Deep within the tomb of the thousand lords, the seal clicked shut behind my party. Far away, inside another spiraled corridor, a rumble echoed like thunder contained within stone lungs. Gears turned. Chains rattled. Stone sarcophagi lining the walls of the forge approach began to hiss—steam venting from ancient pressure valves as thick sigils ignited one by one, glowing a malicious green.
From within each obsidian coffin, a Stone Manticore rose. Not beasts of flesh, but machines of ancient magic and calcified spirit ore—bodies sculpted from basalt and armored jade, with wings that unfurled like siege walls and tails lined with cursed obsidian barbs. And their eyes burned with soul fire.
The Thousand Leaves Vanguard – Interception Team
Ibara's Thorn Chain snapped taut as the air grew dense with chi displacement.
"…The Tombs defenses are waking up," she growled.
The vines around her pulse-reacted, thorns curling inward as the tomb's own defensive will twisted their qi fields.
BOOM.
A wall nearby exploded outward as a Stone Manticore charged through! As it did it smashed the mural of the serpent queen. Dust and jade shards rained across the vanguard. Kinji dodged, then activated his Sige blade!
Bamboo shoots erupted around his arm into a whip of thorns that coiled and snapped at the creature's face! "It's not a summon," he shouted. "This is a built guardian!" "Spiritual Construct," Yurei confirmed, twin knives shrouded in mist. "Soul-core infused." The Manticore roared—its mouth opened to release a stream of petrifying gas, a haze of grinding spirit dust laced with suppressive qi.
Eiko stepped forward.
The ward-seal tattoos across her skin lit like molten silver, flaring into layered defensive arrays! She chanted a mantra under her breath—words in Old Beast Tongue.
"Nar Tarnak Vin Threl."
"Hold your ground."
Instantly the Party was re-enforced by the beast tongue words of power. Granting the party a twelve percent defense boost. The mist parted against her shield, swirling violently. But more sarcophagi cracked open. Two. Then four. Then six more Manticores, all crawling out, wings flaring like blades of dusk.
Ibara hurled her chain around the first Manticore's neck, thorns embedding into the joints, then channeled qi to ignite poison sap, weakening the binding joints. Kinji dove beneath another, stabbing seed pods into its underbelly—exploding into tether-vines that tried to hold it down. Yurei flickered in and out of the shadows, slashing runes across the leg joints, trying to cripple the front line. Eiko began a binding ritual with four floating glyph discs to suppress the animus flow in the nearest guardian, attempting to nullify its core consciousness.
But the tomb was evolving. The Manticores learned. The constructs began coordinating flanking, isolating, forcing the vanguard into broken terrain, pressing them toward the Grand Conduit Stair. Mid chase a deep rumble shook the forge floor. One Manticore stepped back. The others halted.
The ceiling cracked.
Descending from the roof on a spiral-threaded lift of bone and gear—A larger guardian emerged. An ancient Manticore Warden, crowned in rusted coral horns, its core exposed—shimmering with sealed and refined will fire.
It opened its mouth—
And spoke.
"You trespass in the crypt of kings. You walk without chains. You breathe without oath.
So now—you shall die as strangers."
The Manticore Warden's voice echoed with layered resonance, not quite alive, but charged with a remnant's memory—as if a fragment of a forgotten king's wrath was etched into every syllable. Its eyes—pale green suns—locked onto Commander Eiko. And then it moved. Faster than expected. Faster than the team had ever faced.
Its obsidian claws sheared into the ground, leaving glowing gouges of exposed spirit crystal as it lunged. The rotating blade-tail snapped toward Yurei, who vanished in a flicker of mist—only to reappear half a breath too slow. The blade nicked her shoulder. She dropped hard, cloak hissing with disrupted qi. "She's wounded!" Kinji shouted, launching a volley of blades that bloomed mid-air into barbed ferns. The Warden ignored the damage, its chest pulsing with soul fire.
With a stomp, it released a field-wide suppression pulse, a burst of nullifying energy that silenced Eiko's glyphs mid-cast and stunned Ibara's chain mid-swing. Then came the chant.
"Zhol. Zhol. Zhol..."
The word of unmaking—the ancient Beast Tongue mantra—repeated thrice by the guardian. It rippled across the forge like falling dominoes of entropy. A tomb-encoded backlash of anti-life energy cracked the stones. The weakened tomb terrain collapsed beneath Kinji, plunging him into a molten bone-ash reservoir below. "Kinji!" Ibara cried, thorns flaring outward—but they couldn't reach.
Above, the other lesser Manticores realigned, forming a crescent formation, slowly forcing the survivors back toward the Conduit Stair, where the leyline channels shimmered with unstable heat. Eiko, breathing hard, blood at her lip, steadied herself.
"We won't make it to the core if we stay split—"
Her words choked as the Warden turned its gaze toward her again. Then—unexpectedly—the Manticore Warden stopped. Its core flickered violently. A feedback spark cracked across its shell, a twitch in its motions like glitching memory. The spirit ore in its chest reacted… not to the team, but to something deeper in the tomb.
Somewhere deeper within the inner sanctum, Ash's presence—his qi, his unique bloodline signature, and Felicity's blooming beast aura—had begun to awaken a resonant contradiction in the tomb's systems.
The Tomb recognized Ash…
...as something it couldn't classify.
Not a trespasser.
Not an heir.
Not bound.
And that contradiction rippled back to the forge, causing the Manticore Warden's soul-core to flicker erratically. Eiko seized the moment. "NOW! Break formation and rush the stair!"
The survivors moved—
Ibara threw her chain into a molten groove, riding the chi-burn like a slide. Yurei, bleeding, warps forward with a short-ranged void step. Eiko began reactivating her suppression glyphs as they ascend. Kinji re-emerged from below, carried by a root-beast he summoned mid-fall, barely breathing. Behind them, the Manticore Warden roared, but did not pursue. Its system was locked in feedback, caught between old code and new purpose.
But even so—One final guardian stirred from its sarcophagus, untouched until now. Not a manticore. But a humanoid figure clad in serpent armor, draped in grave silks, a relic enforcer from the Thousands Lords personal guard. It did not speak. It only drew its curved obsidian blade—etched with a beast tongue rune.
The rune word glowed gently.
Fim.
—The End.