Chapter 496 – The Skyward Escape
The hollow was a graveyard of severed coils.
Ghatanothoa's vast, thrashing form had been reduced to a third of its original size, its endless tentacles cut away and left to drift like black, dying stars.
Its roar had changed.
The fury was still there, but beneath it now was a different tone—fear.
Deep inside the monster's vast bulk, the ancient intelligence that had survived since before the shaping of this world began to calculate.
The endless curse that had made it untouchable for eons had no effect.
The power it had considered beneath contempt—mana—was slicing it apart with precision.
"If I stay here, I will be undone.
I cannot hold him in the pit.
I must… leave."
But it did not turn upward recklessly.
No.
This creature had endured for ages by being cautious.
It began to coil its remaining bulk inward, pulling every remaining tentacle tight against its massive body, shrinking itself into a dense, writhing mass of muscle and teeth.
It didn't aim for the narrow mouth of the pit—it aimed for the open sky beyond.
"If I break free into the open… I can flee this world. Into the sea of stars."
Alex, hovering in the air with the nodachi in hand, stopped mid-swing.
In an instant, he understood what the monster intended.
And so, before it could act, he sent his voice upward.
It wasn't a shout. It was a thread of thought so clear and sharp that it pierced the void and reached the minds of the gods waiting far above.
"Move. Now. All of you."
The message struck like a lightning bolt in the minds of those at the mouth of the pit.
Horus froze, feathers standing on end.
Amaterasu's breath caught.
Zeus, Odin, Isis—all of them instinctively felt it: something was coming. Something massive.
It wasn't a question. It was a warning.
They didn't wait to see what it was.
Every instinct screamed that if they stayed where they were, they would be crushed or caught in whatever was about to come out of that void.
"Back!" Horus commanded, his wings snapping open as he ascended away from the edge.
The gods scattered.
Zeus streaked skyward in a blaze of lightning.
Odin called winds to propel himself backward.
Even Amaterasu pulled away, the golden light of her aura trailing behind her like a comet.
The pit mouth was left open, vast and silent.
For a moment.
Then the air moved.
Far below, Ghatanothoa tightened itself one last time, every remaining tentacle compressing its form into a spear-like mass. Its enormous mouth tilted upward, teeth glistening wet in the blue light of Alex's armor.
And with a sound like continents tearing apart, the ancient horror launched itself upward.
The entire pit shook, the black stone walls screaming as the bulk of the creature surged up the kilometer-wide shaft, faster than any mortal eye could follow.
From above, the gods—watching from a safe distance now—saw it coming.
A colossal, writhing shadow erupted out of the pit, hundreds of kilometers of mass shooting skyward like a living mountain.
Even from afar, the sheer scale of it blotted out the light.
Alex followed.
With a burst from his thrusters, he rose right behind the fleeing behemoth, his nodachi blazing bright blue as the hollow wind whipped past him.
The sky above the pit was already breaking apart with noise.
The gods who had withdrawn hovered far to the east and west, their eyes fixed on the center of the continent as the mist boiled upward in a column that reached for the clouds.
And then they saw it.
Something impossibly vast erupted out of the pit.
To call it a creature felt wrong—it was a living continent of coils and teeth, a nightmare of writhing, black mass that tore out of the abyss like a spear, the force of its ascent scattering the fog into a spiral storm.
The sound was like a mountain collapsing into the sea.
Even from a safe distance, the shockwave rolled across them, battering at divine shields and buffeting them backward.
Zeus shielded his eyes against the wind, his jaw set. "By the Fates…"
Horus's golden eyes widened as he felt the full weight of its aura wash over them. "This… is what Void Knight has been fighting."
Amaterasu did not speak. Her lips pressed into a thin line, her hair and robes whipping violently in the surge as she held her ground in the high air, gaze fixed on the streak of blue light chasing it.
The beast wasn't just leaving the pit. It was leaving the planet.
With a final surge, Ghatanothoa arched its vast bulk, aiming itself like a living spear straight toward the sky. It intended to tear past the upper atmosphere and vanish into the blackness of space.
But then, blue light bent reality.
In the instant before the creature breached the high air, space warped above it.
The runes of a teleportation gate snapped open like a slit in reality, and Alex appeared out of nothing directly in its path, Void Edge in both hands.
Time seemed to still for a single breath.
Then he moved.
The swing was simple.
No flourish.
No roar.
Just a single, clean arc of light.
The circuits of the nodachi burned bright, and the air around the blade folded inward, compressing space so thin that the enormous mass of Ghatanothoa met a line of absolute zero thickness.
The world above the continent exploded.
Half of the creature's vast body, hundreds of kilometers of coiling tentacles, was severed in a single strike.
The upper half, driven by momentum, shot upward, veering off-course in a spray of black ichor as it fought to keep from spinning.
The lower half—an entire mountain of flesh—collapsed backward, falling from the upper sky, crashing into the continent below with a sound like the death of a star.
A wave of wind and dust erupted outward, flattening everything for hundreds of kilometers.
The gods could only stare.
Even Zeus, so rarely at a loss, whispered, "He cut it… in half…"
From the heights, the blue glow of Alex's armor hung steady, facing what remained of the monster. Below him, the dismembered bulk of the Great Old One writhed helplessly as it smashed into the broken continent, creating a crater so massive it could be seen from the far edges of the fog.
Above him, the half that had survived the cut tried to spiral away, still aiming for the cold vacuum of space.
But now, Alex stood between it and the sky.
The sky was still shaking from the strike that cut the beast in half when the lower half of Ghatanothoa came down.
The severed bulk, hundreds of kilometers of coils and wet muscle, crashed into the blackened continent with a sound like worlds colliding.
Stone shattered.
Mountains buckled.
A storm of ash and debris rose high enough to blot out the light.
The force flattened everything within hundreds of kilometers, leaving a vast impact basin where the center of the continent once was.
The monster's lower body began to thrash.
Even without its upper mass, the remaining coils were enormous, powerful enough to split the earth with each convulsion. Tentacles whipped through the air like black towers, pulverizing craters and flattening ridges.
And through the ash and chaos, Alex descended.
His boots struck the shattered glassy ground.
The air was hot with ichor vapor, black droplets hissing wherever they landed.
Above, the half of Ghatanothoa that had fled spun away toward the stratosphere. But Alex didn't glance upward.
He had decided: deal with what was here, then finish the one trying to escape.
"Second Light," he said, his voice a low command, calm but absolute.
The circuits along his armor brightened as he sent the order through a mana-link that stretched from his mind straight to the fortress above the planet.
Far beyond the clouds, the city-sized space fortress answered.
Panels shifted open.
Weapons that had slept during the first bombardment locked onto a single point: the writhing mass of the fallen half of Ghatanothoa.
"Target locked," the fortress AI confirmed in his mind.
"Fire."
From the edge of the sky came beams of blue light, thick as mountains, spearing downward with surgical precision.
The impact shook the world.
The first beam burned through kilometers of coiling flesh, leaving a canyon of vaporized tentacle meat in the monster's body.
The second followed, then a third, beams descending in intervals like a relentless hammer.
Each strike was followed by Alex's own attack.
He charged into the storm.
The Void Edge sang, its circuits glowing white-blue as he cut through the writhing coils. Tentacles as wide as city blocks fell before him, severed cleanly with each flash of the blade.
For every piece the fortress destroyed from above, he carved a second path through the chaos on the ground.
The severed half of Ghatanothoa roared.
Without its upper body, its massive maw was gone—but its bulk still moved with hatred, striking at him again and again.
The land cracked.
Black ichor rained down like a storm.
But Alex was everywhere at once.
He blurred from one coil to another, every swing of the nodachi cutting lines of deep blue light across the thrashing mass. Each step forward left devastation behind—a path carved in the ruins.
Above, beam after beam from Second Light smashed into the fallen body, the sky flashing as if the sun itself had descended.
The ground battle became a massacre.
In less than ten minutes, the half-body of Ghatanothoa, still vast at nearly 250 kilometers, was little more than a torn, burning ruin, its tentacles hacked into useless fragments.
The fortress beams burned deep holes into the writhing bulk, forcing it to collapse on itself, every convulsion weaker than the last.
Finally, Alex stood atop the massive carcass.
The nodachi rested against his shoulder, ichor dripping off its edge in thin streams that hissed where they touched the ruined stone.
He looked up into the sky.
The upper half was still climbing.
And now, there was nothing left in its path but him.
Chapter 497 – The Weight of a Victory
The world was silent after the last beam faded.
The fallen lower half of Ghatanothoa no longer moved.
Its coiling bulk, shredded by beam and blade, collapsed into a lifeless mass that steamed in the heat of its own ichor. The colossal impact basin had become a wasteland—a field of glass and smoking flesh stretching out to the horizon.
Alex stood on the still-warm remains, nodachi balanced lightly against his shoulder.
His breathing was steady.
His black eyes lifted toward the sky where the upper half still fled, but before he moved, something struck him.
The system inside him surged.
A pressure welled up in his body, like an ocean suddenly drawn upward by gravity. It wasn't just the relief of a battle won—it was the flow of experience, far beyond anything he had ever absorbed.
A string of numbers lit up before his mind's eye.
Level Up
Previous Level: 54,343
Current Level: 89,015
Level Gained: 34,672
And with that, a flood of 173,360 unused stat points roared through his body, waiting to be placed, humming like a second heartbeat.
His entire body felt different.
Stronger. Faster. More resilient.
Even his mind, already beyond godlike, sharpened as if a veil had been stripped away.
And then… there was something else.
At the edge of his perception, buried deep within the flow of reward, was a line he had never seen before.
You have acquired: ??????
The letters flickered, refusing to settle into shape. It wasn't a skill. It wasn't a title. It was something… hidden. Waiting.
Alex glanced at the glowing words, then closed them with a single thought. Whatever it was, he would deal with it later.
He stepped off the dead, smoldering mass, walking slowly across the shattered ground as the Second Light fortress reoriented above, its massive shadow passing over him like a watchful guardian.
In the distance, the gods began to descend, drawn by the stillness and by what they had seen.
For now, he ignored them.
There was one half of the creature left—and he would not leave the job unfinished.
His gaze turned skyward.
High above, the upper half of Ghatanothoa tore through the last of the clouds, a massive, writhing spear of black muscle aiming for the stars.
With a thought, Alex bent space.
The nodachi's circuits lit brighter, the teleportation runes around his armor sparking.
He vanished.
And reappeared far above the sky, directly in the path of the escaping half of Ghatanothoa.
As Alex reappeared high above the clouds, the escaping upper half of Ghatanothoa was already tearing through the thin blue sky, hundreds of kilometers of its wounded mass twisting as it fought to gain speed. Each pulse of its coils carried it closer to the border where air became void.
But Alex was faster.
In the fraction of a breath after teleporting, he opened his stat window.
The 173,360 unused stat points that surged inside him settled in his thoughts.
Without hesitation, he distributed them evenly:
+28,893 to each stat.
New Stats
Level: 89,015
HP: 866,030
MP: 433,195
STR: 86,613
AGI: 86,593
END: 86,603
INT: 86,639
WILL: 86,487
Power roared through him, so sharp and sudden that the air trembled.
His speed—already incomprehensible—nearly doubled.
His strength was now on a scale that could collapse small islands with a single blow.
And his mana reserve became a deep ocean
He gripped the Void Edge with one hand—and in the other, he summoned a second weapon, its twin, forged of the same black alloy and blue circuits. Two blades, shining like twin stars.
The sky between him and the monster bent.
"Second Light," he called.
The answer came instantly.
From orbit, the massive fortress rotated, its weapons realigning until the colossal main ion cannon faced directly downward.
A single thought from Alex triggered the sequence.
A beam like a second sun split the atmosphere.
The massive ion lance roared downward, cutting through clouds, air, and distance in a single straight line, slamming into the fleeing mass of Ghatanothoa.
The monster screamed, twisting violently as the energy burned into its flesh. Its forward momentum slowed just enough for Alex to close the gap.
He was a streak of blue light, a meteor that outpaced the beam itself.
In seconds, he was there.
The first blade came down.
A slash across hundreds of kilometers of writhing tentacle, tearing an entire side of its escaping form away in a spray of ichor.
Before the coils could even recoil, the second blade followed, cutting diagonally, creating an X-shaped wound that left the entire mass reeling.
"Continue firing," he ordered coldly.
The fortress obeyed.
A second ion beam hammered into the wound he had just opened, blasting clean through the monster's body, shredding another hundred kilometers of coiling flesh into drifting fragments.
The air was chaos.
Blue light from the beams poured across the stratosphere like rivers, while Alex darted in and out of the explosions, his swords flashing in clean arcs, cutting away anything the beam didn't destroy.
Every time it tried to surge upward, another cut slowed it.
Every time a tentacle lashed outward to defend itself, a clean strike severed it.
The creature's momentum was gone now.
It wasn't escaping.
It was being dragged down.
In one final burst of speed, Alex teleported directly above the writhing mass.
Both blades drew in mana, the blue circuits along their length burning almost white.
With a single swing, he brought both down at once, crossing the blades and unleashing a strike that tore the sky itself apart.
The two swords met at the center of the massive bulk, carving deep into it just as another blast from Second Light's cannon struck.
The combined force of the beam and his blades split the upper half of Ghatanothoa completely in two.
The enormous mass stalled mid-air, then began to fall—slowly at first, then faster, trailing a rain of ichor and mist as it plummeted back toward the continent below.
Above it all, Alex hovered, both swords at his sides, staring down as the last of the monster's body fell from the sky.
The two severed halves of Ghatanothoa fell like mountains of black flesh. The sky howled from the weight of them, wind whipping in spirals across the continent as the fragmented bulk tore through the thin clouds. They hit the ruined basin below with a roar that flattened ridges, scattering ichor like a rainstorm of tar.
The creature still tried to move. Even cut apart, even burned by beams, its coils flailed weakly, refusing to be still. A wounded roar bubbled up from deep inside its torn mass, no longer proud or commanding, but furious and afraid.
Alex descended through the smoke and the falling ash. The twin swords burned with blue light, leaving trails like falling stars as he dropped. Second Light fired again, another series of precision beams pinning the broken mass to the earth, melting through tentacle and sinew until its enormous form sagged against the ground like a dying serpent.
He landed on its body, feet sinking slightly into the slick surface. With both swords in his hands, he walked forward, cutting down the coils that still tried to reach for him. Every swing erased another piece of the Great Old One, and he moved without hesitation, without pause, cutting his way to the central core of the remaining bulk.
The mass shuddered as he reached it. A deep, echoing pulse rippled through the air, the last desperate surge of the curse that had crushed gods and mortals alike. It was the law of Ghatanothoa, unleashed in its final breath, trying one last time to trap him in eternal stillness.
The blue circuits along his armor flared, and the curse broke against his willpower like waves against a mountain.
He lifted both swords high. Mana swirled down their black alloy blades, the air folding inward around them, bending space into a single, perfect edge.
"Die."
The blades came down in a single cross-shaped strike, cleaving the massive core of Ghatanothoa from top to bottom. The monster's final scream tore through the continent, a cry so deep it rattled the earth for hundreds of kilometers. Its coils froze, split apart, and collapsed inward. The cursed presence that had haunted the land since the pit was opened finally went silent.
And then, in the stillness after the last echo faded, the surge came.
Level Up.
Previous Level: 89,015
Current Level: 100,362
Level Gained: 11,347
Unused Stat Points gained: 56,735
The flow of power poured into him, heavier than ever. His armor hummed as his body adjusted, stronger, faster, sharper.
Ghatanothoa, Great Old One, Law of Curses, was no more.
Chapter 498 – Sealing the Wound
The ruin of Ghatanothoa lay still, its massive coils sprawled across the shattered continent like the remains of a nightmare. Even in death, the air around its body warped faintly, a lingering curse that pressed against the edges of weaker minds watching from far away. The gods who had gathered in the high skies kept their distance, not out of fear of Alex, but of what the creature's corpse might do if left unattended.
Alex looked up. His voice was calm, steady, cutting through the quiet. "Second Light. Begin disposal. Main cannon, wide dispersal."
High above the clouds, the fortress responded. Its massive ion emitters shifted, plates sliding open as the primary cannon reoriented. The runes along the weapon core burned bright blue.
"Target locked," the fortress AI confirmed in his mind.
"Fire."
The sky lit up as a continuous beam of light, wider than a city, descended. The ion lance struck Ghatanothoa's corpse with such force that the ground beneath it melted to glass. The carcass writhed under the blast, then began to break apart. Chunks of black flesh vaporized, tentacles turned to ash, and the vast remains that had once been a Law-bearing Great Old One dissolved into nothing.
The beam did not stop until there was nothing left but a smoking scar in the land, a glassy crater where the monster had fallen. Only when the cursed presence faded entirely did the cannon cut off, leaving behind an eerie silence.
Alex descended toward the vast mouth of the pit. He stood at its rim, the abyss yawning beneath him like a wound in the world. Even empty, there was a pulse down there, slow and faint, as if something deep below had been disturbed.
He reached into his dimensional storage and pulled out a black cube, no larger than his hand. Lines of blue light ran across its surface, circuits interlocking with a hum. He tossed it into the mouth of the pit. The cube dropped for a moment, then stopped in mid-air, opening like a flower.
Blue light spread outward from it, weaving into a web of runes that stretched across the entire width of the pit. The barrier solidified, layers of dimensional locks tightening over one another until the whole opening became a glowing blue seal. The pulse from below struck the barrier once and bounced back harmlessly, unable to pass.
The cube's voice whispered through the armor, confirming what he had already known: the lock would prevent anything from climbing out, and keep what was inside from touching the surface.
Alex looked down into the sealed pit for a long time. "This isn't finished," he murmured. "But nothing comes out of there. Not until I decide."
He turned away from the glow, rising back into the air, the Void Edge still in his hand. His eyes narrowed, already running calculations, equations forming in his mind. If corpses like this could spread madness, there had to be a way to dispose of them completely—not just burn them, but erase their essence.
He had built a fortress. He had built weapons. Now, he would build something else.
A way to unmake the remains of things that should not exist.
Alex rose from the edge of the sealed pit, the blue glow of the barrier shining faintly below him. Second Light drifted high above, waiting for his next command, but this time, the fortress would not be enough. There were still pieces of Ghatanothoa far down in that abyss, fragments of its alien flesh scattered along walls too deep for beams to cleanse. If they remained, they would poison whatever lived in the darkness, and that corruption would one day crawl upward.
His thoughts turned elsewhere. World Frontier.
In an instant, his armor circuits flared and he vanished, reappearing in the sky above a vast and quiet plain in that other world. The air here was still, a thousand stars above, and Ciel's presence reached him at once, her soft voice touching his mind.
"You came here to work," she said.
"I need time," Alex replied. "Slow this world down. A thousand to one."
The golden sigil of her symbol pulsed faintly on his hand. "Done. What will take a week here will be less than ten minutes outside."
He nodded once. Then he began.
For seven days in World Frontier time, he worked without pause.
From metals and materials only he could create, he forged a smooth black sphere, no larger than his own body, interwoven with the same circuits that powered his Void Edge. Inside, he combined two concepts: the consuming energy of ion fire and the unrelenting spread of napalm. A self-sustaining inferno that would burn through anything, even the cursed remains of a Great Old One, reducing them to nothing at a level that normal destruction could never reach.
Every layer was reinforced with space-folding seals and runes to ensure it would only ignite when released. When finished, it looked like a sleeping star, a silent globe of destruction.
Exactly one week later, with his task complete, Alex returned to the world above the pit. For everyone else, only ten minutes had passed since he had sealed the abyss.
The gods still waited high above, their divine senses fixed on the glowing barrier, watching for what he would do next.
He hovered over the center of the seal, the black sphere cradled in one hand.
The blue light covering the mouth of the pit split open at his command. The abyss below opened like a deep wound, the pulse of that unnatural place washing up again. Without hesitation, Alex dropped the bomb into the depths.
"Close," he said.
The barrier sealed shut again, layers of dimensional locks snapping back into place.
And then, from deep below, came light.
The napalm ion bomb ignited.
A surge of white-blue fire exploded outward in the darkness, expanding in a silent fury that filled the entire shaft. The blast was not just a flash of heat—it was a storm of energy, ionized flames clinging to every surface like liquid stars. It burned downward and outward, consuming everything it touched. The remnants of Ghatanothoa's flesh, the fragments clinging to the walls, the ichor that had soaked deep into the stone—all of it burned in an inferno so intense that even the walls of the abyss were left glowing.
The gods above saw the effect even through the barrier. The pit glowed from deep within, as if a second sun had been born under the earth. The air itself rumbled with the energy.
When the light faded, the pit was quiet again. Nothing stirred. Nothing remained.
Alex floated above the barrier, lowering his hands slowly. "Clean," he said to himself.
The blue light over the pit strengthened once more, ensuring nothing—no curse, no echo—would escape.
And then he turned to the sky, eyes already searching for the upper half of Ghatanothoa that had fallen after his final cut.
"That's one problem solved," he murmured. "One left."
Chapter 499 – The Second Crater
The land around the pit was still steaming when Alex turned away from the barrier. His armor thrusters whispered as he lifted into the air, rising past the broken clouds. Far to the west, the ground was torn open into another vast crater, one that had formed when the upper half of Ghatanothoa came crashing down after he cut it from the sky. Even from this height, he could see the black coils moving sluggishly in that distant wound, a carcass still clinging to life.
He accelerated. The terrain below blurred into streaks, the impact basin growing larger with every second until it filled the horizon. When he arrived, the air was thick with the stench of burning ichor and the faint, oppressive weight of a curse still trying to take hold. His Will cut through it like wind through mist.
The upper half of Ghatanothoa was vast even in its ruin—hundreds of kilometers of twisted, coiling mass sprawled across the crater. Tentacles twitched weakly, some blindly lashing at the air, but there was no strength left in them. The headless bulk still pulsed faintly, a vestige of the thing's stubborn existence.
Alex descended into the basin. Both swords appeared in his hands as blue light wrapped around their edges. The monster's coils surged when he entered, a last desperate defense, but they were slow now. Too slow.
His movements were not.
With each step he advanced, the blades cut. Hundreds of strikes in moments, clean arcs of light carving through the endless tentacles. Black ichor sprayed in sheets, but the cords fell limp before they could even touch him. The creature roared, a broken, guttural noise that shook the air, and then it fell silent as Alex cut into its core.
At the center of the crater, he stopped and stood still. His two swords crossed in front of him, their circuits blindingly bright. Mana flooded into them, bending the air around his body. Then, in a single motion, he drew the blades apart.
The cross-shaped strike tore the center of the upper half apart. The massive coils convulsed, splitting open, the black ichor spraying like a geyser. The sound that followed was deep and final, the last cry of Ghatanothoa as the life left its body. Its entire form collapsed, shaking the ground so violently that the surrounding cliffs fractured and slid into the basin.
And then came the surge.
Level Up.
Previous Level: 100,362
Current Level: 112,629
Level Gained: 12,267
Unused Stat Points: 61,335
The familiar rush of power coursed through him. He felt his strength rise again, as if the world had become just a little slower beneath his movements.
He turned his gaze upward. "Second Light. Finish it."
High above, the fortress moved into position. Its main cannon reoriented one final time. A moment later, a massive ion beam came down, a continuous stream of blue-white fire that struck the massive corpse dead-on. Flesh melted. Bone and coils disintegrated. Within minutes, there was nothing left but a crater scorched to glass, the last remnants of Ghatanothoa erased from the world.
The oppressive weight lifted completely. The continent, for the first time since it rose, was silent.
The blast from Second Light faded, leaving behind nothing but a vast glassy wound in the earth. Smoke drifted upward from cracks that glowed faintly with heat. The oppressive curse that had hung over the continent since the rising of the pit was gone, stripped away like mist under the sun.
Alex hovered alone above the crater. The remains of Ghatanothoa were no more. Now there was only silence.
Inside his vision, the glowing numbers of his growth hovered.
Unused stat points: 118,070.
He exhaled once, calm and even, and began to assign them.
+19,678 to each stat.
Updated Status
Name: Alex Elwood
Level: 112,629
HP: 1,062,810
MP: 531,585
STR: 106,291
AGI: 106,271
END: 106,281
INT: 106,317
WILL: 106,165
The flow of power settled into his body, reinforcing everything. His muscles felt sharper, his senses more precise, his mana deeper and heavier, a sea that seemed without end. The Void Edge in his hands hummed as if recognizing the change, its blue circuitry pulsing in rhythm with his pulse.
He glanced around at the scorched glass basin, at the clean horizon where no coil or shadow moved.
"It's done," he murmured to himself.
Second Light drifted high above, waiting silently.
Alex turned, his black armor catching the wind, and began to ascend from the basin. His work on this continent was finished. There was nothing left of Ghatanothoa. Nothing left that could threaten the surface—or the pit.
But his eyes still narrowed slightly as he glanced back toward the sealed abyss in the distance.
"This place," he thought, "is just one door."
Then he rose higher, leaving the shattered land behind.
Chapter 500 – Silence Above the Continent
Alex left the continent without a word. His figure blurred once, twice, and then the blue glow of his armor disappeared into the air. Above the shattered land, Second Light slowly drifted higher, its massive form sliding into the sky until it vanished beyond the clouds, leaving only the sealed pit and the endless scars of the battle behind.
For a long while, nothing moved.
The gods, who had been watching from a safe distance, did not follow him. They stood suspended in the air, their robes and wings touched by the slow winds rolling off the ruined continent, but they made no sound.
Horus's sharp eyes stayed locked on the horizon where the blue light had vanished. Zeus gripped his spear, jaw tight, but said nothing. Odin's single eye turned slowly to the pit, then back to the sky.
Amaterasu's golden light rippled around her as she stood perfectly still. Her lips curved faintly, proud and awed at what she had seen. Shock mixed with that pride; the man they had just witnessed cutting apart a Great Old One was her husband, the father of Yuka. She held that thought quietly, but it burned brighter than her light.
None of them spoke. Not a single breath of argument or question. The silence was not just shock. It was the realization of what they had witnessed.
One man. No pantheon. No Law. No army. And yet, before their eyes, he had fought and destroyed a being they had all known by name. Ghatanothoa, a Great Old One, bearer of the Law of Curses—something most of them would never dare to confront directly. And he had done it alone.
No one even glanced at the sealed pit below. Their attention was fixed entirely on the space where he had been, each of them replaying the same moments in their mind: the fortress, the ion beams, the dual swords, the battle that looked more like a force of nature than a man.
Even as the silence stretched on, Amaterasu did not move. Her chest swelled slightly with pride as she thought of Yuka. What she had just seen confirmed it again—this man was unstoppable. Her pride was something she did not hide, but even then, the shock had not faded from her face.
The others did not even look at each other. For the first time, the gods found nothing to say.
The Void Knight. Whoever he was, the mystery surrounding him had only deepened. And though every single god present had questions, not one dared break the silence.
Above the shattered continent, they remained motionless, their figures small and still against the vast sky, waiting for words that did not come.
The gods stayed where they were, high above the scarred continent, watching the empty sky where the fortress and the blue glow of the Void Knight had disappeared. Slowly, as the silence dragged on, voices began to stir.
"What was that?" Zeus said at last, his voice low, still strained with disbelief. "That fortress, that man—no one among us has ever built or wielded such power."
"I have never seen anything like it," Odin said, his one eye narrowing. "That weapon above the sky and the one who commands it… they act as though none of us exist."
Horus looked toward the sealed pit, golden eyes hard. "I was there when he went inside. Whatever that thing was, I've never encountered anything like it. And he fought it alone. Even watching, I couldn't follow all of his movements."
"What kind of creature was that?" one of the gods muttered, gaze fixed on the scorched land far below. "Its size, its strength… none of us recognized it."
"None of us even know its name," Zeus admitted. "Only that he killed it. And he did so like it was nothing."
Amaterasu's golden light burned brighter as she stood apart from them. Though her expression remained calm, there was no mistaking the pride in her eyes. "None of us could have stood against that thing. And he destroyed it. Alone."
The others glanced at her, but they didn't press. She said nothing more, her gaze still fixed on the horizon where he had disappeared.
A murmur passed among them, uneasy. "That man, the Void Knight… no one knows who he is," Odin said. "And yet, with power like that… who could tell him no?"
"No one even knows if he is human," another whispered. "He appears, acts, and disappears as if the rest of us are irrelevant."
"What I do know," Zeus said, "is that he saved us all from whatever that was. And in doing so, has made us realize there is someone in this world far beyond our reach."
The gods stood in silence once again, none of them realizing the truth: the man they had watched was the same one they had spoken to in other halls, the same Aten who had stood among them. The truth remained hidden.
High above the shattered continent, they floated in the wind, still trying to make sense of what they had seen. None of them knew his face. None of them knew his name. They only knew the image of the Void Knight—an armored figure with two blazing blades and a fortress in the sky, erasing something they could not even begin to understand.