Unauthorized Reincarnation

  Chapter 12: Consequences (Final Part)

  Far from the North, far from the chaos to the West, in the middle of the night, four figures descended into the depths of an unknown, newly formed dungeon located near demon territory. The air grew colder with every step, stone walls dripping with moisture, their narrow path was hemmed in by jagged rock.

  Achilles strode at the front, his bronze armor clanking, voice carrying far too loudly for such a place.

  “Once we clear this, we’ll be drinking at the festival. Mark my words. First round’s on me!”

  Behind him, the gothic girl adjusted the sleek, gunmetal device in her gloved hands, its glass face flickering with runes and shifting diagrams. Her dark eyes, heavy with shadowed makeup, flicked toward the others.

  “Ever since I came to this world as… like this—” he gestured at his female body with a wry smile, “I’ve been getting strange feelings like a déjà vu. I think we should cancel the mission and turn back.”

  Achilles barked a laugh. “You always say stuff like that. Jinxing us every time. Relax, goth-Tomb Raider, nothing’s going to happen.”

  A voice drifted from the rear—low, restrained, as if each word had to be carved out of stone.

  “And she...” Minoru’s cough cut sharp in the dark, “Robert was right last time too. You’re the one being blind.”

  The three devolved into bickering like children. Their voices bounced down the narrow walls, arguing about who jinxed what, who had better instincts, who had worse luck.

  The masked man, silent until now, finally spoke. His voice was muffled but steady, carrying a strange gravity.

  “How do you always know exactly where to go? Every dungeon we enter, we walk the safest path. How?”

  None of them heard him.

  Achilles only shouted louder, waving his hand in mock annoyance. “How many times do I have to tell you? There is no ‘other.’ We finish this mission before the festival and head back to the little princess—”

  The words hung in the air like a blade unsheathed.

  The trio froze mid-argument. All three glanced—just briefly—at The masked man, then turned back to bickering as though nothing had slipped.

  But He heard. He always heard their slipped mysterious words.

  At last they reached a sealed chamber, the walls carved with symbols neither holy nor demonic but something between. At the center sat an artifact—an amulet, circular, gleaming with both runic light and mechanical veins, as though the future had been forced to coexist with ancient sorcery. Robert lifted it gingerly, lips tightening.

  “We found what we were looking for. Let's get out here.” he muttered.

  But Achilles was already boasting. “See you were jinxing us for no reason!”

  They turned back, laughter and insults sparking again as they made their way toward the exit.

  Then the dungeon widened into a vast hall.

  And waiting there was death itself.

  A demon stepped forward from the shadows. Crimson skin, a single horn on his forehead, tattoos etched across his torso pulsing with molten light. Four arms flexed with predatory grace. His eyes locked onto them, hunger and hate radiating from his aura.

  “This dungeon is part of Oblivara—my dead planet. That passage… even I barely recognize it.”

  the tattoo on his chest glowed like a flame

  “You walk a path even us forget. How?”

  Robert’s girly voice snapped sharp. “Mist Fog—activate!”

  Robert's feminine body exhaled smoke that bled into the chamber. The haze curled, cloaking them. For allies, sight sharpened, muscles surged with strength and speed. For the demon, the mist blurred the world, seeping venom into his lungs.

  Minoru vanished without sound, his presence dissolving. A heartbeat later, he reappeared with twin strikes, his skill Reckless Heart igniting a storm of fury. Each blow came sharper, faster, like a man willing to bleed himself dry for strength.

  Achilles roared, tearing his weapon from the blue light of his interface. A sword unlike any other, alive with whispering will—the Soul-Cutting Blade. Its voice rang only in his mind, steering his strikes with unnatural precision.

  The trio surged in unison—mist, shadow, bronze.

  But the demon’s tattoos burned red, and his body moved with impossible speed. He slipped between Minoru’s blades, twisted from Robert’s poison-laced fog, and met Achilles’s blade head-on.

  Steel shrieked.

  The Soul-Cutting Sword struck true—yet left not even a mark on his flesh.

  The demon grinned. And then he pressed forward.

  The clash became chaos. Four humans, empowered by unnatural special skills, were still nothing but prey. The chamber rang with clangs, curses, cries of effort—until finally, reality set in.

  They could not win.

  “Run!” Achilles bellowed, his grin gone at last.

  Together, the four fled. Mist clung to their heels as they burst from the dungeon mouth into the night air. The forest stretched dark and endless ahead of them, branches whipping past as they ran.

  Behind them, the demon’s roar shook the trees, promising this was far from over.

  And so the four shadows vanished into Castriel’s woods—arguing even as they ran, bound by secrets, and hunted by something they could not yet comprehend.

  They didn’t stop running until the forest thinned and the night air burned in their lungs. Achilles slammed his hand against a tree, panting, his grin long gone.

  “Robert—how far?” he demanded.

  Robert’s slim, pale hand flicked the gunmetal device awake. Runes flared against the glass. His breath caught.

  Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

  “Thirty seconds. That thing will be on us in thirty seconds.”

  Achilles’s eyes narrowed. He thrust out his palm.

  “The artifact. Give it.”

  Robert hesitated, then slipped the artifact into Achilles’s gauntleted hand. Its light pulsed faintly, as if alive.

  Achilles turned, his bronze armor creaking. His gaze locked on the masked man who stood silently apart, chest heaving but voice unused.. Achilles stepped closer.

  “I’m sorry, man,” Achilles’s tone softened, almost kind. “But we need someone to hold it back. Just long enough.”

  The Soul-Cutting Sword hissed free. With one savage thrust, the blade sank into the masked man’s chest.

  The masked man staggered, the steel’s unnatural precision tearing through him as though fate itself demanded it. Achilles wrenched the bags from his shoulders in the same motion.

  “I promise…” Achilles whispered, face tight. “I’ll remember your name—Rufus—and I’ll mourn for you.”

  Then he turned. No hesitation. He and the others vanished into the trees, Robert and Minoru shouting, curses and disbelief mingling with their frantic retreat.

  Rufus fell to his knees, gloved hands clutching the wound. His breath rattled, blood spilling into the earth.

  The forest shook as the demon emerged from the treeline, tattoos burning like rivers of magma across his crimson flesh. He stopped, looming over the dying man. His four arms flexed with disdain.

  For a heartbeat, he only stared.

  Then Rufus moved. Weak but deliberate, he reached and clamped his hand onto the demon’s ankle. With his other, he revealed what he had stolen right before the betrayal, the artifact, gleaming faintly in his palm.

  The demon’s eyes narrowed. He reached into his sash, pulling free a shard of flawless blue crystal. Without a word, he crushed it to dust between his fingers.

  The air split open behind him. A portal surged into being, its edges glowing like broken stars, blue fire licking the void beyond.

  The demon bent, scooping Rufus up as though he were nothing more than a child. With one last glance toward the direction the three had fled, he stepped into the light.

  The portal sealed. The forest fell silent.

  ___________________________________

  Shadows of Cindralith

  The battlefield had grown silent, broken only by the hiss of wind across scorched stone and the faint groans of the dying. Alaric stood over the ruin, his blade chipped, his eyes hollow as they settled on the last elf who had survived at his side. Her robes were tattered, her breath ragged.

  Alaric exhaled, voice low and sharp with frustration.

  “This… is not what we had planned. Something has shifted—something major.”

  His jaw clenched. He turned toward her.

  “Show me my fate.”

  The elf lowered her dark lashes, her expression unreadable.

  “My king… you have only two favours left. Once they are gone, the contract is broken. Is this truly what you desire?”

  Alaric’s eyes burned with the kind of resolve only born of despair.

  “Yes.”

  She reached out, her dark hand cool against his face. Smoke seeped from her palm, curling over his eyes, drowning his vision in a veil of black.

  And then he saw it.

  His own head, mounted on a long pike, its lifeless eyes staring into nothing. His body impaled through with a grotesque, otherworldly blade—its shape unlike any weapon forged in Veyloria. From his decapitated form, branches twisted and grew, a tree of death blooming from his ruin.

  Alaric staggered back with a strangled sound. His stomach lurched, bile rising. He dropped to his knees and vomited into the dirt, the image burning itself into his soul.

  When the vision finally released him, his gaze drifted to Lily’s unconscious body lying among the corpses. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, staring at her pale, still face.

  “No…” he whispered, voice hoarse. “She isn’t capable of that. No one from Veyloria is.”

  The elf’s voice broke the silence, soft and cruelly patient.

  “My king, if you would prevent such an end, then you must follow the prophecy. You must become the father.”

  Alaric’s hands tightened into fists. For a long moment, he said nothing—only breathing hard, the taste of ash and blood still in his throat. At last, he nodded.

  His eyes swept over the field once more—the bodies of his comrades strewn across the earth, the price already paid. Slowly, he bent and lifted Lily into his arms, cradling her as if she were something fragile, dangerous, and precious all at once.

  Without another word, he turned from the battlefield, Lily a silent weight in his arms. He did not look back at the dead, his eyes fixed only on the path ahead, on the terrible, necessary future he now had to build and began the long walk back to city Cindralith.

  _____________________________________

  Among the bodies, something impossible happened.

  The elf who had turned to stone lay in a fractured heap of statuesque shards. For a long beat the forest held its breath — then, as if obeying some unseen wind, the shattered pieces crumbled finer and finer until only dust remained. The dust lifted and vanished like memory.

  The scene snapped.

  She opened her eyes to a darkness that was not empty but full — a colossal throne room carved from pitch and starlight. No robes now; the dead elf who had been stone rose from the dust as a dark-blooded beauty, features sharp, ears long and proud. She knelt once, ceremonial and precise.

  “My Lord Lucifer,” she intoned. “Your loyal servant returns.”

  The figure on the throne was almost obscene in scale — four times the height of a man, a perfect terror wrapped in long, black hair. His face was handsome in a way that made the room colder: high cheekbones, skin like midnight, white pupils that drank the light. When he spoke his voice filled the chamber and the stones answered back.

  “What news of Veyloria?”

  “Everything proceeds as planned,” she said. “Except—”

  “Except?” He leaned, an animal at its keeper’s table.

  Her voice lost none of its composure. “The future king of humanity—Prince Alaric—will be slain:”

  Lucifer chuckled softly, a sound of distaste. “Obvious. I will finish him myself.”

  She replied with trembling voice. “My lord… it will not be you. But someone else.”

  Lucifer’s grin sharpened. “Interesting. There is scarcely anyone strong enough in Veyloria—perhaps the five generals of the four-handed race together, perhaps his teacher. But none would dare to strike him down outright.”

  “The cause will be unusual,” Elf said. “He will be killed by an unusual sword a thorny sword.”

  For the first time in a long while, Lucifer was still. Darkness pooled around him like ink drawn by gravity. He whispered to himself, a long, brittle thread of sound. “What is that old bastard plotting now?”

  Then, abruptly: command. “Velith. Show me my fate.”

  She hesitated. The air itself seemed to wait. “My lord,” she said quietly, “I have only one favor left. After that, our contract will end. I will be no longer what I am — I will return to being the princess Velith who despises you. I do not want this.”

  “If you love me, do as I ask,” Lucifer said, almost tender in the way he ordered obedience.

  Velith closed her hand against his palm. Black smoke spilled over her fingers, a soft suffocation that crawled across his white eyes. She pressed the last of her will into him.

  Lucifer’s vision broke open.

  He saw himself, old and ragged, throat rent and limbs broken in ways that would twist any storyteller’s tongue. He saw the same thorny sword — the same cruel instrument promised Alaric — driven through his heart.

  He ripped the image from himself and choked on the impossibility. “It is impossible. I have countless bodies. I cannot be killed.”

  Velith’s fell to the polished obsidian floor and laughter wove through the throne room like a blade. Her face returned to her own; the spell unmade her. The black smoke peeled away and she smiled with a hunger that was almost joy. “I have only one regret,” she said, voice low and gleeful. “I won’t be there to see you fall, you coward.”

  Lucifer lifted Velith by her neck. For a blink she met his white gaze full-on. She spat into that pale light as if daring fate. With a single motion, a crack like a snapped bone — and her head lolled. He dropped her body to the floor.

  Her corpse hit the floor with a hollow sound. Then, from somewhere beneath the edges of the throne room, a new voice curled up — a woman’s laugh, echoed and far away, threaded with malice.

  “I smell your fear, brother,” the voice sang. “I have waited centuries to smell that fear. I can't wait to smell your blood. I will savor it when it spills—hahaha. I will praise the one who brings the consequences of your actions”

  Lucifer’s expression folded into a mask of rage so vast it swallowed the light. He spoke once, low and lethal. “Be quiet, you mountain of meat.”

  Her laughter only grew louder—a hungry, echoing sound. Lucifer left his throne room, hands clenched, the white of his eyes cold as broken glass.

  Beyond the dark windows of that throne room the world turned toward the fate the visions had shown: Thorny sword, a dying prince, a man already marked by prophecy.