The Oasis's gift for my mission in the Purge had stayed stored away for many reasons.
The main one was simple: even after months, I had never managed to make any progress toward anything that would let me harness its power. I tried. I studied. I tested within the limits I dared to test. And I always arrived at the same wall — there was no hidden mechanic to unlock, no skill to develop, no buried secret waiting to be discovered by the right person.
There was an irony in that item that always brought me back to the same conclusion.
Perhaps there was nothing important within it because the item, in itself, was already everything it needed to be. What mattered wasn't what it did when manipulated. It was what it was naturally — without intervention, without technique, without refinement.
And what it was, was something terrible.
That was why I had kept it so long. Not because it didn't serve a purpose.
Because it served too well.
✦ ✦ ✦
I opened the box.
"AHHHHHHHHHH!"
The screams came from everywhere at once.
Including mine. My throat tore in pain without my having decided to scream — the body releasing the sound involuntarily, the same way a body recoils from a flame before the mind registers the heat. The roar that came from that small box wasn't a sound you heard. It was a sound you suffered. It pierced everything and everyone, exactly as it had the first time, on the day I opened it without knowing what I was opening — except now, in the open air, on a battlefield, it had space to show what it truly was.
The Infernals who had been preparing to receive my attack stood paralyzed in surprise.
What they expected didn't come. I didn't advance. I didn't summon. I did nothing that a cornered enemy does when it plays its last card. I simply stood there, holding something that looked irrelevant in my hands — and that revealed itself as the cruelest executioner on that field, drawing blood from every body within reach of the sound.
And for them, it was worse than for me.
Much worse.
The Infernals were creatures superior in everything — strength, resistance, speed. Including acoustic capacity. The same hyper-developed senses that made them perfect predators were now the door through which the roar entered and destroyed them from the inside out. The advantage that had kept them at the top of the Oasis for generations had transformed, in a matter of seconds, into the weakness that was tearing them apart. The better the ear, the deeper the sound cut.
I kept standing.
Without closing the box — even though I desperately wanted to, even though every fiber of my body begged me to end it. I looked back.
Carla and the others seemed not to understand what was happening.
That was a good sign.
It meant the dome was holding — that Carla's barrier was absorbing the sound before it reached the survivors inside. I had bet on that. I had asked her to make the dome soundproof not to protect me, but to protect them from what I was about to release. If the barrier failed, the remaining humans would die alongside the Infernals.
Arachne, outside with me, seemed alright.
The pressure she felt was clear from the tone of despair arriving through our bond — but it was a despair different from the Infernals'. It was like sensing a fatal enemy without being able to see it anywhere. Her instinct recognized a mortal threat. Her senses couldn't locate it. It was the difference between one who feels fear and one who understands fear.
I couldn't respond to her.
Blood poured from my throat. My eyes burned, the vision tinging red as the vessels gave way under the pressure I had released myself. Then something fell beside us, a few meters away, exploding the ground and raising a curtain of earth.
"So you feel it too.".
The great Drake was disoriented — and in agony, a pain that stripped the colossus down to something smaller than its size. For a second I saw in it something I would have recognized in Arachne: a creature too large to be made this helpless, and helpless anyway.
But its fear was different from Arachne's — and that was what gave me chills. Arachne felt a threat she didn't comprehend. The Drake comprehended perfectly. It knew exactly what that sound was. It recognized the frequency, the origin, the meaning — and the pain of hearing something capable of tearing it apart while it roared in panic was something I had no vocabulary to describe.
That told me a great deal.
If a creature of that size — fifteen meters of colossus that had treated my entire army like toys — recognized the sound and went into panic, then I finally understood why there were no accounts of dragons that weren't about destruction and death. They were the gods of the Oasis. Nothing stood above them. Not even the child of one of them — because that was what that box contained — not even the distant echo of one of them was something the world could withstand.
The Drake, kin to the dragons, trembled before a roar that came from something of its own family.
There was no metaphor there. There was hierarchy. Pure, biological, ancient.
"HOW— AHHHHHH! KILL THAT HUMAN! AHHHH!"
The Vorthari's shout died before reaching anyone.
There was nobody in any condition to obey. The Infernals' eardrums had already burst — blood cascaded out, running down the sides of their heads, dripping to the ground as they fell one by one into stupor. The strongest creatures on the field, reduced to bodies convulsing beneath a sound that no armor, no muscle, no resistance could block.
Only I remained conscious.
And barely.
My condition worsened by the second, and the great Vorthari — fallen to its knees, hands pressing against its own head — didn't seem to be much worse off than me. It was a race now. Who could hold out longer. And I wasn't certain it was me.
"ARACHNE — ADVANCE!"
Arachne, the only creature on the field still in any condition to act, advanced.
And it was the most terrifying thing that field had produced until then.
She stepped on the dying Infernals with the weight of seven meters of colossus, crushing those in her path, and the ones who survived the step were caught by her claws and torn apart — not with fury, not with vengeance, but with the methodical regularity of a harvest. That was exactly what it looked like. A harvest. She reaped the lives of my enemies little by little, constantly and without mercy, without haste, because there was nowhere left for them to flee. The Infernals had no chance. For the first time in the battle, the despair was on the other side.
It was the revenge I had promised her.
For her children. For every offspring she had watched die without being able to intervene. I had said I would give her the opportunity — and I was giving it, at the cost of every second I could manage to remain standing holding that open box.
"DAMMITT— AHHHHH— JUST A LITTLE LONGER—"
My consciousness was going out.
Against my will, I felt it going and coming back — fading and returning in waves, the body trying to protect the mind the only way it knew, shutting down before the damage became permanent. I wouldn't hold out much longer. Each time it returned, it returned weaker. Each time it faded, it took longer to come back.
And it was during one of those absences that it happened.
Something struck Arachne.
Something large enough to move seven meters of colossus — and the impact threw me far along with her, my body hurled by the wave of force like a leaf.
"FATHERRR!"
Arachne's cry brought me back.
✦ ✦ ✦
I woke on the ground.
Countless bodies had cushioned my fall — a macabre bed of dead Infernals that, in an irony I didn't have the energy to appreciate, had saved my life. The small box lay beside me.
Closed.
The impact had closed it as it tore it from my hands. And with it closed, the roar had ceased.
Before I could process what that meant, something kicked me.
Blood returned to pour from my mouth as I rolled across the ground. It was an Infernal — clearly on its last legs, barely able to stay upright, but alive. Alive enough to want to kill me with what remained of it. I got up with effort, and the scene around me finished waking me better than any healing could.
It was chaos.
With the box closed, the Infernals were beginning to rise. One by one, staggering, bleeding from the ears, but rising — because the roar had stopped before killing them, and their superhuman resistance did the rest. And I was in the middle of them.
Surrounded.
Arachne tried to advance in my direction.
But the Drake and the Vorthari cut her off — the two of them recovered enough to stop her, drawing screams and jets of green blood with every blow she couldn't dodge as she tried to reach me.
"FATHERRR!"
"FIGHT AND STAY ALIVE! I'M FINE! DON'T DIE!"
It was a lie.
I wasn't fine. The damage was done, and part of me had already accepted that I was lost — that that field would be the place where I stopped. But if I told the truth, Arachne would abandon everything to reach me, and the two colossuses on the other side would tear her apart on the way. Lying was the only way to keep her alive. So I lied.
The Infernals approached.
First two — one from the left, another from the right, the kind of coordinated movement that even the ritual's rebound hadn't managed to erase from their instinct. I dodged the first. I couldn't dodge the second, and the kick caught me dead on, throwing the air out of my lungs.
I spat blood.
But I was standing.
The kick had been strong — devastating, by the standards of any normal human. But I had put eighteen points into strength, and for the first time in that battle that choice showed a positive side. I had absorbed a blow that should have split me in two and remained conscious. It was little. But it was more than I had an hour earlier.
"COME ON, YOU SONS OF BITCHES!"
I transformed the Mark into a sword and shield.
If I was going to die there, it wouldn't be on my knees. Not after everything. Five Infernals approached, staggering, bleeding, clearly wrecked by the roar — and still as strong as me on my best day. It was the raw reality of that race summarized in five half-dead bodies that still surpassed me.
Another advance from the flanks.
I raised the shield, stopping one's advance, while driving the sword into the second. The tough flesh yielded to the blade — I ran it through — but not without receiving a deep cut in my side, a third one's sword finding the space I didn't have enough arms to cover. They still attacked like kamikazes. They didn't care about their own defense. They wanted only my death, and they were willing to pay any price for it.
"Son of a bitch."
I kicked the enemy off, tearing out the sword buried in my side.
And it was in that instant that the blow the shield had blocked rounded my guard — a second blade, coming from an angle I could no longer cover, aimed straight at my face a few centimeters away.
By instinct, I closed my eyes.
I waited for the impact.
It didn't come.
I opened one eye.
"Prince?"
The Griffin stood between me and the blade, its wing raised like a barrier, its eyes fixed on the enemy it had intercepted at the last possible instant.
"Of course. Let's kill them all."
✦ ✦ ✦
And then everything moved at the same time.
While I remained still, still processing that I was alive, all my creatures passed me. The Prince first, advancing over the dying Infernals with a fury I had never seen in that normally restrained creature — avenging every Griffin that had fallen before the Drake. The two Urskra behind him, crushing what the Prince couldn't reach, their ancient stubbornness transformed into a weapon. They tore flesh, dismembered, finished off the weakened Infernals in seconds — because this time the balance had shifted, and the invincible enemy of an hour ago was now prey.
Then came the humans.
What remained of them. Healed, raised, throwing themselves into the fight with their hopelessness converted into something more useful — the rage of those who had watched friends die and finally had a chance to strike back.
And then a woman stopped at my side.
In the chariot pulled by two unicorns, Carla looked down at me with the expression of someone who had held the world on her shoulders for too long and still arrived in time.
"Thank you. Rest."
She held my gaze while I swayed, the body operating on autopilot, consciousness already beginning to slip again now that the immediate danger had passed. Carla launched the healing through the unicorn. I felt the burn of the magic trying to mend what had been destroyed — but the pain was still too immense, the damage too deep for any healing to resolve all at once.
I only had time to say one thing before everything went dark.
A single thing that mattered more than my own survival.
"Save Arachne… My daughter."