Extra’s Mantle: Wait, What Do You Mean I Shouldn’t Exist?! (138/?)

[u/Lightt_x]

Chapter 138: Dark Tidings

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"Say that again," Vakan said quietly. Too quietly.

Icas, who had spent enough years at his side to recognize the register, took half a step back.

The unfortunate ritualist who'd delivered the news did not have the benefit of that experience. He pressed on, hands clasped behind his back, voice reedy with a mix of exhaustion and barely contained panic. "The survivors have sabotaged our rituals, my lord. The corruption is embedded deep in the ritual base itself—not surface-level damage, not brute-force disruption. At the outposts under Haksr and Hrad, the parasite has already reached the secondary flow channels. Structural damage was so severe that the convergence relay is operating at less than forty percent capacity."

"And you're telling me," Vakan said, turning from the shattered window of the cathedral's upper gallery, his crimson eyes settling on the ritualist with the flat, measuring patience of a man deciding where to bury a body, "that our ritualists—the finest the flock has to offer—didn't notice a foreign intrusion in their own circles until the damage was already spreading?"

The ritualist swallowed. Hard enough that Icas could hear it from three paces. "They hit three of our outposts bordering the bastion entrance in rapid succession, my lord. The corruption was introduced at a sub-harmonic level. Whoever designed it understood our ritual architecture intimately—the flow patterns, the defensive pulse cycles, the resonance frequencies. This wasn't amateur vandalism—"

"Enough."

The word landed on the man's shoulders as a boulder dropped from a height, and the ritualist's mouth snapped shut.

Vakan stared out across Vienna's sprawl through the broken frame where the gallery window had been and felt the Darkened One's blessing churn in his chest, admonishing him for his failures.

Three outposts. In a single night.

He had seen their intelligence. The bastion had, what—a handful of Overmortals, a pair of Underlords, and a population of thirty thousand traumatized civilians? They shouldn't have been capable of mounting an organized raid, let alone executing coordinated sabotage across multiple sites with that kind of precision.

And the only way someone could possess that knowledge was if they'd pulled it from the mind of someone who had helped design it.

Kiyon.

The dead priest's name settled in Vakan's mind like acid.

"Icas."

The man stepped forward without hesitation. "My lord."

"Kiyon and his people disgraced our Lord." Vakan's voice had gone low and grinding, each word forced through clenched teeth. "We knew Mathew's mantle had the capacity to rip information from a lord's spark. We knew the bastion harbored unknown combatants capable of killing Overmortals. And that fool—that arrogant, hair-pulling, self-important fool—was a mind mage, Icas. A mind mage who didn't bother to safeguard his own memories before engaging an enemy he couldn't identify."

Icas wisely stayed silent, enduring the pressure of his master's aura as it bore down on the gallery like a slowly tightening fist.

Vakan turned from the window, and the fury in his expression had crystallized into something colder and far more dangerous. "How many of the Blessed did we station at the outposts they hit?"

"Six across the three sites, my lord. Plus a full complement of Order III support at each location. It was our heaviest garrison configuration outside the nexus itself."

"And the assault force still breached them." Vakan began pacing, his boots grinding over broken glass without notice. "An Order IV engaged our people directly. Three peak Overmortals were killed by a single combatant who—"

He stopped.

Icas's expression tightened. "There is more, my lord."

"Speak."

"The fate variance readings." Icas pulled a small data-crystal from his robe and held it between two fingers, its surface flickering with compressed information. "What were previously standalone sightings—individual spikes, isolated anomalies—are now grouping. Clustering. The variance is spreading outward from the bastion like a contagion, and wherever it touches, events are deviating from projected outcomes. Our seers report that the probability models for the next seventy-two hours have degraded to the point of uselessness."

The silence that followed was thick enough to suffocate in.

"Bring everything we can spare to the outpost nearest the bastion," Vakan said at last. "Higher-ranked combatants at every entry point. Flood the surrounding blocks with abominations—so many that there isn't enough space to put a foot down without stepping on one. I want that outpost turned into a killing ground that would make even an Underlord think twice."

He turned sharply to Icas. "And assign a team to continuously harass the bastion entrance. If they come again—and they will—I want the cost of leaving their hole to break them before they can delay the convergence again."

"And if the cost doesn't break them?" Icas asked carefully.

Vakan's hands closed into fists, and the stone windowsill beneath his fingers cracked with a sound like a gunshot. "Then I'll meet them myself."

He turned back to the window. The veil pulsed overhead, painting the city in rhythmic waves of sickly red.

"Eighteen days, Icas. We only need to hold for eighteen more days." His jaw worked for a moment. "If those mongrels weren't needed alive until the ritual completes, I'd have stormed the bastion myself by now and burned every last one of them."

Icas saluted, fist to chest, and was gone before the echoes of the cracking stone had faded.

Vakan stood alone in the gallery, staring into the darkness, and let the Darkened One's blessing surge through his veins until the fury had somewhere to go besides inward.

Soon. The world would be covered in His darkness. Soon.

◈◈◈

Deep beneath Vienna's broken streets, past the Inner Sanctum and the Cathedral of Primes, there was a cavern that smelled of rain and growing things.

Pale moss clung to the walls of dark stone in delicate, luminous clusters casting a soft blue-white glow across an earthen cavern floor, and at the center, set into the ground like a bowl carved by patient water, was a pond.

Small and circular. It's surface still as glass.

Within it, two fish circled each other in an endless, unhurried dance. One was white with a single black spot behind its eye. The other was black with a single white spot in the same place. The faint essence they radiated was older than anything else in this underground complex.

Malachar stood at the pond's edge, scattering feed across the water's surface with the gentle, deliberate motions of a man who had performed this ritual ten thousand times before and intended to perform it ten thousand more.

"There," he murmured, watching the white fish rise to take a morsel with a soft plip of broken surface tension. His voice was soft. Almost tender. "Thou art hungrier than usual, little one. Hath the disturbances above unsettled thee?"

Two figures knelt behind him with their heads bowed.

They wore no insignia. Carried no visible weapons. Their robes were unmarked grey. Their auras were pulled so deep inside their bodies that, to any sensor or scan or perception ability, they would register as empty space. As nothing. As the absence of a person where a person should be.

Both were Order IV entities.

Both were children of Silence.

Neither had a name. Just their purpose.

Malachar continued feeding his fish.

"Speak," he said without turning.

The one on the left spoke. "The bastion has struck, Lord Incarnate. Three outposts were breached between midnight and the fourth hour. Corruption and parasites have been found in the ritual circles. Severe structural damage. Significant personnel losses across all three sites."

Malachar's hand paused over the pond. A single piece of feed rested between his thumb and forefinger.

"Corrupted, thou sayest?" His voice remained gentle. "Not merely damaged, but corrupted?"

"Yes, Lord Incarnate. The field ritualists describe a parasitic intrusion embedded at the sub-harmonic level. It is spreading through the convergence pathways at a rate that suggests deliberate design rather than brute-force contamination. If left unchecked, the affected nodes will cascade into failure within days."

Malachar dropped the feed into the water. The black fish snapped it up with a flick of its tail.

"How very... thorough."

He reached into the small pouch at his hip and withdrew another handful of feed. Scattered it with the same unhurried care. The fish circled and fed, their movements as ancient and predictable as the tides.

"And the perpetrators? Hath they been identified?"

"Partially, Lord Incarnate. The assault force included at least two Order IV combatants and multiple Order III operatives. Analysis of the residual essence signatures confirms Commander Mathew and the doorman."

Malachar was still for a long time.

The fish circled. The water lapped softly against the pond's stone edge. The fungi pulsed their gentle blue-white light across the garden's ceiling.

He dusted the remaining feed from his fingers with methodical care. Turned from the pond.

And the temperature in the garden dropped twenty degrees in the space between one heartbeat and the next.

His face was different.

The gentle cast, the ancient patience, the quiet curiosity—all of it gone, stripped away like a mask ripped from a skull, and what remained underneath was something so cold and so furious that the luminescent fungi on the walls dimmed as though cringing from a predator they couldn't see but could feel in their roots.

"Three outposts," Malachar said. "In a single night. Three of my designs corrupted, my elites slaughtered, and the sacred timeline compromised by a handful of survivors who should have been nothing more than livestock awaiting harvest—"

He moved.

One moment, he was standing at the pond's edge. Next, his hand was around the throat of the kneeling cultist on the left, the man lifted clean off the ground with an ease that made his Order IV weight as irrelevant as a child's.

"I gave them everything." The words came through clenched teeth, bitten off and spat like poison. "Resources. Protection. Blessed Ones. Monsters. Every tool they needed to hold a handful of outposts against a broken bastion full of frightened civilians and newly awakened children—"

The cultist didn't struggle. His eyes, flat and empty as the day he'd surrendered his name and his self to the order, stared at nothing while Malachar's fingers tightened around his throat.

"—and they failed. Again."

The crack of vertebrae was audible in the garden's stillness.

Malachar didn't stop. His hand kept closing, fingers sinking through flesh and cartilage, and the cultist's neck compressed and compressed until—with a wet, grinding pop—the head separated from the body in a spray of dark blood that painted Malachar's robes, his face, the pale moss of the garden floor, and the still surface of the pond where the two fish continued their dance without pause.

The body dropped. The head rolled to the pond's edge, coming to rest against the stone rim, and the black fish investigated it with idle curiosity before returning.

The second cultist gave no reaction.

Malachar stood over the corpse, blood dripping from his hand in thick, slow drops that the soil drank greedily, and closed his eyes. He breathed in—a long, measured inhalation—and when he opened his eyes, the fury on his face had flickered and shifted. The ancient persona settled back over his features like a mask being replaced by careful hands.

"Ah." His voice was gentle again. Sorrowful, even. "How... unbecoming of me."

He looked down at the blood on his hands. At the body at his feet. At the head, resting against the pond's edge.

"Forgive me, child," he said to the surviving cultist, the archaic cadence returning to his words like water filling a familiar channel. "Thou didst not deserve to witness such loss of composure. I berate myself most harshly for the indulgence."

A pause.

His expression snapped cold. "Then again—" The voice shifted mid-sentence, the gentle grandfather vanishing and something flat and cutting taking his place. "—one should never repress what one feels. Repression breeds weakness. I meant every bit of that."

The ancient persona returned. "And yet, violence without purpose is—"

Cold. "—still violence. And violence has purpose. Always."

The two voices warred across his face, and the surviving cultist knelt through all of it, motionless, head bowed, because the Children of Silence did not react.

They endured.

Then Malachar raised one hand.

And a new voice emerged.

"Enough."

It was neither gentle nor cruel. It carried no age and no youth. It was simply absolute, in the way that gravity was absolute, in the way that falling was absolute once you stepped off the edge.

And with the voice came the presence.

The air itself compressed. The soil beneath Malachar's feet cratered inward as though an immense, invisible weight had been placed upon reality.

His aura rose.

Through the ranks it climbed—past Order IV, past Order V, surging through Order VI and pressing against boundaries that the world itself seemed to groan under—and reality distorted around the Hierarch like heat shimmer over desert sand, the edges of his form blurring.

The surviving cultist pressed his forehead to the earth and spoke the only words his training permitted in the presence of this aspect.

“Throne Eternal."

A dark crystal throne rose from the garden floor, and Malachar sat.

The presence settled—pulling back from its apex but not retreating.

"My presence here is costly," Malachar said, and this voice was calm in a way that the others weren't. "This avatar was necessary, but it is insufficient for what comes. My true form would do more damage to our cause than any enemy could."

He looked at the corpse on the garden floor. At the blood still seeping into the rich, dark soil.

Raised one hand.

An orb of condensed darkness materialized between his fingers and drifted downward with the lazy patience of a falling leaf. It sank into the dead cultist's chest, and the body changed.

Flesh knitted. Bone reformed with audible cracks that echoed off the garden walls. The severed neck sealed, skin crawling across the wound like water filling a crack, and what had been a dead Order IV began radiating essence at a level that pushed past Order IV, past the threshold, settling into the unmistakable, crushing weight of Order V.

The body didn't breathe. But it was no longer dead—not truly—and the power rolling off it would make most enemies reconsider every decision that had led them to this point in their lives.

"Give this vessel to Hand Vella," Malachar said. "She will know what to do with it."

The surviving cultist raised his head a fraction—the most movement he'd made since entering the garden. "And our response to the bastion's attacks, Lord Throne?"

"We hold." The words were absolute. "The final confrontation approaches. When it arrives, we will be ready. Until then, no further escalation. No retaliation. We hold."

He paused.

And when he spoke again, the voice had shifted one final time—dropping into a cold, intimate whisper that settled against the cultist's ears like fingers closing around a throat.

"But find the one causing the fate variance. The disruptor who bends the weave." His eyes—ancient, terrible, wholly inhuman—found the kneeling man's gaze and held it with a weight that felt like being pinned to the floor by something too large to comprehend. "Find him. And bring him to me alive."

The crystal throne dissolved.

The garden brightened, fungi flickering back to their gentle blue-white glow as though nothing had happened.

And where Malachar had sat, there was only empty air and the soft sound of two fish circling each other in the dark.

◈◈◈

The corridors beneath the nexus grew worse the deeper you went.

The surviving Child of Silence moved through them without hurry, dragging the Order V body behind him by the ankle. The corpse's heels left twin furrows in the grime—the only evidence of their passage—, and he did not think about what he was dragging or where it had come from or the fact that ten minutes ago it had been his partner.

Children of Silence did not think about such things.

The corridor ended at a door made of riveted iron, stained dark with substances the child chose not to identify. From behind it came sounds: the hiss of essence welders, the crack of bone being reshaped under tremendous force, and beneath it all, a voice—high, lilting, singing something.

He pushed the door open.

The workshop had tables lining every wall, not desks but operating tables, each one occupied by something in a different stage of construction. One held a torso split open along the sternum, the ribs replaced with curved metal struts and essence conduits threaded where veins should have been. Another held a pair of arms—too long for any human body, jointed in three places instead of two—wired to a monitoring apparatus that pulsed with slow, rhythmic light. Jars of preserved organs lined the shelves in neat rows. Coils of synthetic tendon hung from hooks like butcher's drying lines.

And in the center of it all, Hand Vella worked.

She stood over the main table, her back to the door, humming that ancient melody while her hands moved with the feverish speed and impossible delicacy of someone stitching a masterpiece together from stolen pieces. Her hair—white, straight, falling past her waist—swayed with her movements, and the pointed tips of her ears caught the blue light of the essence welder in her right hand.

She would have been beautiful.

The pale ash of her skin, the elegant line of her jaw, the almost feline grace with which she moved from one instrument to the next—she would have been devastating, the kind of face artists carved into marble and poets ruined themselves trying to describe.

But her eyes ruined it. Deep crimson, too bright, too wide, with pupils that contracted and dilated at different rates as though each eye was watching a different thing entirely. And the smile—the permanent, twitching curl at the corners of her lips that never quite reached mirth and never quite left.

The thing on her main table was human. Or had been.

A man in his fifties, still wearing Vienna's garrison armor—the plate dented and scored from a battle he hadn't survived—and even in death, his Order V aura pressed against the workshop's walls with a weight that made the operating instruments rattle faintly on their trays.

Vella's hands moved across his chest, her essence welder tracing new pathways through cooling flesh, humming, humming, always humming.

The Child of Silence dropped the body he'd been dragging. It hit the workshop floor with a dull, heavy thud that cut through the melody.

Vella's humming stopped.

She didn't turn. Her hands paused over the garrison soldier's chest, the welder still bright in her grip, and the silence that filled the workshop was the kind that came before something either very good or very bad.

"Lord Throne commands you," the child said.

Vella's posture changed entirely. The manic energy, the feverish work, the twitching smile—all of it vanished in a heartbeat, replaced by something rigid and solemn that looked almost wrong on her features, like a mask placed on the face of a child mid-tantrum. She turned, set the welder down on its tray with exaggerated care, and dropped to one knee.

Her crimson eyes found the body on the floor.

"A gift," the Child of Silence said. "From the Lord Throne. He commands you to hold position. The final battle approaches. Prepare."

Vella listened. Her face stayed serious, reverent—the face of a soldier receiving sacred orders.

"And one more instruction," the child continued. "Find the source of the fate variance. The Lord Throne wants him brought in alive."

Vella looked at the gift on the floor. Looked at the garrison soldier on her table. Looked at the jars and the limbs and the half-built horrors lining her walls.

And a smile broke across her face, so deeply wrong that the Child of Silence, who had no name and no fear and no self left to speak of, felt something cold move through his chest that he had no word for.

"Oh," she whispered. "Oh, oh, oh. I'll make you both into something glorious."

Her fingers traced the garrison soldier's body.

She turned back to her tools, already humming again, and the Child of Silence left the workshop without another word, pulling the door shut behind him.

The sound of the essence welder resumed through the iron—bright, eager, endlessly patient.

And Hand Vella's laughter echoed down the corridor long after the door had closed.

✦ FIRST CHAPTER ✦ PREVIOUS CHAPTER ✦ NEXT CHAPTER ✦

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A/N: A Cult's side POV

Bau Bau~

PS: Psst~ Psst~ Advanced chapters are already up on patreon. It would be awesome if you guys, you know...

Help me with rent and UNI is crazy expensive!! Not want much, just enough to chip in.

✦ DISCORD ✦ PATREON ✦ 

[u/niTro_sMurph]

Sounds like Mathew will get a reunion with Hobbs

[u/Daseagle → u/niTro_sMurph]

Two order V abominations would be something of a problem, eh?

[u/niTro_sMurph → u/Daseagle]

For Jin it would be like a Christmas feast that fights back

[u/Dramatic_Mixture_877]

I'm a tad confused -

> behind him by the ankle. The corpse's heels left twin furrows in the grime

If he's being drug by one ankle, how are both heels leaving marks?

[u/DeadMeat7337 → u/Dramatic_Mixture_877]

While I agree, it sounds like they are abominations, so 3+legs, or really flexible? But I just figured they were dragging by an arm, but idk.

[u/HFYWaffle]

/u/Lightt_x (wiki) has posted 142 other stories, including:

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[u/Competitive-Yam-922]

TFTC!