Hollow System Ascension

The Citadel

The building announced itself slowly, without much fanfare. One moment it wasn't there and the next, there was something jutting out from behind the horizon.

First it was a darkness against the darker sky ,a solidity that interrupted the arcing light-lines overhead, blocking them cleanly rather than letting them pass through.

Then it was a shape, angular and deliberate, rising from the flat ground with the kind of architectural intention that said something had thought carefully about what it wanted to project.

Then it was a wall, and Cael stopped walking and looked up at it and revised every scale estimate he'd been making for the past hour.

It was enormous. Not dungeon-enormous, not the vaulted ceilings of Cathedral-type Fractures that impressed through height alone. This was dense and horizontal and built with the weight of something that had no intention of ever being moved.

The walls were the same dark reflective material as everything else in this space but thicker ,metres thick, he estimated, based on the depth of the gate opening he could see from here. Carved all over, every surface, the same dense columnar marks as the smaller structure he'd found earlier, but more of them, layered over each other in a palimpsest of Record-keeping that must have taken longer than he had numbers for.

'Citadel,' he thought. 'That's what that is.'

The Hollow Hound's presence in his sternum was alert in a way it hadn't been during the walk here ,not the combat-tension of the attack earlier, something different.

Closer to the feeling of standing at a threshold. Recognition, maybe, though he was cautious about projecting too much onto an instinct that wasn't his. He still had no idea why this creature decided all of a sudden to inhabit his soul.

He stood at the gate opening for a long moment, looking in.

The interior was lit the same way everything here was lit ,sourceless, adequate, casting no shadows. A wide passage led inward, the walls close enough that he could touch both sides if he stretched his arms, the ceiling high enough that he couldn't see it clearly. The carved marks continued inside, denser than the exterior, running floor to ceiling in columns so tight they nearly touched.

He went in.

The passage opened after thirty metres into a space that was large enough to deserve the word chamber.

Circular, high-ceilinged, the floor continuous with the passage ,that same dark reflective material, recording his steps in their fading brightened impressions. The walls curved up and inward to a point he couldn't see, lost in the ambient dark above.

Around the circumference of the chamber, at regular intervals, were alcoves ,shallow recesses carved into the wall, each one containing something he couldn't make out clearly from the entrance.

He moved to the nearest alcove.

It contained a weapon.

A sword, or something that functioned as a sword ,single-edged, long, made of the same dark material as the walls but with a quality to it that the walls didn't have, a density that suggested the material had been treated, compressed, made into something more.

He could faintly sense…something from it, something that resonated with the hound inside him. He didn't quite understand that feeling either. It rested in a mount carved specifically for it, fitted exactly. He didn't touch it.

The next alcove held something he recognised as armour ,a chest piece, same material, same quality. The one after that held a helm. He moved around the chamber slowly, hands in his pockets, cataloguing without touching.

'Trophy room,' he thought. 'Or an armoury. Or both.'

The Hollow Hound's presence shifted behind his sternum ,not alarm, but a pointed quality of attention that directed him toward the centre of the chamber before he'd looked there fully.

There was a figure standing in the middle of the room.

He didn't know how he'd missed it on the way in. It was standing completely still, which might have been part of it ,his eye had moved past it the way normal you would overlook a door handle ina museum. Not something with any presence.

But it was present.

Unambiguously, undeniably present, regardless of whether it was alive or not. It radiated presence. He wanted to smack himself in the face for not noticing it before.

‘And this is how I die. Pitiful.’ he mused, his eyes taking in the statue before him.

It was tall. Two metres at least, armoured in something that wasn't the dark material of the chamber but something older, a deep grey that absorbed light rather than reflecting it. The armour was complete ,legs, torso, arms, gauntlets, a helm with a visor that was down, concealing whatever was underneath.

The design of it was unlike any guild-issue equipment he'd seen, unlike anything in the dungeon gear catalogues he'd memorised out of boredom during slow porter jobs.It wasn't breathing. Its chest wasn't moving, which somehow seemed to bother him more than if it were animated.

It gave him the impression that it had been standing here for longer than Cael had been alive, possibly longer than the city he came from had existed, and it radiated terrible power ,the feeling of compressed potential, like a dam.

He stopped walking.

'Apparition,' he thought, carefully. 'It has to be. The trial said the interior was not hostile. This is part of the trial. This is something the Record is showing me, not something that can actually—'

The figure's head turned.

Smooth, mechanical, the visor finding him with the precision of something that had known exactly where he was the moment he stepped into the chamber and had simply been waiting for him to see it first.

The pressure hit him before it moved.

He no longer felt his original apprehension for the statue’s immobility.

‘Crap!’

He'd felt Awakened presence before ,the ambient weight of high-ranked souls that pushed against the air around them, that made the back of your neck register something before your conscious mind caught up. He'd felt B-rank presence when Yuna Seil stopped holding herself back in the dungeon corridor, the air compressing around her in that particular way. He knew what that felt like.

This was not that.

Compared to this, B-rank would be the way a glass of water was to a river. The pressure came off the figure in a wave that hit him in the chest and staggered him backward a full step before he'd processed it as movement, and the quality of it was wrong in a way that bypassed his thinking entirely and spoke directly to the part of him that was still, underneath everything, an F-rank human in a place he didn't belong.

His vision narrowed at the edges. His legs wanted to do something embarrassing, but by sheer will, he managed not to.The Hollow Hound behind his sternum reacted with a sharp spike of its own instinctive alarm, which compounded into his nervous system on top of the external pressure and made the total effect significantly worse than either alone.

'A-rank,' he thought, from somewhere very calm and very small at the back of his mind. 'At least. That's A-rank presence at minimum.'

The figure raised one gauntleted hand.The gesture was almost casual, lazy even, and the air between them compressed into a visible concussive shape, gathering itself the way Ito's force-pressure but skills gathered before release, except where Ito's had been the work of someone channelling a system-given ability this was like watching a storm given birth to. A Calamity.

It released.

Cael had approximately enough time to understand that the thing coming toward him was going to hit the wall behind him, whether he was in the way or not. It slammed into him with the force of a speeding truck, slamming him into the wall.