All Chapters of BENEATH THE MASK: REVENGE OF SAMUEL HAYES: Chapter 541
- Chapter 550
621 chapters
542
The air was thick with ozone, sharp and unnatural. Every breath tasted like the aftermath of lightning. Samuel stood silently over the ruins of the relic chamber, watching Lin as she lay sleeping under a thick layer of blankets. Her body occasionally twitched, remnants of trauma still pulsing through her limbs.They had moved her to one of the high sanctum shelters, far from any shard residue, and deep beneath the old Temple ruins, where the Guardians once meditated in solitude. Only Ilara, Dareth, and Samuel remained behind, the others dispatched to prevent a new Sentinel signal rising in the east.“She won’t last,” Ilara said, her voice quiet.Samuel didn’t look at her. “She’s breathing.”“She won’t last,” she repeated, stepping beside him, her fingers glowing faintly with healing energy. “Her soul is frayed. Her life essence doesn’t know what it belongs to anymore. She’s tethered to too many paths.”“I already destroyed the relic,” Samuel murmured. “Isn’t that enough?”“No,” Ilara
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He stood atop the monolith ridge, overlooking the shattered coastline below, where the sea had pulled away for miles, revealing the jagged skeleton of the seabed. It was unnatural. It pulsed. The breath of the Gate was seeping through cracks in the world.“Do you feel it?” Ilara asked as she approached. Her voice trembled, not with fear, but exhaustion. “It’s like the air’s thinning. Something ancient is pushing through.”Samuel nodded. “They’re coming. All of them.”“Sentinels?” she asked.“No. Worse.”Behind them, Sarah and Dareth climbed the final stretch of the ridge, dragging a reinforced beacon core between them. Its energy signature had been dormant for years. It was only to be used if all communication systems failed—if the old flame networks went dark. And now… all had.Joey was the last to arrive, limping. His wounds still fresh from the last confrontation with the corrupted shard army in Shatterplain City. He said nothing, just dropped beside the beacon and began calibratin
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The message had gone out. Across fractured continents and burning skies, the last flame beacon sent its cry into the soul of the world.And the world answered.From places Samuel didn’t even know still existed, they came.An airship carved from dragonbone roared through the twilight sky, its crew draped in crimson armor long thought extinct. A caravan of mountain monks carried ancient weapons bound in protective runes, emerging from the cloud-hidden slopes of the Eastern Reaches. Even the silent Watchers of the Iron Grove, who had not stepped beyond their stone forests in over a century, began to march.The Guardians were gathering.Samuel stood at the summit of Flame’s Rest—a once-sacred mountain now marked by blackened stone and deep fault lines. It was here they would hold the assembly. Not a council. Not a strategy meeting. A stand.He stared out at the gathering chaos below. Tents. Flags. Circles of glowing glyphs. Every hour, another group arrived, some limping, some dragging wo
545
Samuel stood alone at the peak of Flame’s Rest, the wind cutting through his coat like blades of ice. All around him, the sky had turned the color of a dying ember—rusted red, streaked with pulsing black veins that reached toward the heavens like claws. Every breath he took tasted like ash.This was it.They had trained. They had gathered. They had bled.And now… the Gate was opening.A low hum filled the air, vibrating in the bones of the mountain. Not thunder. Not wind. Something older—a song of unraveling, of worlds splitting at the seams. It rose from beneath the earth and echoed across the jagged rocks, up through the clouds, and deep into the hearts of every Guardian below.Ilara joined him silently, the lines on her face more defined than ever. She’d aged ten years in the last ten days, and not one of those lines came from weakness.“It’s begun,” she said, not as a question.Samuel didn’t answer right away. He stared toward the western horizon, where a crack had appeared in the
546
The moment Samuel stepped through the Gate, he felt everything inside him twist.The world behind him—Flame’s Rest, the Guardians, the battlefield—disintegrated like ash in the wind. Not because it was gone, but because it no longer mattered in the place he had entered.The sky was not a sky. It was a canopy of shifting void—black, gray, and violet, crawling with memories and half-formed screams.The ground beneath his feet was not stone but memories solidified. He stepped on an echo of his old home, then onto the bones of a battlefield he didn’t recognize, and next into a riverbed made of broken clocks, each ticking out of sync.This was the other side.The Gate had not led to a battlefield. It led to a mirror. And in that mirror, the world had died.Behind him, the other Guardians followed, one by one, tearing their way through the veil of war. Sarah arrived first, panting, her blade shimmering with spectral fire. Lin hovered instead of walked, her feet inches above the broken time
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The sky beyond the Gate cracked like glass under strain, leaking streaks of green and violet light that sucked the color from everything it touched. On the other side of the threshold, the earth was not earth at all—but a scarred reflection of the real world. Wilted forests pulsed with unnatural veins. Lakes simmered like open wounds. Buildings—once familiar shapes—hovered, half-suspended in the air, crumbling upward as if gravity had forgotten its duty.Samuel stood at the front, eyes narrowing against the swirling winds that carried whispers too faint to be real.Behind him, the Guardians fanned out, their boots pressing into the ash-gray soil that seemed to drink the warmth from their skin.“Stay close,” Samuel warned, his voice barely carrying over the humming wind. “This place… it’s not just another world. It feels like—”“—a forgotten piece of ourselves,” Ilara finished from behind him. Her tone was flat, but not emotionless. There was something ancient in the way she said it. L
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The fog did not lift as the Guardians pressed deeper into the fractured land beyond the Gate—it thickened, curled, and shifted as if aware of their presence. This world, this reflection of Earth drowned in decay, seemed to inhale their every breath and return it with something altered, something colder.Joey moved near the rear of the group, silent, eyes scanning the unnatural horizon. Above them, massive rings of stone hovered, spinning slowly without any visible anchor. Within each circle, a shard of some unknown crystal pulsed like a heartbeat.Sarah glanced back at him. “You alright?”Joey didn’t answer at first. His gaze lingered on a ruined tower bent backward in an impossible angle, as if snapped by the wind of time.“Fine,” he muttered eventually. “Just… I keep expecting the ground to open up and swallow us.”“No,” Ilara replied from ahead, “this place doesn’t devour. It tempts.”The path narrowed between two walls of fractured stone, jagged like the ribs of some dead titan. S
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The landscape shifted again as the Guardians advanced through the withered remains of a forest. The trees here were like skeletons—tall, silver-white trunks without leaves, their bark marked with glowing runes that pulsed slowly, like breaths. The sky above was no longer purple but gray, dense with ash, and though the air was still, a dry whisper rustled constantly between the trees, as if the forest remembered speaking.Samuel walked slightly ahead of the group, jaw tight. His right hand hadn’t left the hilt of his blade for the past hour. His flame pulsed faintly beneath his skin, unsettled by something he couldn’t name.Ilara walked beside him. Silent, as usual—but not withdrawn. She had been watching the trees. Studying them.“They weren’t planted,” she murmured. “They grew in the shape of runes. Grown to bind something… or someone.”Samuel didn’t look at her. “How do you know that?”“Because I’ve seen forests like this before. In dreams.” She turned her head slightly. “But dreams
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The chasm yawned open beneath a sky that no longer resembled anything from Earth. Swirls of violet and gold twisted overhead, and floating shards of land hovered like jagged teeth, suspended by unseen forces. In the distance, something howled—not like an animal, but like a song warped by pain.Samuel stood at the edge, gripping the hilt of his blade tightly as wind tugged at his coat. Across the ravine, a narrow path of cracked stone spiraled downward through the air—a natural bridge leading into what looked like a crater filled with broken time.“The shard is down there,” Ilara said. She’d been staring at her relic compass since dawn. Now, the crystal in its center spun violently, as if it was trying to drill into her hand.Joey peered over the edge and exhaled slowly. “That’s not a crater. That’s a wound.”Sarah frowned. “A wound?”“Look at the stone,” Joey said, pointing. “See how it moves? Like it’s pulsing?”They did. The stone walls weren’t still—they breathed, rhythmically expa
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The shard’s pull grew stronger as the Guardians approached the lowest chamber of the crater. The air had changed—now humid and buzzing faintly, like electricity beneath the skin. Threads of violet mist snaked through cracks in the stone walls, pulsing with slow light, as if the shard had veins and the land was its body.The team moved cautiously along a wide ledge that circled downward. The walls dripped with condensation, and wherever it landed, the stone hissed, sizzled, then hardened into crystal.“Don’t touch the walls,” Ilara warned, brushing her hand along the air instead of the surface. “The shard’s presence is rewriting the stone itself. This entire crater is becoming a conduit.”Samuel walked at the front, eyes narrowed. His internal flame was unsettled. The moment they’d passed a boundary—one invisible to the eye but heavy as fog—he’d felt Lin change behind him.“Lin,” he said without turning, “how are you holding up?”No answer.He slowed and looked back.Lin had stopped wa