From Deadbeat noble to Top Rank Swordsman-Chapter 48: The Fissure Below

The citadel shuddered.

Leon felt it in the soles of his boots as he moved through the eastern archway—a long, slow pulse, like something exhaling beneath the earth. Ashveil thrummed with the same unease. It wasn’t fear.

It was anticipation.

Marien’s voice echoed behind him as she rallied the Fifth Cohort. The sound grounded him. Steady. Commanding. But as he moved through the inner causeway, every hallway felt narrower than the last.

Something had shifted in the deep.

Not just breached—warped.

By the time Leon reached the first seal chamber, the torches had gone out. The sigils across the archway pulsed red. He slowed.

The door was already open.

The blast marks told the story: a forced entry, but precise. Not brute force. Inside, the stone was scorched black, yet there were no bodies. No signs of resistance.

Only one thing remained.

A mark.

Drawn in soot, across the floor. Not a glyph. Not a sigil. A symbol older than language.

A circle, broken at the edge.

Leon knelt beside it, fingers hovering just above. The warmth in the stone was recent. Whatever had been summoned, or passed through, had done so minutes ago.

"They used the old path," he murmured.

Ashveil answered with a flicker.

Behind him, footsteps approached—not rushed, but careful. Marien stepped into the chamber, her eyes scanning quickly.

"Cadets are positioned on the upper tier. There’s no movement there yet," she said. Then her gaze fell to the mark.

"You know what this is?"

Leon stood. "I do now. It’s not a summoning mark. It’s an invitation."

Her brow furrowed. "To what?"

His hand tightened around the hilt of Ashveil.

"To parley."

She blinked. "You think they want to talk?"

"No," Leon said. "I think they want to remind us we’re already behind."

Far beneath the citadel, deep past the old vault lines and blood-sealed thresholds, something opened its eyes.

And smiled.

Beneath the sealed levels—lower than any map dared record—a chamber long thought collapsed stirred with life.

Not light.

Not warmth.

Movement.

The stone shifted, but not from pressure. From something moving within it.

A fissure cracked wider as something pressed against its edges. From the other side came whispers, not carried on air but laced directly into the magic of the place. They crept into the runes lining the old sanctum, peeling their meanings apart, twisting their protections inward.

A shudder passed through the spine of the citadel. Cadets above stumbled. One fell to their knees, eyes wide and streaming with blood. They weren’t hurt.

They were listening.

In the council tower, Idran flinched mid-command. His voice wavered. "They’re using resonance. Cut all arcane channels—now!"

But it was too late. The whisper had already passed through half the city’s wards.

In the deep, behind a veil of dust and silence, something crawled into the space between worlds. Its limbs weren’t made of flesh. They were history, older, ancient. Its thoughts weren’t malice. They were memories.

It didn’t break into the citadel.

It simply remembered its way in.

Like it had existed there, long before it was built.

And now, it had remembered Leon’s name.

Thorne.

Leon staggered as the floor vibrated again—this time not a pulse, but a rhythm. Measured. Intentional.

Marien grabbed his shoulder. "Leon."

"I know," he said. "It’s not just coming. It’s waking others."

"What others?"

He stared toward the broken symbol. "The things buried with it."

She followed his gaze, but her expression hardened. "We need to seal this passage."

Leon shook his head. "We need to find the others like this first. If we seal the passage now, we trap something in here with us. Or worse—we trap ourselves with it."

From behind the wall, there came a sound—soft, like fingers tapping stone. Then scraping. Then... breath.

Both of them stepped back. Ashveil flared in Leon’s grip. Marien drew steel.

And the wall cracked.

A sliver opened—no wider than a hand—but it bled dark mist, and in it were shapes. A face, or something like one, peered out. It didn’t speak.

It just smiled at them.

And all around the citadel, the broken circles began to glow brightly.

The first circle to fully ignite was beneath the Eastern Archive, flooding the script-stained walls with sickly amber light. Dust lifted in clouds. Books burned without flame. And somewhere in the shadow of the second level, an instructor fell backwards screaming—eyes locked on something that hadn’t been seen in centuries.

Another circle awoke beneath the dormitory wing. Cadets scrambled to higher ground as the floor split open along fault lines etched with the same soot-blackened symbol. Smoke hissed from the cracks—not choking, but cold, and whispering.

Like death.

By the time the third circle lit—beneath the Council’s Tower—panic had spread. Runners failed to reach the barracks. Some disappeared mid-turn. Others stood frozen, whispering verses that made no sense. Lines older than the city itself.

Marien gritted her teeth as the stone trembled beneath her boots.

"Leon—these circles. They’re all coordinated."

Leon’s eyes tracked the glow stretching beneath the corridor walls, tracing the pattern.

"They’re not just waking up," he said. "They’re forming a chain."

He looked up.

And realised the centre of the chain wasn’t beneath the citadel.

It was him.

In the Forge District, the sky split open.

A vertical seam of golden flame erupted in the clouds, casting long shadows across the northern wall. Alarm bells rang out in erratic beats, not from signal towers—but from the mouths of those who could still scream.

On the western rampart, a young scout stared out toward the cliffs—and dropped his spyglass. Below the outcrop, the old warded stone had collapsed inward, and from the ruin rose a lattice of bone and rust, shaped like a gate.

It wasn’t there hours ago.

Now it pulsed with the same rhythm as the circles.

And from within it, something began to crawl upward—something robed in echoes, walking on borrowed time.

Leon didn’t yet see it.

But he felt it.

The chain wasn’t complete.

It was still building.

And when it finished, the thing on the other end wouldn’t knock.

It would remember its name.

And with it bring ruin.