NOVGO.NET Chapter 375: A Step Unlike Any Other
Chapter 375: A Step Unlike Any Other
***
{Outside The Projection}
Again, the hall wasn’t surprised by what Malik had done.
No one even gasped anymore.
They’d accepted it.
This was just… Malik now.
But still… Sitah. The Sixth Layer.
A place even the strongest of their Jinn feared.
The oldest seekers, the monsters of legend…
Barely any had made it this far.
Only Mithqals, and even they struggled.
But Malik?
HE WALKED IT.
Dominated it and didn’t even break stride.
The crowd didn’t know whether to be terrified or thrilled.
Still, and for the third time, that didn’t surprise them.
What did, however, was the land he walked on itself.
The land of death.
A land of rot.
A land no man was ever meant to set foot on.
A land none of them expected they’d ever see.
This gave them a dangerous kind of excitement.
It made them think of a now-repeated question:
’What’s next?’
***
{Inside The Projection}
Malik, after a few hours of falling, landed on the ground.
Black dust floated up on impact, as if trying to suffocate him.
He waved it away and looked around, scanning the Seventh Layer.
Worse than what came before it, the sky here was entirely gone.
It was just endless, towering slabs of stone.
All of it was stone.
’…Hm.’
He was in a labyrinth.
A labyrinth with walls that curved in ways that made absolutely no sense.
It was as if God took a fortress, folded it into itself a thousand times, and left it here to rot.
And though it rotted, it was still alive.
Because yes, the labyrinth breathed.
Walls expanded and contracted, each ’inhale’ dragging a storm of black dust, each ’exhale’ closing up one of the corridors, threatening to crush him, the intruder, into paste.
This land held no gravity.
But unlike the Third Layer, it had no rules.
Everything seemed to be completely random.
From the way he saw the dust move, each gargantuan corridor was different.
Relative to others, Malik was currently standing sideways on a wall.
Even though to him it was normal ground.
Huh… perhaps this one was a test of the mind as well.
A land with a time limit, where the black dust was the sand falling in an hourglass, and the seeker was the bottom half of that hourglass, being filled up… Corrupted.
Again, this was a great thing for Malik; he had no time limit.
Still, that didn’t mean that he would take it easy.
His goal was Hell; he could not waste time here.
And so, as the Layer trembled, Malik walked.
One step, and the world bent.
BOOM.
He crossed miles with his heel barely leaving the stone.
BOOM.
Another step, and another corridor stretched before him, longer than cities, curving at impossible angles, vanishing into itself.
Every wall was the size of a nation, some vertical, others horizontal, a few spiraling, and yet… he walked them as if he were on a flat slice of Fam Iblis, his feet not leaving the stone, no matter the gravity.
It was staggering how vast this place was.
This Layer—buried at the planet’s heart—was larger than entire continents stacked atop each other.
A world inside another world, and it BREATHED.
Malik paid the absurdity no mind and kept on moving.
But after nearly an hour of travel, he stopped.
Standing on the ceiling of a corridor shaped like a cube folded inside out, he watched the dust swirl upward… or sideways. It was hard to tell. But he had seen enough to draw conclusions.
His eyes fluttered shut.
A soft tremor passed through the stones.
’Hm.’
Malik was wrong; this place had rules.
These tremors…
They were roughly ten minutes apart.
He made sure of it for the third time now.
His eyes blinked open.
“…It moves.”
His words were no speculation but matter-of-fact.
He took a breath and laid out everything in his mind.
The exit moved.
He had walked ’left’ for nearly an hour and saw nothing but repeating corridors.
That shouldn’t have been possible in a closed space, unless the target was not stationary.
Again, every ten minutes, the Layer trembled; it wasn’t random but something deliberate.
The whole labyrinth shifted with these quakes, as did the exit itself.
That wasn’t the only thing he noticed.
There was another rule.
Black dust came in fixed intervals.
Every three seconds, then seven, then ten, then twelve, and then back to three again.
It looped, and that meant something, maybe not the Path, but the window.
Perhaps the right Path could only be accessed when the cycle resets.
Malik touched the wall beside him.
It was… sweating Aether.
Alive.
Earlier, he thought it metaphorically, but no…
This labyrinth was actually a living, breathing thing.
The gate wasn’t just moving; it was being carried.
An organ shifting inside a beast’s ribcage.
Malik’s hand lowered.
He almost couldn’t believe it.
’…I’m inside a monster.’
The corridors were its vessels.
The tremors were heartbeats.
The dust was its breath.
Incredible.
He truly was inside a beast.
And that meant that the key to solving this puzzle wasn’t direction.
It was a matter of timing, as these vessels opened and closed at regular intervals.
Malik needed to move right when the fourth interval of dust came.
He exhaled softly, and then, finally, he moved again.
BOOM.
This time, he didn’t simply walk left; he hunted.
Corridors shattered behind him from the sheer pressure, and dust funneled around him like a tunnel, parting before his boots.
He was a devil wrapped in flame, streaking through stone veins faster than sound.
Every thirty-two seconds, he made a sharp turn into whatever corridor that opened up.
He kept doing that for nearly nine minutes, running faster than ever before.
Then, six seconds later, the dust paused.
The beast held its breath.
Malik was close.
He knew that something was going to change.
And sure enough…
HHRRRUUUUHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH.
It did.
As he ran up the corridor that twisted upward like a spine, the walls around him suddenly began to move, repeating that seismic inhale…
That wasn’t right; they moved before their time.
…It seemed that the beast stopped following its self-imposed rules.
All four titanic slabs of stone neared each other, aiming to crush him flat.
Malik, using all his strength, stepped forth—it began with a twist in his core, a faint tension that rippled down his frame as his muscles coiled like ropes around steel, the veins on his legs bulging outward, flickering with white fire that echoed, reaching the bottom of his soles, fracturing the ground, and flaring with blinding gold that nearly hid the burning hooves.
His center of gravity dropped, his chin low, his arms loose by his sides, and then—
BOOOOOOOM.
He disappeared, a step unlike any other.
The air shattered around him as his hooves struck down, releasing an explosive shockwave that ripped apart the corridor behind him for miles on end.
His body failed to reflect light as he streaked forward in a straight line, tens of miles vanishing under his feet, the very curvature of the labyrinth warping from the force.
And yet, despite his incredible speed, the corridor missed him by a mere mile.
One mile.
If he were a fraction late, he would’ve been crushed.
Anyhow, there wasn’t time to think of ’what ifs;’ he wasn’t safe just yet.
The land before him was empty.
Right, there was no corridor for him to stand on.
He was forced to fly and walk on his own sand, at least until finally…
WHOOOOOOOOOOOSH!
Another wall came swinging from the side like a pendulum.
It stopped before it could crush him, a palm of golden fire spanning most of it.
Using his momentum, Malik jumped and landed sideways on its face.
He ran across it, each step cracking the surface, pushing it down.
Indeed, the exit was trying to seal itself.
This place no longer had rules.
Or at least none except the first rule.
Apparently, that wasn’t something the beast could control.
Even then, Malik couldn’t see himself surviving this.
His speed was inadequate.
He only had thirty seconds to reach the exit before the ten-minute rumble.
Thirty seconds to fight, jump, and fly across hundreds of miles.
Maybe he was—no…
He would not die here.
This was only the Seventh Layer.
FAILURE WAS NOT AN OPTION.
Malik, using all of his Aether, risking his very core, picked up even more speed, his body beginning to burn and crack.
Steam began to leave his skin, and his fire charred everything around him.
He was a meteor traveling through space.
Corridors crushed around him, yet they could not keep up.
Malik never hesitated.
He dove through one, skated across another, and kicked through a third.
The entire Layer groaned now, trying everything it could to slow him.
But Malik didn’t slow.
He accelerated.
And finally—
He saw it.
A gate.
Yet this gate…
It was not like the others; rather, it was unlike anything he’d ever seen.
It was vertical, not built into a wall or the side of a corridor, but standing between the top and bottom of the Layer, like a wound in space.
The thing was simply gargantuan.
…But it was getting smaller.
It was closing.
Closing so very fast.
Oh, thirty seconds had passed.
Malik was too late.
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