All Chapters of BENEATH THE MASK: REVENGE OF SAMUEL HAYES: Chapter 481
- Chapter 490
621 chapters
481
The wind over Mirrorhold’s ruins was still. Too still.Samuel crouched atop the fractured outer wall, eyes narrowed at the horizon. In the aftermath of the gate’s collapse, the city had gone eerily quiet. No Sentinels, no illusions, no ambient hum from the leylines. Just silence and dust. He couldn’t decide if it was peace… or a prelude.Ilara approached from behind, her steps light. “We bought ourselves time,” she said, voice low. “But we didn’t win yet.”“No,” Samuel agreed, rising. “This was just the Gatekeeper’s first step.”“He’ll strike again.”Samuel turned to face her. “He already has.”A pulse of foreign energy had been surging beneath the surface for hours. Unlike the Nexus energy they’d faced before, this was colder, more surgical. It wasn’t simply destructive—it was precise. Like a scalpel against the world.Joey joined them at the edge. “Scouts reported something moving out of the Southern Wastes. Something big.”“How big?” Samuel asked.“They’re calling it a Leviathan,”
482
Night cloaked the highlands in velvet darkness, but the stars above burned too bright—wrong somehow, like they were watching. Samuel stood at the edge of a cliff overlooking the vast expanse of the Eastern Divide. Below, silver rivers coiled through dead valleys, and far in the distance, jagged shadows moved where nothing living should.“The stars aren’t aligned right,” Joey muttered as he joined him, clutching a scope.“They’re not stars,” Samuel said. “Not anymore.”Ilara appeared behind them. “They’re beacons. The Gatekeeper’s doing. He’s leaving marks in the sky so his Sentinels can follow.”“How many?” Samuel asked without turning.“Too many,” she replied.Behind them, the camp was a flurry of quiet preparation. Kael was tuning the new relay stone to intercept transmissions from the resistance network. Nyra hovered over the fire, fingers weaving sigils into the flames for warmth and shielding. Dareth sat like a statue, cleaning blood from his blade though they hadn’t fought in ho
483
The wind shifted as they crossed the ridgeline into Blackpine Forest. No birds called. No branches swayed. Even the air was wrong—thick with silence, too dense to breathe comfortably.Samuel kept the girl close. She hadn’t woken since the tether was severed. Her breath came steady, but her aura flickered in unnatural patterns. Whatever the Gatekeeper had planted in her hadn’t entirely faded.Ilara walked beside him, scanning her readings. “Her soul was used as a conduit. That leaves scars—some permanent.”“Can it be removed?” Samuel asked.Ilara hesitated. “Maybe. But not without help.”“Then we find help.”Behind them, the rest of the team moved in practiced formation. Joey kept watching the trees like they might grow teeth. Kael’s eyes glowed softly as he used a low-level ward to detect movement. Dareth walked last, silent and unyielding.Nyra suddenly stopped. “Something’s ahead.”Samuel raised a hand. Everyone froze.They all heard it—footsteps. But not one person. Dozens.Then vo
484
The journey to Shatterplain began under a blood-orange sky. The team moved in silence, the weight of the death mark above them pressing on every breath they took. The girl slept deeper now, her connection to the Gatekeeper growing dimmer, but Ilara warned they didn’t have long before he tried another tether.Shatterplain was once a holy site—sacred ground scorched in the War of the Breaking. Now, it was a wasteland of black glass, ruptured stone, and dead whispers. It also housed one of the few people Ilara claimed could sever a bond tied to a Nexus-born fragment.“A witch?” Joey asked, already regretting the thought. “Can’t we just find, like, a hospital?”“She’s not a witch,” Ilara said, adjusting her hood. “She’s a Weaver. And she doesn’t take guests lightly.”“She’s also the only one who ever survived tether corruption,” Kael added. “So if we want the girl free, we go through her.”The team moved swiftly through the broken plains. Every so often, Samuel felt a pull—a faint echo in
485
The morning wind carried with it the smell of metal and smoke—far too early for a battle that hadn’t yet begun. Samuel was already up, standing at the edge of the camp, eyes fixed on the horizon. The others began to rise one by one, the unease in the air too thick to ignore.Kael walked over, his blade sheathed but his hand never far from it. “Something’s wrong.”“I feel it too,” Samuel replied. “Something fell last night. A wall. A barrier. I could hear it in the Wound.”Nyra joined them. “The northern quadrant. There's only one city close enough to cause this much of a ripple.”“Silien,” Samuel muttered.Ilara appeared beside them, her cloak pulled tight against the chill. “That city had protective wards over its core. If they’ve been broken, the Gatekeeper may have found another Sentinel.”“Then we go now,” Samuel said. “We can’t let him turn another.”“Samuel,” Joey called from the campfire, Elen still curled up beside him. “You’re not leaving her here, are you?”“She’s untethered
486
The evening sky bled crimson as Samuel’s team reached Mirror Valley.Though the name suggested peace, the valley was far from tranquil. Its waters shimmered like broken glass, reflecting not the sky above—but scenes from lives long lost. Flashes of war, of betrayal, of things never spoken aloud. Every step closer to the center caused those illusions to deepen, to whisper. It was a place where the past clung to the soul like wet cloth.Joey waited near a ring of jagged stones, sharpening his blade out of habit more than necessity. Beside him sat Aria, eyes shut, meditating—or bracing herself. Sarah paced, eyes flicking between the valley’s mirrored pools. None spoke. They didn’t have to.Samuel approached first. “Report.”“We took out a conduit in the western gorge,” Sarah said. “Barely. That Sentinel was… different. Like it wanted us to win, but not too quickly.”“Same pattern,” Joey added. “Mass mind-binding through crystal shards. They’re learning. Testing responses. This is no long
487
Not just in temperature or direction—but in its memory. Samuel felt it the moment they crossed the shattered border of Ardent’s Reach, leaving the smoldering ruins behind. Every gust carried whispers. Not of voices, but of intention. Something was moving beneath the surface of the land, deep and ancient, awakened not by time, but by conflict.Dareth was the first to speak. “It knows we’re coming.”“What does?” Joey asked, tightening his gloves as he glanced back at the wrecked skyline.“The sixth Sentinel,” Ilara replied, voice taut. “The one that wasn’t active. It's not like the others. It isn’t just watching. It’s preparing.”Sarah turned to Samuel. “You think it’s the original one? The prototype?”Samuel didn’t answer immediately. He reached into his pocket, pulling out a shard of the crystal they’d retrieved from the fallen tower in Ardent’s Reach. It vibrated faintly, like a heartbeat.“It’s more than that,” he finally said. “This one wasn’t built to fight. It was built to rememb
488
Not from thunder or flame—but from pressure. As if the sky had suddenly remembered it was supposed to crush the world beneath it.Samuel looked up.The rupture spread across the heavens like ink spilled in water—slow at first, then violent, jagged. A figure emerged from the tear, not descending but falling sideways, as if gravity bent around them. They shimmered with shadow and light, wings folded in impossible geometry, body cloaked in robes that shimmered between crimson and void.“Is that…?” Aria’s voice broke.Joey finished the thought. “Riven.”Samuel didn’t reply. His chest tightened. Of all the things he’d expected—an assault, a relic trap, even a corrupted beast—he hadn’t expected him.Riven had once been their ally. A tactician. A protector. The first to unlock the flame after Samuel, the one who taught others how to wield it without burning out.And then he vanished.Without a trace.Without a word.Until now.Riven hovered above the Marsh, his eyes locked on Samuel. The res
489
They moved before dawn.The mist over the grasslands curled low and thick, swallowing boots, whispers, and thoughts. Each of them carried the weight of what Riven had said the night before. The Gatekeeper wasn’t just an enemy now—he was a destination. A fate. A mantle waiting to be passed on.Samuel refused it.But the path ahead didn’t care.Ilara walked beside him in silence, her hair braided tightly, fingers always half-tensed at her side as if ready to call on her sigils. Riven walked behind them now—not as a prisoner, not quite an ally either. He was quiet, his eyes scanning every ridge, every whisper in the trees. He knew this part of the world better than any of them. That made him valuable. Dangerous.“Sky Vault’s a day’s trek east,” Kael murmured. “But the storms might make it two.”“Let them try,” Dareth said. His voice rumbled like distant thunder. “I haven’t stretched in a while.”“You’re all too calm,” Aria muttered. “I can’t get it out of my head—what Riven said. That th
490
The key hovered above Samuel’s hand, spinning slowly, its three interlocked crystals now fused into one pulsating core. Each beat of light felt like a heartbeat, like the world itself was waiting to exhale.The others stared in silence.Aria finally spoke. “What now? You said it’s not the end. But we’ve followed this trail across continents. Lost friends. Fought monsters. And now we’re at the Gate?”“No,” Samuel said quietly, “we’re at his last test.”“The Gatekeeper?” Joey asked.Samuel nodded. “He isn’t gone. Not yet. And that... thing we saw in the Vault? That was a memory. A piece. Elian may have wanted to give up. But the part of him that clings to power—that still wants to decide the fate of the world—he’s still waiting. Beyond the last gate.”Dareth stepped forward. “Then we open it. We finish this.”But Ilara raised a hand. “It won’t be that simple.”The key flickered as she spoke, casting brief shadows that twisted and shimmered unnaturally on the ground.“That’s not just a k