The Last Step-Chapter 209: High Ground

Date: January 11, 2018 | Time: 2:10 AM | Location: The Mother’s Layer - Chasm Interior

Perspective: Navina Caelwyn

The sky hadn’t just changed colors. It had failed.

The ceiling of the Scarred Crater had vanished into a bruising, violent red, weeping a blood rain that hissed as it struck the cooling slush Lucas had left behind. Every drop felt like a needle of concentrated sorrow, sinking through my clothes and into my very marrow.

Ahead of us, the Mother of Despair—the skeletal nightmare that had already claimed a dozen of my men—was unravelling.

She was no longer a mountain of bone. She was a silhouette of swirling, dark gore, slim and humanoid, with that calcified ’Baby’ pulsating at the center of her chest like a living, weeping heart. The Suffocating Domain wasn’t just a mana-effect anymore; it was a physical weight, a crushing S+ rank gravity that forced my knees to buckle until they hit the slush.

"Don’t... don’t look at it..."

Pryce’s voice was a jagged rasp. He was a tactician of logic, but how do you calculate the trajectory of a god’s grief?

"Wren! Bram! Form up!" I roared, the metallic rain blurring my vision as I forced myself to stand.

"Form up on what, Guildmaster?" Wren’s voice was a hyperactive streak of panic. "The ground is becoming the sea again! My daggers are rusting in the air! We’re standin’ in blood!"

"Shut up and hold the hammers, you spindly rat!" Bram growled, his voice a low, terrestrial rumble. He slammed his Warhammer into the slush, creating a localized shockwave to give us a few inches of solid ground. "If we die, we die with dignity!"

Ten meters to my right, the mercenaries were even worse.

"Cid... I can’t... I can’t feel my hands..." Tiara, the Elven archer from Cid’s party, was slumped against a jagged obsidian spire, her emerald cloak darkening with the blood-rain. Her world was nothing but pain and iron-scent.

"Dammit, Tiara! Stay with me!" Rengar, the lion-beastkin, roared as he slammed a kinnetically-charged fist into the empty air, trying to punch back the pressure. "Cid! Do something! The Golems are sinking!"

"I’m trying, you oversized Poultry!" Cid’s voice was a snarl. "These Shadow Golems are our last resort catalysts, but this... this bitch’s rain is dissolving them!"

Then, the static died.

It didn’t just fade. It was cut—replaced by a clean, high-frequency signal that hummed with an unnatural, artificial clarity.

"Yoo... mic test, mic test. One, two. Is this thing on?"

The voice was light. Casual. It sounded like a man leaning back in a leather chair, bored by a play he’d already seen.

"Hey everyone, how’s the party going? Looks like things are getting a little... damp."

I froze. "Identify yourself! We’re under S+ priority engagement! Who is this?"

"Identify... identify..." the voice mused. "Is the Guildmaster really asking for a name when she should be asking for a lifejacket? Does a drowning bird care about the name of the wind, or does it just wish it could fly?"

"Who the hell is this?" Cid spat, his voice tattered with exhaustion. "You’re hacking an encrypted Requiem-Eclipse line! I’m Cid Valthor, and if you don’t start making sense, I’ll find where you’re hiding and cut your tongue out!"

"Ah, the Executive Necromancer," the voice chuckled, a dark, melodic undertone beneath the humor. "Always so busy with ’contracts’. Tell me, Mr. S-Rank... if your Shadow Golems are ’Paragon-grade,’ why are they currently looking like decorative mud-statues? Is the gravity too heavy, or is your ego just a little too large for your talent?"

"You—!"

"Silence, Cid!" I stepped forward, firing a precision burst from my Needle at a surging gore-tentacle. "You on the line. You’re the one who overhauled our Aether-Vox yesterday, aren’t you? The one who asked for ten gold and insulted my engineers? Why are you back?"

"Back? back is a relative term, is it not?" the voice asked, his tone shifting into a playful, investigative riddle. "Can one return if they never truly left? Or perhaps the better question is: What is currently crying in that monster’s chest? It sounds suspiciously like a memory you’re all too scared to look at. Tell me... how is the environment? Is it salty? Bitter?"

"What are you talking about?" I roared, my boots sizzling as the rising tide laapped at the leather. "The Blood Sea it caused is boiling! The Mother is slimmed down, humanoid, and her core is protected by a rotating gore-shield! We can’t reach the ’Baby’! The pressure is paralyzing my mages!"

"Humanoid... gore-shield... paralyzing..." the voice repeated the words slowly, as if mapping them. "So the aggression has failed, but the desperation remains. And you, little Queen of Curses... why are you standing there so close to it? Are you waiting for a miracle, or are you just scared to get your dress dirty?"

"Shut up nobody!" Celia’s voice. "Whoever you are, your voice is annoying! I don’t take orders from someone faraway safe in their rooms! If you want to witness, then watch as I shred this insect and everything around it!"

Celia launched, her chains wrapping around a floating rock-shelf as she swung her scythe. But the Mother didn’t even turn. A flick of her obsidian wrist sent a pulse of ’Calamity’ mana through the air, catching Celia mid-jump and sending her spiraling back into the slush.

"Pathetic," the voice sighed over the comms. "All that aggression, and for what? To die with a cool line on your lips? Answer certain things for me, Warriors. How often does that ’Baby’ pulse? Is there a rhythm to the rain? Or are you all so busy dying that you forgot to count the beats?"

"Every... every seven seconds," Silas, the stoic Earth-user from Cid’s party, spoke up for the first time, his voice calm and fact-based. "The earth tremors every seven seconds. The mana-drain spikes with the beat. The rain gets harsher when it cries."

"Seven seconds... hm. A prime number for a prime mistake," the voice chuckled. "I’m beginning to get a clear picture. You’re not in a raid towards victory. You’re in a funeral. And unless you start listening to the wind, I’m afraid the only standing ovation you’ll get is from the worms."

The Mother of Despair took a step toward us, the red sky screaming in unison with the child in her chest.

"Final question," the voice dropped into a cold, clinical depth. "Do you want to survive because you have a future... or because you’re just terrified of death?"

"What I want," I gritted my teeth, slamming a fresh Ionized Frost cartridge into my Arcflinger, "is to know who the hell you are and why you’re tampering with a Guild operation! If you’re watching, then you know we’re one step away from a total wipe!"

"Such a loud demand for such a small bird," the voice chuckled. "If you want the ’how,’ look at the sky. Your connection to the ridge—to your precious Sylvia—isn’t dead; it’s just... drowned. The blood rain isn’t just water; it’s a hyper-conductive ichor. It creates a liquid Faraday cage around the chasm, absorbing every mana-wave the Aether-Vox tries to broadcast. And the Mother’s wail? It’s an inverse-oscillation pulse. It’s not just a cry; it’s a jammer."

"A liquid cage?" Pryce murmured, his eyes narrowing as he watched the red rain sizzle against his sleeves. "He’s right. The mana-density in the air is acting as a grounding wire."

"If you can see the problem, you must have the solution," I spat, firing a suppression bolt that the Mother ignored. "How do we reconnect?"

"Find the echo, and you find the exit," the voice replied. "Reverse the output. If you phase-shift the Vox frequency to exactly 440 megahertz—matching the resonant frequency of the rain—the resulting interference will shatter the surface tension of the shield. You won’t just hear Sylvia; you’ll hear the heartbeat of the Mother itself."

"How is a stranger reaching us if the rain is a ’cage’?" Rengar growled, his lion-mane soaked and heavy. "And why can’t I tell who you are? Your voice... it’s vibrating. It’s fake. You’re using a modifier."

"Are you asking who I am, or are you asking if I’m your only chance?" the voice asked.

I stood still for a heartbeat, the metallic rain blurring my vision.

The 10-gold pervert.

It had to be him. The man from the Gilded Chalice who had overhauled our arrays in two hours. He’d negged Ulla, insulted my guards, and had a heart rate so calm it defied human biology. But why now? Why help us when he’d been thrown into the street?

I looked at the Vanguard—at Bram’s shaking hammer and Wren’s glazed eyes. I couldn’t say his name. I couldn’t mention the "dancing pervert." If they knew our lives were in the hands of a sleazy engineer I’d humiliated, the last of their morale would vanish.

I had to play his game.

"I can guide you," the voice offered, the playfulness vanishing into something heavy and authoritative. "I can see the gaps in her shield that your ’Sword Saint’ eyes are too slow to catch. All you have to do... is listen."

"I don’t trust it!" Tiara sobbed, her bow snapped in two. "It’s the Mother! She’s in our heads! She’s making us hear voices so we’ll drop our guard!"

"She’s right," Lucas’s voice was a whisper, cold and detached. "I don’t know who this is, but in this crater, ’help’ usually comes with a knife in your back."

"I agree!" Celia spat, her chains rattling like angry snakes. "I don’t take directions from strangers, let alone someone annoying like that! If you’re so powerful, ’Voice,’ then come down here and fight alongside us!"

"We have no choice!" Sylvia’s voice crackled through, barely audible beneath the static. "The rid-ge is being swall-owed by th-e red cl-ou-ds! I’ve l-ost the Vangu-ard’s signals! If he kn-ows how to pi-erce the r-ain, we ha-ve to try!"

A group of Requiem mages in the back began to murmur, their faces pale, their hands trembling as they looked at the Mother’s humanoid form.

"Wait..." one of them whispered, his eyes widening with a sudden, localized terror.

He looked at his companions, then at me, then at the gore-humanoid standing in the center of the Blood Sea.

"Why... why are we here?"

The question was so simple it was bone-chilling. It wasn’t a question of strategy. It wasn’t a question of fear. It was a question of existence.

"Because of the raid, idiot!" Cid snapped, but even his voice faltered.

"No..." the mage shook his head, his hands dropping to his sides. "I mean... why are we here? What did we come to kill? Why does my head feel like it’s filled with someone else’s memories?"

The Mother of Despair hummed a singular, low note.

The Memory Bleed had begun.

Perspective: Alina

Input. Output. Frequency.

I stood in the center of the Blood Sea, my eyes half-closed as I sampled the mana-drag. To most, magic was a miracle or a curse. To me, it was a series of differential techniques.

My head throbbed.

It wasn’t a standard mana-exhaustion ache. It was a sharp, localized pressure behind my eyes, as if a rusted needle was trying to stitch a foreign memory into my frontal lobe. Around me, I could see the Vanguard faltering. Wren was rubbing his temples, and even Pryce’s face was pale beneath the red rain.

"My head..." someone from Requiem groaned, dropping to one knee. "It feels like... like someone is screaming in a language I used to know."

440 megahertz. Phase-shift. Reverse the output.

The voice on the comms was a variable I hadn account for. He wasn’t talking about ’will’ or ’bravery.’ He was talking about Echo-Yield Induction. It was a Master-level logic, a way of looking at reality that stripped away the ’mystic’ and left only the ’mechanical.’

If the blood rain was the ground, we needed a carrier wave.

Lightning for frequency. Wind for propagation. Water for resonance. Light for the anchor.

Four elements. A Heavenly Stance that didn’t aim for the Mother, but for the atmosphere itself.

Thirty meters ahead, Navina was a gold-clad blur. She was chasing the gore-humanoid through the sludge, her Arcflingers—the Ionized Frost and the Plasma Vortex—firing in a rhythmic, deafening cadence. Every shot created a localized vacuum, a loud crack that momentarily pushed back the red mist.

"Blink warning! Eight o’clock!" the voice on the comms barked.

I didn’t move. I didn’t trust a phantom voice in a box. Neither did the others.

"Ignore the noise!" Rengar roared, lunging with a kinnetically-charged shoulder-check. "It’s a trap!"

The Mother flickered.

She didn’t move across the sea; she simply existed at Rengar’s eight o’clock. An obsidian claw swept out in a silent, Withered Touch. The beastkin screamed as the edge of the claw grazed his flank, his thick lion-fur and muscle turning into brittle, grey ash instantly. He collapsed into the slush, his skin smoking with necrotic decay.

"Rengar!" Tiara shrieked, her hands trembling as she reached for a broken arrow.

"Next blink! High-angle! Pivot left!" the voice barked again, colder this time.

This time, we pivoted.

The Mother appeared in the empty air where Silas had been standing a millisecond prior, her foot crashing into the slush with enough force to send a tidal wave of blood toward us. If we hadn’t moved, we wouldn’t have just been hit—we would have been wiped.

"Who are you?" I demanded, my voice tight as I slashed through a surge of gore. "Why can you see her?"

"Call me X," the voice replied, the casual playfulness returning. "And as for the ’why’... let’s just say I have the high ground. Literally. I’m looking at your little ’god’ from a top-down perspective she can’t even perceive. I’ll notify you of every teleport, every flicker... until you idiots find a way to close those echos."

"X?" Cid spat, coughing up red mist. "I don’t care if you’re the Devil himself! Just keep talking!"

Cid slammed his staff into the bone-slush, his mana erupting in a violent, violet geyser. "Arise! Ossuary! Sentry of the Vellum!"

From the depths of the crater, a terrifying mass of grinding bone rose, a skeletal monster that churned the sludge into a trap for the Mother’s feet. Beside it, thin, paper-like shadows—the Vellum Scribes—unfurled into the air, wrapping around the Mother’s humanoid limbs like living, mana-suppressing bandages.

Celia was already in the center, her hair whipping like a flag in the storm. She was a red blur of black scythe and silver chains, her Withering Scar carving lethal, jagged lines into the Mother’s gore-shield. Her scythe was an extension of her own absolute obsession, each strike a rejection of reality.

"LUCAS! NOW!" Navina roared.

Lucas lunged forward, his charcoal coat heavy with ichor. He slammed his palms together, sending a violent, swirling Tempest Gale toward the Mother. He was trying to blow the rain away, to clear the cage ’X’ had described.

The wind hit the red deluge and simply... vanished. The high-conductive ichor absorbed the kinetic energy, turning the ’Tempest’ into a tepid, red steam.

"It failed," I murmured, my vision blurring. "He used raw Wind. No carrier. No resonance. The 440-megahertz shift requires a vibratory frequency, not a pressure shift. He’s trying to push a mountain with a fan."

"CELIA! STOP BEING A FUCKING DUMBASS!" Lucas roared, slamming wind to blast gore off a downed mage. "YOU’RE RUSHING IN LIKE A RETARDED COCKROACH BEGGING TO GET SQUASHED!"

Celia spun, scythe ripping through mist, laughing like a maniac. "Cockroach? Pathetic. At least I don’t play like a lukewarm piece of shit who can’t even finish a kill, you talentless hero-wannabe clown!"

Lucas snarled, shredding enemies with razor gusts. "Oh sorry—did I hurt the feelings of the psycho bitch who needs to stab everything to feel stimulated? You’re a walking embarrassment, one bad move from getting yourself buried, you edgy horny murder-slut!"

Celia cackled, flipping over a claw swipe. "Murder-slut? Cute try. But your whole existence is room-temperature garbage in a cape. You’re disqualified from being my rival, you donkey-ass clown—stay trash!"

Lucas’s eye twitched hard. "I’ll smash your stupid dreams to bits and leave you crying like the weak little bitch you are, you glittery gutter reject!"

"Big words from a half-baked hero," she fired back, scythe spinning to decapitate Cid’s summons. "You’ll never in a million years beat me, loser. Go kneel somewhere else, Captain Save-a-Hoe!"

"SHUT THE FUCK UP AND COVER LEFT!"

"ONLY IF YOU ADMIT YOU’RE MY BITCH!"

"NEVER, YOU CRAZY CUNT!"

They synced up anyway—furious, flawless, hating every second.

I... why.. are they so aggressive to each other? But... right now...?

"Everyone..." I whispered, my voice caught in the roar of the rain. "Do you remember... why we’re here?"

The question was back, louder than the rain. A Requiem member beside me dropped his sword, his eyes glazed and vacant.

"I... I think I had a daughter," he murmured, his hands reaching for the blood rain as if it were a memory.

The Memory Bleed was no longer a headache.

***

"Do you like the piano, Alina?"

The memory hit me with the force of a physical blow, yet it was strangely stable—a warm, mahogany-scented anchor in the middle of the red rain.

I was 10 years old. My legs dangled from a plush velvet stool, and my master—the only man whose eyes never looked at me with pity—stood by the window. He wasn’t a saint or a king then. He was just a ghost in a grey coat.

"I do," I’d whispered, my fingers hovering over the ivory keys. "It sounds... calm."

"Do you know what sound is?" he’d asked, his voice calm, technical.

"It’s what we hear?"

"No," he’d shook his head, a faint, manipulative smile playing on his lips. "Sound is a mechanical wave. It’s a vibration that travels through a medium—air, water, even steel. It doesn’t exist without something to catch it and something to carry it. I want you to learn these instruments, Alina. Not to be a musician, but because the soul is often too quiet for words. It needs a bridge of frequency to express what the heart cannot."

"But Master..." I’d looked at the corners of my room. "When I play in here, the notes... they repeat. Even after I stop."

"That is an echo," he’d explained, leaning over the piano. "It happens when a sound wave hits a hard surface and bounces back to you. If the surface is far enough away, the time delay creates a second version of the same truth. To manipulate an echo is to control the memory of a sound."

My eyes snapped open in the present.

The Blood Sea. The red rain. The conductive ichor.

The time delay creates a second version of the same truth.

I looked at Navina. She was twenty meters away, her Arcflingers spitting arcs of plasma that tore through the mist. Every shot was a massive, uncontrolled release of kinetic energy. Every shot was a noise that was being absorbed by the rain.

"NAVINA! FIRE!" I screamed, my voice tearing through the Aether-Vox. "GIVE ME EVERYTHING YOU HAVE! DON’T STOP!"

"Watch the right flank, Sword Saint," X’s voice crackled, cutting through the static with an advisory chill. "The Mother is twitching. She doesn’t like the way you’re looking at the rain."

"Shut up and watch the blinks, X!" I gritted my teeth.

Navina didn’t hesitate. She shifted her Plasma Vortex to maximum output, the barrels of her gold-plated weapons glowing white-hot.

Heavenly Stance: Ocean’s Crucible.

I slammed my blade into the slush, pulling a massive, rotating wall of water from the Blood Sea itself. But I didn’t send it at the Mother. I sent it into the path of Navina’s bullets.

The water submerged the projectiles, wrapping each high-velocity shell in a dense, high-pressure liquid sphere.

"Dumbass, what are you doing?" Cid roared. "You’re blocking her line!"

"No," I gritted my teeth, my head screaming as I focused. "I’m storing the noise."

"Storing the noise... interesting," X drawled. "But tell me, Alina... what happens when a sound has nowhere to go? Does it die, or does it just become a louder version of itself?"

"It becomes a Sonic Boom," I whispered.

Sound travels four times faster in water than in air. By trapping the acoustic energy of Navina’s shots inside the rotating crucible, I was compressing the vibrations into a singular, localized wavefront.

Light for density!

I channeled a flash of white-mana into the center of the sphere. The heat turned the inner layer of the water into high-pressure steam. The pressure reached a critical point.

"NOW!" I released the technique.

The sphere didn’t just break; it exploded. The compressed sound waves, suddenly freed from the liquid medium, hit the air with the force of a physical hammer. A massive, white-noise Sonic Boom rippled through the chasm, the frequency tuned precisely to the resonant frequency of the blood-rain.

For a heartbeat, the rain stopped. Every red drop shattered in mid-air, turning the environment into a clear, crystalline vacuum.

The Mother of Despair staggered. Her humanoid form flickered, the calcified ’Baby’ in her chest letting out a jagged, interrupted wail.

"It... it worked!" Wren cheered.

But my eyes narrowed. The Mother wasn’t falling. She was resetting. The "Sonic Boom" was a spike, a singular peak in a valley of silence. But the Mother’s wail was constant. Within seconds, the blood rain began to reform, the red mist thickening once more.

Attempt Two.

I tried to use the Ossuary as a drum. I slammed Navina’s plasma into the bone-gears, trying to create a continuous, metallic vibration—an artificial "white noise" to drown out the Mother’s wail.

"Too slow," X commented. "A drum is a reaction. You’re still letting her set the tempo. Why play a drum when you could be the entire orchestra?"

The Mother simply raised her Light-Crushing Palm and physically grabbed the vibration, snapping the bone-gears into dust as if they were glass. She was adapting. She was learning my frequency.

What am I missing?

Headache. More headaches. The memory of the master was fading, being replaced by the grey ash of the crater.

"Alina," the ghost’s voice whispered in the back of my skull. "An echo is a reaction. But there is a sound that exists even when you are silent. It is the atmosphere. It is the background. It is the Ambiance."

My eyes opened. The fire in them wasn’t cold anymore—it was white-hot.

"Ambiance is constant," I whispered.

We needed a symphony that never ended.

***

"CID! LUCAS! NOW!"

I lunged forward, my boots skidding through the bone-oil. "Cid, I need Rock Golems! Not shadows—physical, dense stone! Line them up in a circular formation around the Mother! Lucas, fill the gaps with water and Boil it! I need a steam-chamber!"

"What?" Cid barked, wiping blood from his eyes. "Jokes? At a time like this?"

"Do it, Cid!" Lucas shouted, his eyes wide as he finally grasped the logic. "She’s trying to reverse the Faraday effect! She’s turning the chasm into a resonator!"

Lucas lunged forward, flooding the circle with a torrent of water. He snapped his fingers, his Solar Flare turning the interior into a blinding, high-pressure fog.

"And a little something extra!" Lucas added, raising his arms.

He funneled a swirling vortex of wind into the steam, creating a localized wind-tunnel that trapped the heat and the sound in a perpetual loop. He was improving my design in real-time.

"Navina! Fire into the steam! Aim for the stones!"

The memory...

As I ran toward the fog, a singular image from earlier flashed in my mind. The man with the black hair and those piercing, blue eyes. I’d watched him from the shadows when he’d brought Lucas and Celia. He’d made a mock-gun with his fingers, aimed at his own temple, and ’fired.’ Then, with his other hand, he’d mimicked a cutting motion.

At the time, it had seemed like a moron’s theatrical madness. But now, with the 440-megahertz logic in my head, it was a blueprint.

If you cut a sound source mid-flight, you create a dual interference pattern. You don’t just get one frequency; you get a Beat Frequency—the mathematical difference between two waves.

If I cut Navina’s bullets, I wouldn’t just be doubling the noise. I’d be creating a sustained vibration that would vibrate the steam and the stones, creating a constant, white-noise ’Ambiance’ that the rain couldn’t drown.

The Mother of Despair sensed the shift. She turned, her humanoid form flickering with a violent Reaping Blink. She appeared directly in front of me, her claws raised to shred my throat.

THWACK.

A red blur hit the Mother’s back with a devastating kick. Celia.

"Go ahead Alina!" Celia hissed, her chains wrapping around the Mother’s obsidian leg to anchor her. "Do whatever ridiculous thing you’re planning! I’ll take care of this insect!"

"Wren! Bram! Pryce! Suppress the attack!" Navina roared, her officers lunging forward in a desperate, last-stand melee to keep the mother occupied.

I entered the steam.

It was hot—scaldingly so—but the high-pressure air was a perfect transmitter.

Heavenly Stance: Oscillation - Silent Symphony.

Navina quick-switched and fired. 16 rounds of high-velocity plasma ripped into the steam-chamber.

I didn’t block them. My blade moved in a blur of trans-sonic speed, a silver line that sought the center of every projectile.

12. 24. 48.

I executed 48 cuts in less than thirty seconds. My movements were a conductor’s baton, weaving the ’Sound’ of the fight into a singular, ongoing frequency. The atmosphere inside the circle changed. The "Lullaby" of the Mother hit the 440MHz ambiance and shattered. The phase-cancellation was absolute. The red rain inside the chasm suddenly reversed, the droplets flying upward into the sky as the Faraday effect was neutralized.

I stood in the center, my blade smoking, my lungs burning, as the white-noise symphony roared around us.

And then, the miracle clicked.

"—The signal is back! The ridge is clear! Guys, do you copy?!"

Sylvia’s voice was clear, terrified, and beautiful.

Our heads shook as the connection stabilized, but then a new weight hit the line.

"Now that the world is upside down," X’s voice came through, deeper and more resonant than before, "I and Sylvia will ensure her utter defeat. Are you ready to finish this, Warriors?"

The Mother of Despair staggered back, her humanoid eyes wide with something I’d never seen before. Confusion.

"How?" the Mother’s voice rasped, a jagged, emotional wail that sounded like tearing silk. "How can a child... how can a child stop my sea? You are nothing! You are a speck of dust in the wind of my sorrow!"

I stood breathlessly in the center of the clear chasm, my smoking blade held at my side. I looked up at the skeletal nightmare, my gaze cold and unyielding.

"I may be a child," I said, my voice carrying across the crater like a death sentence. "But the lessons I received in this lifetime are far superior than what one achieves in a whole."

"Alina copies," I whispered into the Aether-Vox.

"Target is solved. Initiating Phase Two."

The Mother’s eyes teared with blood.