Belial sat down on the edge of the stone slab he called a bed, gritting his teeth as pain flared up from his leg. The wound still throbbed—raw, jagged, and angry—but it had at least clotted. For now. He let out a slow breath and looked down at the meat in his hands, steam still curling from the thick, sinewy strips.
He tore into it without ceremony, jaw working mechanically. Hunger beat pain by a narrow margin, and his body knew what it needed.
The flesh of the Minor Hollow was dense with ether—volatile and foreign. As the essence spread through his system, his muscles clenched involuntarily. Heat flooded his core, tendrils of energy writhing beneath his skin like living threads.
He closed his eyes, focusing.
This part was always the worst.
The pain wasn't just physical; it was transformation. Like weaving strange fibers into a web already spun too tight. His etheric channels pulsed like overheated veins, trying to reject the invasive flow even as they hungrily absorbed it.
He hunched over, clutching his stomach.
His breathing turned shallow. He felt the old sensation—the way it always came on—like being unraveled and rewoven at the same time.
His body convulsed.
Then came the inevitable.
He stumbled outside, barely making it to the edge of the cliff before he vomited, the acidic stench sharp in the dead air. Below him stretched the black abyss, a maw of shifting shadows that clawed at the base of the mountain. He shivered as he crouched there, staring into that void.
Something was down there. Many somethings. He'd sensed them before—shuffling shapes, whispered growls, things that shouldn't crawl.
He didn't want to think about it.
The shivering started again—this time up his spine, traveling to the back of his skull in an electric wave that made his whole body twitch.
When it passed, he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and forced himself upright, limping back into the cave.
The fire had died down to embers, but the meat was still warm. He finished eating the last bite, chewing slowly, methodically. The flavor was sour and sharp, with a strange mineral tang he didn't recognize—but it was food. And the chrysalis needed him alive.
He was about to lie back when a soft chime echoed from the band on his wrist.
He froze.
The visor—silent for weeks—was glowing faintly now, a soft green pulse emanating from the cracked interface.
He narrowed his eyes.
What the hell does that mean?
He raised the device and tapped it. The screen flickered once before stabilizing. A status page displayed in familiar text.
Name: Nero
Rank: Balancer
Weapons (1): Bloodfang
Armor: ---
Items (15): Room Key, Horn, [Translated] Crystalline Book, [Translated] Crystalline Book, [Translated] Crystalline Book...
"Translated?" he muttered aloud.
He furrowed his brow.
The Director had mentioned something in passing when he first received the visor—some function buried in the software, a translator protocol encoded in old Slyvaic runes.
Belial pulled one of the crystalline books from his satchel. It shimmered faintly, the carved symbols now glowing with faint, pulsing lines of light.
When he looked down at the cover, he saw something new.
Not the tangled alien glyphs he was used to.
But a title in a familiar language he spent years trying to master... Slyvaic.
Its smooth crystal spine bore a title in faded, embedded script: Cry-Mechanical Data.
It sounded like a technician's misfiled manual, not a relic of history but ,maybe it was...as his fingers brushed the cover—It felt smooth and new but it had that feeling of aging—he felt a weight beyond its physical form.
He sat on a cold crystalline bed, the tome open in his lap. A single shaft of moonlight pierced the shattered ceiling, illuminating the page like a spotlight on a sacred script. The vellum-like sheets felt ancient, soaked in centuries of silence. His eyes scanned the text, a mix of original glyphs and a remarkably clear translation scrawled in the margins. Some long- scholar had decoded it.
The words didn't describe history in the way he'd expected. They spoke of statues, but not the kind built for worship or vanity. These were war-machines—stone warriors, sentinels of a lost empire. Forged from obsidian, ironstone, and a crystalline alloy that shimmered in the sketches, they were not shaped like gods but soldiers: broad-chested giants, agile scouts with serpentine joints, and one that stood apart. The final sketch, rendered in meticulous detail, depicted a towering figure with a triangular crest on its forehead, flanked by lines like circuit etchings. A chill crawled up his spine as he stared at it.
He knew that design.
It matched the statue in the main hall below—the one he'd passed on his way to the chrysalis. He'd dismissed it as a rusted monument, a hollow fog of a forgotten people's pride. But now, the caption beneath the sketch burned into his mind: "Unit Designation: L.O.K. - Last Of Kings. General model. Direct neural conduit to high command."
His breath hitched. If that statue wasn't just stone…
The text described their cores, powered not by gears or fuel but by tears. Not metaphorical ones—literal tears, harvested from the grieving. One line, underlined three times in red engraving made him intrigued: "The stone of anguish is the engine of wrath." He flipped the page, his hands trembling slightly. A diagram outlined a procedure, not a ritual. It showed a chamber, a human subject, and a machine with hundreds of tiny arms, delicate as spider legs, weaving tears into a crystalline core. The caption read: "They wept for their fallen. The light was harvested. Memory encoded in grief. Each warrior remembers the death of its maker."
He paused, his pulse was quickening as a uncontrolled greedy grin spraed across his face. This wasn't just technology—it was something deeper, arcane and raw. It reminded him of a scene from an old superhero movie, the one with the genius billionaire in a metal suit, forging his armor in a blaze of ingenuity. But this want that. This was ancient, crude in its craftsmanship yet terrifying in its purpose. The mystery of it dwarfed any cinematic spectacle.
He closed the book halfway, suddenly aware of the chamber's oppressive silence. The wind blew through broken pillars and keyhole of the mountain... He'd uncovered something monumental. He was the first to read this, to understand what had been buried beneath sand, bone, and a thousand years of forgetfulness. The weight of that discovery pressed against his chest, this was his favorite part— being the first to find forgotten history, there was a certain itch that it scratches when learns about history.
This was how he found out about the holes in history Afterall, the forgotten time period where his people were framed as war mongering—world conquering monsters.
A noise echoed from far ahead—a soft grind, stone on stone. He froze. It could be the wind, shifting debris in the ruins. But he knew better. He'd seen too much, understood too much. His eyes flicked to the corridor ahead, where shadows pooled like ink. The main hall lay beyond, home to the statue that might not be a statue at all.
He had to know.
With a breath caught between fear and fascination, he snapped the book shut. The sound clapped through the chamber, lingering like a gunshot. He slid the tome into his visor, its weight disappearing in the grey light , and stood. The corridor stretched before him, a throat of darkness leading to the dark door.
His boots scuffed the stone floor as he took a giant step, then another. The air grew colder, sharper, as if the ruin itself was exhaling. He thought of the statue again...the Last Of Kings. If the text was true, it wasn't just a relic but a machine, its core pulsing with the grief of a lost empire. What would it do if it woke? Would it recognize him as a person—or a threat?
There was only one way to know.