Level Up Legacy

Chapter 1425: Misshaped

Diana had stopped trying to measure time.

There were no days in the stolen realm of Vharos. The sky shifted between black and green, sometimes splitting open to reveal eyes instead of stars. The land itself twisted with every step. Reality, as she knew it, had long been discarded.

She didn't waste time anymore. She survived.

Athos perched on her shoulder, the owl spirit carved from stone and filled with spectral light. His voice was quiet, always calculated. "Do not speak unless it matters," he had warned early on. "Everything here has ears. Even the air."

Diana had learned.

She no longer relied on mana. The realm twisted and consumed it. Instead, she trained her body and her will to use spiritual energy in its rawest, most disciplined form. Athos taught her to keep it tucked beneath her heartbeat, subtle as a breath.

"Your soul is a signal," Athos had said. "If you shine too brightly, you invite what watches."

She listened. Practiced. Became a shadow among ruins.

The world around her was built from pieces—fragments of cities, inverted temples, forests half-dreamt and stitched into wrong places. It was a prison of stolen things, and none of it belonged here.

It wasn't until the seventy-fourth structure that Athos stilled. "Elvish," he said. "Three voices. Alive."

Diana crouched low and crept forward through shattered pillars. Her dagger stayed drawn. When she heard the voice, she almost didn't believe it.

"Ranya," she whispered.

"Diana?"

Ranya stepped into view. Her armor was worn, her eyes sunken. Behind her was Malrik—the same proud general who had once dueled Arthur—and another elf Diana didn't recognize.

"You survived," Malrik said.

"So did you," Diana replied. "Ranya, are you—"

"Alive," she said. "Barely."

"I'm Nyel," the unknown elf added, eyeing Athos with caution. "We've been trying to stay beneath the notice of the realm."

"You've done well," Athos said.

Malrik drew half an inch of steel. "It speaks."

"Spirit companion," Diana said. "The only reason I'm still breathing."

Athos ruffled his stone feathers. "And the reason she doesn't reek of soulfire."

"We lost five from our group," Ranya said. "We thought we could use mana to defend ourselves. It only made us visible. That's when the first one came."

Nyel's hand trembled. "It wore Elith's skin."

Diana nodded slowly. "They feed on memory. Want. Identity. You can't fight them with force."

"Then teach us," Malrik said.

They camped in the remains of an amphitheater twisted on its side. Diana led them through exercises—slow, deliberate, inward.

"No mana. Only spiritual energy," she said. "You don't project it. You hold it. You shape your soul, not your spells."

Nyel struggled. Ranya caught on quickly. Malrik fought every inch of it.

"Strength doesn't matter here," Diana warned him. "Not in the way you're used to."

"I noticed," he muttered. "We've been hunted like deer."

Athos instructed them all.

"Spiritual energy is will made form," he said. "Not fire, not blade. It is silence. Clarity. You must learn to wield restraint as a weapon."

Three days passed in tense silence. They avoided movement. They whispered only when needed. And slowly, they became less visible to the realm.

Until the creatures came.

It started with a shimmer in the air. A glimmer like heat on stone.

"Watch the horizon," Athos warned. "They've sensed us."

Six forms emerged—humanlike, but broken. Too-tall. Limbs bent the wrong way. Faces like cracked mirrors reflecting old grief.

"Misshaped," Diana said. "Don't let them touch your mind."

They charged.

Diana stepped forward, spiritual energy burning in her chest. She exhaled slowly, and a flicker of blue light laced her arms—Spiritual Ice, sharp and precise. It coated her blade in a freezing sheen, lines of cold tracing up her forearm like veins of frost.

The first creature lunged at her with limbs that cracked backward, and she sidestepped with perfect footwork. Her dagger swung, and the ice tore through the creature's neck. Its head didn't fall—it simply unraveled into threads of mist and vanished.

Another leapt from the side. Diana met it mid-air, slamming her palm against its chest. Soulfire erupted from her hand, golden and searing. The creature didn't scream—it convulsed as its form burst into flickering light and collapsed.

"Ranya, left!" she called.

Ranya loosed a volley of arrows, each infused with sharp pulses of spiritual clarity. They struck a creature in its shoulders and throat—not to kill, but to sever its form from its spirit. The body twitched, collapsed, and burned from within.

Malrik swung his sword low, his strikes infused with tightly coiled spiritual bursts. His control had improved. The blade sang with silent power, cutting through two creatures with a single movement.

Nyel rolled beneath a lunging enemy and stabbed its leg. His spiritual cloak flared once, redirecting the impact. Then he flipped backward and struck again, this time in the spine. The creature's form shattered like glass.

But one creature remained.

Taller than the rest. Its limbs were unfinished, twisting into shadows. It moved like thought and struck like memory.

It reached for Diana with a limb that melted into her past. She felt it—faint laughter, her father's voice, her childhood garden, all rushing in like a flood.

She faltered.

Athos screeched. "Resist! Burn it away!"

Diana screamed and unleashed Soulfire from her entire body. It wasn't a blast—it was a cleansing. Flames of her will tore through the false memory and incinerated the creature's touch. Her blade followed, coated in Spiritual Ice, and she struck the creature clean through the chest.

The creature let out a sigh that echoed like a fading thought and disintegrated.

Then there was silence.

The creatures were gone.

They didn't bleed.

But they had been real.

Afterward, they did not speak for a long time. They merely sat, each tending to the inner trembling they could not shake.

"They are not endless," Athos said. "But they are drawn to inconsistency. You must become part of this world to pass through it."

Diana stood. "We keep moving. We stay quiet. And we don't remember anything we miss."

Malrik rose beside her. "Then lead. We'll follow."

As they packed, Nyel whispered, "Do you think there are more survivors?"

"I don't think," Diana said. "I plan as if they are."

They walked toward the next ruin. The sky churned above, green lightning flashing across a sunless horizon.

They didn't look up.

They didn't speak.

But they moved as one—and that, for now, was enough.

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