"False alarm," Chuthulos said a moment later, sounding faintly embarrassed. "That was just backlash from seven simultaneous breakthroughs happening at once. My sensors overreacted. Carry on."
"Wonderful," John said, exhaling. "Try not to give me a heart attack next time."
He didn’t get much further than that before Alfred let out a low, startled growl, staring down at his own chest like something inside it had just knocked.
A pulse of black light bloomed beneath his fur, and where a normal Monster’s soul gear would have settled into something bound by the world’s usual rules, this one tore straight past them, crystallizing into a small, dense orb of void-black stone wreathed in slow, orbiting motes of crimson light.
[Eldritch Soul Gear: Ashen Maw]
[Bound to: Alfred]
[Effect: Grants brief phase-state during full-force charges, allowing passage through solid matter for up to two seconds.]
"So after getting Eldritch attribute, their Soul Gear also turned into Eldritch Soul Gears," Chuthulos said, hovering closer with obvious fascination. "Their soul embryos were already complete, and with Eldtich attribute mutating them, they gained Eldritch Soul Gears that can develop further."
"So my friends should be out of this monster cosmoverse’s laws like me after infusion of Eldritch attribute," John said slowly, watching the same black light ripple outward to the rest of his pets one by one.
"Correct. At least, in Monster Paradise, the cosmoverse’s laws shouldn’t be able to interfere. But outside, we have yet to test further. For starter, all of you needs to reach peak of Calamity-rank. Only after that will the laws of this cosmoverse start to react to us," Chuthulos said as he looked at others.
Pymon’s throat lit up gold, a thin ring of light settling permanently around it. Rexion’s neck grew a faceted ember-colored gem just beneath his jaw. Levi’s spinneret core turned void-black and cold to the touch. Terravax’s shell cracked open along one seam to reveal a crystalline heart pulsing steady beneath it. Chronavael’s antlers crowned themselves with a tiny, slow-turning hourglass. Noctelith’s chest hollowed briefly before sealing shut around a small, silent gravity well.
...
That evening, once the celebration finally wound down, John retreated to a quiet corner of the first island with the Rune of New Beginning open in front of him, turning the same problem over for the dozenth time.
’If I could bestow the Eldritch attribute on my own Monsters,’ he thought, ’there has to be a way to do the same for Yuna, Azelis, and Jibril.’
"There might be," Chuthulos said, settling beside him. "But you gave it to your Monsters through the contract bond. Humans don’t carry that same connective thread to you. We’d need to build one from scratch, safely, without unraveling anything already holding their souls together."
"So carefully," John said.
"Extremely carefully."
While he worked, the rest of the paradise carried on without him. Jibril spent the afternoon in Ythera’s tower, sleeves rolled up and hair tied back, mixing a pale green paste under Ythera’s patient correction while Becky hovered nearby offering opinions nobody had asked for.
"Too much river-light," Becky said, peering into the mortar. "Becky can smell it."
"She’s right," Ythera said, not unkindly. "Half a measure less next time."
"I had no idea gardening translated this directly into alchemy," Jibril admitted, wiping her forehead with the back of one stained hand.
"It doesn’t, entirely," Ythera said. "But patience does. You have plenty of that."
Across the water, Azelis and Yuna spent the day testing the new limits of their bodies against each other, sparring long past the point either of them needed to, laughing more than either would admit afterward. Vhastra and Emberlune eventually joined in, turning the whole match into something closer to four-way chaos than an actual fight.
...
Several hours into his research, John hit a wall he couldn’t will his way through.
"It’s not a strength problem," he admitted, rubbing his eyes. "It’s a stability problem. I can force the attribute onto them the same way I did with the Monsters, but the human soul isn’t built to hold it the same way. I could kill all three of them trying."
"Then don’t force it today," Chuthulos said gently. "Some walls need time, not effort."
John closed the Rune with a long breath. "Fine. I need a different problem to throw myself at."
"Conveniently," Chuthulos said, "I happen to have one. Breaking through to Calamity-rank requires Calamity-rank resources. Ones far denser than anything you’ve gathered so far."
"And we don’t have any of those lying around."
"We don’t," Chuthulos agreed. "But someone in this paradise might know where some are."
...
Ythera looked almost amused when John found her that evening, herb dust still clinging to her sleeves.
"I know of several deposits within the Forbidden Zone," she said. "Deep pockets the world never managed to strip out of the ground, mostly because reaching them requires surviving what lives near them. I can mark the locations."
"Then let’s go get them," John said.
They crossed back out of Monster Paradise an hour later, the whole group stepping onto the Godsgrave Expanse’s upper terrace under a sky gone hazy with drifting ash. It took less than a minute to realize something had changed.
Dark shapes moved along the ridgeline in disciplined formation, scanning crystals raised toward the mist below, Dranvok banners snapping in a wind that smelled faintly of ozone.
"They’re scouting the resource pockets," Ythera said, six-eyed focus narrowing on the distant formation. "Thoroughly, this time. Someone above them finally started taking this crater seriously again."
John watched them for a long moment, something slow and sharp working itself out behind his eyes.
"You know," he said, "I’ve been meaning to build a reputation."
"Explain," Ythera said, already sounding intrigued.
"I’ve got an identity I use for trade. Mr. Tauren, Vault of Curio Traders. Forces do a lot better business with someone they’re a little afraid of." He grinned. "And nothing builds fear faster than the rumor that some mysterious troublemaker managed to free an Ancient One right out from under Dranvok’s boots."
Ythera’s eyes gleamed with something that looked remarkably like delight.
"Ythera," John said, "are you up for some destruction? I want to wipe out Dranvok’s command center here."
"I have wanted to do that for approximately three hundred years," Ythera said. "Yes. Enthusiastically, yes."
...
The plan came together fast, mostly because neither of them needed much convincing.
"I’ll sneak toward their command center," John said, already threading Voidspace and Chronolight together into a familiar, careful weave. "Then I’ll open a spatial window from there back to here. You just launch an attack from wherever you’re standing, and it’ll land exactly where I point it."
"And they’ll believe I somehow broke free and struck them myself," Ythera said, following the logic easily. "A very satisfying rumor to leave behind."
"They’ll be terrified," John said, grinning. "The Ancient One, loose, and personally furious at Dranvok specifically. Exactly the kind of story that makes people very eager to trade nicely with a merchant who might know her."
He vanished into Chronolight-threaded shadow, closing the distance to the fortress on the crater’s northern rim in a handful of breathless seconds. Patrols passed within arm’s reach of him twice, boots crunching ash-dusted stone, and both times he simply wasn’t where their eyes happened to land.
The outer wards took longer to slip than the patrols did, layered defenses humming with old, tired magic that had clearly never expected anyone to walk through them uninvited. Voidspace peeled each layer open just enough to pass, then sealed shut behind him without so much as a flicker of alarm.
The command center rose ahead of him at last, black stone and humming ward-lines, technicians visible through high windows moving between banks of glowing consoles, utterly unaware that anything had already gone wrong.
John pressed his palm flat against the empty air above the compound’s central spire, and a window tore open silently beside him, dark and star-flecked, exactly matching the one waiting on the other end.
’Ready when you are,’ he thought, and felt Ythera’s answer arrive an instant later, vast and eager.
...
Inside the command center, Commander Thessaly Korvain was mid-sentence, reviewing scan results from the morning’s sweep, when the window bloomed open directly above the spire without warning.
For half a second, nobody understood what they were looking at. The air itself seemed to thin around a point of absolute, star-flecked dark, temperature dropping so fast that frost bloomed across every console in the room at once.
"Containment breach," someone finally screamed, far too late to matter.
Ythera’s strike didn’t look like fire or force. It looked like gravity remembering an old grudge, a compressed column of collapsing starlight punching down through the spire’s roof and driving straight through nine floors of reinforced stone in absolute silence.
Glass didn’t shatter so much as forget how to hold its own shape, runework unraveling into drifting motes of dead light as the column passed through each floor in turn. Technicians threw themselves from their stations, screaming orders nobody was left standing to follow.
The building didn’t explode so much as fold in on itself, walls and consoles and support beams collapsing inward toward the strike’s center before the whole structure simply ceased being a structure at all, imploding into a smoking crater where the command center had stood a heartbeat earlier.
Dust and displaced ash rolled outward in a slow, heavy ring, settling over the courtyard like grey snow, and for a long moment the only sound left was the faint, dying hum of ward-lines with nothing left to protect.
Korvain was thrown clear by the outer shockwave, landing hard against the courtyard stone, ears ringing, staring up at a settling column of pale starlight fading slowly back into ordinary sky.
"That was her," she rasped, scrambling upright with blood running from one ear, staring at the crater where her command had stood a minute earlier. "That was Ythera. She’s loose. She’s actually loose."
Across the smoking ruin, soldiers were already screaming into communication crystals, voices cracking with a fear none of their training had prepared them for. Somewhere beneath the rubble, an emergency ward-siren tried and failed to activate, its housing crushed flat along with everything else in the spire’s lower levels.
John slipped back through the fading window a moment later, unseen and untouched, and found Ythera waiting on the other side with an expression that looked, for the first time since he’d met her, genuinely satisfied.
"Well," she said. "That felt considerably better than three hundred years of waiting."
"Mr. Tauren," John said, grinning, "is about to have a very good year."
They vanished back into Monster Paradise laughing, the sound of it still fading between them when Chuthulos’s voice arrived, considerably less amused than either of them.
"Brother John. Whatever you just did, it already reached the upper layer. Something up there just took a very sudden, very focused interest in the Godsgrave Expanse, and it isn’t Dranvok this time."