Chapter 124: Ambush
Null zones had always been whispers.
Whispers of places that predated maps. Zones where the world itself bent unnaturally, where magic died or twisted into something unrecognizable. Most believed they were shattered fragments of the Origin Planes, remnants from before the world was condensed into a planet, when all of existence had been spread across open planes of law, chaos, light, and void.
Scholars argued over their nature. Some claimed null zones hid ancient treasures artifacts that somehow survived the Origin Plane Destruction, older than gods, others believed they were graves burial sites of beings too powerful. Others believed they were vaults, created by the Emperor himself seals so potent not even the primordial gods could break them.
And yet, today, a mortal had opened one.
A mortal named Philip.
He returned to the surface at dusk.
The sky above the Chad Basin had changed. The clouds no longer moved with the winds they spiraled in geometric patterns, as if responding to the leyline quake below. The air was dry, but dense. Pressure pulsed like a silent drumbeat across the horizon.
Thunder echoed rolling, constant but no lightning followed.
Philip stood at the basin's edge, crown in hand, eyes scanning the sky.
Something had followed the signal.
He didn't need to see it.
His senses, now deeper woven into the ambient fabric of mana itself felt the ripple in space thirty meters ahead. A thin seam peeled open, barely visible, and something stepped through.
A humanoid shape clad in cobalt armor, etched with glowing sigils and humming with artificial mana. The plating was sleek, too advanced for Earth's standards, and rippled with shielding matrices beyond anything the awakened governments could build.
Its voice came through multiple filters, metallic and cold.
"Philip," it said. "You are required for questioning."
Philip's expression didn't change. "You're not from Earth."
"Correct. My designation is Cohort 6. I represent NAM. We maintain surveillance and intervention across the known harmonized realms the original planet."
Philip narrowed his eyes. "You came alone?"
Cohort 6 raised one hand.
Two more rifts tore open in the sky, sharp lines of folding space. From them stepped two more armored figures sleek, compact, and armed with weapons that sang in frequencies designed to silence gods.
Each moved with synchronized grace interdimensional shock troops, built to overwhelm.
Philip exhaled softly. His eyes burned faintly.
"This world doesn't belong to your people," he said.
"No. But the relics do. We have records of imperial class vaults. This site was one of them. You've broken a containment that was untouched for over 40,000 plane standard cycles."
"You will come with us."
Philip's aura responded before his words did flaring outwards, a shimmering corona of gold and red. The air around him cracked as gravity distorted.
"You're not here to talk," he said.
Cohort 6 didn't deny it.
"We are here to extract you peacefully or not."
They struck first.
Their assault was instantaneous.
The first soldier surged forward, warping short distances through chained micro rifts. His blade made of hardlight folded through multiple spatial dimensions slashed downward with speed that blurred sound.
Philip didn't move from his position.
Instead, the space around him twisted.
The blade bent sideways before impact, curving violently away as if magnetized to a different plane. Philip flicked his wrist, and the space behind the attacker compressed violently imploding with a pop that sent the soldier flying forward uncontrollably
The troopers vanished into localized portals folding space to bypass response time. Beams of condensed entropy fired from their palms, warping air and collapsing rocks into powdered glass.
Philip stepped forward.
His body became a blur no, not a blur. A refusal to exist where they aimed. The first beam hung motionless in the air as if caught in a memory of motion. He appeared beside the closest attacker, his fist crackling with crimson lightning.
He struck.
The trooper's armor caved inward with a thunderclap. The force hurled the figure across the basin. It struck the far cliff wall and disappeared in a wave of static, armor fracturing into fragmented code.
The second soldier reached him wielding a twin bladed staff that shimmered with temporal shear. Every swing threatened to erase the moments it passed through. But it never connected.
Philip raised two fingers.
He touched the weapon lightly.
A pulse surged out, not through the blade but through the time it occupied. The weapon shattered and so did the timeline it was in. The soldier froze, caught between ticks of reality, and crumbled in a flicker of broken causality.
Only Cohort 6 remained.
It fired a sphere black, smooth, and silent.
The moment it reached Philip, it detonated into a compressed stasis field, designed to trap him in an infinite loop of frozen micro moments, a prison of stillness outside time.
For one breath, it seemed to work.
Philip paused the world forgetting him briefly.
Then he moved.
He expanded space itself twisting the distance between his body and the edges of the field, making the trap chase him infinitely, never quite reaching.
He reappeared beside Cohort 6.
Placed a hand gently on its chest.
Telekinesis surged like a collapsing black hole.
The armored figure didn't explode it imploded, crushed into a dense cube of matter. Philip held it for a second. Then slid it into his spatial ring, along with the dismembered remnants of the other two.
The world was silent again.
The spiraling clouds above still pulsed with pressure. The thunder no longer rolled.