Chapter 165: Iron Rock |
The wind was the town’s only resident now, and Cid was its solitary guest. He walked down the main thoroughfare, his boots crunching on grit and fractured dreams. On either side, empty buildings stood as hollow sentinels, their windows like sightless eyes. Some structures gaped open, their doors torn away by time, while others were sealed tight, their shutters clinging to the frames with a tenacious grip. With every gust that blew through the abandoned lanes, those shutters would groan and creak. It was the sound of aching bones.
The architecture was a historian’s puzzle. Here, the severe, blocky granite of the Gixian Empire, all imposing symmetry and martial pride, was grafted onto the delicate, wrought-iron filigree and tall, arched windows of the Union States. The two styles clashed and merged on a single facade—a Gixian barracks crowned with a Union-style cupola, a Union chapel fortified with a Gixian watchtower. It was a dissonant harmony, and it made perfect sense to Cid. This place had never been allowed an identity of its own.
This town, a nameless place now, had been a prize in a centuries-old tug-of-war between the two superpowers for its minerals.
The Gixian Empire arrived first. They would erect their formidable granite fortifications and plunge deep, greedy shafts into the mountains. For a decade the mines would roar to life, and the settlement would swell with soldiers, engineers, and laborers Then, silence would fall. Not the silence of a planned withdrawal, but something abrupt and unnerving. Official records would cite "logistical reassessments" or "shifting strategic priorities," but the whispers told a different story—of entire work crews vanishing overnight, of communications ending mid-sentence, and of scouts reporting an "untenable atmosphere" that seeped from the very rock. The Empire would decamp, leaving their architecture empty as silent tombs.
Emboldened by their rival's retreat, the Union States would sweep in. They would whitewash the Gixian facades, string up their wrought-iron balconies, and create a community. They tried a different approach, using advanced machinery and offering generous wages to lure settlers. But the result was always the same. First, it would be the pets. Then, the outlying homesteads. The town's population would slowly bleed away, not in a military defeat, but in a series of quiet, inexplicable disappearances. The final group would simply be gone one morning, leaving breakfasts uneaten on tables and tools lying in the dust, as if the occupants had been plucked from the face of the planet.
A generation later, with memories faded and greed renewed, the cycle would repeat. Gix, with new emperors and old maps, would try to reclaim their "rightful" asset, only to fail again. The Union, convinced their predecessors lacked the proper fortitude, would also return, meeting the same cryptic fate, until eventually both sides gave up and never tried to settle this place again.
Now, it had a new master.
Scarlett had found this place, seen past its derelict state to its strategic potential, and had claimed it. She’d named it Iron Rock, for the veins of ore that ran through the surrounding mountains like iron blood.
The evidence of its primary purpose was everywhere, preserved in a state of eerie readiness. Heavy, rust-brushed excavators sat silent near gaping pit mouths. Rail lines, once busy with ore carts, speared out of the town and vanished into the dark tunnels of the mines. One entire district was a single, vast smelter with its network of conveyor belts and the silent, towering, crucible at its heart. It was all in remarkably good condition for a place that had been left to the mercy of the seasons for centuries. The atmosphere was one of haunting suspension, as if the ghost of the town's industrious past was diligently maintaining the machinery, waiting for the whistle to blow and the shift to start once more.
For this town, this transient, nameless place, wasn't located in the civilized heartlands of the Empire or the Union. It was out here, in the lawless and untamed vastness of the Wildlands—a place where the normal rules of nature were often considered… flexible.
Iron Rock huddled in a precarious sliver of land, nestled just north of the official border between the Gixian Empire and the Union States. Its location was a calculated risk, positioned barely beyond the ancient Warding Stones—monolithic obelisks erected by the Giants in an age long past.
The prevailing theory, a hope more than a certainty, was that the Stones' power would cast a protective shadow, a buffer against the palpable weirdness of the Wildlands that began in earnest just beyond. It was a hope that had proven tragically, fatally naive. The ancient superstition—though Cid reflected that "superstition" was too gentle a word for a documented, lethal truth—held firm: anything north of the Warding Stones was too dangerous for normal life to endure. Iron Rock was the proof.
This ever-present danger was the reason Cid’s knuckles were white as he walked. Clutched in his fist was a specialized aether crystal, a device of Scarlett's own design that glowed with a soft, pulsating hum. It was attuned to the complex defensive network she had woven throughout the town. Without it, his life could be measured in seconds. The crystal was his key, his safe-conduct pass, and he held onto it for dear life.
Through the crystal's filter, the seemingly deserted town transformed into a hidden death trap. The air itself shimmered with intricate, glowing patterns. Magical circles, etched in an orange light, lay superimposed on the ground, dotted across walls, and even hung, web-like, between eaves. They were ethereal landmines. A single misstep, a casual lean against a wall without the crystal's protective aura, would kill him—tearing his body apart in a violent release of condensed magical energy.
The reason for this paranoid level of security was a discovery far more horrifying than mere bandits or rival soldiers. Scarlett, with her relentless curiosity, had pieced together the fate of the town's previous inhabitants. The perpetrators, she explained, were creatures of nightmare: shadowy forms composed of a viscous, blue tar-like substance. They were phantoms, nearly impossible to study. They only manifested under the light of a full moon, and with the first touch of dawn, they would evaporate into nothingness, regardless of their situation. Scarlett had once managed to corral one in a reinforced underground chamber, only to watch at sunrise as it simply faded from existence, leaving behind not a trace.
These "blue tar" monsters, as she called them, possessed a unique power. Their touch addled the mind. Victims would enter a docile, dazed state, stripped of all will and self-preservation. In this trance, they would methodically dig a hole, lie down within it, and with their own hands, cover themselves with earth, suffocating to death in a silent, gruesome act of self-burial. Scarlett had uncovered the evidence, excavating countless bodies from the hard-packed soil of Iron Rock—bodies curled in fetal positions, their final, peaceful expressions forever etched into their skulls, confirming the grim theory of the town's past mass disappearances.
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The creatures were not just passive hazards; they were aggressive, drawn to living presence. They had come for Scarlett. While her overwhelming power allowed her to fight them off with contemptuous ease, their constant assaults were a nuisance.
The countless traps were her solution. The detonations of her traps acted as a deterrent, a scorching light and concussive force the shadowy things instinctively shunned. She had told Cid it seemed to be working; the frequency of their visits had lessened.
Yet, the existential threat of the blue tar monsters was, for the moment, a secondary concern in Cid's mind. He had willingly left the sterile safety of Scarlett's laboratory bunker for a singular, personal purpose: to lay his eyes upon the legendary Warding Stone.
Scarlett had mentioned offhandedly that one of the monoliths was visible just beyond the town's southern perimeter, and the moment she said it, the idea had taken root in Cid with the force of a long-deferred dream. The Warding Stones were one of the continent's most famous, if remote, tourist attractions.
It was a dream perpetually deferred by the mundane pressures of life and lack of funds. Fenny's strange, bone-based teleportation magic had deposited them directly into this blighted town, bypassing the journey entirely and giving him no opportunity to see the Stones. And also leaving a hundred questions about thaumaturgical mechanics buzzing in his head, questions for which he still hadn't found a polite moment to ask.
When he had expressed his desire to Scarlett, she had merely shrugged, her focus never leaving the arcane schematics glowing on her workbench.
Scarlett: "The path is clear. The Stone is just past the old smelter. You can't miss it." She had tossed him the security crystal with a casual warning. "Just be back before dusk. The traps are calibrated for the town's grid. Out there, you're on your own. And remember," she had added, her tone lowering a fraction, "I've catalogued the tar-things and the self-burying compulsion, but this is the Wildlands. Assume I haven't found everything that goes bump in the night."
Now, with the crystal in his palm and Scarlett's warning echoing in his ears, Cid picked his way through the labyrinth of invisible wards. His heart beat a little faster, thrumming with excitement.
As Cid rounded the final bend in the path, leaving the skeletal outlines of the outermost buildings behind, the world abruptly opened into a vast, windswept field. And there, dominating the horizon, was the Warding Stone.
It was not merely tall; it was a geographical event. A colossal, rectangular monolith of seamless gray stone, it stood upon the land like a god's forgotten cornerstone. Its sheer scale defied immediate comprehension, its peak seemingly scraping the underbelly of the clouds. The nearby mountains, which from Iron Rock had appeared so formidable, were now reduced to mere foothills in its shadow, their rugged peaks failing to reach even halfway up its impossible height.
Its surface was unnaturally smooth, a vast, unadorned plane that had resisted the scars of millennia. The wind, rain, and sun of ages had not pitted it, nor had lichen dared to cling to its sides. This perfection, coupled with its stark, geometric lines and razor-sharp edges, left no doubt that it was not a work of nature, but something that was made with purpose. The sheer, unimaginable effort of its creation struck Cid with disbelief.
A breath he didn't realize he was holding escaped in a slow, reverent sigh. The textbooks, the artists' renditions, the fervent descriptions from his professors—all of them had failed. They had conveyed the fact of its size, but not the profound, humbling presence of it.
Cid: “Wow,” he whispered, the word swallowed by the immense silence of the field. Then, finding his voice, he spoke again, the tone thick with awe. “It’s just as big as they said it was.”
A profound sense of accomplishment settled over Cid as he stood there.
He was gazing upon a “Sky Pillar”—a sight he had relegated to his mental list of "distant dreams." To witness one of the ancient wonders of the world was a goal he’d cherished, a milestone that gave his life a thread of purpose.
Yet, in all his university-day fantasies, he had never pictured himself viewing it from this angle: from the forbidden side, looking back toward the so-called civilized world. The perspective was as humbling as it was terrifying.
His eyes drifted from the impossible monolith back to the grim silhouette of Iron Rock. He thought of the blue tar creatures, the self-buried dead, and the centuries of silent, strange deaths. Then, his gaze returned to the Warding Stone, a bastion against the very chaos that had consumed the town.
He ached to get closer, to run his hands over that impossibly smooth surface, to see if he could feel the thrum of the ancient power that was said to reside within it. But the rational part of his mind quickly doused that flame. Judging by the scale—the way the Stone dwarfed the distant mountain range—it was quite a long journey.
The open, grassy field before him was a deceptively peaceful vista, hiding Gods-knew-what in the Wildlands. Every blade of grass could conceal a burrow, every gust of wind could carry a predator's scent. He had already taken one monumental, life-altering risk by sparing and aiding Alan—a decision that he now regrets. He wasn't ready to roll the dice again so soon, not for a closer look, no matter how tantalizing.
With a resigned sigh, he took one final, long moment to sear the image into his memory: the gray giant against the vast sky, a silent guardian for a world that had largely forgotten its purpose. Then, he turned his back on the wonder and began the cautious walk back to the bunker's hidden entrance.
As he retraced his steps, his mind churned with the sheer absurdity of their situation. Of all the forgotten corners and hidden valleys across the continents, Scarlett had chosen to plant her flag here in the Wildlands. This was a place spoken of in hushed tones around dying campfires, a byword for madness and death.
Every historical attempt at settlement, from the legendary First Wave to the doomed Gixian outposts, had ended in the same grim fashion as Iron Rock: in silence and mystery.
And yet, perhaps that was the stroke of genius.
Scarlett was the most wanted criminal in living memory. In the civilized world, bounty hunters and Union spec-ops teams would be a constant, buzzing annoyance. While she could swat them aside like flies, the relentless interference would grind her real work to a halt.
Here, in the Wildlands, she had built her laboratory in the one place her enemies were too fearful to tread and too vast to search. The land itself was her most formidable bodyguard, a natural filter that eliminated all but the most desperate or deranged of pursuers. The isolation granted her the one thing her notoriety had stolen: peace and quiet.
But Cid couldn't shake a nagging unease.
He was certain there were very, very few individuals in the world as brazen, powerful, or perhaps simply as mad as Scarlett would even attempt claiming a piece of the Wildlands. Her confidence bordered on arrogance, but Cid wondered if it might also be a blindfold. They weren't just hiding in a dangerous place; they were guests in a realm that had evicted every other tenant, and the landlord was notoriously unforgiving.
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