Blackout Ascension: Return of Primordial Heir-Chapter 40: Moonspire Hill

Moonspire Hill was widely known as a dangerous, forbidden zone for the normal citizens of the Zephyros Kingdom. It was located far outside the capital walls. It was composed of jagged bed rocks and long, twisted trees. The air was thin, and the shadows were deep. Wild, rigid mana swirled around the top of the peak, making it hostile to human life.

Normally, Luna Zephyros hated coming up here. It required a long, exhausting hike, and required unnecessary physical effort. But tonight, Luna didn’t complain about climbing up. He hiked up the sloppy, dangerous mountain path. His boots crushed the dry leaves with a crunchy sound. He wore the usual black training uniform. The cold nocturnal gale grazed against his pale face, but he ignored the cold. His silver hair wavered messy in the gale. His pale eyes were focused, burning with an intense resolve of becoming strong.

I cannot be lazy anymore, Luna thought, clenching his fists tightly while climbing. Soltheia accepted my proposal. She is going to be my wife. I am officially going to be a husband. A family man.

He reached the perfect training spot on Moonspire Hill. The luminescent full moon loomed in the pitch-black sky, casting a silver-white light over the mountain. Luna walked to the absolute center of the rugged terrain. He took a slow breath, his chest slowly puffing out. He remembered the oppressive power of the Demon God Algreth, and pure despair he felt watching his best friend, Kairos, step forward to fight an impossible battle. Kairos had a mysterious, god-slaying power hidden inside him. Ignis and Terravarous had the destructive power of the royal bloodline.

And what exactly do I have? Luna asked himself bitterly. I have wily shadows, pale mind dimension and gravity. I am a skilled assassin, but I am not powerful. If a Calamity beast attacks tomorrow... my tricks won’t be enough to defeat it.

He impelled his hands out to his sides. "Shadow Domain: Crushing Field!" Luna roared into the quiet, dark night.

His dark mana fragmented instantly outward. The shadows covering the ground instantly become tumid, turning the rocky terrain into a pool of liquid darkness. The surrounding gravity instantly rose, multiplying by ten times.

CRACK!! CRUNCH!!

The heavy black boulders surrounding were pinned down. They shattered into millions of tiny pieces under the immense pressure of his gravity magic. The hard ground groaned in agony, splitting wide open.

Luna’s pale face trembled in extreme pain. He was pushing his mana core far beyond its safe limits.

"More!" Luna shouted loudly, his voice commanding fiercely across the mountain. "That is not enough power!"

He clinched his hands tightly together in front of his chest. "Gravity Core: Point Collapse!"

The pool of darkness convulsively snapped back toward him. All the crushing gravity on the terrain incisively concentrated into a single black sphere hovering one inch above his palms.

The tiny black sphere reverberated violently. It was desperately trying to burst out. Luna’s arms quaked uncontrollably. The blood started dripping slowly from his nose, his mana core felt like it was on fire.

He was creating a highly unstable, concentrated black hole. It was a forbidden technique. If he lost control for even a single microsecond, the gravity would brutally crush his own body into a blood cube.

Hold it together, Luna gritted his teeth, his pale eyes burning red. If I can safely control this... I can easily crush the heart of a Calamity beast.

He held the vibrating black sphere for ten agonizing seconds. Every single muscle in his body scathed with searing pain. He was drenched in beads of cold sweat. Finally, he couldn’t hold it anymore. He vehemently thrusted his hands upward into the sky.

BOOM!

The constricted gravity sphere shot high into the dark clouds and exploded violently. A massive shockwave shuddered through the night sky, blowing away every single cloud for miles around. Luna collapsed, dropped heavily to his bare knees.

He gasped, struggling for air, panting like a dying dog. He rubbed the sticky blood from his nose with the back of his trembling hand. His body felt completely hollowed out and utterly exhausted.

But a very small, proud smirk traced on his lips.

"I actually did it," Luna whispered weakly between raspy breaths. "I compressed the field. I am working hard for once in my miserable life."

He slowly lay flat on his back on the cold, hard rocks, staring up at the clear moon. He just needed to rest for five minutes to safely recover his depleted mana. But suddenly, the night gale entirely froze. The loud, annoying chirping of the night insects vanished. The entire mountain became terrifyingly silent suddenly.

The atmospheric temperature inexorably dropped. It went from a biting night into a freezing winter. Frost precipitously formed on the black rocks around Luna’s boots. Luna’s eyes snapped wide open. His elite survival instincts screamed at him in pure panic.

Something was wrong. Luna stammered.

He slowly pushed himself up off the ground, wholly ignoring his agonizing, exhausted muscles. He looked down at his own shadow. His shadow, which he was a master of, was not obeying his commands. It was shivering on the ground. It was stretching far away from him, pointing straight toward a thick cluster of twisted trees on the edge of the dark jagged terrain.

His own magic was genuinely terrified of whatever was standing over there. Luna didn’t make a single sound. He erased his physical presence, slowly, silently creeping forward toward the trees, hiding inviolably within the dark shadows. He sneaked carefully past a thick tree trunk.

His breath groaned, hitching in his dry throat. His heart skipped a violent beat, there was a tall, skewering figure standing alone in the shadows.

It wasn’t a monster or a calamity beast. It was something different, and somehow, much worse.

It was a towering knight oppressively clad in pitch-black, jagged plate armor. The dark armor looked ancient, deeply scarred like it fought thousands of battles. But it wasn’t just simple metal. Thick, suffocating black mist frigidly oozing actively from the joints of the dark armor. The black mist devoured the moonlight around it. Where the mist touched the dry grass, the grass turned into grey, lifeless ash.

It was a Black Mist Knight. Luna had seen one before, and he also recognized the legendary description from the restricted military archives. They were the forbidden and forgotten ghosts of the ancient world. They were not supposed to be real.

The Black Mist Knight wasn’t moving. It was totally focused on the ground. In its armored hand, it held a massive, jagged sword that looked like it was forged from the night itself. The Knight was methodically dragging the tip of the dark blade through the dirt. It was like carving a massive, complex magic circle on the hard ground.

Luna squinted his eyes, trying desperately to read the shining dark runes being carved, but the magical symbols made no sense. They weren’t standard elemental runes or an ancient dragon languages. They were jagged, and wrong. Just simply looking at the dark shapes made Luna’s eyes watery and his head throb with a sickening ache.

Then, the Black Mist Knight stopped moving. It slowly lowered its heavy sword, and it began to speak. It was like a corrupted, rigidly layered, scraping sound. It sounded like a thousand dying souls ragefully whispering at the same time inside an empty tomb.

It was chanting a mysterious, ancient language.

"Kael’thos... Vaneer... Xylo... Rell."

The next second the terrifying syllables hit the silent air, Luna’s body entirely seized up. The mysterious language howled in his ears. Dark words drilled straight into his brain.

Luna clamped both of his hands over his ears, his eyes widening in agony.

"Gah...!" Luna gasped quietly, biting his lip so hard it instantly bled. He desperately tried to stop himself from screaming out loud.

The strange language felt like rusty, jagged nails being thrashed into his fragile mind. It was a targeted mind attack coagulated inside the chant. His trained mana core was destabilized. His vision was obscured into double images. A warm drop of red blood slowly oozed out of his left ear and crawled down on his pale neck.

What the hell is this?! Luna screamed inside his own mind, his body trembling uncontrollably. It’s just talking! It’s literally just talking, but it’s tearing my brain apart! 𝙛𝓻𝒆𝓮𝒘𝙚𝙗𝒏𝙤𝙫𝓮𝒍.𝓬𝒐𝙢

The Black Mist Knight didn’t even glance towards the trees where Luna was hiding and bleeding. It ignored him like a mighty lion ignores an insignificant ant crawling in the dirt.

The dark magic circle carved into the ground suddenly flared with a blinding, black light. The Knight took one slow, heavy step forward into the center of the dark circle.

The black mist wrapped around the armored figure like a thick cocoon. The Knight chanted one final word in the disturbing, alien language.

"Zul."

WHOOSH!!

The black magic circle collapsed inward on itself. The dark mist hastily folded into a point in space and simply vanished into thin air.

The Black Mist Knight was gone. The freezing, unnatural cold vanished, and the normal nocturnal wind returned to the mountain. The crickets slowly started chirping again in the dark.

Luna collapsed forward out of the shadows. He fell flat onto his hands and knees in the dirt. He was breathing, his chest heaving heavily, taking desperate gulps of air. His entire body was drenched in cold sweat. He desperately smeared the sticky blood away from his ear with a shaking hand.

He stared at the empty spot in the dirt where the terrifying knight had just been standing. The immense dread lingering in the air was suffocating. It was a primal fear. It was much worse than fighting an angry, mindless monster in a dungeon.

A Calamity beast was a highly destructive, mindless force of nature. You could hit a beast with a massive sword. You could burn a beast with magic fire.

But this? This intelligent, ancient black mist knight? A being that literally breaks your mind apart just by speaking a few words?

"That absolutely wasn’t a random monster," Luna whispered quietly to the empty mountain, his voice shaking with pure terror. "That was an organized, elite soldier."

Luna slowly forced himself to stand up on his trembling legs. He looked down at his shaking hands. His new motivation to get stronger suddenly didn’t feel like enough anymore.

If terrifying monsters like that Black Mist Knight were moving silently in the deep shadows of the world... then the coming Great War wasn’t just a normal fight for the royal kingdoms. It was going to be a brutal fight for survival. Luna turned around and began to walk back towards palace.