Arc 2 Final: Begin Of A New Order (4/4)

  There was absolute, complete darkness. A sensory vacuum that knew neither cold nor warmth. There was no sound, no smell—only the void after the apocalyptic discharge of Reyn's purple mana wave. My existence was reduced to a floating, disoriented point.

  And yet, from somewhere, from nothingness, a ray of light came. It was not a bright, warm light, but a cool, clinical shimmer that delineated this transitional space. It was enough to allow for vague perception. When I looked down at myself, I recognized the outline of my once white-gold Paladin armor. That armor, which was once the symbol of my loyalty, which I had sold three years ago for a few ridiculous coins to save an innocent life, and which had definitively ended my old life.

  My current, black armor—the one I had worn since the beginning of this record and which was still part of my essence even in death—came from a blacksmith I had once saved from a group of mercenaries.

  But what did that matter now? I was, after all, dead, my physical shell fundamentally annihilated by Reyn's attack. I didn't know why, but in that moment, in the transition between the Realms, I didn't dwell on what had just been at stake. I didn't think about Reyn's mad order, not the ritual, not the primordial wars. What I had senselessly died for seemed irrelevant.

  Were my friends still alive? That was the first question that came to mind. Maybe. Would Reyn win? That depended on the answer to the first question.

  Had I failed?

  “No,” a voice in my head, deep and familiar, breathed. It was Gravor. So he was accompanying me even into death. The realization felt very good in that moment. It felt good to have a friend by my side, even if that friend was a demon.

  “You did what you could... we did what we could,” Gravor explained, his telepathic voice devoid of his usual sarcasm or dark humor. It was a sober, honest assessment. “His power was unprepared for and total. You threw everything we had together against him.”

  “I shouldn't have hesitated when Maira screamed,” I replied, guilt gnawing at my ethereal form. “If I had destroyed the embryo…”

  “That's a fallacy, Luken. Maira knew what we didn't,” Gravor interrupted. “That thing is only an anchor. His true weapon was himself. He just waited until you were about to deliver the final blow to channel all the ritual energy into that single counterattack. He used us. We were necessary chaos for his release.”

  “Will Reyn win?” I asked, now lost in thought, hope fading like smoke.

  “As you just thought, it depends on your friends,” Gravor said. He sighed—or simulated breathing—a soft sigh. “We have fulfilled our duty. Our history as a fusion is over. For both of us, it is now time to move on to the Higher or Lower Realms…”

  “No!” a person from the shadows suddenly interrupted him, their voice abrupt and absolute, allowing for no contradiction.

  The voice did not come from Gravor's thoughts; it was real, acoustic, and positioned in front of me, beyond the cool light. I felt my essential form stiffen.

  Then the speaker stepped into the light, which only partially illuminated them. The appearance was impressive and terrifying at the same time.

  It was a large, humanoid figure wearing a mask that resembled a gray-white skull. The eyes in the deep sockets of the skull glowed red, but not the warm red of a demon, but a cold, pulsing ruby red. The teeth, masked in the skull's rigid grin, glowed gold.

  The figure's upper body was covered by pitch-black armor, the surface of which was so matte that it swallowed the sparse light. However, a perfect representation of the bone structure underneath was drawn onto this armor—a flawless, anatomically accurate depiction of the skeleton in a bright silver-gray, which made the armor look both vibrant and macabre.

  The entire back of the body, from the shoulders to the feet, was concealed by a black cloak that did not appear to be made of cloth, but of a smooth, flowing mass of condensed shadow.

  The figure, which was at least two heads taller than me in my demon form, carried a pitch-black scythe. The blade was sharp and curved, the tip resting casually on the floor. The wood of the handle looked ancient, but the steel of the blade reflected no light.

  This was Ulthanox, the Keeper of Souls, Death itself.

  “Gravor,” the figure barked, and the voice was deep, echoing, and devoid of emotion. “I finally realized it was you.You know the rules. The fusion is over. Your claim to this war is forfeited. You both will now be transferred.”

  Gravor's essence twitched in my internal perception. “Ulthanox,” Gravor countered, his voice now clearly more respectful and smaller. “The fight is not over. The balance is being destroyed by Reyn. You can feel it.”

  Ulthanox’s golden teeth shimmered in the darkness. “I only feel disorder. And you are a part of it. Your agreement with this mortal was a violation of the boundary that we tolerated. The tolerance has expired.”

  I didn't really understand what they meant, but Death raised the scythe slightly, ready to finally sever our essential connection and send us to the corresponding Realms. There was no negotiation with him. Our existence here was over.

  I closed my eyes. And then... nothing. Not in the sense that it was over. Instead, Ulthanox, Death itself, suddenly froze. His entire, massive form convulsed. His hands tightened around the scythe's shaft, the muscles beneath the black armor tensed to the point of tearing. He hesitated. It was a conflict playing out in his primordial body.

  His body wanted to strike, to fulfill his cosmic duty, to uphold the order of transition. But his mind, his conscience—a quality I had not fully understood in such beings until now—turned against himself. The clarity of the rules broke before the complexity of the situation.

  Then he stuttered. Something a being of his stature never did in front of a mortal. It was an unbelievable breach of his iron facade. This only happened when the situation was so extreme that even the cosmic overseers reconsidered their millennia-old duties and the consequences of adhering to them.

  He looked at us thoughtfully. His gaze, the ruby-red eyes in the skull mask, felt like it was drilling into my essence, into my soul. He was analyzing not just me, but the energetic signature of the disturbed balance within Gravor and me. He was searching for the cosmic loophole that would allow him not to act.

  Then Ulthanox sighed. Deeply. Strainingly. It was a sigh of such immense, energetic force that, had it occurred on Tirros, it would have caused earthquakes and shifted mountain ranges.

  And finally, he lowered the scythe back to the ground. The dull impact of the scythe's shaft on the floor of the transition space was definitive.

  "I cannot do this," he stammered, the words broken and almost unreal. "I cannot do this," he repeated to himself, like a mantra with which he tried to weigh the spoken rules against the higher laws of necessity. "I must fulfill my duty." The inner conflict tore at his immortal existence.

  Then he looked down, the ruby-red eyes fixed on the tip of his weapon, repeating that mantra—I must fulfill my duty—over and over, and I waited. My essence remained in tense silence, Gravor's presence beside me was stunned.

  Finally, he looked up, resolute. The doubts had not vanished, but the new resolve had overcome them.

  "But you still have a task to fulfill."

  With that, it was said. It was not a decision for us, but a decision against the interference of the primary order.

  Then the world around us changed. The cool, dark void began to pulse. The gray light flickered and was replaced by a swirling storm of colors and raw, twitching strands of energy. The static environment of the transition space collapsed.

  And Gravor began to smile again. It was a triumphant, deep smile that echoed through my own essence. We had been given a second chance.

  -

  The first thing I felt as I returned to Tirros—or rather, as my essence was violently forced back into my freshly reformed but unstable body—was the immense, crushing power of Reyn's destructive force.

  He was no longer a wave; he was a focused, gold-purple beam of absolute annihilation. He had tracked me down the moment I re-materialized. The beam struck me before I could manifest my claws or my demonic blade. The heat was so intense that my still-shattered body immediately began secondary destruction.

  But this time, it was not my end.

  I screamed at the top of my lungs. It was a shared scream, mine and Gravor's, a primal roar of complete, shared willpower. We blocked him. Not with a shield, but with the pure, instinctive counterforce of our fused essence. Our energy was a wall of pulsing, black tissue and fiery red rage.

  But he was too strong. The power of the cosmic mana he now directed unrestrained was overwhelming.

  The beam slowly, relentlessly pushed us backward. Every inch of ground we lost was agony. My demonic armor began to melt at the point of impact. My back almost touched the pulsating embryo, which now lay exposed in the shattered crystal capsule. It was an agonizing struggle that I could not win alone. My hands slowly began to dissolve, the flesh boiling under Reyn's purple fire.

  The end threatened again.

  But then I felt it. A hand touched my left shoulder. A hand that was also pressed with full force into the beam, holding firm with me. Vin. She had returned, her right side bloody, her eyes glowing green with concentrated, elemental force. She fought alongside me, using all her unrestrained power of nature.

  But I knew: even with all of Vin's strength, even with Maira, we would lose. We were three mortals—or what was left of them—against a cosmic force channeled through a human conduit. The dissolution of our resistance was only a matter of seconds.

  But then a shadow fell over me. A figure hurled himself in a wild act of sacrifice in front of the beam.

  But it was not Arik, whose return I had unconsciously hoped for.

  Instead, an aged, wise face looked into mine, framed by a thick, grey beard. The eyes, though etched with deep lines of worry, shone with a final, bright determination. It was Axos. The leader of the rebels. The wise strategist who was now throwing himself into the indomitable beam.

  His clothes instantly vaporized. His bare skin burned and boiled. He had no chance.

  But then the old man's face suddenly flickered. The familiar, wrinkled skin transformed into a flowing, internal gold that seemed to pulse beneath the surface. His eyes, which moments before had glowed with the final, burning determination of a leader, now flared up like two suns, filled with an unnamable, ancient power. In the next moment, he was the old man again, only to then not be the old man again. His other face smiled, the face of an angel—pure, of flawless, astral beauty, completely untouched by the physical world. It was a moment of divine revelation, a distortion of reality that showed me the rebel leader's true identity for a fleeting, shocking moment.

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  “What… are you?” I whispered, my shock so profound that it briefly paralyzed even Gravor’s fury. The realization shook the entire narrative of the conflict.

  Then Axos’s face was human again, the golden glow receding, the astral form concealed, and he whispered with the last breath of his mortal voice: “Dodge.”

  Finally, the purple-gold beam completely engulfed him with a nasty hiss. His eyes fixed on mine one last time, his determination burning into my memory before his body disintegrated into nothing but glowing vapor and decaying essence. Axos, the great unknown, had vanished, his sacrifice now definitively completed.

  And I knew what I had to do. The sacrifice could not be in vain.

  Axos had commanded me to dodge and save my life. But I ignored this last instruction from the man who had just sacrificed himself for me. Instead of jumping aside, I braced all my remaining strength against the beam. With Vin's green, elemental power on my left flank and Gravor's volcanic rage at my center, I pushed the beam—that unimaginably powerful spear of light—to the side with me.

  It was a fight against the laws of physics and cosmic energy itself. The heat seemed to scrape away my armor; my muscles screamed under the inhuman strain. I used the impulse force of Reyn's own attack to steer it like a massive jet of water.

  Inch by inch, I forced the beam to deflect away from me and toward the crystal embryo. My fingers continued to disintegrate, but my resolve was unbroken. I watched as the purple-gold essence of the beam began to touch the silvery, pulsating shell of the embryo.

  And the moment it was fully aimed at the crystal—when the perfect line of destruction had been drawn—I leaped to the side with one last surge of my demonic strength. I yanked myself and Vin out of the path of the coming catastrophe.

  Reyn screamed: “NO!!!”

  It was not a scream of anger, but of cosmic anguish—the pain of absolute defeat at the moment of near-triumph. He realized that his own attack was now becoming the executioner of his act of creation.

  But it was too late.

  The beam struck the embryo with the unrestrained force of Reyn's entire mana reserve. The thing didn't just disintegrate; it imploded and then exploded in a secondary, chaotic discharge of raw, unbound magic. A blinding white light filled the entire cavern, followed by an acoustic blast that ruptured every eardrum.

  We were all thrown to the edge of the platform by the shockwave. The entire cavern was shaken as if its foundations were being shattered, yet we survived the explosion.

  With blurred vision, a loud ringing in my ears, and a throbbing ache in my newly, partially reconstituted body, I slowly stood up. The air was full of dust, ozone, and the terrible smell of burnt vines and melted Tharnite.

  Vin lay right next to me, quite battered now, the wound on her arm glowing, but she braced herself on her intact hand and was still ready to fight.

  Maira, however, was quickly back on her feet. The Plague Cleric seemed only briefly irritated by the explosion; her posture was unchanged, cold and composed. Her eyes immediately fixed on the center of the platform, where Reyn now stood alone and unprotected.

  But before I could get a clear look at the center of the platform myself, a rush of air whooshed right beside me. The air did not condense but changed its texture. Slowly, a person formed from ash. Not from smoke, but from a dense, black powder that molecularly assembled into a solid, human shape.

  Arik.

  “You're a little late,” I commented, as he helped me lift my heavy demonic body. The slight sharpness in my words was intentional, an unavoidable release of pent-up tension. After all, I had just died, but that could wait.

  “How are you holding up, Gravor?” I asked kindly, my voice rough and my body, although newly reconstituted, still feeling unstable. It was important to confirm the emotional connection after we had just gone through cosmic death. One couldn't forget that my entire body had been remade, even if everything slowly felt familiar again, and control over the demonic form became more fluid.

  “Shut up and look ahead!” he roared energetically in my head, his telepathic voice a clap of thunder, devoid of any weakness. His command cut through my exhaustion.

  I snapped my gaze to the center of the platform, where I expected Reyn and the remnants of the ritual. Then my jaw dropped. The destruction was complete, but instead of an empty, blackened spot, a blue, radiant avatar hovered there.

  The figure was at least as tall as Ulthanox, with perfectly formed limbs, a massive torso, and an even head. It was not physical matter, but concentrated, cosmic light that pulsed in an eerily pure blue. The disturbing thing was the head: the figure had absolutely no face. Eyes, mouth, nose, even ears were missing. The surface was flawlessly smooth, an unbroken, blue oval of light. It hovered there, without any movement, without any gaze.

  I had the uncanny feeling of needing to kneel, a feeling of primal, unquestioning submission. A feeling to which Reyn immediately succumbed. The Lord of Shadow sank to his knees, his golden armor clanking on the blackened Tharnite.

  Then the thing spoke. Its voice was soft but echoing, as if coming from the innermost part of the universe. It was solemn, almost euphoric: “Finally.”

  The Avatar looked around sightlessly, as if perceiving all creation with its essence. Reyn, however, stammered, his flawless facade finally broken.

  “Master. I… I’m sorry,” Reyn, who had just been an invincible titan, now a small, kneeling man, gasped. “Phase One could not be completed. It did not proceed…”

  “Does this look,” the figure said gently, interrupting him without any effort, pointing to itself, “as if Phase One was unsuccessful?”

  This only made Reyn stammer more. “Yes. But… but it was not supposed to be like this. It should have been complete. Perfect. Yet—”

  “It is alright,” the entity’s avatar interrupted him, and its voice slowly lowered, adopting a more human, comforting timbre. “I am not complete, only a fragment, yes.” He accepted the imperfection with terrifying calm. Then he raised his head again, the blank oval radiating with new intensity. “But for the next steps, it is enough.”

  Reyn smiled enthusiastically. A smile of restored faith, of absolute, fanatical triumph. The smile of a man who saw that his greatest sacrifice—the near-destruction of the ritual—did not matter.

  This smile, this merciless acceptance of superiority, was the final straw. That was too much.

  That was the moment that made me break, as well as my friends.

  With a roar—a primal scream of defiance and despair—we charged, planless, idiotically, and collectively, at the hovering being. It was a reflexive rebellion against divine arrogance. Arik was ahead in a black cloud, Vin and I followed in a lightning-fast sprint, our weapons and magic raised.

  But in the next moment, where the blue Avatar hovered, there was suddenly only a blue beam. The entity’s essence focused into a single, ominous flash that struck Reyn with unimaginable speed, like a cosmic arrow.

  No explosion. Just a silent, deep penetration.

  Thereupon, I think at least, the same thing happened as my symbiosis with Gravor—only much, much more powerful and violent.

  The Lord of Shadow and Storm shrieked in pain. It was no longer a scream of rage or triumph, but an inhuman, distorted screech of physical and spiritual reconfiguration. His golden armor splintered and tore open as new, unknown elements formed beneath his skin. Cosmic energy and physical essence merged in a catastrophic, painful birth.

  What happened next, I can only dimly recall. The intensity of the unleashed power distorted reality around us. The air boiled.

  We were running. Not of our own volition, but because a massive, golden aura enveloped, covered, and swept us away. It was the powerful rescue of an unknown protective mechanism—perhaps it was the Realm's reaction to the instability, perhaps a final act of Axos.

  We were flung. Our vision tore. A flash-like feeling of teleportation, incomparably faster than Corven's crystal.

  And then we were gone. The cavern, Reyn, the fragment, the corpses of the rebels, everything had vanished.

  -

  Ulthanox stood in his throne room, deep within the Lower Realms. It was a place conceived for eternity and final silence. The hall itself was hewn from Nightshard rock, a material similar to the essence of his scythe—pitch-black, light-swallowing, and of unshakeable, cold hardness. The air was static, so cold it felt petrified, and the only sound was the faint, metallic scraping of his scythe, the tip of which he nervously dragged across the floor.

  He was waiting.

  He was, of course, waiting for someone to deliver the consequences. The consequences for the rule break he had deliberately committed. He had allowed two souls—a demon essence and the remnants of a Paladin—to return to the mortal world, even though their claim to this conflict was forfeited. A rule breach of this magnitude had not happened in millions of years, not even by the other Cosmic Overseers or the gods themselves. They adhered to the designated boundaries to maintain the illusion of order.

  Ulthanox was deeply disappointed and ashamed of himself at the same time. The disappointment was the gravity of the act; the shame was the acknowledgment of the necessity. He had broken a sacred oath. Yet, a burning rage overlaid all these self-destructive feelings. A rage that perhaps superseded all other thoughts and temporarily relieved him of the burden of the consequences.

  “Ragiel, that bastard,” he whispered softly to himself.

  He had only felt it when the miserable, golden asshole in the mortal form of the rebel leader threw himself into the annihilating beam. A light too pure for mortals had flashed through in that moment of sacrifice. The signature was unmistakable—the energy of a being from the Highest Sections of the Celestial Archive. The Angel of Purity, who had interfered in the conflict as a mere human.

  Naturally, the angel hadn't truly died afterward; his essence had long since returned to the Higher Realms. But his avatar on Tirros was destroyed. Ragiel had not only violated the supreme intervention rules but had also put Ulthanox in an impossible position.

  “Ragiel,” he whispered again, and the voice was now darker, hoarser, filled with raw animosity. He clenched his fists. His hands, which held the fate of souls, tensed, his skeletonized armor quietly creaking. His entire body almost convulsed again, but this time from fury.

  Finally, upon recalling the pure, self-righteous smile he had seen on the astrally clear face of his former enemy in the moment of cosmic revelation, the dam burst.

  He struck the nearest wall.

  The Nightshard rock, the indestructible material, yielded slightly. A dull, deep thud echoed through the hall. Delicate cracks formed at the impact point, spreading like glowing scars in the black rock.

  “How… how dare they!?” Death fumed angrily, the skull mask radiating heat waves of his frenzied emotions. He barely kept himself in check, the scythe trembling in his hand. “They break the rules! The rules they bend for themselves at any time! The rules they. FORCE. UPON. US!!!”

  His last word was a roar that tore through the darkness of the throne room. He struck again, the force now greater, his primordial power unleashed. A loud rumble, shaking the hall, boomed through the Lower Realms, a groan of suppressed indignation.

  This time, a small dent formed in the Nightshard rock. Ulthanox leaned against the wall, his chest heaving. The humiliation was twofold: He was forced to allow the chaos to prevent the even greater chaos that Ragiel's intervention was causing, and he had to do so knowing that he was violating the laws of the higher hierarchy, whose rules he himself deeply despised.

  The rule break was his small revenge—the necessary revenge. He hadn't saved Luken. He had respected Ragiel's sacrifice, thereby sending the weapon back into the conflict that could defeat Reyn. And now he waited for the receipt from the self-righteous gods.

  It came faster than expected. At least, Death thought so. Time was relative in the Lower Realms, but the presence of his visitor was instantaneous.

  The doors to his throne room, crafted from Nightshard rock and covered with dozens of macabre skulls of those who had found their final resting place, opened with an ear-splitting screech. The sound tore through the absolute silence of the place.

  His old friend and ally stepped through the gap: Erebos, the Plague Father.

  The god, whose head consisted only of a bare skull behind a transparent, greenish veil of condensed toxin and mana, radiated an ominous, humid cold. Erebos looked at him smiling. It was not a friendly smile; it was the cruel, gleeful smile of a god who had just wept with laughter.

  “I have to admit, Ulthanox,” Erebos said with a serene, oily voice, only slightly muffled by the humid slime, “your action was… spectacular. And much, much more consequential than my little intervention.”

  Erebos stepped closer with a snickering sound—reminiscent of abscesses bursting. He knew exactly how to provoke Ulthanox to ignite the rage that the Judge of Souls was suppressing.

  Ulthanox remained silent. His fury boiled up again, hotter than the molten metal in the Higher Realms.

  “Do you remember?” Erebos asked, the schadenfreude in his voice almost impossible to overlook. “When you announced how you would laugh at me should I mess up?”

  “I know,” Ulthanox said quietly, his voice a menacing, deep vibration. The controlled rage was almost worse than his previous outburst.

  “Well,” Erebos continued savoring the moment, his skull jaws seeming to distort beneath the veil, “I believe your intervention was greater than mine. I merely gave a cleric some nice curse powers with my fragment. You violated the boundary of Death.”

  “I know,” Ulthanox repeated, his fists clenching again, so tightly that the Nightshard rock on the wall cracked under the pressure of his mere presence.

  Erebos dropped his mockery. The atmosphere in the chamber changed abruptly. The Plague Father became serious.

  “Moreover, the Council is convening,” Erebos announced, his voice now urgent and ominous.

  With that, he brought the matter to a head. The Council of the Gods of the Lower Realms—the supreme authority overseeing the rules.

  “I KNOW!” Death yelled at the Plague Father. The scream was a pure, unleashed shockwave of despair that made the skulls on the gates tremble.

  But Erebos’ next sentence hit Ulthanox like a cold-hearted blow to the essential core of his existence. The drama of the scene increased exponentially.

  “But not because of you,” Erebos said, now more concerned than he was when he lost all the servants of his church except for Maira. This level of concern was new and terrifying.

  Ulthanox raised an eyebrow beneath the mask. Confusion mixed with his raging anger. “Because of whom, then?”

  The Plague Father sighed, a more tragic sigh than one would expect from the God of Rot. The silence in the hall after the sigh was paralyzing, the anticipation for the answer agonizing.

  “A fragment of Altron… it is free.”

  The words echoed in the hall.

  So Reyn was not the core problem. He was just the channel, the unwitting host of an older, darker principle.

  Ulthanox’s hands slowly dropped. The anger instantly died. It was replaced by a cosmic, cold fear. The entire weight of eternity seemed to fall upon his shoulders. His own rule break was merely a small accident in the face of the impending apocalypse. The fusion of the Principle of Absolute Order with a fragment of Altron… that was the formula for the end of everything they knew.

  “The ritual was succesful? How much of him?” Ulthanox asked. His voice was now eerily quiet, the last trace of emotion gone.

  Erebos shook his head, his green veiled cowl trembling. “We don’t know. We only know that Reyn… is no longer Reyn. He is the host and the fragment—an imperfect weapon, but a weapon that has been activated.”

  Ulthanox slowly raised the scythe, fixing his gaze on the pitch-black blade. The great game had begun. The rules had become irrelevant.

  The Wrong Paladin.