Semua Bab Broken by One, Desired by All : Bab 351 - Bab 360

Miles' Point Of ViewThe cold out here didn't just chill your skin - it felt like breathing in crushed glass, raw iron, and ash that burned every single time I dragged air into my lungs. Even after four months in this godsforsaken place, I never got used to it. Some nights I dreamed of warmth, of ordinary fires and ordinary rooms, and woke to find only this endless gray dark pressing against my eyes. Four months back. The borderlands. The void sitting right in the cracked gap between realms. I was crouching on the edge of a jagged obsidian cliff face, my knees pulled up to my chest, staring down into the abyss below. The darkness down there was crawling with motion. Thousands of Dark Sigen vanguard soldiers were gathering in tight formation, their pitch-black obsidian armor reflecting the harsh crimson glow of their containment runes. Weapons clanking, heavy iron boots stomping, magic circles humming - they were gearing up for a full-scale, calamity-level surprise invasion. They wa

Zane's Point Of View"Watch your steps," I muttered, my palm slick against the leather wrap of my hilt. "The ground feels soft. Like rotten meat.""It's ash, Captain," a soldier behind me whispered back, his breath ragged in the freezing dark. "Just ash.""Yeah, well, ash doesn't stick to your boots like glue," I grunted, testing my weight against the strange give of the earth beneath me. "Keep your shields up. Don't drift off the path."We had just crossed the threshold of the realm gate. The air on this side didn't feel right… it was freezing, heavy as lead, and smelled like dried copper and burned hair. A thick, grey fog hung over everything, dense enough that I could barely see the man marching five feet ahead of me. My squad's footsteps sounded muffled, swallowed whole by the mist, and a cold unease settled into my gut that had nothing to do with the temperature, something about this silence gnawed at me in a way I couldn't quite name, a wrongness that seemed to seep up through

Ronan's Point Of ViewThe spatial tear snapped shut with a sound like a wet towel popping. One second my fingers were half an inch from Zane's leather glove, and the next, there was nothing. Just empty, grey fog rolling over the spot where he'd been standing, as if he'd never existed at all. The absence hit me before my mind could even process what my eyes were telling me. "Zane!" I bellowed, my lungs burning as I lunged forward, my boots skidding through the black mud. I slammed down onto both knees, my gloved hands tearing through the wet ash where his feet had been a second ago, desperate for some trace of him… a footprint, a scrap of fabric, anything. "Zane! Answer me!" Nothing. Just the distant screaming of our vanguard and the clash of steel fifty yards back, indifferent to the hole that had just opened up in my chest. The world kept moving, uncaring, while mine had just stopped cold. ‘Dakar,' I growled into my own mind, my pulse hammering in my throat. ‘Locate him. Track th

Ronan's Point Of View The guy was practically shaking so hard his teeth were clicking together, staring up into my eyes like he was looking directly at an executioner. His fingers clawed uselessly at my leather boot, trying to push three hundred pounds of angry hybrid off his crushed chest.Sweat mixed with the grime on his face, carving pale tracks through the dirt, and I could smell the fear rolling off him in waves, thick and acrid, the kind that came right before a man's mind broke entirely. "I… I told you!" he gasped out, his voice cracking, spit and blood flecking the inside of his hood. "Lower labs! Under the old mining shafts! The east ridge entrance!" "The east ridge," I repeated, my voice deadly flat. "How many guards?" "A dozen! Maybe twenty!" he stammered, panic making his words stumble over each other. "Void-Iron gear, all of them! They're holding the perimeter while Vane finishes the extraction! You go there now, you're running straight into a meat grinder, Prince!"

Zane's Point Of ViewZane's Point Of View Another cold line of fire ripped across my ribs, and my legs just gave out. My knee slammed hard into the wet metal grating, the sound ringing out flat and dead in the dark. I didn't even have the breath left to curse properly. Just a long, ragged wheeze that tasted like copper and iron, my lungs feeling like somebody had stuffed them full of broken glass. Every inhale scraped against something torn inside my chest, and I wondered distantly how much longer my body could keep doing this… kneeling, bleeding, breathing, before it simply forgot how. Somewhere beneath the pain, a small, stubborn part of me refused to accept that this was how it ended, though I couldn't have said why it still bothered arguing. "Oh, look at that," the voice purred from somewhere above my left ear, floating in that greasy, heavy fog. "The little hybrid is kneeling. Tell me, captain, does it hurt more in your flesh or in your pride?" "Fuck... you..." I dragged out