The Extra's Rise - Chapter 956

956: Thread Through the Crack 956: Thread Through the Crack The blue garden held for one more breath.

I could feel the new weight of her power, a clean, steady hum of settled reality.

Mid Radiant.

Earned, not gifted.

Then my slate buzzed once against my hip, a discreet vibration no one else would notice.

‘North: anomaly on your ring.’ I didn’t let go of her.

“It’s fine,” I said, and made it true.

I drew a quiet shell of Lucent Harmony around the artifact in my pocket, and the sudden pressure spike from whatever it was trying to do flattened into nothing.

Rose’s fingers tightened on my arm.

“It tried to ring home?” “Something like that,” I said.

“Not again.” We stepped out of the greenhouse and straight into Ouroboros ops.

The room was steel, paper maps, and the handful of people I trusted to keep the world from breaking.

Cecilia was already at the main table, stacking folders into neat, dangerous lanes.

“We cut the spine,” she said without preamble.

“Now we break the legs.” She tapped a satellite image showing a desolate canyon.

“Evelyn’s last spell left a thread.

It points here.

A pocket city, anchored by a fissure.

The Order never disbanded.

They just hid sideways.” Vyr, her hand resting on the hilt of her blade, nodded sharply.

“My teams are prepped.

We can hold the breach or push through on your mark.” “The intel is solid,” Elias added, pointing to a schematic.

“Their power is centralized.

Four key anchors.

If they fall, the city’s infrastructure goes dark.” Cecilia’s eyes met mine, hard and clear.

“This is Emberfall.

We burn them out before they regrow.” “Then let’s get to work,” I said.

I pulled the Grey up just enough to read the world’s seams.

Rose held a single blue petal in her palm; it spun and tugged, a dowsing rod for paradoxes.

The line it drew wasn’t straight.

It slipped under rivers and around ancient wards, finally stopping over the dead canyon two countries to the west.

The cliff face at the end of the gorge looked ordinary, but the Grey saw the truth: a scar on reality, a place where the world’s grammar was wrong.

“Here,” Rose said.

The fissure was a crack in the world glued open with iron staples, each one stamped with Arakhel’s lazy crown.

Rose reached out, and blue roses grew directly from the cold iron, their impossible life a direct contradiction to the sloth-magic’s law.

The iron hooks didn’t just loosen; they groaned as years of enforced stillness were undone in a single moment.

The magic holding them forgot its purpose.

“Grey,” I told the seam.

“Open.” It opened like a book that didn’t want to, and then did.

We stepped through into a city.

It wasn’t large, but it was real.

Streets, forges, shrines, and barracks, all stitched together with ward-lines like a spider’s web.

The air was thick with the humidity of sloth, an oppressive calm that slowed thought.

This wasn’t a hiding hole.

It was a capital.

Vyr’s security squad, black-clad and efficient, came in behind us to secure the entrance.

“Perimeter on the crack,” she said, her voice crisp from her helmet’s comm.

“No leaks.” Rose pointed, her eyes already tracing the city’s weave of power.

“Four anchors: the money hall, the forge grid, the chapel square, and the command vault.

Break those, and the rest of this place falls apart.” We moved.

The money hall looked like any other bank, all polite murder behind glass.

The guards came fast, armored and well-trained.

I didn’t give them a grand speech.

My sword laws are simple.

First bite.

Shortest line.

Carry-through.

Exit clean.

I moved through their formation like a geometry problem, my blade drawing lines, their bodies following them to the floor.

I wove a simple nine-circle construct, a lattice of kinetic force that plucked knives from hands and tilted the floor against a charge.

Rose, meanwhile, wasn’t even looking at the guards.

Her gaze was fixed on the floor, where a single blue rose pulsed with a soft, steady light.

I felt a stutter in the building’s power, a cough in the deep rhythm of the ritual engine below us.

She wasn’t attacking it.

She was introducing a paradox into its delicate math-a reality where a key component was failing.

The engine sputtered, choked, and died.

“Next,” I said, as Vyr’s people swept in to bind the survivors and secure the ledgers.

The forge grid ran hot and wrong, the air thick with the smell of scorched metal and something sour underneath-sloth-magic soaked into the steel itself, telling the metal to stay lazy and brittle.

A Radiant foreman stepped into our path, a smile on his face that didn’t reach his eyes.

He lifted both hands, preparing to dump a nine-circle construct of heat-blind fog over our lane.

I laid a sheet of Lucent Harmony over the space, and the fog refused to form.

“Heat Sink,” I added, and the floor drank the rest of his spell.

He tried a sloth bind, a thick, convincing wave of lethargy.

Rose created a paradox that split the single, wide attack into a dozen thin, useless straps, and I cut them apart with a flick of my wrist.

Then I cut the ring off his finger.

He stopped smiling.

While I kept him busy, Rose walked the line of cooling ingots, trailing her fingers over them.

A faint blue light followed her touch, and the dull, sluggish metal suddenly gleamed with the strength of properly forged steel.

She wasn’t destroying.

She was fixing.

Chapel square was worse.

A courtyard with seven sacrificial pits and a black stone table worn smooth.

Sloth priests chanted, their voices dragging at the air.

An icon of Arakhel hung above them, a lazy crown with hooded eyes, watching.

“Leave the icon,” I said.

“It’s bait.” We hit the priests like a hammer that had learned manners.

I used space and force, weaving a subtle nine-circle spell that altered distances, causing their charges to falter and their formations to break.

It was non-lethal crowd control.

Rose focused on the icon.

She created a large, persistent paradox around it-a bubble of reality where it had no followers, no power, no purpose.

The icon, a being of pure belief and influence, began to starve.

A single blue rose kissed its crown, and it winked out of existence.

Redeemers flooded the pits with Purelight, unsticking the sloth from the stone until it stopped sighing.

Two anchors left.

The command vault sat under a plain hall, the door a contract written on steel.

Rose looked at it once and wrote a blunter sentence over it with a single blue rose.

Open.

The door forgot whose side it was on.

Inside: twenty Radiant mages, three bishops, and a general with hard eyes.

They hit us as one, a coordinated salvo.

A net of crackling lightning designed to paralyze, followed by waves of crushing gravity and reins of pure sloth that sought to drag our will into mud.

They were good.

Coordinated.

But they fought like a textbook, every move a known quantity.

They were a perfectly written sentence.

Rose and I were an argument.

I met their offense with my own symphony.

Lightning in my muscles.

Gravity under my heel.

Wind at my feet.

I wove a Stonework construct to ask the floor to be our partner.

Deepdark cut their sightlines while a comb of Purelight stopped their residual magic from clinging to my team.

All the while, my sword wrote its small, brutal truths.

Rose stripped their cleverness bare.

Blue roses climbed their complex spell-circles and introduced mean little paradoxes.

‘No mirror.’ ‘No swap.’ ‘No echo.’ A bishop wove a complex nine-circle bind aimed at me, his motions practiced and perfect.

Before the final ring of the construct could lock, Rose glanced at him, and a single blue rose bloomed over his spell-casting hand.

The bishop’s intricate weave of power collapsed into a shower of harmless sparks.

A paradox where he had forgotten the final word.

On beat five, their front line folded.

On beat nine, the general made a desperate grab for a black box on a stand in the center of the room.

I was already there.

I eased the lid open, wrapping my hands and the container in a small pocket of Grey so the rest of the world didn’t have to breathe what was inside.

It was a glass vial filled with a dark, heavy liquid.

It wasn’t a familiar evil.

It was a miasma so dense the air bent around it, carrying a profound sense of entropy, of things coming to a final, quiet stop.

My Soul Resonance, my second Gift, reached for it on reflex, hungry to understand it, to copy it.

Don’t copy this, Valeria’s voice was a blade in my mind.

“I won’t,” I said out loud, cutting the reflex off like it was a hand that wasn’t mine.

Rose cupped her palms around the vial without touching it.

Blue roses wrote three simple rules on the air around it: Stay in glass.

Don’t multiply.

Be quiet.

The suffocating pressure eased a notch.

Erebus, the Lich King in my service, opened a reliquary grown from pale bone, his movements precise and silent.

“Give it,” he said.

No drama.

I set the vial inside.

The reliquary closed, and the room stopped trying to crawl out of its own skin.

The spine of the Order’s city was broken.

We sealed the crack in the world behind us, and the clean canyon wind hit us like a real thing again.

I sent the tally to the five powers.

Central’s reply came fastest: ‘Bring me the ledgers.’ Rose leaned against my side, her energy spent but her presence more solid than ever.

“Thank you,” she said.

“Always,” I answered.

We didn’t cheer.

We started sending names to people who move budgets and guards.

That’s how you kill an empire hiding in the shadows: you break its power, and then you patiently, relentlessly, kill its budget.

When we finally got back to Avalon, the blue garden was waiting.

Rose stepped into it like she was coming home.

I followed, tired in a way that felt like progress.

She was standing by the cracked pot that held her first rose when I came up behind her.

I didn’t say anything.

I just wrapped my arms around her waist, and she leaned into me, a silent, perfect fit.

“You smell like ink and ozone,” she murmured.

“You smell like home,” I said.

She was quiet for a moment.

“Was it enough?” she asked, her voice small.

I tightened my hold slightly.

“For tonight, it is.

We cut the root.

The branches will wither.” I rested my chin on her shoulder, looking out at the city lights.

Seeing her standing here, free and powerful in a garden she had made for herself, made every moment of the day’s violence worthwhile.

“We did good work, Rose.” She let out a slow breath and nodded, finally letting the fight go.

“We did.”