Solflare: The Painter's Secret-Chapter 183: Eyes That Does Not Blink

The ramp of the Triarch closed slowly behind Leon. He stood at it for a moment, his hand holding the collar of his hoodie, and gave a short exhale.

’Their safety is in your hands.’

Hei Yung’s words had felt like a standard statement when he first heard them. Now, sitting down in the pilot seat and watching the three officials, through the narrowing gap, their hands raised in a farewell that carried no guarantee of reunion, the words became something else entirely.

He turned forward.

The cockpit waited, dark and patient.

He flipped the master power switch. The flight-core activator followed, and the cockpit came alive in layers of blue light, each system announcing itself in sequence. He engaged the navigation HUB, thumbed the thruster ignition stud, and set the stability-assist to active. The canopy seal turned green. He moved the mode selector to Pursuit Standby, released the brake clamp, and pushed the lift thrusters online.

Only then did he wrap his hand around the grip.

He was about to ease the main thrust lever forward when a voice came through the internal speaker.

"Hello, Leon Storm."

His hands stilled. He stared at the dashboard, at the swelling lines moving across the small screen like a pulse.

"I am the virtual assistant set in place by Longwei. Call me Gia."

The name appeared on the screen for three seconds, then vanished.

Leon sat there for a moment. Longwei’s face surfaced in Leon’s mind without permission, the same smile, the same calm before the blast.

Leon pressed his jaw together, took in a deep breath, and looked at the screen, listening to Longwei’s voice now echoing from a machine.

"Place your hand on the fingerprint panel to initiate our connection."

He hesitated, then did it. A blue light erupted from the panel and swept upward across his face in a single pass.

"Initialization complete. Storm 07."

He exhaled once, quietly, then eased the thrust lever forward.

...

Hei Yung, Hei Luo, and Lu Wang stood at the front of the vehicle bay as the Triarch lifted. None of them spoke. They simply watched as the craft climbed high, its pointed nose cutting upward through the open bay ceiling and into the sky.

Birds that were already airborne scattered when the craft passed through their formation, then regrouped and continued as if nothing had moved through them.

The Triarch broke through the first cloud formation and vanished.

Lu Wang exhaled through his nose, then turned and walked back inside without a word.

Hei Luo remained a moment longer, his gaze on the sky where the craft had been. Then he also turned.

Hei Yung was the last. He stood there until the clouds had fully closed over the gap the Triarch had left, then folded his hands behind his back and walked inside, his face carrying nothing that could be read easily.

...

For the first twenty minutes, no one inside the Triarch spoke.

The world below shifted in scale as the craft reached full speed. Buildings became rectangles. Streets became thin lines. Cities folded into patterns, and then even the patterns dissolved into the brown and grey of open terrain. Mountains appeared and passed beneath them like sleeping animals.

An Lang sat with his arms crossed, watching the window beside him. His war discs rested against his back, sometimes causing him to adjust himself.

Liu Yan had her eyes locked on the sky ahead, her black sword resting across her lap. She had not spoken since entering the craft. Her fingers rested on the hilt without gripping it, present but not committed.

Wu Ze sat perfectly still. She had been still since the ramp closed. Her twin pens were clipped at her side.

She occasionally shifted her gaze between the window and the back of Leon’s seat, reading the craft the same way she reads every environment she entered, distances, and threats before they announced themselves.

The sky outside darkened without warning.

It did not dim the way the afternoon gradually becomes evening. It shifted, the blue simply ending, replaced by a black that had no stars in it and no graduation.

The terrain below was broken and bare, split by deep fractures that ran in separate directions.

Lightning streaked across the sky in horizontal lines, traveling sideways as if the atmosphere here were its own logic. Thunderous sounds followed. The very kind that is felt in the chest before it is heard by the ears.

An Lang broke the silence.

"Has anyone thought about what it means that three expeditions went down here and nothing came back?"

The question sat in the cabin unanswered. Liu Yan’s fingers tightened slightly on the hilt. Wu Ze did not move.

An Lang waited, then looked at the back of Leon’s head, then at the window, then at his own hands.

"Well," he said. "If no one is bothered to answer, I will just keep it to myself." He unfolded his arms, nodded once as if confirming something only he knew, and tilted his gaze back to the window.

The Triarch began its descent.

The entry shaft appeared below them as a dark circle cut into already dark ground. It looked exactly like what the documentation had called it. A wound. The edges were uneven, the interior had no visible depth from above, and the air moving upward from it carried a warmth that the external sensors registered before anyone inside could feel it.

Leon adjusted the craft’s angle and brought the nose down.

The surface light disappeared within the first two hundred meters. Not dimmed. Gone. Above them, the entry point reduced to a grey circle, then a pale ring, then nothing.

The darkness below was the kind that does not feel like the absence of light. But so much as the presence of something else.

Leon pressed the ninja mode activation. The Triarch’s exterior shifted, its surface absorbing the surrounding darkness rather than reflecting it, its running lights cutting to zero. The craft became part of the tunnel.

The walls moved. The rock itself appeared to be expanding and contracting in a slow rhythm that the craft’s sensors logged but could not classify.

Beneath them, veins of molten lava ran along the tunnel floor, casting an orange light that reached nothing above knee height. It illuminated only the ground, leaving everything above it darker.

Leon held the craft steady and kept the descent slow.

After another kilometer, the sensors flagged something.

The alert came without drama, a single chime and a line of text across the navigation screen.

"Horned Maw Snakes detected. Stay alert."

The danger lights along the cockpit rim shifted to a deep amber pulse.

Leon’s arms tightened on the controls. He reduced speed further and brought the craft closer to the tunnel’s center, away from the walls.

Then something moved past them.

It did not approach. It did not circle. It simply passed, a force with mass and speed that the external sensors registered for less than a second before it was gone. The craft shuddered once, a brief lateral shift that Leon corrected before it could become a roll.

Then the power cut.

Every light in the cockpit died. The navigation screen went dark. The amber warning pulse stopped. The hum of the systems fell silent so completely that the sound of An Lang’s breathing became audible from the rear seats.

Leon’s hands moved across the panel by memory, pressing the restart sequence. The system did not respond.

He pressed it again. Nothing.

Two eyes appeared outside the canopy. Each one was roughly the same width as the craft itself, and they had the color of heated iron with a core that pulsed slowly. They did not blink. They moved fractionally, adjusting their angle, and through the dark canopy glass, Leon had the distinct sensation of being assessed rather than seen, as he had felt in Alchemania.

He did not move.

Behind him, Liu Yan’s mouth had opened. She stayed like that, completely still, as if a twist of even her hair would lead them into the molten lava.

An Lang sat with sweat tracing lines down the sides of his face. His arms no longer had a flare but pressed flat against his thighs. He looked at the eyes, looked away, and back to the eyes, not knowing which one was worse.

Wu Ze had not changed expression. Her thumb rested on the green button of her left pen, not pressing, hovering. Her eyes were fixed on the eyes outside with the same attention she gave everything that had not yet decided what it would do.

The eyes held their position for a long moment, then vanished.

The power returned in a single surge, every system coming back simultaneously, the cockpit flooding with blue light that felt almost violent after the darkness had held its stance.

Leon’s hands moved across the controls before the restart sequence could finish, stabilizing the craft and resuming the descent.

No one spoke for a full minute after that.

...

The deeper they went, the more the tunnel changed.

The walls that had breathed became walls that had texture. The molten veins below widened, pooling and sending heat upward in waves that the craft’s systems constantly compensated for.

And then the tunnel ended.

The Triarch passed through a final threshold and entered an open space that had the look of an upside-down world.

A new world that had its own sky. The molten lava remained as the sun, while the clouds smelled of corpses.

When the Triarch finally landed on a pale and cracked earth, its weight settled onto it with a sound of something between a creak and a sigh.

Then, from somewhere in the dark beyond the craft’s exterior lights, a howl tore through the air of Tartarus.

It was not like any sound the documentation had prepared them for. It did not rise or fall. It simply arrived and remained, filling the space around the craft and pressing against the hull as if testing whether the metal would hold.

Leon’s hands stayed on the controls, eyes locked forward, the AI voice echoing around him. "Sub-level one of Tartarus had received your arrival."