Wonderful Insane World-Chapter 126: Cold Moon

The silence that followed the Guardian’s crash was heavier than the roar of the previous battle.

A ragged, wet breath escaped from his broken visor, laced with a dark trickle. The ground beneath him seemed to drink his vital essence. In front of him, the Lady of Midnight advanced. Every step was agony, a defiance of gravity and her own nightmare anatomy. Her body, now a forest writhing with supernumerary limbs, weeping eyes and mouths whispering curses, dragged itself forward with obscene slowness. The gnarled mass replacing her wounded flank throbbed like a sick heart.

The Guardian saw her twisted shadow spill over him. Saw the forest of claws rise, ready to strike him down. Despair should have consumed him. Instead, a glacial calm took over – the final reflex of a system on the verge of collapse. His one functional arm, the one still holding the Jian whose blade was now a jagged, smoking spine, extended forward. Not to block. Not to strike. But to plant the sword into the ground before him, like a final line in the sand.

The blade vibrated as it met the hardened earth. A faint glow, barely visible – more memory than light – ran along its chipped edge. Not enough to wound. Just enough to be seen by the maddened constellation of eyes fixed on him.

She hesitated for a fraction of a second. Like the ancient instinct of prey before a raised blade, dulled though it was. A moment’s pause in the storm of her fury.

That was all the Guardian needed.

With a roar that tore through his throat and spat out a jet of black blood, he lunged forward. Straight into the beast’s monstrous belly.

He left the Jian behind, planted like a silent reproach. His bare hands, slick with blood and grime, didn’t grasp a weapon—they seized the strongest pulse within the twisted knot of petrified entrails that had replaced her wounded flank.

The Lady of Midnight screamed. A real sound this time. A physical rupture in the air that made the Guardian’s bones shiver. A dozen claws came down on him, shredding what was left of his armor, digging into the already broken meat of his back.

He felt ribs give way, a lung punctured. The taste of copper and ash flooded his mouth. But his fingers, like iron vices, sank into the cold, viscous tissue of the growth. He pulled, with the madness of a man trying to tear a stone from a mountain.

He didn’t tear it free. He ripped it apart.

A surge of putrid blackness, thick as tar and flickering with malignant glints, burst from the gaping wound. And it wasn’t blood.

The Lady of Midnight arched in a massive spasm, a shriek piercing and inhuman erupting from her countless mouths. The parasitic limbs flailed madly, striking at random, smashing against each other in chaotic pain. Her eyes rolled, white with shock.

The Guardian, now a grotesque puppet hanging from her side, felt his strength drain. The claws in his back pinned him, emptied him. But he saw something. In the heart of the black flow, where his hands were buried, the flesh around the tear... wasn’t healing. It was shrinking, drying, as if burned by its own venom. The cancerous regeneration had stalled—too busy trying to contain this hemorrhage of vital shadow.

This was the opening. The only one.

With one last superhuman effort, the Guardian let go of the growth and flung himself backward, tearing his body from the claws that held him. It was agony, pure dismemberment. He crashed to the ground, rolling, leaving behind a trail of dark blood and black matter. He was spent. No more armor. No more sword. Nothing but rags and a will in tatters.

The Lady of Midnight, staggering, tried to contain the black flood with her many hands. Her grotesque form was wavering, losing coherence. Pain and the loss of her primordial substance disoriented her. But the hatred in her eyes still burned. She saw him—vulnerable, gasping in the dust. A flicker of savage triumph crossed her crazed gaze. She gathered her strength to crush him for good.

In a silent plea, the Guardian raised a trembling hand toward the Jian, still embedded in the earth a few meters away. The chipped blade caught a flicker of distant spectral light.

The Lady understood. She roared and lunged, flinging a tentacled limb to strike the sword aside, to deny this dying wretch his last hope.

Too late.

The Guardian hadn’t moved. His raised hand wasn’t reaching for the sword. It was concentration. A final, burning focus of what power remained to him—of the will that had held against the unnameable. He didn’t need to go to the sword. fгeewёbnoѵel.cσm

He called the sword to him.

The Jian trembled, then shot out of the ground in a tarnished silver flash. It crossed the fetid air like a dying meteor and landed in the Guardian’s open palm with a dull thud. The impact nearly shattered his wrist, but his fingers closed instinctively around the familiar grip.

The Lady of Midnight was upon him, her twisted shadow engulfing him—a forest of claws and fangs about to tear him apart.

The Guardian, lying on his back, had no strength to rise. No way to dodge. He had only one gesture left. One.

He pointed the blade to the sky, directly into the path of the monstrous weight falling toward him.

And let himself fall onto it.

This was no strike. This was a sacrifice. He used what little strength remained, not to drive the blade, but to hold it, to anchor it into his own body like a stake—as the colossal weight of the Lady crashed down.

The Jian vanished into the forest of flesh. There was a grotesque sound—a wet rupture, the cracking of bone, and a final metallic screech. The Lady of Midnight collapsed onto the Guardian, burying him beneath her writhing mass. A deathly silence fell, broken only by muffled gurgles and the sinister hiss of negative energy gnawing the earth.

Then, slowly, something moved.

The Lady’s grotesque mass lifted slightly, spasmodically. And from beneath, a single arm rose.

The Guardian’s arm. Still gripping the Jian. The blade, buried to the hilt in something essential at the abomination’s heart, was now pure black—charred, but whole.

Around the wound, her flesh wasn’t healing. It necrotized, crumbling into grey ash before their eyes. The cancer he’d fed had finally found its core.

A last cry—choked, hoarse, more human than monstrous—escaped the tangle of mouths before the whole form began to collapse inward, like a sandcastle under a crashing wave.

Finally free from the weight, the Guardian lay still, staring at the misty sky through the dissipating shreds of flesh. His sword, still clenched in his hand, pulsed with warmth. He didn’t move. Only the dying hiss of the abomination broke the silence. The chasm between them had closed. In mutual annihilation.

⸻

Suddenly, footsteps broke the quiet. Uneven. Hesitant. Like a heart wandering. The Guardian heard them through the thick cotton of pain, but he couldn’t turn his head. Every nerve was a raw string, every thought a shard of vertigo. His body was just a relic now—a broken shell for a spirit adrift at the shore.

Veiled by the mist, the moonlight painted the sky in milky grey. He felt its glow more than he saw it. His eyelids were too heavy, stone soaked in sweat and blood. He might never see the end of this last full moon.

And that was fine. He’d seen enough for a hundred lives.

The steps stopped close beside him.

Then something blocked the light. A silhouette. Blurred. Upright but shaking. A presence.

The Guardian didn’t know if he was dreaming.

A warm breath touched him, carrying the scent of blood—and something oddly familiar. And it wasn’t the Lady. No. This was something alive. Terribly alive.

Then, a voice. Soft, trembling. Like a string about to snap.

"...Is it over? Did you... did you kill it?"

He knew that voice, somewhere deep inside. A memory. Too human for this world of ghosts. Too fragile to belong here. He wanted to answer. Say something, anything. He hadn’t spoken in over a century. Had forgotten his own voice.

His throat gave only a rasp. A thread of life torn from the void.

The silhouette knelt beside him.

A hand touched his forehead.

He shuddered.

She didn’t cast a spell. And the Guardian didn’t feel pain, only warmth. Skin against skin. A gesture without power—yet full of intent. And maybe that was the miracle.

"I’m here," she said. "Stay with me. Just a little longer."

A held-back sob. A tear he didn’t see, but felt fall on his blood-soaked cheek.

"Thank you for saving us."

Lie.

He hadn’t fought the abomination for three nobodies. He had only defended his ground, upheld his pact. The only purpose he’d clung to for generations.

But he had no strength to correct her.

And... maybe it was a beautiful illusion.

So he smiled. Barely. Just a twitch of cracked lips. A spasm that said: Don’t thank me.

The Jian in his hand still pulsed, like a second heart. And in that final beat, he felt something pass through. A memory. A trace. A last will embedded in the metal.

Someone else would inherit it.

That was how it had to end.

And maybe begin again.