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ArabicArknights: Soul Knights of Terra — Chapter 13
Chapter 13: The Flame Demon and the Flame Demon
Darkness. Agonizing, suffocating pain.
Her consciousness fought to piece itself back together. Saria coughed violently, expelling a mouthful of blood and thick dust, her blurred vision struggling to make sense of the ruined world around her. She lay entombed within a fractured groove of calcified crystal, a makeshift sanctuary barely large enough to hold her. It was the final, desperate defense she had instinctively woven with her Originium Arts before the darkness had taken her.
Her appearance was ghastly. Her usually pristine white hair was a ruined mess, matted with debris and dark, congealed blood. Crimson continuously wept from her nose and mouth, trailing down her jaw to stain her shredded uniform. The most devastating toll had been exacted upon her right arm. The limb was mangled, violently twisted into a sickening, unnatural angle by the sheer kinetic force of the final impact. It hung utterly numb, devoid of all sensation.
The catastrophic blow had stripped her of all mobility. The hollow emptiness brought on by the severe over-expenditure of her Originium Arts, combined with her multiple critical injuries, made moving even a single finger feel like an impossible task. She could only lie trapped within these crumbling crystal remains, gasping futilely like an insect caught in amber.
Forcing her heavy eyelids open, Saria observed the outside world through the jagged cracks in the crystal wall.
She seemed to have plummeted into a massive subterranean fault line. Surrounding her were collapsed rock faces and mountains of falling architectural debris, forming a cavernous underground arena. Fortunately, this appeared to be an undeveloped bedrock stratum; there were no innocent civilians present to be caught in the crossfire.
Not far away, the colossal Lava Troll had also fallen into the abyss.
Having lost its primary target, the beast turned its towering rage upon the surrounding cavern. Its four massive arms smashed wildly into the rock walls, causing the entire underground space to tremble with every thunderous impact. Yet, Saria’s sharp tactical gaze noticed a crucial detail: as it vented its fury in this chaotic, mindless manner, the heart-palpitating, molten glow radiating from its rocky hide was gradually dimming.
[In the Mental Chat Group]
[Number Two: Boss! Boss, how are things on your end?]
[Number Three: Boss, are you holding up? If it’s really too much, just come back first!]
[Number Four: Yeah, Boss! Worst case scenario, we’ll just make Number Two suffer a bit and have her spam a few more buffs.]
The Eldest’s consciousness drifted through a chaotic haze of molten heat, but the familiar, bickering voices of his brothers anchored him, pulling back a vital shred of clarity. He remained silent, ignoring the immediate urge to retreat.
He harbored his own selfish fears. The raw, catastrophic power surging through this monstrous vessel was utterly terrifying, and he had yet to fully leash it. If he teleported back to the Vitality Hall right now, carrying this volatile, unstabilized energy, a single slip in control could incinerate the very brothers he was trying to protect. Compared to the unfamiliar natives of Terra, he was far more terrified of harming the companions who had become his lifeline.
[Boss:…I’m fine.]
Enduring the molten agony still churning through his veins, he projected a calm reassurance into the mental link.
[Boss: The energy is slowly stabilizing… I’ve already… managed to rein it in a little…]
As if to validate his claim, the colossal Lava Troll ceased its mindless demolition of the cavern. Its massive, craggy chest heaved with violent, dragging breaths. The magma coursing across its rocky hide flared and receded in rhythmic, pulsing waves. Though the entity remained dangerously unstable, the blinding aura of its rage was visibly fading.
Saria tracked the Troll’s every microscopic shift. Watching it finally halt its rampage brought a fleeting, razor-thin margin of relief. It proved her tactical hypothesis: this berserker state was not perpetual. A window of extreme fatigue inevitably followed the explosive discharge of its power. She gritted her teeth, attempting to marshal whatever dregs of stamina remained in her battered frame, desperate to seize this opening.
But the moment she tensed her muscles, a blinding spike of agony hijacked her nervous system. Her vision went entirely black, and she collapsed back into the crystal groove with a muffled, agonizing groan.
“Haa…”
Saria let her eyes fall shut, utterly powerless. There was no other tactical option left. She could only pray that no one else would stumble into this abyss to provoke the beast, allowing it to naturally exhaust its fury.
Yet, fate possessed a cruel sense of irony, always striking at the most disastrous possible second.
Just as the subterranean ruins settled into a heavy, suffocating silence, a young girl’s voice—shrill with panic and raw desperation—echoed down from a fractured fissure high above.
“Saria…! Saria—! Are you down there?!”
Saria’s eyes snapped open, stark horror bleeding into her deathly pale face.
‘Ifrit!? Why is she here?!’
Shifting back to a few moments prior—
When the initial shockwave of the violent tremors struck, Ifrit had been sequestered in her lounge, enduring another painfully ordinary day. She sat on the edge of her bed, her legs kicking idly in the air as she flipped through a colorful picture book Silence had left behind.
“So boring…” she muttered, her amber eyes darting toward the door as she plotted. Maybe she could sneak out and secretly practice her Originium Arts in the training wing. Or better yet, go hunt down Silence and demand some attention. Silence was always drowning in paperwork, but she would still take a moment to gently pat Ifrit’s head.
Just as she finalized her rebellious little scheme—
BOOM!!!
A sudden, violent earthquake launched her straight off the mattress. The glass of water resting on her nightstand plummeted to the floor, shattering into jagged shards.
“Waaah! What the heck is going on?!”
A split second later, a piercing, mechanical alarm shrieked through the entire sector. The pristine corridor outside instantly devolved into absolute chaos. Through the heavy door, she could hear the panicked, high-pitched cries of the other contained children and their guardians.
Driven by instinct, Ifrit scrambled toward the lounge’s reinforced viewing window, pressing her hands against the glass and standing on her tiptoes. She watched researchers sprinting down the hall, their faces twisted in sheer terror. Cutting through the fleeing crowd was a heavily armed tactical security squad, their expressions grim as they marched rapidly toward Sector A.
Through the muffled, chaotic din, a few fragmented words bled through the glass:
“Monster…”
“Attack…”
“…It’s the Flame Demon!”
“Flame Demon?” Ifrit blinked, tilting her head in genuine confusion. “Does that have anything to do with me?”
A passing researcher caught sight of her face pressed against the glass. He immediately stopped, his expression hardening into a stern, unforgiving glare. “Get back! Stay in your room and behave!”
Ifrit curled her lip in a petulant sneer, reluctantly peeling herself away from the window and flopping backward onto her mattress.
“Tch, what’s with the attitude…” she grumbled under her breath. “Whatever. None of my business anyway.”
She snatched the discarded picture book off the floor, determined to force herself to read and block out the irritating noise outside—
BOOM!!!!
A second tremor hit—this one so cataclysmic it felt as though the entire world had been violently flipped upside down. The reinforced walls of her room groaned and shuddered violently.
“Wah!” Ifrit shrieked, hurling the book aside and gripping the metal frame of her bed with white-knuckled desperation.
Even her childish mind instantly registered that this was no standard containment breach or minor laboratory accident. And before she even considered her own safety, her thoughts snapped to the two people who mattered most.
Where was Silence? Was she safe?
Through the ringing in her ears, she caught the faint, hysterical screams from the corridor:
“The headquarters… it’s completely destroyed…”
“The Defense Division can’t hold the line!”
The Defense Division! That was exactly where Silence and Saria worked!
A tidal wave of anxiety instantly drowned out her own fear. Silence was so small, so fragile. And even though Saria was the strongest person Ifrit knew, what if…
She didn’t dare finish the thought.
Suddenly, the heavy electronic lock on her door disengaged. Several security personnel charged into the room, their faces slick with cold sweat. Without a single word of explanation, they grabbed her arms.
“Move! Get her out of here! Transfer her to the deep isolation zone immediately!” the squad leader barked.
“Let go of me!” Ifrit thrashed wildly, violently wrenching her arms against their grip. “Where is Silence?! I want to see Saria! Is Saria okay?!”
She desperately needed to know if her family was safe. But the men offered no comfort, no explanation.
One of the guards, a man whose nerves had clearly snapped under the apocalyptic pressure, turned his terrified, bloodshot eyes upon her. His face twisted into a mask of pure, unadulterated hatred.
“It’s all your fault! It’s all because of you, you damned Flame Demon! If it weren’t for you freaks, none of this would have happened!”
“You drew that monster here! Because of you, Rhine Lab is a graveyard! Director Saria is probably—!”
His hysterical rant was abruptly cut off as his squadmate clamped a gloved hand over his mouth, but the guard’s eyes remained locked onto Ifrit, burning with venomous resentment.
Flame Demon… Freak… Monster…
The words were like jagged daggers, plunging deep into Ifrit’s chest. Her frantic struggling ceased instantly. Her amber pupils dilated, trembling with a fragile, shattered vulnerability.
She wasn’t a monster. She didn’t want to be a monster.
Why… why did everyone always look at her like that?
In that fleeting second of stunned distraction, she was half-dragged out of the room, forced down the corridor toward the subterranean vaults.
But before they could cross the threshold of the sector, a third, devastating tremor ripped through the facility. The floor buckled, forcing the guards to release their grip on Ifrit just to keep from falling.
The violent jolt snapped Ifrit out of her daze. Like a startled deer, she bolted. She sprinted recklessly down the violently shaking corridor, dodging falling ceiling tiles and sparking wires.
She had only one singular, burning thought: Find Silence. Find Saria.
“Stop! Get back here!” A guard spotted her sprinting directly toward the epicenter of the destruction and lunged forward to intercept her.
His partner yanked him back by the collar. “Are you insane?! That’s the core combat zone! Do you want to die?!”
“But she’s—”
Another staff member, his face pale with the trauma of near-death and twisted by displaced, ugly rage, spat out a low curse. The words carried perfectly over the blaring alarms, piercing straight into Ifrit’s ears:
“If that invading monster is a Flame Demon too… then let the two monsters tear each other apart!”
The venom in his voice acted like a physical blow, causing Ifrit to stumble mid-stride. She bit down hard on her lower lip, tasting copper, and refused to look back. She pushed her legs to run even faster, desperate to outrun the suffocating weight of their fear and hatred.
Monster…
The passageway heaved and groaned. Overhead fluorescent lights flickered and died in rapid succession, showering her with sparks and concrete dust. She tripped and fell countless times. Her knees were scraped raw, her arms bleeding from jagged debris. But every single time, she scrambled back to her feet, furiously wiping away the hot tears blurring her vision, and charged deeper into the inferno.
The closer she drew to the epicenter, the more oppressive the atmosphere became. A suffocating, scorching heat rolled through the air, carrying the heavy, terrifying aura of absolute destruction.
Finally, she skidded to a halt before a massive, jagged breach in the reinforced wall. Through the ruined concrete, she looked out—and her breath caught in her throat.
Ifrit’s amber eyes shrank to pinpricks, paralyzed by a primal, overwhelming shock.
‘…Is this… the true Flame Demon?’
She knew, deep down, that the volatile entity sealed within her own body was merely a fragmented piece—a Flame Demon Fragment. Yet even that mere sliver, when it slipped its leash, possessed the catastrophic power to level city blocks.
But this colossal, molten titan standing amidst the ruins… radiating an ancient, suffocating pressure that made her very soul quake… was this the complete entity?
And according to the guards’ panicked screams, Saria was down there fighting this god-like nightmare alone!
The paralyzing terror gripping Ifrit’s heart was instantly incinerated by a ferocious, burning surge of protective panic. She didn’t hesitate for another second. Locking onto the Troll’s location, she threw herself forward.
BOOM—!!!
A deafening roar, eclipsing all previous explosions, tore through the facility. It sounded as though the very sky was caving in. A sickening sensation of weightlessness seized her as the floor directly ahead of her completely gave way, plunging into the abyss.
Ifrit screamed, slamming her heels into the trembling floorboards. She skidded to a halt mere inches from the jagged lip of the newly formed crater. She collapsed onto her hands and knees, her chest heaving violently as she stared down into the swirling, dust-choked darkness below, her heart hammering against her ribs.
Trembling, Ifrit cautiously crept forward, peering over the precipice.
The collapse had revealed a cavernous, subterranean fault line. And at the very bottom of that dark abyss lay the terrifying Lava Troll.
What offered a microscopic shred of comfort was that the beast seemed to have finally stopped moving. Its mountainous silhouette lay slumped in the gloom, the molten cracks across its hide pulsing with a slow, rhythmic, yet deeply menacing crimson glow.
‘…Did it knock itself out from the fall?’ Ifrit wondered, her childish logic struggling to process the sheer scale of the battlefield.
But regardless of the monster’s status, the apocalyptic destruction had finally ceased.
Which meant… where was Saria? Was she trapped down there in the dark? Was she bleeding?
Her desperate need to find Saria completely eclipsed her instinctive terror of the dark and the monstrous titan resting within it.
Mustering every ounce of courage in her small body, Ifrit cupped her hands around her mouth and screamed down into the abyss:
“Sa——ria——!”
“Are you down there——?!”
“Answer me——! It’s Ifrit!”
The young girl’s clear, desperate voice pierced the heavy silence, echoing off the cavern walls.
But the answer Ifrit received did not come from Saria.
Down in the suffocating darkness, the colossal Lava Troll suddenly snapped its massive head up.
Ifrit gasped, stumbling backward in sheer terror. As she fell onto her back, the Troll raised a molten, rocky arm, reaching up toward the ledge where she sat.
From the shadows below, Saria’s voice tore through the air—a raw, blood-choked scream of absolute terror.
“Run! Ifrit! Get out of here!!!”