The instant their feet touched the jagged obsidian surface of Point Zenith, the world changed.
Above them hung no sun, no moon—only a sky bleeding with astral rivers, cascading like celestial veins. Light throbbed strangely, bent into arcing patterns that defied gravity. Space curled at the edges. Even thoughts strained to stay still.
"This place..." Ingrid muttered, her voice distorted like an echo underwater. "Feels like it's trying to think for us."
Dawn didn't reply. His eyes swept across the warped terrain—plateaus that floated midair like shattered thoughts, glowing glyph-stones etched into nothingness, and in the distance, other teams materializing on their own isolated islands.
Point Zenith had not been a battlefield. It was a proving ground for the mind, Will, and identity.
A massive stone monolith rose at the center of the sky—a floating obelisk with its base in the air and apex pointed down. Words glowed upon it in archaic Celestial script, only partially translated in the contestants' minds.
"Secure Understanding. Shatter Conflict. Absorb Resonance. Leave as Self."
Gary frowned. "That doesn't even sound like rules for a fight."
"It isn't," Dawn murmured. "It's a test of… dissonance."
Before anyone could respond, the first wave hit.
A ripple of harmonics tore through Point Zenith, not sound but memory. All three froze—yet not physically. They were still moving, still breathing… but they now stood in alternate versions of themselves.
---
Dawn saw a world where he had died.
The ash of a broken sky rained around him. A shadow like a Prime loomed over a battlefield strewn with corpses—Ingrid, Gary, even Luna. A world without his defiance. A world that had knelt.
He blinked—and the memory vanished. But its weight lingered, dragged behind his thoughts like a funeral shroud.
---
Ingrid saw herself as a failed alchemist, rejected, scorned—her marks incomplete, her ambition devoured by fear.
Gary saw a gauntlet he could not lift. His resolve had cracked. His father had looked away.
Each vision faded in a breath. But the echoes did not leave. Something in Point Zenith had tasted them.
And now… from the monolith above, the first trial descended.
A mirror being—a warped fusion of each team member's vision—materialized from the sky. Three-eyed, six-armed, flickering with memories not theirs but almost. It did not speak. It struck.
Dawn's eyes flared silver. "Stay close. This is no illusion—it's a reflection of who we fear we are."
---
Meanwhile, across a separate platform of Zenith, Cedric and his team faced their own monster—a twisted construct of stone and furnace heat, speaking in his father's voice.
And far above, hidden behind veils of light, Princess Luna watched the formations unfold from her vessel's deck—her eyes narrowing on one particular island where silver radiance pushed back a nightmare.
She did not know why the sight made her heart twist. Only that something in her core whispered:
"That one will never kneel."
---
Ahh! Fianlly! 100 chapters!
By the way, this author speaking, ahem, writing.
The greatest dissonance in this chapter is the end of it without any warning.
I am just a youth who dreams abd overthinks a lot. I also read webnovels a lot. So I occasionally had ideas of a novel, many of them in fact!
So I decided to write one, finally.
One step a time, My goal was a 100 chapters first to see if I can actually write or if it is just a hallucination!
The good news! I can!
I definitely can write a good story. But that's not the main point here. The main point is, since I have reached my goal, I decided to end this book here at ch 100.
The main reason being that there's too many mistakes done in this novel to properly erase th and make it as I wanted.
The better move is to just throw this away and start anew. But as My first webnovel, this has sentimental value so I think I will keep it as it is!