The Trial of Storm and Silence
Six hours earlier.
Kael leapt from the ship like a flash-fried god. The wind screamed past him, sparks dancing around his heels as he spun midair, grinning like someone who'd just been told he was too sexy to die.
The weapon unfurled from his back — a long, double-ended staff wrapped in spiraling metal bands. At its midpoint, a rune pulsed: "Kael-Approved."
With a sharp twist, the staff split in two.
> "Lefty: The Seducer!" he announced dramatically, twirling the left blade into a flirtatious spin. "Righty: The Backstabber!—she bites harder than heartbreak!"
He landed.
The earth cracked.
And in every direction, hingchas surged. Dozens. Maybe hundreds. Beastlike aberrations crawling on warped limbs, their flesh stitched from hunger and void residue. Eldritch glyphs flickered across their hides like fevered tattoos, some whispering things even the void would forget.
Kael didn't blink.
His grin widened.
Electricity sparked up both arms.
> "All right, nightmares," he said, raising Lefty. "Prepare to get seduced into oblivion."
---
Kael's Lightning Style: Theatrical, Tactical, Terrifying
He didn't fight like a soldier.
He danced.
Lefty and Righty whirled through the air like chaos given form, blades crackling with voltage laced in anti-eldritch coding — fine-tuned over years to disrupt Yai corruption and shatter reality tears. With each strike, a hingcha convulsed, twitched, then shattered into static.
From above, ANSEP's ship fired pinpoint missiles into dense swarms. The skies flashed with ordinance.
But down below — Kael was the storm.
Where others used lightning for damage, Kael used it for mental invasion.
> His bolts didn't scorch flesh — they unwrote intentions.
He erased the rage in a hingcha's mind and replaced it with confusion.
He short-circuited their movements, made them stutter through warped timelines.
One beast lunged at him, jaws gaping — then vanished into static before impact.
Kael spun Lefty into a sideways arc, and static sigils bloomed in the air, cutting the cosmic fabric around the creature, trapping it in a stasis fold.
> "I call that the Blue-Ball Barricade," Kael smirked. "Stops you right before climax."
Bashanta, from atop the ridge, groaned audibly.
---
Anti-Eldritch Lightning Mechanisms
Kael's specialties weren't just flashy — they were calibrated.
▌Reality Piercer Mode:
A concentrated bolt sharp enough to puncture through folded space, undoing cloaked hingchas mid-phase.
> Used it to spear a phase-jumping entity before it could split.
---
Veil Jammer:
A wide-spread dome of magnetic field and neuro-electric pulses that disrupted the mind-warping whispers common to voidborn creatures.
> "You're not driving me crazy," Kael muttered under his breath, "I'm already there."
---
Static Psychoshield:
A buzzing cocoon of lightning that isolated his mind — preventing intrusive thoughts or madness mimics from taking root.
> He once called it his "Ex-Girlfriend Repellent."
---
The Battle Lasted Six Hours
Not because the hingchas were strong — they were fodder-tier.
But they were endless, crawling like infection toward nearby settlements. The 4th Corps split in teams, suppressing berserks before they reached civilians.
Even Cilene, the ship AI, had to reroute drones mid-battle, muttering grimly:
> "Probability of Kael being insufferable after this: 98%."
---
When it was over, the air sizzled with ozone.
Corps members collapsed across the terrain, panting, some vomiting, most drained.
Kael stood atop a heap of twitching voidflesh, holding Lefty and Righty aloft, both weapons crackling faintly with residual voltage.
He took a photo.
> Caption:
"Just saved the world again. Look how hot I look doing it. I'll marry anyone who likes this pic."
---
But Then… Silence.
Their ship touched down near the assigned facility in the Lunar Belt.
And all levity drained.
The base was a ruin.
Walls crumbled inward, blackened with residue. The sky above had fractured into a prism-like shimmer — as if someone had sliced open reality with a blade made of mirrors.
Cilene's voice dropped to a whisper.
> "No energy signatures… no movement detected… but the interior is… wrong."
Tremeur drew both guns. Elina tapped into the comm-grid — only static answered.
And Kael?
He lowered his weapon. No joke came.
Only a grim, rare silence.
> "Something's off," he murmured.
"Like the world's holding its breath. Waiting to scream."
---
Atiya woke up choking on silence.
His lungs burned with stale air, and his stomach turned as if he'd swallowed smoke and regret. Dizziness curled behind his eyes — thick, aching nausea that made even the act of blinking feel offensive.
For a long moment, he just lay there, staring at nothing.
Then:
> "Oh. You're alive."
A voice like blunt steel. Deadpan, unimpressed.
Zelaine.
Atiya groaned, sat up — instantly regretted it — and tried a smirk anyway.
> "Vampy, is that concern I hear? You do care. How cute." He mock-sobbed. "I'm touched. Don't look, I might cry."
Zelaine stared down at him, her arms crossed.
> "You're a disease."
She turned away before the disgust on her face became audible. For a second, she even considered not insulting him — just once — in the name of their current misery.
She failed.
> "You've been unconscious for three hours. I would've let you rot, but your snoring scared away whatever horror was watching us."
Atiya tried to stand. His legs trembled like a drunk deer.
He looked around.
And then frowned.
They were inside a library — or what resembled one. Bookshelves reached far beyond sight, some twisted, others floating midair. The air was thick with dust and the scent of old ink. Shadows moved in unnatural arcs, and the light… it existed, but from no source. As if the air itself was emitting a dim, indecisive glow.
> "Where… is this?"
Zelaine shrugged, exhausted. "No clue. I woke up here. Thought I was dead for a second. Then I heard you wheezing like a dying pig."
> "You are the least comforting person I know."
> "And you talk too much."
She leaned back against a crooked pillar and sighed.
> "Thirty, maybe forty percent of my Yai's recovered. Enough to not die. Not enough to murder you. A tragedy."
Atiya groaned again and ran a hand through his hair. The threads around his fingers flickered — dull and erratic. No signal. No guidance. No teleport node.
> "I can't sense any routes. It's like the lair… but twisted differently. Like the laws here rewrite themselves every few seconds."
Zelaine stared upward into the infinite stacks.
> "Great. So your teleport's useless. You can't even be a proper getaway vehicle. No wonder you're single."
Atiya twitched. "I will punch you."
> "You can try."
Their bickering spiraled quickly — insults over power, personality, dating prospects, even fashion choices — until something shifted.
The books.
Pages began to tear themselves free, not in chaos, but in rhythm — an elegant dance of parchment and ink. The air rippled. Dust froze mid-flight. The floating pages circled above like vultures. Their ink ran in rivers, twisting together until they formed a screen.
And then —
A voice. Calm. Elegant. Unsettlingly familiar.
> "You do not belong here."
It mimicked Yaishna's voice — but it was wrong. Something in the cadence, too measured. Too flawless.
> "You are trespassers. Interlopers. Not of this memory. And yet, you wandered into the Mansion of the Williams."
Zelaine's eyes narrowed.
> "Yaishna? Don't you dare use her voice, you paper-stuffed bastard."
The pages didn't react. But the light dimmed.
> "This place is not for the unqualified. And yet, here you stand. Intruders within the House of Record."
Atiya glanced sideways at Zelaine. "Okay. So… trial number what now? Four?"
Zelaine snarled.
> "We've had enough. Show yourself, imposter!"
The pages folded inward, collapsing into a single floating tome. Then it unraveled, page by page, forming a screen of ink in the air.
And on that screen:
Memories began to play.
Flickering, distorted, but unmistakable.
The First Trial had begun.
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