Chapter 85: Grik’s Past (Part 4)

"ANISE!"

My eyes snapped open. I lunged upward, my hands frantically grasping at the empty air, desperate to catch a woman who was already buried under a mountain of ice.

BEEP. BEEP. BEEP.

The frantic, rhythmic chirping of a heart monitor assaulted my ears. The suffocating, freezing dark of the cavern was gone.

It was replaced by blinding fluorescent lights and the sterile, chemical stench of bleach and rubbing alcohol.

I was not on Mount Everest. I was lying in a crisp hospital bed.

A nurse rushed into the room, speaking rapidly in Nepali, her hands gently but firmly pushing my shoulders back down against the mattress. A doctor followed closely behind her.

"Mr. Robert, please remain calm," the doctor urged in heavily accented English.

"You are in a hospital in Kathmandu. You suffered severe frostbite, broken ribs, and a severe concussion, but you are miraculously alive."

I grabbed the doctor’s white coat, my grip terrifyingly weak.

"Where is she? Where is Anise? We were in a cave... the altar... the dead climbers..."

The doctor exchanged a very grim, sorrowful look with the nurse.

"Mr. Robert, your expedition was hit by a catastrophic avalanche near the summit. Search and rescue teams scoured the mountain for three days. You were the only survivor. And... the location where you were found defied all logic."

The doctor looked down at his clipboard, his brow furrowed in utter disbelief.

"You were found completely buried in a snowbank almost four miles below the Hillary Step. The rescue team said it looked as if you had been thrown off the peak by an explosive force. It is a sheer drop. Surviving that fall is physically impossible."

"I did not fall!" I screamed, the memories of the blood red runes flashing vividly in my mind.

"She pushed me! Anise pushed me out! The missing climbers, the ones from the Sterling expedition... they came out of the walls! They were dead, but they were walking! There is a bleeding altar inside the mountain!"

The doctor’s sympathetic expression instantly hardened into a mask of clinical concern. He gently pried my fingers off his coat.

"You have suffered extreme high altitude cerebral hypoxia, Mr. Robert. Hallucinations are a very common trauma response to the Death Zone."

"I am not hallucinating!" I roared, thrashing against the sheets.

"You have to go back! The mountain is corrupted!"

They did not go back. They did not believe a single word.

When I refused to recant my story, when I kept screaming about zombies and a magical explosion that saved my life, the sympathy of the authorities completely vanished.

They labeled me a madman. A traumatized survivor who had completely lost his grip on reality due to survivor’s guilt.

I was transferred from the hospital in Nepal directly to a high security psychiatric ward back in my home country.

I spent the next ten years locked inside a sterile, padded cell.

"The next ten years were filled with different phases of life. The first two years, I tried convincing people to believe what I saw. No one believed me. Then, I started to make attempts to take my own life. I was stopped, almost every time. The time they didn’t find me, memories of Anise made me give up." I said as the pack listened.

---

"They fed me heavy sedatives," I told my pack, my baritone voice echoing coldly in the Labyrinth vault.

"They tried to chemically scrub the memories from my brain. But I did not lose my mind in that asylum. I honed it."

Every single night, the exact same nightmare played on a loop. The crimson light. The dead eyes of David Sterling. Anise turning back to mouth the words ’I love you’ before the mountain swallowed her.

"I realized I was not insane," I said, pacing slowly across the polished marble.

"I realized that the magic I witnessed was real. And if it happened on Everest, it was happening elsewhere."

When the doctors finally deemed me "stable" enough to release, I did not try to resume a normal life. I became a ghost.

I funneled every dime of my remaining savings into obsessive, relentless research.

I locked myself in a small apartment covered floor to ceiling in maps, newspaper clippings, and red string.

I tracked every single unexplained disappearance, every freak geological event, and every mythological sighting across the globe.

"I connected the dots," I whispered, my glowing eyes burning with the weight of a horrific truth.

"Earth was a world without magic. But it was not a closed system. Something out there, something incredibly ancient and terrifying, was slowly bleeding into my world. The altar on Everest was a gateway. A breach. The supernatural corruption was invading us."

I had compiled undeniable, absolute proof.

I documented the exact coordinates of a dozen other dormant breaches hidden across the globe.

I was finally ready to expose the terrifying reality to the public.

I was ready to prove that Anise did not die for nothing.

"But I was too late," I concluded, the bitter taste of failure flooding my mouth.

...

"I never got to publish my research. I died."

Rolf blinked, leaning forward.

"How?"

"I do not know," I admitted softly.

"I was sitting at my desk, looking at the final manuscript. Then, a sudden, blinding pain pierced the back of my skull. It felt like an ice pick. The world simply turned to black. At least, that was the last memory that I remember. I do not remember anything else. But I did not die a normal death."

I looked down at my heavy, brass plated Vanguard Arm.

"When I finally opened my eyes again, the apartment was gone. Earth was gone. I was lying on the cold stone floor of a brothel in the Monster Kingdom, staring at my green skin in a cracked mirror. I was Grik, the defective, suicidal goblin."

The flashback completely faded. We were back in the silent, freezing vault of the Great Iron Labyrinth.

My pack sat entirely speechless. Nyssa was wiping a fresh stream of tears from beneath her glasses.

Kaelith stared at me, her pitch black eyes holding a profound, silent respect for a man who had fought a war across two different lifetimes.

Lysandra clutched her hands tightly over her heart.

"You spent a decade in a cage, trying to prove her sacrifice mattered," Nyssa whispered, her voice cracking with emotion.

"Grik... I am so sorry."

"It does not matter anymore," I said softly. I turned my back to my squad and looked up at the massive, crystalline stasis pod sitting in the center of the room.

"Because she is here."

I stepped up to the pedestal.

The woman inside the freezing, magical fluid wore the armor of a Holy Alliance Hero, but I did not care about the title. I just cared about the face.

I reached out with my organic hand, placing my palm flat against the frosted glass directly over where her face rested.

"I do not know how the Holy Alliance pulled your soul from the rubble of Everest," I murmured to the sleeping woman.

"I do not know how they turned you into a weapon and locked you down here. But I am getting you out."

HISSSSSSS!

Before I could even attempt to channel my C Grade mana to break the seal, the ancient vault violently reacted.

A sharp, deafening hiss of highly pressurized air erupted from the base of the pedestal. 𝑓𝘳𝘦𝑒𝑤𝑒𝘣𝘯ℴ𝘷𝘦𝓁.𝑐𝑜𝑚

CLACK. CLACK. CLACK.

Heavy mechanical locks disengaged in rapid succession. The glowing magical runes etched into the crystal coffin suddenly flared from a dormant blue to a blinding, brilliant gold.

"Grik, step back!" Kaelith shouted, her daggers flashing as she leaped up the stairs.

I did not move a single inch.

GLUG. SQUELCH.

The magical, freezing fluid inside the pod began to rapidly drain, emptying through hidden vents in the floor.

The thick frost covering the glass melted away instantly.

"It is fine. A little bit of splash will not scar me. The scars of my past life are much more painful. But they are healing. I am healing! Thanks to you!" I said calmly.

The heavy crystal lid of the coffin groaned loudly.

Slowly, automatically, it slid open, releasing a massive cloud of freezing white mist into the marble vault.

I stood perfectly still, my heart hammering a frantic, desperate rhythm against my ribs.

Through the dissipating mist, the woman in the white and gold armor let out a soft, ragged gasp.

Her chest heaved as fresh air filled her lungs for the first time in centuries. Her eyelashes fluttered, brushing against her pale cheeks.

Slowly, she opened her eyes. They were a brilliant, piercing shade of hazel.

She blinked against the dim light of the vault, her gaze completely unfocused. She looked at the stone ceiling, then turned her head weakly toward the side.

Her hazel eyes locked directly onto my glowing, dark green face.

She stared at me. Her brow furrowed in deep, hazy confusion as she looked at my monstrous features, the black arcane circuits on my neck, and the heavy brass arm bolted to my shoulder.

Her lips parted.

"Robert?" she whispered.