The next day.
The morning sun rose over Division V's compound.
It was early in the morning—too early for the mess hall to be open, too early for drills to begin, too early for anything except thinking.
Lucien stood alone when the sun rose up on the western edge of the Divison five base, where the treeline gave way to a ridge that overlooked half of Hokkaido's southern coast. The wind stirred his white hair, gentle but cold for the summer. On the horizon, the light flickered—not in color, not in brightness, but in something deeper. As if the concept of "sunrise" had become unstable.
He was almost ready. The Crucible is coming.
Behind him, the base was surprisingly alive with low murmurs coming from the kitchen. Emiluna now in the kitchen making breakfast calibrated her Chronomend all night long in the underground chamber. Jason shattered reinforced dummies with his kinetic fists, each punch gave a tremor through the entire command post. Rylen ran laps after laps to improve his speed and stamine, his aura rippling like fabric caught in a storm.
But Lucien didn't move an inch. He only stared into the horizon, where morning shimmered like a dying memory.
Five days. No—four days remain, now. Or maybe even less.
Time was broken. And reality was cracking.
When midday hit, Lucien was in the grove again—the one just past the southern perimeter, hidden beneath an arch of whispering pine trees and white-barked cedars. This had been his meditation space since his earliest days when he joined Division V. Now, it felt like he was in foreign territory.
He sat down with his cross-legged, a slow breath entering and exiting his lungs, hands resting on his knees.
All around him, light bent in ways it shouldn't.
A single leaf fell from above on top of his head—then reversed direction midway, snapped back into the branch, only to fall again, on loop.
After five minutes Lucien opened his right palm.
Soulfire answered to him.
The flame that emerged was not orange or gold, but white. Pale and searing. It flickered like a candle trapped between different dimensions and realms. It pulsed once then twice—then again—then began to hum. He didn't will it to. It just…reacted to his feelings.
He gasped, closing his hand.
The flame vanished in an instant. But the mark it left in the grass remained: a scorch pattern shaped like an eye, staring upward.
Lucien stood up abruptly.
"I can't control this stupid power," he muttered.
Flashback:
Forstjaw Reiken. Cryo-Graviton Domain. Infernal Surge. His mind unraveling as two realities collided—his body burning in like he was in hell and freezing like he was the East Antarctic Plateau at once. Voices screaming. His name spoken by things that didn't have mouths.
He clutched his head.
This is not what I wanted in the first place. I didn't ask for this all this power. I didn't want to be their weapon.
"You're not Lucien," a voice said.
Lucien turned.
Rylen stood at the grove's edge, arms crossed, expression unreadable as usual. Rylen his dual blades were strapped to his sides. His skin was glowed faintly, a side effect of training in an enhanced gravity loop for four hours straight.
Lucien said nothing. Just waited for him to say something.
Rylen walked toward him and sat down beside the scorch mark.
"You remember what I told you," Rylen said. "Back when you collapsed after the battle with Reiken?"
He nodded in agreement. "'You're not alone anymore.'"
He nodded. "That's still true Lucien. But there's more to it."
Lucien looked at him, uncertain.
"You can carry the fire all alone if you want, Lucien," he said. "But you don't have to become the fire."
Those words landed heavy.
Rylen continued, his voice was getting softer. "They want you to burn so brightly that you forget the shape of your own soul. Don't let them do that to you."
Lucien's chest tightened.
"…I don't know if I have a soul anymore," he whispered.
Rylen didn't flinch.
"That's what they want you to believe, and you know that too."
The breeze shifted. Birdsong stopped. A single snowflake floated down, even though it was in the middle of the summer.
Lucien reached out and caught it. It melted instantly.
"Something's completely wrong with the world," he said.
Rylen stood. "Then let's fix it our world. Together."
Lucien nodded with a smile.
They walked back to the fifth division compound side by side, unaware that in the same moment, thousands of miles away, a very different soul was beginning to shatter.
Somewhere deep in the Grand Canyon, in a cavern untouched by sunlight or wind for months, Archer Irving stood naked before a pool of boiling black water.
Surrounding him were strange runes that were flickering along the stones—fiery red, void-black, and something else. Something that refused to be named.
He hadn't slept for a week now.
Not because he couldn't.
Because he didn't deserve to sleep.
He scratched at his arms, he had scars all over his body. The veins had begun to pulse outward, branching like cracks in glass. His skin was pale, white, waxy. His hair matted. His eyes—once light brown—were now streaked with crimson and ash.
And he was laughing at himself.
Talking to himself.
Pacing.
"Lucien doesn't want the throne of Hell," he said, speaking to a reflection that didn't match his movements. "And that means it defaults… to me."
The reflection smiled at him.
But Archer did not.
He clenched his fists and began to scribble something on the cavern wall with his nails. The letters were jagged, chaotic, almost alive.
"The King must rise if the Chosen one won't."
"I am not a god and i never will be one."
"But I am what's left."
He stopped to scribble on the carvern wall.
Blood dripped from his fingers onto the grounf.
He turned to the pool behind him.
"You lied to me," he whispered.
The air grew cold.
"I saved them all over and over again. I gave everything. And still they died in battle."
The reflection now moved on its own.
Archer stumbled back. His body shook violently. A laughter echoed across the walls—low, ancient, layered with something far beyond human.
From the shadows, his past emerged:
A boy, eight years old, lifting a broken blade to train for hours.
A teenager, collapsing from immense blood loss during his tenth survival test.
The Nightguard ceremony.
The team he himself built.
The team that died because he couldn´t protect them.
Their faces blurred.
All except one.
Lucien.
Still alive.
Still human.
Still choosing his path.
"I envy him," Archer whispered. "He gets to make a choice. I don't."
From the corner of the cave, an arm reached out—his own arm, but twisted, skeletal, eyes embedded in the skin.
"You're not real," Archer said.
The arm smiled at him.
"You're not even whole yet," the arm replied.
Suddenly, fire erupted from the ceiling of the cave.
Blue fire.
Not natural fire.
It was Hellfire—twisted with Chrono-thread. The same signature from Tromsø.
Archer screamed in pain.
He fell to his knees, punching himself in his skull, veins bulging across his face. His body convulsed.
And then—
Silence.
He looked up.
Breathing shallow.
Smiling, but not with joy.
With surrender.
"I see it now, King of Hell," he said. "If the world must break, let me be the one who snaps."
His eyes glowed were balck. His skin steamed in blue fire. Shadows wrapped around him like robes.
Above the cave, the sky cracked like old glass.
And far away, in the quiet grove behind Division V, Lucien shivered—without knowing why.
Lucien stood ready at the edge of the Division V training ground, his fighting boots were buried in damp grass. The air shimmered—not with heat, but with tension. As if reality itself held its breath for whats to come.
Jason hurled a 1000 pound weighted slab at the kinetic dummy, the dummy didn´t break, thats how strong the dummies were. Emiluna floated mid-air with her new suit above a rune-circle, calibrating the new pulse sensors on her Chronomend.
But Lucien? He didn't move for the first thirty minutes.
Something inside him was cracking. Not violently. Not loudly. But constantly. Like the slow splitting of a glacier beneath ancient pressure.
He looked down at both of his hands. This time both were flickering—between flesh, flame, and something... less defined this time. He tried clenching it. The flickering stopped, but the feeling didn't.
I erased something from time itself. I burned through a monster's soul with my own fist. And yet I'm still afraid of who I'll become when i´ll choose...
He turned his head away from the training ground. No one else noticed. Or maybe they pretended not to.
"Lucien," Rylen's voice came from behind, breathless from sprinting for hours. "Come. We found something new."
"What kind of something do you mean Rylen?" Lucien asked, his voice flatter than intended.
Rylen didn't smile. "Something like Tromsø. But… a lot louder."
Deep within the situation room, Division V's command screen pulsed with flickering red. At the bottom, in capitalized white letters, a message repeated:
ANOMALY DETECTED — SOUTHERN PATAGONIA GLACIAL FIELD. COSMIC FLOW DISRUPTION. SEQUENCE: NONLINEAR.
The visuals made no sense to them all.
A glacial valley that blinked between morning and midnight every second. A lake whose waves reversed mid-splash. Villagers frozen entirely mid-run, mouths open in silent, deadly screams—then, seconds later, they were seen laughing in perfect health before it rewound again.
Lucien leaned forward in comeplete shock. "It's not just time itself anymore," he whispered. "It's narrative reality. Cause and effect."
Jason crossed his arms. "Same as in Norway then?"
"No, not even close Jason," Emiluna replied. "It's far worse. This one's writing its own story."
Lucien stared at the screen, his eyes wide open. His instincts—those divine shards in his blood—began to ache in a different way. This wasn't just a King of Hell anomaly.
This was a prelude. And it was accelerating in a abnormal speed.
That same night, Lucien couldn't sleep. He was thinking the whole night.
He was laying in his bed. On the outside the stars were flickering like signals in a dying broadcast. Sometimes, when he blinked, the sky would change with him, without him noticing—blackness swapped for a glowing sea of violet embers, or a crimson storm above a throne made of fire.
He was losing his head.
He could hear them again. The voices. Subtle but it was clear as day for him, as if they were right next to him. It were the exact same voices that had haunted the temple in Tromsø. The ones that called him vessel. Avatar. Weapon. Choice.
"You are being watched right at this moment," one whispered in a tone like rusted wind chimes."You are being shaped," said another."And still, you resist."
Lucien sat up, chest tightening. "I'm not your pawn," he growled. "I'm no one's chosen one."
A shadow passed behind him. He turned—and saw no one but shadow of himself.
Until the sky shifted. He felt it again.
A singular tear opened in the fabric of night, and through it descended a figure clad in a robe of living symbols. Eyes like mirrored galaxies. Skin woven from prayer and paradox. The air froze, then burned, then stilled into silence.
Lucien didn't kneel. But he didn't stand either. He simply faced the being.
The Creator of Gods.
For the first time she descended to earth.
"Your flame burns strangely, my son" the being said, voice neither loud nor soft—only inevitable.
Lucien breathed in slowly. "Finally i can talk to you again."
"I was always near you."
"What do you want Creator?"
The Creator hovered beside him, looking out at the broken stars. "To warn you Lucien."
"About the Crucible?" Lucien asked.
"No," the Creator said. "About the lie within it."
Lucien narrowed his eyes. "What lie are you talking about?"
The stars blinked once. Twice.
Then the Creator spoke:
"The Crucible is not a test. It is an extraction. A sculpting of soul and flame. Those who step into it are not tested. They are rewritten."
Lucien's heart dropped.
"And if I refuse to take the test?"
"Then the world will fall to the one who won't," the Creator said. "Or worse... to the one who believes he must."
Lucien saw a face in his mind. Archer Irving.
"I'm not ready yet," Lucien whispered. "I'm powerful. But I'm still—"
"Human," the Creator said, finishing the sentence. "That good."
"Why good?"
The Creator turned to him, her eyes like twin supernovas. "Because what's coming to kill you has devoured some of my sons and with that i mean previous gods. And only something less than divine can stand where divinity fails."
Silence.
Lucien looked up. "Will I survive it?"
The Creator tilted its head.
"Do you care to survive?"
Lucien didn't answer.
But when the Creator vanished, leaving behind a trail of burning sigils in the air, Lucien stood taller.
Not because he felt stronger. But because the fire within him whispered something new.
Not vengeance. Not fear. Not duty.
But defiance.
Three days remained.
The anomalies were growing each hour.
Lucien stood in the command center again. Map glowing. Destinations marked. His family was standing behind him. Soulfire dimly pulsing in his palm.
The Crucible wasn't waiting. It was coming. It was coming soon
But this time…Lucien wouldn't walk into it with doubt.
He would walk in with everything he was. And fight with his fists through whatever waited for him.
Even the gods.
"I choose. I fight. I fall as myself. No throne. No chains. No rewriting."
The fire surged.
And time blinked again.