Stuck in an Island with Twelve Beautiful Women
Chapter 828 - 830

Chapter 828: Chapter 830

The shard vibrated violently, then snapped in half.

But the room did not collapse.

Instead, the light from the walls began to shift. The webbing pulled inward, spiraling toward the core. The creature screamed, not in pain, but in frustration, in disbelief. It was being pulled back, sealed not by force, but by invitation. Jude had become the lock, the cipher, the very key it once used turned now against it.

But the cost was immediate.

His nose bled. His eyes burned. His thoughts began to fracture.

Darren saw it happening. "Jude!"

Jude didn’t answer. He couldn’t. Every word, every breath was being consumed by the pattern. He stumbled forward, placing what remained of the shard into the heart of the core. It melted into the machine, and the floor ignited with symbols that had no human equivalent.

The creature howled one last time.

Then it was gone.

The chamber fell silent.

Jude collapsed.

Darren caught him before he hit the floor, lowering him gently. "You’re alright. You did it. It’s gone."

Jude opened his eyes slowly. "No. It’s not gone."

"What are you saying?"

"It’s asleep again. In me. I am the cage now."

Darren looked around. "Then we leave. We get you out of here."

Jude smiled weakly. "You don’t understand. I can’t leave. If I cross the boundary of this chamber, it spreads."

"Then what, what the hell do we do?"

"You leave. You seal this place behind you. Erase the paths. Bury the maps. Burn the memory."

"No. That’s not, " Darren shook his head, gripping Jude’s coat. "There’s another way. There has to be."

"There isn’t. She told me this might happen. If the seal failed, the only solution would be to host it. To contain it with a living thought. That’s me now."

Darren stood up, pacing. "I won’t do that. I won’t leave you here."

"You have to. You’re the last one who knows the path. You’re the only one who can make sure no one ever finds this place again."

Jude’s voice began to fade. "Tell them nothing. Let the world forget."

Darren stood for a long time, trembling. Then he nodded. He took Jude’s rifle, his satchel, and turned away. As he reached the tunnel, he looked back one last time.

Jude was sitting now, his back against the ruined core, eyes closed. At peace.

Darren walked for hours. Maybe days. He retraced their path, set fire to the entrance, dropped the map into a river swollen with spring thaw. When he finally emerged from the ruins of the city, he was alone.

He never spoke of what happened.

He told those who asked that Jude died in the collapse. That there was nothing left to find. He moved far away, changed his name, lived quietly. But some nights, when the wind blew just right, he thought he could still hear the hum.

The sound of a man holding back the end of the world.

The scent of ash lingered long after the winds had shifted. Jude was gone, and with him, the fragile tether that had held the darkness at bay. Darren hadn’t slept properly since the seal. Every time his eyes closed, he felt the pulse, not in the ground beneath him, but in the air, the trees, the silence. He didn’t talk about it. There was no one left to talk to. Not anyone who would believe him. He had relocated to a village far from Leonork, a quiet pocket nestled in a forgotten valley, where time moved slower and people didn’t ask many questions. His days passed repairing old tools, helping farmers mend fences, occasionally hunting in the nearby woods. He became something of a myth himself, tall, broad, silent, and haunted. Children whispered about him; adults respected the distance he kept. They all understood in their own way that some men carried storms within them and that it was better to let those storms remain undisturbed.

But even in the silence, nothing remained still. There were signs, flickers of memory echoing through the corners of reality. The way animals paused at certain spots in the forest, refusing to cross. The sudden static that would ripple through radios during thunderstorms. A girl, maybe ten, who painted a picture of a sphere wrapped in light and eyes that weren’t hers. Darren had seen enough to know those weren’t coincidences. The Helix was sleeping, yes, but dreams can leak, and the seal was never meant to last forever.

He began writing things down. Not facts, no, those were too brittle to hold something so vast. He wrote impressions, moments, fragments of thought Jude had once shared. Symbols he remembered seeing in the core chamber. Dreams he couldn’t explain. He didn’t know why he wrote them. Maybe to warn someone. Maybe to remind himself that the price they paid hadn’t vanished into nothingness. But he kept the notebook locked in a wooden box beneath the floorboards of his cottage, only opening it when the pressure in his skull felt like it might crack bone.

Years passed like that. Seasons folded over each other, burying the past beneath layers of snow and soil and half-forgotten stories. Until one morning, a stranger came to the village.

She wasn’t dressed like a traveler. Her coat was tailored but worn, boots caked with mud, her hair tied back with a strip of linen. She didn’t smile much, and when she spoke, it was with a sharp precision that set people on edge. Her name, she said, was Maye. Just Maye. She asked questions, about the area, about any strange occurrences, about the man who lived alone by the woods. She never said what she was looking for, but Darren recognized her eyes before she even knocked on his door.

He opened it before she could lift her hand. She blinked, surprised, then composed herself quickly.

"You’re Darren."

He nodded slowly. "You’re not from here."

"No," she said. "But you already knew that."

He stepped aside without a word, letting her in.