NOVEL NEXT Chapter 246: Top
The climb beyond the eight-hundredth step felt like a descent into another world, though their feet still rose higher into the sky. The light had changed. The atmosphere had changed. The stairs themselves were no longer stone, but something crystalline—shimmering with hues that twisted with every step, every breath, every thought. When Damien stepped onto the nine-hundredth step, the change was immediate.
It was as if the entire stairway had been waiting for this moment.
The elements did not return one by one.
They all came at once.
Wind screamed in from all directions, cutting with invisible blades that shrieked like tortured wraiths. Fire roared beneath their feet, licking up from the stairs with sudden surges of radiant heat that scorched flesh and memory alike. Lightning struck from the sky above, arcs of blue and violet lashing like celestial whips. Cold seeped in through their bones, freezing bloodstreams and slowing breath. The iron pressure returned with a vengeance, dragging at every muscle, threatening to crush their lungs with each inhale. Earth itself rose against them—every step felt like lifting a mountain with bare feet, and gravity no longer obeyed their expectations. Wood energy slithered through the gaps of their mental defense, trying to lull their consciousness into peaceful oblivion. And death—death remained, subtle and constant, whispering reminders that life could be extinguished in a single moment of misstep.
The other drow cried out almost immediately.
Vathrian dropped to one knee, blood trailing from his lips as fire and ice attacked him in tandem, canceling his protective shields. Sylea's robe caught fire. She tore it off and hurled it into the abyss. Thalvia had to use three of her treasured talismans just to survive the first two steps. The lone survivor from House Mirath was gasping, his eyes wild as wind and lightning battered him into a crouch.
But Damien?
Damien walked forward with the calmness of a seasoned traveler returning home. His silver-grade body, long tempered by the Supreme Starstone Lily, absorbed the fire. His mastery of frost allowed his organs to cool themselves against rising heat. The fusion of lightning within his necromantic core allowed him to bend and redirect the violent strikes from above. His understanding of wood, learned through silent stillness, enabled him to anchor his thoughts. Iron no longer burdened him—it responded to his refined structure, and even the oppressive gravity was lessened by his spatial comprehension, allowing him to reframe weight as simply another vector of movement.
He was not immune. He was in harmony.
He shifted his footing to flow with the wind, letting it slide over his shoulders without resistance. When lightning struck near him, he did not block it. He turned his necromantic aura into a path and let it pass through safely. Fire became warmth. Cold became focus. The elements danced violently, but Damien moved through them as though they were old rivals who had learned to respect him.
Beside him, Lyrisa still held his arm, humming cheerfully under her breath.
The tune was absurdly out of place in the storm of chaos. It was something sweet and almost childlike—a song about a fox and a rabbit who wanted to be friends, despite the forest always telling them they couldn't.
"I like this part," she said, her voice lilting between verses. "The rabbit teaches the fox how to dance."
"You're really humming that here?" Damien muttered, though his voice held more amusement than reproach.
"You're doing all the hard work," she replied with a smile, not missing a beat. "The least I can do is keep the mood light."
He didn't argue. Her presence grounded him in a way nothing else could. She was not a burden. She was a constant.
Step by step, they moved forward, Damien's death energy weaving a protective curtain around her whenever the elemental chaos surged too violently.
He calculated every shift in pressure.
When the iron weight increased sharply at the nine hundred and twentieth step, he lowered his stance and used his understanding of compression to realign the force against itself, letting his reinforced bones absorb and release the impact like tempered springs. When fire and ice collided around him at the nine hundred and fortieth step, he used the clash to create a pocket of neutral energy, drawing heat from the fire to counter the cold, stabilizing the atmosphere.
At the nine hundred and seventy-fifth step, death energy surged more violently than ever before, as if recognizing him. The others behind were floundering—still moving, but their steps were ragged and desperate. Damien allowed his aura to flare just slightly, offering a shield of equilibrium that kept the storm from exploding outright. He did not help them fully—not this time—but he gave them the space to find their own path.
At the nine hundred and ninety-ninth step, he paused.
Lyrisa looked up at him, smiling. "Almost there."
And together, they stepped onto the one-thousandth step.
The platform was wide and open. At its center stood a single golden step, raised half a meter above the rest. It gleamed with quiet majesty, humming with power so deep that it made the rest of the staircase feel like whispers in comparison.
Nyxara was already there, seated cross-legged at the edge of the platform. She opened her eyes when they approached and nodded once.
"We wait," she said simply.
And so they did.
One by one, the others arrived, burned, bloodied, but not broken. Vathrian was the last, and he said nothing when he joined them.
They stood together, seven of them.
And together, they stepped onto the one-thousandth step.
The golden platform beneath their feet shimmered with a calm, sovereign radiance.
It felt neither hot nor cold, neither soft nor hard, it simply existed, complete and undeniable. It stretched wide, suspended in the pale sky above the world they had climbed from, and at its center rose a single golden step.
It stood just half a meter higher than the rest, but the pressure it emitted was vast, as though the weight of JerAxle's entire legacy had been condensed into that single polished stone.