Deep within the ancient ruins, Roy remained bound to the final stages of hibernation.
Rest no longer felt like rest.
The magma beneath him flowed unevenly, responding to pressure that had not existed before. Cracks formed and sealed again without pattern. Containment required effort now—constant, deliberate control rather than instinct.
Above all, imbalance pressed inward.
Roy did not see the tragedies of the world as scenes or faces. They reached him as distortion—regions sealed too cheaply, lives categorized too quickly, decisions repeated until they ceased to be decisions at all.
He suppressed the urge to rise.
It did not vanish.
It accumulated.
A dormant blessing stirred within his mind.
Not a command.
Not a voice.
Guidance of God.
Roy steadied his thoughts and allowed two attributes—normally kept apart—to surface together.
Holy Light.
Abyssal Fire.
They did not clash.
They aligned.
The cavern responded immediately.
Stone exposed to the release did not melt—it stabilized. Heat flattened unnaturally. Mana density equalized with precision no natural process could achieve. The environment did not burn or freeze.
It was edited.
The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.
This change would not revert.
Far above, in a low-priority sealed settlement distant from the capital, containment failed exactly as expected.
Mutated creatures turned on one another, then on the walls meant to hold them. No observers were stationed. No warnings issued. Reinforcements had been rerouted days earlier.
The system would later classify it as delayed awareness.
Before spread could occur, something intervened.
The sky dimmed briefly—not black, not stormed—violet.
Fire fell without heat.
Light followed without warmth.
The creatures ceased movement mid-action, their existence collapsing inward as if never fully resolved. No bodies remained. No residue. No corruption lingered.
The land stayed broken.
The spread stopped.
From that moment on, predators avoided the region instinctively. Even newly mutated beasts refused to cross invisible boundaries, panic overriding aggression without identifiable cause.
Nearby, an administrative post responsible for repeated resource diversion experienced a failure of a different kind.
Several officials collapsed simultaneously. No wounds. No burns. No visible energy signatures.
Authority simply… ended.
A handful survived.
They would never provide testimony—not from fear, but because language failed to describe what they felt vanish.
Elsewhere, systems reacted.
Detection arrays registered overlapping signatures—holy and abyssal present in equal measure. Devices returned valid data and invalid conclusions simultaneously. Classification failed for the first time since implementation.
Reports conflicted.
Logs rewrote themselves.
Attribution collapsed.
The system flagged the incidents as unresolved anomalies.
Beneath the ruins, Roy felt the cost immediately.
Containment burned now. Suppression resisted instead of settling. The attributes did not rebel—but they no longer slept easily.
One truth became unavoidable:
Restraint was no longer free.
And next time, it would cost more.
Roy withdrew before instinct could push further. He forced the magma to still, the thunder to quiet, the abyssal flame to dim beneath control.
As he returned to hibernation, something far away fractured quietly.
A minor holy site failed to respond for the first time in recorded history. No backlash followed. No announcement was made.
Divinity had absorbed the cost.
In the capital, detection chambers worked without rest.
Signals spiked and vanished. Patterns refused alignment. Holy and abyssal readings appeared together, then nowhere at all.
After days of confusion, the events were officially declared acts of divine assistance.
Witnesses were compensated.
Records sealed.
Questions buried.
Internally, the heroes did not sleep.
For the first time, their systems had acted correctly—and still lost control.
