The mist suddenly parted to both sides.
A massive, partially obscured face slowly descended from the thick grey fog, coming level with the Guardian at the edge of the canyon.
It was a face composed of grey-white stone textures, its features hard and ancient, as if carved into a cliff by a clumsy stonemason a thousand years ago.
Within the eye socket exposed outside the mist, there was no eyeball, only a hollow void of greyish-white.
"How shall you act?"
The raspy, overlapping voices echoed lowly between the canyon and the cliffs.
The wind died down, and the mist ceased its churning.
The Guardian stood with his hands tucked into his sleeves, his cloudy pupils showing no ripple of emotion as he quietly met the stone face's gaze.
A negotiation between the Nightwatchers' strongest combatant and the remains of a forbidden existence was thus silently laid out.
At the same moment the parley began at the top of the tower, something beneath the earth of Bronze City also lost its original balance.
Deep within the pipe network, at an alert outpost on the Northwest Branch.
The Nightwatcher on duty was holding an oil lamp, performing a routine inspection of the massive pillars of The Bronze Sin standing within the gaps of the walls.
These bronze pillars had originally been emitting faint transcendent ripples at an extremely slow pace, and the inscription grooves on the pillars were still glowing with a ghostly blue light.
But just now, the underground air suddenly became piercing, and the aura emanating from around the pillars abruptly turned incredibly dense, causing even the blue light in the grooves to tremble.
The lamplight drew closer, illuminating the rough bronze surface.
A small patch of extremely fine yet dense gnawing and claw marks was emerging at the very bottom of the bronze pillar.
The duty Nightwatcher's pupils shrank.
The surface of this bronze pillar, which served as a cornerstone of the seal, had been eroded by the things beneath.
And it wasn't just this one.
Counting further into the passage of the Northwest Branch, the sealing array of the four surface bronze pillars, including this one, began to show this extremely dangerous omen of collapse.
As the copper was gnawed and devoured, the inscriptions began to fail in large patches, and the underground defense line was already riddled with holes.
At the sinkhole in Old Council Square.
The Nightwatchers guarding the sinkhole suddenly heard a muffled sound surging up from deep underground, growing more and more frequent.
It was the sound of countless coarse, dry guttural voices tangled together, roaring frantically.
His face instantly turned pale, and he turned to scream toward the fortifications behind him.
"This is bad! The ghouls are rushing up!"
The Nightwatcher's shout was instantly shredded by the cold wind surging from the sinkhole.
Atop the tower, the negotiation had just begun. All communication channels had been tightly sealed by the Guardian, and not a single whisper from the outside world could leak in.
But deep at the base of the tower, the rupturing rift was tearing toward the surface at an unprecedented speed.
No one could be in two places at once.
When the cry of "The ghouls are rushing up!" slammed into the night wind, Glock was standing at the command post on the edge of the sinkhole.
He turned his head sharply, his hand already on his waist.
The bronze protection layer beneath his feet, which led to the Abyss, was currently half-open.
Before nightfall, the Descendants had sent word up that things were indeed gnawing on the copper underground. Several gnawed conduits wouldn't hold for long, so they had to go down and patch them during the night when ghoul activity was slightly weaker.
Additionally, they wanted to test that section of still-twitching tentacle the Great Ascendant had previously retrieved from a dive. Several parties wanted to use this opportunity to see exactly how efficient this thing was at eating copper.
The heavy bronze protection layer was being raised inch by inch by winches, and the dark opening beneath had only just revealed a small portion.
Yet, it was exactly at this moment that this incident occurred within the Abyss below.
Glock did not hesitate for a second.
"Close it! Seal the opening!"
Several Nightwatchers lunged at the winches, turning them with all their might. The heavy bronze plates emitted an ear-splitting screeching sound as they were pressed down inch by inch.
Just before the gap was about to close, the claw of the first Greater Ghoul reached up.
The claw was a circle thicker than a normal ghoul's, and its pale knuckles were stained with a layer of dark green copper rust. As soon as its fingers touched the edge of the protection layer, it gripped it tightly, forcing its way out.
The bronze plate pressed down, and the claw was snapped clean off, black-red blood gushing from the break.
The protection layer was locked tight once more.
In the next moment, dense impact sounds echoed from beneath the sealed bronze plates, one after another, making the entire piece of bronze hum and vibrate. The impacts were also punctuated by bursts of faint sizzling sounds.
Glock recognized that sound; it was the sound of ghoul flesh hitting the sealing inscriptions and being scorched by the backlash of transcendent power within them.
The number of things surging up from below was not small.
The sealed bronze plates were struck repeatedly from below. Several rivets at the corners groaned under the strain, and even the ashlar blocks pressed on top shifted slightly. Glock immediately called over the two nearest Nightwatchers to press down and reinforce the edges of the protection layer with new materials.
As long as this opening remained sealed, the things below couldn't get up. That was the most critical point for now.
Glock took a half-step back and spoke in a low voice to the messenger beside him.
"Send the signal. Spread it everywhere, as fast as possible."
What he wanted to transmit was more than just "Main sinkhole in danger."
The sinkholes beneath Bronze City were not limited to the one in Old Council Square.
The North Ward, the Northwest Branch, and the area beneath the inner city had all suffered several collapses before. Most had already been backfilled and covered with sealing bronze plates by the Nightwatchers, leaving only the one beneath his feet as the sole remaining passage for diving.
If ghouls were truly surging at the main opening, it meant that the backfilled openings elsewhere might also crack and burst through. What the Nightwatchers had to guard was never just the one beneath their feet.
The Nightwatcher brother who received the order ran off. Glock stared at the vibrating bronze plate beneath his feet, his heart sinking for some unknown reason.
Wasn't Hilde's calculation for the seal's failure still two months away?
Why did it have to be tonight, and why was it coming so suddenly and fiercely?
He had no answer, and he had no time to think of one.
The Holy Armored Army and the Iron Guard were already stationed around the sinkhole. As soon as the Nightwatchers' signal went out, both sides almost simultaneously dispatched personnel to rush toward the old backfilled openings.
The squad from the Holy Armored Army marched north in formation, their heavy armor creating a dull thudding of footsteps in the night.
The people from the Iron Guard scattered further, the dark red patterns on their bodies glowing in the dark as they lunged toward the nearest backfill points.
The entire defense line stretched across the underground of Bronze City suddenly tightened at this moment.
In the brief interval before the wave truly broke, no one yet knew that the hand that had truly overturned this chessboard was currently resting atop the hundred-meter-tall Polymath Tower.
The wind atop the tower could not blow into this domain.
The Guardian stood on the rock platform protruding from the edge of the canyon, his grey hair hanging down, his cloudy pupils staring at the massive stone face emerging from the grey mist.
The Man on the Wall, who had just been posing in a questioning stance, suddenly relaxed his expression.
Beneath that hard, ancient stone face, at the neck where there should have been a clean break, strands of grey-white mist were now entwined. The mist crawled and churned slowly against the break, faintly hinting at flesh that was about to be born.
The Guardian's eyelids twitched slightly.
He could see that this remnant hadn't just recovered; after recovering, it had developed other ideas.
The Man on the Wall spoke.
The overbearing pressure from before had mostly dissipated, and the overlapping voices gradually faded.
"I am trapped within this skull."
"I originally intended to rest and recuperate until this body was whole again before seeking further matters."
The Guardian heard those two sentences clearly.
But as soon as the words fell, a sense of awkwardness he couldn't quite name flashed through the Guardian's heart.
The Guardian narrowed his eyes.
It said, "until this body was whole again." Those few words made his heart sink more than any posturing threat.
This remnant had no intention of letting things end here. The Empire had treated this head like a treasure for half a year, harvesting and extracting from it, researching it over and over, yet it had never truly settled for a moment. Its current half-dead weakness was clearly just hibernation. What it was waiting for was the day it could catch its breath and truly revive.
When that day truly arrived, the thing it would do would certainly not be to stay quietly atop this tower.
The sliver of killing intent in the Guardian's heart instead settled, hardening into a cold certainty.
It seemed his choice for this trip had been the right one after all.
If he had allowed it to persist until the day it regained its power, that would have been a situation no one could handle.
He stared coldly at the stone face, not responding.
The Man on the Wall didn't seem to care whether he responded or not.
The mouth of the stone face slowly split open into a gap.
A pitch-black stone was spat out from that stone crack, hovering in the grey mist between them, slowly rotating.
The Guardian's pupils suddenly shrank.
He recognized this thing.
It was the black stone that had vanished into thin air from Kame's hand back when he had released his domain to shroud the entire Polymath Tower in darkness. Kraus had followed up with questions later, asking if he had noticed a black stone when he struck, and he had shaken his head at the time. He truly hadn't noticed it.
It turned out it had been taken silently in the darkness he had personally unleashed by this head sitting atop the tower, pretending to be harmless.
The Guardian instinctively moved to seize it.
But as soon as he raised his hand, he realized it was impossible. This domain had suppressed most of his power. He couldn't reach the stone hovering a few steps away, nor could he take it.
"I did not expect you to be so decisive."
There was no anger in the overlapping voices of The Man on the Wall, only a hint of almost sentimental flatness.
"You have disrupted my plans."
"I originally intended to recuperate for several more months before releasing this stone." He paused for a moment. "Now, I have no choice but to move it forward."
As soon as the words fell, the black stone drifted back toward the stone face, pressed against it, and melted in bit by bit, vanishing in the blink of an eye.
In the middle section of the Polymath Tower.
Arthur had just propped himself up by the handrail, the scent of blood still in his throat. Hilde was two steps below him, clutching her bruised chest as she gritted her teeth and struggled to climb.
The stone walls above their heads suddenly lit up.
A surge of pitch-black energy flowed down along the inscription patterns on the tower walls. It came from the direction of the tower top, passing all the way through the tower body where the two were located, down and down, silently sinking toward the tower's foundation and the deepest part of Bronze City.
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