O.C. Saar
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Omega Release | Chapter 30: The Basilisk's Gaze
🕑 Added 2025-07-02 18:00:15 +0000 UTCI looked at Yusuke in confusion. Had he lost his mind? “What do you mean your dead body?”
Yusuke got up from his knees with a grunt of effort and sat back down on his throne. He waved at a nearby seat, knitting his fingers together with a thoughtful look, and I sat down, deciding to humor him for a few minutes.
“First of all, thank you for hearing me out. Your willingness to hear out this old man will be rewarded, even if you choose to turn my request down. How much do you know about Basilisk Objects?” Yusuke asked me, observing me behind steepled fingers.
I blinked at the promise of a reward and the sudden shift in topic. “Uh,” I’d gone on a few delves myself, but I was never interested in going deeper than the first floor, so I never joined the Delvers’ Guild. “Nothing more than the surface-level stuff. Easier to pluck a Priest’s eyes out than to get you Delvers to share anything other than the introductory info packets with outsiders.”
Yusuke snorted in amusement. “About as much as I expected, then. You were told that if you found a door with a snake eating its own tail on it, you should never open it, right? Well, inside those doors are objects and files that are, for the lack of a better word, cognitive hazards. Whoever becomes aware of any substantial information regarding their true shape, function, or construction is doomed, even if that information is second-hand.”
I raised my eyebrow at Yusuke. “Doomed, huh?”
His Novas lit up, and he flicked his finger a couple of times, and a window opened in my vision.
[Basilisk’s Gaze]
“Death approaches. Seek forgiveness.”
“Anyone with any real knowledge about a Basilisk Object or a Basilisk File gets the [Basilisk’s Gaze] debuff and dies the moment they step either Topside or Underside. No cause that anyone could find. They just… die.” He said, his expression grim as he picked up a nearby mug and took a swig from it.
“And you have this debuff?” I asked, taken aback at Yusuke’s nod. “How?”
Yusuke’s grip tightened around his mug, and I could hear the Synthwood groaning under the massive stress. “It all started with Yumi. Twenty-five years ago.” He scowled at his mug.
“Wait, Reina’s mom?” I knew she had passed around twelve years ago. Reina had come to the Dojo where we both trained with a hollow look in her eyes that day. A few days later, she quit the Dojo. We didn’t see each other again until five years later, when I took a job from her father and learned that the girl who had been my rival for four years had been the daughter of an Otherlord.
Yusuke nodded with a bitter expression. “All who are marked with the [Basilisk’s Gaze] are destined to die, even if they stay in the Otherside. They can only extend their or their descendants' lives for as long as possible.” As he talked, he got angrier and angrier.
“What do you mean by their descendants?” I asked in alarm, leaning forward.
“The blasted debuff gets passed on to your children once you die,” Yusuke growled, teeth bared in anger. “It’s designed to wipe out your entire line,” he roared and slammed his mug down on the table so hard that the synthwood desk and the mug shattered.
“Agh, blast it.” He said, wiping mead from his dark green coat. “Fine, it was about time we left this stuffy room. Come, I need to get some stress out while I talk about this, and you need your reward.” He stood up and waved at me to follow, which I promptly did. We went through a door in the back and found ourselves walking down a dimly lit, metallic corridor. With a sigh, Yusuke broke the silence.
“The moment you get the debuff, you get given an item called the [Icon of Sin].” Yusuke held his hand out, and an object appeared in his palm. The sight was familiar to any child who went through the basic education info packets. It was a tiny model of Terra’s lost moon. It looked scarred and deformed like some great cosmic beast took giant bites out of it, but it was unmistakably Luna.
Yusuke waved over the item, and another window opened before me.
[Icon of Sin]
Rank: Divine
“Confess your sins.”
“If you touch the [Icon of Sin] to a terminal containing information on the Basilisk Object you found, it gives you time. The more information, the more time. You can use it on yourself or save it for your descendants. If you have more than one child, the time gets divided equally.” He said, stopping before a metallic door painted a vivid orange.
“Incentivizing you to research as much as possible to avoid an ever-encroaching death, but also making sure you can’t ask for any substantial help, and forcing you to choose between your life and your children’s? That’s incredibly fucked up.” I said, feeling disturbed by what I was hearing. “But if Reina’s mother was the one who found the Basilisk Object, why do you have the debuff?”
“Out of choice.” He grunted, stepping through the doorway into a smithy straight out of the Terran medieval era. He put on a leather apron and went to the forge, where a red-hot metal handle was sticking out. He used a pair of tongs to get it out and onto the anvil. He picked up a hammer and started swinging at what looked like a dagger blade, each strike sending out a shower of sparks.
“I know you’ve never been a big fan of Otherside history or politics, but this requires some background information.” He used a metal brush to clean the slowly cooling dagger blade and looked at it critically. “The Molten Fist was not always the powerhouse you know it to be. Once, we were the weakest clan in the Otherside, on the verge of getting our clanship revoked.”
He pointed at the bellows on the side of the forge, and I immediately understood his meaning. I pumped the bellows until he gave me a satisfied nod, then plunged the blade into the hot coals. It was hard to imagine the Molten Fist as a weak faction. For as long as I knew of them, they were a clan that was highly respected and feared by the entirety of the Otherside.
“My father was a good man, but a bad leader. He let treachery fester in our ranks, treachery that took my mother from me and left him a shadow of his former self. A shadow filled with rage, regret, and guilt.” He nodded towards the bellows again, and I started pumping, watching his expression soften as he stared into the flames.
“To escape all that, I went on delves, trying to make a name for myself to hopefully escape my dying clan’s fate. That’s where I met Yumi.” A tender smile flickered on his lips. “She was a delver like me. An elusive sharpshooter of uncommon intellect. Reckless, headstrong.” He let out a sigh full of joy, grief, longing, and love. “She was glorious.”
I smiled at the fond look he had as he reminisced. “Sounds like Reina took after her quite a bit.”
He barked out a laugh and nodded. “Aye, that she did. Although, thankfully, Reina inherited some of my cautiousness as well.” At that, his smile turned brittle. “After we married, she became obsessed with finding some way to ensure our rule brought the clan back into prominence. She started researching experimental technologies and even going on delves to find equipment we could use in said research to find an edge.” Yusuke took the blade out, examined it, and returned it to the anvil, where he started hammering it again. “Grab me those two containers,” he told me, pointing at a silver can as big as my head and a smaller red can on the other side of the room.
As instructed, I lugged the surprisingly heavy cans to Yusuke, placing the silver one next to him and the red one on the anvil. “Certain factions in the clan didn’t like that. They counted on my father’s death and the clan’s decline to justify a coup. Yumi’s plans disrupted theirs, as we started course-correcting and bringing us back into the green before my father passed. So, they struck.” He spat to the side, opened up the red can to reveal it contained some sort of silver, shimmering dust, and dumped the whole thing on the blade. The metal immediately absorbed all that dust like it was a sponge.
“They somehow got a suicide agent of theirs to find a chamber with Basilisk Objects and disguise its true nature at the cost of being struck by the debuff himself. Then, he put out a time-limited commission for a delver to find a room full of communication research. Yumi, in her recklessness, desperation, and, I will admit, arrogance, thought this was the opportunity she had been waiting for and pounced on it without doing her due diligence.”
“When they reached the chamber’s door and opened it, she was struck by the debuff. The bastard had the gall to gloat. Told her that now that she was cursed, I wouldn’t want to have a child with her, as that line would be cursed.” His lips twisted in a grimace. “They wanted to punish her for flying too close to the sun. Little did they know that we had learned Yumi was pregnant a week prior to that.”
Yusuke sighed and examined the blade on both sides before shimmying it back into the fire. “Yumi, in a fit of rage, killed the bastard. Then, she came to me and told me what had happened. I bet whoever orchestrated that whole thing expected me to crumble under the stress or abandon my wife. Either of those was going to undermine my future rule.” Once more, he removed the blade from the fire, opened the silver can, and plunged it into the black liquid that the can contained.
“But, instead of giving up, we planned.” A slow, vicious smile grew on his face. “Turns out that fake commission wasn’t quite as fake as we thought. The Basilisk Object we found was related to long-range, mobile communication, and researching it gave us an edge nobody else has ever had. Once my father passed, we went through the clan, cleansed it of as many traitors as we could find, and used our research to reforge the Molten Fist to what it is today.”
“Wait, but long-range, mobile communication is impossible. That’s why we are forced to use Terminals. If you managed to unlock a rudimentary version of that… How did you stop the nanites from going haywire and eating you?” I asked as smoke from the bubbling liquid obscured Yusuke’s features.
“Clan secret, kid.” he tapped the side of his nose. “Anyway, Yumi and I came up with a plan. Yumi used what time she had to research the Basilisk Object as much as possible and split the time between her and Reina. She lasted for eleven years before her research slowed to the point where she took more time to find new data than the data gave her.”
With a sad sigh, he removed the blade from the liquid and examined it closely, nodding in satisfaction. “She decided to stop saving time for herself and let the timer run down. For two more years, she worked tirelessly to give our daughter as much time as possible. Managed to save up fifteen years for Reina.”
Yusuke walked to the far end of the room, and the wall, which looked like it was made of stone bricks, opened up, revealing an advanced fabricator I’d only seen in Silver’s workshop before. “Then, we discovered in the archives of a person who was also cursed by [Basilisk’s Gaze] that there was a loophole of sorts.” He grunted and put the blade in the fabricator, going to the panel next to it and starting to fiddle with the display.
The machine hummed to life, and a complex lattice of lasers danced on the blade's surface. “A loophole?” I asked.
Yusuke, absorbed in his work, took a minute before he answered. “Turns out, if both parents have the debuff, it won’t be passed on to their child until they are both dead. So, a week before Yumi’s time ran out, I looked through her files, gaining the debuff too, buying Reina a little more time.”
“What happened to Reina’s mom?” I asked, never having the courage to broach the subject with Reina herself.
Yusuke paused as if weighing what to say. “She was murdered. Her timer ran out, and it gave her a message that her death was imminent, but for a couple of days, nothing happened. Then, one day, I woke up with a gaunt man, all gray, from his clothes to his skin to his eyes, standing above her dead body next to me. There was a hole in her forehead. He turned to me, smiled, and disappeared into a cloud of smoke.” I could hear the panel groan with stress, and Yusuke grasped it and squeezed.
I looked at Yusuke in disbelief. “The Gray Man? But he’s just a story parents tell children to scare them into behaving.”
Yusuke shrugged. “Well, turns out he’s not. When a person’s timer runs out, they get the message, and then it might take an hour, a day, or a week, but he inevitably appears, killing them with a single hole through the forehead. Some tried wearing helmets, some tried locking themselves in safes and dropping them at the bottom of water reservoirs, some tried fighting back, but practically nothing has worked. He appears, extends his hand, and people die.”
I watched Yusuke turn the blade over and repeat his previous actions, engraving a subroutine into the blade. A shiver ran down my spine as I heard my father's voice sternly telling me, “If you don’t go to bed right now, the Gray Man will come and eat your teeth.”
Yusuke’s voice dispelled the bitter memory. “After Yumi’s death, I discovered that for the last two years of her life, she had been slowly disseminating pieces of information about the Basilisk Object to the clan’s researchers. Not enough for anyone to gain the debuff, but just enough for researchers to start generating data.” He stepped away from the panel, the dizzying dance of lights ceasing as he picked up the blade, now a deep black with golden circuitry patterns on its surface.
“Unfortunately, the first packet of usable data came five months after Yumi’s passing. I used my clan’s research results to give Reina and me time for the next nine years.”
“But research dried up,” I stated, understanding where Yusuke was going with this.
He nodded in acknowledgment. “With the research slowing to a crawl, I was forced last year to redirect my efforts into stabilizing the clan and training Reina to become my successor. And now, I’m out of time.”
My stomach clenched at the finality of those words. “What would you have me do? How can I help?” I asked as the hulking man walked to a nearby bench and picked up a simple, dark gray, plasteel handle with no guard.
Yusuke looked at me and smiled gratefully, knowing my mind was already made up. His gaze steeled, and he inserted the blade into the handle, the two pieces fitting together with a satisfied click. “I refuse to have my line ended by this cursed debuff,” he said with a growl. “I refuse to let that gray bastard hurt my daughter. Once my time comes, I will go for a recreational delve and not return. I’ll leave her a message that she needs to hire you to delve with her and find me.”
I gaped at the man. “You really have this all thought out, don’t you? But why do you want me to investigate your murder? Just to retrieve your corpse?”
“I’ve had a decade to plan. As for your second question,” Yusuke shook his head, “I’m afraid that is something you cannot know until you find my body. But know this: ensuring my daughter is safe, and my body found is something that I am willing to give you two more ruby tokens for right now and an item of your choosing from the Red Hoard once you find my body.”
I boggled at Yusuke’s offer. A piece of the Red Hoard sounded like the biggest payout of my life.
“Why me? And won’t Reina be suspicious that you asked specifically for me?” I asked, staring hard at the man, trying to understand his game.
“Two reasons. First is because of the Ash Stag.” Yusuke said, looking me in the eyes. “That beast should not have made it as far as it did. Someone from within the clan is working against us. Until their identity is discovered, I cannot do anything that would leave us exposed, including hiring mercenaries. I’ll explain this to Reina in my message.”
I nodded, finding his logic sound. “And the second reason?”
“When I uncovered the plot against my wife all those years ago, one name kept coming up. A man who sought to tear my clan apart from within. A man I had never been able to track down. Ignatius Toriklas.”
Before the words had time to register, a window opened up before my eyes.
[MISSION OFFER]
[Murasaki no Yakusoku]
Patriarch Yusuke of the Molten Fist Clan has asked you to keep his approaching demise secret and to assist his daughter in retrieving his body.
Reward: [Ruby Tokens] x2 upon accepting this quest.
One object of your choosing from the Red Hoard upon completion of the quest.
[Accept]?
“Damn you, Yusuke,” I said as I pressed accept. “I’ll do it.”
He nodded with satisfaction, produced two more [Ruby Tokens], and handed them to me, along with the knife he had just crafted. He offered his hand, and I shook it.
“I expect this is the last time we will see each other.” He said somberly. “Be good to Reina. She really cares for you.”
I cleared my throat, forcing a lump down as the mountain of a man patted my shoulder. “The pleasure was all mine, Yusuke. And I will.”
With that, I left the fortress and the doomed Patriarch behind. I wasn’t about to walk through the Scorched Plains a second time, my armor still not fully repaired from the previous battles, so I called for a driverless car to take me to the exit, my mood subdued while I waited.
“Where to now?” Hob asked, having observed the entire exchange with Yusuke in silence. His voice snapped me back to the present and the upcoming mission.
I took a deep breath and stretched as a car pulled up in front of me, feeling several of my joints pop. “Now,” I said, sending a reply to Mr. Toriklas that I would meet him at a place of his choosing in three days. “We’re going to the Fluxborn Guild. To pull this off, we’re gonna need a team.”
