CHAPTER 86: BYE BYE FOG

Lucy rose shakily.

The Crucible of Grace had restored his body, but that didn’t mean it didn’t hurt. The healing came with agony. Bones snapped back into place with brutal force, tendons reknit in bursts of burning light, and muscles stitched together like threads drawn by a divine, merciless sewing machine.

All around him, the fog pressed in.

It wasn’t quiet. Hidden within the gloom, faint screams and distant shouts echoed—his teammates, lost in the mist. He couldn’t see them, but he didn’t need to.

He could feel them.

Every thread of emotion clung to him like cobwebs—panic, desperation, love, terror, and... something darker—a cold hatred, slick and crawling beneath his skin.

Caelgorr.

"They’re all under illusions," Lucy muttered, his voice rough in his throat. Then a sharper thought struck him. He focused.

One... two... three... four...

There should have been five other emotional signatures—four teammates and the monster. But only four pulsed in his perception.

"What the hell happened?"

He scanned again, letting his emotions pour through his senses like static on a wire: panic, fear, determination, and malice. But something was missing.

Eri.

There was no void where her emotion had been. No cold emptiness. Just... nothing.

He exhaled—slow, controlled—letting the thick fog enter his mouth. It burned slightly, tasting of rot, incense, and something sharp and wrong. But the moment it touched his tongue, it hissed and turned to steam. His body, still crackling with atomic radiation, rejected the mist like poison.

"The best outcome," he muttered, wincing as his bones shifted again, flesh binding together under divine fire.

He turned and began to walk.

The fog parted with a soft hiss wherever it brushed his skin, scorched away by the lingering pulse of radiation in his blood. Beneath that, the Crucible of Grace worked tirelessly—restoring melted ribs, muscle, and organs—each piece rebuilt with pain as its thread.

He focused next on his Soulthread, casting it upward.

Llarm. He could feel him flying above, his emotions spiking—panic, confusion, fear. He was flailing, unsure, hovering in danger.

Lucy’s attention shifted to the ground below. The hatred—Caelgorr—was moving, slithering through the mist, tracking him. The beast had picked its next target.

Lucy didn’t know why; maybe Caelgorr thought he was the weakest, or perhaps it was personal. It didn’t matter.

He paused.

An idea formed in his mind—a flicker of reckless inspiration. He imagined Llarm casting his wind magic, the way it carved through the air. And in that same moment, Lucy’s own radiation had burned a slice of the fog away.

A grin tugged at his lips.

"When better to test something new than during a life-or-death battle?" he mused aloud, voice dry. "Training, probably."

He reached inward, calling on his wind. The spell coiled around him, spiraling upward like a tightly wound spring. Cold and sharp, it cut the air above his head. The fog clung to it, refusing to yield—but that was fine. That wasn’t the plan.

He raised a hand and touched the current.

It whipped against his fingers—chilled and wild—but he held it firm and began to channel something else. Atomic radiation. He let it leak from his palm, carefully, like bleeding poison into ice water. Mana control was everything here. Too much and the wind would dissolve under the radiation’s raw destructiveness. Too little and it wouldn’t infuse at all.

Vorn’s gift was a cursed thing—hungry and absolute. But Lucy had always been a quick learner.

It took a few long, strained seconds of razor-thin focus. But finally, the magic synced. The wind shimmered, and where it spun, the fog began to scream.

Steam curled outward.

The spiral around Lucy cleared, leaving a tight dome of visibility—a pocket of clarity carved into a nightmare.

"I’ve had enough of this bullshit, Caelgorr," he thought, eyes sharp. "You’re nothing but a coward hiding behind illusions. Let’s see what happens when that fog is gone."

With a surge of will, he released the storm.

His spiral of atomic wind burst outward like a ring of knives. The fog hissed and vanished everywhere it passed, as if flayed by the combination of force and rot. Clear lines of sight opened up in jagged paths, tunnels of truth carved into the deception.

Lucy directed it toward the space above, where he felt Llarm—and the malice beneath him.

The fog parted with a shriek.

Llarm appeared, hovering in the open air, his face ghost-pale and frozen in shock. And directly beneath him—

Caelgorr.

A twenty-foot horror, its body a patchwork of darkness and moving anatomy. Dozens of eyes glared from its chest, shoulders, and limbs. One of its many arms—thick, long, and clawed—was stretched upward, inches from Llarm’s boots.

Lucy watched the color drain from Llarm’s face. For a second, the elf’s soul practically fled his body.

But he didn’t freeze.

Now able to see, Llarm reacted with speed born of training and terror. He shot upward, wind cracking around him, narrowly avoiding the reaching limb.

The fog boiled beneath them. The battlefield had changed.

In an instant, the fog was gone.

Caelgorr’s illusion-shrouded veil evaporated completely, stripped away by the swirling atomic wind. The grey stone floor of the temple emerged, its cracked surface slick with condensation. Visibility returned like a slap to the senses.

Bruma stood tense and ready, her massive green form rooted like an ancient tree. Llarm hovered above, wind magic humming beneath him, eyes wide with alertness. Below him loomed Caelgorr, the abomination’s many eyes twitching in confusion.

And then—Gindu.

He stood frozen, unmoving. His golden eyes were wide, not with fear but something deeper—horror, disbelief, and a soul-piercing grief that locked his limbs in place.

Lucy followed his gaze.

His breath caught.

Eri sat slumped at the base of a stone wall between two broken archways. Blood painted the grey stone behind her in thick splashes, some still wet and running. Her chest was torn open—a gaping hole punched clean through her torso.

Her head tilted lifelessly forward. Strands of brown hair veiled her face like a curtain, gently swaying in the air still warped by battle.

But Lucy didn’t react with the same horror as Gindu. His eyes narrowed instead, puzzled.

’Why is he so shaken...?’ Then it hit him.

’Of course. He forgot.’

"Snap out of it, Gindu! Remember her ability!" Lucy shouted, his voice ringing with urgency.

Gindu blinked once, then again. The disbelief burned away, replaced by a sharp, focused rage. His yellow pupils thinned like slits, and his jaw clenched with fury. It wasn’t aimed at Lucy.

It was for Caelgorr—the thing that had dared to harm Eri.

Lucy cast a single glance at Bruma and Llarm. They didn’t need words.

As if bound by a silent agreement, all three lunged forward.

And Caelgorr?

For a moment, the creature twitched, its limbs jerking uncertainly. It reached for the fog, for its illusions—but they didn’t come. Lucy’s radiation suppressed them, silencing the beast’s trickery.

The confusion lasted only seconds. Then Caelgorr roared, every eye igniting with savage intent, and charged to meet them head-on.

Caelgorr charged like a living avalanche—twenty feet of writhing limbs and shrieking eyes, each one twitching and swiveling across its unnatural body. The ground trembled beneath its weight.

Bruma was the first to meet it.

She surged forward with a roar, her massive axe glowing faintly as she slammed it downward. Caelgorr caught the weapon on one of its jagged forearms—bones creaking from the force—but it wasn’t enough to slow him. Another arm whipped around, claws glinting.

Bruma narrowed her eyes. Gravity pulsed.

The limb twisted mid-air, yanked downward by an unseen weight. The monster’s momentum sent it stumbling—but not falling.

Lucy struck next.

He darted in from the side, his body still thrumming with radiation. His wind spiral hissed and held the fog at bay around him, clearing the battlefield. His fists glowed faintly with ghost-light, infused with mana.

He aimed for one of Caelgorr’s eyes—wide, unblinking, gleaming violet.

But the eye snapped shut just before contact, its lid clanging like metal slamming shut.

Clink. His knuckles rang out like he’d punched a wall of steel.

"What the hell?" Lucy growled, shaking out his hand. "Metal eyelids? Really?"

Another limb came screaming toward him. He barely ducked in time, rolling away as Bruma intercepted the strike with a heavy parry of her axe, the floor cracking beneath her.

Above, Llarm circled, hands raised. Winds coiled at his fingertips before firing in narrow blasts—razor gusts meant to cut deep.

They struck Caelgorr’s black flesh and staggered it slightly, but they didn’t pierce it. The monster’s skin was too dense and too strange.

Below, Gindu lunged, his blue scales gleaming like glass in the dim light. They extended, sharpening like blades, covering his arms and shoulders. He raked them across Caelgorr’s leg, leaving behind faint gashes.

It barely noticed.

Gindu snarled, ducked under a lashing tail, and came back with another swing—but the abomination ignored him entirely, focused instead on Bruma and Lucy.

"Eyes!" Lucy shouted. "We hit the eyes, we hurt it!"

"Not if they’re made of fucking steel!" Llarm snapped from above.

Bruma moved like a wall, carving massive arcs with her axe. One blow finally connected with an open eye, and Caelgorr reeled, bellowing, ichor spraying in black spurts.

Lucy seized the moment.

He twisted beneath a sweeping limb and launched a punch straight at a chest-mounted eye.

—CLANG!

The lid slammed shut just in time. Since the blow was blocked, Lucy activated double strike in the hope Caelgorr would open his eye in time for it to be destroyed, but both strikes ricocheted off with bone-jarring force, sending him skidding backward, and coughing blood.

"He’s learning," Lucy spat. Caelgorr had tracked Lucy ever since he had entered Seraphs Hollow, so it was natural that he knew about his double strike ability. Still, it was frustrating.

"We’re not doing enough," Bruma growled. "Even gravity barely slows it."

Caelgorr shrieked, its body pulsing with hatred. One of its limbs slammed Gindu into the stone wall, another swatted Llarm from the air like a fly. The battlefield tilted.

Then—

A flicker of light.

Behind Caelgorr, a figure stepped from the shadow.

Eri.

Blood still stained her armor, but her eyes were alive, burning with fury. Her shortsword gleamed in her hand, gripped tightly.

Llarm, dazed and battered in the air, saw her. His eyes widened.

Without a word, he lifted a palm.

Wind surged.

Eri’s body shot upward like a missile, riding the current straight toward Caelgorr’s towering head. The monster began to turn—but too late.

She landed atop its shoulders.

With silence, she drove her blade straight down, burying it deep into the skull between two of its metal-lidded eyes. The steel shrieked and buckled beneath her strength and the force of her fall.

Caelgorr convulsed.

Every eye across its body flared wide, then blinked closed in unison.

And he fell.