Wonderful Insane World-Chapter 186: All for Power

Alka closed the door behind her.

The hallway was narrow, dimly lit by flickering neon strips, pulsing like the lazy breath of a sedated giant. A clinical silence reigned there, almost religious, in stark contrast to the muffled screams she’d heard earlier.

She didn’t linger. Her steps rang out sharp on the polished concrete, measured, precise, without hesitation. At her belt, nestled in a rigid leather case sealed with three engraved clasps, rested the gem. She could feel it even through the protective casing — a muted, latent heat, pulsing — like a stone heart still warm from the sacrifice it had been torn from.

She hadn’t needed to search Dylan. Of course he’d kept it on him. She knew him well enough to be sure he trusted no one. Not even her. But he hadn’t hidden the gem well enough, too confident in his instincts, too obsessed with his own survival to think of discarding an artifact so valuable. In the end, he’d swallowed the bait.

Everything had gone according to plan.

Or almost.

Alka passed a coded door, climbed two floors, and slipped into a private room of the technical complex. A disused maintenance chamber, seldom used anymore. She locked the door behind her.

"Finally alone..."

She took out the gem.

A bluish glow flared from the crystal, pulsing slowly, like the eye of a living being in slumber. An almost organic shape, both angular and fluid, seemed to shift within. Heroic Fragments... That’s what the Pilaf researchers called them.

They were only found in the central ruins, according to reports. War artifacts, created by a civilization that believed neither in gods nor in natural laws. Raw sorcery, devoid of morality.

Capable of engraving the mark of a spiritual or demonic beast onto another being and claiming its power. But on a human, the engraving would manifest as a Stigma, an alternative to the beasts’ original marks. Even if it meant giving up the awakening of one’s own natural stigma.

She brought it closer to her bare palm, hand trembling not with fear, but with restrained anticipation.

The stigma she could gain from it was nothing natural — she knew that. These marks weren’t blessings of fate, but grafts. Spiritual anomalies. But what did that matter? A natural awakening was a statistical luxury. A biological lottery she had no intention of waiting around for. The world rewarded those who took.

And she had taken.

Not just from Dylan.

From Gael, too. That man — that so-called strategist — who still believed his deal with the Clay Unicorn clan guaranteed Alka’s loyalty. What a joke. Her name had been traded, sure. Her strength, sold. But her will? Never.

The clan bowed only to power. Not to some crumbling county. Not to some reformist dream. And certainly not to a tired man, no matter how clever.

She could return with a stigma. With power incarnate. She could become an asset. An irreplaceable name in the guild, in the clan. Climb the ranks not by serving — but by dominating. By possessing something no one else had dared to steal from Pilaf’s sacred ruins.

And Dylan... he was just a variable. A footnote.

They’d shared a mission. Yes. She didn’t hate him. Maybe she even liked him, a little, in a crooked kind of way — but that held no real value. He was a liability. A weakness. He could have ruined everything by clinging to the gem. Worse: he could have wasted it.

He wasn’t ready.

She was.

Alka slid the gem back into its case, locking the clasps with ritual-like care. The moment wasn’t right yet. The engraving required a specific location. But she now had everything she needed.

She could wait for the right moment, engrave the mark, and vanish from the mission.

She sat on the metal stool, hands folded on her knees, gaze lost in the void. 𝕗𝚛𝚎𝚎𝐰𝗲𝗯𝗻𝚘𝚟𝚎𝗹.𝕔𝐨𝕞

Cold, upright, motionless — like an effigy of her own ambition.

She had no regrets. Who would, in her position?

Regrets were for the weak — for those who still believed the world worked on anything other than barter: power for loyalty, flesh for ascent. For those who still thought you could climb without getting your hands dirty. Or worse — without selling someone off along the way.

She was not one of them.

Alka stared at her palms — those agile, disciplined hands that had stolen, killed, healed, betrayed. She wondered how many lives they held, how many faces they had touched with tenderness, how many they had stabbed in the dark.

Dylan... that boy.

She closed her eyes for a brief moment. His image flickered in her mind: the way he furrowed his brow while studying a map, how he masked his emotions with clumsy sarcasm, his eyes — too clear, too alive for a world like this.

She shook her head.

Weaknesses. That’s all they were. Ghosts of half-born connections. Feelings she neither had time nor luxury to unearth.

She had built herself, alone. Even within her clan, she was a pawn before she was a sister. She had been trained, used, tested. She had made herself useful — but never indispensable. Her rise had been slow, harsh, always conditional. She’d been a shadow, a messenger, an executioner. But with this gem — with this stigma — she could change that. She could climb the ladder, erase the legacy of silent submission that had always been demanded of her.

"Loyalty to power." That was the unspoken creed of the Clay Unicorn.

And what weighed heavier than raw, incarnate, supernatural power?

A stigma.

Even an artificial one.

Especially an artificial one — because it proved she had chosen her strength, not been handed it by fate.

She rose slowly, her leg still numb from sitting. The gem pulsed softly at her waist, as if it too sensed the impatience of its future host. A slow, confident beat. She let her finger slide along the top clasp of the container. It would take a few more hours to secure the perimeter. Ideally, she’d wait for the night guards’ shift change. She knew their schedules — she’d studied them. Nothing would be left to chance.

The engraving process would be painful. Likely worse than anything she’d seen the awakened soldiers do to Dylan.

But she wasn’t afraid of pain.

She had lived in it all her life.

And this time, she would emerge stronger.