Dead Nerds Society: What Do You Mean My Guild Was Also Isekaid?-Chapter 70: Shattered Sanctuary (1)
The sky above the Eclipsed Sanctuary was wrong. It wore the colors of a broken aurora. Curtains of light stuttered and desynchronized, bands of teal and violet glitching like a video buffer on a dying connection.
At the center of it all, Cecilia stood alone.
Mina and Marya waited at the edge of the circle of silver thread she had traced on the floor. Ephyrael and Siraaeniel remained behind at the perimeter as an honor guard, along with an obscene number of contingencies.
If things went wrong here, she wasn’t sure any number of contingencies would matter.
Silver thread of consecration encircled the altar in three nested rings, stitched with mirrored candles and inscribed plates of translucent crystal.
The runic plates were not quite Ephyraeon. They were like glyphs distorted by the cold precision of debug menus.
Above the cracked altar hovered ten lights. 𝗳𝚛𝗲𝕖𝕨𝕖𝗯𝚗𝚘𝕧𝕖𝗹.𝗰𝗼𝕞
They were not clean spheres like the souls of the animals in the forest near Aberswan had been. These were ragged, jagged things, flickering, stitched to invisible axes like models that hadn’t finished loading.
One of them pulsed pale blue.
Cecilia could not tear her eyes from that one.
((It might be Helen. Or maybe I’m just seeing what I want to see.))
Each soul flickered between "light" and "text." Sometimes they were glowing particles. Sometimes they were strings of symbols.
[User batch: 03]
[Status: Queueing...]
[Anchor: Eclipsed_Sanctuary.Core]
[Error: External process interference - NULL_SIGNATURE detected.]
The error had appeared during teleportation before, a brief red flash as she jumped back to Drakenhof. Now it crawled across reality itself.
"Miss Cecilia..."
Marya’s voice barely reached her across the circle. The girl’s hands clutched the strap of the backpack with the ritual components, knuckles white. Her eyes darted between the glitching souls and her master, full of fear and worries.
"Are you sure..."
"No. I’m not."
Cecilia didn’t take her eyes off the souls.
"I’m not sure. That’s why you’re staying outside the circle, Marya. You and Mina both."
Mina’s tail fluffed up.
"That’s the third time you say that, Master. It’s bad for my heart."
"I know. But I can’t sugar-coat things. So. Stay there. But, if the worst comes to happen..."
"Run?"
Mina supplied.
Cecilia gave a humorless smile.
"Document everything. Then run."
For a heartbeat the whole cavern flickered to black, and only the ten souls and the rings of silver thread remained visible.
System messages bled through reality, visible only to Cecilia.
[External process: NULL_THREAD.Muvetheret()]
[Action: Preserve incoming user-data. Override Cycle routing.]
[Result: Pending - Administrator approval required.]
((Administrator. Again. I really wanted that to be some dev somewhere. Not... me. Where is that person who contacted me?))
Cecilia lifted the Chrysalis Scepter. The cracked crystal cocoon at its tip pulsed with a soft inner glow, responding to the thrum of the ten heartbeats hovering above the altar.
She inhaled, letting the cold air of the Sanctuary fill her lungs, and began to chant.
"Ephemarion phor-ael en kythera-velion,
Nythera lythaen; anthyra phaneros.
Velion-ael en moratha; phorion aelys-nyth,
Lythaen-phōs en cycle; elendar ephemar."
("O soul, walk your passage through the veil-bridge,
Let death fade; let return be revealed.
Through the veil of the soul within the turning,
Light wanes into the Cycle; dawn rises in the spirit.")
The silver thread on the floor began to vibrate, singing a chord that rose through her bones. The mirrored candle flames bent sideways, forming horizontal bridges of light that linked her, the altar, and the ten glitching souls.
[CyclePath.EPHEMERION initialized.]
[Awaiting Administrator decision.]
"Myrath ephemarion, phor-ael en skenon-lyth,
Anthyra-ael es melathion, en cycle phaneros.
Ephemerys-velion, chros en lythaen,
Anathyra ephemar; elendar phōs.
Phor-ael, phor-ael... en cycle morathesyr."
("Dawn of the soul, crossing the shadow-fade,
Return to flesh, to resting-place revealed within the Cycle.
Ephemerys’ shroud, hue of gentle fading,
Bring the soul back; let dawn-light bloom.
Passage of the soul... passage of the soul... within the sacred turning.")
The last syllable of the chant left her lips.
Reality clicked.
The world shattered in silence.
A single, absolute, surgical cut in the noise of existence. The cold air, the flicker of auroras, the rustle of Mina’s tail, the small, shaking breath of Marya... All of it vanished.
Cecilia found herself in a dark place, surrounded by the ten souls.
She recognized the place as the same she was before, when she passed out during the confrontation with Aenoth.
But, this time, she was not alone. The souls hung around her, each fixed to invisible lines that radiated outward into nothingness. Threads of light and code, stretching in all directions, forming a spiderweb that had forgotten to choose a center.
Her body still existed. She could feel the scepter in her hand, the weight of her robes, the faint pressure of her bare feet on something that wasn’t quite there.
The UI of the game system was visible, flickering like a reflection in disturbed water, with fragments of menus appearing and vanishing in her peripheral vision.
[Administrator Morielen detected.]
[Privilege set: Fragmentary.]
[Request: Confirm routing of User batch: 03.]
"Routing them to the Cycle. Standard rebirth. Same as... me."
Those words flew out of her mouth automatically. It was like she knew instinctively what to say. Like something inside her knew.
After a few moments, new logs appeared.
[Conflict: External claim already applied.]
[Process: MUVETHERET.NULL_THREAD has seized provisional custody.]
"Of course he has."
She muttered in frustration.
Then, a voice answered her, coming from everywhere and nowhere at once. A voice that she had already heard today.
"You say it as if I were a bug in your code, little priestess."
The void rippled.
Pieces of something began to collect in front of her.
It was like ash drifting backward into shape, coalescing into the silhouette of a man seated upon an invisible throne. His body was the color of bone, his skin the texture of calcified dust.
Over his skin, lines of black mercury pulsed slowly, their movement barely visible, like the last beats of a dying heart.
Light avoided him, refusing to touch him. A thin halo of absence clung to his form, as if reality was politely stepping aside wherever he existed.
Cecilia tightened her grip on the staff.
"Muvetheret."
He inclined his head graciously, as if greeting an equal at some formal court.
"Morielen Thal’Mor. High Aelysid. Ex-Oracle of the Cycle. Administrator by accident."
Calcified lips curved into a smile that would have looked warm on a living face.
"And, more importantly, a girl who has had enough of pain."
((Shit.))
She kept her expression neutral, or tried to.
"You’ve been busy. Hijacking teleportation anchors. Reaching into the isekai pipeline. That wasn’t in your old boss mechanics."
"Five hundred years is a long time to iterate. This world grew teeth. I chose to grow hands."
He spoke mildly. Tiny fractures glimmered along his surface as he shifted, but the cracks never quite completed themselves.
[User: ???]
[Origin: EARTH//dns.local]
[Character data: FOUND]
[State: Disembodied – Pending initialization.]
Cecilia’s throat closed.
DNS.
Dead Nerds Society.
The pale blue soul pulsed, briefly stabilizing into a human silhouette. A girl with messy hair, glasses, a familiar tilt of the head. It remained like that for a heartbeat, then glitched back into anonymous light.
((Helen... Was that Helen...???))
Muvetheret watched her, with his mercury veins stirring.
"You recognize the pattern the way a surgeon recognizes the outline of an old wound."
He rose from the invisible throne. The motion was too smooth, too slow, as if time around him had taken a sedative.
"These ten have been torn from one cage and are about to be cast into another. You of all people understand what awaits them here. Pain. Loss. The knowledge that their friendships, their families, their very lives were overwritten."
He spread his hands. Black mercury glistened.
"I offer them something kinder."
Cecilia snorted.
"Kinder? No... Oblivion is not kindness."
He chuckled like a parent hearing their toddler child say something funny.
"Life is noise. Change is injury repeated. Ephemerys would spin them again and again on her wheel, grinding them from one ignorance into another. I merely propose... stillness. No more fear. No more attachment frayed by time."
He gestured, and the void shifted.
Scenes spilled out of the dark like film projected onto smoke. Hospital corridors. An ICU ward. The faint beep of a heart monitor that Cecilia knew far too well. She could almost feel the phantom weight of the ventilator tubes she once wore.
The photo of a girl laughing on another hospital bed.
Her.
Helen, in the world-that-was.
The image shimmered and multiplied.
Now Helen on a late-night voice call, hair tangled, complaining about homework.
Helen rage-quitting a raid and DM’ing Cecilia thirty screenshots of some PvP asshole’s profile, demanding jointly planned revenge.
Helen, crying, when the she heard that Cecilia had died, biting her lips.
Each memory was real. Each hurt. Even the one she hadn’t experienced herself.
Muvetheret’s voice wrapped around them like velvet.
"Imagine if she never had to endure another goodbye. If this, here, now, could be frozen. Preserved. Ten friends kept in the exact moment before disappointment. In perfect camaraderie, perfect trust. I can hold them at the edge of joy forever."
