The Extra is a Genius!? - Chapter 473

Chapter 473: Chapter 473: Shattered Paths
“What the hell just happened!?”

The words tore out of Noel’s throat the moment sensation returned.

He lay half-buried in pale sand, the grains still sliding away from his coat as his body remembered gravity all at once. For a second, instinct screamed, battle, pressure, denial, the Gatekeeper’s collapsing core—but there was no impact, no follow-up strike.

Just sky.

Gray-blue and distant, stretched wide above him.

The last thing he remembered was the system window hovering before his eyes.

Mission Complete.

They had done it. Together. The Gatekeeper had fallen under lightning, magma, shadow, and will.

And yet—

This wasn’t progress.

Noel pushed himself up on one elbow, chest tightening as he scanned his surroundings. Sand. Strange sand, too fine, almost glassy in places, faintly iridescent when the light hit it at the wrong angle. The shoreline curved away on both sides, framing a sea that was disturbingly calm.

No debris.

No broken mast.

No floating bodies.

No ship.

“…Noir?” he said, voice rough.

Her presence pressed against him immediately, warm and solid in his mind.

‘I’m here, dad,’ she replied, sharp but steady. ‘I don’t know exactly what happened. One moment everything folded, and the next… this.’ A pause, more gentle. ‘You’re exhausted. Mentally and physically. You should sit down before you fall over again.’

That alone told him how deep the fatigue ran.

He let himself sink back fully, sitting on the sand with his legs stretched out, palms braced behind him. The ache flooded in now that adrenaline had nowhere left to hide, every muscle tight, every nerve buzzing dully from overuse. His core felt heavy, not unstable, but spent in a way that warned against reckless movement.

He stared out at the ocean.

It reflected nothing clearly. No ripples of recent violence. No scorch marks, no warped space. Just an empty horizon that might as well have never known the battle that had torn rules apart moments ago.

‘We’re okay,’ Noir added after a brief scan, her tone firm. ‘No critical injuries. You’re battered, but functional. Me too.’

That helped. A little. Noel turned his head slowly, forcing himself to take in the island properly. It wasn’t natural.

Jagged stone formations rose inland at odd angles, not eroded but placed, as if the ground had been folded and locked into shape mid-motion. Some surfaces looked polished smooth, others fractured into repeating geometric patterns that caught the light strangely.

Noel exhaled slowly, fingers curling into the sand.

‘So this was deliberate,’ he thought grimly.

Whatever had happened when the Gatekeeper collapsed hadn’t simply scattered them randomly.

It had separated them.

He glanced back to the empty sea once more, jaw tightening.

“Alright,” he murmured under his breath. “Let’s figure out where the hell we landed.”

Noel straightened slightly and drew a slow breath, steadying his pulse before speaking again.

“Status.”

For once, the system did not answer immediately.

A heartbeat passed. Then another.

The faint, familiar pressure at the back of his mind felt… sluggish, as if whatever governed the interface had to push through resistance it hadn’t encountered before. Noel frowned, eyes narrowing as he waited.

“…That’s new,” he muttered.

At last, the translucent blue pane surfaced in his vision.

He barely glanced at the standard readouts. Normally, the system would have wrapped that up instantly and moved on. This time, something else followed.

The interface flickered once—then expanded.

[New Notification – Mission Updated]

Reach the Central Island.

The location of the Second Pillar lies there.

Noel stared at the words for a long second.

Then he let out a quiet, humorless huff. “Very helpful, Noctis. Truly. Couldn’t have said that before the world broke apart?”

The irony didn’t sting as much as it should have. He understood the implication immediately.

A central island meant satellites. Multiple landmasses arranged with intent. Which meant the violent distortion that followed the Gatekeeper’s death hadn’t been random displacement just as he thought.

His gaze lifted from the interface back to the island around him—the unnatural stone, the silent air, the sense of being watched without hostility. If he was here, then the others were somewhere too. On different islands. Alone, or in pairs. Injured, or stable. There was no way to know.

Two paths formed in his mind, clear and merciless.

Go alone.

Push straight for the central island. Confront the Second Pillar before it could prepare. Before it could tighten whatever chains it wielded. It would be faster. Cleaner. And infinitely more dangerous.

Or—

Find them first.

Delay the confrontation. Risk whatever waited at the center growing stronger. But ensure that Selene, Elyra, Charlotte, Elena, Clara, Marcus, Garron, Roberto—everyone—was accounted for.

Noel closed his eyes briefly.

Before he could speak, Noir’s presence pressed closer, her voice firm inside his head.

‘You asked them to fight with you for a reason, dad,’ she said without hesitation. ‘Charging ahead alone now would make that pointless.’

He opened his eyes.

She wasn’t finished.

‘And the Second Pillar,’ Noir continued, more thoughtfully. ‘From what you remember from the novel… she wore chains. Chains usually mean restraint. Control. Something bound—or something that binds others or things.’

That gave him pause.

“…Yeah,” Noel said quietly. “You’re right.”

He exhaled, decision settling into place.

“Then we don’t rush the center,” he said, more to himself than to the system.

Noir’s tone softened, just a little. ‘So we look for them.’

Noel nodded once.

“First, we regroup,” he said. “Then we move.”

The air changed first.

Noel felt it along his skin, like the moment before a storm decided which way to break. The mana around him shifted in slow, uneven pulses, rising and falling without rhythm. It wasn’t gathering. It wasn’t dispersing.

It was reacting.

Noel straightened slightly, eyes narrowing as he let his senses expand. The island answered—not with hostility, but with awareness. A low hum threaded through the ground beneath his boots, subtle enough that he might have missed it if he weren’t already on edge.

“…This place isn’t empty,” he murmured.

Noir’s shadow stretched a little farther across the sand, her presence bristling. ‘No,’ she agreed. ‘But it’s not attacking either.’

That, somehow, was worse.

Further inland, the jagged stone formations seemed to shift—not physically, but in perception. Angles that hadn’t quite lined up before now felt deliberate, like they had been arranged to be seen from exactly where Noel stood. Faint echoes carried on the air, not sounds in the usual sense, but impressions.

The island was watching.

Noel exhaled slowly. “This isn’t like the Gatekeeper.”

‘No,’ Noir replied. ‘That pressure was absolute. Direct. This one’s… spread out. Diffuse.’ A pause. ‘Expectant.’

He didn’t like that word.

Noel crouched and pressed his palm briefly against the ground. Mana responded sluggishly, sliding away from his touch as if reluctant to be shaped. Not resisting. Just… unwilling to commit.

He rose again, gaze sweeping the horizon where other islands broke the sea’s surface in distant, uneven silhouettes. Rings. Layers. Not a single destination, but a structure—one that had to be crossed, not reached.

“In one of these,” Noel said, more to himself than to Noir, “there has to be the shard production facility. Or at least the path leading to it.”

‘The central island,’ Noir confirmed. ‘That’s where the Second Pillar is. And if the shards are being used as an energy source… then whatever processes or refines them would have to be there too.’

Noel’s jaw tightened.

“And these outer islands?” he murmured, eyes scanning the unnatural terrain around them. “They’re not just land. They’re filters. Barriers. Layers meant to be crossed before you’re allowed anywhere important.”

He let out a short, humorless breath.

“That explains a lot.”

Tharvaldur. Places that collapsed from the inside before anyone understood why.

It had never been about brute conquest.

“They didn’t take the Northern Isles with armies,” Noel said quietly. “They did it by controlling movement. Energy. Access. You don’t fight the core—you get worn down reaching it.”

Noir’s presence pressed closer, thoughtful.

‘And once people realize what’s happening,’ she added, ‘they’re already inside the structure.’

Noel nodded slowly.

The Circle hadn’t needed overwhelming force everywhere. Just the right control points. And enough patience to let the world walk into the trap on its own.

That was how it should have worked at least.

The Holy Capital. The Imperial Academy of Valor. Tharvaldur. Any major power hub, any place where people gathered, relied on shared routes, shared energy, shared stability, each of them should have fallen the same way the Northern Isles did. Slowly. Quietly. From the inside out. Not by conquest, but by design.

Cut the paths. Regulate the flow. Control who moves, who advances, who reaches the center.

Noel swallowed, jaw tightening.

“But it didn’t,” he said under his breath. “Because I was there.”

He had disrupted it. Again and again. Sometimes knowingly, sometimes by sheer stubborn refusal to follow the script laid out for him. What should have been inevitabilities turned into ruptures. And now the Circle was compensating, scaling up, tightening the structure, turning the Northern Isles into a full demonstration of how the world was supposed to be handled.

Noel exhaled slowly.

“This is bigger,” he admitted quietly. “Bigger than anything we’ve dealt with so far.”

Not just another arc. Not just another escalation.

He knew that feeling too well—the sense of standing at the edge of something final. One of the last events. A turning point the story didn’t walk back from.

And that scared him more than any monster.

Because this part… he hadn’t read.

Marcus never made it this far.

Which meant there was no blueprint. No meta-knowledge to lean on. No certainty waiting at the end of the page.

Only decisions.

Noel straightened, eyes lifting toward the warped horizon and the strange, silent islands beyond.

“Alright,” he murmured. “Then we do it the hard way.”

Find the others.

Navigate the islands.

Break the structure.

And walk into the unknown—without a guide, without guarantees, and without backing down.