter the idea of flesh.

In earlier fights, every time the Twisted’s spines had touched him, the limb they found had twisted out of true past the point where ordinary healing could reach it. They were not attacks to block; they were attacks to avoid. Even Heroes would fail if they tried to stop such strikes by force.

However, this time was different. The axe met the spine with a meaty, tearing clang that was not a sound steel should make. The Twisted’s authority bit at all things, trying to torque them into ruin. It reached for the axe as well, a chewing at the edge that would have unmade the weapon if it had been no more than mortal ore.

Yet, it did not yield. Aura thickened around the axe and howled as it resisted. Ketal pressed with both hands and twisted his weight through his hips. The spine jolted wide.

It slammed into the far wall. The stone puckered and writhed around it like dough rising too fast, then seized and cracked open into a hole large enough to drive a cart through.

“The Abomination’s authority,” the Twisted said. “So you have learned to pull it out of yourself. Curious. A being from elsewhere should not manage such a thing. No... Perhaps this, too, is an aspect of your own power.”

“Stop talking,” Ketal said, and he cut off the rest by closing the distance.

The Twisted obliged. A storm of spines leapt. Each barb carried in its tip the power to catch the world and wring it. A handful of Heroes working together might turn one or two aside; no gathering of men could stop a summer rain of them.

Ketal did not attempt to stop them all. He moved, shoulders tucked and head down, changing height with each step. Some he slipped past, letting barbed points graze the air where his ribs had been, and the rest he battered aside in sparks and bitter notes of torn law. He was almost on the Twisted when it spoke, voice hollow with will.

“Be knotted.”

The world turned sideways around him.

𝐟𝕣𝕖𝐞𝐰𝕖𝚋𝐧𝗼𝚟𝐞𝕝.𝗰𝐨𝐦

Space did not merely kink; time took part, twisting until a small singularity bloomed like a coal at the center of the room. Anything with a definition of

before

and

after

that was not nailed to bedrock tried to collapse toward that new rule. Ketal dragged the Myst in him up over his body like armor and clamped both hands tighter on the axe’s haft.

He punched through the warped layer. The skin of the bent world tore, and he stepped into ordinary distance again. Shock rippled through his arms and across his chest; it flashed in his jaw as a brief throb. He grimaced and measured what he had just felt.

It is strong

, he thought.

This was no avatar or puppet. This was the true body itself. Worse, it felt heavier than before, as if it had eaten something between then and now, perhaps pieces of the other Primarchs it had beaten in the White Snowfield, and added those weights to its own.

The Twisted’s true body had shown itself on the continent. It was, in plain language, a disaster. The Primarchs were strong in a way the Mortal Realm did not compute. Unlike the Demon King, whose force ran along a channel that mortals, on a very good day, could follow with their eyes, the Twisted’s was alien by design. It had a talent for defiling surfaces and interiors alike.

Even so...,

he thought without heat.

Even so, the Twisted was lacking. He slipped backward under a sweeping tide of pressure and shaved a spine away with a diagonal cut. The deflected barb spun out like a thrown spear and then rattled harmlessly across the floor at an angle he had chosen for it. He kept moving.

By the standards of the White Snowfield, by the memory of the power he had seen there being thrown like boulders across a lake, this presence felt smaller. Not small, never small, but narrowed. He could meet it without tearing himself apart to do so. While blocking the attack and assessing the situation, Ketal suddenly realized something crucial.

Another spine screamed free. Ketal took it on the flat, let the shock run into his elbows, and guided it high. The barb streaked away and flew toward the sky beyond the palace. If it had reached the open air and lodged in the earth outside the capital, it would have left a twist in the Mortal Realm that would not right itself for a thousand years.

However, it did not reach the sky. It hit something invisible with a pitched whine, rebounded, and tumbled back into the palace like a needle caught in a net.

So it is bound here,

Ketal thought.

It cannot leave the capital.

The Twisted appeared bound to this place, its presence anchored by something unseen. The thought settled in his mind like a weight. The White Snowfield lay far away. If the creature had truly broken through its ancient seals and emerged victorious, its hunger should have first turned toward the lands surrounding its battlefield. That it had come here instead revealed the workings of a different force entirely, a mechanism beyond the simple logic of conquest.

It was strange that the Twisted had managed to emerge so easily in the first place. Even the Ugly Rat he had faced in the North had said that stepping outside consumed a great deal of strength. The Ugly Rat claimed that it was already at its limit, and that the Primarch could never leave its domain.

This meant that something else was at work. Ketal spread his senses. The capital unfolded in his mind in layers, each layer noting its simple facts. He let the information flow without resistance.

He found the answer under the imperial palace. There, behind a translucent veil that blurred and shifted like heat-haze, something writhed—something that did not belong in this world and yet was intimately connected to it.

Just then, another barrage of spikes came toward Ketal. He shrouded himself in Myst and dodged the attack. Without breaking motion, he charged forward and struck the Twisted with a fierce blow.

The Twisted let out a low groan as its spiny, sea-urchin-like body was sent hurtling backward, crashing into the ground. Though the effort drained a considerable amount of Ketal’s strength, he had bought the time he needed.

He pressed his heel against the floor of the imperial palace and drove his power downward. The ground split open beneath him, collapsing in a roar as he plunged straight into the depths below.

“What is that?” he said aloud.

It was alien. He had never seen this exact device, and yet something about it pried at a drawer in his memory and almost slid it open. He stared through the veil, counting edges and rhythms, and then the image resolved.

“Is that... the White Snowfield?” he murmured.

A pale, frozen plain appeared and vanished beneath the shifting skin of the thing. The Abomination within him spoke softly.

“A passage,” it said.

“A passage?” he repeated.

“A trace will do for a name,” the Abomination said. “Before the gods and demons together bound us, this world was ours to name and unname.”

Once, the universe had belonged to the Oldest Ones. Only when gods and demons had laid hands together on the same ring had the door been forced shut.

“Of course, some traces remained,” the Abomination murmured. “After the war, most were cleaned. Not all.”

“So this is how the Twisted reached Outside,” Ketal said.

The Twisted had not pushed its true body through a wall and paid the toll. It had extended itself along a preexisting line—this trace, this passage—and settled at the far end. That explained the boundary. It could not move far from its anchor without tearing something important and draining itself dry. As Ketal looked, the Abomination made a small dark sound.

“But why do I see traces of me?” it asked.

“You mean those sigils?” Ketal said.

Near the veil lay a careful arrangement of ornaments resting upon low stands and shallow shelves. Each bore a single, perfectly etched symbol, their precision untouched by time. The Abomination regarded them and gave silent confirmation, its awareness sealing the truth of what those marks represented.

“Mortals who served me used that mark,” it said. “Why is it here?”

“Because they served you, once,” a voice said.

The answer came with a prickle at Ketal’s spine. He turned in the same instant as he swung. The axe met a rush of spines with a crash that tore paint from walls three rooms away. The Twisted shouldered through a frame of broken stone and laughed softly.

“They believed the one beyond that passage was you,” it said. “They sent gifts and prayers. It was a comic sight.”

“You wore my name,” the Abomination said, and for the first time in a long while, the sour note of displeasure edged its tone.

“So the Empire served the Abomination from the beginning,” Ketal said. “That explains their stillness in the war against the Demon King.”

They had refused to serve a god or a demon because their loyalty ran elsewhere. They had no cause to oppose the Demon King; the Demon King was not the one who answered their vows. When they did stir at matters of the Demon Realm, it would be because they believed they had found the path to the being they truly worshiped.

That was enough to form a plan. Ketal deflected another spine with a flick of his weapon, the sharp clatter of impact scattering through the air before fading into a hush that slipped away like startled birds taking flight.

“This much I can meet,” he measured.

If he fought honestly and put his life in the first stack of things to spend, he could kill the Twisted. Killing it as soon as possible would serve the fantasy he desired, the shape of the world he intended to leave when he stepped away from it.

Then, he frowned. Something would not settle.

Why, then,

he thought.

Why are there no people in the capital?

The stillness of the Twisted carried intention. It had chosen to wait here. Its apostle’s strike on Magna Rain had already proven its reach beyond these walls. If expansion had been its goal, it would have already begun. The silence surrounding it felt deliberate—a pause steeped in purpose rather than absence.

Ketal did not discard the feeling. His instincts had brought him out of worse rooms than this. He shoved another rank of spines wide and widened his senses again, trading a moment of offense for a cleaner map.

This time, he did not glance over things or let them blur together. He counted everything—the tiles that lined the stretch of pavement, the two apples soft and sinking on a forgotten dinner table, the fork that lay on the floor beside a chair pushed aside and never returned to place, the bowl of stew that had long since cooled and turned to a gray-green sponge of mold. When the count ended, he found them at last.

Deep beneath the capital lay a labyrinth of chambers, silent and stifling. Within them stood hundreds of human figures—perhaps once citizens of the city above. Yet they were no longer human. The corruption of the Twisted had found them and remade them, bending bone and flesh alike until what remained resembled apostles fashioned in its image.

One such creature could overturn a province. There were hundreds, sitting docile in the dark, waiting for a word from above. The shape of the plan revealed itself.

“You...,” Ketal said, but the word was only a pin to fix a thought to the air.

“You have understood. I could leave this place if I spent enough to do it. But why should I? I am not interested in small hunts. I look at larger prey,” the Twisted answered, laughing. “I want the world.”

Long ago, the universe had been their estate. The Twisted wanted to restore that order. It lifted its voice as if already making proclamation in a captured city.

“This is only a forward camp,” it said. “The universe will be mine. I will stain all things. And you, thing from elsewhere—you are the first rung.”

Spines poured from it in a true storm, not the probing squall of earlier exchanges but an all-directions crush meant to pen him in and pin him down, then nail him to the floor under their combined weight.

Ketal’s mouth bent in a colder shape than a smile.

“Who granted you permission?” he murmured.

The words carried a chill that slid under the skin. Even the Abomination felt a brief, instinctive flinch. Aura rose with a low growl. The Abomination began to climb toward the surface of him, called by force of will. It was not the only answer that came.

Something other than the Abomination moved. It was not the Twisted. It was not anything the Twisted had ever named. It came up from the dark place in Ketal that did not have a word in this language.

The world erased itself along a narrow path. Spines winked out by the dozen, then the hundred, as if a rubber had been dragged across ink. Ketal took a step that put him inside every barrier the Twisted had raised. He did not stop. He drove straight through the open wound and struck.

The blow landed with a sound like a cliff falling into the sea. The Twisted slammed into the deep floor and drove a crater into stone. A scar opened along its body, large and raw, and for the first time since it had appeared in the palace, it showed a mark that did not immediately try to heal.