In the simulated reality of the [Glimpse], the air tasted of copper and funeral lilies.

  I stood in the center of the Bone Fortress of Nexus Delta-31. Around me, the fused skeletons of the city’s architecture seemed to vibrate, rattling their teeth in unison. The millions of undead Azrael had consolidated here — zombies, skeletons, death-knights, and wraiths — stood in concentric circles around the Spire, motionless. But they weren’t an army to fight. They were fuel.

  Azrael stood atop the highest spire. He appeared to be there physically, not taking the form of one of his undead. He was wearing ceremonial robes woven from shadow, holding an object that made my [Void Perception] wince.

  It was a Horn.

  Curved, massive, and made of a material that looked like blackened, fossilized cartilage. It pulsed with a heartbeat that synced with the thrumming of the city.

  “The Synod sends its regards,” Azrael announced. His voice wasn’t loud; it was absolute.

  He raised the Horn to his lips and blew.

  It wasn’t a sound. A sound vibrates air. This was a frequency that unraveled it.

  The note was a deep, mournful drone that resonated in the marrow of my bones.

  Then, it began.

  In the Glimpse, I watched as the millions of undead surrounding the tower simply dissolved. They didn’t scream. They didn’t fight. Their physical forms broke down instantly into streams of neon-green necrotic mana, rushing upward in a reverse waterfall of death. The sky turned a bruised, sickly violet as it drank the souls of an entire army.

  Azrael fell to his knees, the Horn smoking in his hands, drained but ecstatic.

  “Come forth!” he shrieked. “Malak-Thul! Herald of the Silence!”

  The vortex in the sky tore open.

  It wasn’t a simple looking portal. It was more of a gaping wound. And from the bleeding gash of reality, It descended.

  At first, it looked like a meteor of grey fire. As it slowed, gravity bending painfully around its arrival, the form became clear.

  It was vaguely humanoid, towering nearly a hundred feet tall. But that’s where the familiarity ended. It possessed six wings, but they weren’t feathered; they were composed of thousands of tattered, grey scrolls — contracts of death fluttering in a wind that didn’t exist. Its face was a smooth, featureless mask of white bone, save for a single, vertical slit that wept black oil. In its hand, it held a scythe that seemed to be a cutout of the starry void itself.

  I maximized my [Void Perception], gazing into the magnificent looking creature to see all its details.

  “Tier 8,” I muttered in the simulation, feeling the pressure. My knees locked. The gravity around the entity was crushing, heavy enough to crush a reinforced tank like tinfoil.

  I didn’t wait. I attacked. Immediately expanding my Domain to force my reality upon the summoned creature. “Edict: Collapse.”

  I reached out with [Apex Mana Authority], seizing the space around the Herald and twisting it. I tried to implode its skull.

  The Herald didn’t move. The vertical slit on its face opened slightly.

  It hissed.

  My spell — a localized singularity that should have crushed a mountain — shattered. Not countered. Just stopped. The mana froze in mid-air, turning into grey dust that drifted harmlessly away.

  The Herald turned its eyeless gaze toward me.

  “Noise,” it spoke. The voice wasn’t audible; it was a telepathic spike directly injected into my brain stem. “We bring Silence.”

  It swung the scythe.

  I triggered [Void Walk] instantly.

  The scythe passed through the space where I had been. The reality behind me — the bone buildings, the air, the light — was sliced cleanly. It didn’t just cut the stone; it cut the history of the stone. A section of the city simply vanished, erased from existence, leaving a smooth, terrifyingly perfect void that rushed to fill with air.

  I reappeared above it, sweat stinging my eyes.

  “It conceptually deletes things,” I analyzed, my mind racing. “Just like my Flame, but cold. A form of Stasis. It targets the layers underneath, forcing things in reality to cease existing.”

  I couldn’t use my Hybrid Affinity. In this Glimpse, I had to keep the Flame — the one thing that might be a hard-counter to this — hidden. If I had to resort to it to defeat this creature and ended up revealing it here, Azrael might be able to somehow send the information to the Undead Empire.

  “Void it is,” I hissed.

  I dove.

  I encased my fists in the [Void-Star’s Hunger]. Pure, black nothingness wrapped around my gauntlets.

  I slammed into the Herald’s chest.

  The impact created a shockwave that flattened the remaining bone-structures for a mile. The Herald staggered back. The grey scrolls of its wings fluttered violently. My Void punched through its Stasis-field because it could not freeze ‘nothing’.

  I felt a rush of mana. I tore a chunk of essence from it. It tasted like cold ash and ancient bureaucracy.

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  “Void Born,” the Herald droned.

  Its wings spread wide.

  Thousands of the grey scrolls detached, turning into razor-sharp projectiles. They swarmed me like a hurricane of papercuts.

  I spun, weaving through the storm. I used [Void Perception] to see the ‘Lattice’ lines of the attack, dancing between the ribbons of death. Every scroll that touched me tried to drain my stamina, trying to issue a ‘Cease and Desist’ order to my heartbeat. An Edict of his own Domain.

  I grabbed a handful of the scrolls and consumed them with the Hunger. The bracelet on my wrist burned, sending sensations of ecstacy at the new, powerful flavor.

  “Is that all you got, feather-face?” I taunted, blasting it with a gravity mana burst.

  The Herald stopped.

  It floated higher, raising its scythe to the sky. The slit on its face opened wide, splitting the bone mask in two.

  Energy began to gather. Not mana. Not essence. It was gathering… Endings. It felt eerily similar to the concept of my Flame but yet very different.

  The sky turned black. A massive, halo-like ring formed above the creature.

  “Edict: The Final Verse.”

  The pressure spiked. It wasn’t just a powerful Tier 8 anymore. It was charging a stored attack — something perhaps gifted by the Empire — that felt like a tactical nuke made of silence.

  My senses of danger didn’t just ring; they broke.

  In the simulation, I tried to interrupt it. I threw a Void-Lance. I tried to Warp the space.

  But the Angel-like creature was locked in a frame of Invulnerability, anchored by the sacrifice of millions.

  The ring pulsed.

  White light — cold, dead white — erupted.

  The simulation destabilized.

  The sheer volume of data, the conceptual weight of the attack, was too much for the [Glimpse] to process without me experiencing the actual death. The feedback loop shrieked in my mind.

  I gasped, snapping back to reality.

  I was sitting on the ridge, thirty miles away. My nose was bleeding. My head felt like it had been split open with a wedge.

  “Tier 8,” I panted, wiping the blood away with a trembling hand. “A Herald of the Synod. And that final attack… I didn’t see what it did. I just saw the wind-up.”

  “Master?” Jeeves’ voice was urgent. “Vitals critical. High stress levels detected. Based on your shared memory packet I believe it is prudent we wait for another Glimpse. Your orders?”

  Before I could answer, a sound rolled across the plains below.

  My blood froze.

  I looked down at Nexus Delta-31.

  The purple clouds were swirling. The bone army was standing still. And atop the Spire, small as an insect from this distance but undeniable, Azrael raised the Horn.

  “He’s doing it,” I realized. “Right now. Without me confronting him. He’s blowing the horn.”

  I stood up, stumbling slightly.

  “I have to go down there,” I said, my hand drifting to my sword.

  But I stopped.

  I didn’t know what the Final Verse did. In the Glimpse, it broke the simulation. If I went down there personally, and that thing fired off a reality-erasing nuke… I might not just lose a life. I could lose my connection to the Void. My very existence could be rewritten.

  It was too risky. The intel gap was lethal.

  “But I can’t let that thing wander the planet,” I hissed. “It will strip the world.”

  I needed a proxy. Something strong enough to fight a Tier 8, but expendable enough that losing it wouldn’t end the war.

  “Zareth,” I commanded into the Anima link. “Wake up.”

  “The Caller is listening,” came the polite, hollow reply. Zareth was currently in Bastion, occasionally summoning Void beasts for our people to farm for Essence and materials.

  “I need a Guest,” I said. “The biggest one you have. The one in the basement of the basement.”

  Zareth paused. “Master… to bring forth a Lord of the Deep Layers… without the proper preparation time… the toll on my essence would be… severe.”

  “Can you do it?”

  “I can,” Zareth said, and I could hear the smile in his voice. A terrifying, jagged smile. “I have been saving a particular Invitation. A Behemoth from the Third Layer. But after the summoning, I will be bedridden for a month or so. My core will need to re-knit.”

  “Do it,” I ordered. “I’m sorry for pushing this onto you but I don’t really know what else to do right now. I will also be sending an Echo to guide it. Coordinate with my Clone.”

  “With pleasure. Opening the Door… now.”

  On the ridge, I didn’t run down.

  I activated [Echo of the Ashen Sovereign].

  But this time, I poured nearly half of my entire mana pool into it. I crafted it with care. It had all of my skills, focusing on a near perfect [Void-Star’s Hunger]. Its [Domain] was also a near perfect replica of what mine had been as soon as I evolved into Tier 7.

  The clone materialized next to me. It cracked its neck, looking identically lethal in the black mana-armor.

  “Suicide run?” the clone asked, grinning with my face.

  “Glorious battle,” I corrected. “Go hold the line.”

  The clone saluted and vanished, [Void Walking] toward the city.

  Down in the Bone Fortress, the sky tore open.

  Malak-Thul, the Herald, descended just as I had seen. The millions of undead turned to soup, fueling its arrival. The biblical terror floated above the spire, its six wings casting a shadow of silence over the ruins.

  “Noise,” it broadcasted to the world.

  Then, the ground beneath the city erupted.

  It wasn’t a portal. It was a breach.

  Zareth, channeling through the link, tore the fabric of Earth’s reality apart.

  From the black, churning abyss below the city, a claw the size of a skyscraper surged upward. It was chitinous, vantablack, and dripped with star-stuff.

  A roar shattered the Herald’s silence.

  A massive entity hauled itself out of the rift. It looked like a cross between a wolf and a centipede, armored in void-plate, with a mane of writhing tentacles. It had no eyes, only a maw filled with rows of spinning teeth that chewed on the light itself.

  [Summon: The Abyssal Ravager (Rank: Tier 8 - Void Beast).]

  The Ravager groaned, a sound that shook the very foundations of the city, a bass note so deep it cracked the bone pavement for miles.

  “Apologies, Sovereign,” Zareth wheezed, his connection fraying at the edges. “He is… uncivilized. Please direct him toward the buffet.”

  “Understood,” I said, a rare warmth filling me for the eldritch summoner. He had just burned weeks of recovery for this single summon. “Take a nap, Zareth. You have earned it.”

  On the battlefield, my Clone appeared, standing on top of the Ravager’s head like a rider on a kaiju.

  “Hey, Feathers!” the Clone shouted, amplifying his voice with [Mana Authority].

  The Angel turned its blank face toward the beast.

  My Clone raised a hand, pointing at the Herald.

  “Lunch.”

  The Ravager screamed — a sound of pure chaotic hunger — and launched itself into the sky, colliding with the Herald in a shockwave that flattened the mountains.

  On the ridge, safely hidden behind my Veil, I sat back and watched the titans clash.

  “Show me all your hidden tricks, Azrael,” I whispered, watching the sky burn grey and black. “Burn your resources while I observe and take notes.”