There's No Love In the Deathzone (BL)
Chapter 568 - 562. The Cliff

Chapter 568: Chapter 562. The Cliff

Bassena came out not long after with a hissing black orb resting on top of his scaled hand.

"The Queen must be angry, huh?" Han Shin grinned. Knowing her, there was no way she wasn’t fuming. From her perspective, it was like they abruptly left her after using her as a guide for the past few days, with no fixed date on when they would be able to meet again.

"Oh, don’t worry," Bassena replies casually. "I told her she could vent his anger however she liked next time."

Suddenly, Han Shin had a bad feeling. "Huh?"

Bassena smirked. "She only takes it out on you anyway."

"Hey! How can you sacrifice me?!"

"One for the team, man," Bassena patted the healer’s back, but his eyes were full of pity. "One for the team."

"Ugh--"

"Aight, that’s enough," Bassena wiped the grin off his face and looked at the hissing black orb in his hand. "Let’s get to it."

Han Shin, however, still had a lingering doubt inside. "Hey, but are we really sure? We might get stranded for days or weeks here if we can’t find another dungeon."

Bassena loosened the grip on the core and replied with a shrug. "We can always try to find the map of the area we visited before."

"Hmm..."

"It’s okay," still with a relaxed tone and expression, Bassena tried to reassure the healer. "In the worst situation, I can ride Jormungard and look for a way from above."

"Oh! There’s that way!" Han Shin clapped his hand, finally brightened up and nodded. "Okie, okie!"

Seeing the apprehension disappear on Han Shin’s face, Zein unknowingly let out a soft breath of relief. From the subtle change in the others’ faces, he realized that it wasn’t only the healer who harbored doubt about this sudden reckless plan--especially because Bassena decided on it unilaterally. If something bad were to happen, even if it was Zein who wanted it, the blame would lie on Bassena.

This...Zein held his breath as he looked at the steady amber eyes. Those ambers were like flames that warmed his heart, and he would have jumped the man for a kiss if it wasn’t for the urgent situation.

"Good, let’s get started for real this time," Bassena signaled for them to step back. "Shield."

Cohen immediately stood in front and put up his physical shield in front of Zein while casting three layers of mana shield all around the group. Once the defender nodded, Bassena poured mana into his hand, which was covered in black scale, and gave strength to his grip.

Crush!

The orb shattered and miasma rushed out as if getting sucked by the dungeon. A few seconds later, the gate started to swirl backward, and a crunching sound akin to an imploding can could be heard. A second of silence ensued, followed by a deafening explosion of intertwined mana and miasma. The force rattled the barrier and shattered the first layer of mana shield, but nothing more.

Out of habit, Zein turned his head away and closed his eyes during the explosion. When he opened them, the thick darkness had started thinning out, and his dark vision goggles were finally able to discern more of the surroundings.

"Ugh--it’s like a bomb," Han Shin blinked away the surprise. The explosion was bigger than the usual black dungeon in the colored zone. "Is it because it’s in the Deathzone? The explosion is way--oh, it stops."

"Hmm?" Bassena frowned as he stared at the place where the dungeon gate used to be.

There was nothing. Nothing but a flat-top boulder. Bassena turned to look at Zein, who frowned even deeper than him, and got worried for a second before the guide blinked and widened his eyes slightly.

"Wait--something feels..."

Zein stepped forward before anyone could stop him. When he looked at the space keenly earlier, he felt like he saw something flickering in the air. He reached out his hand to the strange area.

"Mmh--" he felt static at the tip of his fingers, and his nape--or rather, Setnath’s stigma--was tingling. The sound of vibration filled the air, and a small space at the tip of his fingers crumbled like a glitch.

As if taking off its invisibility cloak, a shard revealed itself to the world. The same shard that Zein tried so hard to reach during his burnout, that sometimes still appeared in his dreams.

Unconsciously, Zein took a deep breath and let it out nervously. This shard, or rather this place, felt special for him.

"Whoaa," Han Shin exclaimed while covering his mouth in astonishment. "Oh! So that’s why Zein was..."

It wasn’t the healer that got a sudden excitement. From Zein’s ring, the underground lake shard sprung out as if it had been waiting for that moment all this time. Perhaps it did; it was the first time the shard met another shard.

In contrast to the excited shard that kept circling around it, the shard of the cliff stayed calm, hovering at the edge of Zein’s hand. From their touch, Zein could see himself in the shard’s memory; the sight of him desperately trying to reach out.

In turn, the shard’s feeling flew into him. The thought of how dangerous it would be if Zein got stranded in the Deathzone at that time.

"Was it hiding between the splitting dimensional space created by the appearance of the dungeon?" Jock asked.

"That’s smart!" Han Shin exclaimed and clapped his hands.

Zein held the shard with both hands, smiling behind his mask. "You’re the one who sent us back through the rift, right?"

The others raised their brows in surprise and curiosity, so Zein explained it promptly. "We managed to clear the dungeon back then. But looking at it now, we should be thrown into this place normally, not the gate we originally came from."

"Right, that’s why an exit also appeared," Ashur nodded.

"But at that time, the dungeon crumbled slightly, and I could see this shard--well, the shard saw me too," Zein stroked the jagged surface of the shard. "I think the shard sent us back through the original rift in space."

"Like a reverse summoning," Han Joon muttered.

"Whoa, doesn’t that mean this shard is very strong? Skillful?" Han Shin widened his eyes.

Of course, the other shards also had their own skill--especially in hiding--but this one...hiding between dimensional rifts, even reversing the system of the dungeon anomaly...

No wonder those Fallen Star’s fragments couldn’t find it; the shard must have been using the dungeon gate’s energy to mask its presence.

"Yeah, this one is skillful," Zein agreed as he cast his eyes toward the boulder. "After all...this is the place where my ancestor stayed for a while in the past."

The espers, especially Cohen, almost gasped in surprise.

"I received the vision of my mother’s ancestor and the first Ishtera patriarch from that incident."

Bassena narrowed his eyes and asked bitterly. "When you’re unconscious from the burnout?"

It was one of the many incidents that happened while he wasn’t there to help.

"Yeah," Zein recalled the brief vision of himself that the shard shared with him earlier. "Maybe we managed to resonate when the space was distorted."

"I see..."

And if that was the case, over the cliff should be...Zein shifted his gaze toward the cliff’s edge, which was slightly uphill. He walked to the edge with the two shards, and the light coming from them illuminated the landscape below.

Except that it wasn’t a landscape.

"The sea!" Han Shin exclaimed excitedly, jumping up and down while punching the air. "We reach the sea!"

* * *

Reaching the sea was not really in their calculation, but it was a welcomed turn of events. Finding another shard and a region bordering the sea made destroying the dungeon worth it--even if they had to get stranded in the middle of nowhere for weeks.

Naturally, they immediately set up the camp and installed both the purification device and the beacons. As usual, Jock volunteered to map the surrounding area and Ashur did some cleanup while the rest of them made a temporary home.

Zein, however, had been sitting near the edge of the cliff for a long time, doing nothing but staring at the dark sea. There wasn’t much to see, as everything was still covered in miasma down there. But where he sat, with the protection of two shards that allowed him to take off his protective gear, he felt content.

"Do you still like it even like this?" Bassena asked behind him.

"It’s fascinating, isn’t it?" Zein smiled subtly. "If we ignore everything else, it just looks like a regular sea at night."

"Hmm...I suppose so..."

Zein could feel Bassena’s doubt from that answer, but he merely chuckled. Well, for Bassena, this sea of darkness was the scenery he had been seeing almost all his life in his sleep, so it wouldn’t stimulate him at all.

"It’s strangely calm," Zein said. The dark water was steady, with no churning storm above or swimming beasts to be seen. It was just like the night sea he saw from the cruise ship. "It’s nice."

Bassena looked around; the sea itself did not stimulate him, but the cliff...

The shards suppressed their light and purification, enough to just illuminate their camp and not alert unwanted entities. But even within a small radius, Bassena was starting to see something;

At the beginning of that scene he kept seeing in his dream. The scene of blue sky and emerald sea, of a house on a cliff.

His lips stretched wide and Bassena nodded. Yeah, it’s nice.

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