The entrance to the ruins was a gaping maw of stone and twisted, ancient roots. The air that spilled out was cold, dry, and carried the dust of millennia. As soon as Heim and Flora crossed the threshold, the darkness came alive with malice.
A pressure plate sank under Heim's foot with a soft click. From the walls, a volley of rusted, poison-tipped darts shot forth with a hiss. Heim didn't even break stride. A gesture of his hand, and a wall of interwoven, iron-hard vines sprouted from the stone floor itself, absorbing the darts with a series of dull thuds.
Further in, the floor gave way, revealing a pit lined with sharpened stakes. Flora, with a gasp, began to fall, but Heim's Logbuster mace tapped the ground. Thick, rope-like roots erupted from the pit's walls, weaving themselves into a solid bridge in an instant, allowing her to cross safely.
They encountered swinging stone pendulums, triggered by nearly invisible tripwires. Heim simply willed the stone of the ceiling to grow grasping tendrils of moss that seized the massive blocks, halting them mid-swing. They faced a corridor that filled with choking, toxic gas. Flora, with a focused look, gestured, and the phosphorescent fungi on the walls glowed brighter, their surfaces shifting to absorb the poisonous particles, cleansing the air.
It was a deadly gauntlet, but to the two masters of the Jungle power, it was less a threat and more a minor inconvenience. Their abilities were not merely tools; they were an extension of their will upon the environment itself. The ruins, for all their deadly ingenuity, were just another part of the natural world, and they were its sovereigns.
As they progressed, Heim's sharp eyes continuously scanned their surroundings. The traps were expected. It was the markings that gave him pause. Etched into the walls, carved onto the pillars, and inlaid into the floor in faded pigments were characters and diagrams. They were angular, complex, and hauntingly familiar. A deep, nagging itch started in the back of his mind. He had seen this script before. He knew he had. But the memory, like so many from his time as a fragment within Boboiboy, was just out of reach, a ghost in the vast archives of their shared past.
After navigating the final trap—a chamber that attempted to crush them with converging walls, only to be held apart by unyielding, grown stone pillars—they emerged into the heart of the ruins.
The contrast was stark. The central chamber was vast and circular, devoid of any traps or mechanisms. It was a space of quiet desolation. Thick, soft moss carpeted the floor, and faint light filtered down from openings high above, illuminating motes of ancient dust. The air was still. It was not a tomb, but a refuge. The scattered remains of simple bedding, a fire pit filled with cold ash, and crude, stone tools spoke of a place where someone, or something, had lived out its final days.
It was Flora who found it. On the far wall, partially obscured by a curtain of hanging vines, was a final, deeply carved message. The characters were the same as those they had seen throughout the ruins, but these were not warnings or labels. They were a testament.
"Flora," Heim said, his voice a low rumble in the silence. "Can you...?"
Flora stepped closer, her shyness forgotten in the face of academic curiosity. She traced the ancient grooves with her fingers, her brow furrowed in concentration. Her lips moved silently as she deciphered the text.
After a long moment, she spoke, her voice soft but clear, imbuing the dead language with a sorrow it had not known for ages.
"The world is about to end. Our civilization has angered nature. Its wrath is upon us. The sky burns, the earth splits. There is no escape for us. We are the last. If any soul from beyond finds this... do not seek our fate. Do not follow our path. Run. Run away."
Heim stared at her, genuinely surprised. "You can read this?"
Flora blushed, dropping her gaze from the wall. "I... I've always liked learning ancient languages," she explained softly, her voice gaining a little confidence as she spoke about her passion. "It was a hobby. In my old world, this... this is the language of the Chaldean people."
The name struck a chord deep within Heim's consciousness. A spark of connection.
"Chaldea..." Flora continued, her eyes distant with recalled knowledge. "It was a civilization in our universe. Brilliant. They were pioneers in theoretical physics and dimensional mechanics. According to the archives at SAGOPS, they were on the verge of a breakthrough in interdimensional travel technology. But... they went extinct. Suddenly. Completely. Their entire star system was just... scoured clean. The official records list it as a catastrophic stellar event, but... there were always rumors."
She looked back at the desperate, final words on the wall. "Rumors that they didn't just die. That they... fled. Or that they unleashed something they couldn't control."
Heim fell into a deep, troubled silence. The familiar script, the name Chaldea, the theme of a civilization destroyed by its own hubris against a force of nature... the pieces were swirling in his mind, but the full picture remained elusive. This was not a random ruin on a primitive world. This was a piece of a cosmic puzzle, a relic from a universe he knew, left here like a message in a bottle. And the message was a warning. A warning that felt chillingly, intimately familiar.