Chapter 158: The Last Collapse and the Only Way Forward

Elora's POV

The collapse came faster than imagined, and far more violent.

From the massive crater blown open by dragonfire at the center of the council chamber, dark crimson magma and thick black miasma gurgled and surged outward like a fountain.

The heavy marble floor beneath their feet fractured in radiating cracks, and countless broken stones plunged with dull, bone-chilling thuds into the bottomless abyss below.

The stench that had been more than half purified from the air was instantly replaced by a sulfurous, putrid reek a hundred times more concentrated.

The roar that rose from the deepest depths bore no resemblance to any known creature's cry — it was more like the grinding of teeth from ten thousand dead souls, all gnashing at once inside a cold and hollow stomach.

"Damn it..."

Darian leaned against a half-collapsed stone pillar, his left hand forcibly knitting his broken right arm back together with blood-qi, the excruciating pain drawing a layer of cold sweat across his brow. His crimson eyes locked onto the fractured earth below, and he ground his back molars. "That idiot buried underground... how could it possibly wake up now?"

I braced my long whip against the ground and knelt on one knee, gasping hard, my heart slamming against the walls of my chest.

Something was wrong.

This was absolutely wrong.

In every piece of intelligence we had gathered before the war, the Void Devourer — the Abyss's third avatar — was a primordial beast of incomprehensibly massive scale. To awaken a creature of that tier, the required life-force and soul energy was an astronomical figure.

By any reasonable calculation, the battle at the glacial pass on the frontline had only erupted days ago.

Even if the Church had converted thousands upon thousands of civilians into berserk puppets and driven them to their deaths, the energy conducted back through the subterranean veins to the Holy City would have suffered tremendous loss along the way.

More critically — we had just slain the second avatar, the Flesh Puppeteer.

With the old Pope dead, the neural nexus completely drained and destroyed, the puppets at the front should have already lost all control, and the conduits extracting life-force should have severed along with it.

Without the steady, unceasing flow of sustenance, what possible grounds did the primordial beast sealed in the cathedral's lowest depths have to cross the threshold of awakening so immediately?

This defied all logic.

"This doesn't make sense..."

I wiped the blood from my chin and fixed my gaze on the fissure spewing black miasma. "There's no way it's absorbing energy this fast. Even if you stuffed every mortal body that died at the pass these past few days into it, it still wouldn't be enough to ignite its core."

Beside me, Lucius forced himself upright using his sword hilt as a brace. His face was ashen as paper, but his sapphire eyes held a complex expression — deep pain, and unmistakable understanding.

"Its breathing is accelerating."

As a former Grand Inquisitor of the Church, he was more attuned to the Void Devourer's rhythms than any of us.

"The Church's advance hasn't stopped." Lucius straightened, his spine rigid as an iron rod on the verge of snapping, his voice hoarse. "On the contrary, the zealots at the main camp are pushing people into the altar. Not outsiders — their own Holy Knight battalions."

I froze for a moment, and then a wave of cold detonated straight up my spine.

"They've gone mad?" The words left my mouth before I could stop them. "They're feeding their own souls to the Abyss's third avatar?"

"Not mad. Desperate."

Darian let out a quiet, cold laugh, his tone edged with cruelty and contempt. He brushed the ash from his cuff with an air of casual indifference, then moved to stand beside me, gazing down at the distant horizon.

"My little moth, you just upended half the Abyss's staging ground on this plane." Darian's narrow red eyes narrowed further, a flash of bloodthirsty light crossing them. "The moment the second avatar died, the Abyssal Lord's only remaining anchor in this world became that Devourer. The old ones behind the Church know perfectly well that once your dragonfire recovers, they'll never get another chance."

"So they severed the third avatar's outer shell ahead of schedule." Lucius picked up the thread. "They couldn't afford to wait for the Devourer to feed itself to full power. They forced open its eyes using something close to a suicidal method — tearing it awake by brute force."

I drew a sharp breath.

A premature monster.

It meant the Abyss's third avatar now stirring slowly into wakefulness was not at its absolute peak. It was a starving, colossal beast that had been forcibly stabbed into consciousness.

"Even without being at its peak, its power is not to be underestimated." Darian's smile faded somewhat, and his eyes turned cold. "A creature in a state of hunger and frenzy doesn't think about tactics. It will simply devour every living thing in its path without restraint, tearing apart whatever it can find to fill the void in its core."

A low-frequency vibration, deeply unsettling, carried on the wind — the sound of the earth cracking in the distance, of space being forcibly rent apart.

The original plan became waste paper in an instant.

My skull rang with a heavy, reverberating pressure.

The plan had been straightforward: infiltrate the Holy City, eliminate the old Pope and the second avatar by surprise, sever the control over the front-line puppets, and thereby buy precious breathing room. After the decapitation strike succeeded, we would return through the underground aqueducts the way we came, retreating to the Northern Command at maximum speed. There, we would rendezvous with Rowan's heavy cavalry, Gael's werewolf legions, Silas's high-elven mage corps, and Kael's dragonkin, pooling every mind and blade to determine how to confront the Abyss together.

But now —

That plan was dead.

A violent crack and crash shattered my thoughts. The great golden gates at the entrance of the council chamber, along with dozens of meters of sheer cliff wall surrounding them, collapsed thunderously under the enormous subterranean tremor. Tens of thousands of tons of stone came down in a suffocating cascade of rubble and dust.

Worse still, the entire marble floor of the Supreme Council Chamber was visibly, undeniably sinking.

"There's no time to breathe — get out first!" I shouted.

Darian, Lucius, Nyx, and the remaining elite fighters followed me in a dead sprint toward the exit. This time we didn't retreat the way we had come; we fled openly through the Church's main gates.

Just as I had anticipated, with the fall of the second avatar and the stirring of the third, the Church — and the entire Holy City — had descended into chaos. My own mind was no different.

By the time we made it out of the Holy City and back to the Northern Command, the great devouring beast, having fed on the underground reserves of an entire holy city, would long since have broken through the earth's surface, reducing the whole of the north — and eventually the entire continent — to a wasteland of the dead. Every act of resistance by that point would be nothing more than a pitiful, laughable struggle.

"There's no going back, is there." Darian turned his face toward me, his gaze carrying a flicker of all-seeing mockery and something deeper beneath it. "So then, my Empress — what devious little idea is turning over in that head of yours right now?"

Lucius stepped forward as well, dropping to one knee, pressing a hand over his heart, lifting his eyes to me with the fervent, reverent gaze of a man looking upon a god. "Wherever you point, my sword will slaughter for you alone."

I did not answer immediately.

I drew a long, slow breath of cold air laced with blood and sulfur, letting the sharp sting force my exhausted mind back into clarity.

Against my chest, the dragonfire pulsed violently, searing and insistent.

I looked at the three men around me, each one holding on by sheer will. Darian's right arm was fractured and still not fully restored, his blood-qi deeply depleted. Lucius had just fought through the battle with the second avatar and was too weak to hold his sword steady. Nyx had burned through every drop of magic — even sustaining an illusion was beyond her now. And I myself had spent more than half my dragonfire in that last detonation.

A direct confrontation with the Devourer in this state was suicide. Retreating to the Northern Command was no longer an option. And once that creature fully crawled free of the earth, nothing and no one would be able to stop it.

If the path forward was sealed and the road behind was severed, then only one path remained.

But the cost was beyond reckless. The danger was absolute.

I slowly wound the dragonfire whip back in, coiling it tightly, securing it back around my waist.

"We're not going back to the north."

"Here. Today."

"We seal the Abyss — completely."

Darian's crimson eyes contracted slightly. He seemed to know exactly what I intended, and the curve of his smile grew wilder, more unhinged.

"As you command, my Queen."