Shadow Slave

The floor of the chamber shattered, pulling Saint into the boundless darkness below. Everything happened so fast that even her impossibly swift reflexes weren't enough to react — not that she could have done anything otherwise.

Saint was a master of warfare and excelled in all types of combat. However, there were still things she wasn't capable of, and one of them was flying.

As countless tons of shattered stone plummeted into the abyssal chasm below the vast chamber, she fell as well, pulled down by her immense weight.

Sunny and Nephis fell with her.

The Hollow Mountains had earned that name because they were hollow on the inside, drowning in elemental darkness. The entrance they had used was at the very pinnacle of one such mountain, and the ancient battlefield must have been located immediately above the great void of its empty interior — the last place where a besieging army could have been stopped. Now, the last obstacle had been broken, and they fell into the depths of the Underworld.

Even after surviving myriad calamities, Sunny still felt a cold sense of panicked alarm take hold of his mind — even if it was only for a moment. Then, he forced that feeling down and regained his composure. The mountain they had entered was not the tallest mountain of the vast mountain range by far, and yet, it was still taller than the highest peaks of Earth — easily surpassing ten kilometers in height. It was to the point that anyone below Transcendent Rank would find it difficult to breathe while nearing its pinnacle.

So, now, Saint was facing a ten-kilometer drop, with nothing around her to arrest her fall and no indication of what waited for her at the bottom of the enormous cavern... if the interior of the mountain could even be called that.

That was troublesome in and of itself, but the peril of falling from such height paled in comparison to the true threat — the fact that they were plummeting into the depths of the Underworld, surrounded by an endless expanse of true darkness and all the horrors that could be dwelling in its cold embrace.

‘Troublesome.'

The fall itself was not a problem. Nephis could summon her wings, and once she illuminated the world with her radiance, Sunny could use Shadow Manifestation to do the same.

However, there was no need to go so far — yet.

Even if Saint could not fly, she had her own ways of handling this fall. She could turn into a torrent of elemental darkness, for example, rushing down unscathed. Alternatively, she could use the power of nothingness instead.

That was what she chose to do, swiftly reducing her weight to that of a feather. A moment later, she wasn't falling anymore and seemed to be hovering in the air — in truth, she was gliding downward at an infinitely low speed, supported by air resistance.

The immediate crisis had been resolved, but Saint was still in a precarious position.

That was because, as the debris of the crushed floor of the gateway chamber disappeared into the darkness, taking the last traces of the ancient battle with them, a thunderous groan resounded from above.

It echoed in the boundless darkness, making Saint look up.

The ferocious white flames burning beneath the visor of her helmet blazed as she saw the roof of the destroyed chamber fracturing, enormous slabs of stone breaking away and crashing down in clouds of dust.

The entire peak of the mountains seemed to be collapsing... falling right on her head. Sunny was not particularly worried about the weight of the mountain's pinnacle — a Supreme would not be heavily damaged even if buried under it — but he had a strong suspicion that the Creature of Darkness that they had encountered did not particularly care about what kind of stone it used to create a shell.

Whether it were the shards of fallen Stone Saints or the fragments of the mountain itself, it could still form a new body — one even larger and more difficult to destroy than the colossus Saint had beheaded earlier.

A split second after Sunny gave the command, Saint increased her mass to the original prodigious value, plummeting down like a meteor weighing hundreds of tons. That weight plus a constant acceleration while falling from a height of ten kilometers or more... Sunny did not want to imagine how violent that impact would be.

With some luck, he was not going to find out.

As Saint fell, the boundless expanse of true darkness embraced her like a cold sea, its invisible currents moving around her in a ghostly maelstrom. The walls of the hollow mountain were getting further and further away, making it seem like she was falling through an infinite abyss.

Devoid of shadow sense, Sunny could only perceive what Saint perceived. And what she saw filled him with a grim sense of unease.

Because he couldn't help but feel that something was hiding in that darkness — or perhaps following them — getting closer and closer.

No, it wasn't just a feeling. He knew it. Many powerful Nightmare Creatures possessed an ability to sense when someone was gazing at them. And at the moment, Sunny knew that someone... or something... was scrutinizing him, its attention cold and unfathomable.

He knew it because he had sensed a vast and boundless Will brush against his own.

‘Damn it...'

In the next moment, something about the darkness surrounding Saint changed. Its currents were disturbed, and one of them — colossal and seemingly endless — twisted, reaching forward like an unthinkable tendril.

The moment the enormous torrent of darkness entered the field of annulment, it seemed to lose a fraction of its cohesion, collapsing in on itself. But it was simply too enormous in its magnitude, and so, that only slowed it down for a moment.

There was already a second gargantuan tendril reaching toward Saint from the opposite direction, as well, its roots hidden somewhere far, far below, in the ancient darkness.

A moment before the tendrils reached her, an ocean of flame escaped from beneath Saint's armor, coalescing into a radiant figure.

Her radiant wings opened wide, igniting with a blinding brilliance...

And in that brilliance, the darkness melted like snow.